Here, except for the river valleys, the issue of the old inland sea is Permian limestone and shale laid down a quarter of a billion years ago, long before the rising of the great saurian world of giant jaws. To walk the Flint Hills is, in a sense, to walk where the evidence of the last 250 million years—the shape of the hills themselves—shows only as does the hand of the sculptor on the finished figure: to see Michelangelo’s chisel and his dusty grip, look at the swell of David’s buttock, the incurve of his back. The ancient aspect of this terrain derives, in part, from the last quarter billion years’ appearing to have gone off and left only a carved artifact behind, and, sometimes, I think the citizens absorb that aspect: they often seem to be people from another time, people who desire permanence over continuity, who just happen to find themselves surfaced in an era of X-rated movies, the Internal Revenue Service, Styrofoam burger boxes, and nuclear medicine.
Now: I’ve stopped walking and have sat down to take a pull from my canteen, to look about and consider my trouble in finding the well I figured would be near these stone ruts of the old drillers’ track. The day is quiet, and the western slope above Gannon Branch seems to invite a long roll down its easy contours of grasses, a hill smoothly stretched like a circus tent caught full of a breeze and pulling against its ties. This place is not what the aboriginal world was, but you can sense something of that other period, the dominance of a landscape that seems to be at rest and in place and immutable but for the seasonal changes of its colorings. This illusion of stasis is its power over us, our newness among all the. oldnesses, we such nervous tenants afraid of endings. A far, narrow black line that is a barbed-wire fence looks absurd, so humanly small, a thing as foolish as a fence strung over a piece of sea: ownership is too paltry for the long reach, horizontal and vertical, of these hills.
Chase County is as it is because the Permian seas were as they were: the condition of those waters supplied the matrix for the shape of the terraces and ridges where the cherty sheets of rubble that give the hills their name protect beds of shale from storm and fire and plow. In the valleys, man can eat directly from what the soil gives—corn, wheat, fruits—but on the hard uplands he needs the intermediary of four-stomached animals, and in that small link, these citizens see themselves (truck mudflaps say CATTLE COUNTRY), but the linkings go no further back, and the residents don’t picture themselves as children of the Permian seas. They understand their living in the hills but not the hills living in them, and so the deeper links are broken and don’t inform their conscious life. The connection would seem to be more apparent than it is, since it’s so easy to mistake a distant piece of limestone for a skeletal something, or a bleached steer-bone for a chunk of limestone. (The Canopic jars holding mummified pharaonic innards are, appropriately, cut from limestone as are the pyramids themselves.)
I’m guessing, but I think a telling in this county of the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha—repopulating a postdiluvian world by throwing the bones of their mother, common fieldstones, over their shoulders to make new people—would receive blank stares, and the tale would have neither the power of myth nor the truth of geology. Yet the fact remains: limestone is a rock not unlike bone; the fact remains: the chemical nature of the old seawater produced a stony land that produces good grasses that produce good, hoofed protein digestible to man. Flint Hills beef is a 250-million-year-old gift, yet the sense of history here goes back only to 1850 or sometimes a little further to the time of lithic weapons, and then it ceases. Even the three most noted buildings—the courthouse, the Z Bar Ranch home, and the Fox Creek School—made as they are from that primeval, thickened Kansas sea cut and laid up into walls, even these buildings do not carry the people’s connections beyond the nineteenth century. The sense of the past here is abbreviated, and it lies separate like a severed limb.
The rubble on this ridge is Wreford Limestone, a fragmentary rock derived mostly from sea plants, and so better suited for railroad ballast than courthouse walls, and the well-diggers’ track is full of it and broken flint. No one knows certainly how flint, its hardness greater than steel, forms within soft limestones that will dissolve in a bowl of apple-cider vinegar Typically here, the flint develops in elliptical spheres, nodules to remind you of sponges, and some geologists, in fact, believe that ancient sponges provided the “seed” for flint (I like its formal name: cryptocrystalline quartz, and I imagine: the Cryptocrystalline Hills). I’ve just picked up a piece of blue-gray flint, the color of deep seawater under clouds, and I try to imagine spongeness; but how could something so soft, absorbent, open-textured, and weightless ever be transmuted into a thing so hard, impermeable, heavy, sharp-edged, and capable—if I strike it against another—of releasing sparks? (Surely those sponges were the kind more like coral.) Fire from the old sea, as if the silica, a Prometheus, had stolen it away from the igneous granite god and, through all the long changes, held it close until I set it loose again in a place and day so distant from its inception.
