The man who helped transform the Flint Hills is leaving, but his legacy will remain

There’s a stretch of I-35 between Wichita and Kansas City that even the most passive passersby notice. It’s about 8 miles of pristine, undulating tallgrass on both sides of the interstate that visitors can gaze upon from a lookout next to the Bazaar cattle pens. This time of year, there are streaks of burnt red and sage through the mostly golden stalks, which up close are so brilliant in the full sun they’re almost a blinding white.

The view, uninterrupted except for the road, is largely due to one man: Bill Haw.

“There’s no one in the world that’s bought more Flint Hills grass than Bill Haw, and I’d say he pretty much single-handedly made the Flint Hills what they are instead of just a place to drive through on the way to Kansas City,” said Haw’s neighbor, Josh Hoy of the Flying W Ranch.

Haw is now selling what remains of his property there — two ranches of more than 14,000 acres — all of which he’s placed on perpetual conservation easements through The Nature Conservancy. That means whoever buys the land, either this time or in the future, can’t divide it beyond the three easements, and there’s a limit to what can be built there.

“I don’t want it to remain perfect and unspoiled just for my lifetime, but forever more,” Haw said.

“You can’t look at the Flint Hills in small pieces. It has to be as far as you can see to be able to fully appreciate it.”

Despite his love for the Flint Hills, not everyone there has looked favorably on Haw. When he showed up three decades ago, he broke with local practice by double stocking his land, meaning he grazed more cattle over shorter periods than was customary.

“When I started doing what I’m doing, which is better for the land than the other way, I actually got a permit to carry because I was considered to be the evilest son of a bitch on the face of the earth for violating these multigenerational rules that people thought they had to do,” Haw said. “Now, almost everybody double stocks. And, by the way, I never did carry the gun. I just felt threatened enough I ought to get one.”

Hoy said he remembered his grandfather thinking that Haw “was going to ruin the Flint Hills.”

“Anything new, especially in the Hills — we’re full of hillbillies, you know — anything outside and new is suspect and suspicious,” Hoy said.

“Many people now recognize him for what he is: a pioneer . . . in how we both perceive the hills and how we graze them,” Hoy said.

Today, Haw is best known as a Kansas City developer, but that’s not what he’s always done, and that’s not how he describes himself.

“I would say that I am an entrepreneur who wants to work for myself and do things that are both profitable and make the world a better place, and I really mean that sincerely. . . . Those aren’t mutually exclusive. . . . If I hadn’t been pretty sensitive to things that were economically viable, either now or in the future, then I guess I still wouldn’t have any money.”

Haw, 82, is a lean man who at first glance might seem to be any wealthy city dweller coming to inspect his country property in a sharply pressed shirt and an Omega watch — a man who clearly understands optics, offering to wear a work coat instead of his dress coat for photos out on his property.

Spend a minute talking to Haw, and much more comes across: a caring-yet-unsentimental guy, the kind you likely wouldn’t want to cross in business, who naturally peppers what he says with the kinds of words you don’t say around your mother.

Though Haw said he’s selling for the worst possible reason — his age — he’s also matter of fact about it.

“I don’t make a big deal out of anything. I just do what I need to do.”

‘Boy, that’d be cool’

Both Marvin and Mildred Haw — he was a doctor and she was a nurse and artist — realized their son Bill was not the best student, though he was a reader. He grew up in the Missouri lead-mining community of Bonne Terre and majored in English at the University of Missouri where he also was in the ROTC.

A two-year stint as an officer in the Army followed, and that’s probably where Haw would have remained had it not been for a particularly irksome commanding officer. Haw said he loved the idea of leadership in the military back then. He quickly jumped in rank, which, when he circulated his resume after getting discharged, attracted a Houston bank.

“Boy, that’d be cool,” Haw said he thought. “You wear a suit all the time and work in big tall buildings.”

He decided to get a master’s degree in finance instead. A year in, Kansas City’s Commerce Bank offered him $500 a month to take a job there. Haw asked what he could make if he finished that second year. The answer: $500 a month. Haw left school.

Within a decade, he was offered the presidency of the bank — twice. He declined, which was detrimental to his first marriage but allowed him to get a stake in his first company. When an agricultural client at the bank sought his bankruptcy advice, Haw’s advice was to hire him.

His new career made him want his own land, too, so Haw looked throughout the northern and western parts of the country. He read about some work K-State was doing on intensive grazing.

“It seemed to me like an incredible idea,” Haw said. “So I borrowed a helluva a lot of money and bought some big ranches.”

Contacts in the banking community — and their trust in him — were what allowed him to do it, and the K-State research gave him the confidence to do it.

His goals were focused: run a cattle business in a radically new way in order to make a lot of money and then have a place to park his wealth that would appreciate in value.

