At 955 feet above sea level, this is the summit of Katy Trail State Park on the Osage Plains, a region named for the Osage people who were once the dominant tribe in western Missouri. The landscape was once tallgrass prairie with narrow woodlands along streams and rivers, but beginning in 1830 agrarian European-Americans dramatically changed it. More than two-thirds of Pettis and Henry counties had been prairie, yet because tallgrass soil made good farmland, less than one percent of Pettis County's prairie ecosystem now remains, much of it with fewer native and more non-native plants than before. The Missoury-Kansas-Texas Railroad, or Katy, unintentionally helped preserve remnant prairie when it acquired a 100-foot corridor through this landscape in 1870; the rail bed occupied only about 15 to 20 feet, leaving the rest protected from the plow. Although trees later invaded, the prairie remained dormant beneath the shade, with seeds staying viable for a century until fire and an open canopy returned. Missouri's partners in prairie restoration, including the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Missouri Department of Conservation, and the Missouri Prairie Foundation, have used periodic burning and the removal of invading elm, red mulberry, and eastern red cedar to restore native prairie along both sides of the trail here. Grasses such as big bluestem and Indian grass are re-establishing themselves, along with prairie-indicator species including ashy sunflower, sumac, compass plant, and rattlesnake master. The restored prairie also supports birds that favor prairie, such as northern harriers, scissor-tailed flycatchers, indigo buntings, dickcissels, meadowlarks, bobwhites, and occasionally greater prairie chickens, whose sharply declining population may benefit from cooperative habitat restoration here and in nearby conservation areas.