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Author: George Frazier Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700624821 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming the state in search of these hidden treasures, The Last Wild Places of Kansas is Frazier's idiosyncratic and eye-opening travelogue of nature's secret holdouts in the Sunflower State. These are places where extirpated mammalian species are making comebacks; where flying squirrels leap between centuries-old trees lit by the unearthly green glow of foxfire; where cold springs feed ancient watercress pools; where the ice moon paints the Smoky Hills with memories of the buffalo, wolf, and the lonesome rattle of false indigo; where the blue lid of the sky forms a vacuum seal over treeless pastel hills, orange in winter; where bluestem rises. Some are impossible to find on maps. Most are magnificently bereft of anything beneficial to 99.9 percent of modern America. True wildernesses they may not be, but at the correct angle of light, when the wind blows pollen carrying biological memories of the glaciers, these places are a crack between the worlds, portals to the lost buffalo wilderness. En route Frazier takes us from the unexpected wilds of the Kansas City suburbs to the Cimarron National Grassland in the far southwestern corner of the state. He visits ancient springs, shares a beer with prairie dog hunters, and fails in his mission to canoe the upper Marais des Cygnes—a trip that requires permission from every landowner on the route. Along the way we encounter a host of curious characters—ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, explorers, wildlife experts, and outdoor enthusiasts—all fellow travelers in a quest to know, preserve, and share the last wild places of Kansas.
Author: George Frazier Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700624821 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming the state in search of these hidden treasures, The Last Wild Places of Kansas is Frazier's idiosyncratic and eye-opening travelogue of nature's secret holdouts in the Sunflower State. These are places where extirpated mammalian species are making comebacks; where flying squirrels leap between centuries-old trees lit by the unearthly green glow of foxfire; where cold springs feed ancient watercress pools; where the ice moon paints the Smoky Hills with memories of the buffalo, wolf, and the lonesome rattle of false indigo; where the blue lid of the sky forms a vacuum seal over treeless pastel hills, orange in winter; where bluestem rises. Some are impossible to find on maps. Most are magnificently bereft of anything beneficial to 99.9 percent of modern America. True wildernesses they may not be, but at the correct angle of light, when the wind blows pollen carrying biological memories of the glaciers, these places are a crack between the worlds, portals to the lost buffalo wilderness. En route Frazier takes us from the unexpected wilds of the Kansas City suburbs to the Cimarron National Grassland in the far southwestern corner of the state. He visits ancient springs, shares a beer with prairie dog hunters, and fails in his mission to canoe the upper Marais des Cygnes—a trip that requires permission from every landowner on the route. Along the way we encounter a host of curious characters—ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, explorers, wildlife experts, and outdoor enthusiasts—all fellow travelers in a quest to know, preserve, and share the last wild places of Kansas.
Author: Max McCoy Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700626026 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
The upper Arkansas River courses through the heart of America from its headwaters near the Continental Divide above Leadville, Colorado, to Arkansas City, just above the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Max McCoy embarked on a trip of 742 miles in search of the river’s unique story. Part adventure and part reflection, steeped in the natural and cultural history of the Arkansas Valley, Elevations is McCoy’s account of that journey. Going by kayak when he can—by Jeep, on foot, or by other means when he has to—McCoy takes us with him, navigating the Arkansas River as it reveals its nature and tests his own. Along the way, and when he isn’t battling the current for his overturned kayak; braving a frigid Christmas Eve along the river; or joining the search for a drowning victim, he steps out to explore the world beyond the river’s banks. Here for instance is Camp Amache, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Here is Ludlow, where thirteen women and children died in a standoff between striking coal miners and the militia in 1914. Farther along we find Sand Creek, site of a massacre by US soldiers in 1864, and, uncomfortably close, Garden City, where white supremacists were charged with planning a terror attack on Somali refugees in 2016. Whether traveling back in time, pausing in the present, or looking forward, Elevations captures the Arkansas River in its thrilling moments and placid stretches, in its natural splendor and degradation at human hands. The book shows us the river as a flowing repository of human history and, in the telling of this gifted writer, as a life-changing experience.
Author: Craig Miner Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700614249 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 552
Book Description
Kansas is not only the Sunflower State, it's the very heart of America's heartland. It is a place of extremes in politics as well as climate, where ambitious and energetic people have attempted to put ideals into practice-a state that has come a long way since being identified primarily with John Brown and his exploits. Craig Miner has written a complete and balanced history of Kansas, capturing the state's colorful past and dynamic present as he depicts the persistence of contrasting images of and attitudes toward the state throughout its 150 years. A work combining serious scholarship with great readability, it encompasses everything from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the evolution-creationism controversy, emphasizing the historical moments that were pivotal in forming the culture of the state and the diverse group of people who have contributed to its history. Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State is the first new state history to appear in over twenty-five years and the most thoroughly researched ever published. Written to enlighten general readers within and well beyond the state's borders, it offers coverage not found in previous histories: greater attention to its cities-notably Wichita-and to its south central and western regions, accounts of business history, contributions of women and minorities, and environmental concerns. It presents the dark as well as the bright side of Kansas progressivism and is the first Kansas history to deal with the post-World War II era in any significant detail. Craig Miner has spent almost forty years researching, teaching, and writing Kansas history and has dug deeply into primary sources-especially gubernatorial papers-that shed new light on the state. That research has enabled him to assemble a wider cast of characters and more entertaining collection of quotations than found in earlier histories and to better show how individual initiative and entrepreneurial aspirations have profoundly influenced the creation of present-day Kansas. Ranging from the days of cattle and railroads to the era of oil and agribusiness, this history situates the state in its own terms rather than as a sidebar to a larger American epic. Miner brings to its pages an identifiable Kansas character to preserve what is distinctive about the state's identity for future generations, echoing what one Kansan said over half a century ago: "Kansas is simply Kansas. May she never be tempted to become anything else."
