The Last Wild Places of Kansas

Journeys into Hidden Landscapes

George Frazier

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700624829
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622207
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Winner: Ferguson Kansas History Book Award

Winner: Hamlin Garland Prize in Popular History

Winner: Midwest Book Award-Nature Category

A Kansas Notable Book

Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming the state in search of these hidden treasures, The Last Wild Places of Kansas is Frazier’s idiosyncratic and eye-opening travelogue of nature’s secret holdouts in the Sunflower State.

These are places where extirpated mammalian species are making comebacks; where flying squirrels leap between centuries-old trees lit by the unearthly green glow of foxfire; where cold springs feed ancient watercress pools; where the ice moon paints the Smoky Hill with memories of the buffalo wolf and the lonesome rattle of false indigo; where the blue lid of the sky forms a vacuum seal over treeless pastel hills, orange in winter; where bluestem rises. Some are impossible to find on maps. Most are magnificently bereft of anything beneficial to 99.9 percent of modern America. True wildernesses they may not be, but at the correct angle of light, when the wind blows pollen carrying biological memories of the glaciers, these places are a crack between the worlds, portals to the lost buffalo wilderness.

En route Frazier takes us from the unexpected wilds of the Kansas City suburbs to the Cimarron National Grassland in the far southwestern corner of the state. He visits ancient springs, shares a beer with prairie dog hunters, and fails in his mission to canoe the upper Marais des Cygnes—a trip that requires permission from every landowner on the route. Along the way we encounter a host of curious characters—ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, explorers, wildlife experts, and outdoor enthusiasts—all fellow travelers in a quest to know, preserve, and share the last wild places of Kansas.

CHAPTER ONE

Black Bob and the Prophet

After three grueling days stuck on the most intractable software bug of my professional career, I felt like a man trying to roast a turkey with a birthday candle. This much was certain: I’d caused the problem and only I could fix it. But as our customer in California lost patience, I hunkered down with valgrind, callgrind, lint, electric fence, purify, gdb—an arsenal of debugging weapons that programmers reach for when they’re desperate. Nothing helped. At night, I dreamed of shopping for my burial plot.

I’m fortunate though, my wife, Christina, knows me. To clear my mind and set the stage for code satori (and because early August in northeast Kansas had been a hot humid mess) she thought a change of venue might help, so at sunset we drove out to Bloomington—the state park—to feel the wind from the lake and watch a free presentation on Kansas caves.

Bloomington—the town—once was an abolitionist farming community. Most of its residents simply tried to scrape enough off the land to survive winter, but a few were eccentrics and dreamers, and two years after settlement the town found its way onto the radar of pro-slavery activists.

In 1856, Bleeding Kansas struck like a panic attack. A pro-slavery Indian agent murdered town militiaman Thomas Barber near Lawrence, which made him an instant martyr for the Free State cause and subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, a famous poet in an era when famous poets attracted nutty followings like alt-country bands do today. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, freed slaves poured north, and by the end of the 1870s Bloomington had one of the largest African American farming populations in the state. In Steele Grove—one of hundreds of Kansas walnut groves that used to have names—Bloomingtonians imbibed in spirited Baptist revivals and, sometimes, in spirits. The killer tornado of 1917 thrust hard to the right at the last second, sparing the tiny village almost certain annihilation.

But Bloomington’s luck didn’t last. When Clinton Reservoir was proposed, planners penciled the entire town into the flood control pool. In the 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers started buying farms, a few by force of eminent domain. Piece by piece the town was taken apart and bulldozed. Eventually Bloomington lay fallow for a decade, waiting for the Wakarusa River to back up against the massive earth-fill dam near Lawrence and deliver the extremities of the new lake to the heart of the old town.

Thus was born Bloomington—the state park—where the abolitionists and the named groves and the nineteenth-century martyrs who inspired rock star poets have been replaced by sunburned dads banging on jet ski motors, popup-trailer base camps where nobody drags themselves out of bed to fish before noon, and college kids playing Ultimate and grilling Hilary’s Black Rice Burgers. We walked down to Bloomington Beach and found a half-buried bottle of Grape Malt Duck (an extinct species of near beer) that might have been dumped out of a wormhole connected to 1981. A green Chevrolet Celebrity drove by with a bumper sticker that read, “Everybody looks Republican when you’re high.”

When it comes to caves, I like being an outsider. I’ve never been caving, nor karsting, nor spelunking, and though I’d love to take an Icelandic cruise to Vatnajokull Glacier Cave if someone else paid for it, the Horton-Strahler Number is a complete mystery to me, I don’t honk for hematite, and I’ll never impress a woman with my knowledge of speleogenesis. But as the sun slipped beneath the horizon, I settled deeper into my chair and listened as a ranger from Clinton Lake showed slides and reminded me how little I knew about the caves of my home state.

To date, more than eight hundred caves have been discovered and explored in Kansas, and any cave hunter worth his stalactites has a decent chance of finding new ones by driving around the countryside looking for piles of junk—preferably massive ones—because piles of junk sometimes divulge sinkholes, and sinkholes sometimes divulge new caves. Sinkholes have insatiable appetites, so people feed them crushed grain silos, rusted Ford Fairlanes, storm rung windmills, bee boxes, Johnny Mathis record collections, bricks and stones from old foundations, bedsprings. Inevitably, though, the land does a little jiggle and the sinkhole returns, not much different from before. Beneath a sinkhole, bedrock is subject to slow erosion from acidic groundwaters and artesian springs. Patiently, this hydrochemical drill can bore pockets in bedrock—pockets called caves.

Kansas caves, often completely submerged by the spring that formed them, are not for the squeamish. A grown adult can rarely stand upright in all but the most vaulted caverns. Expect bat guano, colonies of slime molds, blind spiders, hellgrammites, varieties of salamander known only from a single cave, even nesting broods of rattlesnakes.

The presentation continued with field notes scribbled on a hand-drawn map: “Enter balcony room after passing second stone terrace once you leave bathtub. Watch out for nose scraper 15 feet past last strawtite. Lots of stalactites. Punch through narrow two-foot throat hole near mud cairn. Don’t worry. Slime and muck, but plenty of good air.”

Christina nudged me, pointing out a pair of big brown bats—Eptesicus fuscus—dive-bombing katydids mesmerized by the lights of the projector. If either bat noticed the slides and felt a pang for some lost home, it didn’t let on. These prairie bats probably spent their days under the bridge over Rock Creek.

After the presentation ended and the crowd began to leave, a man walked up to the ranger and asked, “Have you ever been to Blackbob Cave?”

“The Blackbob Cave slide. I skipped it, didn’t I? Give me a sec,” the ranger answered, and brought up an old grainy image, probably a scanned forty-year-old Polaroid. Skinny oaks and walnuts lined a draw that panned up to a ridge in the back of the shot. Shingles weathered back to bare wood hung mutely on a few of the trees—zombie no-trespassing signs.

But that cave! Even through the digital distortion of the scanned slide it wasn’t merely dark, but black-hole black, a featureless oval in the vertical limestone seam below the forest, and it was enormous. A man with a cheesy grin knelt in the foreground of the photo (a mental image flashed in my mind of seventies singer Sammy Johns—“I’m gonna love you in my Chevy van and that’s alright with me”—from the cover of one of my dad’s records). A spring gushed from the cave like it might sweep him away.

The man asked the ranger if he knew where Blackbob Cave was or if it even still existed. “I’ve only been to caves back home in southeast Kansas, by the strip pits,” the ranger said, “but I think Blackbob Cave is around here somewhere. Closer to Kansas City in Johnson County. On private land.”