Before the children of Europe took these hills, the people who walked here believed stones to be alive because they carried heat, changed their forms, and moved if you watched long enough. To them, rocks were concentrations of power and life; all over the world, where people have not forgotten the wisdom of primitivism, they touch sacred stones to bring fertility. But here, when a bottom farmer limes his fields with “inert” granulated rock, in his chemistry there is no informing poetry, no myth. Yet, to think of rock can be to dream origins and be reminded of the old search for the philosopher’s stone, that elixir basic to all substance.
Now: my topographic map shows I’ve walked too far, and I turn back and try to look where I’ve overlooked before, and I rewalk, my hopes dwindling, and then there is something not right, a thing that doesn’t blend, and I’ve found the wellhead. In my delight, it’s a few moments before I see the concrete cap, and for me, except in imagination, there’ll be no approach to the Nemaha Ridge, the true Kansas Mountains, no looking down toward the crystalline basement lying at the far bottom of this tube of darkness, three Empire State Buildings below, no sniffing that source granite warmed by the earthern heart and covered with the sea gift. There are some places you don’t go, some journeys you can’t make. But now, in my pocket, like an old coin often spent, is a chip of the Nemahas.
Outside the Z Bar
The American prairies and plains eat pretension and dreams of aristocracy with the slow patience of inevitability, corrupting, eroding, and quite dissolving them in some places, and in others leaving only a carcass as a kind of memorial, a monument, a memorandum. Drive the rock roads of Chase County and you can see old, cutstone walls of abandoned houses roofed and unroofed, windows broken and gone even down to the frames; in the houses still having roofs and floors, you’ll find gnawed holes and in a corner a large pile of brittle sticks like a few baskets of laundry dumped and left; these wood-rat nests are the last insult: spheres of scat spreading and deepening over the parlor, the kitchen, the bedroom, in a final defiling of the wish for nobility.
Around the county there are a dozen or so of these houses, all built between 1870 and 1890 of native stone, always cut and usually dressed. A few of them are small, no more than four rooms, and, seemingly, designed as the walls went up, as if the owner told the mason, I have this much money—do what you can but do it well, and the mason did, so that even the humblest of these somehow partakes of the timeless stone, and these small shells are the saddest ones. The other houses, larger, are mostly still occupied; of them, sitting above Fox Creek a couple of miles north of Strong City, is the finest, Spring Hill Ranch, now often called the Z Bar. Its 112 years of occupancy are about to end, and with them ends the capital expression in Chase of an American hunger for the trappings of landed noblesse.
Of all the gifts from these prairie hills, humility may be the greatest, but it apparently wasn’t what Stephen F. Jones, with his so common last name, was looking for when he came into the county with his family and black servants (once slaves in his
and his wife’s families) and two thousand head of cattle; Jones arrived with big money (Dollars sticking out of every pocket, said an old countian) and grand, southern notions. He wanted from the hills, it seems, an American fiefdom. Born near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1826, at twenty-three he went to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, to work on a cotton plantation where he married Louisa Barber, who followed his fortunes from that time forth. They went to Texas to farm and ranch, and eighteen years later moved to the Arkansas River Valley of the Colorado plains and continued farming, ranching, becoming rich. In 1876, for reasons I haven’t been able to discover, along with much else about the Joneses (why was his brand an N?), they’reversed the usual pattern of settlement here by emigrating from the West with much money and many possessions—in fact, with everything for a ranch except land, and they soon also had that, seven thousand acres along Fox Creek. On the western slope above the stream and just below the crest that opens to an extravagance of horizon, Jones laid out his ranch home near the spring that untypically issues from a hilltop as if its water were highborn. He bought the big grassland at his back and the wooded valley before him so that he came to own the horizon too.
