It’s past noon and he’s smoking faster as if to speed things up, but I can’t leave fire alone and I ask him whether he ever saw a steer trapped and burned, and no, he never did, and not a man or truck either, but you have to watch grass that hasn’t been burned or grazed for a year or two because that’s when fires get big. High grass is dangerous and overgrazed grass won’t burn worth a shit. We got other problems too, like lightnen—it’ll kill three or four head a year. It’ll whap them directly or they’ll get up against a fence and it’ll hit that, and then we lose our commission and the cattleman loses his steer. There’s rustlers. They stole four head last year, and it wasn’t no strangers because they knew our operation—went right in the pasture with a truck and knew when to go in.
Slim is mulling losses, and that slows the smoking. Three years ago I got throwed. A course I been throwed before but always off to the side. This time my horse turned end over end and me with him. Broke three ribs and stove me up so, it was a couple of days before I could get back on.
When I push away from the table he’s relieved, and we begin talking about pack rats in his shed, and then I ask whether he ever wanted to earn a living another way, and he says, I wouldn’t care about book work. I used to farm alongside cowboyin—plowin with mules. Did both durin the war, and I ask, do you like being a cowboy, and he thinks and says, I don’t know. As much as I ever did. It’s a way of makin money. Ride or farm, it’s not much difference to me. None of it’ll get you rich. A cowboy ain’t nothin but a hard hand, but they ain’t many tellin you what to do. Nobody much out in them hills, you see. Hell, Windy, my brother, couple years back, died out in the pasture. They found him out there and his horse by his side waitin. That’s how he went.
At the door I say that I hear he’s a pretty good fiddler, and he gives a smile, the first that morning, and says, Hell, I used to play over to Bazaar at the platform dances. They’d put some boards down in the summer and call us in. Square dancin, round dancin, a waltz, a schottische. Out would come some Sharp’s Crick moonshine, or else they was home brew—everbody made that in them dry years. They’d all pass the hat, and we’d get a dollar fifty maybe. But oh hell, we fiddled. I like music with a lot of bowin. “Irish Washer Woman”—now there’s a real crooked old tune.
About the Red Buffalo
I am driving out of the west: the highway laid over a section line that deviates north or south no more than does the equator, the road straight, straight, but sometimes rising and descending, the dusk gone, and on the car radio a championship game, basketball among the crackles, play-by-play coming and going, and the drone of wind and tires and voices, and my nodding, nodding, a numbed awareness of entering the county, the wandering across the centerline not enough to rouse me, and nodding, and peace. Then: uproar of rock flying in wheel-wells and the violence of riding the shoulder and the car jolting me into fear, and I stop, my senses tumbled. Everywhere ahead in the surrounding dark, the land not separable from the black sky, stretch orange lines of fire, red-gold on jet, angles and curves, oghams and cursives of flames, infernal combustings, and a pall rising and surrounding and seeming to make the valley a smoking pit. What city of burning light is this, and how could I have so lost my way as to come into it and not know it? This must be some dreamplace of Moloch, or have I just died in a highway ditch? Along the firelines rise ignitions and expostulations of yellow cinders, my nose fills with a sweet scent of char, and, on the dimmed horizon, the big, blooded moon rises, too smoked to light anything but itself, the fire like oozing magma, marking out the lines of this plutonic landscape. I try to compose my wits.
I am standing on a ridge and looking down into a vale burning itself clean, making itself into a bowl of primeval ash like the source of the cosmos itself, and I am alive, and it’s early April, and this is Kansas. Chase County is setting itself afire as it does each spring so that the prairie may remain prairie here on this moist land between woodland and plains, where, at the edge, the last line of eastern trees waits like wolves watching just beyond the pale of the campfire. I’ve never seen the hills burn before, and I stand a long time, at last comprehending how a nineteenth-century scoundrel would torch a prairie just for the spectacle, how another could speak of thick, ropey air, which is seen, tasted, handled, and felt. Then I drive on across state 150.
