In Kansas’ surviving wild places, a connection from the distant past to a hopeful future
George Frazier wrote "The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes,” published by the University Press of Kansas. (Photo by Christina Frazier)
Ten years ago this January, I began to worry about my upcoming birthday.
It was one of those ages that sits neatly on a ten, and as a computer scientist who pays attention to numbers, that symmetry carried weight. At the same time, I was looking forward to the April publication of my first book, “The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes,” a project I had been wandering toward long before I ever wrote a word of it.
While I was working on the book, as I began finding places so remarkable I couldn’t believe they were in Kansas, I was at a loss for what to call them. They weren’t wilderness in the academically charged sense of the “Wilderness Act of 1964.” I decided to call them simply “wild places.”
This spawned the question that shaped the book: What do we mean when we call a place wild? The environmental poet Gary Snyder describes it as a place where nature is in charge, a system self-regulated by nature processes. But what does natural even mean as we slog our way into the Anthropocene? Descriptions always fall short. It is better to take someone by the hand and point.
One frigid March night in ye gone days, my friend Alan and I were in a downtown Lawrence bar. We were both graduate students at the University of Kansas. While the Replacements and Husker Du played on the jukebox, we pored over a new publication on the status of greater prairie chickens in Kansas.
Tympanuchus cupido populations had been declining for 50 years. The main reason was habitat loss. More than 95 percent of the tallgrass prairie that the birds rely on had been plowed in the 150 years since Euro-Americans began carving farms from Midwestern grasslands. The Kansas Flint Hills and central Nebraska held the only remaining healthy populations. A time series of maps in the paper animated this shrinking territory at roughly 10-year spans.
As far as we knew, nobody had seen a prairie chicken in Douglas County, where Lawrence is located, for years, but a faint cross hatching in one of the maps teased that prairie chickens had been present in southwest Douglas County, near the hamlets of Worden and Globe, as recently as 20 years earlier.
Could prairie chickens still be hanging on near Lawrence, we wondered? They were the closest thing to free-roaming bison or buffalo wolves left in the eastern prairie. I had never seen a prairie chicken, but Alan grew up in the Flint Hills and knew what to look for. Tortured by the possibility, we left the bar, loaded up my car with camping equipment, and drove off into the night in search of ghosts.
At about 2 in the morning, we stopped beside a small lake to make a fire and rest. We slept on open ground, in bivy sacs instead of a tent. A screech owl purred somewhere in the pines. Occasionally the moon peeked through the clouds in bursts of amber.
Well before first light, a park officer woke us with the beam of his flashlight. We were sleeping in an area off-limits to camping and had to leave. As we packed up our gear, the officer shared his coffee with us. He lived near Globe. We told him our plan, and he said he had heard there were still a few prairie chickens in a pasture near US Highway 56, a two-lane road built on the ruins of the old Santa Fe Trail. Back in the car, we spread out road maps but eventually just began driving mile after mile on dirt roads.
Eventually we reached a large pasture in the general area the officer told us about and parked in a cemetery. A perimeter of section roads, each a mile long, bounded the prairie. We left the car and started hiking along the roads in a quagmire of mud and melting snow.
As the eastern sky began to soften with violet light, we noticed wallows in the prairie, ovals of earth compacted centuries before by buffalo rolling in the mud. They stood out from the taller grasses.
Walking once more, I saw what I thought were a dozen geese coming to land about a quarter mile from us in the pasture. Alan shouted: “Prairie chickens!”
The birds landed in a squat patio of trampled grass. As we watched through field glasses, the males began to drone like Tibetan monks and promenade in an ancient springtime mating ritual. It felt like we were in a dream.
Others had rediscovered these last Douglas County prairie chickens, in the finest remaining large prairie in the county. Three years later, the birds disappeared and today there are no prairie chickens in Douglas County. But on that cold spring morning, their booming incantations and the spooky heebie-jeebies of ghost buffalo made us feel like we’d tumbled into a wormhole connecting the past and a remnant of an ecosystem that we hoped teetered on the brink of renewal, part of the remaining wilderness heritage of the once vast American interior grassland.
There are no maps for these kinds of experiences.
In my travels, I found hundreds of similar places, where the vortex of history blooms in a great collision of nature and folklore. I wrote “The Last Wild Places of Kansas” not as cartographical exercise, but to share a process, a methodology for others to create their own maps. I have continued the work in a second book, “Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America.”
Ten years on, as another birthday approaches, I’ve met hundreds of people who feel as strongly as I do that Kansas wild places are unique in the pantheon of American wilderness. They are as important as redwood groves, Yellowstone geysers, and Rocky Mountain fourteeners.
My fellow Ad Astrians, never let anyone scoff you into believing that Kansas doesn’t have wild places worth fighting for. If you read my books, I hope you will form your own opinions about what does and does not qualify as wild in the Midwest and that you will come to better appreciate the singular natural legacy of places like Kansas.
If you already understand the subtle beauty and biological complexity of one square meter of prairie, or visit a cat run of wild pawpaw groves each September, or have wandered, awe-soaked, in centuries-old pecan groves along the Missouri or Marais des Cygnes rivers, or have consulted Amtrak schedules to see if you could hop out at Cimarron National Grasslands and catch a ride back after three days camping in the sand sage, then you already understand the central premise of my writing: Kansas and the Midwest still have wild places that matter.
For everybody else, read the book and get ready to change the way you feel about Kansas.
George Frazier is an environmental writer and academic whose work traces the deep intersections of nature, history, and place. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.