By Tuesday’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
Dr. Jay Price listens to a question from the audience following his Kansas Day presentation at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Museum.
THE KANSAS ARCHIPELAGO
When it wasn’t being called part of the Great American Desert, the Kansas landscape was often compared to a sea because, well, it looked like one. Early travelers and settlers saw nothing but miles and miles of open grassland.
Riding over the waving tall grasses, which mimicked the movement of ocean waves, some of those wagon travelers became seasick.
Wanting to extend the metaphor, my friend, Dr. Jay Price, has taken that Kansas-as-sea image and turned our towns into islands. He compares the splatter of small towns on the prairie to an archipelago.
On Kansas Day, Jay Price gave a presentation at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum titled “Settling the Sea of Grass – Many Communities, One State.” Price is an associate professor of history at Wichita State University and the director of WSU’s Public History program.
As he began, Price mentioned that when he teaches classes on Kansas Day he makes his students sing “Home on the Range.” And so he led the audience in the state song.
We sang “Home on the Range,” but perhaps we could also think of it as Home on the Sea.
Comparing grass to oceans is a fun way to picture the state because Kansas is about as landlocked as a place can be. Other states act as bodyguards, keeping our toes far away from saltwater.
“If you fly over Kansas, particularly at night,” Price said, “you’ll notice lots of little clusters of light separated by expanses of darkness. If you fly over the Caribbean, Hawaii, the Mediterranean at night, you’ll see little clusters of light separated by expanses of darkness.”
Price referred to the book “Giants in the Earth” by Ole Edvart Rolvaag about the Norwegian immigrants to came to the Dakotas from the coastal areas of Norway. Price said those immigrants “found themselves adapting fairly easily to parts of the Great Plains because they could navigate much as they would navigate with a boat.”
“Indeed, if we look at communities from the level horizon, they do sort of look like islands, don’t they?” Price asked. “There’s a little elevated spot that tells you there’s settlement here, there’s community, you go to it and you cross the water, you cross the expanse to reach it.”
“If you think of a lot of small towns, there’s a point where the community ends and it can be very sudden, perhaps a road, and on the other side of the road is the wide open grassland again, and that is not very different in some ways from the beach,” he said.
“Communities here tend to be very self-contained, they don’t tend to bleed out and so there are very strong marks of where community is and where it ends.”
Kansas is, for the most part, two-dimensional. Looking far and wide, our eyes connect with very few vertical objects.
“In a world without mountains and elevated land forms, humans have to create their guideposts,” he suggested.
While the seas have lighthouses and beacons, Price said, “Out on the plains you go from grain elevator to grain elevator. … And at night you notice the lights on the top of the grain elevator well before you get to the town, not unlike using navigational beacons on the water.”
What helps provide the vastness for this imagined sea is Kansas’ decentralized population pattern, one of the state’s significant and defining features.
There are hundreds of little islands in the Kansas archipelago. Kansans pride themselves on local identities; we become part of the place where we spend our time – our towns, the schools, our county. Each one of the Kansas islands develops its own personality and loyalties.
While I love the solid earth and could never be a sea person, the island image is a new perspective to contemplate when traveling from one harbor to the next, from one lighthouse to another.
Bon Voyage.
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
Sunflower cookies were served.
The Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum.
Shiver me timbers! I also like this allegory.
Not without reason, Kansas was paired with Paraguay over forty years ago at the inception of the Partners of the Americas program. Like Kansas, Paraguay is an inland nation without mountains or beaches. The Kansas-Paraguay Partners of the Americas is a very active organization, and if you meet someone from Paraguay, it’s likely s/he has come to Kansas as part of the many exchange programs. In fact, I’m sure there have been Paraguayan students at Emporia State, maybe some are there this semester.
For the last 10-15 years or so we have had a number of Paraguayan students due to a partnership with a university there. Not as many today as say five years ago when we may have had as many as 25.
Another great commentary, Cheryl. The Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum is breath taking – AWESOME! Are there offices in the building? How much of the building is used for a museum. I hope they have a lot of flyers promoting that museum. Every school in Kansas should take their students on field trips there – well, almost every school.