The next morning: I am hiking across the blackened hills amidst the smoking dung settlers called prairie coal, walking until I catch up with the back side of an unattended headfire cleaning its way across a slope like a dutiful farmhand, destroying the invading exotic plants, removing thatch, leaving behind a warmth to help release soil nutrients. As white blood cells are to man, so fire is to prairie. This pasture has been grazed hard and the headfire is only inches high. I jump it time and again, the heat up my pant legs, my boots and denim turning black; a dust devil of ash twists past coating me, and behind, lumps of scat steam like pies fresh from the oven, and I walk out patterns in the char, footprints spelling out PRAIRYERTH (a photographer’s negative of a snow scene). When I stop my play, I too am a piece of carbon.
The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken it makes a return in equal measure. The aboriginal peoples received the gift and made it part of their harmony here and used it as a white man would a plow to bring forth sweet and nutritious new grasses, or as a scythe to open a route over the prairie, or as a horse to dislodge deer or drive bison for harvesting, or as a cake of salt to draw the beasts within arrow range, or as a telegraph to send a message with smoking grasses. Indians, recognizing the bond between flame and prairie, seemed to understand in a symbolic way how fire shaped the grasses and plants, how a green beauty rose and evolved from wet clay as if the master hand of fire turned a potter’s wheel.
Today, agronomists believe the bond is twenty-five million years old and that before white settlement these prairies saw a couple of fires every decade, a couple hundred times each millennium. Yet, even to the first European travelers, fire was a mad beast from Hades; across the West, citizens fought it, and almost everyplace they succeeded—except in the Flint Hills, where the pioneers learned of the bond from the Indians, and ranchers continued the burning although agronomists, year after year, advised against such a scorched-earth policy; but people of the Hills continued until at last even the scientists realized the necessity of fire and said the prairie is a phoenix, so burn, burn. (They recently pointed out, however, that wildfire didn’t take every area each year, that it was more common from August to March when grassland animals and plants were less vulnerable; biologists on the Konza Prairie Research Natural Area sixty miles north of here have also learned that the greatest diversity of native organisms occurs with fire every fourth year, a schedule that also lessens the deleterious effects of agricultural burning on the atmosphere.)
An old cowman of the region wrote a few years ago:
The squaws would weave a large ball of this long-stemmed bluestem grass, and then the men would take their braided-hide lariat rope and throw it around those bales or balls of grass and set it afire. Then they would ride just as far as they could, dragging that ball of fire.
For whites, the means have varied: some pulled along a burning tire or a bundle of corncobs soaked in coal oil or a long, smoldering stacker rope; some still use a welding or propane torch, a kerosene weedbumer, even an army-surplus flamethrower; but, more and more, it’s the firestick.
Now, I’m walking on far in front of the flames, and I’m remembering the fellow who dropped his pistol and set fire to the prairie to find it. To prove a point, I light a match and drop it, but it only consumes itself, and five others do the same: this overgrazed place won’t take the fire. Instead of grasses, ragweed, broomweed, and spiky-podded entanglings of buffalo burr grow, and the pasture is so bare I could hit fungoes for an hour and never lose the ball unless it were to land in a cluster of eastern cedar or Osage orange or honey locust, th
ose first trees to steal the grassland, the ones that turn a prairie into a viciously thorned scrub lot that wood rats will take to but not a prairie chicken or upland plover. Those trees, vanguards of the woodland, if they grow large enough to cast their deadly shade, can break the back of the red buffalo, prairie wildfire.
In my pocket a dozen more matches: if the wind shifts and turns the fire across my course, these vestas will enable my escape: light a circle, step downwind, and follow your flames out, or stand within the island of ash (an Indian method and a better one than crawling into a disemboweled horse). Not long ago, two pasturemen without any matches got caught when their pickup mired in and they had to run for a swale and lie down in hopes the blaze, like a tornado, would pass over them, and it did, but they lost the truck and the skin off their backsides.
