“A prairie is not any old piece of flatland in the Midwest,” writes Kansas-born reporter Dennis Farney. “No, a prairie is wine-colored grass, dancing in the wind. A prairie is a sun-splashed hillside, bright with wild flowers. A prairie is a fleeting cloud shadow, the song of the meadowlark. It is the wild land that has never felt the slash of the plow.” The prairie Farney describes once covered almost all of Kansas. Now only a little virgin prairie can still be found, in the Flint Hills region west and south of Topeka, where you can see 30 miles on a clear day and waist-deep sea of grass waves in the wind as it did when pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail passed through some 150 years ago. The 11,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was created in 1996 to protect this unique landscape, and it is the largest privately owned parcel of land in the National Park system. “The Flint Hills do not take your breath away,” wrote western folklorist Jim Hoy. “They give you a chance to catch it.” Much of the area was grazing land, first for buffalo, then for the cattle driven to Kansas railheads like Abilene and Dodge City in the 1870s and 1880s. This brief moment in history has been recaptured in the Boot Hill Museum of kitschy Dodge City, where Main Street is called Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

After the harsh winter of 1886-87 wiped out the cattle herds, farmers moved in with plows and barbed wire (commemorated in Lacrosse’s Barbed Wire Museum), which enabled farmers to keep livestock out of their wheat fields. The farmers also brought Yankee civilization to this vacant landscape—schools and churches and some foreign traditions as well, like the Cathedral of the Plains built by German Catholics. Now this civilization is threatened. “My great-grandparents and grandparents were part of the stream of settlers who migrated to western Kansas after the Civil War to become wheat farmers,” writes James Dickenson in his elegiac Home on the Range. “They broke the virgin sod, erected houses, barns, schools, churches and towns, and made the area one of the most agriculturally productive in the world. A little more than a century later, the population has ebbed away from this area and many of the farms, schools, churches and towns lie vacant, dilapidated and boarded up like old boomtowns.” The average age of Kansas farmers has approached 60. But there are also signs of rejuvenation, including growing agri-tourism to supplement farm income. Some towns are attracting new residents by giving away land as homesteads. Big meatpacking plants in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal (the “Golden Triangle of meatpacking”) have attracted large numbers of Hispanic immigrants, many living in trailer parks. Nearly two-thirds of the schoolchildren in these counties are Hispanic, and Spanish-language radio is prominent. Wind farms have grown on prairie land, though some worry that they may disturb the prairie ecosystem.

The 1st Congressional District consists of most of this expanse of Kansas, almost everything west of the Flint Hills and Abilene, the boyhood home of President Dwight Eisenhower. It contains 66 full counties and parts of three others; only the Nebraska’s 3rd District has more counties. The “Big First,” which stretches 350 miles east from the Colorado border, is roughly the size of Illinois. Population increased from 76,000 people in 1870 to 570,000 in 1890, but it has not grown much since then. With its aging population, it has the most hospitals of any district in the nation. Kansas now has more “frontier counties,” with between two and six people per square mile, than it did in 1890. It also has more farms and more acres in grain-sorghum production than any other state, and more cattle. And from 1995 to 2006, the district received the highest percentage of federal farm subsidies of any congressional district. Politically, the 1st District is solidly Republican. It voted for George W. Bush by nearly 3-to-1 in 2004, and it voted for John McCain by better than 2-to-1 in 2008. But it also voted narrowly for Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, whose late father-in-law, Republican Keith Sebelius, represented the district in the House for 12 years.