In the Quadrangle:
Thrall-Northwest

I have climbed here: the view from Texaco Hill, rising one mile from the very southeast corner of Chase County, is of aerial Kansas. North and south you can look along the eastern escarpment of steep slopes, flattened uplands, and rounded hills, the more distant ones fading to blue as if a real cordillera rather than a mere cuesta, and you can understand two early names for the Flint Hills: the Kansas Mountains and, when their origin became understood, the Permian Mountains. I won’t press the point because I could walk in twenty minutes to the bottom and back up to this crest. To the north lie several spring-fed creeks, linked like rootlets, merging here to form the Verdigris River, of some fame in its lower reaches.

Before the turnpike cut into the northwest quarter of this quadrangle in 1956, only three hilly rock roads wrenched out twisted courses through the pastures and the oil fields that edge up to the county corner from the east and south and stop almost exactly at the border as if carrying contraband. A few wells now pump just inside the line, but, a half mile farther on, the oil-bearing shoestring sands, once beaches of an ancient sea, stop. From these jacks coughing out their one-cylinder putt-putt-putt and from several more in the extreme northwest come thirty thousand barrels of crude, which put Chase eighty-first among the ninety-two Kansas counties producing oil. The five contiguous counties all pump more, the smallest output twice as much and the largest sixty-six times greater; the relative paucity of Chase petroleum, beyond its economic effect, has left this corner pleasantly unmessed to show off its elevated scenery.

Texaco Hill, elevation 1,650 feet (four hundred above the broad eastern valley), is the highest place in the county, and from here I can look north along the front of the scarp to the place where Zebulon Pike and his soldiers entered the Flint Hills in the fall of 1806 on their way to reconnoiter the newly acquired central plains and make a permanent peace between the Kansa and Osage. He was the first person to map and write about the county and, maybe, the first white (surely the first American citizen) to enter it. Lacking the capacity of either Meriwether Lewis or William Clark to perceive and evoke, Pike, perhaps taking his view from this very prominence, limned the Chase terrain in two brief entries, one just descriptive enough to give a lasting name to the big escarpment: Passed four branches and over high hilly prairie, and, the next day, Passed very ruff flint hills. My feet blistered and very sore. I stood on a hill, and in one view below me saw buffalo, elk, deer, cabrie [antelope], and panthers. His “flint” was, more accurately, chert, but no one here regrets the error: a resident said to me yesterday when we were talking about whether panthers had actually returned to Chase as several reliable countians claim and I mentioned Pike’s misnaming the rock, Like hell. I’m not living in any Chert Hills. Indeed, to natives, the eponymous stone, in an emphasizing tautology, is flint rock.

Sixteen years later another government explorer, Jacob Fowler, passed through this corner on his return from Santa Fe. Writing nearly illegible characters of his own invention, Fowler’s terse entries are in a sometimes logical, sometimes daft orthography:

 

wensday 26th June 1822. We sot out Early pasing over a Rich Roleing Pirarie to a Crick With Some timber—taylor killed two deer—We maid 8 miles [north] 15 East It Rains Heavely—

 

thorsday 27th June 1822. Set out Early Crossing five Cricks all Runing South East Some timber on all of them one twenty yds Wide the Cuntry as ushal Rich and Roleing—

 

Five miles due west of me, on a high and wind-struck hill that can sling a ridge-riding harrier a hundred feet upward in a couple of seconds, is High Prairie Cemetery, the most isolated burial ground in the country. Because the nearest village, Matfield Green, lies some distance away, I had never understood those desolate markers, so many of them above the graves of young women and children and infants, the dated chunks of native rock being testaments to the high mortality of birth and childhood. I couldn’t make sense of this far cemetery until I rode the quad with Joseph Hickey, a former New Yorker, now an anthropologist at Emporia State University. Joe was coming into the middle years with his hair as black as pasture ash, his eyes like faded blue denim. He said, You walk around here, and you begin to believe you’re the first to pass over any given spot, but you aren’t, of course. Indians lived in this watershed for at least six thousand years, from the Archaic era through the Ceramic and on to the historic tribes—Quivirans, Wichitas, Osage, Kansa. A short view of time distorts the emptiness up here. These uplands and especially the creek bottoms have been full of occupation since before King Tut.

Hickey had nearly finished writing a book called Thurman in the Flint Hills, about the human life along the hollows of the westward-tending creeks that merge with the South Fork of the Cottonwood just west of the quadrangle. If human occupation here is long, particular settlements have been brief: Indians apparently made only hunting camps, and a white community built around the continually shifting neighborhood post office lasted only seventy years. For a place of good—if limited—shelter, water, soil, timber, fruits, and game, a land of linked and pleasing valleys surrounded by rich and uncorrupted prairie, the repeated pattern of brief settlement is odd. Joe said, Thurmanites saw land and community in practical terms, things that could be discarded if they didn’t provide immediate benefit. They were wanderers who pursued the western illusion that riches and a better life were always over the next hill. Thurman, really, was only a neighborhood that followed wherever the post office went.

