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Tallgrass Prairie
APRIL 2007
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By Verlyn Klinkenborg
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Photographs by Jim Richardson
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In the Flint Hills of Kansas, the nation's last great expanse of tallgrass prairie anchors a world renewed by fire.
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Americans have always lived in a land of possibility—a place where the grass is "hopeful green stuff," as the poet Walt Whitman put it. Our habit is to wonder what we can make of a place, to gaze at the future instead of the present. As a result, nature often lies hidden beneath our expectations. That's why the Flint Hills of Kansas—the last great swath of tallgrass prairie in the nation—can be so hard to grasp. The Flint Hills are no longer hard to get to, no longer a matter of ox train and overland trail from somewhere east of the Missouri River. They're transected by roads of every description now. But when you get to the hills, when you rise onto the low shield of flint and limestone that defines them and walk up onto the highest brow and stand into the wind that's trying to pry your ears apart, what do you see?
Open sky, open land, unending horizon, the "limitless and lonesome prairie," to quote Whitman again. But the word that also springs to mind may be "nothing." A glorious nothing, but nothing nonetheless.
That too is an American word, full of the conviction that nothing much stands between herds of bison and herds of cattle, between the millions of acres of tallgrass prairie that once stretched across the plains and the millions of acres of corn and soybeans growing there now. Historically, we have valued the prairie grasses mainly as cattle fodder or as placeholders till the sod could be broken and crops planted, crops that are themselves just placeholders until the houses eventually come. The prairie topography is almost too subtle for us, which may be one reason the National Park System contains only a single unit dedicated to grassland—the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, Kansas, the heart of the Flint Hills.
When you walk across the grassbound hills above Fox Creek, just northwest of the small town of Strong City, it's easy to pretend you're striding through the past. There is no sound or sight to remind you of the immediate century. But that reverie too is a way of failing to notice the grassland. The hard part here in the Flint Hills—and in any of the few remaining patches of native prairie—is learning to see the tallgrass ecosystem for itself. It is a study in the power of modesty. Learn it well enough and you begin to suspect that grasses are what hold this world together.
Some of the lowlands in the Flint Hills are planted to corn and milo, and the creek bottoms are full of oaks and an occasional white-limbed sycamore. Along the gravel roads you come across old limestone fences and Osage orange trees, or bois d'arc, planted by the settlers as hedge and windbreak. But on the uplands—and the Flint Hills are mostly upland, stretching from northern Kansas down into Oklahoma—the prairie still holds its own. The soils are too thin, too rock-strewn to make good farmland. Wherever you walk, you find drifts of limestone, like fallen grave markers, grass pushing through the holes that time has made in that soluble stone. The very toughness of this place—amply recorded by its early occupants—has helped preserve it.
That toughness is more than mirrored in the grasses themselves, especially in species like big bluestem—one of the dominant grasses in the Flint Hills. Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) persists from year to year, spreading by seed and rhizome, creating an underground web of coarse roots near the surface as well as fine root fibers that may reach eight feet (two meters) deep where the soil allows. What grows above ground—the tillers—is essentially disposable. The actual growing tip of the plant lies low to the earth in spring and is undisturbed when the tillers are cropped or singed. Like most of the other plants in the tallgrass ecosystem, big bluestem actually rejoices in grazing and fire, if they come at the right time of year.
The prairie is sometimes called a sea of grass—a metaphor that points to the endless green expanse and the wavelike motion of the grasses. But there is also a tide in these grasslands—a cycle of growth that sweeps chronologically across the Flint Hills. High tide comes early in the year. The prairie swells into life in early spring, and if fire comes then, the plants respond with a redoubled burst of growth. The fires clear away last year's plant debris, letting in more light and warming the soil.
To the grazers on the hills—bison once and cattle now—the new green on blackened ground is a timely feast. In the cycle of warm-season grasses like big bluestem, this is the peak of their nutritional richness. They continue to grow all through the summer, but as the weeks pass they harden off until, in autumn, their leaves are somber, dried remnants of themselves, crimson, maroon, clattering in the wind.
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