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This is the monument that Knute Rockne and University of Notre Dame fans drive many miles to see. Dedicated in 1934, it stands in a Flint Hills pasture 10 miles south of Cottonwood Falls. Easter Heathman, a retired farmer, has taken over a thousand people through locked gates to see the stone. Some of the chips in the stone were made by souvenir hunters.

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Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. In 13 years his record was: 105 games won; 12 lost and 5 ties.

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This photo of the Fokker F-10 was taken in the first Kansas City airport on an unknown date. The numbers on the tail of the plane match with those on the plane that crashed near Cottonwood Falls in 1931.

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Sightseers and federal investigators were on the scene of the crash of flight 599 after it lost a wing over the Flint Hills near Cottonwood Falls, March 31, 1931. A plane, far right, sits in the pasture after landing there. Eight people lost their lives in the crash. The square in the top center of the photo is a piece of fabric from the plane that someone attached to this old photograph.

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People gathered around the crash site for days following the March 31, 1931, disaster. Easter Heathman remembers that a team of horses and a wagon was used to pull the fuselage apart to retrieve the bodies inside.

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The wing that fell off the Fokker F-10 landed near the crashed plane nearly intact. Heathman remembers eye-witnesses of the crash saying that the wing fluttered through the sky and took almost a half minute to hit the ground.

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A crowd of curious sightseers walks through the wreckage of the plane that carried Knute Rockne to his death in the Flint Hills. The Civil Aeronautics Administration wasn't organized until 1940.

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Poking through the grass with his cane, Easter Heathman found a small pile of stones marking the spot where Notre Dame legend Knute Rockne's body was found after he died in a plane crash March 31, 1931. The spot is at the rear of the monument that faces east from its pastoral setting.

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A small pile of stones nearly obscured by grass marks the spot where Knute Rockne's body was found after his plane crashed.

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The grass around the base of the Rockne Memorial in Chase County has been cut since this photo was taken. "My son-in-law John Brown and I went up there and 'weed shipped' around the base, and it doesn't look so shaggy now," Easter Heathman said.

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Easter Heathman points towards Kansas Highway 177 as he leans against a hedge tree fence that surrounds the monument to football legend Knute Rockne and seven other passengers who died in a plane crash on this site in 1931. The monument was errected in 1934. Heathman has taken more than 1,000 people out to see the monument located 10 miles south of Cottonwood Falls. It sits on private property in a Flint Hills pasture.

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A commercial airline pilot from Canada flew his jet into Emporia and rented a small Cessna aircraft to take this aerial photo of the Rockne Monument after Easter Heathman showed him where it was located. The worn areas around the monument are made by cattle who use the hedge tree fencing as a back scratcher while grazing in the pasture.