The National Park Service says tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America. But within a generation, most of it had been transformed into farms, cities, and towns. Today, less than 4% remains intact. You can still see examples of tallgrass prairie at the Konza Prairie, near Manhattan, and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, near Strong City. Commentator Rex Buchanan recently found some tall grasses in the mixed grass prairie in the Smoky Hills of central Kansas.
(Transcript)
It was an odd summer, weather-wise, where I grew up out in central Kansas. Extremely dry going into the spring, so dry that vegetation in the pasture I own took on a gray cast. It was somehow depressing, and dry enough that, like the previous year, we decided to reduce the number of cattle grazing on the place, and take them off the pasture earlier. There just wasn’t enough grass for business as usual.
Then it started raining. The creek that flows through the pasture carried water for the first time in a couple of years. The grass took off. Now, it’s taller than I’ve ever seen it.
This pasture is native mixed-grass prairie in the Smoky Hills. It has some characteristics of the tallgrass prairie, like in the Flint Hills, where big bluestem seems to be the predominant grass, and of the shortgrass prairie out west, where buffalo grass is more common.
With all the rain, the big bluestem kinda took over. I’ve read accounts of people coming across the plains on horseback, with grass reaching up to the stirrups. Tall enough to hide cattle. But I’m not sure I’d ever seen that for myself.
The people at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Flint Hills say that the most common question they get from visitors is, “Where is all the tallgrass?” Because the pastures at the preserve are generally burned and grazed, the grass seldom reaches its maximum height.
And I can tell you, a pasture of grass that is four or five feet high feels really different. It’s hard to see very far. It’s almost hard to walk through. When I was out there a few weeks ago, I camped out and then started to drive out early in the morning, before sunup. Between the dark and the grass, I was almost completely disoriented, to the point that I had trouble finding my way out of a pasture that I thought I knew by heart.
I see now why early Europeans might have been bewildered, maybe even a little frightened of the seemingly endless prairie. Even though Native people and lightning set the grass on fire, the landscape was dominated by tall grasses, without the demarcation of today’s roads and power lines and fences. Without many of the trees that grew up when white settlers began to suppress fires.
It’s not unusual for people to speculate about the appearance of this place prior to white settlement. Sometimes you get a little of that sense in the Flint Hills, in places where there are large contiguous pastures and a lack of human structures. Though even there, the grass is generally shorter because the pastures are regularly burned and grazed.
For just a little while that morning out in the middle of Kansas, wandering through grass that was almost as tall as I am, I got a little of that feeling. It was both awe-inspiring and a little frightening. A reminder, maybe, of what this landscape once was, and sometimes still is. ###
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. When he's not camping on his pasture in Rice County or on some far flung fishing trip, he lives in Lawrence.