See feral pig side view here.

Compare it to the above mount.

We try to preserve tallgrass prairie around our farm pond (dug out glacial feature), we used to have more on the railroad right-of-ways, but unfortunately when the railways made us -buy- back what had been -leased- (while we retained the tax responsibilities) them free of charge under the takings clause in the Constitution, it had to be bulldozed and plowed to make up for the high cost (the alternative was for a neighbor to buy that and do the same, while owning a diagonal strip right through our field. Dad considered it a great pity, but didn’t see any alternative.

Anyway.

I’ve never heard of anything like the Shunka Warak’in around there, and the oral stories go back to the pioneer days, when you could canoe from north Iowa to Lake Superior, from prairie pothole to prairie pothole, or so it was said. We knew where the old seasonal Lakota encampments were, in Grandpa’s day, arrowheads were frequently found when plowing or walking beans.

But the closest to that cryptid would be the Scots Collie sized coyote Dad saw at the end of the field last year. Much more likely a young male wolf kicked out of one of the Boundary Waters packs. Too spindly to be a coydog.

The high school art teacher we had in the late 70s claimed to have seen a bigfoot in the slough just south of Eagle Lake. That would be around the time that there were sightings SW of us in N. Central Iowa. But that is the closest to any cryptid presence around there.

The tallgrass prairie ends in eastern Nebraska and the eastern Dakotas where the shortgrass prairie begins, FWIW.

The buffalo grass grows literally up to the eye of an American wisent, and horseback riders would have an interesting experience riding in that stuff. When the wind blows, it is just like waves on the sea.