Holier Hills
Kansas’ Lost Springs, the Unfortunate Vestigial Nature of Lovers, and How to Find Hope in Collapse
“I rolled into Glen Elder at high noon needing a fill on gas. It was while attempting to use the ancient pump that I was confronted by what was probably the only Exoduster in town. He wore a ‘Make America Great Again Hat’ and had a pack of Lucky Strikes duct taped to his arm. In a harassing manner, he asked what I was doing this far from “flerda.” I told him was on a quest, a noble outing to see the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City. It was after that his face wrinkled and he told me ‘why go there, here in Glen Elder we got ghosts at the bottom of the lake.’”
- Colin Brant, 2018
Samuel C. Pomeroy was a noteworthy figure of mid-19th century Kansas. Over his lifetime he was a founder of the city of Lawrence, a radical Republican senator who helped end slavery, and John W. Phelps’ running mate in the Anti-Masonic party’s 1880 bid for presidency. He was a stern man who spent most of his non-political life working out small details in finance and railroad management, but in 1870, while touring Kansas and talking to constituents, something changed him when he came across the home of a man named Pfeiffer.
Pfeiffer lived in Mitchell County, a barren place that straddled the slow Solomon River, where the bison still roamed free and the first towns of Glen Elder and Cawker City were starting to emerge. It was a place where the view seemed to go on forever, only interrupted by the caldera behind Pfeiffer’s shack.
It was that caldera that shook Pomeroy to his core, where he fell to his knees on those holy hills and marveled. In 1871, when he returned to the Senate with a new respect for the American wilderness, he introduced S.392, or The Act of Dedication, which would create Yellowstone National Park and widen the preservation of America’s natural resources. That was the power of Wakonda Springs, the Great Spirit Springs of Kansas, a place of remarkable healing, and a place that in so many ways saved the American wilderness, though, in the end, it could not save itself.
It was some time ago in an age of moderate poverty and nicotine addiction that I found myself living at home. It was a place of dull amusement, where the primary source of joy was slurping a 69-cent slushie at night in the Kangaroo Station’s parking lot. It’s a place where time itself moves differently, slowed by the thick air or disfigured in the wetlands by Skunk Apes that dwell beneath the longleaf pines. But it was also the place I conned my way into a gig playing live music at our local family friendly bar. Now, as someone whose skills with the guitar rank below functioning, I shouldn’t have had this gig, but in a land of so many low bars, I made due. It was here playing guitar in front of running children and buzzed fifty-somethings that I met her. Flaming locks of auburn hair, ivory skin, and eyes of emerald green, she was the kind of girl to flatter. The next week I took her to see the baby gators at the
Florida Citrus Center & Souvenir World gas station. There was once a man named Burnham. Almost everything about him has been lost to history except that, in the 1880s, he established a water bottling plant at the site of Wakonda Springs. He would embellish the mythic origins of the springs, selling the water on the bases of its almost unbelievable powers, which were picked up on the winds of the market. His tales were, in many ways, a resurrection of the holy site, a recycling of forgotten cosmology centered around love and healing.
So, in the decades after the Pawnee and Kaw tribes had been forced to leave these holy grounds, a new set of believers flocked to the springs. They came for the water, for the therapeutic and curative hotel and health spa that would later open in the 1890s. Burnham had become the prophet of the Kansan Hagia Sophia and society was in love with it. This was the heyday of the springs, with its importance expanding beyond the local level to the national stage, and its water selling across the country. The hills had remained holy, though, during this time, no one could see that, in a few, short generations, this would all change.
The woods around my home are a strange place. Few trails dive into the endless pines, and even fewer souls attempt to traverse them. But she had demanded it, and who was I to protest the march through mosquitos and mud? The shrapnel left from bomb tests in interwar years, alongside general litter from the locals, contributed to the place of untraditional beauty. It was an inconceivably cool day, with the thinner air making the trek somewhat bearable, or maybe she served as a distraction from the mid-summer sun. Whatever it was, it was in these moments I knew I had fallen in love. And though by God it sounds like some awful cliché of sappy nothing, in those moments I didn’t care. I was happy.
Dr. G. P. Abrahams was next in the line of men to manage the springs. Under him, the cult of Wakonda springs would solidify its reach. Abrahams expanded bottling business to produce 150 gallons of water a week, water that would go on to cleanse the nation, and the people occupying the 60 rooms in the sanitarium. The springs continued to be passed down through time to Dr. Carl Bingesser and, finally to Dr. Carlos Bingesser, the first and only care keeper in recorded history to have been born on the grounds of the springs. He was a man whose whole life was dedicated to the craft of medicinal healing and the welfare of the springs. He was a man who wanted to hand down the springs to his children, and his children’s children, and his children’s children’s children, and so on. But, he was just a man, and storm clouds were growing over the prairies of Kansas.