I’d never heard of any place like Blackbob Cave in eastern Kansas, much less in Johnson County. I suddenly felt anxious; a core belief that I’d internalized decades ago rose up and threatened to breach. I shook my head and looked out across the dark lake. The ranger had to be wrong.

I grew up in Johnson County. We lived on the outskirts of suburbia, where the city grew right up to the edge of the corn. It was safe, secure, and idyllic in so many ways. I played Little League baseball, ran cross county, watched game four of the 1980 World Series twenty-three rows back from home plate, and received a top-notch public school education that included classes in computer programming, which eventually became my career.

But I also bought a banged-up black Les Paul Custom guitar and taught myself to play, started bands, and got involved in the burgeoning Midwest punk rock scene. I discovered the literature of the road and books on environmental advocacy by Gary Snyder, Aldo Leopold, William Least-Heat Moon, Paul Gruchow, Annie Dillard, Rick Bass, and Edward Abbey. By the time adolescent rebellion became harder to ignore, Johnson County started to feel as straightlaced and banal as 1860s Bloomington was abolitionist and eccentric, especially when it came to my increasing fascination with wild places.

As Kansas Citians began migrating to the suburbs in the late 1960s, developers planted shopping centers and housing developments in cornfields that a few generations before had been buffalo pastures. Decades after the greater prairie chicken was thought to be extirpated in the county, birders located a relict population on the prairie outskirts of Johnson County Executive Airport. Prairie chickens engage in a wild mating dance each spring. Airport leaders, worried that a sex-crazed bird might bring down a jet, convinced the county to repeatedly mow the booming grounds (effectively “clear-cutting” their prairie). Nobody ever saw the prairie chickens again.

But the world felt different forty miles to the west in Lawrence, where I went to college. Like Bloomington, Lawrence was founded by abolitionists. The gorgeous Elkins Prairie flanked remnants of the California and Oregon Trails west of the city. The Wakarusa and Kansas Rivers cradled the lower reaches of Mount Oread, the limestone cuesta that the University of Kansas sat atop. It was in Lawrence—in Douglas County, not Johnson County—that my obsession with the wild places of Kansas was born. Provisioned with field guides to trees, shrubs, woody vines, prairie flowers, mushrooms, reptiles, amphibians, and birds, I set out to learn the country. I discovered spikes of turkey-clawed big bluestem poking up through the brome, mistook quail for prairie chickens and prairie chickens for pheasants, got completely covered in ticks—even in the corners of my eyes—followed red fox tracks in the snow, and once was sprayed by a skunk when I went looking, drunk, for the ruins of a nineteenth-century hermit’s camp. My friends and I screen printed “Out of my Bog!” T-shirts to protest a road that threatened Baker Wetlands. I wrote a corny song about the ghost of a Bear Shaman.

Eventually most of those friends left Kansas for places like Boulder, Moab, Asheville, Seattle—places closer to real wilderness. I too was searching, but proportional to my friends’ wanderlust, I dug my heels into the rich “prairyerths” and stayed put. My pilgrimage was leading me nowhere, that is, to here. If I could find the lost wild essence of America in Kansas, I could find it anywhere.

In 1541, when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado became the first European to set foot in present-day Kansas, its eastern portions were dominated by the tallgrass prairie, an infinity of sky and wind stretching from the Wabash River west 750 miles to the Flint Hills. Sprinkled among the vast prairies, ancient stands of deciduous forest inhabited by black bears, cougars, red wolves, luminous fungi, and flying squirrels clung to north-facing flanks of limestone hills. Rivers like the Missouri, the Kaw, the Marais des Cygnes, the Neosho, the Verdigris and countless smaller streams were shrouded in cathedral groves of cottonwood, sycamore, and pecan. In western Kansas, clouds of bison by the tens of millions thundered across the Smoky Hill country, creating a robust economy for predators such as the grizzly bear, gray wolf, and man. The arid rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains stole taller grasses from the mix, giving rise to the shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains. In spring and fall, a great biomass of birds rested from their timeworn migrations at prairie potholes, playas, and expansive saline wetlands along the Arkansas River.

