Cottonwood Falls, KS: Symbolic capital of the vast empire of America's grasslands

There is a little-known country within the United States.

It is a sparsely populated, largely ignored land of grass, stretching from Texas to the Dakotas.

It is a diminished realm because of agriculture, urbanization and all kinds of dividing lines, real and imagined. However, it is a dominion not totally Balkanized by those things. The heart of the Republic of Grass still remains in east-central Kansas. Its capital is Cottonwood Falls in Chase County, in the middle of the Flint Hills.

This little noticed republic even has a capitol, a majestic one at that. It's the 1873 French Renaissance Chase County Courthouse. It is hewn from the limestone that underlies the prairie for miles in every direction.

You might have heard of Chase County. It came into fame as the setting for William Least Heat Moon's epic book of landscape, "PrairyErth." He strolled nearly every inch of it and described the area's subtle beauties in a way that spoke to me (and thousands of other readers).

Fame doesn't equate with wealth, of course. Cottonwood Falls is a ranch town stuck between Wichita and Emporia, Kan. Like the Republic of Grass it now administers, its glories lie in the past.

The people of Cottonwood Falls, like people in out-of-the-way small towns all over the Midwest, are struggling to make a living in an era of consolidating farms and ranches and changing government farm programs.

Still, it's the people's resolve to recapture some of that glory that appeals to me. In Cottonwood Falls, the old Grand Central Hotel has reopened on Broadway. An artist, Judith Mackey, paints scenes of Flint Hills beauty in oil in her restored store-front gallery.

The glories of the landscape are not diminished. Hwy. 177 winds through the blue-stem-covered hills, which still support cattle and the cowboys and cowgirls who make a living by taking care of them.

Meanwhile, the elegant courthouse, which looks as if it would be more at home in Paris than in rural Kansas, watches over it all.

Cottonwood Falls is the kind of place that I hope will always exist. It is a link to our past, a link to nature, a link to how many of us would really like to live life -- a little slower, a little more genuinely, a little closer to grass and sky.

--Todd Epp, 37, is a graduate law student at the University of Houston Law Center. He is a former public and commercial TV journalist and a freelance writer from Harrisburg, S.D.