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“Give me a home, where the Buffalo roam…”

Day 54

          Don’t it always seem to go

          That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone

          They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

          We all know these lines from Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song, Big Yellow Taxi, and I’m sure that at one time or another we’ve all quoted it when the time was appropriate. Progress is a relative word, depending on one’s point of view.

          So, let’s call it process.

           This almost five-hundred-year-old process of moving across North America has had its positives and negatives, and we are not going to debate these at this point.

           Let’s just say that it is a good thing that somewhere along the line, someone takes a good hard look at something and decides that enough is enough and we need to stop that something in its tracks.

          And sometimes we get to take advantage of a good thing when we see it.

          Enough with the nebulous statements! But that’s exactly what the Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service have done in this unlikely place in the middle of Kansas.

          Here’s another quote for you,

          “Whenever you stop on the prairie to lunch or camp, and gaze around, there is a picture such as poet and painter never succeeded in transferring to book or canvas….

[We] ought to have saved a…… Park in Kansas, ten thousand acres broad….. the prairie as it came from the hand of God,

Not a foot or an inch desecrated by ‘improvements’ and ‘cultivation.’

It is only a memory now.”

          Here’s the best part of that quote, it was written in 1884 by D.W. Wilder, the Editor of The Hiawatha World, a newspaper in Hiawatha, Kansas.

“And it came to pass…..”
An almost birds-eye view

          Enter Stephen F. Jones in 1878 and his wife, Louisa.

          The Jones’s had a cattle company in Colorado and wanted a place to graze their stock. Their Spring Hill Farm eventually grew to about ten-thousand acres. The Jones’s, and the subsequent owners of this farm, never broke the soil, never farmed the pastures, and never needed to not have the native Tallgrass eliminated from the lands.

          Tallgrass, and its cousins, Shortgrass and Mixed Grass are some of the correct terminologies used to describe the types of grasses that grow here, and only here. Most of the rest of the Prairie, which at one time spanned the heartland of our Country from Kansas all the way up to, and into, the south of Canada, succumbed to Mr. John Deere’s new invention, the steel plow.

          Process.

          As luck would have it, (for us) the farm and all of its wonderful buildings, came up for sale in the 1980’s because it went into receivership. Over the next few years, several plans were put forth by concerned citizens and organizations to try and preserve this, the last, best example of Tallgrass Prairie left in the country. The Nature Conservancy, along with the National Park Trust, eventually acquired the entire farm and folded it into the National Park Service, who administers it to this day.

The main house, circa 1880, complete with root cellar, ice house, formal parlors, and built entirely out of the local limestone. All of the ornate woodwork inside is still intact.
This massive barn was constructed at the same time and of the same materials as the house.

          This Park, the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, is about as simple as it gets. 11,000 square acres of what was once over 400,000 square miles of Tallgrass Prairie is left to its own design and is allowed to do, and be that, forever. The prairie has some new (?) indigenous species re-introduced to it, the American Bison, or buffalo, if you prefer. Bison, and/or cattle, do not harm this region at all. In fact, these automatic fertilizer machines work nicely with the local ecosystem as you may expect. A few head of these critters were “imported” from the herd in Yellowstone and the only thing that is managed is the total number of Bison that are kept on this relatively small expanse of prairie.

There are thirty miles of stone fencing on the property, needed when “Open Range” ranching came to an end.

          We took a short walk on one of the trails that weave their way through the rolling topography that is indicative of this, the Flint Hills of Kansas. The view from up on top was seemingly endless. Thinking that we were seeing exactly what our Native American friends saw those many years ago was quite humbling.

Paula (bottom left corner) amongst the Tallgrass

          I think that Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Wilder both got it right.