Prairie’s Home Connection

Was your home town once a field of tallgrass prairie?

Now I know. I recently made the pleasant discovery that my childhood home has a close connection with the tallgrass prairie. During my childhood, however, no one ever mentioned it. I would have liked to have known sooner that I was a child of the prairie. Maybe some of you might be able to discover a similar connection.

I entered the world in Wichita, Kansas, just outside the Flint Hills and I currently live in the northern Flint Hills. I am not talking about those locations, however. No, the heritage that connects my childhood, in a loose way, to tallgrass prairie is found in Little Dixie, otherwise known as Mexico, Missouri. Our family moved to Mexico, which is my mother’s hometown, when I was two and I lived there until I graduated from high school.

When I graduated from MHS — go Bulldogs! — I went to Kansas State University, where a degree in landscape architecture gave me a deep appreciation for the Flint Hills and the tallgrass prairie. What I didn’t know at the time, however, was I had been living in the land of the tallgrass prairie for years. All that was missing around Mexico was the prairie.

Mexico is a small, but important, town in Northeast Missouri and serves as the county seat of Audrain County. It’s modern history stretches back to the 1830′s with the arrival of early settlers, many of whom came from the upper south of Tennessee and Kentucky. Many of those early arrivals brought southern ways, including slavery and southern agricultural methods. Later immigrants came from Germany and other northern European countries.

Mexico and Audrain County became important as an agricultural center, as the region produces corn, sorgham, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. As a child I learned many things about Mexico’s past and present. Like, Mexico was the Saddlehorse Capital of the World and the home of the largest firebrick refractory in the world. These special fire bricks, which lined the insides of large furnaces around the world and even covered the launching pads of Cape Canaveral, could be made in Mexico because of the unique clay soils of the region.

As a child, I learned all about these and other stories of my town’s unique heritage. I also did a lot of exploring for my own stories. We lived on the west side of town, the very edge of town, so I spent a lot of time hanging out along the nearby creek (we pronounced it “crick”). We caught ribbon snakes and crawdads all the time, and kept a box turtle for a pet every summer. The creek was surrounded by woods, which made it a perfect place to play hide and seek.

On the edge of the woods were large empty fields. We had dirt-clod fights in the deep ditches that crisscrossed the fields and we could hide in the tall grass in late summer. I also remember where the gooseberry bushes grew, which gave us stomach-aches because we ate the berries before they were ripe.

Now subdivisions have tamed the creek and the fields, but Davis Creek still carries water north of town, where it joins the South Fork of the Salt River. That river then runs north towards Santa Fe, where it joins the North Fork and forms the Salt River, which then runs east to join the Mississippi, just north of Louisiana, Missouri.

[When you include Mexico, Santa Fe, and Louisiana with towns named Cuba and Paris, you start to realize early Missouri pioneers weren't too original with place names.]

So the land north of Mexico runs into a Mississippi River watershed. Travel just a few miles south of Mexico to Auxvasse (French for “out of the muddy clay”) and from there, the water flows southward into watersheds of the Missouri River. Mexico occupies the high ground between these two mighty rivers.

I never thought too much about that until recently when I ran across the Web site of the Missouri Prairie Foundation. I am always looking for information about the history of the prairie and how early settlers impacted the tallgrass eco-region (see my entry on Illinois). I was interested to learn, for example, Missouri was once covered by about 15 million acres of tallgrass prairie. As with most prairie lands outside the Flint Hills, the majority of that prairie was lost to development, invasive species, and agriculture. All the more reason to love the Flint Hills.

A map of the tallgrass prairie in Missouri (from the Missouri Prairie Foundation) shows the extent of the prairie in Audrain County.

Then I came across a map of Missouri’s original prairie lands at the Missouri Prairie Foundation. Most of the original praire, as expected, grew in the northern and western reaches of the state. One major exception, however, was a massive expanse of tallgrass prairie that occupied the high country between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in northeast Missouri. As I looked at that part of the map, I was amazed. It was as if the unusual shape of Audrain County was formed by tracing the edges of this tallgrass region. There it was, my home county was originally covered by tall grasses.

With a little thought, it all made sense. The clay soils, those same soils that made great fire bricks, held water well, but were also well drained. Mexico, in the heart of Audrain County, occupied a high spot. So the soil of my county would have dried out from time to time. Add a few prairie fires, and you have the perfect ingredients for a tallgrass prairie. My childhood outdoor playground was once covered in big bluestem, Indian grass, switch grass, and all the rest.

All my life in Mexico, however, no one had ever mentioned it. We never discussed tall grasses or prairies in school. I never knew what a tallgrass prairie was until I came to the Flint Hills, but all along I had lived in prime prairie land.

I am a child of the prairie, but didn’t know it. The thing is, maybe some of you are too. The tallgrass prairie once dominated the landscape from Illinois to Kansas and from Canada and Minnesota to Texas. Estimates claim over 140 million acres of tallgrass prairie covered the heart of North America.

The prairie as a landscape, however, has not been given its true worth until recently. So if you grew up in the heartland, maybe your home sat on land that was once covered by tall grasses, which were burnt and kept alive by frequent prairie fires, and no one today pays any attention to the fact. Maybe that field or park near your childhood home was once a field of goldenrod or cordgrass. Who knows, at one time, maybe a buffalo wallow once sat in your backyard.

Maybe some day, one will again.