Tallgrass Prairie: The Sea of Grass That Once Covered a Continent

Before the plow, the tallgrass prairie was one of the great ecosystems of North America. It stretched from Indiana to Nebraska, from southern Manitoba to central Texas, covering roughly a hundred and seventy million acres, more than a quarter billion football fields of waving grass reaching as high as your head, sustained by some of the deepest, most fertile topsoil on earth.

Today, less than four percent of that original prairie survives. The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas hold the largest intact remnant, and at the heart of the Flint Hills, near Strong City, lies the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve: ten thousand eight hundred acres where the nineteenth century hasn't entirely left.

The Flint Hills survived because they couldn't be broken. The shallow, chert-laced soil that gives the hills their name defeated every steel plow that tried to turn it. Farmers gave up, and ranchers stayed. The grass stayed too. What you see here is what the entire middle of America once looked like: big bluestem reaching six feet in summer, sideoats grama, switchgrass, Indian grass, all rooted in a soil layer that took thousands of years of buffalo grazing and prairie fire to build.

Speaking of buffalo: the preserve has reintroduced a bison herd, a small one but real, and watching a bison stand motionless in a tallgrass meadow is one of the most powerful acts of historical imagination available on the Great Plains. These animals once numbered between thirty and sixty million. By eighteen eighty-nine, hunters had reduced them to fewer than a thousand.

The Spring Hill Ranch, established in eighteen eighty-one, still stands within the preserve. Its stone barn, built with local limestone by crews of stonemasons, is one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century ranch architecture in the region. The National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy manage the land jointly, a partnership as unusual as the landscape itself.