Early History of Kansas
Spanish Conquistador Vasquez de Coronado was the first explorer to reach Kansas all the way back in 1541. Searching for the mythical “Seven Cities of Gold,” Coronado traveled northeast from Mexico to Kansas along trails created by Native Americans for hunting and trading. In Kansas, he found the Quivira (Wichita) people, but no golden cities.
When the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet paddled down the Mississippi River in 1673, they included Kansas on a map of the Missouri River, which forms the eastern border of Kansas. In 1804, Lewis and Clark camped where the Kansas River meets the Missouri and encountered the Kaw tribe, also known as the Kanza or “Wind People.”
Proud warriors, the Kanza fiercely opposed white settlement in Kansas in the early 19th century but couldn’t stop the inevitable. Two major overland migration routes passed directly through Kansas—the Oregon Trail running northwest and the Santa Fe Trail running southwest. New arrivals squatted on Kanza land and overhunted bison. The Treaty of 1825 shrank Kanza territory to a small, 30-mile-wide reservation.
'Bleeding Kansas' and the Civil War
In the 1850s, Kansas witnessed violent clashes over the issue of slavery that were a preview of the Civil War.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created Kansas and Nebraska as new territories. The residents of each were allowed to vote on the issue of slavery. Nebraska was solidly anti-slavery, but Kansas could go either way. As settlers poured into the territory to vote, anti-slavery activists from New England clashed with pro-slavery forces from Missouri.
In 1856, pro-slavery “border ruffians” from Missouri captured and sacked the town of Lawrence, Kansas, an anti-slavery outpost founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Society. In response, the firebrand abolitionist John Brown and his sons murdered five men and boys in a pro-slavery village near Pottawatomie Creek.
More than 50 people were killed from 1854 to 1861 during the chaotic period known as Bleeding Kansas. It ended when Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1861, just in time for the start of the Civil War. During the war, Union fighters from Kansas were called “jayhawks” or “jayhawkers,” a nickname first used by anti-slavery gangs during the Bleeding Kansas period.
Kansas was the site of two particularly brutal events during the Civil War. In 1863, the town of Lawrence was sacked again, but this time Confederate forces killed nearly 200 unarmed boys and men before burning it to the ground. The Battle of Westport in 1864 was the largest and bloodiest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi, and the hard-won Union victory turned the tide against the Confederacy in the West.
Wild West 'Cow Towns'
Founded in 1867, Abilene, Kansas, was the first of the state’s iconic cattle towns or “cow towns.” Located on the Union Pacific Railroad, Abilene was the final destination for cowboys driving longhorn cattle up from Texas. In Abilene and other Cow Towns, cattle were shipped to ranchers and meatpackers in the Midwest, and cowboys could find hospitality and entertainment.
The semi-mythical Wild West was largely based on life in Kansas cow towns such as Ellsworth, Wichita and Dodge City in the second half of the 19th century. While not as lawless or violent as Hollywood Westerns, cow towns had their share of saloons, brothels and gambling halls. Legendary figures including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok also earned their fame there.
Dust Bowl and Depression Hit Kansas
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was an unprecedented environmental disaster in Kansas and other Plains states, caused by a combination of drought and unsustainable farming practices.
In the early 20th century, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act, which promised 320 acres to Americans willing to settle and farm unclaimed land, including large swaths of western Kansas. Wheat proved the most successful crop, and millions of acres of native grassland were plowed under to plant it.
When severe droughts struck the Great Plains in 1931, there was no grass to protect the parched soil from high winds. Massive dust storms, called black blizzards, darkened skies, destroyed farms and blew choking dust into Kansas towns and cities.
In Kansas, the Dust Bowl’s destruction worsened the economic distress of the Great Depression. Countless Kansans joined the largest exodus in U.S. history as impoverished Plains farmers migrated west to places such as California.
Brown v. Board of Education
The city of Topeka, Kansas, was the backdrop to one of the most important civil rights cases of the 20th century. In 1951, a young Black student named Linda Brown was denied entry to one of Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. Her father, Oliver, filed a class-action suit against the Topeka Board of Education, claiming that the city’s Black public schools were inferior and therefore in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Linda Brown’s case was one of five lawsuits filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund against segregated school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court considered all five under the name Brown v. Board of Education. Two years later, the court issued its landmark ruling that public schools must be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.”
Date of Statehood: January 29, 1861
Capital: Topeka
Population: 2,937,880 (2020)
Size: 82,278 square miles
Nickname(s): Sunflower State; Wheat State; Jayhawk State
Motto: Ad astra per aspera (“To the stars through difficulties”)
Tree: Cottonwood
Flower: Wild Native Sunflower
Bird: Western Meadowlark
Interesting Facts
Fort Riley was established near the Kansas River in 1853 to protect settlers and trade along the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. In 1866, the 7th Cavalry organized at the fort under General George Armstrong Custer, who later led the regiment in the infamous attack on Sioux and Cheyenne tribes at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876.
When French astronomer Pierre Janssen first discovered the element he called helium on the sun in 1868, it was believed to be one of the rarest elements. It wasn’t until 1905, when faculty members at the University of Kansas in Lawrence began experimenting with gas from a newly drilled well in Dexter, that helium was identified as a common element on Earth.
Kansas is the leading producer of wheat in the United States. Known as the Wheat Capital of the World, Kansas farmers harvested more than 300 million bushels in 2024.
Meade’s Ranch in Osborne County, Kansas, is the geodetic center of North America—the point of reference by which all property lines and boundaries on the continent are surveyed. Identified in 1901, this triangulation station for the United States, Canada and Mexico is also known as the North American Datum.
In 1907, Charles Curtis became the first Native American elected to the Senate. He later served as vice president under Herbert Hoover. His support for Native American assimilation left a conflicted legacy.
