People of the Flint Hills

The Flint Hills stretch across eighty-two thousand square miles ofAmerican history in a long, rocked-up, grassed-up finger pointing from theOklahoma border all the way to Nebraska. This history winds though the mythosof the cowboy, climbing among families built on fierce independence, respectfor the land and the water, and stubborn refusal to sacrifice a way of life toenforced economic change. These stories tell the hard truths of hard peoplewhose traditional values have carried them, have helped them prosper for fivegenerations. Ancestral land belongs these days only to those willing to fightfor it. Heaven’s own sunsets wait only for the strong and the certain. Theworld would do well to know these hills and those who live here.