The first waves of settlement passed over the Flint Hills for destinations much farther west, but, as those lands filled, people began looking again at the eastern portion of what an 1823 map based on Stephen Long’s exploration four years earlier called the Great American Desert. They discovered not aridity and sand but something closer to the earlier meaning of the word: deserted—at least empty of white farmers. The land was not at all barren, and, when the immigrants of Cottonwood Falls and Council Grove and a hundred other Hills places saw their apple trees bloom and their corn and oats grow, all that remained was to get clear title and evict the inhabitants of the last ten thousand years. Anglo society accomplished that deed in only ten years by odious methods governments and churches condoned, by an ethic that taints every Pioneer Mother statue put up by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The nineteenth-century dumping ground, a kind of huge ghetto that Kansas had become for eastern tribes forced in with the native Kansa and Osage, had to be emptied so that Indian Territory (I.T.) could become Kansas Territory (K.T.), could become Kanzas (Kan.), could become Kansas (KS). And so, a decade after its founding, the Falls and its county were free of tribal Americans except for occasional wanderers from the new Indian Territory, a place the next wave of Anglo usurpers, the Boomers and Sooners of Oklahoma, would soon take. Today there is not even a half-blood Indian living in the county, although the aboriginal presence was once so great that anybody who will walk the plowed bottoms can still find stone points. The Roniger Museum behind the courthouse has thousands of them, a collection once coveted by the Smithsonian Institution.
A few weeks ago I sat in the last row of the Chase County High School auditorium, and before me was an assembly of blond heads with last names from Kent and Antrim and Bavaria by way of New York, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and I remembered what a New Jersey visitor once said to me: The people here look so American.
II
GLADSTONE
From the Commonplace Book:
Gladstone
The true state of every nation is the state of common life.
—Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland (1775)
Nowhere in America, probably, is the contrast between the Northern and the Southern man exhibited in so marked a manner as in Kansas. He who would see the difference between comfort and discomfort, between neatness and disorder, cleanliness and filth, between farming the land and letting the land farm itself, between trade and stagnation, stirring activity and reigning sloth, between a wide-spread intelligence and an almost universal ignorance, between general progress and an incapacity for all improvement or advancement, has commonly only to cross the border-line which separates a free from a slave State. But he who would see these broad contrasts in a single view, the evidences of well-directed enterprise and intelligent energy mixed up with the ugly features of backgoing and barbarity, should seek out Kansas and make its strange varieties of inhabitants his study.
—T. H. Gladstone,
The Englishman in Kansas (1857)
June 15th, 1856: Others have written of a vitality in the atmosphere of Kansas that is truly wonderful, “it breathes new life around, and vigor and buoyancy is felt coming back to old limbs.” My health has not been so good for years as since I have been in the Territory; my headaches have lost the greater share of their severity, and I feel equal for any task. I never was so thin in flesh, and never felt such agility.
November 29th, 1856: Often father Colt would say when we urged him to leave Kansas with us, “I had as lief lay my bones in Kansas as in any other place”; and so it has come to pass. But to think of a death in Kansas, in that wild though beautiful country—to be laid away in a rough box, in a grave marked only while the mound looks newly made, away from all kindred and friends who would drop on it a tear or plant on it a flower, seems to me horrible in the extreme.
—Miriam Davis Colt,
Went to Kansas, Being a Thrilling
Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to
That Fairy Land and Its Sad Results (1862)
Pioneer life was usually duller and safer than it is generally imagined.
The Wilderness was no “heritage” to folk who had to cope with it; it became one only when it no longer had to be lived in.
—David Lowenthal,
“Not Every Prospect Pleases” (1962)
Nature is uncommonly helpful to the settler here.
—Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg,
“Across Kansas by Train” (1877)
Until 1895 the whole history of the state was a series of disasters, and always something new, extreme, bizarre, until the name Kansas became a byword, a synonym for the impossible and the ridiculous, inviting laughter, furnishing occasion for jest and hilarity. “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.”
—Carl Becker,
“Kansas” (1910)
As in all other things, the myth of the Great American Desert is an asset of no mean proportion to the Kansas man. All of which serves to establish, in a way, the boast that what is a calamity for other countries is often a valuable asset for Kansas.
