In case you hadn’t noticed, an endlessly-belabored point in these essays thus far has been how Kansas compares with Oz, insofar as it seems L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books, purposefully selected the sunflower and prairie state as the staid, familiar, and comforting symbol of “home,” in contrast with all that was most wondrous and strange and at times forbidding in the land of wizards and witches, heartless tin woodsmen and brainless scarecrows, those creepy flying monkeys and so much more. Face it: greatly aided and abetted by Hollywood, what you get is that Oz is cool and Kansas is kind of a bore, perhaps a cherished bore but a bore all the same. Just compare the soaring lines of Over the Rainbow with “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” sung in the musical South Pacific. Baum is not alone in having this attitude, and one familiar modern aspect of it is the whole notion of “flyover” country.
It is hoped that all the words and pictures offered in these posts have done something to dispel such notions, but it would be disingenuous to fail to mention an epic tome from 1991 that took on this very same task in a much more comprehensive and literary and poetic way, though without any illustrations. That effort took the form of a book, William Least Heat Moon’s Prairyerth, highly recommended but you’d better be ready for 600 pages covering every conceivable aspect of Chase County, Kansas. The book, a one-time bestseller which was on our trip’s reading list, is charming and thoughtful and funny and incredibly well-researched, and to offer an example of this, here’s a statement of that author’s aspirations:
“For years outsiders have considered this prairie place barren, desolate, monotonous, a land of more nothing than any place you might name, but I know I’m not here to explore vacuousness at the heart of America, I’m only in search of what is here, here in the middle of the Flint Hills of Kansas.”
Obviously Mr. Moon found a very great deal of whatever was there, and he wrote all about it, and you are invited to check that out. If you turn out to be a fan of his style of storytelling, you’ve many hours of pleasure ahead of you, and the guy has written a number of other books you might also like. What is germane here is that Cottonwood Falls is one of two major towns that lie at the center of Chase County, and if you’ve been following this narrative you’ve had a look at Broadway, the main street, and seen the bank and Luke Koch the stone guy doing his thing and telling his story.
Readers of previous posts should also know that they are already somewhat familiar with Chase County’s main claim to fame, namely the National Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, which W.L.H. Moon also features in his book. The creation of that federal preserve and the publication of Prairyerth have probably brought more people to Chase County in the last 20 years than in the previous 100, which may be an exaggeration but we shall never know. The population of Cottonwood Falls at last census was 851 and Chase County reported 2572 souls in 2020, after a long and steady decline from a peak of 8246 back in 1900. This trip generally featured a level of quiet everywhere that was most serene but also almost eerie at times, much of it due to the minimal human presence. This was not so much the case in the downtowns of Wichita and Manhattan, though of course one noticed it out on the range, which was sort of to be expected, but it seemed a bit strange how serenity also prevailed along places like Broadway in Cottonwood Falls.
Coming down from Manhattan, Ed had talked up the town, emphasizing the importance of visiting the courthouse and especially going inside and seeing the jail, which could only be accessed by walking through the courtroom when court was not in session. The building itself is quite impressive, as is the wordy historical marker outside, which lays out most of the highlights of town history. After getting the story from that marker, a visit inside reveals many display boards covered with photographs of Cottonwood Falls and some of its people, dating back to the town’s inception and up to its turn-of-the-20th-century heyday, when the horse drawn railway was running the two miles up to Strong City and the Santa Fe depot there. It was the height of prosperity and population growth, and by some measures things have gone downhill since then, or at least many have found reason to leave and never come back. Today the place looks clean and prosperous enough, probably a nice place to live if you like it quiet and you don’t mind traveling 20 miles east to Emporia for many basic needs, like a doctor or a pharmacy or supermarket.
What’s strange is to realize that those people depicted on the walls of the courthouse exist from a time when by most measures things were as good as they ever got, there in Chase County, after which many of their descendants slowly but surely trickled away. Dorothy gratefully returned home at the end of the movie, but did she remain there for the rest of her days? Is it possible all those wild memories of Oz, as traumatic as some of them might have been, also inspired her to abandon small town rural life and head west, with aspirations to become a blackjack dealer in Reno or an author of children’s books in San Francisco, or by some wild ironic twist an actress in Hollywood? That book was never written, as far as anybody knows.
