PRAIRIE REVERIES

There's nothing plain about them. The Upper Plains States are the most underrated region of the West, when it comes to discovering Western history and natural beauty, both of which abound here.

If it's true that the Rockies furnish the iconography of the West—with their magnificent peaks and grand vistas comprising the backdrops for what must be three out of every four set pieces of Western art, cinema, or still photography—the biggest doings in the Old West did not transpire high on windswept mountaintops but down in the sprawling lowlands. It was on the upper Great Plains that the great conflicts were settled and the great westward expansion encountered its first and most formidable challenges. These parts are thick with historic sites and stories that'll chill the blood or stir the emotions. And in between the historic stops is some of the most appreciable scenery you've never seen. Join us for a two-staged road trip through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

To Preserve the Past
by John Brown

Today's Kansas saves a prairie for posterity.

For a while there in the early 1990s, it was Bloody Kansas all over again.
It was brother against brother involving matters of constitutional prerogative and the proper use of eminent domain, with the coffee debate raging every dad-blamed morning at a dozen Chase County cafes: “Who really should own the grass around here?” For a while back then, a passing motorist needed only to have read maybe one of these handmade signs—“Private Lands In Private Hands”—to understand the deep-down fervor of the feeling of the third- and fourth-generation ranchers along state Route 177, from Cassoday up toward Council Grove. The slurp and the dash of the hand-painted letters demanded out loud that the bureaucrats and the promoters and the land-grabbers get their bad selves pretty much on down the road. Pretty much right now.

And so understand the nature of the beast—this glorious old stone home and the Hollywood barn and the Little House schoolhouse and these limestone buildings' placement there on a promontory picked out by the richest landowner in these parts 130 years ago, God's own grass growing silly-rich all around. The nearly 11,000-acre Spring Hill Farm and Stock Ranch—now the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve—had stood there just north of Strong City, Kan., since Stephen F. and Louisa Jones established it in 1878.

The ranch has always been a showplace—architecture of the Second Empire in the house with its distinctive mansard roof and the tall opposing windows to catch the cooling summer winds, the entire structure nestled into the hillside to grab the natural insulation of cool prairie earth, the springs feeding a cistern and a piping system the technological marvel of its time in these parts, an ice house with the pond-cut blocks wrapped in hay, and the barn—oh my gosh, the barn—60-by-110 feet, three-storied, with 2.5 tons of tin used in its original roofing in December 1881, the bottom floor stabling horses and milk cows, the upper two floors storing hay, grain, and implements—grain wagons lumbering up ramps on the north, unloading in a granary gravity-flowed to hungry horses 20 feet below, the empty wagons exiting on the barn's south side.

For awhile back there a large doubleheader windmill, its blades 20 feet long, drove corn grinders and hay choppers, but its unharnessed power shook even the great mass of the barn to its foundations, and the mill was removed for structural reasons. Meantime, the Joneses went for the wow factor wherever they might. Even the chicken house manages to impress; its barrel-vaulted stone  construction stood larger than some of the dugout structures where pioneer Chase County families still lived back then.

His palatial headquarters complete, Stephen Jones in 1882 donated land for a new school with the stipulation that the land and its one-room stone building would revert to the ranch if the school were ever to close. Ms. Dora Peer called the first class to attention in September 1884, the last Fox Creek kids running off toward home—school out forever—in the spring of 1930. Lovingly and accurately restored by Kansas Garden Clubs, the schoolhouse joined the rest of the ranch building on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

For all their reach and heft, all their limestoned grandeur, the manmade elements of the ranch drift off toward insignificance, cowboy construction lost on an ancient, inland sea. Once covering 400,000 square miles of central North America, the tallgrass prairie has dwindled now to less than 4 percent of its original range. But make no mistake, this grass to this day makes especially stupid any notion of lasting human involvement beyond a silent, an unknowing, and a helpless respect.