In constructing his house and a half-dozen outbuildings into a composite collection from a single material—limestone quarried on the place—he hired so many workmen that travelers on the Council Grove road would take the hubbub for Strong City and stop and try to find lodgings. Completed, the three-story house of eleven rooms seemed larger than it was, probably because of the tripleterrace garden he set in front of it. Yet the place is not pretentious: maybe it’s the hugeness of prairie and sky that subdues things, gives them a human if not a humble scale. Like the house, the barn is three stories and built into the slope, a feature not seen by Jones’ workmen since the hillside dugouts of the first settlers. Twin ramps, high and steep, rise to the top floor of the barn so that a four-horse team can enter and turn around inside or continue through to the other exit; attached to it was a big doubleheader windmill that could both thresh and grind. When Jones finished the immense building he learned that its length fell two feet shy of being the biggest barn in the state. His workers constructed a chicken house with a barrel-vault ceiling, a combined smokehouse and spring- house, and a cut-stone privy with a cupola and arched window to light three seats (one half-height for children). He surrounded it all with twenty-six miles of English-style stone fence that he believed would be rat-proof. His manor was complete.
Jones then founded the Strong City Bank, bought into a lumber and hardware business, had a five-acre orchard planted, helped develop English Herefords, and also raised Shorthorns, Galloways, Hambletonian trotters, Berkshire and Poland China hogs, some sheep, and put three hundred acres into cultivation. Five years after entering the county, his holdings could be matched, or nearly so, only by J. R. Blackshere on his Clover Cliff Ranch eight miles west. In a time when a farm of a quite prosperous countian could be valued at fifty thousand dollars, Stephen Jones’ holdings were worth two hundred thousand.
At sixty-two, twelve years after arriving here, he sold Spring Hill, and he and Louisa moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he built another house, this one also of Cottonwood Limestone shipped all the way from Chase County. A quarter of a century later, this man, who had lived in six states and gotten rich in four, came back to Kansas to die. I’ve been told that, in his last years, he used to sit alone on a small stone wall along Cottonwood Street in Strong City and watch automobiles pass by. A countian said, It was a pitiful sight.
Today there aren’t many countians who can tell you what the carved letter J above the comice of the house stands for, and hardly anyone recalls Jones’ daughter Christiana, who stayed on in Strong City, although a few remember his granddaughter Colie, who married William Yoast Morgan, son of the first and only woman mayor in the county, the man who sold the Emporia Gazette to William Allen White and who later wrote the “Jayhawker in Yurrup” travel books. (Morgan had the capacity to turn a phrase: about Holland, he said, Some of the land looks lower than the rest, but none looks higher.)
The ranch: old highway 13 passed thirty or forty feet closer to the lowest terrace than does the newer and straightened and renumbered route 177, but both highways split the small valley, really not much more than a long and broad hollow. The roads approach Spring Hill laterally, when the ranch layout calls for a long, frontal entrance, one that would let the place rise on its levels in the eye as does its wealth in the imagination. The terraces are long and narrow and parallel to Fox Creek running beyond the east line of trees; the wall of each terrace is of cut stone, and atop the lowest is a wrought-iron fence, only knee-high to mark out the estate but not block the traveler’s view, and on the highest terrace is a circular stone fountain once served by the spring but now filled with soil. The home, built by some of the men who worked on the courthouse, seems to be a descendant, with its Second Empire Parisian urbanity and its red, standing-seam mansard roof articulated by dormers. On each end of the front side are twin projecting gables, and a crenellated comice joins the roof to the rock shell of undressed cut-stone of regular dimensions cornered by tooth-hammered quoins. The oblong and columned first-floor porch, the element that makes the place look like a home instead of a small courthouse, opens to the east vale. Grillwork once topping the gable is gone, but above the cornice remains this:
A.D. J 1881.