External evidence of Thurman is gone now except for a school used as a garage and a derelict farmhouse once the first post office: the scattered homes, the blacksmith shop, two schools, and post offices have disappeared; the cultivated fields have vanished under grasses to become what the countians call go-back land. Today, ancient lithic artifacts are more abundant than homesteaders’ remnants. Joe said, We can excavate more from the Ceramic culture than from star-route Thurman. These were poor settlers in the bottoms—we’re talking burlap-bag shoes. Their world was cloth, wood, and some iron. About all that remains of the first Thurman are discolorations in the soil. I said, that’s something else we have to relearn—how to make a culture that will completely oxidize, how to let earth, air, fire, and water remove us to mere stains.

We rode and wandered the place as Joe talked Thurman into existence again. I asked about the lone and pitiful little hill cemetery, and he said, The upland belonged to outsiders—the government, railroads, speculators—all of them absentee landlords, although Thurmanites at times used it as communal grazing land. Pasture churches and cemeteries didn’t take up valuable cropland in the narrow bottoms. But High Prairie was built by stock raisers during the Great Cattle Boom of the 1880s. The community was at the center of several big ranches—before the boom busted. Land ownership here has always been peculiar. An itinerant speculator, William Thurman, set the pattern in the 1870s when he bought acreage and turned around and sold it at a nice profit. To this day, a lot of these uplands have never been owned by Chase countians. But one thing has been consistent through all the years of white settlement: just about everybody has treated the land as only a commodity to make a buck off of.

This corner of the county is a place of energy transfer. The oldest is nutrient passage from sea to rock to soil to grass to ungulates to man, and next is that of generation to generation; now oil gets drawn from the shales, natural gas courses the pipelines from western Kansas to Chicago, high-tension lines hump electric power east to west, microwave relay towers kick along information between the coasts, and there’s the railroad and the interstate, these last five all striking about the same angle across the county. In a place as apparently still as the under-rock itself, transit and translation lie all over this quiet corner.

I stood atop Texaco Hill once before on an early trip into the quadrangle Thrall, a name seeming to describe my response to this high prairie, despite my knowing Thrall was only a Greenwood County ghost town of rusting remains from the oil boom of the twenties. I came off the hill that autumn afternoon, went back to the road, drove away, stopped, walked out into the grasses and stirred a coyote into a long-legged lope, went on toward the promise of another overlook, hoofing far and looking back to find the highpole gate, my lone landmark, lost in the broadly curving upland I’d thought so level, and then all I had was a surround of horizon. I felt the misgivings of a sea swimmer gone out too far, and the grasses slapped their russet sameness against me like waves. I thought: don’t walk circles, walk straight—no place in this county is farther than five miles from a road. Killdeer rose and veered and wheeled and squealed, and the grass shortened as it approached a ledge of caprock, and then the upland cleaved and just fell away to space above the east valley, and I had found the scarp again. I followed it to a vantage where the southern horizon seemed to have been pressed from both ends and crumpled into zigzags. It was the best spot I’d ever discovered to sit along this high edge of the West and look deep into the East: beyond the county, on what was once pure prairie and only that, now lay a road-checkered woodland lapping at the scarp like a dark green, usurping ocean, an inundation of eastern things moving toward the hills and carrying seeds baneful to prairie. The twentieth century was edging in, threatening, and mostly what stayed it was fire.

I thought, stop and fix this image, and as I started to sit I saw at my feet the figure eight in stone: parallel to the ridge, tangent circles looking like the sign for infinity drawn in flint. Wasn’t it clear that two people had sat here and watched the spread valley when it was a grassland of hoofed and homed beasts, all the while knapping out their razored points to let that ruminant blood? The only chert nearby was this figure of gray, curved flakes the size of thumbnails. The old sea had not left these stones.

Under the southwest wind, I sat down inside the loop and merge of lines of no start or end, and I lost sense of the late afternoon, and my mind seemed to fall into the circles and away. I think I dozed, because the next thing I remember was the dusk sunk into an oppressive sky, and the gone-too-far alarm coming on again. Then I was up and trying to keep along the dark ridge and walk a straight course. A few days earlier I’d heard about a man miles from his ranch in this very area who’d fallen from his horse and lain with a broken pelvis through the night; he tried to keep from passing out so when the pickup trucks came looking they wouldn’t run over him.

The prairie was a wet burden, and I kept feeling as if I were down, below, under, and the grasses dragged: a sea-bottom walker through beds of kelp. I began stumbling, and I thought, hike a figure eight and the cowboys will find you next spring. Then, as if I were not walking in my sleep but sleeping on my walk: in some light-less, soundless dreamplace, obscure forms seemed to pass by in pale luminescence, opalescent figures everywhere. My lower body sogged in the cold dew, the upper half in hot sweat. Then something rose from nowhere and snagged me and pulled me down: I’d come to a fence, a road, and, farther, the car. I was woozy that night and thrashed through the distortions of fevered and vertiginous sleep.

That’s my memory of the figure eight, but now I understand it in a different dimension; another energy transfer happened, one I hadn’t realized: I’d come into the prairie out of some dim urge to encounter the alien—it’s easier to comprehend where someplace else is than where you are—and I had begun to encounter it as I moved among the quoins, ledgers, pickled brains, winds, creek meanders, gravestones, stone-age circles. I was coming to see that facts carry a traveler only so far: at last he must penetrate the land by a different means, for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That’s how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense.