In the Flint Hills, bony steers driven up from Texas along old cattle trails arrived by late April, grazed in Kansas Bluestem pastures through May and June, and were shipped to the Kansas City stockyards in July and August, a yearly cycle that began in the 1870s and later shifted to rail shipment by the late 19th century. For thousands of years before that, great bison herds roamed these acres, and their grazing and migration, along with periodic prairie fires, shaped the region’s ecology until hunters drove the bison nearly to extinction. The Flint Hills extends from here to Oklahoma in a north-south strip about 60 miles wide, and in the 1920s the Kansas Board of Agriculture promoted the name “Bluestem pasture” as a marketing term; the area remains one of North America’s most fertile grazing belts. In 1856, free-state colonists from Connecticut joined earlier settlers to found Wabaunsee, 15 miles northwest of here. Brooklyn abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher helped raise money to supply the settlers with Sharps repeating rifles for defense during the sometimes-violent era of Bleeding Kansas, and a New York Tribune article that year quoted him as believing the Sharps rifle held more moral power against Kansas slaveholders than a hundred Bibles. His congregation also supplied Bibles, perhaps giving rise to the term “Beecher Bibles” for the rifles. Wabaunsee residents soon joined the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom in Canada, and between 1860 and 1862 the community completed the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, now listed in the National Register of Historic Places; nearby Mount Mitchell Heritage Prairie interprets this history today.