PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  It is a queer sensation to experience a storm out on the open prairie.

  —Ernestine Franke Huning,

  Diary (1863)

  Our maps have indeed grown less speculative, less interested in the elemental possibilities of the Earth’s skin. They are drawn by computers from satellite photos, and that suggests that the Earth has lost its capacity to keep secrets. The natural features are buried under the gridwork of toads and the blur of names. Maps become a means of getting past things, of threading the ganglia and writ of modern life. We tend to look at them for what we want to avoid, rather than what, in good fortune, we might discover.

  There is not much fable in a landscape we cannot enter.

  —Peter Steinhart,

  “Names on a Map” (1986)

  Since the world beyond Kansas has been so well guidebooked, the only trip left us is inward.

  —John Krich,

  New York Times Book Review (1989)

  The universe and all it contains does not advance along a linear or planar path. It expands and grows volumetrically outwards and must, at the furthest limit, rupture, split, collapse, and disappear. But at a point, beyond this limit, what should have vanished reverses its course and reappears, now moving centripetally inward, contracting and condensing. What has form vaporizes at the limits of development to a void, and the void condenses into a form and reappears in a never-ending cycle of contraction and expansion. I liken this pattern of development to the wheel of Dharma or a cyclone because it is identical to a cyclone or tornado, which compresses the atmosphere into a vortex, expanding and growing as it rages furiously, then eventually disintegrates and vanishes.

  —Masanobu Fukuoka,

  The Natural Way of Farming (1985)

  Until all the desirable lands and the prairies were fenced and claimed, the early settler’s philosophy and reaction to loss of natural resources was to use it up and move on.

  —Donald Christisen,

  “A Vignette of Missouri’s Native

  Prairie” (1967)

  Time was when all a man had to do was just farm eleven and a half months, and hunt the other half. But not now. Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain’t enough. You got to belong to the business of mankind.

  —William Faulkner,

  “Race at Morning” (1955)

  As machines replace skill, they disconnect themselves from life; they come between us and life. They begin to enact our ignorance of value—of essential sources, dependences, and relationships.

  The work of [agricultural] production is immediately profitable, whereas the work of responsibility is not. Once the machine is in the field it creates an economic pressure that enforces haste; the machine concentrates all the energy of the farm and hurries it toward the marketplace. The demands of immediate use eclipse the demands of continuity. As the skills of production decline, the skills of responsibility perish.

  —Wendell Berry,

  The Unsettling of America (1977)

  The substitution of machinery for labor, and then larger machinery for existing equipment, has been a fact of midwestern life for a century. The causes of the cycle are complex, but a nagging shortage of farm labor is partly responsible. Young people head for the cities, so the farmers have been forced to go with more machinery and economies of scale. The results are $30,000 tractors and 600-acre midwestern farms, accompanied by a rural landscape that is dotted with abandoned houses, obsolete outbuildings, and rusting equipment. The pace of change has been incredible. Those who can remember the area even a decade ago find many things totally different and feel tinges of nostalgia, in spite of the obvious advantages of the present situation in production efficiency. Farming as a “way of life” is about gone in the United States.

  —James R. Shortridge,

  Kaw Valley Landscapes (1988)

  It was difficult for Kansas farmers to comprehend that there had been only two eras of sustained agricultural prosperity since statehood: one just before and during World War I and the other during and just after World War II. . . . They have often been forced to choose whether [farming] has to be a business or a way of life, especially with the trend toward larger farms, exploitation of the soil, and pressure to pursue quantity rather than quality.

  Many farmers like to point out that in the old days, if a farmer’s son was not smart enough to get a job in town, he could always farm; while now, if he is not smart enough to farm, he can always get a job in town.

  —Leo E. Oliva,

  “Kansas: A Hard Land in the

  Heartland” (1988)

  Few things in nature have a greater human appeal than a family of gallinaceous birds. The whole scene from the hatching of the first young [of the prairie grouse] to the departure of the brood is one brimming with thrilling incidents. The motherly interest of the old bird when the first youngster pokes its head through the breast feathers and gives a contented peep, as it picks at its mother’s bill or her eye, is an event never to be forgotten. Then the unexpected poking of a downy head through the plumage, first at the side, then through a rear window, and perhaps two youngsters surprising each other as they appear simultaneously, all are experiences that make a long vigil in the blind well worth the effort. As more of the young hatch they become more daring and may vigorously compete for a position on the mother’s back. They make repeated attempts to scale the slippery feathered dome, and finally when one does succeed he has an unmistakable look of triumph. All these things seem to have a truly human aspect, and surely the most skeptical cannot help but take an anthropomorphic attitude toward their behavior.

