Not the trucks, but the truck stops that host them. This one’s in Emporia, Kansas.
Autonomous (self-driving) 18-wheelers are currently being tested. If trucks on the Interstates have no drivers, will there be a need for truck stops?
Category: Uncategorized
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is southwest of Kansas City and just off Route 50, in an area of Kansas known as the Flint Hills. Most of the remaining North American tallgrass prairie is nearby, the remnant of what was once 400,000 square miles.
The prairie is a complex ecosystem. It currently supports some fifty species of grass and over 400 other plant species, ranging from lichen to trees. In addition, over 200 species of animals live or lived in the prairie, including birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Of course, we know of the bison (30 to 60 million of them, at one time), but grizzly bears and wolves also once roamed the prairie.
Fires periodically burned the tallgrass prairie, and controlled burns are still used in the Preserve. The grasses survive the fires because 80% of their mass is underground.
The prairie still exists in the Flint Hills because the limestone and flint below the soil are too close to the surface for effective plowing. As a result, the land was given over to ranches and grazing, and this allowed the grasses to continue to flourish.
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was once a ranch, and its outbuildings, such as the one in bottom picture, were built of rocks from beneath the prairie.
The Mennonites Come to Kansas
The Mennonites came to Kansas in the mid-1870s. Although they were farmers and Kansas offered ample space for farming, they had to travel thousands of miles to get to the American Midwest. This is the story behind that journey. It begins in Europe in the 1500s, but be patient, there’s drama.
The 1500s were a time of religious ferment in Europe, largely efforts to break away from the Catholic Church. Martin Luther was the fermenter many of us are most likely to have heard of, but there were others. One was Menno Simons, a Dutch Roman Catholic priest. He left the Church in the 1530s, and the Mennonites are named for him.
Menno was an anabaptist, a word which means re-baptizer. Anabaptists, including Mennonites, believed that before being baptized a person should consciously desire it, something infants can’t do. They re-baptized adults who had already been baptized as Catholics. The Church regarded this as heresy.
The Mennonites also believed that to be a genuine follower of Jesus, one must live a life of peace and not be involved in wars, and therefore not serve in the military. What’s more, the Mennonites had a tendency to decline politics in favor of a quiet life, so they had little political power.
This last turned out to be important, because demands to break away from Catholicism were not demands for individual religious freedom. At the time, all subjects of a given kingdom, duchy, or other political entity were expected to embrace the religion chosen by their ruler. Martin Luther, for example, tried to get sovereigns to sign both themselves and their subjects on to his religious vision. The Mennonites maintained people should not be required to believe as their rulers did. Since they generally didn’t participate in government, they were at a serious disadvantage in this dispute.
This led to a form of double jeopardy. Mennonites were viewed as heretics by the Catholic Church for their religious beliefs, while the ruling class saw the Mennonites’ political beliefs as a threat to their power and control. It was a situation ripe for persecution, and persecution occurred. Rulers, supported by the Church, demanded punishment for anabaptists. Torture and executions followed.
Mennonites regard the victims of this persecution as martyrs. By 1660, Tielman J. van Braght, a historian, had counted no fewer than 803 anabaptist martyrs. Copies of his book enumerating them, The Martyrs Mirror, still exist. Eventually, over 4,000 anabaptists were executed for their faith.
The communal memory of this persecution lives on for the Mennonites, and martyr’s stories are part of Mennonite culture. This is reflected at the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas, a repository of Mennonite history. The visitor passes through exhibits on Mennonite life, farming, and crafts, and then comes to an area devoted to Mennonite martyrs.
An exhibit tells the story of one of the most famous martyrs, Dirk Willems. He lived in Asperen, Netherlands in the late 1500s and was sentenced to death for being an anabaptist. Imprisoned in a castle, he escaped by lowering himself from his cell using a rope made of knotted rags. A prison guard pursued him. It was winter, and Willems fled across an ice-covered pond. The guard chasing him broke through the ice and fell into the freezing water. Willems turned back and rescued his pursuer, who promptly re-arrested Willems and took him back to the castle, where he was burned at the stake.