What if by happenstance Dorothy had been blown out of Kansas from the Flint Hills, someplace around Cottonwood Falls, for instance? Baum, having little interest in the state aside from its symbolic value, did not bother to specify anything like this, which is too bad. One distinction of the place, and a possible reason for that population decline, is how unusable the local landscape is for most agriculture other than ranching. What if Dorothy had returned home to become a cowgirl, riding the range to adventure? With Toto peeking out of her saddlebag in wonder at the buffalo and the settlers and whatever Kaw or Pawnee were left?
For it is a fact that the Flint Hills can legitimately lay claim to being where the American West begins, right here, in an unequivocal way. One cannot make this more clear than to follow the advice of Wm. L. H. Moon, who suggests that one take a drive along US Route 50. Built in 1926, the road begins in Ocean City, Maryland, there by the Atlantic just north of Chincoteague where that Pony Swim will happen for the 99th time in July of 2024 and how about that? Heading southwest, US 50 leads one to the nation’s capital, right past the Washington Monument, in fact, before turning due west across W Virginia, on through Chillocothe and Cincinnati Ohio, through St Louis and finally Kansas City (which is mostly in Missouri, something you should know by now). Heading south it gets one to Emporia KS, just a stone’s throw from Cottonwood Falls, where you know what happens?
All the trees disappear. Until that moment, the roadside across the eastern third of the continent has been replete with various stands of woods and sometimes whole forests and perhaps occasional cleared-out urban spaces. None of it that unusual to any seasoned veteran of the road, at least anyone familiar with North America’s eastern parts. But at some point one notices that the various stands of trees begin to play out, maybe around the Kansas/Missouri border, until the point is reached where one is gazing west towards nothing but grass, all the way to the horizon. It must have been a wild experience for settlers plodding along back in the days of Manifest Destiny, but even in modern times the effect can be startling, at least the first time, a magical sleight of hand of the landscape just as wondrous as any of the hocus-pocus found in Oz.
And in the Flint Hills, one not only reaches the great western landscape but also what is pretty much cowboy country. Our rookie trip leader, Ryan, grew up on a ranch near Manhattan that is still a going operation, and one of the highlights of the trip was the dinner he arranged, through some childhood friends who now run a restaurant there, whereby our entire party was served meatloaf made from the grass-fed stock of his father’s. Many of us are not exactly fans of red meat anymore, but it was delicious meatloaf greatly enhanced by Ryan’s family pride and enthusiasm regarding the quality of it all, the product of a small ecologically sustainable operation. Cargill or Tyson orHormel it was not, no way!
There was a sort of coda to the evening whereby afterwards we all drove out to the ranch at sunset, met Ryan’s family and then drove out to a bluff to admire the view as the sun set. Ryan talked about how he and his girlfriend would come and camp out here before they were married. His son also delivered a brief lecture on dinosaurs as we stood around in the encroaching darkness until the sky filled with stars and it got pretty cold.
Another piece of this story involves the hat. This writer, in typical Aquarian contrarian fashion (Aquarians tend to have nightmares about not being perceived as “individuals,” in case you didn’t know) has long eschewed the nature-themed baseball caps beloved of most birders in favor of what is known as a “feed-cap,” a common sight in much of rural America, part of the uniform worn by old guys driving tractors. The feed cap tends to have a broader brim and squarer cut than the baseball version that now dominates the popular imagination. Nobody on many a birding trip has ever commented on the fashion statement made by the feed cap – until Ryan, someone with a bonafide agricultural background.
It says something about the man that not only did he find that Lowville Feed & Grain hat cool, but he offered to give away a hat from his own vast collection that had accumulated over the years. “They’re always given away as promotions and I’d always take one and have way more than I need or might ever wear and and would you like to select one from my assortment?” is not exactly what he said but such is the sense of it. The cattle auction hat depicted was the obvious choice, so expressive of ranching in the Flint Hills, also wonderfully obscure to anybody not from the area, even better. Of course certain reservations had to be overcome, about it being a bright red baseball cap in the current turbulent political era where it might get confused with another that is all too familiar nowadays. But any confusion of that sort might only occur at a great distance. Up close, the odds are that a very different confusion might occur of a less volatile nature, and it was easy to settle for that and take one’s chances. This writer is still confused over the curious spelling of “commision” on the hat, for what it’s worth, which is part of the fascination.
