The Smoky Hills

About two hundred sandstone spheres, many as big as a room, crowded into a strip of pasture above the Solomon River south of Minneapolis, where groundwater cemented them inside buried sand.

A Dakota sandstone bluff 300 feet above the Smoky Valley north of Lindsborg, named by boosters for a Spanish visit that never happened here, with a WPA stone castle on top.

The six-room house on Southeast Fourth Street where David and Ida Eisenhower raised six sons, and the library, museum and chapel that grew up around it in south Abilene.

The 1867 blockhouse, guardhouse and two officers' quarters of a post on Cheyenne and Arapaho land, and what the post surgeon's ledgers and a sold-off reservation left behind.

Dr. Brewster Higley's 1872 homestead cabin on West Beaver Creek in Smith County, where he wrote the poem that became Home on the Range, kept on its ground by a farm couple who would not sell it.

A Kitkahahki Pawnee village of the late 1700s above the Republican, where a museum shelters a lodge the women built and a family bundle carried out of Massacre Canyon and given back to this place.

A Civil War veteran's limestone log cabin in Lucas, ringed by forty-foot cement trees, Adam and Eve, and his Populist sermon on the people who crucify labor, with the builder himself in the mausoleum.

A roller mill of 1898 on the Smoky Hill that still turns over once a year, and a Swedish manor house shipped to the 1904 World's Fair and given to Lindsborg's college afterward.

Fort Hays State University's museum under the old Metroplex dome off I-70, built around a family of fossil hunters who started digging in the Kansas chalk and sandstone in the 1860s.