The scope of persecutions such as this led the Mennonites to look for safer places to live. They moved about Europe with little permanent success until Catherine the Great of Russia took an interest in them in the late 1700s. She was looking for experienced, successful farmers to develop marshy lands in Ukraine, then a part of Russia. She promised the Mennonites exemption from military service, autonomy within their communities, and respect for their beliefs and the German language they spoke. In response, a group of Mennonites settled in southern Russia in the early 1800s.
But in 1870, the czar Alexander II rescinded these guarantees and decreed universal military service. Once again, the Mennonites needed to look for a new refuge.
In 1872, a Mennonite named Bernhard Warkentin came to the U.S. to scout potential living places. He liked what he saw in Kansas. The railroads were promoting settlement along their newly constructed tracks, and the land was suitable for growing wheat. The Mennonites had created a successful wheat farming region in Russia, where they built their own farming equipment. They wanted to take those strengths with them, and Kansas offered the chance.
Over the next twelve years some 5,000 Mennonites immigrated to Kansas from Ukraine. Even though not much wheat was being grown in Kansas at the time, they brought with them bags of seeds for Turkey Red wheat, a hearty winter wheat variety. Their success in growing it changed wheat farming in the U.S., and similar wheat is grown in the great plains today.
Immigration is hard, though, and such success came with personal costs. One unidentified Mennonite settler had this to say:
I took my family in my own wagon; it was the 17th day of August when we rode from Peabody onto the land, 14 miles northwest. I had loaded some lumber and utensils and my family on top … So we rode in the deep grass to the little stake that marked the spot I had chosen. When we reached the same I stopped. My wife asked me, “Why do you stop?” I said, “We are to live here.”
Then she began to weep.
Today, the Mennonites continue to grow wheat, and one mark of their success is Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, a Mennonite institution with around 600 students. A key part of the wheat harvest is separating seeds from the plants, a process called threshing, and so the Bethel College teams are known as “the Threshers.”
To learn more about the Mennonites, their history, and their lives on the Kansas prairie, visit the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas. It is affiliated with Bethel College and is a mile or so from Route 50.
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The image at the top of the page shows Dirk Willems rescuing his pursuer. It is in the public domain and comes from the Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons.
The quote telling of a settler’s family’s arrival in Kansas is from “History of The Kansas Mennonites With A Study of Their European Background,” Victor C. Seibert, 1938, Fort Hayes (Kansas) State University.
The image of the Kansas prairie was taken at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, on Route 50 not far from North Newton, Kansas. Copyright 2019, Scott A. Seely.
Hutchinson, Kansas, and Salt
This is a block of salt. It is in South Hutchinson, Kansas, on the spot where salt was first discovered in this area on September 27, 1887. The man who discovered it, Ben Blanchard, was actually looking for oil.
Salt was a pretty important discovery, though. When the new processing plant produced its first barrel of salt a year later, 5,000 people turned out for the occasion. Even today, salt production continues to be a key part of the local economy.
Unfortunately, Ben Blanchard didn’t share in the resulting prosperity. He was too busy escaping from failed real estate deals.
The Kansas Underground Salt Museum is not far from this block of salt. You can take a tour, but they recommend reservations.
Kinsley, Kansas
As you can see from the photo above, Kinsley, Kansas is the middle of the country.
It is also the site of the Edwards County Museum. The museum is small, but it houses a variety of interesting exhibits such as the one shown below, identified in the museum as a lace loom.
It appears to be a “Princess Lace Loom,” produced and sold in the early 1900s by the Torchon Lace Company, based first in Chicago and then St. Louis. The company claimed that more than 25,000 were sold.
It might more properly be called a bobbin lace maker. It was used to produce basic lace patterns such as those shown below, also on display at the museum.
The device in the next photo, also in the museum, was designed to harvest corn.
It was called a “Corn Sled.” As it was pulled through a field, the opening on the left would gather the corn. The blade, which you can see just under the Corn Sled label, would cut the stalks
And then, there is this:
Sod Houses in Kansas
This photo of a sod house is on display at the Edwards Country Museum in Kinsley, Kansas.
