All About Kansas
Today's cutesy, gingham-pinafore image of Kansas, associated with Little House on the Prairie and The Wizard of Oz, is a far cry indeed from the troubled history that made it known as ''bleeding Kansas.'' It took three hundred years after Coronado came in search of gold in 1541 before pioneers established trails across the region, and Kansas's bid for statehood in 1861 is often cited as the catalyst for the Civil War. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave both territories the right to self-determination over slavery, led to fierce clashes between Free Staters and pro-slavery forces. Runaway slaves from the South were given passage through the area, aided by abolitionist John Brown, and Kansas eventually joined the Union as a free state.
After the war, the mighty cattle drives from Texas made towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City centers of the '' Wild West .'' The debauched, male image of the West, spawning such ''heroes'' as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, is, however, challenged in Kansas, which as well as being the first state to give women the vote in municipal elections, boasts the nation's first female mayor and senator, as well as aviator Amelia Earhart and the battling Prohibitionist Carry Nation.
In 1874, Russian Mennonites brought the grain that was to transform the state into the bountiful ''bread basket'' that now harvests most of the nation's wheat. However, only in the west do miles of golden corn sway in Kansas's infamous gusty wind. The green and hilly northeast, patterned with woods and lakes, is home to the unattractive industrial city of Topeka, liberal college town Lawrence, and the dull suburbs of Kansas City (though downtown lies across the state line in Missouri). The wild and sparse northwest is pioneer country, while the once-wicked cowtown Dodge City is in the southwest. Wichita, the state's largest city, lies in the south central area.
Undulating east Kansas is laced with lakes, streams and rivers. The northeast, once crossed by the Oregon, Santa Fe and Smoky Hill trails, and now home to both Topeka and Lawrence, is more heavily visited than the southeast, where the major attraction is the Little House on the Prairie historical site, located 13 miles southwest of Independence on Hwy-75. The heritage of Kansas's four Indian tribes comes alive in annual powwows, held in major towns as well as the northwestern reservations. Three towns re-create the state's Wild West heritage, although only in the westernmost, Dodge City, does the scrubby landscape conform to the cowboy-movie image. Abilene, if less famous than Dodge City, has as many outlaw and gunslinger stories, and Wichita, about 200 miles southwest of Kansas City, holds an excellent, authentic reconstruction of frontier days in its Old Cowtown Museum.
Greyhound buses run to all Kansas's main cities, supplemented by erratic smaller companies; services to the west and southwest are especially poor. The most frequent routes run from Kansas City to Albuquerque via Wichita (about 3 daily; 20-23hr), with one or two buses per day along I-70 to Denver. Amtrak trains head east-west between LA and Chicago through the center of the state, calling, usually in the middle of the night, at Lawrence, Topeka, Emporia, Newton (for Wichita, but without a connecting service), Dodge City and Garden City. Wichita has the state's biggest airport.
