Maxwell Wildlife Refuge preserves two thousand five hundred seventy-four acres of mixed-grass prairie in central Kansas beside McPherson State Fishing Lake, adding more protected land and a small lake. At the southern edge of the Smoky Hills near Gypsum Creek headwaters, it protects a transitional prairie landscape between taller eastern grasses and shorter, drier western prairie. Its importance reaches back to John Gault Maxwell, a Scottish immigrant who settled here in 1859 and helped save native prairie and a remnant bison population as the species vanished across the Great Plains. Funded by his son in 1940, the refuge opened in 1951 and today maintains herds of bison and elk.