"The Flint Hills, also called the Bluestem Hills, are the last remaining grand expanse of tallgrass prairie in America . . . Once a mere four percent of the American long-grass prairie, they are now nearly all of it . . . The grasses can grow to ten feet, high enough that red men once stood atop their horses to see twenty yards ahead . . . Because they belong to the open world of grasses, they dominate if not the sky then the horizon with their symmetrical and flattened tops, their trapezoidal slopes, and (at dawn and sunset) their shadows that can stretch unbrokenly and most visibly for a prairie mile." -- William Least Heat Moon, PrairyErth
