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The once great prairies with their fruits and wildlife nourished our nation through its weak infancy. They nourished it again through its reckless and wasteful adolescence. The nation has now reached a maturity which should make it capable of recognizing that the prairie can no longer give that which it does not have and that as man destroys it he destroys himself.
—Eugene M. Poirot,
Our Margin of Life (1964)
You must not be in the prairie; but the prairie must be in you. That alone will do as qualification for biographer of the prairie. . . . He who tells the prairie mystery must wear the prairie in his heart.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
[Arrowheads] cannot be said to be lost or found. Surely their use was not so much to bear its fate to some bird or quadruped or man as it was to lie here near the surface of the earth for a perpetual reminder to the generations that come after.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1859)
The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, composes the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura—the sleeping mind.
“Suspiria de Profundis” (1845)
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-conciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises.
—C. G. Jung,
Psychological Reflections (1953)
Dream time is not past, present, or future, but a continuum—a stream of knowledge closely binding all aboriginal people with the land and each other.
—Madelon Rosenfeld,
“Dreamtime” (1988)
We can know the dark and dream it into a new image.
—Starhawk,
Dreaming the Dark (1982)
He felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
—Willa Cather,
O Pioneers! (1913)
Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.
No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.
—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
Cross Creek (1942)
What bothers us about primordial beauty is that it is no longer characteristic.
—Robert Adams,
“Truth and Landscape” (1981)
There is a Kansas character, and its roots are found in the midwestem rural traditions of hard work, struggle in the face of adversity, frugality, practicality, individualism, democracy, and environmental irresponsibility.
—Leo E. Oliva,
“Kansas: A Hard Land in the Heartland” (1988)
The disappearance of a major natural unit of vegetation from the face of the earth is an event worthy of causing pause and consideration by any nation. Yet so gradually has the prairie been conquered by the breaking plow, the tractor, and the overcrowded herds of man, and so intent has he been upon securing from the soil its last measure of innate fertility, that scant attention has been given to the significance of this endless grassland or the course of its destruction. Civilized man is destroying a masterpiece of nature without recording for posterity that which he has destroyed
—John Ernest Weaver,
North American Prairie (1954)
About eighty percent of Chase County is used for native range. This native range has been used to ninety percent of its capacity since 1900.
—James T. Neill,
Soil Survey of Chase County, Kansas (1974)
The best conservationalists I know as a whole are the ranchers in the county.
—Luke Austenfeld,
Letter to the editor,
Chase County Leader-News (1985)
No living man will see again the long-grass prairie, where a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer. We shall do well to find a forty here and there on which the prairie plants can be kept alive as species. There were a hundred such plants, many of exceptional beauty. Most of them are quite unknown to those who have inherited their domain.
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man.
—Aldo Leopold,
A Sand County Almanac (1949)
You can grow a prairie facsimile in five or ten years. But some scientists think it could take two hundred years to reconstruct the intricate prairie ecosystem. Others think five hundred. Still others, never.
—Dennis Farney,
“The Tallgrass Prairie: Can It Be Saved?” (1980)
Native tallgrass prairie is the rarest of all North America’s biomes. . . . [It] is a singular system defined by climate, weather, size, and the interactions of fire and grazing bison. Because those factors are no longer functioning in a balanced whole anywhere in North America, true tallgrass prairie can be considered to be extinct as a natural, functioning ecosystem.
—John Madson,
“On the Osage” (1990)
Except by the measure of wildness we shall never really know the nature of a place.
—Paul Gruchow,
“A Backyard Robin, Ho-Hum” (1988)
City people who use the countryside can do much to help maintain its beauty and prevent its deterioration by spending their money to keep it attractive, whereas most working farmers can no longer afford the luxury of doing so.
City folk grow bored fairly quickly when left to their own devices in the country, and they demand entertainment; nature alone is not enough for them.
—John Fraser Hart,
The Look of the Land (1975)
Again and again we respond, knowing our words will have little effect, knowing that [prairie] park adversaries will continue to cling to these claims and contentions despite their stunning illogic, knowing that we are challenging a set of myths, myths which, although assailable by simplest reason, remain impervious to it because their roots extend to these people’s skittish mistrust of any and all “intruders”—from coyotes to the Federal Government.
—Tim Amsden,
“Points of Contention” (1975)
Of a government hostile to the individual, [Kansans] cannot conceive.
—Carl Becker,
“Kansas” ( 1910)
Everyone profits from the success of industry. In our area, local industries provide jobs, improve incomes and generate business. It is the responsibility of every Chase Countian to support local industry and to urge new industries to locate here, or someday, there will be a whole lot of nothing.
—Long-running advertisement,
Chase County Leader-News (1985–1988)
Oh God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors!
—William Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part 2 ( 1600)
—Loren Eiseley,
The Immense Journey (1946)
To follow a creek is to seek a new acquaintance with life.
—Peter Steinhart,
“The Making of a Creek” (1989)
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine—they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance—you might as well take the book along with them.
—Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy (1767)
Name, though it seem but a superficial and outward matter, yet it carrieth much impression and enchantment.
—Francis Bacon,
Essays (1623)
A name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it. As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1860)
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?
—Walt Whitman,
“What Am I After All?” (1867)
It took a long time to learn how to spell Kansas.
—John Rydjord,
Indian Place-Names (1968)
The name of this tribe is variously spelled Kanzas, Kansas, Cansas, Konzas, and Conzas; and to cap all absurdity, they scarcely know themselves by any other word than Kaw. Should the Territory be erected into a slave state, it might be advisable to adopt this latter as the title, being the ominous croak of the raven.
—Max Greene,
The Kanzas Region (1836)
Since we have Hoosiers and Suckers and Pukes in the older states, it may be questioned whether we shall not have Kaws in Kansas.
—Jacob Ferris,
The States and Territories of the Great West (1856)
Kansas, as now accepted, written and spoken, is one of the most beautiful Indian words adapted to use in the English tongue. As a name for a state it is unequalled.
—William E. Connelley,
A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (1918)
We are often asked, “Why do you call your city Kansas?—it is stealing a name which does not properly belong to you but to the Territory.” Such is not the fact. When this city was laid off and named, it was called after the river at whose mouth it is situated, and the immense trade of whose valley it controls. Kansas Territory was then called Nebraska; and when it was divided by act of Congress, they stole our name. We trust the public will hereafter stand corrected. We are the original and genuine Kansas, and intend so to continue.
—Editorial,
Kansas City (Missouri) Enterprise (1856)
Women achieved the right to vote in stages in Kansas. They could vote in school elections after 1861 and in municipal elections after 1887, the year Susanna Madora Salter of Argonia became the first woman to be elected to the office of mayor of any town in the United States. The right of Kansas women to vote in state and national elections came eight years before the Nineteenth Amendment.
—Leo E. Oliva,
“Kansas: A Hard Land in the Heartland” (1988)
[Living history] is an imaginative creation, a personal possession which each one of us, Mr. Everyman, fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical or emotional needs, and adorns as well as may be to suit his aesthetic tastes.
—Carl Becker,
“Everyman His Own Historian” (1932)