By Tom Uhlenbrock
Missouri State Parks

MINDENMINES, Mo. — As a natural resource steward at Prairie State Park, Brian Miller spends a lot of time on its rolling grasslands.

Prairie State Park celebrates the 30th anniversary of its dedication this year with a Prairie Jubilee on Sept. 29. The daylong event will include bison tours, a living history loop, live music, bison chip throwing, native plant sales and an 1800s medicine show. All is free except for a lunch of smoked bison.

Missouri was once covered by some 13 million acres of prairie, nearly a third of the state. Less than 1 percent remains. The park is the largest remnant of tallgrass prairie with nearly 4,000 acres that was saved largely because of the rocky terrain. It was mowed for hay and grazed, but the vast majority of the park never was plowed.

The park is one of several tracts of prairie preserved in the Midwest thanks to Katharine Ordway, a Connecticut heiress who donated more than $40 million to buy up pristine examples of the disappearing landscape. She came to Barton County, on the Kansas border in southwest Missouri, in 1972 and liked what she saw, providing financing for the first land purchases.

The prairie is a special place.

Drive the gravel road leading to Prairie State Park and the croplands soon give way to grasses and flowers spreading into the horizon. If you’re lucky, the bison herd may be in view, recreating the scene that greeted the first settlers.

“We kind of get two groups of people,” said Miller, the natural resource steward. “There are people who know what a prairie is and come from all over the country, even other countries, to see it.

“Then there are people who come and say, ‘Where’s the trees? Where’s the park?’ Then they get out of the cars and start hiking and see the wildlife and the flowers — and they get it. That’s the people we want the most.”

Although the park has something to enjoy virtually year-round, June and September are Miller’s favorite months at the park.

“(June is) the peak of the wildflower bloom. You get coneflower, rattlesnake master, beard tongue, lead plant, sneezeweed, butterfly milkweed. September is good, too, with the goldenrod, the yellow sunflowers. That’s why they call it ‘golden September.’”

The park, in fact, can be enjoyed with each changing season.

Spring brings Indian paintbrush, yellow star grass and ragged fringed orchids. Summer color turns to gold and russets in the fall, with sumac a fiery red and tall grasses that wave in the wind. A winter snow coats the bison herd with a mantle of white as their steaming breath becomes a frosty beard.

Winter also brings a special visitor.

“We get short-eared owls from up north,” Miller said. “These last two years have been the best. We’d get within 20 yards and they’d sit there and watch us.”

Because it is a remnant of a rare and disappearing landscape, Prairie State Park may be the most studied piece of land in Missouri. The Nature Conservancy first did a vegetation survey in 1994, and state botanists have used that data as a baseline for observing changes due to prescribed burns, invading exotic species and bison grazing over the following 18 years.

Mike Currier, a prairie ecologist with the Department of Natural Resources, said the intensive studying helps in the management of the park.

“Monitoring data is kind of a barometer,” Currier said. “It helps us understand what changes are going on. Insect life, bird activity all are based on vegetation.”

(Editor’s note: This article is part of the State Park Stories series from the Missouri State Parks division of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.)