1 comments about Pioneer Women - Voices From the Kansas Frontier.

1. My heart's home is in Kansas -- I want to live there again someday.
   
   So it is very interesting to me, the stories of the struggles of the early Kansas settlers.
   
   I'm sure I would not make a very good pioneer.
   
   This book is pieced together from reminiscences written decades after the events occurred, so the detail is sketchy. For the most part, the book records memories. Lilla Day Monroe sought to preserve Kansas history and requested letters and stories from women settlers, now grown old. Before her work of writing the book was done, she died, and the letters sat unpublished. This book is a glimpse at the lives the settlers lived.
   
   The book gave me a *little* of what I wanted -- a picture of early frontier life and the hardships, fears, and joys of the pioneer women.
   
   But it was written at such a distance of time that the immediacy of the experiences these women must have faced is... gone. Inaccessible.
   
   Two mental images remain with me from the book. One is of a pioneer family traveling with a larger group. The teenaged children are visiting one another, they are called back home, and one girl steps into a rattlesnake den and dies of snakebites almost immediately. The family buries her at the side of the trail and moves on the next morning. As the reader, you supply the struggle that mother went through -- no comment is made of what she endured.
   
   The other image that sticks with me is the utter lack of materials on the prairie. The chapter that describes women out collecting buffalo droppings for fuel, and bringing it back in enormous quantities to their sod burrows stays with me. Especially the bit that talks about trying to keep house in a place made, essentially, of dirt.
   
   Oh, and a third image -- a family of eight living in a one-room cabin the size of my bathroom.
   
   I'm glad I read it, but I wanted more.
   
   The book lost its charm for me when it got into frontier women in Progressive Causes (prohibition, the suffrage movement, etc) -- the settlers were the more interesting section.

No comments about Historical Atlas of Kansas.

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5 comments about PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country.

1. If you want to experience Kansas, with its excruitatingly boring places that slowly creep up on you and leave you blissfully satisfied and in awe of beauty; if you're willing to read long passages of flat text just to discover the beauty of burning fields; I highly recommend PrairyErth.

   I grew up in Kansas, about 2 hours from Chase county and was always facinated by the hills, the people, and just the auroa that came from Strong City and Cottonwood falls. After reading "PrairyErth" I am even more mesmorized by the locale.

   I have been out of the state for 2 years now, and long to go back. Many friends have complained about the long drives through Kansas, the flat scenery, and boring people. PrairyErth brings to life these flat lands and opens up new worlds of community and life.

   For me, reading Moon's book was much like experiencing life in Kansas. I did find some of the chapters long, dry, and dull.. but, that's how some Kansas life is. Moon always concludes these sections with a gorgeous snapshot of the land. He shows us what it is like to be in relationship with the land just as we are in relationship with one another.

   He concludes the book with a beautiful journey down the Kaw Trail.
   "How do you know when the Prairy is in you?"
   "When you see a tree as an eyesore."




2. In Blue Highways the inimitable William Least Heat Moon drove across the backroads of America. In River Horse this courageous, spiritually-venerable man floated in a barge across this nation's waterways. In Prairy Erth, he does his exploration mostly on foot. Confining himself to a microcosmic canvas, Least Heat Moon spends over 600-pages describing how he spent months delving into a single county in the heart of Kansas. Packed with maps of Chase County, its hills, waterways, roads and farmsteads, the author tells a sometimes dry but often rich story of one remote but improbably charming spot on planet earth. He meets many of the county's 3,000 residents, hears and tells of the folklore, the history, the textured layers to life in such a location. By the book's end an unknowingly begun spiritual journey reaches its conclusion, which is the way with all of William Least Heat Moon's writings. If you have the time to put into Prairy Erth, it is a compelling book that challenges the nature of individual outlook.



3. If only every county in the United States had as passionate and articulate a chronicler as William Least Heat-Moon.
   
   I came to "PrairyErth" after having read and loved "Blue Highways." This tome--though longer and less expansive, geographically--possesses many of the qualities I admired in Heat-Moon's earlier work: the narrative tone (there's none of that stuffy, impersonal, third-person prose one finds in some travelogues; the author is himself part of the story), the occasional dips into philosophy and history; the candid interviews with "locals"; and the intense search for meaning in the most ordinary of places.
   
