PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  —Donald Christisen,

  “A Vignette of Missouri’s Native

  Prairie” (1967)

  During the past six hundred million years, the natural background rate of extinction has been about one species per year. Around the world now, the rate is estimated to be one to three lost every day— perhaps as high as one species every hour—and the trend is accelerating. Scientists predict that by the early twenty-first century, we will witness several hundred extinctions per day.

  —G. Jon Roush,

  “The Disintegrating Web” (1989)

  It is of importance to seek out these primitive races and ascertain the plants which they have found available in their economic life, in order that perchance the valuable properties they have utilized in the wild life may fill some vacant niche in our own, may prove of value in time of need or when the population of America becomes so dense as to require the utilization of all our natural resources.

  —John W. Harshberger,

  “Phytogeographic Influences in the

  Arts and Industries of American

  Aborigines” (1906)

  [Buffalo gourd] is one of the plants considered to possess special mystic properties. People were afraid to dig it or handle it unauthorized. The properly constituted authorities might dig it, being careful to make the prescribed offering of tobacco to the spirit of the plant, accompanied by the proper prayers, and using extreme care not to wound the root in removing it from the earth. A man of my acquaintance in the Omaha tribe essayed to take up a root of this plant and in doing so cut the side of the root. Not long afterward one of his children fell, injuring its side so that death ensued, which was ascribed by the tribe to the wounding of the root by the father. . . . When I have exhibited specimens of the root in seeking information, the Indians have asked for it. While they fear to dig it themselves, after I have assumed the risk of so doing they are willing to profit by my temerity; or it may be that the white man is not held to account by the Higher Powers of the Indian’s world.

  —Melvin Gilmore,

  Uses of Plants by the Indians of the

  Missouri River Region (1919)

  The [Indian] women gathered [tipsin, or breadroots] by digging them out of the sod by means of digging sticks [and] when [the women] went out to the prairie to dig tipsin, the mothers would show the children some of the plants and call attention to their appearance and habits. Noting the branching form of these plants, the mother would say to the children: “See, they point to each other. Now here is one: notice the directions in which its arms are pointing. If you go along in these directions and look closely you will find other plants in line with the direction of each pointing arm.”

  The children were interested and eager to show their own alertness and ability, and so they were happily busy in finding other tipsin plants for their mothers to dig. Of course, if the children followed any of these lines and kept close watch they would soon find another plant. The pretty fancy of the plants pointing to each other stimulated the lively interest of the children.

  —Melvin Gilmore,

  Prairie Smoke (1929)

  Much energy can be spent harvesting prairie turnips [or breadroots]. In fact, I have sometimes just quit digging when the soil was so hard or gravelly that it required a pickax. It seems amazing that the roots are able to penetrate such hard ground.

  —Kelly Kindscher,

  Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie (1987)

  The rock formations of this [Kaw] region are limestone and sandstone. The Amorpha canescens was the characteristic plant, it being in many places as abundant as the grasses.

  —John Torrey,

  Catalogue of Plants Collected by

  Lieutenant Frémont in His Expedition

  to the Rocky Mountains (1843)

  We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning.

  —Bill McKibben,

  The End of Nature (1989)

  There is something preternatural about unknown lands that seizes the imagination of certain visionaries. Promoters, opportunists, reformers, businessmen, and even crackpots are attracted to the unknown magnet and often see it as their particular El Dorado, awaiting nothing more than the touch of their hands, the power of their money, and the fruits of their skills to achieve incalculable wealth.

  —John Leeds Kerr,

  Destination Topolobampo (1968)

  Railway enterprise is a cure for the social and political problems of modern life. Poverty, revolution, brigandage, religious persecution, and social singularities disappear before this all-powerful agent. When armies and legislation are powerless, the locomotive-engine does not fail of success.

  —Albert Kimsey Owen,

  from a Topolobampo promotional

  pamphlet (c 1880)

  It is true original investors [in the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway] lost about twenty million dollars, but my excuse for the only unsuccessful venture I have ever organized in forty years of business is that a revolution is an abnormal thing and cannot be reckoned with as a contingency of progress.

  How grateful we should be that the Federal Reserve Bank is at hand and that financial panics can no longer be made to order.

  —Arthur Edward Stilwell,

  “I Had a Hunch” (1928)

  History is a social expression of geography, and western geography is violent.

  —Bernard DeVoto,

  A Treasury of Western Folklore (1951)

  While no people endure the reverses of nature with greater fortitude and good humor than the people of Kansas, misfortunes seemingly of man’s making arouse in them a veritable passion of resistance. . . . Grasshoppers elicited only a witticism, but the “mortgage fiends” produced the Populist regime, a kind of religious crusade against the infidel Money Power.

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  Then it was remembered that of the dozen or more cold-blooded murders committed in this county during its history every murderer was acquitted except one, and he got off with a comparatively light sentence. These acquittals were not the result of lack of evidence, but through the “smartness” of attorneys who with the aid of plainly manufactured testimony, deluded the jurors; that while the man who stole a half cheese was sent to the penitentiary for five years, no perpetrator of a great crime was ever punished.

