Kansas is one of the fifty states that, together with Washington D.C., form the United States of America. Its capital is Topeka and its most populous city, Wichita. It is located in the Midwest region of the country, in the Central Northwest division, bordering Nebraska to the north, Missouri to the east, Oklahoma to the south and Colorado to the west. On January 29, 1861, it became the 34th American state.
The geographic center of the 48 contiguous United States is located in its northern area, in Smith County. The geodetic center of North America is also located in its territory, in Osborne. This is used as a reference point for all federal government maps.
It is one of the national leaders in the agricultural industry. It is the largest producer of wheat in the country, which is why it is known as the Wheat State and the Breadbasket of America. It also has one of the largest herds of cattle in the country. Agriculture and cattle raising were its main source of income for much of its history. Dodge City is considered by many to be the «Cowboy Capital of the World.» It also has a strong mining industry, and is a national leader in the production of oil and natural gas. Today, the state’s main sources of income are trade and industry.
During the 1850s, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a large number of abolitionists and defenders of slave labor settled in this state. It was the scene of many clashes between abolitionist and slave militias, as well as in the neighboring state of Missouri (where slave labor was permitted). These conflicts were so violent that it was nicknamed Bleeding Kansas. Another nickname with its origins in this conflict is the Jayhawker State. Jayhawker is the common act of abolitionists invading slave farms in Missouri, looting ranches, and freeing slaves.
Kansas’s most well-known nickname is The Sunflower State. Sunflowers cover much of its plains. The name Kansas originates from the Native American Kansa tribe, who lived in the region until the 18th century. Kansa means «people of the southern winds.»
HISTORY
Until 1861
When the Europeans arrived, the region was inhabited by four tribes: the Kansa (hence the name of the state), the Osage, the Pawnee and the Wichita, who lived by hunting buffalo and growing corn.
The first Europeans were members of the Castilian expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1541. They were looking for a region called Quivira, with supposed gold mines. But when they did not find them, they left.
In 1682, the explorer René Robert Cavelier claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France. Thus, most of the territory became part of the colony of New France, a colonial province of Louisiana. At the beginning of the 18th century, French explorers landed in search of furs.
Between 1763 and 1803, the territory of Kansas was part of Spanish Louisiana. Governor Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga ‘le Conciliateur’, during this period, encouraged expeditions and good relations with the Amerindian peoples, among the explorers was Antoine Marigny and others who continued trading through the Kansas River, especially at its confluence with the Missouri River, tributaries of the Mississippi River.2
In 1803, with the Louisiana Purchase, most of the territory was annexed by the United States. President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the new territory to explore it. They left on June 26 from St. Louis. Following the Missouri River, they reached the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, in present-day Kansas, and explored the region for three days before continuing west.
In 1806, Zebulon Pike led another expedition that crossed the state from east to west. After his exploration, he claimed that the Great Plains were uninhabitable, which prevented further settlement. The Spaniard Manuel de Lisa was the most active and successful man of his time to explore these regions.
Kansas was part of the Louisiana District, the Louisiana Territory, and the Missouri Territory until 1830. In 1825, the federal government, which had confiscated large areas of land from native tribes in the east, established a reservation in the region—then sparsely populated by whites—for tribes forced to give up their land. Between 1825 and 1845, 30 tribes settled there. Meanwhile, Kansas, located in the central region of the present-day United States, became an important transportation hub, thanks to American expansion westward.
In 1827, Colonel Henry Leavenworth established the first fort in the region, Fort Leavenworth. Initially, in the 1830s, most of the whites who settled in the region were abolitionists from the American North, who wanted to stop the expansion of slave labor in the country. In the 1840s, however, the region began to attract a greater number of people interested in seeking better living conditions, mainly European immigrants, Germans, Irish, English, Swedes and Russians.
The settlement of white settlers put pressure on the American government to make the region an independent territory, and forced the relocation of Native Americans, during the early 1850s. The government negotiated with each of the tribes, and gradually, all were relocated, most to Oklahoma. The last one left the state in 1854.
On May 30, 1854, it became a US territory through the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Until then, it was part of the so-called Indian Territory, along with Nebraska and Oklahoma. To reduce conflicts between abolitionists and slave labor advocates, the U.S. Congress allowed a choice between allowing or prohibiting the use of slave labor. Most of Kansas wanted to prohibit slave labor. This led to immense conflicts with neighboring Missouri, where the use of slave labor was permitted. During the rest of the 1850s, it received large numbers of abolitionists and slave labor advocates, who settled there to increase the political strength of their respective groups. The territorial elections of 1855 were won by an abolitionist political party, the Free State Party. On January 29, 1861, after the secession of 11 southern states from the Union (which formed the Confederate States of America), it became the 34th U.S. state.