KSKansas History

Kansas produced four rival constitutions in five years before Congress would let it into the Union, and settlers shot at each other over which one counted. Free state delegates wrote one at Topeka in 1855, proslavery delegates answered with the Lecompton document in 1857, a third came out of Leavenworth in 1858, and the fourth, drafted at Wyandotte in 1859, is still the constitution Kansas operates under today. Admission finally came on January 29, 1861, once senators from the seceding southern states walked out of Washington and stopped blocking it.

Quivira, and the nations of the river valleys

The Kansa, whose name the state carries, lived along the lower Kansas River. The Osage held the southeast, the Wichita farmed and built grass-thatched lodges along the Arkansas River near the Great Bend, and Pawnee hunting parties ranged down from the Platte. In 1541 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado marched north out of the southern plains chasing reports of a wealthy province called Quivira and found those Wichita villages instead. He left behind a Franciscan, Juan de Padilla, who returned the next year and was killed, the first recorded European death on the plains.

In the 1830s and 1840s the federal government treated eastern Kansas as a dumping ground for nations it had already removed once. Shawnee, Delaware, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Sac and Fox, Ottawa and others were given reserves along the Missouri border. Most of those reserves were dissolved within twenty years of the territory opening to white settlement, and the nations were pushed south into Indian Territory. The Kaw themselves were removed to Oklahoma in 1873, twelve years after Kansas took their name.

Purchase, trail and garrison

France claimed the region as part of Louisiana and sold it with everything else in 1803. Lewis and Clark went up the Missouri along the northeast corner in the summer of 1804 and spent the Fourth of July at a stream they named Independence Creek, near present-day Atchison. Zebulon Pike councilled with Pawnee headmen on the Republican River in 1806, and Stephen Long's 1820 report labeled the western half the Great American Desert, a phrase that kept farmers away for forty years.

What crossed Kansas first was commerce. William Becknell opened the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, turning the state into a wagon corridor between Missouri and Mexican New Mexico, and the Oregon and California trails cut the northeast. Fort Leavenworth was founded in 1827 to guard the traffic and is the oldest continuously active army post west of the Missouri River.

Bleeding Kansas

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 30, 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise line and left slavery in the territory to a vote of whoever settled there. That turned a land question into a race. The New England Emigrant Aid Company financed free state colonists at Lawrence, while thousands of Missourians crossed the border to vote in the March 1855 election and installed a proslavery legislature. Proslavery forces sacked Lawrence on May 21, 1856. Three nights later John Brown and his sons dragged five men from their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek and killed them with broadswords. Another thirty were pulled out and shot or wounded at Marais des Cygnes in May 1858.

President Buchanan tried to force the proslavery Lecompton Constitution through Congress; Kansas voters rejected it by roughly six to one in August 1858. When statehood arrived, the legislature took as its motto Ad astra per aspera, to the stars through difficulties, which was a direct reference to those years. The war that followed hit Kansas hard for a state so far from Virginia. William Quantrill's raiders burned Lawrence on August 21, 1863 and killed about 150 men and boys. The First Kansas Colored Infantry fought at Island Mound in Missouri in October 1862, among the earliest Black units to see combat. Union cavalry broke Sterling Price's retreating army at Mine Creek on October 25, 1864.

Cattle towns, Nicodemus and Turkey Red

Joseph McCoy built stockyards at Abilene in 1867 where the Kansas Pacific track met the Chisholm Trail, and the shipping point migrated west with the rails to Ellsworth, then Wichita, then Dodge City. Quarantine laws against Texas fever closed the Kansas trail towns in 1885, ending the era that gave the state its gunfighter reputation.

• Nicodemus, 1877. Black settlers from Kentucky founded a townsite in Graham County. Thousands more, the Exodusters, arrived in the 1879 exodus out of the post-Reconstruction South. Nicodemus is the only surviving town of that movement west of the Mississippi and is now a National Historic Site.
• Turkey Red, 1874. Mennonite families leaving the Russian steppe settled in Marion and McPherson counties with a hard winter wheat that could take dry ground and short seasons. It rebuilt Kansas agriculture around a single crop.
• Prohibition, 1881. Kansas wrote a ban on liquor into its constitution, the first state to do so, and did not repeal it until 1948. Carry Nation began smashing saloon fixtures with a hatchet at Kiowa in 1900.

Dust, bombers, and a Topeka third-grader

The southwestern counties sat at the center of the Dust Bowl. On April 14, 1935, remembered as Black Sunday, a wall of soil rolled across the plains and turned afternoon to night. Meanwhile Wichita had become an aviation town: Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman were all building aircraft there in the 1920s, and during the Second World War the Boeing plant turned out B-29 bombers by the thousand.

The state's largest mark on national law came from a grade school. Oliver Brown was one of thirteen Topeka parents who sued the local board over segregated elementary schools, and on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka against separate schools. Monroe Elementary, where the Brown children were sent instead of the school near their house, is preserved as a national historic site. Dwight Eisenhower grew up in Abilene and is buried there; Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison in 1897. Wind turbines now stand across the same short-grass counties the Dust Bowl emptied, and Kansas draws more than a third of its electricity from them.

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