Chase County and the Bluestem Pastures

The rolling prairie around you is the Flint Hills, known to ranchers as the Bluestem Pasture Region, and it is one of the last great stretches of true tallgrass prairie left in America. Named for its nutritious bluestem grasses, the region runs in a narrow band from Oklahoma almost to Nebraska. It survived the plow because the ground here is too rocky and flinty to farm, so the deep-rooted native grasses were never broken.

Instead, cattle thrive on it. Cattle are fattened on these pastures every year. This is grassland as it looked before the settlers came.