The story of the prairie and plains wilderness, of course, does not have a happy ending. As Kansas transformed itself into the breadbasket of the nation, more than 80 percent of the original tallgrass prairie was destroyed. Bears, cougars, wolves, black-footed ferrets, deer, river otter, elk, and most beaver and pronghorn antelope vanished from the state. The bison were systematically slaughtered in a holocaust of sport and gluttony. Wilderness retreated to the true West, to the public lands of the national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

By the late twentieth century, Kansas had no national park, no true national forest, no lonely tracts of BLM land—in fact, little public land of any sort. At 2 percent of total acreage, Kansas ranked dead last among states in public land holdings. Most state parks, wildlife refuges, and public hunting areas were created adjacent to federal and state reservoirs. Selected for flood control, not to protect native ecosystems, sensitive species, or natural landmarks, many were just thorny brambles on the wayside of declining rural America.

It cannot be overstated that access—the lack of it—profoundly shaped the psychology of Kansas wild places. While it is true that Kansas had no pristine cathedral landscape enshrined by the National Park Service, the remaining wild places we did have were systemically forgotten, like a repressed memory, a wound. Lack of access came to mean nonexistence.

But I knew, or at least I wanted to believe, that this wasn’t the whole story. Kansas still had the Flint Hills, the largest native tallgrass prairie left on the planet, and hundreds of relict prairies survived in the counties bordering Missouri. Kansas still had old-growth forests and wetlands frequented by whooping cranes, one of the most endangered birds in the world. Extirpated species were returning to the state. Kansas still had the vast emptiness of the western plains.

I believed that the truth about Kansas wild places was somewhere between the indifferent yawns of wilderness purists and the quaint clichés of coffee table books with pretty sunsets, little boys fishing in farm ponds, small kept herds of bison, and rainbows Photoshopped over winter wheat. I didn’t want to feel like an outsider in my own state, so I made a pact with myself to seek out the last wild places of Kansas, to find the truth behind the barbed wire. When I saw that Polaroid image of Blackbob Cave nestled in its sleepy hollow, however, something snapped, exposing a prejudice that had festered inside me since I was a teenager. I was forced to consider the possibility that there might still be wild places in Johnson County.

Back home from Bloomington, I brewed jasmine tea, moved out to the back porch, lit citronella for the mosquito gods, and grabbed my laptop. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single search (Book of Google: 6:14). How hard could it be to find a gigantic limestone cave in Johnson County, world headquarters of Garmin?

First I dug into the “Kansas Springs Inventory,” an online report by the Kansas Geological Survey. A table of stream flow measurements buried in an appendix showed that even in late July the spring was a gusher. Blackbob Cave was in Johnson County—the report confirmed it—but the rest was smoke and mirrors.

I kept going, but “Blackbob” and “Cave” made useless search terms. Google thought I wanted to shop and proffered every conceivable megastore with a Blackbob Road address. I’m even privy to a teenager’s perfectly preserved bulletin board post from the days before Facebook: “If my dad didn’t cave and sell the Subaru I would drive myself. . . . Don’t make it weird, just pick me up at the Ulta off of Blackbob.”

But when I sliced Black from Bob (“Black Bob”) and decorated the search with a few more terms, Google gave up a hint. The cave was named after Black Bob, a remarkable but forgotten Shawnee tribal leader who once governed much of what is now modern Johnson County.

The boundary before and after “settlement” reciprocates the BC/AD timescale of Western history in most Midwestern states. The word is as imprecise and deceiving as it is pejorative. Kansas history didn’t begin with settlement in the summer of 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the floodgates for white pioneers. At the time of the American Revolution, more than a half-dozen Native American tribes lived in present-day Kansas, including the Kansa, Osage, Pawnee, Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Comanche. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 (and other treaties) radically changed Indian Kansas when thousands of Delaware, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Potawatomie, Miami, Chippewa, Sac and Fox, Iowa, Ottawa, and others were deported from their eastern homelands to reservations carved from the lands of the original Kansas tribes. Among them were the Shawnee.