   I have never been to Chase County, Kansas, but after spending a month or so accompanying Heat-Moon through the pages of his book, I feel as though I have. The book is subtitled "a deep map," and that is indeed what the author provides here. Square mile by square mile, the reader is introduced to the prairie, its topography and history, its residents and its wildlife. Heat-Moon correctly understands that the essence of a place is often best captured through anecdote and observation. There is nothing sweeping or grand about his narrative, and that's what makes "PrairyErth" such a delight. It's a detailed, intimate read; one almost has the feeling of looking over the author's shoulder (and back through history) as he ambles and rambles about the quadrangles of Chase County.
   
   If there's one criticism I would offer, it's that Heat-Moon sometimes lapses into needless digressions about himself and the challenges he faced while writing the book. It struck me as a bit self-absorbed--as did the occasional Faulknerian stream-of-conscious, punctuationless prose. These stylistic excesses add little to what is otherwise a magnificent and fascinating travelogue.



4. New to William Least Heat Moon, I wasn`t quite sure what to expect with Prairyerth. Having heard about the critical acclaim of Blue Highways, I thought a lesser known work would be the place to start. And I am glad I chose Praityerth.
   
   With Prairyearth, William Least Heat Moon has dug down to the heart of a specific place, in this case, the Flint Hill country of Chase County, Kansas. Not unlike Thoreau`s Walden, Prairyerth is an exhaustive chronicle of one man`s journey to the bottom--historically, geologically and geographically speaking--of one particular and rather insignificant place in the American landscape. Prairyerth, like Walden, is impossible to lump into one clean-cut literary category. Neither pure history, nor pure geology, nor `storytelling` per say, it is rather a brilliant concoction of all three. It is, as the author pens it, a `deep map` of one tiny piece of the New World. And deep it is. Least Heat Moon delves into every square inch, every prehistoric layer of his subject. The result is a stirring and fascinating ride through the discovery, settling, exploitation and ultimate destruction of the American prairie. Half Native American himself, Least Heat Moon walks through the tall grass of the American Sea with much the same spirit of his ancestors. Here was not emptiness as thought the first Europeans, but rather a vast ocean of endless natural wealth. Home to the once vast bison herds, the tall-grassed hills of Chase County were once giant mountains of the Kansas range that were slowly worn down into the Flint Hills of today. Least Heat Moon follows the tracks of the Osage and the Kansa, `people of the wind,` who traversed this area long before Zebulon Pike and John Fremont made their tentative forays across the prairie towards more secure landscapes. The author vividly captures the reverence that the Osage and Kansa held for the `prairie.` Tracking down the stories of the few remaining pure-blood Kansa, Least Heat Moon paints a metaphor for what looms in the future for us, lest we ignore the lessons of the past. Not only does the author richly expose the layer of Native Americana within Chase County, but he does justice to the natural elements of the place as well. Some of the most fascinating parts of Prairyerth are the sections on two of the county`s most enduring denizens, the Osage Orange tree/bush and the Wood Rat, aka Pack/Trade Rat. Least Heat Moon has an ultra sharp eye for interesting detail and oddity and knows how to bring such things to life.
   
   The structure of the work is as ambitious as it is groundbreaking. Every other chapter covers another quadrant of the county. Least Heat Moon spends most of his time analyzing the present inhabitants of the county, trying to distill the essence of `Kansasness.` He chats with the weathered old farmers and ranchers who`ve survived every tornado and flash flood over the last half-century and who entertain no thoughts on living anywhere else. Every voice in the county gets its chance. Feminist cattle ranchers give him the lowdown on castrating bulls, local high schoolers divulge their dreams and the regulars of the Emma Chase Cafe unload gossip unaware of who`s writing it all down. Kansasness, according to the author, is a baffling mix of progressive politics and constrictive convention. A place of often violent contrasts. Kansas was the first state born out of the fires of abolition, first to stimulate integration (Board of Education vs Topeka), yet the `n word` is still commonplace all over the county. The forefather of the county, Samuel Wood, was one of the most eloquent voices among the abolitionists, yet he stopped short of pushing for full integration. Kansas was a place where all people had freedom of opportunity (especially to better oneself economically), as long as everybody kept to his/her own. One of the first states to allow women`s suffrage, it was also one of the first to embrace Prohibition. It also kept its archaic and puritan sex laws on the books until the recent Supreme Court ruling overturned such laws.
   
   In between his quadrant explorations of the county, Least Heat Moon has interspersed chapters comprised of nothing but various epigrams and short passages regarding the state. Coming from sources as disparate as Horace Greeley and Black Elk to graffiti found at the KU library, these chapters are some of the most entertaining and enriching of the book.
   