  —Alfred Otto Gross,

  Life Histories of North American

  Gallinaceous Birds (1932)

  The flavor of the prairie chicken’s flesh is as wild as its prairie flight. Its tang is caught from the wayward prairies, a wild flavor as strange as bison flesh, the prairie become sapid.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  I have joined several times in the deer hunts, and more frequently in [prairie] grouse shooting, which constitutes the principal amusement of this place. . . .

  I was lucky enough the other day, with one of the officers of the garrison, to gain the enviable distinction of having brought in together seventy-five of these fine birds, which he killed in one afternoon; and although I am quite ashamed to confess the manner in which we killed the greater part of them, I am not so professed a sportsman as to induce me to conceal the fact. We had a fine pointer, and had legitimately followed the sportsman’s style for a part of the afternoon; but seeing the prairies on fire several miles ahead of us, and the wind driving the fire gradually toward us, we found these poor birds driven before its long line, which seemed to extend from horizon to horizon, and they were flying in swarms or flocks that would at times almost fill the air. They generally flew half a mile or so, and lit down again in the grass, where they would sit until the fire was close upon them, and then they would rise again. We observed by watching their motions, that they lit in great numbers in every solitary tree; and we placed ourselves near each of these trees in turn, and shot them down as they settled in them; sometimes killing five or six at a shot, by getting a range upon them.

  In this way we retreated for miles before the flames, in the midst of the flocks, and keeping company with them where they were carried along in advance of the fire, in accumulating numbers; many of which had been driven along for many miles. We murdered the poor birds in this way, until we had as many as we could well carry, and laid our course back to the fort, where we got much credit for our great shooting, and where we were mutually pledged to keep the secret.

  —George Catlin,

  Letters and Notes on the Manners,

  Customs, and Conditions of the North

  American Indians (1841)

  When I passed through [Kansas] Territory it was being devastate
d by a scourge of locusts, or grasshoppers, as they are here called. In many places they covered the soil with a moving mass, and filled the air like snowflakes on a snowy day. At a roadside station, the train was not able to start till they had been swept from the track. The growing crops were cut off, the trees stripped of their leaves, and the cattle were starving for want of food. The alarming extension of this insect pest, which has ravaged Kansas, Nebraska, and the neighbouring states for the last two or three years, is plausibly explained by the destruction of winged game on the prairies. The nidus of the grasshoppers is the sage brush desert, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Their flight westward was checked by myriads of prairie-fowl [Tympanuchus cupido], which devoured them greedily. The opening up of rapid railway communication between the western country and the eastern seaboard has led to these birds being killed in countless numbers for sale in the New England states, and for exportation to Europe. The barrier which previously existed to the spread of the locust was thus removed. It affords a curious illustration of the intimate relationships which now unite distant nations, to find that an addition to our supply of food in England should bring disasters to cultivators of the soil at a distance of five thousand miles.

  —Samuel Manning,

  American Pictures (1878)

  Prairie chickens probably contributed more to homesteaders than the buffalo ever did.

  —Gerald Horak,

  Kansas City Star (1975)

  Someone wrote that the prairie chicken’s booming was of great comfort to the pioneer. I can’t imagine why. Many things can be said of prairie chicken noise, but by no measure is it a comforting, civilized sound. It is a lonely, wild sound made by a lonely, wild bird. It has the quality of an ancient wind blowing across the smoke flap of a wickiup—companion noise to an Indian courting flute and the drum of unshod pony hooves on bluestem sod. In all of modern America, there is no more lost, plaintive, old-time sound than the booming of a native prairie chicken.

  —John Madson,

  Where the Sky Began (1982)

  A grizzled country of narrow fertile lowlands and wide, depressing uplands, which smiles a few days in the spring and relapses to sullenness during the remainder of the year; a country with cattle on a thousand low-flung and menacing hills, and the green and purple of alfalfa in threads between. That’s where Knute Rockne died.

  —Jay E. House,

  Philadelphia Public Ledger (1931)

  So died the great Viking of football on a high hill overlooking a prairie, at the crossroads of the old forgotten stage road and the new highway of the air, and at his bier, keeping vigil on the hilltop stood, not the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, but four sun-tanned horsemen of the plains forcing back from the tangled wreckage a gaping, curious crowd.

  —William Allen White,

  “How a Viking Died” (1931)

  (Talk as you like, he only suits these States whose manners favor the audacity and sublime turbulence of the States.)

