Writing about US-50, author William Least Heat-Moon has said that “for the unhurried, this little-known highway is the best national road across the middle of the United States.” After traveling 13,000 miles of back road through the nooks and crannies of 38 states to write his first book, the road-trip classic Blue Highways, Heat-Moon began work on a very different study. Straying no farther than the 744 square miles of Chase County, Kansas, he embarked upon what he termed a “deep map” of the area that sits atop the lush rolling Flint Hills, the nation’s last remaining grand expanse of tallgrass prairie, split by US-50 and the Santa Fe Railroad.
The result was the 1991 book PrairyErth, a 600-plus-page evocation of history and contemporary life in this otherwise unremarkable corner of the country, which Heat-Moon describes as being “five hours by Interstates from home, eight hours if I follow a route of good café food.” Combining folk history and contemporary anecdotes with captivating quotes from sundry novels, Native American legends, travel guides, essays, and old newspaper clippings, this unique project—which has been described as the nonfiction equivalent of the Great American Novel—manages to capture the rhythms of ranching life here in the middle of the great American nowhere.