Here is landscape made by fire. Lightning struck, the first fires enabled grasses and herbaceous forbs to seize control of the prairie expanse and, in time, the earliest Native Americans—the Pawnee, the Osage, the Wichita, the Kansa—learned that the buffalo grazed with overwhelming preference on land just charred, learned to drag burning sheaves behind their loping ponies to draw the bison to just-made hunting grounds. Here is landscape saved by its geology.

The stair-stepped topography of the Flint Hills grew from a geological process called “differential erosion.” In the random emergence of limestone, flint, and shale, the thin and rocky soil of these hills did not much adapt to wide-scale plowing, and in that absence more native tallgrass prairie survives here than anywhere else on the planet. And so any trip to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve invites an informed look into an invisible miracle capable of producing the earth's greatest concentration of vegetable protein, 80 percent of the food system lying clean out of sight.

Climb a hill, any hill, and see again the roundabout nowhere of the bluestem, the switch, and the Indian, seed stems reaching 9 feet and more up toward their Creator, roots tangled at the barest heart of things. See the wildflowers, the legumes, the sedges all mixed up in symbiosis ain't none of us will ever fully understand. The grass grows good in Chase County, Kan.

Down-Home Appeal

Nebraska peddles homespun with pride.
by John Brown

For some of us, retirement
simply cannot come soon enough. Consider Joe and Marilyn Norris, my 50-something friends already planning their golden-age adventure in the research associated with their forthcoming book on small-town festivals honoring not much in particular: the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Fruita, Colo., for example, “Celebrating a Long History of Open Minds,” the intrepid rooster living for months after a local farmer failed to bring him immediately to Sunday dinner.
A motivation similar to Marilyn's lay behind my wife Lee Ann's and my recent jetting into the municipal airport in southeastern Nebraska at York (elevation 1,620 feet), seeking there the beginning of a rental car odyssey with a Missouri riverside catfish dinner at its southeastern extremity. Per my buddy Joe, we were taking our fun exactly where we hoped to find it.

York, Neb., is Carl Sandburg's Chicago writ small, “husky, brawling, bareheaded, shoveling, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding.” Such is the community's zeal for economic development that York lists on its official website the town's capacity for business-to-business communication with “experienced translators available as needed: 14 Spanish, three French, four German, two Chinese, three Arabic, one Dutch, one Finnish, one Hebrew, one Swedish, one Turkish.” York College is responsible for many of those translators and ranked among the Best Comprehensive Colleges in the Midwest by U.S. News and World Report.

We headed south from York 6.5 miles on U.S. Highway 81 to Junction to join “a large crowd of race-hungry fans jamming the grandstands of the Junction Motor Speedway for Saturday's 4th Annual Nebraska Spring Thaw as the O'Reilly Auto Parts United States Modified Touring Series staged a thrilling main event to put the wraps on a memorable weekend doubleheader at the three-eighths mile clay oval. With a stout race car, flawless driving, and a little help from lapped traffic, Al Hejna picked up where he left off in 2006 with a victory in Friday night's season opener.” The wild man Hejna will be driving in circles all summer, as the Junction Motor Speedway becomes home to the Third Annual Cornhusker Midget Challenge in late July, a must-see prelude to the Belleville Midget Nationals. There remain to the rodeo heart few thrills as existential as dirt-track racing, as practiced by lovable amateurs with horsepower to spare and genuine oblivion to any emotion remotely approaching fear.

Al Hejna's victory lap complete, we aimed our rented Taurus on toward Geneva to catch a late movie at the historic Rialto Theater, a grand old pile built in 1915, erstwhile home to both city government and a resident opera company. Plan to be in Geneva on July 6 to 8 on the occasion of the mysteriously named Q125 Celebration for dancing, contests of weird ability, crafts displays, a parade and—because this is southeastern Nebraska on our nation's birthday—barbecue and fireworks. If this be Geneva, can Hebron be far ahead? Hebron, home of the world's largest porch swings, with seating in comfort for 18 adults or 24 children. “Come and sit a spell. Plenty of room for the whole family,” the promotional brochure says. Hebron, by its own description, “a clean, honest, and easy place to live,” populated by “hardworking folks willing to put up with a few twisters and cold weather once in awhile.” Listen here to the town's quick inventory of fun things to do: “bird and deer hunting, a little canoeing and fishing, golfing, bowling, and flying.”

