Settlement of Southwest Kansas
- Details
- Written by Leola Howard Blanchard
- Category: Kansas Reading Library
For several years after Western Kansas was being opened for settlement, the counties in this region remained unorganized and had no population except the cattlemen. They were the lords of the land, but had no interest in it except as it provided grass and water for their stock. They ranged their cattle over thousands of acres without the restriction of a single fence, but they were doomed to witness a marvelous change in the country.
Kansas In The Civil War
- Details
- Written by Anna E. Arnold
- Parent Category: Kansas State History Articles
- Category: Kansas Military History
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Beginning of the Civil War
Just before Kansas was admitted several of the southern states seceded from the Union. The trouble between the North and the South had reached the point where it could no longer be compromised. Other states seceded, and when, on April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was fired upon, the Civil War had begun.
The Cattle Kings
- Details
- Written by Emerson Hough
- Parent Category: Kansas State History Articles
- Category: Kansas People
It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the Plains. The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone, but are soon to pass.
Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide, open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all men who had cows to range. The land laws still were vague and inexact in application, and each man could construe them much as he liked.
Some Prominent Kansans
- Details
- Written by Anna E. Arnold
- Parent Category: Kansas State History Articles
- Category: Kansas People
Hundreds of Kansas men and women have served their State in a way worthy of note. To tell the story of the services rendered by all of them would require many volumes. In a book like the present one, mention can be made of only a few of those most widely known.
Puritans Of The West
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- Written by Kate Stephens
- Parent Category: Kansas State History Articles
- Category: Kansas People
Of local phases of the American spirit, none has incited more discussion than that developed in Kansas. The notion that the citizens of the State are somewhat phrenetic in experimental meliorism; that they more than others fall into abnormal sympathies and are led by aberrations of the crowd—intoxications the mind receives in a congregation of men pitched to an emotional key—this notion long ago startled peoples more phlegmatic and less prone to social vagaries.
The Range
- Details
- Written by Emerson Hough
- Parent Category: Kansas State History Articles
- Category: Old West Kansas
When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the mouth of the Missouri.