—William Connelley,
History of Kansas (1928)
Water runs off these rolling prairies so rapidly that a stream which a three-year-old child might ford at night will be running water enough to float a steamboat before morning.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
March the 3rd, 1857
Dear Brother and Sister we received your letter March the Second with much pleasure and glad to here from you all and much to here that you had sole out to come to Kansas for I think it is the best thing you can do the sooner you come out the beter it will be for you We are all well at present and we hope these few lines may find you injoying the same blessing I will go and se farther Jacobs and take your letter along and he can se and know your Request of him I thot it best to rite to you so you would get the Waybill in good time I now want to inform you that when you come to the perraryes that you had beter take a little wood along in yor fead troft or else you mite miss your coffee some night because that when I came out I had to burn cobs or get no coffee also when you get to Kansas City if your woman neads any thing Hannah says that is the time to get it whatever it may be you can get things closer but not so cheap before you get through the state of Mosoury get some fead for your horses if you have any and if you have cattle you won’t nead any grane for you will finde plenty of grass of the best kinds bring ropes and drive little stakes and tie some of your horses and let the Rest go and they wont nead much hay Hannah wants you to bring roses sprouts lalock sprouts curns sprouts tansy and roots and a little whiskey to keep the roots alive for Jackson peach seeds aple seed and all kinds of garden seeds that you suppos to be neadful because they are scarce out here they are nothing like sweet potatoes here If you can bring a few Irish potatoes or good ones some [of] a good kind We have had toler colde winter but it has not been long about two months and then the winter was over. . . . Now I will clos these few lines so no more at present but remains effectionet friends until Deth
Jackson Holmes
Hannah [Jacobs] Holmes
—Chase County Historical Sketches (1948)
Much of the population in many American small towns would be either marginal or unemployable in any city. In their hometowns, such people usually have the advantages of roots, family, some kind of standing within a group, and often have their own homes.
—Albert Solnit,
“What’s the Use of Small Towns?” (1966)
Urban-oriented students of small central places are afflicted by a kind of metropolitan myopia, which makes them act as though they think that rural residents somehow are just not quite as smart and clever as city people.
—John Fraser Hart,
The Look of the Land (1975)
The earth is a fire planet, and Homo sapiens, a fire creature. The earth has fire because it has lif
e.
—Stephen J. Pyne,
“The Summer We Let Wild Fire Loose” (1989)
Haveing nothing else to do, I set fire to the Prairies.
—Francis Chardon,
Fort Clark Journal (1839)
The Indians now set fire to the prairies and woods all around us, and the chance of good sport daily diminished. These malicious neighbours were determined to drive us from the district; they evidently watched our every motion; and whenever we entered a wood or grove to hunt, they were sure to set the dry grass on fire. Half a mile to the windward they pursued this plan so effectually, as not only to spoil our hunting, but on two occasions to oblige me to provide hastily for my personal safety: on the first of these, they set fire to a wood where I was passing, and compelled me to cross a creek for fear of being overtaken by the flames; on the second, having watched me as I crossed a large dry prairie, beyond which was some timber that I wished to try for deer, they set fire to the grass in two or three places to the windward; and as it was blowing fresh at the time, I saw that I should not have time to escape by flight; so I resorted to the simple expedient, in which lies the only chance of safety on such occasions: I set the prairie on fire where I myself was walking, and then placed myself in the middle of the black barren space which I thus created, and which covered many acres before the advancing flames reached its border; when they did so they naturally expired for want of fuel, but they continued their leaping, smoking, and crackling way on each side of me. It was altogether a disagreeable sensation, and I was half choked with hot dust and smoke.
—Charles Augustus Murray,
Travels in North America (1839)
Over the elevated lands and prairie bluffs, where the grass is thin and short, the fire slowly creeps with a feeble flame, which one can easily step over; where the wild animals often rest in their lairs until the flames almost burn their noses, when they will reluctantly rise, and leap over it, and trot off amongst the cinders, where the fire has passed and left the ground black as jet. These scenes become indescribably beautiful, when their flames are seen at many miles distance, creeping over the sides and tops of the bluffs, appearing to be sparkling and brilliant chains of liquid fire (the hills being lost to view), hanging suspended in graceful festoons from the skies.
But there is yet another character of burning prairies. . . . There are many meadows on the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, of many miles in breadth, which are perfectly level, with a waving grass, so high, that we are obliged to stand erect in our stirrups, in order to look over its waving tops as we are riding through it. The fire in these, before a [strong] wind, travels at an immense and frightful rate, and often destroys, on their fleetest horses, parties of Indians, who are so unlucky as to be overtaken by it; not that it travels as fast as a horse at full speed, but that the high grass is filled with wild pea-vines, and other impediments, which render it necessary for the rider to guide his horse in the zig-zag paths of the deers and buffaloes, retarding his progress, until he is overtaken by the dense column of smoke that is swept before the fire—alarming the horse, which stops and stands terrified and immutable, till the burning grass which is wafted in the wind, falls about him, kindling up in a moment a thousand new fires, which are instantly wrapped in the swelling flood of smoke that is moving on like a black thunder cloud, rolling on the earth, with its lightning’s glare, and its thunder rumbling as it goes.
