Last summer I was standing next to a great bull buffalo innwestern Kansas. He was mad and had a right to be. Mynbuddy Joe Kramer, along with other men from Kansas Fishn& Game, had this great American bison in an animalnsqueeze while they took a blood sample and gave him a shot.nAll this activity was part of Kansas’ effort to maintain a fewnbuffalo in the state. The Westerner’s relationship to thenbuffalo has been loaded with irony. In 1889 the last buffalonin Kansas was killed, and in 1955 animals brought from thenWichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahomanwere the descendants of 15 animals donated by the NewnYork Zoological Park.nAs a few flies buzzed about the bufFalo bull, I wasnreminded of some other flies, those that Edmund Burkenalluded to as he reflected upon the past’s gift to the present.n”[UJnmindful of what they have received from their ancestors,nor of what is due to their posterity, [the temporarynpossessors and life-renters] [w]ould act as if they were thenentire masters. . . . No one generation could link withnanother. Men would become little better than flies of ansummer.”nThe American West is freighted with the past’s gift ofnWilliam Mills is the author of a book on the ArkansasnRiver, recently published by the University of ArkansasnPress.n12/CHRONICLESnVIEWSnThe Flies of Summernby William Millsnnninstruction for the present, in its mythology, its seeminglynlimitless landscape, its severely beautiful nature. At a timenwhen the Laputans reside on the Floating Islands ofnWashington and Wall Street above one coast and Hollywoodnabove the other, it is imperative that the center, ornHeartiand, hold steady to moor their experiments. Thisnbecame clearer to me as I moved up and down the ArkansasnRiver Valley working on a book about the river.nAs you travel westward along the Arkansas and leavenDodge City, most of the trees are left behind. You have alsonpassed the 100th meridian. This imaginary line marks thenbeginning of what once was called the “Great AmericannDesert,” pointing to a land where the annual rainfall dropsnto 16 inches or less. From the start, few people out here hadnto be instructed about the value of water, something theirncousins east of the Mississippi took for granted, or thoughtnthey could take for granted until recently when much of itnhas been poisoned. I say the travelers west knew about thenscarcity and thus the value of water; but this is not to say thatnthey understood the many limitations that this put upon thenland. As we know from Wallace Stegner’s book Beyond thenHundredth Meridian, John Wesley Powell’s warnings aboutnthe limitations that setflers needed to recognize were largelynignored. If we could have acted on Powell’s advice, asnBernard DeVoto has remarked, “incalculable loss wouldnhave been prevented and the United States would ben