In the Quadrangle:
Saffordville

In 1952, when I first crossed Chase County, I was twelve years old and riding in the front seat as navigator while my father drove our Pontiac Chieftain with its splendid hood ornament, an Indian’s head whose chromium nose we followed for half a decade over much of America. In the last weeks, I’ve probed my memory to find even one detail of that initial passage into the western prairies. What did I see, feel? Nothing now except our route returns. My guess is that I found the grasslands little more than miles to be got over—after all, that’s the way Americans crossed Kansas. Still do.

In 1965, when I came out of the navy, I drove across the prairie again on a visit to California, and the grasslands looked different to me, so alive and varied, and now I believe that two years of watching the Atlantic Ocean changed the way I viewed landscape, especially levelish, rolling things. I also began to see the prairies as native ground, the land my hometown sat just out of sight of, and I began to like them not because they demand your attention like mountains and coasts but because they almost defy absorbed attention. At first, to be here, to be here now, was hard for me to do on the prairie. I liked the clarity of line in a place that seemed to require me to bring something to it and to open to it actively: see far, see little. I learned a prairie secret: take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon. Like its moisture, the prairie doesn’t give up anything easily, unless it’s horizon and sky. Search out its variation, its colors, its subtleties. It’s not that I had to learn to think flat—the prairies rarely are—but I had to begin thinking open and lean, seeing without set points of obvious focus, noticing first the horizon and then drawing my vision back toward middle distance where so little appears to exist. I came to understand that the prairies are nothing but grass as the sea is nothing but water, that most praine life is within the place: under the stems, below the turf, beneath the stones. The prairie is not a topography that shows its all but rather a vastly exposed place of concealment, like the geodes so abundant in the county, where the splendid lies within the plain cover. At last I realized I was not a man of the sea or coasts or mountains but a fellow of the grasslands. Once I understood that, I began to find all sorts of reasons why, and here comes one:

I am driving west of Emporia, Kansas, on highway 50 where it takes up the course of the two-mile-wide and shallow valley of the east-running Cottonwood River, and I’ve just entered the prairie hills through a trough of a wooded bottom on this route that runs some way into the uplands before it rises out of the floodplain to reveal the open spread of grasses. The change is sudden, stark, surprising. If I kept heading west, I would ride among the grasses—tall, middle, short—until I crossed the prairie and the plains (the words are not synonyms) and climbed into the foothills of the Rockies. By following route 50 into Chase County, up out of the shadowed woodlands, out of the soybean and sorghum bottoms and into the miles of something too big, too wild to be called a meadow, I am recapitulating human history, retracing in an hour the sixty-five-million-year course of our evolution from some small, bottom-dwelling mammal that began to crawl trees and evolve and then climb down and move into the East African savannahs. It was tall grass that made man stand up: to be on all fours, to crouch in a six-foot-high world of thick cellulose, is to be blind and vulnerable. People may prefer the obvious beauty of mountains and seacoasts, but we are bipedal because of savannah; we are human because of tallgrass. When I walk the prairie, I like to take along the notion that, while something primal in me may long for the haven of the forest, its apprenticeship in the trees, it also recognizes this grand openness as the kind of place where it became itself.

Now: I am in the grasses, my arms upraised: spine and legs straight, everything upright like the bluestem, and I can walk a thousand miles over this prairie, but I can’t climb a tree worth a damn.

On highway 50, two miles west of the eastern Chase County line exactly (man-made things are often exact distances here because they grow up along section-line junctures), a gravel road crosses the highway; I am walking it southward, toward where it passes over old route 50 and then over the old Santa Fe tracks, then over the new tracks, and then drops steeply down the high grade to the oldest route 50 and runs a mile to the Cottonwood River. Between tracks and river stand four houses, a brick school, and, off in a grove, a wooden depot used as a storage shed, and the sign still says, although fading, SAFFORDVILLE.

Saffordville: population five, the youngest fifty-five, the oldest eighty-two. The village, briefly called Kenyon (I haven’t discovered why), takes its name from a Kansas judge who advocated passage of the Homestead Act of 1862. I am in the grass and scrub where the town once was, and I climb concrete steps leading to nothing, shuffle down native-stone sidewalk slabs going nowhere, and ahead is the concrete cooler of a grocery and, behind it, the block shell of an auto garage. In 1940, two hundred people lived here. No town in the county has increased its population since World War II, and what I am about to say is true of other villages nearby, the twin towns of Cottonwood and Strong excepted; as a form of shorthand, let me call this dying the Saffordville Syndrome: in the thirties, the town had a doctor, three stores, two schools, one hotel, a blacksmith shop, lumberyard, grain elevator, implement dealer, creamery, café, barber and butcher shops, bank, garage, a church, and five “lodges” (Masons, Woodmen, Eastern Star, Royal Neighbors, Ladies’ Aid). These happened: farmers needed fewer hands to get a good crop from the rich bottoms, and bigger implements required more land to make them pay; automobiles and paved roads opened the commerce of Emporia (so properly named); county schools consolidated.

That much is general American history. Saffordville added a detail that, in one Kansan’s words, capped the climax. Town speculators trying to make a killing by inventing towns and then selling lots laid out Saffordville not just between Buckeye and Bull creeks, but also on the first terrace of the Cottonwood River so that heavy rams rush the village from three sides, and, on the south, a bluff forces the Cottonwood in flood northward toward Saffordville where the railroad grade dams it. The effect is something like building a town at the bottom of a funnel; even after the citizens cut away a loop in the river, it didn’t drain fast enough during flood. In the 1940s, an old raconteur wrote:

 

The Indians used to warn settlers who settled near the river. They said they had seen the water from bluff to bluff. The settlers did not pay any attention to the Indian warnings, and in 1904, there came a flood and the Cottonwood River overflowed its banks and flooded Everything. Two weeks later it overflowed again, which was the last flood for nineteen years. Again in 1923, there came another flood. It was the last one until 1926. In 1929 there were two floods—one in June and the other in November. From 1923 to 1929, the river overflowed eight times.

 

And then, as if to prove these were not mere and rare chances of nature, in 1951 the Cottonwood flooded four times, the last the worst in white man’s memory. Less than a hundred feet wide here, this river, which had caught fire from an oil-well spill a generation earlier and two generations before that had gone dry (countians tell of walking the twelve miles to Emporia on the riverbed and of helplessly standing by their empty wells and watching their houses burn to the ground that summer), this same river gathered the waters of its tributaries running full of July rains, and went overnight from five feet deep to thirty feet, and took off once again across the valley, just as it was to do in 1965, 1973, 1985. Had there been an economic reason for Saffordville to continue, these repetitions of muddy water would have been serious drawbacks, but, without reasons beyond the inertia of initial settlement, the Cottonwood, like a wronged red man, finally drove out the town. A fellow told me, That river ate our dinner once too often. The residents packed up possessions, picked up their houses and church and even some of the stone-slab sidewalks, and moved a mile north to the higher ground of faceless Toledo, a mere cluster of buildings that happen to stand in some proximity. Since the big flood of 1951, only two families have stayed on in Saffordville, and, a couple of decades ago, another moved in. To my knowledge, no one around here thinks them crazy.