The Last Prairie

Read deep into the journey through Oklahoma’s Osage country, where tallgrass and community are rooted in history.

- Sunny Cherme Cooper

The Last Prairie

Before one sees the way the sun hits the southern edge of the Flint Hills, or runs a hand across the wild buttery grass of the plains, a feeling makes itself present, quickly, like the twinge in a bison’s shoulder, and then settles into the hide of the landscape. One might call it ghosts of the past or just plain nostalgia. If nostalgia itself were to take on a tangible shape or form, one could imagine it as tall grass, waving in the wind, just at dusk—flush, soft.

In the 40,000 unplowed acres of Osage County, Okla., nostalgia runs untamed, whirling up like dust blown off a windowsill. Time flutters and stands still in a few rare places in the world. This prairie is one of them and it holds its visitors in a current like a swallow on the wind. Perhaps nowhere else on Earth is there such a deep evocation of the past, as here in Osage County, a place named for (and sharing its borders with) the Osage Nation Reservation, and home to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the last of its kind.

Seventeen miles northeast of Pawhuska, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve offers a scenic drive and frequent sightings of large herds of American bison and other wildlife. Hiking trails are sometimes foot printed by coyotes and white-tailed deer, and the promise of pink sunsets spilling through wide open spaces prompts many visitors to pack a picnic basket. Parts of the year, a small gift shop—once a cowboy bunkhouse—opens its doors; but year round, the preserve is open from dawn to dusk, welcoming people from around the world, who—much like James Fenimore Cooper’s trapper in his frontier novel, Leather stocking Tales—want to “come to a place where he cannot hear the sound of people cutting down the forests.”