  Everyone knew that the evidence against [George Rose] would be circumstantial and that if methods successfully employed in previous trials should be adopted by the defense, he would be turned loose.

  —Chase County Leader,

  “A Terrible Crime: Karl Kuhl Shot and

  Instantly Killed by George Rose, a

  Drunken Printer” (1894)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Matfield Green

  Only two dreams—sleeping dreams—from my childhood remain, and, forty years later, they still hold the sharp focus of a viewcamera photograph exposed at f/64: one was a piece of aerial fantasy, the other industrial archaeology, and each occurred only once. In the first, I went aloft in a wingless, propellerless orange crate mysteriously powered by a small, spring-wound clock without hands that could keep me airborne, just above the rooftops, as long as I kept winding it. In the other, I dreamed I uncovered beside our neighbor’s picket fence a section of forgotten rail line—ties, tracks, spikes. This dream of finding history buried in my own yard, I believe now, set me out on my first walk in Chase County. But, tramping along some months ago, I was remembering only a strange and exotic thing I’d heard citizens mention, the Orient grade, an alleged rail route partly built but soon abandoned that ran through the county; evidence of it was purportedly visible around Matfield Green, even in the backyards. I say purportedly because I’d driven in the area several times to look for the grade and had found nothing, and so I put the line in with fanciful folklore about Zebulon Pike’s stone fort and a house porch stained by a murdered man’s blood that would never wash clean. />
  I pieced together these improbabilities about the Orient line: Missouri businessmen in 1900 decided to open a route to China by building a railroad from Kansas City to some forsaken Mexican town on the Gulf of California from where ships would open trade with the Far East. It seemed to me that anyone who could believe such a scheme existed could believe in a route from, say, Boise, Idaho, to Uxmal, Yucatán, to tap the African ivory trade. Yet hints about the track grade kept cropping up, and, after failing to find it on my walk, I decided to treat it as a puzzle on the grid, a crossword of blanks and clues where the game is to avoid turning to the back for the solution: I refused to ask people to show it to me, if they could. The search for phantasmagoria—grails, fountains, unicorns—runs deep in men, often producing things even more unexpected than the phantasm, so I made the Orient grade mine. Looking for the ludicrous allows our dreams—and sometimes dreams of others—to lead us.

  I was walking about three miles north of the southern county line along route 177, which I first knew as Kansas 13, and which, to the amusement of the older residents, I still call 13 because 177 is a numeral and nothing more, but 13 is an ancient character, a glyph, an image charged with history, superstition, legerdemain, necromancy: if I say “thirteen,” things rise inside you, but 177 is only three digits leading to the next county. I was walking and thinking about this, composing some of this sentence, or at least the bones of it, and then I began remembering it was this section of old 13 that had convinced me that Chase County held something I wanted to know. Something else happened on this little asphalt meander among rock walls and coffee trees, a stretch, as in most of the county, of billboard-free highway, the kind of road homeward Americans dream of: driving it in the mid-seventies, I wondered whether a traveler could cross the United States on nothing but back roads like this one. Three years later, trying to step out of the knee-deep shambles of what was passing for my life, I took off on such a trip with the hope that following new, physical maps could change the dream cartography a mind wanders in; that tour went on for thirteen thousand miles through thirty-eight states.

  When I returned here in October of 1984 and was walking the Matfield road in search of Og (so I’d taken to calling the Orient grade), I realized that, while circumnational journeys are fine, I might have reached a similar destination by staying within a single American county, even one of seeming spareness like this one. The new challenge, as my quest for Og would soon reveal, was, to reword Thoreau a bit, to travel a good deal in Chase County, and the requisite to that was to go slowly, almost inch by inch, on foot. And so, I was on Kansas 13 again, looking for Og but hoping to find, as always, connections: I had gone out and come around, but I was still hunting for links—this time along a route where the way was too broken for anything but feet, a stout walking stick, and some dreaming.

  The Matfield quadrangle is much like the topography just to the north, both taking their character—their genius—from the South Fork, which splits the quad north to south as nicely as a halved melon, although the traveler along route 13 misses the similarities because just south of Bazaar the road drops off the uplands into the little river valley and follows it along on the west bank to Matfield, where it branches southwest down the vale of Mercer Creek, then rises again onto the prairie and heads out for the oil fields around El Dorado. On each side of the South Fork the prairie spreads out almost entirely unmolested by roads but dissected by a dozen major creeks that flow in just a bit aslant of true east or west. The turnpike cuts the southeast corner, and the surprise in this open land is that you rarely see the toll road until you cross it (throughout Chase, the pike hardly shows up once you leave it). The pattern of streams and roads in the quadrangle reflects that of the county as a whole, but here the configuration is reversed and inverted, as New Zealand is to Italy. South of the turnpike and near old Thurman sits the Booster Station, where Cities Service in 1930 built a little settlement to tend the machinery of the natural-gas pipeline, a feudal village to serve the manor. The place is now a ghost town and the big compressor building, its pipes bending up from underground into the light like serpents cast out, lies with the uneasy quiet of the haunted, the machines more or less now minding themselves; but countians still speak of the Booster baseball team and the whang-leather arm of Chick Shaft, a pitcher Cities Service hired as an oiler so it could win itself a championship.

