Roughly 160 years ago, the tallgrass prairie stretched from Illinois to Kansas, and from Canada to Texas. This prairie was a complex ecosystem featuring grasses like big bluestem, little bluestem, switch grass, and Indian grass. Then European settlers arrived and began plowing it up or building towns on top of it. I’m not against human progress. I live in a town. I eat food raised by farmers. But, it would be worse than a shame to lose the tallgrass prairie. This ecosystem needs to be preserved. Once it dominated the landscape of the heartland and today less than four percent of it remains. That’s where we see the importance of the Flint Hills. The rocky soil - the Flint Hills are filled with layers of flint-hardened limestone - kept the early pioneers from plowing up the prairie in this part of Kansas. Instead, they became ranchers as they discovered how good the tallgrass was for cattle. So there’s no place else in North America, outside the Flint Hills, where you can see so much tallgrass prairie. That’s what we celebrate here.