   William Least Heat Moon is one of the greatest prose stylists I have ever encountered in modern American letters. His writing is rich with metaphor and digression, begging second and third readings of certain passages. While sometimes he expands profusely, Faulkner-like, for paragraphs, clarity is rarely forsaken. It just means reading carefully and slowly. Prairyerth is definitely a book that needs digesting. I took me almost six months to finally devour it up and when I did, I had the distinct feeling of having consumed something grand and very nutritious, albeit a bit heavy. In fact, those without persistent natures would best choose something else to read. Prairyerth is meat and potatoes and requires a lot of chewing. And perhaps that is where the work falls a tad short of its possible ancestor. Whereas one can open Thoreau`s Walden anywhere and revel in the beauty and wisdom (albeit often cryptic) found therein, Prairyerth is nothing if not taken in its entirety. Its just too dense, with too much stuff packed into its innards. In fact, a little editing could have helped the book. Some chapters are a bit superfluous and leaving them out would have only helped the work as a whole. Moreover, Least Heat Moon`s astute observations serve his examination of the natural world far better than they support his delving into the human realm. Somehow a lot of the `characters` of Chase County never fully come to life in Prairyerth. Rather, they seem two-dimensional and oddly trapped on the page. Yet, taken as a whole and for what it is, a grand archaeological and sociological dig through the layers of New World settlement, Prairyerth succeeds grandly. Never has one tiny and often ignored section of the American quilt come to life so vividly and richly as does Chase County, Kansas in Prairyerth. A place so seemingly devoid of life, is, in actuality, overflowing with the past, present and future. All you have to do is look,look carefully. The author himself says it best: `A traveler(who cannot even remotely detect the thousand-mile-an-hour spinning of the planet he rides through space at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, to say nothing of its solar and galactic movements and its precession) writes in his notebook, ~nothing is happening~. Man muses, God guffaws.` Next time you feel that nothing has ever happened or is happening now or will happen where you`re at, pick up Prairyerth and be amazed.



5. A very deep map indeed, the second of Heat-Moon's three literary tours-de-force is the story of a county in Kansas. In his first excursion, the best-selling BLUE HIGHWAYS, the author reported on a ten thousand mile sojourn along the old Federal Highways (blue on most maps). PRAIRYERTH grew out of three years of hiking, conversation and archival research in Chase County, Kansas and the result is a living history of both the particular locale and the European invasion of the west. From Knute Rockne's death in a commercial plane crash to Sam Wood's murder to Native medicine, dream walking to newspaper accounts of life on the prairie, and fossils to legends to The Land Institute where Wes Jackson explores the looming demise of the liquid fuel era, this volume casts a wide net. Heat-Moon is clear eyed enough to see the facts and then see beyond the facts to the life between the lines of old courthouse documents and pioneer diaries. He is open to less tangible subtlety as well, admitting susceptibility to hunch, daydream or the message from another's Ouija board. He tells a tale of hawks, buffalo, cowboys and beef, notes the profound damage wrought on the American prairie by McBurger mania and the possibility of recovery in a place of vast flatness and endless wind and sky. He lunches with the dead in old cemeteries and stakes out to observe life in a dying town where nothing happens. There are midnight moonlight hikes and journalistic experiments, pertinent quotes by the truckload and poignant still lifes of moments of love and loss. Such a deep map makes for a long read, but well worth the effort as pieces click into place in later chapters and a pastiche emerges, a hologram in which you can walk between the hills and dip a cupful from a clear flowing spring.

3 comments about Kansas Atlas & Gazetteer.

1. I was born and grew up in Kansas, yet there is much of the state I've never seen. I recently began driving the back roads of Kansas to get from my house to my daughter's on the western side of the state. I am learning to appreciate the undervalued beauty of Kansas. This atlas, showing all the roads in Kansas, including county roads and minimum maitenance roads is an excellent resource for finding my way around the state. It's fun to look in the atlas and find the little dirt road that runs by the cemetery or to see the gravel road that edges the pasture owned by a friend. I didn't realize map reading could be this fun!



2. Once again, Delorme atlases won't lead you astray. Living in Kansas City, I often take excursions into Kansas when I want to get out of the city. With this atlas I can head onto almost any back road and not get lost. These maps are great for finding places that the basic road maps can't show. Whether you're birding, hunting, or camping, you'll find this atlas useful. You can get to Lyon County Fishing Lake, Quivera NWR, Morton County or any place in Kansas easily. Highly recommended!



3. They have done a good job on this Gazatter. I has been a few years since it was updated but can get you where you are going. They give Latitude and Longitude in Decimal and Degree,hour & minutes, which is a plus.