Route Descriptions: Kansas

 (Courtesy of Mark Hansen)

The Great Plains encompasses most of the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, the eastern parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, the western part of Oklahoma, and the Panhandle and a little more of Texas. As you’ve already seen, it’s open, flat, and featureless. It has few trees, those mostly in river and creek bottoms. These days, the eastern parts are mostly agricultural, the western parts grazing land.

Its greatest significance is historical. It is the actual, historical West (as opposed to the Hollywood West), the land of the great buffalo herds, cattle ranches, and cowboys and Indians.

The parts we’re traveling through were the ranges of the Southern Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Pawnee, and other southern plains tribes. The tribes described as Sioux (Dakota and Lakota), the Northern Cheyenne, Arikara, Crow, and others were northern plains tribes in Nebraska, Montana, and the Dakotas. Their cultures of tipis, feathered war bonnets, beaded moccasins, buffalo hunts, sun dances, and mounted warfare are so iconic that they are the picture of the American Indian for Americans and foreigners alike, even though they are so unlike the Native peoples of other parts of the United States. John Ford may have placed the events of The Searchers in Monument Valley in Utah but the story is inspired by Cynthia Parker, a girl abducted in Texas in the 1830s and raised as Comanche, the mother of the great Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Dodge City and Larned are near two of the southern plains forts, Fort Dodge and Fort Larned, established to protect travelers and traders on the Santa Fe Trail. They each had a role in the Indian Wars of the late 1860s (Fort Larned more than Fort Dodge) that subdued the southern plains tribes and forced them onto reservations. The two forts are a few miles off the route.

Kansas was also the land of the cowtowns. Dodge City was the latest and most famous of all. (Others were Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita.) The cowtowns were railheads that moved west as the railroads did. They received herds of cattle driven north from Texas to Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita on the famous Chisholm Trail and to Dodge City on the Western (or Texas) Trail. The animals were then loaded onto rail cars and transported to meat packing centers like Kansas City, Omaha, and especially Chicago. The television Western “Gunsmoke,” with Marshall Matt Dillon and the dancehall operator Miss Kitty, was set in Dodge City (although filmed on a Hollywood lot).

Today, the southern Great Plains is still a center of meat production. After World War II, farmers in the region began to tap into the Ogallala Aquifer for irrigation. It’s a vast, ancient store of water held underground in sand at depths of 100 to 400 feet. The aquifer underlies most of Nebraska, the western third of Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. On what was once cropland used for wheat (or grassland used for pasture), farmers began to grow large quantities of corn and sorghum (called “milo” locally) for use as animal feed. They watered the crops with rotating 1300-foot pipes on wheels called “center-pivot sprinklers.” If you’ve flown over the region you’ve seen the thousands of “circles” from the air. The feed stocks attracted operators of cattle feedlots (which we saw near Dalhart), which acquire “feeder” cattle weighing around 500 lbs and feed them grain to bring them to market weight of about 1200 lbs in 200 or so days, much faster than on grass. In the 60s and 70s, the meat packing houses moved west to be near the cattle. It was more efficient to slaughter cattle near the point of production than to carry them hundreds of miles. Dodge City is now a major meat packing center. The workforce comprises large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and Vietnam. You can buy fish sauce and eat a good Vietnamese meal in Dodge City.

Most of the Great Plains and Kansas was settled after the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The act gave up to 160 acres (a half mile by a half mile) free and clear to settlers who lived on it and farmed it for a period of five years. (The government sold land to farmers or granted it to military veterans in states further east.) With few sources of timber, and limited availability of stone, many early settlers lived in houses with walls and roofs of sod or in “dugouts” - houses cut into the sides of hills and fronted and roofed with sod. The pioneers cut the sod from the prairie in big blocks 6 to 10 inches deep. In this semiarid region, the native buffalo grama has a deep root system that holds the sod together. My great-grandparents from Denmark homesteaded in northwest Kansas in the 1880s and my grandfather (with four siblings) lived with them in a two-room “soddie” from birth until his mid-twenties.

