Cassoday: Prairie Chicken Capital of the World

Cassoday, population about one hundred, carries the unlikely title of Prairie Chicken Capital of the World. The town grew up in Butler County along the railroad. It was named for John B.

Cassoday, chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The prairie chicken connection is real: greater prairie chickens were so common on the surrounding Flint Hills grasslands that early settlers ate them regularly. Hunting nearly wiped the birds out before they gained protection, and after decades of recovery the species boomed again on the tallgrass that farming never broke.

Today Cassoday sits at the edge of the Flint Hills and hosts hunters and birders who come for the annual prairie chicken season, a remnant of a grassland ecology that once stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles.