This article was originally published by The Mennonite

On the edge of the Great Plains: A letter from Robert Kreider

This letter was written in 2014 by Robert Kreider, longtime church leader and former college president. He was corresponding with Brad Born, then dean of Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, and Bethel President, Perry White. This exchange inspired a 2016 conference focused on the theme, “Fidelity of Place.” Kreider passed away in December 2015. You can read more reflections on the idea of “Fidelity of Place” in the November issue of The Mennonite magazine. 

To make a prairie it takes a clover

                        and one bee,

            One clover, and a bee,

            And revery.

            The revery alone will do           

            If bees are few.  Emily Dickinson

“I like to think of landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. . . . To see and know a place is a contemplative act.  It means emptying our mind and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety come in.” Gretel Ehrlich, Landscape, 1987

“The prairie, in all its expressions, is a massive, subtle place, with a long history of  contradictions and misunderstanding. But it is worth the effort at comprehension. It is, after all, at the center of our national identity.” Wayne Fields, Lost Horizon

Reading the draft of Raylene Hinz Penner’s autobiography, East of Liberal, I was impressed with how she evokes a lyrical awareness of a childhood growing up on a farm on the Great Plains: a sense of place and space, an infinity of land and sky, the earthiness of life on a farm, the vibrancy of life on soil once submerged under a great ocean. This led to discussion with Bob Regier on how and when an awareness emerged among us that we [here in Kansas] were living on the edge of the Great Plains.

In college I was not aware of the grassy rolling wilderness of the Flint Hills or the majestic north-south travel route of hundreds of thousands of migratory birds pausing for rest in Fall and Spring on their flight between the Arctic and the Tropics on the great flyways of Quivera and Cheyenne Bottoms.  In my college years, the prairie was less a land to be savored than one to be crossed: the Santa Fe Trail, the Chisholm Trail, the Oregon Trail. Bethel alumnus, the late John Unruh, Jr., captured the drama of the crossing in his monumental history, The Plains Across.

I have wondered when we in Kansas awakened to awareness of these high plains as a unique gift, a treasure of the spirit. This leads to a series of observations and ideas to be  explored, tested, amplified and, perhaps, shared in an essay.

Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains, locates the Great Plains in Kansas as west of the hundredth meridian, the approximate limit of 20-inch rainfall. In general here tall grasses to the east ceased and western short grasses began. The Flint Hills are, therefore, on the edge of the Great Plains. More general terms have been used: “prairie,” “Inland Sea,” “Great American Dessert.”

Significant contributors to local awareness of our place on the prairie are Robert Regier and Dwight Platt, both bird lovers, who graduated from Bethel College in 1952. It is not clear to Bob when he first became conscious of the Flint Hills. Perhaps, with a U.S. Geological Survey map, finding his way to Texico Hill, the highest point in the Flint Hills near the abandoned town of Teterville. Only later, Bob, Wes Pauls and I visited Teter Rock that overlooks a panoramic valley.

Bob recalls his first crossing of the Flint Hills around 1970 with Maynard and Griselda Shelly. Returning from Kansas City they chose to drive south and then turn west into the hill country on dirt roads, guided west from Madison by radio towers, making choices when they came to “Y” intersections, and finally coming to Matfield Green. Milt Claassen, Leonard Wiebe and others who herded cattle to the Flint Hills would have memories to record.

Bob’s most vivid early acquaintance with the prairie was with the Sand Prairie, a 40-acre tract a mile west of Harvey County Park West. In the 1960’s, Dwight worked with Bethel College and the Nature Conservancy to join in a 50-50 agreement to purchase 40 acres. Bob designed and helped publish a brochure describing the Sand Prairie project. He ponders, “When did the prairie and the Flint Hills show up in my art?” Bob has made many trips to the Sand Prairie where Dwight has conducted research projects.

In seeking the origins of public awareness of the Great Plains, the Tall Grass Prairie, “the inland sea” with the Flint Hills on the eastern edge, one must trace the history of beginnings of Quivera and Cheyenne Bottoms as state wildlife preserves.

In 1975, the spring meeting of the Kansas Ornithological Society was held at Rock Springs. Bob remembers the presence of Frank W. Robl, a rancher from Elmwood and an ardent advocate for a Cheyenne Bottoms preserve. Bob has preserved a card recording his first bird observation at Cheyenne Bottoms.  Robl, a rancher living near Ellenwood, began banding birds in 1924 in the Bottoms.

Other tributaries of an awakening need to be probed: Wes Jackson’s Land Institute at Salina, the Daughters of the American Revolution marking of the Santa Fe Trail, the Flint Hills Wagon Train based in Eldorado and more. From Dwight Platt one could learn about the introduction of environmental studies at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University and Emporia State University. When did Nature Conservancy open its first chapter in Kansas?  William Least Heat-Moon’s book on Chase County,PrairyErth, was published in 1991, which followed his Blue Highways, the writing of which began in 1978.  It would be interesting to know what gave birth to Moon’s interest in the Flint Hills.

Later environmental influences might be included: Jane Kogan’s ranch at Matfield Green, Pioneer Bluffs, the Symphony in the Flint Hills. Who are leaders in academia (e.g. Jim Hoy of Emporia State), journalism, photography in this reawakening? Among the museums of Kansas are there ones, like the Kauffman Museum, which interpret the Great Plains story in an environmental way?  Can one push back before the 1970’s to a quickening of interest in the Great Plains and an awareness of the Flint Hills?

I reported to Brad Born, Bethel College Academic Dean, the conversation with Bob Regier probing origins of the public awakening to the prairie. His first comment was, “Could this story be a welcome opening to a conference of Mennonite colleges that is to be held on the Bethel campus in 2015?” . And in this is an unheralded story, a critically important public contribution of a small liberal arts college, Bethel.

Is there not an invitation, wherever one is placed, to see one’s locale as one of particular worth to be sought and treasured: Sterling, Illinois on the edge of the divide between forest and prairie; Goshen, Indinana on the edge of the Great Lakes that flow into the Atlantic; Bluffton, Ohio in the once Black Swamp region and astride a pathway from the Maumee River Valley to the valley of the Miami?

Robert Kreider   
July 9, 2014

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