Now some notes on sights along the routes through Kansas.

Guymon to Liberal, Kansas: Of course you will see Dorothy’s House and the Yellowbrick Road in Liberal. The author of the Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, was a South Dakotan transplanted to Chicago. He never visited Kansas. The display moved to Liberal from Topeka in 1992. After many years of treating the film as an embarrassment - the Kansas scenes, you will recall, are in drab black and white while Oz is in brilliant technicolor - Kansas embraced it. At one point, the state’s tourism slogan was “Kansas: Land of Ahs.” In 2003, another museum of Wizard of Oz memorabilia, said the be the largest, opened in Wamego, all the way across the state in northeast Kansas. Before that, Liberal was best known for the International Pancake Race on Shrove Tuesday. Olney, England, has held such a race since 1445. In 1950, Liberal proposed making it an international competition between the two towns. Liberal has the largest helium production plant in the world, manufacturing the element from natural gas from the Hugoton Field to the west.  An early settler gave Liberal its name. He gave out water for free to travelers, causing them to remark that it was very “liberal” (generous) of him.

Liberal to Dodge City: Along the way to Dodge is Meade, Kansas, the county seat of Meade County. Both are named for Gen. George Meade, the commander of the Union Army at Gettysburg. Many of the counties in western Kansas are named for Civil War heroes. The Dalton Hideout belonged to a sister of the Dalton boys, Bob, Grat, and Emmett, train and bank robbers of the 1890s. They operated primarily in Oklahoma and Indian Territory but occasionally visited Kansas. Bob, Grat, and two other gang members died in 1892 when they tried to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas, 300 miles to the east, shot by enraged townspeople. In the Dalton Defenders Museum in one of the bank buildings, there is a huge enlargement of a famous photo showing the four dead gang members laid out on a plank sidewalk, a boy peering at them through a hole in a fence. Beneath it is a motto, “Crime Does Not Pay,” lest anybody miss the moral of the story. If there is one thing you should not miss in Kansas, however, it’s Front Street in Dodge City. It’s inauthentic, a later recreation, and campy in the extreme. You can visit saloons and a “tonsorial palace” (barber shop). You can see dancers perform in the dance halls and rough-and-tough cowboys and lawmen shoot it out on the street. You can also see the jail and Boot Hill Cemetery. The town burghers removed the remainder of the bodies of 30 or so men who “died with their boots on” (i.e., violently) in 1878. A local dentist recreated it in the twenties for a Rotary Club convention. The history behind it is real, however. Front Street took its name from its position facing the railroad. Dodge City was a wide-open town with every vice of interest to young men who have traveled hundreds of miles on horseback and now have money in their pockets. Some of the most famous lawmen in the West tried to keep the peace in Dodge City, including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. (By the time of the recreation, Dodge City was a staid little church-going farming town. The entire state was “dry,” even before and after Prohibition.) It’s right on the way to the hotel just after you turn left on Wyatt Earp Blvd.

Dodge City to Great Bend: Dodge City was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, which followed the Arkansas River through most of western Kansas. In Kansas, the name of the river is the Ar-Kansas, whatever anybody else might call it. East of town, but off the route, near Fort Dodge, there are wagon wheel tracks that can still be seen in the sod. Further on, between Larned and Great Bend, visible from the road, Pawnee Rock was a landmark for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. Many early travelers inscribed their names and the dates of their visits in the soft limestone. (Fort Larned is off the route, west of the town.) I haven’t visited the park by the SAG in Kinsley but I see that there is a sod house and a country church on the grounds along with the train. Great Bend takes its name from the bend in the Arkansas River. Northeast of town is Cheyenne Bottoms, a 64 sq mi natural wetland. It is an important habitat for migratory birds, including endangered whooping cranes. To the southeast is another wetland, the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, also an important stop on the Central States Flyway. Unfortunately, a friend in Great Bend tells me that teenagers no longer “drag Main” on the weekends. Another social ritual ruined by the Internet.

