Kansas

History

Native Americans, explorers, and settlers

Archaeological exploration has uncovered evidence of Native American cultures that existed in Kansas for many centuries before the Europeans settled on the land. From about AD1200 to 1500, there had been a thriving agricultural society in the area of the Republican and Big Blue rivers. El Cuartelejo, near Scott City in west-central Kansas, is the site of the northernmost pueblo ruins in North America. By the 1500s, most permanent settlements were abandoned in favour of migratory camps.

The first known European explorers were Spaniards under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who in 1541 rode northward from Mexico seeking the gold of the legendary Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola. Juan Padilla, a priest with the expedition, founded the first mission in the territory, possibly north of present-day Wichita. The territory was claimed for France in 1682 by René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, who explored the upper Mississippi River valley. During the 18th century, French fur traders had a flourishing exchange with the Kansas Indians in what is now the northeastern part of the state, and whose name was given to the region. Spain claimed Kansas briefly in the early 18th century, but after losing a brief but furious battle to the French in what is now Nebraska, Spain abandoned its territorial ambitions there.

The region passed to the United States as a part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike passed through Kansas in 1806 and described it as the “Great American Desert”—a false image that still persists. Kansas was thoroughly explored during the following decades, but westward-bound settlers and miners passed through it without staying.

From 1830 to 1854, Kansas was in an area designated as Indian Territory, where tribes who had occupied eastern lands wanted by whites were relocated. After 1854 most of those groups were further removed to what is now Oklahoma. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created two territories and opened both to settlement, allowing residents to determine whether their future states would be free or allow slavery. The rush began, and Kansas became a major breeding ground for the American Civil War, as North and South each attempted to send the most settlers into the new territory. Most early settlement was near the eastern border, and Free Staters were harassed constantly by Border Ruffians (proslavery Missourians who crossed the border to agitate against abolitionism). One notable incident was the sacking of Lawrence by Southern guerrillas in 1856. The abolitionist John Brown, with his sons and a few other men, retaliated by dragging five of their proslavery neighbours from their homes and killing them, an incident known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. Proslavery forces attempting to avenge this massacre were captured by Brown, who became a hero to the Northern sympathizers. Hundreds of such incidents won the territory the name Bleeding Kansas.

Statehood

Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861. During the American Civil War, two-thirds of Kansas men of military age enlisted in the Union Army, and, with nearly 8,500 dead or wounded, Kansas suffered the highest rate of casualties (in proportion to its population) of any state in the Union. Before and after the Civil War, sporadic fighting occurred between the settlers and the Indians. In 1867 a peace treaty was signed in which the Indians agreed to sell their land; in return, the United States agreed to build homes for them in what is now Oklahoma and to provide money, food, and clothing. The U.S. Congress did not honour the treaty, and when the Indians returned they found their land occupied by white settlers. Further sporadic battles continued until the last Indian raid, in 1878.

Early settlers in wooded eastern Kansas lived in log cabins, but in the west they had only dugouts or sod houses. Unpredictable weather, recurring Indian raids, droughts and dust storms, and periodic grasshopper invasions discouraged many early settlers. One of the heroes of that era was William Mathewson, known as the original “Buffalo Bill” (a nickname also used later to greater fame by William F. Cody), who hunted buffalo for starving settlers for an entire winter without pay, providing meat by the wagonload. The coming of the railroads in the late 1860s and the '70s made first one village and then another into boisterous cow towns. Texas cattlemen drove herds northward to Caldwell, Wichita, Dodge City, Ellsworth, Newton, and Abilene to reach the railhead. Although this development brought prosperity to Kansas and created a persistent image, the cow-town era lasted less than a decade.

Volga Germans (Germans who had settled in Russia in the 18th century), many of them Mennonites, arrived in 1874, bringing trunks full of hand-selected grains of Turkey Red wheat. This excellent strain was the basis of the abundant winter wheat crops that became an important part of the Kansas economy. Many of the Mennonites' descendants remain as prosperous farmers.

By about 1890, most of the land was occupied, and Kansans settled into a life dominated by agriculture. World War I produced a great demand for food, and more and more prairie was plowed and put into production, which led to temporary prosperity, but such practices contributed directly to the dust storms that devastated the state in the 1930s. World War II stimulated Kansas's growing eminence in aircraft production and brought many people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to work in Wichita's aircraft plants.

The decades of the 1970s and '80s were characterized by a slow but steady growth in population, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, and a steady increase in the number of Kansans employed in mining and in health care and other service activities. This general trend continued in the 1990s, although Kansas was less prosperous than its neighbours, especially the rapidly growing state of Colorado to the west.

Kansas remains a Republican stronghold, with several of its conservative politicians attaining national prominence, but Democrats have been increasingly influential in state-level politics. Part of the political shift can be attributed to the growing number of Hispanic voters, with newly arrived Mexicans and Central Americans repopulating almost-abandoned small towns in the west and forming distinctive enclaves in larger towns and cities throughout the state.

Charles G. Pearson

Gregory Lewis McNamee

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