—George Catlin,
Letters and Notes on the Manners,
Customs, and Conditions of the North
American Indians (1841)
We stood in the dark on the platform of our Pullman, fearfully and in awe, marveling at the gruesome yet sublime spectacle: flames as far as the eye can see in every direction, nothing but flames leaping twenty feet and higher, filling the sky with black clouds, a sea of flames racing toward us and threatening to swallow us and all travelers, as the Red Sea swallowed Pharaoh’s armies. But such a threat looms only when grass is very dry and exceptionally tall. Otherwise, fire is merely a long line about six feet wide, easily jumped to safety. Fire therefore seldom frightens settlers; their lives and possessions are usually safe. The most dangerous of these blazes rage in novels.
—Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg,
“Across Kansas by Train” (1877)
When a tiny flame is discovered in Kansas, or other states where the wind blows a hurricane so much of the time, there is not a moment to lose. . . . The resort of a frontiersman, if the flames are too much for him to overcome, is to take refuge with his family, cattle, horses, etc. in the garden, where the growing vegetables make an effectual protection.
—Elizabeth (Mrs. George) Custer,
Tenting on the Plains (1887)
Perhaps one day prairie burning will be one of the great ritual occasions of the Midwest, a sort of festival of Dionysus, the god of the inexhaustible life—an occasion for drama, music, poetry, and storytelling.
—Frederick Turner,
“A Field Guide to the Synthetic
Landscape” (1988)
Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.
—Victor Hugo,
The Toiler of the Sea (1866)
I saw that a little height on the prairie was enough to look like much more—every detail as to height becoming intensely significant, breadth all falling short.
—Frank Lloyd Wright,
An Autobiography (1943)
Stone was a noble material, not just because it was used for noble purposes, noble buildings. It was noble because it had been extracted from the depths of the earth and was timeless.
We have all but entirely broken away from the Renaissance concept of an architecture standing for permanence and political power, an architecture of stone celebrating an unchangeable political and religious order. The notion of building a symbol for posterity—much less a symbol for the ages—is no longer, except in the case of a few commemorative monuments, taken seriously.
In hard times (which eventually come to every community no matter what its size or wealth) what makes survival possible and desirable is not its archeological identity but its ability to continue, and it continues because some structures, some institutions and facilities provide continuity. These are the landmarks, [and they] stand for continuity, community identity, for links with the past and the future. In the contemporary American community these roles are what counteract our mobility and fragmentation and forgetfulness of history.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Stone and Its Substitutes” (1984)
Whatever the character of the thinking, just so was the character of the building.
—Henry Van Brunt,
Original source unknown
You may have believed that the land itself is what matters, that men may come and go, and their names be unimportant—that one may sow an acre where another reaps, and the change be nothing, since it is the same acre, and the wheat or corn is wheat or corn, whoever the plowman or the reaper. Farmers, so far as history knows, are stripped of their personal idiosyncracies; in all that makes them essential to the nation, they are alike. You may have believed this—but the activity in these [county clerks’] rooms proves that it is man’s relation to the land, whether he be its owner or its slave, that is important to him and to the society he has created here in the shadow of the courthouse.
—Helen Hooven Santmyer,
Ohio Town (1963)
In the Quadrangle:
Gladstone
Now, three miles south of Saffordville: I’m walking in the Gladstone quadrangle, some seventy square miles of grassland, draws, and hollows devoid of roadways but for those at its perimeter and the Bloody Creek Road, which follows the wooded stream to a dead end in the heart of the rectangle (even before the first settlers here saw their children finish school, seven men had been murdered on Bloody Creek). The South Fork bounds the western side of the quadrangle, and Jacobs’ Creek nicks the northeastern comer, and along this fluvial notching, and in a smalle
r strip farther south on the Verdigris River, lie the most ancient things of substance in Chase County—260-million-year-old shales and limestones, strata formed when the seven continents lay as one.
The Gladstone area today is nearly all rangeland, a place where I sometimes must stop my car on the rock roads to let pass approaching Hereford and Angus and crossbreeds moved by mounted pasturemen, the animals pressing against the car, their flanks rubbing doors and fenders clean, gently rocking me inside as they bellow at who knows what. Nearly all things in the quadrangle lie within sight of the most distinctive natural feature in the county, Jacobs’ Mound; even though it is several feet lower than knobs a few miles south, its abrupt rise from a rolling plain and its isolation and symmetry have made it the best landmark around. The first settlers and wagon freighters sighted on it as a coastal pilot would a sea stack, but no one other than a cowboy or hunter has navigated by it for years, and the travelers on Interstate 35, that open-air tunnel from Lake Superior to the Rio Grande, ignore it, if they even see it, preferring to rely on green signs and concrete strips.