A few days later and many miles south of that bluff on the Klataske ranch, in Cottonwood Falls on one of the few backstreets of the town, we came upon the very house where Dot could’ve once resided, if she’d been a real Kansan. The wobbly fence is real storybook quality, wouldn’t you say? A look at the details would make it fit right in with a Dorothy-longing-to-be-a-cowgirl theme, which admittedly skews far from L. Frank Baum’s original story. And of course, the structure here, of heavy and durable Flint Hills limestone, might not lend itself to getting scooped up by the violent winds of a tornado, but one never knows. Never forget the lesson of the brick house in that Three Little Pigs story, and if you’ve forgotten it good luck to you when a Big Bad Wolf or badass twister comes around.
Our lodgings right downtown, The Grand Central Hotel, were also a tribute to the cowhand aesthetic. Yes, indeed, this town is one of those places where the far and maybe even sometimes wild west begins. This is not the Santa Fe trail scene found further north in Council Grove, no way – the prevailing trail aesthetic here is the Chisholm, and don’t you forget it. Cattle drives that started down in Texas came right this way, evidently, though maybe not right through town, on their way to the stockyards in Kansas City, from which all that beef went east. Surely you’ve heard the song, sort of revived by Woody Guthrie but picked up by every cowboy singer worthy of the name, Tex Ritter and the Sons of the Pioneers and maybe you yourself if you’re a boomer who wore cowboy hats and packed a plastic six-shooter back in the fifties. You know the one: come a ti yi yippie yippie ay yippie ay come a ti yi yippie yippie ay and all that. And yee-haw! for good measure, but never forget that yodeling comes from Switzerland and not cow country, for what it’s worth.
Another feature of downtown C Falls and the trip in general was the storefront downtown for Symphony in the Flint Hills, which Ed and Sil had talked up in various moments. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to furthering “knowledge and appreciation” of the Flint Hills, a mission that might also describe what this Naturalist Journeys trip was all about, which by now should be pretty evident. They have a great website where they emphasize involvement with “musicians, artists, historians, scientists, and community members” to further the mission, so their efforts cast a broad net. Their title refers to the annual signature event, whose most distinctive feature is an outdoor concert by the Kansas Symphony Orchestra that always ends with what is often a stirring prairie sunset.
But it’s much more than that, a daylong celebration of the tall grass prairie community, with picnics and nature walks and inspirational talks and local musicians and poets and such. What is also key is that it’s held on a different ranch each year and being an outdoor event it seems its always had good weather, which is kind of a miracle, given the infamous contrary nature of the weather gods in this area. Weather was also a key factor in Dorothy’s story, as you no doubt will never ever forget, and is weather not a big deal for all of us, always, wherever we are?
Weather can obviously generate fodder for great stories, and in the grand tradition of Dorothy’s Kansas weather story, there was the story of the Symphony in the Flint Hills of the previous year. Sil and Ed told it well, where weather was pretty much the whole story, or at least the part that everyone remembers. The t-shirt tells it quite eloquently, but by the time Joan made that purchase in downtown Cottonwood Falls, Sil and Ed had told it in words, with exotic references such as “wall cloud.” On the prairie one can see oncoming weather from a long way off, which can be helpful but never forget that a prairie storm can arise and move along pretty damn quickly, like the one that suddenly loomed over Irma’s pasture on 6/11/22 in nearby Bazaar. What ensued was the rush of 17000 people heading to their vehicles, creating one of the biggest traffic jams in history to ever take place on a prairie anywhere. The best part is that no twisters dropped out of that cloud into the crowd, and those not protected got really wet but nothing more. Just another summer’s day in Kansas, folks! Hopes are high that this year’s event will go off as planned, and the organizers have been forewarned, though chances are they knew that what happened in Irma’s pasture had been inevitable, as any Kansan will tell you, especially Dorothy, likely as not.