Great Bend to McPherson: The explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came though this area in 1541. He was searching for Quivira, which a Native informant named “The Turk” had said was fabulously wealthy. He found a settlement by that name, a group of two dozen villages, which recent archaeological evidence suggests were east and south of Lyons. Coronado found the Quivirans an admirably robust people but they were not extraordinarily rich. He had the Turk garroted for leading him on a wild chase. Coronado’s expedition into central Kansas was the furthest foray the Spanish explorers made into the North American continent. Lyons has a salt mine. There are many in this area. Some mine the salt by pumping water into the dome and then evaporating the brine. Some are underground mines that use the same equipment as coal mining (although in a much safer environment, salt deposits being geologically stable, dry, and non combustible). In Hutchinson, 20 miles southwest of McPherson, a salt mine offers tours, taking visitors through “rooms” created by blasting, crushing, and loading the salt. The mine is also a repository for the original film negatives of Hollywood films, including Ben-Hur and Gone with the Wind. The mine is dark, dry, and cool all the time, perfect for preservation.

McPherson to Emporia: The area east and south of McPherson was heavily settled in the late 19th century by German-speaking Mennonites from the Volga region of Russia. Catherine the Great had invited them (and Germans of other faiths) into Russia to introduce better farming practices. The pacifist Mennonites and other Volgadeutsch left Russia in droves when Tsar Alexander II revoked their exemption from the military draft in 1874. They brought along wheat seed, painstakingly selected. It was a variety of winter wheat, planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, hard, reddish brown, high in protein, perfect for bread flour. Turkey Red, as it was called, became the foundation for the wheat industry in Kansas and other states in the south and central plains. Along the highway east of McPherson you’ll see highway signs for the Mennonite towns of Hesston, Goessel, Moundridge, Newton, Hillsboro, and Peabody and a couple Mennonite heritage museums. The community still holds benefit auctions for their famous worldwide relief efforts. The quilts are particularly prized. As you ride east, farmland will give way to ranch land. This is the Flint Hills region, a band of high grassy hills 160 miles from north to south and 90 miles from east to west in Kansas and a bit of Oklahoma. They take their name from the flint embedded in the limestone hills. The Flint Hills are home to the greatest extent of tallgrass prairie remaining in the world. It used to cover a vast range of the prairie as far east as Illinois. Waist to shoulder high, the expanse of tall grass rolling in the wind brought to the minds of the early settlers the sea, a sea of grass. In most places, the pioneers plowed it under to plant crops but it kept a hold in the rocky soil of the Flint Hills. The ranchers use controlled burning to maintain the natural processes of regeneration. The hills are high and it will be a workout but the roll of the grassy hills is lovely and the vistas as beautiful in their own way as the Southwest’s. One of my favorite moments is the junction of Kansas 150 and US 50, coming out of the hills into the valley of the Cottonwood River, thickly lined by the trees that give the river its name. Off the highway (and route) ahead is Cottonwood Falls, a couple miles south of Strong City. The Chase County Courthouse there, from 1873, is a magnificent Second Empire structure of native limestone outside and native walnut inside. Emporia is on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills, which is the primary reason for its status as the gravel biking capital. (It also hosts a big disc golf tournament.) After Santa Fe and Flagstaff, it will seem lacking in things to do. The great figure of the town was the journalist William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette. In his day, the nineties to the forties, White was a significant figure in the Progressive Movement and the effort to aid Britain before US entry into the Second World War. His home is open for tours. You can also see a one-room schoolhouse on the campus of Emporia State University, originally the state teachers college. My high school classmate Kathie recommends two favorite restaurants, Casa Ramos at 4th and Merchant and Radius, a microbrewery at 6th and Merchant. If you don’t mind a trek, and can figure out transportation, Council Grove is 20 miles away. Nestled into the Flint Hills, it is a picturesque little place. It has 15 National Historic Sites. It was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail and a meeting point for emigrants to form wagon trains. The town takes its name from the meeting spot, a grove of trees on the trail under which settlers negotiated a treaty with the Osage Nation. Hays House, opened by the town’s founder as a trading post, is said to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi. The Kaw Mission State Historical Site presents the story of the mission where 30 boys of the Kaw (or Kansa) tribe attended school in the 1850s, an example of the numerous missions to Indian tribes in the region. (The Kansa, “People of the South Wind,” gave their name to the state.) The Post Office Oak was a mail drop for travelers to leave mail for pickup and take mail for delivery on the way toward their destination.