From 1832 until just after the Civil War, the Shawnee lived on a large reservation in Johnson County. Missionaries and government agents pressured them to assimilate, and about half the tribe complied in some measure.

The other half didn’t.

These traditionalists still mostly adhered to the old ways, shunned Christianity, danced the old tribal dances, and observed equinox celebrations. They stayed up until sunrise under the silky radiance of the corn-picking-moon telling stories. They hunted white-tailed deer and buffalo, bathed in the cold waters of ancient springs, and rubbed themselves with fresh sage and wild mountain mint.

Black Bob was one of these traditionalists, but his legacy has faded compared to the undisputed superstar of Shawnee traditionalism, in fact one of the craziest characters of the entire nineteenth century: Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet.

His ears pierced through with feathers three per side, his neck draped with some kind of mustelid—either a weasel or a mink that seems almost ready to reanimate and sink its teeth into his neck—Tenskwatawa can be seen in a portrait that hangs in the Smithsonian, missing one eye and smiling like Mona Lisa. Black sheep brother of the beloved Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa would live to see his people exiled, first to Illinois, and then to Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. But in his youth he started a remarkable pan-Indian spiritual movement. US presidents kept tabs on him. Eventually Tenskwatawa would come to Kansas on a mission he wasn’t prepared for, and like most things in his life, it would not go well.

Black Bob. Tenskwatawa. These men once lived within hiking distance of my boyhood home. Why had I never heard of them? The first robin tested her voice in the darkness and dawn was near, but I was too pumped up to sleep. I felt on the edge of something vaguely historic.

My discovery took a final twist: The White Feather Spring—not in Johnson County, but close. This spring, according to a brief newspaper article archived from a now defunct Kansas City, Kansas, newspaper, was the site of Prophetstown, the last home and burial site of Tenskwatawa.

I shut my laptop. This rambling August night was finally threatening to end, but not before I’d found the stories of two Shawnee traditionalists, two wild springs, two mysteries lurking somewhere in the backyard of my childhood. Had I stumbled onto a lost fossil record of wild Kansas? If two Shawnee traditionalists from the 1800s knew these places—loved these places—and if, as I believed, the traditionalists sought out wild landmarks with spiritual gravitas—the kind that are rediscovered century after century by careful students of the land—then this might be a rare chance to experience a living history, an electrifying sense of place where past and future collide in deep time.

I didn’t know if either site had survived Kansas City’s dogged suburban expansion, but I was determined to find out. That night, instead of burial visions I dreamed in code, and by mid-morning the next day I’d fixed my bug. Now I had to find those two wild places.

White Feather Spring, at least, hid in plain sight. The next day I called the Wyandotte County Museum in Bonner Springs, and the second volunteer I spoke with gave me an address in Kansas City, Kansas, a few miles north of the Johnson County line.

Saturday looked good for a trip, and I thought about calling my friend August. Not because the woods were full of peril, even though this could be a sketchy neighborhood at night. But, hey, it was a neighborhood at least, not a wilderness, one hundred miles plus from the closest scrawny Ozark black bear, probably three miles from the nearest guy decked out in camo pants and night vision goggles. No, because he kind of looks like Tenskwatawa. In a badass way. And I knew I could count on August to get properly stoked up about a historic spring. He once walked across America in total silence—as in vow of silence—and met a woman so taken with him, that in spite of the fact they had never properl...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Author’s Note
• 1 Black Bob and the Prophet
• 2 La Jornada
• 3 Old Growth
• 4 The Alpha and the Omega
• 5 Ottering
• 6 The Renegade Streams of Eastern Kansas
• 7 Badlands
• 8 Big Springs Go-Go
• 9 Bardo on the Kaw
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover