> It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
Especially when the area is extremely flat. Town I lived in (near, but not, Galena), the only places it was possible to snow-sled were man-made, with the only publicly-accessible one being the banks of the sole road overpass for miles around (I wanna say it went over railroad tracks? But it might have been another highway, regardless it had a remarkably long ramp-up to the actual part where it crossed over the other thing, and that left plenty of space for sledding) or if you happened to own land with coal mining strip-pits that still had the huge tailings/overburden pile, like you mention, and had the brush cleared from part of it.
Those kinds of things are practically the only hills of any kind in some counties in the region. Just outside any of those towns you can look down grid-straight rural roads that disappear into the horizon, and it's not hard to find them. It is flat. (Joplin area, slightly less so) Like, it's flat for Kansas. Many other parts of the state are, relatively speaking, blessed with great altitudinal diversity. Not that part.
It's a bit more south-of-Springfield than SE Kansas (or even Joplin) but the film Winter's Bone kinda felt like visiting home. All those familiar, scraggly trees. They really nail the feel of (a particular, more rural-leaning experience of) the area (I think it was actually filmed in Southern Missouri, so that makes sense, but the cinematographic "eye" of the movie really conveys it, too)
(Incidentally, if there's one thing to do in the very-flat part of Kansas that anyone who finds themselves remotely nearby should detour for, it's the Kansas Cosmosphere, somewhat West of the part otherwise under discussion but still the ultra-flat zone. It might be my favorite space exploration museum, and yes, I've been to most of the big ones in the US. It's shockingly good for being so far from basically anything else worth traveling for. If you have kids, hit the nearby Sedgwick County zoo, too, it's nothing special but it's alright and as long as you're there, why not. Area also has a state park built around some sand dunes left by retreating glaciers, which is kinda neat, though the park's a bit weak mostly due to just about everything outdoors being a really ugly in the region and the key feature of the park covering only a small area, and I make that judgement as someone who still feels weirdly at-peace and like things are correct when I visit, but like objectively it's really goddamn ugly, you gotta search to find anything natural that's as pleasant to look at as just your average view out a window many places, and if you turn around to look the other way you're probably back to ugly)
There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.
So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.
I really appreciate you highlighting exactly how exceptionally flat Kansas is. I've never thought of a place as flat for Kansas, now I'll pay more attention when driving through it. I was already startled by how far horizons seem in Kansas.
Lots of the central-eastern portion of the state is the beautiful Flint Hills area, which is obviously… hilly. Much of I-70 (the main route across the state east-west) features long horizons but lots of low hills in the distance. The West, central, and southwestern parts have the slowly but consistently rolling, low hills of something like the film The Wind or the famous painting Christina’s World (the one with the girl on late summer or early fall green-and-tan grass, looking away from the viewer toward a white farmhouse up a low hill). They’re all much flatter than much of the country, but they’re not flat flat. They’re not Central Nevada flat.
South-central and southeastern Kansas are about that flat. Though with somewhat more trees.
[edit] I mean the remake of The Wind from a few years ago. I’ve never seen the original Lillian Gish film.
[edit edit] Further, those kinds of super-long views like you mentioned are actually kind of hard to come by on the really flat parts of Kansas. You need a little elevation (for the spot you're at) to get over obstructions like bushes, trees, barns, corn, et c, and that's what delivers those impressively-long views that vanish at the horizon in other parts of the state. That's why you need to find one of the (many) very-straight rural roads in the really flat parts of KS to see the "flat all the way to the horizon" effect. Or stand on the roof of a barn or something like that.