We turned east toward Fairbury on U.S.Highway 136, Fairbury the site of Smith's Cabin, a rough handmade dwelling “originally occupied by Smith who was shot in the neck by an arrow and lived,” (much like old Mike the Headless Chicken). Fairbury with its “Magic Etched in Stone,” a mausoleum hand-carved into a sandstone bluff by Nelson McDowell, the wealthy bachelor son of one of Fairbury's founders. Lee Ann, who loves euphemism, points shyly to the Fairbury Chamber of Commerce's admission that “today the mausoleum shows the signs of many visitors who have left their own carvings. Nebraska Game and Parks Commission requests that visitors do not mark on the mausoleum walls to protect them for the future.” My wife put her pocketknife away unused, and we walked into a setting sun to the top of nearby Lookout Mountain for a graffiti-free view of three counties.

The roadside attractions come thick and Hejna-fast now—Wymore, south of Beatrice, with its 20th annual Sam Wymore Festival the first weekend in June, commemorating the town's heritage as prairie home to generations of Welsh immigrants and their New World preservation of language, dance, and intricate musicality in minor keys. On east to Burchard and the Tegtmeier buffalo herd “grazing in their native prairie habitat.” Here's Pawnee City and The Pedal Clinic, full of yesterday's toys, more than 400 kiddie cars and tractors, with one room dedicated peculiarly to thigh-powered John Deere vehicles. And called out for special note “salt and pepper shakers,” obviously and collectibly big around Pawnee City where the local historical museum invites Lee Ann to ooh over “more than 1,600 salt and pepper shakers” while I'm metallurgical a few feet away, studying intricacies of design in an even 800 different types of barbed wire.

To Falls City now and the Richardson County Military History Museum with its memorabilia of two world wars and Vietnam, its memorial to the big old hard-loved cornfed kids who did not come back home. Falls City and the Itha T. Krumme Memorial Arboretum and its self-
guided tours of indigenous biology. It's spring. Al Hejne takes again the inside track. The buffalo roam. Godspeed Joe and Marilyn. And neighbor, will you please pass the salt?

Celebrated Sights

South Dakota offers a mosaic of must-sees.
by Natasha Gardner

Driving north into the southwest corner of South Dakota, you might require a while for your eyes to adjust to the prairie. What initially seems like unending flatland will start to roll. Deer will appear on the horizon, birds will soar overhead, and you'll need all of your senses when you're this close to the land. Once you have your bearings, cruise east on U.S. Highway 14 until you hit De Smet, the “Little Town on the Prairie” that Laura Ingalls Wilder made famous. In town, tour the Wilder's original home and the Surveyor's House, where the family spent their first South Dakota winter. Outside of town, stop at the homestead that Pa staked in 1880 to teach your little ones about life before video games.

Heading west, take a detour south on state Route 37 and pop into the Corn Palace in Mitchell to see the murals that are painstakingly created from thousands of corn kernels. Last year, for the first time, new murals were not made because of a severe drought in the area. But the old murals are still up, so stop by, and show your support for local farmers before heading west on Interstate 90 to Badlands National Park. As you enter the Wildlife Loop (state Route 240), tall prairie grasses give way to sharp canyons and low buttes.

The formations constantly change and uncover fossils of three-toed horses and saber-toothed cats from the Oligocene Epoch. This land is chiseled by wind and water and is called the “Badlands” for a reason. But since you are not traveling by covered wagon, you can see the beauty of these rugged hills without any worries. The loop ends at the small town of Wall, where you can stop for ice water at Wall Drug. The family-owned drugstore has been serving ice water to travelers since the Dirty Thirties. Today you can still get a cup of ice water and nickel coffee at this 76,000-square-foot store, which also has a collection of Western art, a 6,000-pair boot department, and a souvenir section where you can stock up before heading into the Black Hills and up to the Crazy Horse Memorial.

