Kansas Summary

The Wizard of Oz, The Little House on the Prairie, plains full of wheat, fields of sunflowers, oil rigs, tornadoes, cattle drives, and the westward expansion associated with the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails — Kansas is home to all these images and, thanks to its sometimes wild past, is also inextricably linked with cowboys, brawls, shoot-outs, and the likes of lawmen such as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok.

Covering an area of 82,282 square miles, “The Sunflower State” is the geodetic center of the United States, giving a new meaning to the term “Middle America.” These days the Wild West, the so-called Indian Wars, and other episodes of the frontier are safely confined to museums and re-creations of the past. A darker side of the state’s history is its association with slavery, which led to a violent conflict in 1854-56 that earned it the title of “Bleeding Kansas,” and probably pushed the Civil War forward.

Now the nation’s leading producer of wheat, it was once part of the Dust Bowl, and suffered severe land erosion in the 1930s as a result of drought and over-cultivation. In recent years the histories of the state’s Native Americans, African-Americans, and Mennonites have been depicted in museums.

With 23 state parks, Kansas offers visitors plenty of natural recreation areas. Topographically, most of the state is rolling plain. The northeast is fertile, green, and hilly and scattered with woods, streams, rivers, and lakes, while the rugged sparsity of the northwest is evoked by its tumbleweed and buffalo grass.

Although 90 percent of the state is still covered by farmland, two-thirds of Kansans live in urban areas with manufacturing and service industries now dominating the economy. Topeka, settled by anti-slavery colonists in 1854, became the state capital in 1861.

Kansas tends to have cold winters and warm summers although it is prone to sudden climatic changes and dramatic phenomena such as tornadoes, blizzards, thunderstorms, and hail.