I wish I’d known George Washington Starkey, a countian who poked into the curiosities of this place and described several of them before they vanished. His English parents settled here in 1871, and twice wildfire burned them out. George wrote this in the thirties for the Historical Sketches:
Prairie fire was the most dreaded enemy of the early settlers. One time, two men were going through the county and accidentally set out a fire. They were overtaken by settlers and questioned and one of the men was hanged.
Most people would plow two furrows around their [hay]stacks and improvements. They would plow one furrow about fifteen steps away and another about ten steps farther out, then they would burn the strip between. This they called a fireguard, and when the prairie fires came they would set fire outside the guard and that would burn out to meet the prairie fire.
In September of 1878, the Leader reminded the mayor of his duty to burn a fireguard around Cottonwood Falls.
William Sayre of Cedar Creek left this:
It was in February, 1876—I was but seven—a very windy day, and the hay was rolling off the top of our bam, and my father got the first whiff of prairie fire smoke. That smell meant something in those days when the bluestem grew as high as your head and hadn’t been burned over for years. Father commenced to plow the guard so he could burn it off, [and he] and a few neighbors had finished the burning when the fire came. I was standing at the south window of our one-room loghouse when I saw it coming over the hill. The flames were leaping twenty feet into the air. I darted out of the house and crossed the creek on the ice, which was thick but rotten. The water was about a foot deep and every few steps I would break through. I got to the nearest neighbors, the Beverlins. Their woodpile was on fire, set by firebrands from our barn, which had been carried over the treetops a good fourth of a mile. Mrs. Beverlin was going to the orchard with her twin boys. She piled the three of us up and put a blanket over us. The smoke was choking [and blinding] us. My mother took my brother and went down the hill to the creek and stayed under the roots of a large tree. Everything we had burned but the house. Vie found one big fat sow breathing her last, and they butchered her that evening. Everything in the house was black with smoke, and cinders drifted just like snow over the creek bank two feet deep. My folks had lived there ten years, but it was like starting all over again.
And, in 1873, living near Gladstone was Mrs. Richard Phillips, who watched a wildfire take the family’s barn and then approach their home. The men had used up all the water in the well and the house. As the fire, a grizzly ravenous from hibernation, licked the walls, she grabbed the only wet thing left, ran outside with it, and dashed it over the flames: she had just enough cream in the churn to save her home.
Atop the Mound
What I cherish I’ve come to slowly, usually blindly, not seeing it for some time, and that’s just how I discovered Jacobs’ Mound, a truncated cone sitting close to the center of the Gladstone quadrangle. This most obvious old travelers’ marker shows up clearly from two of the three highways, yet I was here several days before I noticed it, this isolated frustum so distinct. I must have been looking too closely and narrowly, but once I saw its volcano-cone symmetry (at night in the fire season, its top can flame and smolder) I was drawn to it as western travelers have always been to lone protuberances—Independence Rock, Pompey’s Pillar, Chimney Rock—and within a day I headed down the Bloody Creek Road until the lane played out in a grassed vale. Some two aerial miles west of the mound, I climbed a ridge and sat down and watched it as if it might disappear like a flock of rare birds. That morning four people told me four things, one of them, the last, accurate: the regular sides and flattened top of the knob prove Indians built it for a burial mound; Colorado prospectors hid gold in it; an oil dome lay beneath it; and, none of those notions was true.
