PrairyErth
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—Richard Bernstein,
“Unsettling the Old West” (1990)
The Romans read places like faces, as outward revelations of living inner spirit. Each place (like each person) had its individual Genius—which might manifest itself, on occasion, as a snake.
—Charles W. Moore et al.,
The Poetics of Gardens (1988)
Land speculation here [in Kansas] is about the only business in which a man can embark with no other capital than an easy conscience.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
We must allow for the possibility that we can only understand something truly by knowing its future, its fruits, its consequence.
—Frederick Turner,
“A Field Guide to the Synthetic
Landscape” (1988)
Only the growth of a global appreciation for our common human past will wipe out assumptions that a site belongs to the person who temporarily owns the land above it.
—Ellen Herscher,
“A Future in Ruin” (1989)
We’re only now learning that there’s yet another, concealed danger in indiscriminately altering the environment: by inadvertently severing connectedness and thus dulling some of our own awareness, we can begin systematically ignoring our surroundings without quite realizing that our alertness has faltered; we can damage our natural systems; we can put our own safety and health in peril.
—Tony Hiss,
“Encountering the Countryside” (1989)
Now that some veils are being lifted on national-security obscurity, indications are that military facilities are major sources of toxic pollution. Military activity, it appears, has been undermining security of a physical kind, in the name of protecting the metaphysical kind contemplated by geopolitical threat assessors.
—Wade Greene,
“An Idea Whose Time Is Fading” (1990)
History is lived in the main by the unknown and forgotten.
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Introduction to Pioneer Women (1981)
The dead take their names with them out of the world.
—N. Scott Momaday,
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
The angels in marble make it impossible to imagine back to life the bones that are buried at their feet. Inflexibly benign, they point to heaven. . . . The historian should stay away, lest he be convinced against his will of the futility of any attempt to bring back to memory the forgotten men whose mortality on earth is here proclaimed in letters of stone.
—Helen Hooven Santmyer,
Ohio Town (1963)
Life extended into death, and vice versa. Death was not the natural end of life but one phase of an infinite cycle. Life, death, and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process which repeated itself continuously.
—Octavio Paz,
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1959)
The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.
—Gilbert White,
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1778)
Brave Buffalo said: “I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but Wakan-tanka does not intend they shall do so directly—man must do the greater part in securing an understanding.”
—Frances Densmore,
Teton Sioux Music (1918)
The most important requisite in describing an animal is to be sure and give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and effect of all its parts, known and unknown. You must tell what it is to man. Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. Yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are as it were phenomena of dead matter.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1860)
[Harrier] flight has the notionateness of prairie winds, and the sudden detour as a change of mind, a leap straight on, and then a notionate, abrupt change in direction as if he had just bought wings and were trying what sort of wings they were.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
E. H. Forbush (1927) says: “As [the harrier] bounds up and down in the air, it seems to move more like a rubber ball than a bird.”
—Arthur Cleveland Bent,
Life Histories of North American
Birds of Prey, Part I (1937)
A few years ago the freight wagons and oxen passing through Council Grove were counted by the thousands, the value of merchandise by millions. But the shriek of the iron horse has silenced the lowing of the panting ox and the old Trail looks desolate. The track of the commerce of the plains has changed and with the change is destined to come other changes better and more blessed.
—Editorial,
Junction City Union (1867)
The most famous spring in Kansas ought to be a state shrine.
—Kate L. Gregg,
The Road to Santa Fe (1952)
We believe it to our interest to discourage the settlement of free negroes in Kansas. The two races never have, and never can associate together on terms of equality. But at the same time, if we have got to have them here, we would have them educated; we are opposed to ignorance in every shape.
—Samuel Newitt Wood,
Kansas Press (1859)
I advocate “negro suffrage” not because they are black, not because they are of the male sex, but because they are human beings and entitled to all the rights of other human beings. If women are not human beings, then they are not entitled to the rights of human beings; but if you once raise them above the brute creation and admit them to be human beings, that ends the argument.
—Samuel Newitt Wood,
Emporia News (1867)
I did what I believed right at the time, with the light that I then had, and I have no apology to make to the present or to posterity for the part I took. I concede some honesty of purpose to others. If any erred, let us throw the mantle of charity over their acts, for not until we reach that better country to which we are one by one surely emigrating and in which [we] will be emigrants and not pioneers, will the motives of all, and the whole work of the pioneers of Kansas, be justly estimated.