Roads crisscross through the Black Hills, inviting motorcyclists for a spectacular trip. Take a joyride on the Iron Mountain Road (U.S. Highway 16A) and with each switchback you'll want to go back and drive it again. As an added bonus, three tunnels along the route give fantastic views of Mount Rushmore. Take a jaunt up U.S. Highway 385 to the Crazy Horse Memorial and with a little luck, you might see workers using dynamite to blast chunks of rock off the mountain to form the head of a majestic horse. The colossal memorial is the largest mountain sculpture in progress in the world. Work began in 1948, and the face was dedicated in 1998. The monument will be stunning when completed, but even now it's a testament to determined wills and unforgettable spirits.

Jump back on U.S. Highway 385, and motor north through the Paha Sapa—the Lakota name for the Black Hills. Stop in the art mecca, Hill City, to enjoy their gallery district. Along the way, keep an eye out for hiking trails and secluded lakes. As you drive through the northern section of the Hills, hop on the Spearfish Scenic Byway (U.S. Highway 14A) and stop for a picnic at the breathtaking Roughlock Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. Whether you stumble upon a small winery or spot a majestic elk, the smell of pine mixed with wildflowers will intoxicate you no matter which direction you turn in the Black Hills.

Endless Horizons

North Dakota's renderings of its heritage far surpass the humdrum.
by Natasha Gardner

The first thing you notice traveling north on U.S. Highway 85 from the South Dakota border is how big the North Dakota sky is. So many people—from Native American tribes like the Sioux and Mandan to French traders and Norwegian settlers—have settled in this state, but the prairie and sky, not cities or roads, still dominate the landscape. As you drive, take notice of the weathered shelter belts, sinking farmsteads, and old windmills along the road. Each tells a story about perseverance and hope. If you read the signs, you can learn a lot about the history of small towns in North Dakota.

A good place to start is at Georgia's and the Owl in Amidon, the smallest county seat in the nation. This little joint serves up a 3-pound prime rib that you'll need to take home in a doggy bag. As you drive out of town, make sure to slow down for Amidon's famous speed trap. “Trooper Sally,” a mannequin propped up in an old patrol car, has been scaring drivers for over a decade. Travel east on state Route 21 to Regent and the start of the Enchanted Highway. The highway began as a way to lure visitors to town but has turned into one of the most visited spots in the state.

Seven of the world's largest metal sculptures are scattered along a stretch of road connecting Regent and Interstate 94. The sculptures celebrate North Dakotan life and use scrap materials, like barbed wire and oil drums, to create hair and other forms. At the end of the highway, take the interstate west, following the expansion of the railroad as you drive into North Dakota's badlands. Nestled in the badlands, Medora is the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park's South Unit. Before hitting the town to shop for homemade fudge and Western gear, make sure to visit the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. The center pays tribute to rodeos, Native Americans, cowboys, ranchers, and horses in true North Dakota style. After your tour, take a drive through the South Unit of the Park, and you'll soon understand why so many people—including Teddy Roosevelt—have fallen in love with this quiet land. At night during the summer, grab a bite to eat at the Pitchfork Fondue before heading to the Medora Musical where the Burning Hills singers clog, dance, and even yodel in an outdoor amphitheater with the badlands as a backdrop behind them.

While humming the catchy tunes from last night's show, travel east on I-94 across the state. Dotting the highway, small towns-some dying and some thriving-break up endless wheat and barley fields. Stop by the local cafes for a cup of joe and a caramel roll as big as a plate. Fans of Louis L'Amour and Peggy Lee must make a stop in Jamestown, the hometown of both legends. L'Amour wrote more than 100 books during his life, and here's your chance to see where it all began. Walk in his footsteps on a self-guided walking tour that shows off the town where he grew up. You will swing past the library where he claimed to have read every book, the Franklin school, and the writer's shack. While you're there, stop by the National Buffalo Museum to learn more about the importance of these great animals and catch a glimpse of “White Cloud,” a rare albino buffalo. As you head out of town, take a few minutes  to marvel at the purples, reds, and blues of the view of North Dakota's top tourist attraction: a Dakota sunset.

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