Author: Pam Grout Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0762765798 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
Your round-trip ticket to the wildest, wackiest, most outrageous people, places, and things the Sunflower State has to offer! Whether you’re a born-and-raised Kansan, a recent transplant, or just passing through, Kansas Curiosities will have you laughing out loud as Pam Grout takes you on a rollicking tour of the strangest sides of the Sunflower State. Visit the Museum of the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things—and get your own largest ball starter kit. Meet more chainsaw-wielding, glow-in-the-dark-scrap-metal-zoo-building, grapefruit-peel-sculpting, papier-mâché-mixing, porcelain-pig-painting grassroots artists than you can shake a stick at! Get a load of Big Brutus, a sixteen-story coal shovel that has become a popular tourist attraction; and discover the thrill of an indoor hurricane—it’ll blow you away.
Author: John Gifford Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700628355 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
Inspired by the mystique of a uniquely American tree, the pecan, Oklahoma writer John Gifford set out to explore the US pecan industry, which provides 80 percent of the world’s supply of this special tree nut. What he discovered during his two-year immersion was a nut—one that’s suprisingly symbolic of America itself—that’s poised to become the next superfood and an industry that today finds itself in the most important juncture in its history. Though the US pecan belt extends from the Carolinas to California, the pecan tree, which was revered by some of our nation’s founders, has its origins in the South Central United States, where wild pecans still grow along the region’s rivers and streams, and in its floodplain forests. The pecan is the only native tree nut that has been developed into a significant agricultural crop. Though native pecans continue to figure into the 280-million-pound annual US crop, wild pecan trees face an uncertain future as worldwide demand centers on the larger and more lucrative “improved” varieties. Pecan America provides readers with a look at how the rising demand for pecans around the world is transforming the way this nut is grown, promoted, and consumed here in the United States. Along the way, Gifford explores its presence in American folk art and culture, documents the pecan industry’s quest for share of stomach in a market brimming with other tree nuts, examines the pecan’s surprising array of health benefits, and profiles some of the fascinating people who bring this food to our tables. In the end, Gifford reveals the pecan to be much more than a food, but also a cultural curiosity and even a metaphor for America itself, one whose diverse nature may be its greatest quality.
Author: Seth Brooks Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1493077732 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Hiking Kansas introduces hikers of all abilities to 40-45 of the greatest hiking adventures across the state. Complete with thorough hike descriptions, mile by mile directional cues, detailed maps and useful information on the surrounding area there is something for every hikers. Between rolling prairies, wooded river valleys, and an abundance of wildflowers and wildlife, a wealth of natural beauty awaits you on the hiking trails of Kansas.
Author: Shea Ernshaw Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1982164816 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
"Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James-a well-known author of dark, macabre children's books-he's led to a place many believed to be only a legend. Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn't exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it...he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James. Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis's abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there's a risk of bringing a disease-rot-into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn't as safe as they believed-and that darkness takes many forms"--
Author: T. Edward Nickens Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1493059653 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
The Last Wild Road is a raucous, gripping, sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and deeply meditative journey through the heart of the outdoors in the modern world. Collected from more than 20 years of hunting and fishing cover stories, columns, and adventure tales written by T. Edward Nickens for Field & Stream, this book is a road trip that takes in a huge sweep of the North American landscape—blackwater rivers in the wilds of eastern North Carolina, deserts and prairies of the American West, remote tundra of northern Canada, and the wildest rivers of Alaska. Along every rutted road and rough trail, with a rod, gun, and pen, Nickens meets unforgettable characters—old French-speaking Cajuns at Louisiana squirrel camps, a one-armed fly-tyer in the ancient Appalachians, Pennsylvania brothers who lost their father in a hunting accident decades ago and return to the scene for a powerful, poignant encounter with history. He explores remote wilderness waters to chase trout and ducks, but finds rich meaning, too, in the familiar and close-to-home: fishing with his children, plumbing the forests of local farms, and butchering deer in his basement as a thanksgiving for the gifts of the outdoors. When it comes to hunting and fishing, writing often falls into the categories of where-to-go, the how-do-it, and the-what-to-bring. This book embarks on the question of “why.” Why does the pursuit of game and fish, and the travel to the wild places where they thrive, bring meaning and clarity to living in the modern world? Why do we laugh more, and live more deeply, far from the sidewalk? If you’ve ever felt that way, you’ll find yourself in The Last Wild Road.
Author: George Frazier
Author: George Frazier
Author: Janis A. Kraulis
Author: Max McCoy
Author: 
Author: Craig Miner
Author: Pam Grout
Author: John Gifford
Author: Seth Brooks
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Author: T. Edward Nickens