My Flint Hills: Observations and Reminiscences from America's Last Tallgrass Prairie

Between the Nebraska border and Osage County, Oklahoma, are the Flint Hills of Kansas, and growing on those hills the last of the tallgrass prairie that once ranged from Canada to Texas, and on those fields of bluestem, cattle graze—and tending the cattle, someone like Jim Hoy, whose people have ranched there from, well, not quite time immemorial, but pretty darn close.

Hoy has always called the Flint Hills home and over the decades he has made a study of them—their tough terrain and quiet b...