We had walked for 40 minutes on the trail at Gourd Island, a service road that doubled as a hiking path, before we got lost. Diving through what seemed to be another wooded path, we found ourselves in an overgrown clearing for homes that would never be built. It was here that we found a new trail in the dust-covered streets of some community named by a focus group in the North.
Eventually, we came to rest at a half frame house with a Spanish moss roof. Sitting on the unfinished concrete from 2008 and looking out at our collapsed civilization, we spoke mainly in inane mutterances. Her humor was something completely unique, as though it had crawled out of some primordial comedic ooze, unrecognizable and straightforward to non-experts, but in a way intrinsically universal. These moments distracted us from the subsequent conversations that we both knew we needed to have but couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about. Summer was ending, and neither of us would likely come back to this small part of the world. This season of our lives would be over. I would still have a nicotine addiction.
The skies were dark the morning of July 9, 1951. They had been that way for the past week, and Dr. Carlos Bingesser was concerned. He knew that if the storms did come, the traditionally-calm Solomon would overflow, and in its wake everything downstream would be at risk. Yet, the ensuing floods would be far worse than anything Bingesser could have imagined.
Following the rise of suburbia and a twenty fold increase in population, the Flood of 1951 would be far deadlier than those in the past, killing 24 and decimating towns from Delphos to Topeka. Plans to dam the rivers of Kansas that had been written up in 1944 were suddenly resurrected, threatening the sanctity of the Wakonda springs. The Bingessers fought for the next decade to save the springs, trying to reinvigorate the communities love for the springs, but to no avail. In 1964, construction crews demolished the sanatorium and dumped its debris into the bottomless springs, flooding the valley around Wakonda as the reserve for the Glenn Elder Dam filled up. It was the end of our love for this hallowed place; we chose convenience and modernity, and flooded those holy hills. Today, the World’s Largest Ball of Twine looks over the manufactured reserve from its seat in Cawker City.
Conversations at the end of relationships are always hard, but that conversation with her was much harder. I had decided the end was necessary, though not a necessarily natural end. The real world doesn’t ever seem to have a grand design; it has poor plotting and a strange stage. It’s only long after the events that we place some greater meaning on them, but in those essential moments there is really nothing. It’s why, in those moments, we make poor decisions, like deciding to drive to Kansas to see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.
Long ago, a native chief had a daughter named Wakonda. She grew up in a time of war, conflict, and peril: her tribe was surrounded on all fronts by enemies, Burn-Belly was long dead, the Huhuk had fled to the land where the tall trees grow, and the scalped men who wandered the outskirts of the town seemed to grow in numbers by the day. It was the apocalypse. Yet despite these hardships, Wakonda found love. To her father’s dismay, Wakonda would wander freely through the plains, alone. One day, she came across a wounded warrior named Takota. She cared for his injuries, ignoring the markings that signified his allegiance to an enemy band.
Eventually, when he was healed and their love kindled, he revealed that he was the son of the opposing chief, a man bent on the destruction of her people. The two decided their only hope of happiness lay in bringing peace between their respective tribes. Wakonda brought Takota to her village, where he spoke to her father by their springs. However, words are hard and, as the conversation continued, tensions rose. Following a final, fatal statement, Takota was struck down by the chief and thrown into the springs. Seeing her love die, Wakonda dove into the springs to join him. Neither of the lovers surfaced again. At night the chief, in sorrow, would go to the springs and heard his daughter voice, knowing that she was still alive deep in the springs. He believed she would continue to be herself, to heal and to love, until the end of the world.
Maybe it was grief, perhaps it was insanity, but I like to believe what he heard that night was real. At least the inhabitants of the springs thought it was real. Seeing the act of forbidden love as divine, the people would take pilgrimages to the spring, honoring the two young lovers. This same reverence was later shared by following generations of people after the Kaw and Pawnee, who saw the springs as important, sacred, or something worthy. It’s why on my quest westward I stayed for a time near the Glen Elder dam, to see what they now call Wakonda Lake. I am an accidental pilgrim to the sunken holy hills, and as I lay on the shore, I heard something. Maybe it was grief, perhaps it was insanity, but I like to believe what I heard that night was real.
