Kansas.
The Sunflower
State.

The Kansa, Wichita, Osage, Pawnee, and Comanche nations had held this prairie for centuries before Coronado crossed it in 1541 searching for Quivira — a city of gold that did not exist. The land entered American possession with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and was largely passed through rather than settled for fifty years, used as the corridor for the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail. Explorers called it the Great American Desert and marked it unfit for farming. The Mennonites who arrived in the 1870s with Turkey Red wheat seed from Ukraine proved them catastrophically wrong.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise and left the question of slavery in the new territories to popular vote. What followed was five years of organized violence — pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” from Missouri flooding Kansas elections, free-soil settlers arming themselves with “Beecher’s Bibles” (rifles), and John Brown executing five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856. “Bleeding Kansas” was not a metaphor. Roughly 200 people died. The territory became the nation in miniature, rehearsing the war that was coming. Kansas entered the union as a free state on January 29, 1861 — ten weeks before Fort Sumter.

After the Civil War, Kansas became the end point of the great cattle drives. The Chisholm Trail ran from Texas to Abilene, then to Wichita and Dodge City, and the cow towns that grew around the railheads created the Wild West mythology that Hollywood has never stopped recycling. Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday all passed through. By 1880, the cattle era was over — barbed wire, homesteaders, and the railroads had fenced the open range. Wheat farming replaced cattle. The winter wheat strains the Mennonite settlers brought from Russia transformed western Kansas into one of the most productive grain regions in the world.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka — the unanimous ruling that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The case had been filed by Oliver Brown on behalf of his daughter Linda, who was denied admission to a white elementary school seven blocks from their Topeka home. The decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and is regarded as the most important Supreme Court ruling of the 20th century. The school where Linda Brown was turned away still stands and is now a National Historic Site.

Kansas today is the breadbasket in full operation — the state produces enough wheat each year to provide every person on earth with six loaves of bread. Wichita’s aviation industry, built on the flat terrain and reliable winds, produced Cessna, Beechcraft, Learjet, and Boeing’s Spirit AeroSystems. The Flint Hills in the east hold the largest intact tallgrass prairie remaining in North America. The western High Plains sit above the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted by irrigation at a rate that will exhaust it within decades — a slow-motion crisis that threatens to turn the bread basket into the desert the early explorers imagined.