Prairie Dunes sits about as far from salt water as a golf course can, on the outskirts of Hutchinson, Kansas, and yet it plays like something the sea left behind. That is the first romance of the place. The second is how patiently it was found. In 1935 Perry Maxwell sat down with the Carey family, owners of a local salt company, to talk about building a course near town. Perhaps he found the tract east of Hutchinson himself; perhaps the Careys led him to it. Either way, what lay there was Ice Age duneland, covered in wild grasses, yucca, sandhill plum and cottonwood. Maxwell held that "the golf course should be there, not brought there," and he lived by it. He surveyed the 480 acres day after day for weeks before he decided on a routing. He was reading the ground, the large undulations and the small, waiting for the holes to show themselves. The building was as humble as the philosophy. Dean Woods, a civil engineer and Maxwell's brother-in-law, supervised construction of the first nine, and like Maxwell he wanted nothing to do with steam shovels. Eighteen horses and mules dragged plows, slips and Fresno scrapers across the sand. The only engines on site were the Model T and Model A Fords and trucks that carried the workers out. The roots of native grass and weeds came out by hand, a wheelbarrow at a time. Nine holes opened in 1937, meshing humbly yet artfully with the land. The Careys had hoped for 36 holes. Twenty years passed, and the Depression and the war passed with them. Perry Maxwell completed a plan for a full eighteen before he died in 1952, and his son, James Press Maxwell, brought a plan to a green committee meeting in 1954. Nobody living has seen that drawing, and nobody knows where it went. In 1956 Press built nine more holes, three on the west side of the property and six on a large paddock to the northeast, the holes now numbered 3 through 5 and 11 through 16. Members who know the course well believe he mostly followed his father's hand, with one major exception. That missing sheet of paper is part of the course now, a quiet question hanging over half the routing. Yet it all reads as one piece, and many visitors are surprised to learn the eighteen were not made at once. The wind is ever present here, the same Kansas wind the state is busy turning into energy. There is sand to spare, ground that pitches and rolls in a seaside way, and holes laid out with thought and cunning. Above all there are the greens. Tom Doak put it simply: what makes Prairie Dunes special is the severity of the greens and the wonderful choice of green sites. Many approaches climb uphill to those sites, which not every golfer loves, but that is where the course finds its challenge. The course has been tended with care. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw renovated it in 2004, and Dave Axland, a former Coore & Crenshaw associate, has since led historical renovation work, most notably re-naturalizing the bunkers. The club has added new back tees to reach a championship yardage near 7,000 yards, but the holes tend to make the most sense, and the walks are kindest, from the middle tees. It is a private club, and getting there takes effort. Doak spoke of how hospitable the club is to people who make the trip, and how modest about what it has, because the members are there to enjoy it themselves, not to impress anyone. That modesty is easy to miss, and so is the course's reach. Draw a line from these dunes to Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes and much of what came after, and it starts here, on the 1st hole, Carey Lane, in the wind.