The J stands inside a shield as if a crest. I have never been permitted inside the house, but I understand it has been modified, remodeled away from grace to practicality, the commonplace absorbing the fanciful and superfluous, as the twentieth century often does to the nineteenth.
On the north side of the home, in complementary but simplified lines, is a peculiar smokehouse-springhouse, the one above the other and joined to the kitchen by a thirty-foot tunnel once surmounted by a small tower to admit light, an eccentric thing Thomas Jefferson might have designed for Monticello. When I first began poking around the county, I heard stories about a slave tunnel at Spring Hill. The passage ran, allegedly, for a couple of miles from the house to the bam, penetrated the big ridge, then opened onto the western prairie to afford escaping blacks a jump on their pursuers. While it’s true that eastern Kansas had an active underground railroad network, Jones built the house sixteen years after the Civil War ended; yet neither the anachronism nor the inability of anyone to find a tunnel other than the short one from the kitchen has dissuaded believers. Last year after a tree on the highest terrace blew over and exposed a rock-lined vault, apparently a cistern, the legend revived. Perhaps because of the mystery inherent in dark, forgotten, death-haunted secret passageways, county children come to cherish the place with a feeling only the courthouse or the big stone-arch bridge a few miles away at Clements can equal. But the truth is that Louisa Jones, after witnessing a tornado strike the house during construction, wanted a storm cellar, one she could reach without getting wet. The only blacks ever moving underground at Spring Hill were servants carrying butter and smoked hams to the kitchen.
When Jones left for Kansas City, he sold the ranch to a Strong City man, Barney Lantry, the third-wealthiest countian, who moved his cowhands into the house. Nineteen years later Lantry sold it, and then it sold four more times, at last being picked up by a Red Hills ranch outfit whose brand was Z—. Except for one interval, only tenants occupied the house after Jones. In the 1970s, the ranch went on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1989, after the Audubon Society bought an option on Spring Hill and its nearly eleven thousand contiguous acres, including the Fox Creek School two miles north, the society started working to get the National Park Service to take it over as a monument to commemorate early ranch life in the Flint Hills. When talk began about also restoring the connected prairie, the ghosts of the Tallgrass Park arose, the old arguments once more started flying, and voices from outside the county were again abundant; but this time many countians spoke up in favor of preservation (not just of Spring Hill but of themselves), and they refus
ed to be intimidated by KGA members who disrupted public hearings and videotaped anyone advocating the monument. (One bold citizen called the association the KGB, and another asked, If you KGA boys are so opposed to federal this and that, why do you accept agricultural subsidies?) The councils of the twin towns even passed a resolution supporting the proposal, and most countians hoped the Kansas congressional delegation would soon introduce a bill to establish the monument.
The dreams of a cattle baron came to this: eight years of blooded horses, candelabra, black servants bearing silver trays, and then a century of mostly hired hands and absentee and corporate owners, the home become tenant housing and now headed toward ownership by every American. Whatever else these hills tolerate from Anglo culture, they do not long admit the phantasm of squiredom, and yet some people here, despising and fearing possession in common, wish for the return of a cattle king to rescue the ranch from fellow citizens they imagine descending on them.
On the Town:
Gabriel’s Inventory
The old Dunkard preacher and his wife came into the county in 1856, their wagon full of what they had imagined in Indiana they would need in the new land. It was a good load, and, once across the Mississippi—in Hannibal, Missouri—Gabriel Jacobs traded his horses for oxen, powerful but tractable beasts that would graze where horses would not, animals born to pull eastern chattels into the West. Traveling with Gabriel and Elizabeth were three daughters, a son, and two sons-in-law, and waiting for them along the creek that would soon bear their name was the eldest boy, who had arrived the year before. Why Gabriel at seventy-three headed west no one knows now, but one countian wrote, They must have heard some glorious and promising story about Kansas. The first Sabbath after the Jacobses arrived in the creek hollow, they observed the Dunker custom of mutual foot washing, and Gabriel took as his sermon text Nehemiah 2:20. “The God of Heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants will arise and build.”