Flint Hills

Why should it be a National Park?

Tallgrass prairie once covered something like 140 million acres of North America, from Indiana to Kansas and from Canada to Texas. Less than four percent of it remains. Almost all of the rest was plowed within a single human lifetime, because prairie soil is the best farmland on earth. The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas survived for one reason: the limestone and chert beneath them are so close to the surface that a plow will not cut. The rock that made this country worthless for crops is the only reason any of it is left.

So the Flint Hills were grazed instead of broken, and what stands there now is the largest remaining expanse of tallgrass prairie in the world. In a wet year big bluestem grows over a man's head. The ranchers still burn it every spring, as the Kaw and the Osage did before them, and on an April night you can see the fire lines running for miles along the ridges.

Kansas spent six decades trying to make a piece of it a National Park. The most serious attempt came in 1961, when the Interior Department recommended a 57,000-acre Prairie National Park in Pottawatomie County. Ranchers had just watched the government take their neighbors' land for Tuttle Creek Reservoir, and they killed it. Proposal after proposal followed through the 1970s and 1980s and died the same way.

The thing that finally worked was a compromise nobody would have drawn on purpose. In 1994 a private trust bought a single historic ranch, and in 1996 Congress made it the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, at 10,894 acres, with most of the land still privately owned and cattle still grazing. The Nature Conservancy holds the deed today and bison were returned in 2009. It is a National Park unit by the narrowest of definitions, on a fraction of one percent of the ecosystem it represents, and it exists because the Park Service finally stopped asking anyone to sell.