Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AT HOME ON PRAIRIE EARTH
According to Osage tribal historian John Joseph Mathews, a division of the tribe, the Heart Stays People, got their name from their allegiance to the earth beneath their feet — they were a group who liked to stay close to home.
I'm not Osage, but I came of age in Osage country, and the lack of wanderlust inherent in the Heart Stays People must be integral to this particular portion of prairie earth. I've spent much of my adult life living away from the place of my birth, but these rocky hills covered with grasses that wave in the wind always remain a beacon. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that my best place remains my first place. It has taken several fits of wandering to figure this out, but in my case the adage fits — there's just no place like home.
One of my earliest memories is of being barely three years old and, when no one was watching, slipping away from our house in a little valley bordering the headwaters of Sycamore Creek. I sat down in the tall grass near an oak grove and, even though dozens of people eventually began looking for me, I didn't make a sound. I remember being absolutely happy there under a wide sky, hidden in the high grass, alone and content until an adult stumbled upon my hiding place.
Since then I've always felt most at home in my own Heart Stays place — the southern edge of the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma's Osage County, a place of grassy mounds with lots of rocks underfoot and clusters of crooked little oaks providing shade. It started young, this long-lasting love affair with a landscape that unnerves the uninitiated a little, mostly because it just seems so empty. But as a proud grasslander, I've learned over the years that the place I call home is biologically fulfilling, unique, and increasingly rare. Biologists from the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy agree that a healthy prairie remains one of the most ecologically diverse and dynamic ecosystems on this planet — as well as one of the rarest left on earth.
Unfortunately, this landscape that once inspired rapturous exclamations from travelers heading west on horseback now mostly exists in fragments exiled from each other by cropland, cities, and interstate highways. Historically, tallgrass prairie stretched from Canada to Texas, from central Kansas to Indiana. Now the last major expanse of tallgrass occurs in the Flint Hills, a verdant landscape extending in a north–south strip across eastern Kansas into northern Oklahoma's Osage County.
I grew up learning grassland ways by helping neighboring ranchers feed cattle in winter and work calves in spring. I helped fight wildfires and listened attentively as our county extension agent lectured about native grasses, cattle, and wildlife — maybe not your typical academic agenda in most parts of the country, but perfect for those of us cloistered in a schoolhouse built from blocks of native sandstone by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s Depression. Five of us started in the first grade and finished together in the eighth, none quite prepared for the culture shock of high school in a town that teemed with twelve hundred citizens, maybe a few more on the weekends.
After college, I went to work for Oklahoma's state wildlife agency, writing news releases and stories for the agency's monthly magazine. I learned how to photograph wildlife and how to craft stories about wild birds and animals without forsaking scientific fact. But mostly I spent as much time as possible with biologists who knew the names and habits of the creatures that lived, died, and interacted in my prairie world. I soaked up their words like some Grecian youth of old sitting at the knee of Socrates. Some of these biologists have gone on to do great things in the realm of conservation ecology, and I'm still amazed by their patience as they fielded my endless questions when I tagged along.
As the years progressed, I wrote for the Oklahoma Wildlife Federation, for a number of hook and bullet magazines, and eventually for national conservation publications I'd once regarded as near-religious texts while dreaming about publishing in those lofty pages. And whenever I could I traveled, camera and notebook in hand, from the Adirondacks to the Rockies, from the South Dakota Badlands to the Texas Gulf Coast, searching for remaining wild spots on an increasingly congested map.
But in the end the place I missed the most was where the cherty Flint Hills fade into the broad Arkansas River valley. It takes a lifetime to truly learn about a place, about its weather, plants, and animals and how all of these merge into the magic we call life on earth. And now as I near the end of my own life, I find that I'm still learning something new every day and that the land has so much to share with those who will simply remain curious, observant, and concerned.
Interest in grasslands is growing, but for many it's hard to grasp the complexity of what appears to be an unending carpet of green pressed against a huge blue sky. Prairies lack the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains or our southwestern canyon country. They're more like the oceans, a mystery you have to dive into and study. Until recently, America's picture-postcard mentality relegated grasslands to lowly status — a place to fly over in an airplane or a blurred backdrop on an interstate highway. Then Iowan John Madson, a country kid who grew up hunting and fishing along a prairie river, gave grasslands a much more flattering face in his book Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie. Madson's lifelong love affair with native grasslands manifested itself in prose that was as strong and rhythmic as the land itself, and people began to take notice. What they found was that our grasslands and the species that evolved with them were disappearing fast.
During the 1980s, the Sierra Club, along with other conservation agencies, pushed for the establishment of the nation's first prairie national park. The movement gained traction, then derailed due to political opposition from members of Congress who didn't feel they had much in common with the Sierra Club. It seemed the idea would die as quickly as it had taken shape until the Nature Conservancy, a group that protects land by buying it outright, decided to make grassland conservation a priority. A ranch in Oklahoma's Osage County selected by the Sierra Club to serve as a core area for its failed national park was still for sale, and the Nature Conservancy moved in quickly to buy the land and reestablish bison as the primary grazer. From these 29,000 acres purchased in 1989, the conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve has expanded to some 40,000 acres containing approximately 3,000 buffalo. As of this writing, it remains the largest parcel of protected tallgrass prairie in the nation.
Kansas joined the grassland preservation club with the establishment of the Tallgrass Prairie National Park in 1996. This too originated with the sale of a Flint Hills ranch, one near Strong City, Kansas; at nearly 11,000 acres, the setting provides a serene addition to America's national park system. But the park is relatively small by grassland ecosystem standards. As the National Park Service points out on its website, only 4 percent of America's once-vast grasslands remains to be protected. We need to protect more while some is still left.
Of that 4 percent, the two largest tracts currently under protection barely exceed 50,000 acres, and prairie wildlife needs elbow room to thrive. Lewis and Clark, as they eased their boats up the Missouri River during the Corps of Discovery, were astounded by the variety and number of wildlife species they encountered, many of which were new to science in 1804. The prairies of today, mostly vacant of all but domestic cattle, are the result of decades of indiscriminate slaughter and habitat alteration. America's flyover country, back in its wildlife heyday, was more like the African Serengeti than Old MacDonald's farm.
Prairie lovers are a passionate lot, and in prairie states like Iowa and Illinois, where row crop agriculture is king, they're working to preserve native plants in old cemeteries, hay meadows, and odd lots that have managed to survive the onslaught of the plow. Modern prairie enthusiasts have also devoted themselves to prairie restoration where it is feasible, and as the science improves so does the number of acres where big bluestem and Indiangrass now thrive in place of nonnative fescues and bromes.
Like all grasslanders, I love late summer when tall bluestems bend and dance with the wind. But I also realize that if we're to preserve more than just symbolic grass farms, protected prairies must be big enough, and their location to other protected grasslands near enough, to allow for biological interaction on an ecosystem scale. Birds and animals that evolved to mingle on millions of acres simply aren't genetically programmed to survive when habitat shrinks to a few thousand acres here and a few hundred acres there. That's not much different from expecting wildlife accustomed to endless open vistas and unrestricted movement to find happiness and long-term health in a zoo.
With bison back in place as the keystone species, wildlife managers can begin the process of real prairie restoration at an ecosystem level. The grassland itself is only the canvas — add buffalo, birds, butterflies, and the other endemics that now survive on the cusp of extinction and suddenly what was once just flyover country is crammed with tourists, cameras in hand. I've seen it happen at the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, where the lonely dirt roads of pre-preserve days are now dusty with automobiles driving ten miles an hour with the windows rolled down, their occupants hoping for a glimpse of a buffalo. And I'll never forget a winter's day in northeastern New Mexico, when drivers pulled off the highway to gawk at a scene that would have fit comfortably in the movie Dances with Wolves. Hundreds of buffalo chomped on yellow grama grass, the shaggy animals ringed by dozens of beige and white antelope, while half a dozen or more coyotes circled this mass of browsers and grazers, hoping that somewhere among all those hooves they might spot a morsel of food. Media mogul and buffalo rancher Ted Turner had managed to turn back the clock by creating a living mural, made even more complete with prairie dogs, swift foxes, and burrowing owls, the animals altogether presenting a scene missing since Santa Fe Trail days.
Not long ago, I learned of another prime piece of southern Flint Hills prairie to receive protection. It contains 43,000 acres and includes the headwaters of Sycamore and Hominy Creeks mentioned in the essays that follow. This ranch is only a short drive from the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the Western Wall unit of the Oklahoma wildlife department's Osage Wildlife Management Area, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' public use areas on Kaw and Hulah Lakes, federal land offering access to Birch Creek and the Arkansas and Caney Rivers. These public lands aren't adjacent or overly large, but for prairie plants and wildlife they offer more of a refuge than you'll find in most of the original prairie states.
The musings contained within this book originated from notes and photographs taken at the aforementioned places or on nearby private land over a period of more than thirty years. Some of the thoughts reach farther back to when my family lived in a ramshackle house near the spring that fed the headwaters of Sycamore Creek. I've remained close to this particular patch of oak trees and grass for nearly seventy years, and it hasn't changed much — some of the oil field scars have healed, new ones have taken their place, the prairie-chickens are gone, but white-tailed deer and wild turkey have returned. My hope is that hundreds of years from now it will still be much the same as when I left it and that the grass will still grow tall, cattle or buffalo will still grow fat, the springs will still flow fresh and clean. Come to think of it, considering how much we've taken from this forgiving old planet, that's not really too much to ask.
CHAPTER 2
CLARION CALL
It was the same every morning. I'd listen for a man on horseback, wailing like some wild animal in distress. For months he was part of the winter landscape, a ritual of motion, a mantra steeped in supple horseflesh and bawling cattle. The high-pitched summons began in autumn, after the native grasses grew dormant and the cowboy began feeding cottonseed meal, or "cake," in pellets the size of a grown man's big toe. They'd nurture the hundreds of Hereford cattle wintering in the pasture where we lived. Not long after sunup, the cowboy would ride past our house on a big sorrel quarter horse, a lanky animal with a long head, a white stripe from forehead to tip of nose, and a contrasting red-brown coat and mane. This lean man with his weather-creased face followed a trace of dirt road west, riding at a fast trot, dressed in jeans, brown canvas work jacket, lace-up work boots, and a billed cap pulled down tightly to keep it from blowing away. And as his long-legged horse jogged along, the cowboy would issue a wild and wordless lament, his cattle call.
It was our morning anthem, a signal to begin the half-mile trek over the hill to the school bus stop. Soon the cattle came galloping into sight, moaning and grousing in cow talk, each the same reddish brown as the cowboy's horse, all with white faces, all galloping to the little green shed where sacks of feed were stored. The cowboy would cut open the hundred-pound bags and fill long sheet metal troughs. The cows would jostle each other, crowding to line up for breakfast. Later they would drift away to graze, loaf, and go about the business of being cows. The cowboy would ride back to his ranch house beyond the hill, and quiet would spread over the little valley where the headwaters of Sycamore Creek trickled from a small spring.
When the weather warmed, generally in early April, the grasses broke dormancy and sent up new green shoots among the parched tan clumps of the previous summer's growth. At that time the cowboy's morning ritual would end, to be resumed in late October or early November. Until then the cattle would fatten on the native and nutritious prairie bluestems, Indiangrass, and switchgrass. Oftentimes in early spring, a smoky haze hung over the rolling prairie as ranchers set fire to old, dry grass stalks to hasten new growth. Spring thunderstorms added to the swelling greenery underfoot. By May, the rolling topography of the prairie was as verdant as any Irish dell.
Ours was a grassland economy in a land tailored for cattle and grazing. The Flint Hills, the most extensive stretch of tallgrass prairie left in the United States, reach from near the northern Kansas border south into Osage County, Oklahoma, where I grew up. These hills contain a mostly unbroken strip of native grassland more than two hundred miles long and nearly eighty miles wide in places. It's a landscape of rolling topography, where outcropping limestone and shallow soils have preserved original prairie plants, protected them from the plow, and allowed this to remain some of the best grazing land in the world.
My childhood home lies at the southern extreme of the Flint Hills, less than fifty miles south of the Kansas state line near the Oklahoma town of Pawhuska. Pawhuska, named for an Osage Indian chief, is the Osage County seat and the tribal headquarters of the Osage Nation. Although geologically and botanically the same as grassland north of the Kansas line, this southern extension of Flint Hills grazing land came to be known as the Osage Hills or, simply, the Osage, because the country was, prior to Oklahoma statehood, the tribe's final reservation. To the south, the prairie fades into the timbered Arkansas River bottoms. To the east, it eases into patches of dense Cross Timbers woodland, an ancient, scrubby forest of mostly blackjack and post oaks. To the west, the prairie begins to climb, level out, and lose its rocky substrate. Soon the land becomes a tidy checkerboard of industrial agriculture, mostly fields of winter wheat.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Heart Stays Country"
by .
Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa Press.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