—Samuel Newitt Wood,
Kansas Historical Society address (1886)
Much of the best legislation of the state was originated by [Sam Wood], especially such as protects the poor and the rights of women and children.
—Editorial,
Lawrence Jeffersonian (1891)
They call Kansas the “Sunflower State,” not because it is overrun with the noxious weed, but because, as the sunflower turns on its stem to catch the first beams of the morning sun, and with its broad disk and yellow rays follows the great orb of the day, so Kansas turns to catch the first rays of every advancing thought or civilized agency, and with her broad prairies and golden fields welcomes and follows the light.
—Editorial,
Burlington (Kansas) Nonpareil (1887)
For a generation Kansas has been the testing-ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every po
litical fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty, and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy. The enthusiasm of youth, the conservatism of age, have alike yielded to the contagion, making the history of the State a melodramatic series of cataclysms in which tragedy and comedy have contended for mastery, and the convulsions of Nature have been emulated by the catastrophes of society. There has been neither peace, tranquility, nor repose.
Kansas was the prologue to a tragedy whose epilogue has not yet been pronounced; the prelude to a fugue of battles whose reverberations have not yet died away.
—John James Ingalls,
“Kansas: 1541–1891” (1892)
The belief that Kansas was founded for a cause distinguishes it, in the eyes of its inhabitants, as preeminently the home of freedom. It lifts the history of the state out of the commonplace of ordinary westward migration and gives to the temper of the people a certain elevated and martial quality. The people of Iowa or Nebraska are well enough, but their history has never brought them in touch with cosmic processes. The Pilgrims themselves are felt to have been actuated by less noble and altruistic motives. . . . This may smack of prejudice, but it is no heresy in Kansas. The trained and disinterested physiocratic historian will tell us that such statements are unsupported by the documents. The documents show, he will say, that the Kansas emigrants, like other emigrants, came for cheap land and in the hope of bettering their condition; the real motive was economic, as all historic motives are; the Kansas emigrant may have thought he was going to Kansas to resist oppression, but in reality he went to take up a farm.
The frontier develops strong individuals, but it develops individuals of a particular type, all being after much the same pattern. The individualism of the frontier is one of achievement, not of eccentricity.
—Carl Becker,
“Kansas” (1910)
Seldom has a community with so much vibrant idealism in its soul, so much creative potential in its mind, become so thickly encrusted with petty bourgeois mediocrity.
—Kenneth S. Davis,
Kansas: A Bicentennial History (1976)
In the Quadrangle:
Elk
That many pioneers came into the American West with a pair of horses’ asses directly before them is not a consideration of either historian or ordinary citizen but, so a fellow from Topeka told me one evening in the Strong City café, for a person taking one of the Flint Hills covered-wagon trips occasionally sold to tourists, farting and manuring horse rumps sweating a few feet away will be a significant part of the view from the wagon seat. I struck up a conversation when I saw him underline with purple ink and a pocket ruler a sentence in Kansas History, the journal of the state historical society. He was a civil engineer, squarish and short, a friendly man of pronounced opinions: after he put a good squirt from the plastic lemon into his iced tea and took a sip, he said, I’ll be damned if I couldn’t eat three lemons and pee out a better juice than this. He loved double acrostics and western history, and I think he’d read everything written on the Union Pacific Railroad. I was familiar with his arguments, but I liked his passion for them, especially his vexations about textbooks and professors.
He said, For six generations we’ve given our kids a picture of the American West that’s no better than the dime novels of the 1880s—nationalistic, imperialistic, romantic, and distorted till hell won’t have it. Indians are either ruthless, conniving savages or noble stiffs. Pioneer men are two-fisted and upright, their women prairie madonnas. The railroads are quaint pufferbellies with lovely little whistles, tooty-toot. And what is probably the most recognizable scene of western history—two armed men facing off on a dusty street—if that ever happened, there isn’t one single reliable record of it. The past we believe in is fabrication. We’re informed idiots about it. The truth is, white settlers were motivated to come out here not for noble endsbut self-serving, economic ones. At their worst, pioneers were genocidal and environmental exploiters encouraged by a grasping and moronic and inhumane government. And the inheritance continues.