Sod is soil covered with grass and held together by intertwined roots. In Kansas, and elsewhere during the settlement of the great plains, people built houses of sod because there weren’t enough trees to build log cabins. They cut the sod into bricks, removed the bricks from the earth, and piled them up to form walls.
This photo shows the wall of a preserved sod house on display inside the museum. Sod worked as a construction material because the deep, strong roots of prairie grasses held the sod bricks together.
Contrary to our modern expectations, a carefully constructed sod house could be sturdy and well-insulated. It did require regular maintenance, although the walls inside and out could be covered with stucco for protection and improved appearance. Roofing materials were also an issue — poorly chosen roofs could be washed away by rain.
Barbed Wire and the Taming of the West
There have been many varieties of barbed wire, and, as you can see in the photo above, the Edwards County Museum in Kinsley, Kansas displays quite a number.
Barbed wire was first proposed in France in 1860. The first patent in the U.S. was granted in 1867, and it was swiftly followed in the same year by five more patents. Barbed wire proved to be much cheaper than alternative fencing methods, and the settlement of the American great plains provided a vast area where it could be used. Demonstrations at the time showed it was simple to install and effective in limiting animal movement. According to the History Channel, one user offered this praise: “It takes no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds, makes no snowdrifts, and is both durable and cheap.” Sales soared, and at the peak of barbed wire production there were 150 companies manufacturing it.
Initially, much of the land in the American West was “open range,” which meant cattle could graze where they wished and move freely from place to place. Barbed wire’s effectiveness in controlling the movement of cattle created conflict between ranchers, who valued open range for grazing, and farmers, who wanted to protect their crops or expand their farmland. This conflict came to a head after the “big die up” of 1885. Free range cattle had typically been able to migrate south during winter, but increasing use of barbed wire made it difficult for the cattle to escape the harsh winter weather of 1885, and some ranchers lost three-quarters of their animals.
At the time, both ranchers and farmers were fencing land with barbed wire, and soon there were “fence-cutting wars,” in which both sides took advantage of the fact that the only tool required to remove a barbed wire fence is a wire cutter. Ranchers cut the wire preventing free-range cattle movement, and farmers cut wire they felt improperly prevented expansion of farms.
Fence-cutting wars erupted throughout the West, but they were particularly severe in Texas, where organized groups with names like the “Blue Owls” cut fences, and armed bands of men opposed them. There were shootouts, and the Texas Rangers were called in to impose order. Arrests, indictments, and trials followed.
Today, we often think the West was tamed when town marshals overcame bands of outlaws, but the prosaic issue of fencing was perhaps more influential. States enacted laws that prohibited cutting barbed wire, and the long-term result was the reduction of free range and the imposition of structure on the Wild West.
Kansas Thunderstorm
According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a typical thunderstorm cloud holds around 275 million gallons of water. If you stand and watch Niagara Falls for six minutes, that’s how much water you’ll see.
But how much of that water actually falls out of the cloud and on to the ground, when it rains? That depends on two things: how big an area we’re talking about and how heavy a rainstorm it is.
Let’s imagine a typical suburban yard, a quarter of an acre in size, and a storm that releases ¼ of an inch of water. In that case, the yard receives almost 1,700 gallons of water from that storm alone.
What about a town of, say, 8,000 people, two square miles in size? From our ¼ inch rainstorm, that little town would receive over 8 ½ million gallons of water.
Of course, a storm that delivers ¼ inch of water is a pretty good storm, but there are plenty of storms that are stronger than that, too.
Grain Elevators, Kansas
These buildings, called grain elevators, store harvested grain. The grain is lifted to the top and poured in, and then distributed from the bottom through gravity or mechanical means.
Although many people (myself included) associate grain elevators with the great plains, mechanized grain elevators originated in Buffalo, New York in 1843. Proximity to shipping opportunities on the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes made it useful to handle grain in bulk.
Though today we are accustomed to the idea of grain elevators, at one time they were regarded as unusual and innovative. When the architect Le Corbusier first saw one, he called it, “The first fruits of the new age.”
Spearville, Kansas — Wind Farm
Route 50 passes through a wind farm east of Dodge City, near the town of Spearville. The farm covers a lot of ground, and it’s getting bigger.
