Chase County & the Bluestem Pasture Region of Kansas

The crash in the plaque's last line changed how airliners were built. Transcontinental and Western Air's Fokker F-10, bound from Kansas City for Los Angeles by way of Wichita, came down in a field a few miles southwest of Bazaar on March 31, 1931, killing all eight aboard. Moisture inside one wooden wing had weakened its glue, and the wing came apart in flight. Fokker trimotors in airline service were grounded, airlines turned to all-metal planes such as the Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC-3, and the Commerce Department stopped keeping crash findings secret.

What the plaque says

Chase County & the Bluestem Pasture Region of Kansas The vast prairie which surrounds this site is typical of the Bluestem pasture region, more commonly known as the Flint Hills. Named for its predominant grasses, the area extends from Oklahoma almost to Nebraska in a narrow oval two counties wide which covers some four and a half million acres. These pastures comprise the last large segment of true prairie which once stretched from the forests of the East to the Great Plains. Today almost a million head of cattle are fattened each year on these nutritious grazing lands. The area normally receives more cattle annually from the Southwest than did all Kansas during an average season in the colorful era of the Texas drives, 1866-1885, when herds were driven north to Kansas railheads. In the hills 14 miles southwest of this marker Knute Rockne, famed Notre Dame football coach, was killed in an airplane crash, March 31, 1931. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chase County Courthouse — 3.0 mi
  A Second Empire courthouse of local limestone, built in 1872 and 1873 to John G. Haskell's design and, by the county's account, the oldest courthouse in Kansas still in daily use.
• Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve — 3.7 mi
  A Chase County cattle ranch of the 1880s with its limestone house, three-level barn and one-room school intact, set among 40 miles of trails through unplowed tallgrass where bison and cattle both graze.
• Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park — 16 mi
  The Kaw Nation's own land south of Council Grove, site of the last Kanza villages in Kansas, with stone house ruins, a dance arbor, and since 2024 the sacred red boulder Iⁿ'zhúje'waxóbe.

More markers nearby

• A Landmark of Distinction — 3.0 mi
• Emporia--Home of William Allen White — 18 mi
• Council Grove — 18 mi
• Bluestem Pasture Region — 22 mi