This is about a single county in Kansas. It's about more than that, really - the prairies as a whole, what's happened to them since white folk got there, what's happened to the people who were there first, the nature of history and time, the ecology and the history, the psychology - but it's all filtered through this largely agricultural county in the Flint Hills, where the trees first start to fall away and there's nothing between you and the sky above.
Heat-Moon breaks the book up into sections, each broadly focused on the 12 primary quadrangles of the National Survey which comprise Chase County. There's a map of the quadrangle at the start of each section, and each chapter has what looks like a tic-tac-toe board with an extra column next to it, a dot in the box representing where he's at.
He usually starts with a short chapter of quotes from various sources which outline what's going to be discussed with that quadrangle. That may be the quality of the grasses, the reactions of white American settlers upon reaching the Great Plains, quotations of Sam Wood, who was a notable abolitionist (though he still wanted black people and Indigenous Americans living in separate places), or even quotes from Tristram Shandy, which was an unwelcome reminder of my miserable experience reading that book.
For there, he shifts to a general physical description of the quadrangle: notable natural features or towns (more often the remains of towns since abandoned.) Usually a chapter focused on a current resident - a woman running a cattle ranch, the man who worked in a since-defunct limestone quarry whose rock went to the state capitol, the last holdout of a nearly-dead town - and then perhaps a chapter on a past resident. A woman who left a journal of her first year on the plains, composed mostly of the day-to-day of the life, or the will of a preacher who moved his family there and died shortly after, as a sign of what people considered essential equipment.
He might spend one chapter in 3 successive sections on a 19th Century murder trial revolving around a prominent rancher, which left only unanswered questions. Like why it's so easy to get away with murder in Chase County.) Or he might spend a chapter on the prairie chicken, or wood rats, or harriers.
So he moves from north to south and east to west, though a chapter may sometimes take us into an adjoining quadrangle, or even outside the county entirely, such as the Wonsevu section, which focuses heavily on the Kansa (bastardized by the white settlers to "Kaw") who were forced onto increasingly smaller reservations within Chase County and eventually sent off to Oklahoma.
But he's also moving up and down through time, looking at the past and the present, speaking with people looking at the future of the county - agriculturalists and high school students alike. He makes a point that the limestone the county sets on is the remains of an ancient sea. Rock set down in thin layers over long spans of time, eventually covered by soil similarly laid down (or stripped away) by wind and water over time. People live, and die, and more people live on top of where those past people did, and they die, and the cycle repeats.
And things are forgotten or ignored. He finds a grave in an out-of-the-way cemetery, all by itself. Whatever inscription it had, has faded over time. What little he can discern by a rubbing or changing the light leads only to dead ends. There's nothing in the newspaper archives, county historical society, or court records to tell him definitively. If any of the ~3,000 current residents know, he didn't find them. That bit of history is more buried than the limestone, which people know is there, but not so much as many of the Kansa traditions (to say nothing of those who lived in those plains even further back), who are in some cases barely more than suggestions or guesses.
So it's a meandering book, the approach matching his tendency to pull of on the side of a gravel road and just start walking in a direction. Sometimes the approaches work - the chapter where he tries to prove even an allegedly "pointless" town can have something going by doing covert observation from the back of his van for 12 hours - and sometimes it feels like he's just getting us lost in the weeds. He lets the residents, living and dead, speak for themselves, which can work better or worse depending on how free a hand he gives them. One chapter is basically a farmer just talking for 7 or 8 pages straight, just the transcript of it. It gives you a deep dive into one person's perspective, but it almost feels too narrow, too limited of a perspective. Prairies let you see for miles in all directions; that was like peering through a fixed toilet paper tube.
'Yet the fact remains: limestone is a rock not unlike bone; the fact remains: the chemical nature of the old seawater produced a stony land that produces good grasses that produce good, hoofed protein digestible to man. Flint Hills beef is a 250-million-year-old gift, yet the sense of history here goes back only to 1850 or sometimes a little further to the time of lithic weapons, and then it ceases.'
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