I walked down the hawk-harried ridge and struck out toward the mound, seemingly near enough to reach before sunset. Its sea-level elevation is fifteen hundred feet, but it rises only about a hundred from its base and three hundred above the surrounding humped terrain. In places the October grasses, russet-colored like low flames as if revealing their union with fire, reached to my belt and stunted my strides, and there were also aromatic asters and false indigo, both now dried to scratching stiffness. From the tall heads of Indian grass and the brown stalks of gayfeather, gossamer strung out in the slow wind like pennants ten and twelve feet long and silver in the sun, and these web lines snagged my trousers and chest and head until, after a mile, I was bestrung and on my way to becoming cocooned. Gray flittings rose from the ground like winged stones and threw themselves immediately into invisibility—I think they were vesper sparrows. Twice, prairie chickens broke noisily and did their sweet, dihedral-winged glides to new cover (Audubon said their bent-down wings enable the birds to turn their heads to see behind as they fly). I stopped to watch small events but never for long because the mound was drawing me as if it were a stone vortex in a petrified sea.
There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because you then begin to believe you’re not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn’t fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark. On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, a thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far, and it seemed every time I raised a step the earth rotated under me so that my foot fell just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere. Before me lay the Kansas of popular conception from Coronado on—that place you have to get through, that purgatory of mileage.
But I kept walking, and, when I dropped into hollows and the mound disappeared, I focused on a rock or a tuft of grass to keep from convoluting my track. Hiking in woods allows a traveler to imagine comforting enclosures, one leading to the next, and the walker can possess those little encompassed spaces, but the prairie and plains permit no such possession. Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness; there is no such thing as a small prairie any more than there is a little ocean, and the consequence of both is this challenge: try to take yourself seriously out here, you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.
I came up out of a hollow, Jacobs’ Mound big now on the horizon, and I could feel its swell in my legs, and then I was in the steep climb up its slope, and: I was on top. From the highway I’d guessed the summit to be the size of a city block, but it was less than a baseball infield, its elliptical perimeter just a hundred strides. So, its power lay not in size but rather in shape and dominion and its thrust into the imagination.
I sat and looked. The thousands of acres that lay encircled around the knob I really didn’t see, not at first. I saw air, and I said, good god, look at all this air, and I recalled a woman saying, Seems the air here hasn’t ever been used before. From a plane you look down, and from a mo
untain you look down, but from Jacobs’ Mound you look out, out into. You’re not up in the sky and you’re not on the ground: you’re nicely in between, at the altitude of those who fly in their dreams and skim roofs and treetops. Jacobs’ Mound is thrush-flight high.
And then I understood: I like this prairie county because of its illusion of being away, out of, and I like how its unpopulousness seems to isolate it. Seventy percent of Americans live on two percent of the land, but in front of me, no percentage of them lived. Yet, in the far southeast, I could see trucks inching out the turnpike miles, the turbulence of their passage silenced by distance. And I could see fence lines, transmission towers, and dug ponds, things the pioneers would have viewed as marks of a progressive civilization but which to me, a grousing neo-primitivist, were signs of the continuing onslaught. The view I had homesteaders would have loved, and the one they had of unbroken vegetation and its diversities I would cherish. On top of the mound, insects whirred steadily, and the wind blew in easy continuousness, a drone like that in a seashell at the ear. In the nineteenth century, the Kansas clergyman and author William Quayle (who once wrote, In a purely metaphorical sense I am a turnip) traded his autograph for an acre of prairie, and, yesterday, I thought him a thief, but now, seeing the paltriness of an acre, I figured he was the one swindled.
On his great western expedition of 1806, Zebulon Pike crossed the Flint Hills just south of this big knob, and he surely couldn’t have resisted climbing this rise for a good look around. In later years, perpendicular to his course ran an old freighter road and stage line that cut between here and Phenis Mound across the county line and five miles east. Near its base, a century ago, farmer John Buckingham plowed up a small redwood chest, took it home, pried it open, and found some old parchments, one marked in crude characters of eccentric orthography advising that nearby a buried sword pointed to the spot on Phenis Mound where lay a cache of golden nuggets. Buckingham thought it a prank until he remembered plowing up a rusted saber the year before; but his and others’ diggings yielded only what the inland sea put down a quarter billion years ago.