  Route 13 also follows the Santa Fe line through most of the quadrangle, the two lying side by side like old lovers, one humping up over the other here and the other humping over there, and the citizens often fix nearby places in relation to these crossings as if they were lone navigational marks on the trail like Courthouse Rock. North of Matfield and a couple of miles south of the first overpass—near the confluence of the South Fork and Crocker Creek from the west and, from the east, Steak Bake Creek (despite the culinary appearance, the name comes from settler Ely Stakebake)—there is a house made from an old railroad passenger car. Not far away and beside the tracks is a long, cast-block building once home to Hispanic rail workers; empty now except for stack-ings of things, it’s the only Santa Fe bunkhouse left in a county where there used to be one every half dozen miles. The citizens still refer to these houses without plumbing, electricity, and insulation as Mexican shanties. The bunkhouse near Matfield is the last vestige of railroad moguldom hereabouts, and only a few people who remember that life remain in the county.

  Near these sorry dwellings are two large frame homes: first, the old Crocker place with its long and angled porches, hipped and gabled roof, and a three-story round tower that was later covered by a portico and fluted columns; this pretense, incongruous on the prairie, so overwhelms things nearby that it’s easy to miss the earlier and smaller Crocker home immediately north or to take it (as I did) for a half-sized child’s playhouse. Second, on down the road is the Rogler place, Pioneer Bluffs, with its 1870 rock wall and a parallel row of cottonwoods named after the presidents (only Lincoln is still alive). A couple of miles south of Matfield stood a third place, the Brandley home, one of the largest frame houses in the county until it burned to the ground in the twenties. These estates were the south-county expression of the wish for prairie plantations manifested at Spring Hill.

  Henry Brandley (born Brandli), a young Swiss who had been a ditch digger in Indiana, walked into Chase from Iowa in 1859 with his friend, an Austrian, Charles Rogler, and they were joined later by Erastus Crocker, who lost a great toe at Appomattox (Rogler served only a hundred days, but Brandley saw action in the West and caught a Ute arrow in his arm that left him with a permanently crippled hand). Following the war, these men began making money and going (or sending sons) to the statehouse, and they formed a club of three: one countian said, They intermarried until who-laid-the-chunk. But, as the twentieth century pressed in, things began changing and the inevitable classlessness of prairie life exerted itself; today the Brandley place is a mere depression on a slope, the Crocker home sold out of the family, and the Rogler house closed and apparently on its way to becoming a museum. To look at the stories of the upper South Fork, it seems that no family got very far from the dirt floor of the log shanty it started in, and that has happened so often across the county it’s as if the prairie lets nothing rise far from itself.

  On that October day in 1984 when I was walking north on Kansas 13 toward Matfield and finding Og nowhere, I was distracted by an old roofline showing above a somber grove, and I headed off west toward it; along an abandoned and overgrown piece of highway I found some small outbuildings piled with wood-rat nests and chewed pods from coffee trees. From under a rotting board that I disturbed crawled a fat black-widow spider missing a leg, and nearby lay a dead heron, decay turning its freakish beak and legs into something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting; a few yards beyond stood a derelict farmhouse of gnawed rat holes, and across the old roadway rose the steep and wooded slope of the western uplands. Cut into the hill was a small stone springhouse with an arched doorway, and from it and a culvert alongsi
de came an outrush of water. The thing opened like a dark, evil maw issuing the sound of far waters moving in turbulence as if riled. Although the day was warm and my thirst up, the water seemed such a voice of lurking malignance that even the hominess of the springhouse ledge, which once held a chum of butter or can of milk, did not lessen the aura of a thing not right. I stepped out of the cool damp hole and, still bent from the low ceiling, slowly straightened, then recoiled violently before I realized that what stood above the springhouse was not a horribly burned man but a tall and charred tree stump, its pair of stubbed limbs like arms upraised in warning. I headed back to the road to get away from the gloom of overgrowth and the infested buildings. In the county are many campsites Indians used for centuries, yet this homestead around Perkins Spring hadn’t lasted sixty years, and I figured my unease came from some notion about white men’s inability to endure, about their incapacity to live with the land, people who were users of and not dwellers in. That no one today could find this little acre of the wooded and watered valley a pleasant place to live in—maybe that’s what cast the darkness. Or was it the other way around—a darkness driving people away? I hiked on up the sunny road and wondered what my price would be to sleep a single night in that bane of a house with its sinister gurgle of water.