He had got himself exercised, and I’m afraid I abetted it when I asked whether I might jot down a few of his words. He waved his hand in what seemed to be assent and said, The white conquest was inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we have to perpetrate lies on our children. They’ll understand themselves, and the threats they live under, if they can see their ancestors honestly. We harm their futures by throwing bull chips in their eyes.
When his steak dinner arrived he kept talking, seeing the ready audience I was, although he choked once and had to pause. Projectiles of food now and then rocketed from his mouth onto me as he continued more to lecture than to swallow. He didn’t blame movies, television, or popular novels for the distortions so much as a couple of generations of American historians who let the public get by with myths. Look, these historians—they were almost all white males—they were more interested in theories than in how the butt of a horse changes the way you see things or why a certain carbine would jam and change the outcome of a battle. They were nothing more than medieval theologians deductively proving their ideas. What they gave us belongs in a Buffalo Bill Wild West show.
He stopped to ask what I was writing down, and I complimented him on his insight and he continued, but not before snorting a particle of pickled beet onto my sleeve. When I took that covered-wagon tour a couple of years ago, one passenger was a history prof back east, a nice guy in Hush Puppies, lots of information, but he couldn’t tell a sycamore from a cottonwood, hadn’t the least idea of what kind of tree to cut a wagon axle out of. He wasn’t exactly sure what an ox is. He didn’t know how to make hominy, hadn’t ever skinned a squirrel or milked a cow—and he got paid fifty thousand a year to tell college kids about the West. A woman, an outspoken gal, asked him what the wagon-train pioneers used for toilet paper and sanitary napkins. Now I’d call that basic knowledge. He didn’t know. If you’d put him in a homesteader’s cabin alone, he’d die in a month. But he told us every theory of the American frontier ever concocted.
After the waitress took away his plate, I asked him how his steak was; and he said, I had meatloaf, and went off again, pausing only once to pick something from a tooth (I thought, if he orders the coconut cream pie I’m moving to the next stool). He said he was glad to see a younger generation of historians working to break down nationalistic and racist and sexist myths of the West by looking at ordinary details of life and then trying to interpret them inductively. Then, But I still haven’t read anything about the realities of riding in a covered wagon for days, where you’ve got a pair of crapping butt ends in your face the whole way.
He spoke about writing an account of his trip, how it changed his perception of our history and the kind of people he descended from; the title was, so he claimed, “Fair History and Farting Horses: Fundaments and Fundamentals of Our Western Passage.” When I wrote that down he said, just so you’ll know, I’ve copyrighted it. I asked to read his essay when he finished it, but I’ve never heard from him. He continued over coffee, now taking on Kansas railroad barons, but his commentary was less heated and interesting, although it later helped me see something in the Elk quadrangle I otherwise might have overlooked.
At forty square miles—the smallest of the twelve quads—Elk has a single westward-running road that follows Middle Creek before splitting off north and south to follow two polar-trending small tributaries, Stribby and Wildcat creeks. The entire northern half, but for a single section, is without roads, and this isolated corner is a lovely reach of hollows and narrow vales dissecting the knobby land. It is a place mostly of pasturage, a good quad for getting the feel of tall prairie even if it is a bit chewed over. Because of its isolation and negligible population, much of its history has never been passed along and recorded in the Falls, the county hearth for storytelling. If you had a handful of half-dollars, you would today have enough to give one to every resident of the Elk quad. But, for about fifty years there was a village here, or at
least the seeds of one, directly atop the county line so that on one side of the main street Henry Collett’s general merchandise and post office sat in Chase but his blacksmith shop across the road was in Marion. Such bifurcation rarely benefits a community, and this split, dividing affairs as it did, was not good for Elk. There were never more than a dozen buildings, and nearly all of them, one by one, went down in flames (the last two, as if to close an era neatly, burned on New Year’s Eve of 1930); all that you’ll see today is a strip of big Osage-orange hedge along a dirt lane. When Whitt Laughridge first pointed out the site to me and said, That’s Elk, I asked, looking right at it, Where? and I walked through the brush and still couldn’t find it; later he showed me a couple of photographs of the village.
Two miles east stand the only aboveground remnants: Balch school, a fine one-room stone building (now a hay barn, the standard use here for old schoolhouses), and little Elk Cemetery, one of the prettiest in the county.