Haw dates his first purchase of 10,000 Flint Hill acres by calculating when he was courting his second wife, Maggie, whom he took to the property for a picnic. They’ve been married 27 years.

One of the first things Haw did was strip the property’s 20 miles of fences left from the days numerous renters leased land for cattle operations.

Unlike most Flint Hills landowners who don’t own their own cattle — Haw called them risk-averse — he wanted to own his land and the cattle, too, and he needed them to be profitable.

There was a depression in the cattle business when Haw first bought his land. Others were leasing land for the low price of $10 an acre, so Haw leased an additional 50,000 acres from neighbors. He approached it like a businessman.

Haw called himself “an economies of scale guy” who uses contract cowboys — “a wonderful culture” in which people work on his land for the 90 days cattle are there and then move on.

“You know, there’s something magical about being a cowboy,” he said. “And you know who likes cowboys? Chicks. . . . It all comes down to ain’t nothin’ more important than impressing the chicks.”

The first year Haw had cattle, he rode with the cowboys and quickly realized they knew what they were doing, and he didn’t.

Haw said his skill is “to just have enough common sense to know what makes sense. And to disregard what people historically . . . have thought made sense.”

The billionaires’ lesson

In addition to buying his own land, Haw eventually purchased about 60,000 acres that he then sold to Texas billionaire brothers Ed and Lee Bass, who trusted his opinions and management.

Haw recalled one evening at dusk when he was outside on his property drinking a beer with Ed Bass, pontificating over economic returns of some land they shared. Bass stopped him.

“Bill, this is priceless.”

Lee Bass, too, once teased him over a deal.

“You mean we can buy it for this amount of money, and they’re going to throw all this scenery in for free?”

The Basses don’t question Haw’s love of the land.

“Bill is a precise thinker and a true realist and at the same time a dreamer, and he manages to make the two work together, which I think is why he . . . has been able to accomplish so much in the Flint Hills,” Ed Bass said.

He said the area’s ecosystem needs a vast landscape.

“There’s not much left,” Bass said. He said Haw’s preservation of what remains “is something he really set a strategy on.”

Bass said he’s never had a better friend or business partner.

“I found I’m always learning, and I’m always enjoying it.”

Haw cares about the land down to the last detail, such as using natural rocks with no man-made cuts for the fence posts outside his house.

The state created the overlook next to the Bazaar pens, which were designed to make it easy for ranchers moving cattle. The state was going to use concrete for the overlook until Haw made a convincing argument to spend an extra $100,000 on natural rock on the wall facing his property.

Haw doesn’t mind that the interstate bisects his land. From the distance of his house, which is barely visible from the road, the noiselessly passing cars and trucks look almost graceful, he said.

The house, which Haw visits weekly, isn’t part of the listing for his two properties. But if someone spends the approximately $30 million it will take to get both ranches, he’ll negotiate the sale of the house, too.

“We are open to different scenarios,” said Wichita’s John Rupp of ReeceNichols of South Central Kansas, who is representing Haw in the sale along with the firm ‘s Terry Rupp and Jake Steven.

The size of the deal likely will “catch the eye of a little different type buyer,” Rupp said.

It could be another large land owner, such as a Ted Turner out-of-state type who, like Haw, may be looking for somewhere to park some money.

There’s also a 90-acre lake in front of the house where Haw, his family and friends — and sometimes uninvited guests, which is why there’s now a fence — have spent much time skiing, swimming and fishing. Creeks and ponds, including one with what Haw claims is the best bass fishing anywhere, abound on the properties.

Haw hasn’t made a particular effort to get to know his neighbors, but he has been involved in the area.

He bought and restored a number of buildings in Cottonwood Falls and helped revive the town square and the whole area.

Haw sold his ranch there in December. He previously sold three buildings at a loss and donated three to the Symphony in the Flint Hills, an organization for which Haw has been a director. Lyle Lovett stayed at his house while performing there. Maggie Haw still talks about what a tidy bed he made and how he left the bathroom spotless.

Despite wanting to divest the Flint Hills properties, Haw is hardly preparing to kick back as a retiree. Instead, he’ll focus on continuing to develop what he calls the Stockyards District in Kansas City, the area around the former Kemper Arena that he bought when he saw that I-670 had ramps there.

“He’s a very savvy businessman,” said Brian Obermeyer, the Kansas director of protection and stewardship for The Nature Conservancy.

He said that makes it even more impressive what Haw has done with his acreage.

“For him to say this is the right thing to do . . . had an impact for other landowners to consider the use of conservation easements.”

So how can someone so involved, so interested in the Flint Hills just walk away?

“Oh, I’ll miss it,” Haw said.

He’s not sad, though, because he said he doesn’t get sad — ever.

“The thing to do is to be optimistic and move forward.”

This story was originally published February 7, 2021 at 4:47 AM.