The Flint Hills: The Last Tallgrass Prairie

Drive across the Flint Hills in May, when the ranchers have just finished the spring burning, and the new grass is coming up green against the black char of the previous year's growth, and you will understand something about why this landscape survived when nothing else like it did.

The Flint Hills run in a band roughly ninety miles wide and one hundred sixty miles long from the Nebraska border south into Oklahoma. Beneath the surface, thin-soiled and rocky, the Permian-age chert and limestone make the ground nearly impossible to plow. Settlers who broke the sod everywhere else they could reach left the Flint Hills to cattle because cattle could graze it and a plow could not work it. That agricultural failure, as measured by the homesteaders, is why four percent of the original tallgrass prairie survives, and nearly all of that four percent is here.

Tallgrass prairie is not a simple thing. The ecologists who study it describe it as one of the most biologically complex terrestrial ecosystems in North America. The dominant grasses, big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass, grow from root systems that extend as deep as eleven feet below the surface, holding soil, cycling nutrients, and maintaining moisture through dry years. The above-ground expression changes dramatically with the season. In May, the bluestem runs ankle-high and green. By September, big bluestem can reach the shoulder of a standing person and has turned the rust-red color that gives the Flint Hills their autumn palette.

The bison that grazed these hills are mostly gone from the wild. The Osage and Kansa who managed this landscape with fire for centuries are gone from it. What remains is the grass itself, maintained now by cattle ranchers who have discovered, largely by economic accident, that the same rotational grazing and burning regime that the Kansa and Osage used also produces the best conditions for stocker cattle. The tallgrass survived because it was useful, and it remains because it still is.

The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City holds eleven thousand acres of it. The largest intact private tallgrass holdings in Kansas run into the hundreds of thousands of acres, owned by ranching families who have kept the plow out not out of ecological virtue but out of practical farming judgment. The virtue and the judgment happened to align.