  —Walt Whitman,

  “By Blue Ontano’s Shore” (1881)

  In the free states, we give a sniveling support to slavery. The judges give cowardly interpretations to the law, in direct opposition to the known foundation of all law, that every immoral statute is void. And here of Kansas, the President [Franklin Pierce] says: “Let the complainants go to the courts,” though he knows that when the poor plundered farmer comes to court, he finds the ringleader who has robbed him dismounting from his own horse and unbuckling his knife to sit as judge.

  The President told the Kansas Committee that the whole difficulty grew from “the factious spirit of the Kansas people respecting institutions which they need not have concerned themselves about.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson,

  “On Affairs in Kansas” (1856)

  The state of controversy respecting the existence of slavery in [Kansas] Territory is well known. Those who would prefer a home where politics are undisturbed by any strong element of agitation had better go into the more northern territory. Nebraska will furnish room for immigrants for many years to come.

  —Jacob Ferns,

  The States and Territories of the Great West (1856)

  The settlement of Kansas was made in the throes of a political revolution; and the character of her people and their acts must be gauged by a state of embryo war leading up to a war which had no parallel in the civilized world. We were but a few years removed from a condition of public sentiment when, even in the most enlightened portions of the North, the attempt to disdain slavery at all had been met with tar and feathers, lynching, and many other modes of torture. Even in enlightened Boston the clamor of the mob of “men of wealth and respectability” had hardly passed away when the very elite of that city pursued the poor fugitive [slave] Anthony Burns and delivered him up to the slave power. . . .[Until] the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska organic act, it was dangerous to express sympathy with the slave anywhere, and peril of death to do it near the border slave states.

  —John Speer,

  “Accuracy in History” (1898)

  The origin or genesis of states is usually obscure and legendary, with prehistoric periods from which they gradually emerge like coral islands from the deep. Shadowy and crepuscular intervals precede the day in whose uncertain light men and events, distorted or exaggerated by tradition, become fabulous like the gods and goddesses, the wars of heroes of antiquity. But Kansas has no mythology; its history has no twilight. The foundation stones of the state were laid in the full blaze of the morning sun, with the world as interested spectators.

  Philosophers and historians recognize the influence of early settlers upon the character and destinies of a community. Original impulses are long continued, like the characteristics and propensities which the mother bestows upon her unborn child. The constant vicissitudes of climate, of fortune, of history, together with the fluctuations of politics and business, have engendered in Kansas hitherto perpetual agitation, not always favorable to happiness, but which has stimulated activity, kept the popular pulse feverish, and begotten a mental condition exalted above the level monotonies of life. Everyone is on the qui vive, alert, vigilant like a sentinel at an outpost. Existence has the excitement of a game of chance, of a revolution, of a battle whose event is doubtful. The unprecedented environment has produced a temperament volatile and mercurial, marked by uncalculating ardor, enterprise, intrepidity, and insatiable hunger for innovation out of which has grown a society that has been alternately the reproach and the marvel of mankind.

  —John James Ingalls,

  “Kansas: 1541–1891” (1892)

  Was slavery the rule and freedom the exception, or freedom the rule and slavery the exception?

  It was evident that the great question, “Shall freedom or slavery become national?” was to be settled upon the plains of Kansas.

  —Samuel Newitt Wood,

  Kansas Historical Society Address (1886)

  He was one of the heroic band who threw their lives between the infant state of Kansas and the demon of human slavery and success fully fought off the monster, notwithstanding it was supported by the whole power of the Federal Government

  —Margaret Lyon Wood,

  Memorial of Samuel N. Wood (1892)

  We are disposed to like Kansas; moreover, we believe in Kansas, for she will, at some future day, accomplish much greater things than party quarrels or Wakarusa Wars. . . . Give her, we say, but a sufficiency of true-hearted and able-bodied Anglo-Saxon men and women, every-day working-people, not fine ladies and gentlemen, not broken-down politicians, or pot-house-ranting filibusters, and we will venture to predict that the moral atmosphere of the Territory would clear itself from its impurities within six months’ time; but above all things, let the men who are to till those yet unbroken acres and ere long make the laws of the state, which is soon to take her glorious place among the proud sisterhood of the Republic, be conservatives. For it is a well-established fact, that as Radicalism is the disorganizer, so is Conservatism no
t only the pacificator but the absolute preserver of the frontier. And we feel assured that if those who claim to be the best friends of Kansas—and in saying this we reiterate our disclaimer of any sectional leanings—would but be satisfied to attend to their own affairs and let border disturbances alone, it would be infinitely better for the Territory and a real blessing to its inhabitants. Nations, like individuals, derive but little benefit from officious outside interference, however well intended it may be.