Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
The ghost of Lady Barker haunts public discourse on the question of burning tussock grassland in New Zealand. The image of this gentle English woman, author of the Canterbury classic Station Life in New Zealand, transformed into a pastoral pyromaniac professing "the exceeding joy of 'burning,'" is compelling. She contests with friends over who can set the most magnificent blaze, exults at solitary cabbage trees exploding into flame, and regrets that she was not there to see the first blaze rage across the plains. Of this ritual, she says, she and her friends "never were allowed to have half enough of it" before the spring burning season passed. The spectacle of pasture burning in the Flint Hills of Kansas is no less prepossessing than its parallel in New Zealand. Modern observers often speak of the beauty of nighttime prairie fires in the Flint Hills: the orange glow in the sky, swirling billows of scarlet smoke, ribbons of golden flame moving sinuously across hillsides. But early reports from the tallgrass prairie, such as Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy's in 1830, more often expressed awe at the "sublime" flames that leapt twenty feet into the air and left apparent devastation in their wake. Horses would stampede, grown men fall to their knees in prayer, and women go mad when confronted with the fearsome sight of a nighttime fire, recalled an unknown traveler to Kansas in the 1850s: Seen from a distance it looked as if the flames came out of the earth. The reflection on the sky, particularly when the sky was overcast, added to the terror. ... When a man has seen a prairie fire at night, infuriated by a wind, with half of the sky for a background, and the whole earth, apparently, for its field of action, everything he sees after that looks a bit tame.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:3 (Summer 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.