Emporia to Topeka: The route today travels the backroads through Lyon, Wabaunsee, and Shawnee Counties to Topeka, the capital of Kansas. The area was strongly influenced by the events leading up to Kansas’s admission to the union in 1861. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the ban on slavery in new states north of the southern border of Missouri, which had been part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Act set off a rush of migrants to Kansas Territory because it made the question of slavery the decision of the residents of the territory. Pro-slavery migrants moved across the border from Missouri, a slave state. Anti-slavery emigrants came all the way from New England and points in between. The area around Topeka was a free-state stronghold. 70 emigrants came from Connecticut to Wabaunsee County in 1855 and established what became known as the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church in the community of Wabaunsee, off the route. They were followers of the famous abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Supporters shipped rifles to them in boxes marked “Beecher’s Bibles,” to avoid suspicion during passage through Missouri, and the rifles themselves came to be known as “Beecher Bibles.” For five years, from 1854 to 1859, Kansas was the scene of violent conflict between supporters and opponents of slavery, most of which occurred to the east, nearer to the border. The territory became known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Rival legislatures met in pro-slavery Lecompton and anti-slavery Lawrence and Topeka. (Lecompton and Lawrence are immediately east of Topeka.) Rival conventions produced four different constitutions, three of which were either voted down in referendum or rejected by Congress. The fourth established Kansas as a free state with Topeka as its capital. In 1942, the regionalist painter John Steuart Curry executed a mural in the Capitol. Titled “Tragic Prelude,” it depicts the abolitionist fanatic and martyr John Brown, a Bible in one hand, a Beecher Bible in the other. In the background, a prairie fire rages, a tornado swirls, and soldiers in blue and gray struggle and die. Brown and his five sons lived in Kansas for three years and took a leading role in the violence. Another sign of the sentiments of the locale is the names of the counties. Lyon Co was originally Breckinridge Co, after the Kentucky politician and U.S. vice president who later served as a general in the Confederate army. Wabaunsee Co was originally Richardson Co, after an Illinois congressman who was a sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. During the Civil War, local residents and the state legislature found it intolerable to honor men who had acted so disgracefully. The county names also recall another aspect of the state’s history. Wabaunsee Co was named for a chief of the Potawatomi tribe. Shawnee Co bears the name of the another Indian tribe. Both nations were removed west to Kansas by treaties backed by force. They were later moved again to Indian Territory in modern Oklahoma. (Lyon Co’s namesake was a Union general who was the first general killed in the Civil War in a battle in Missouri.) Between Eskridge and Topeka, K-4 highway follows the route of the Southwest Trail, a connector between the Oregon Trail in Topeka and the Santa Fe Trail in Council Grove. The Board of Education of Topeka was the lead defendant in the landmark civil rights case, Brown v Board of Education. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that public schools segregated by law violated the the Constitution. Segregation was a matter of local option in Kansas and Topeka adopted the practice. In 1951, Oliver Brown filed suit challenging the policy. His daughter Linda, a third grader, was assigned to Monroe School, a Black elementary school a mile from their home, rather than all-white Sumner School, 7 blocks away. In 1992, the U.S. Congress made the Monroe School a National Historic Site commemorating the case. It is in the center of the city at 1515 SE Monroe St, about 6 miles from the hotel. Beyond its historical significance, the Monroe School is also a nostalgic step into the past for those of us who attended elementary school in the middle of the 20th century.

Topeka to St Joseph, Missouri: The important western trails all originated on the Missouri River around Kansas City. The Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail originated in Missouri in Independence, northeast of Kansas City, and Westport, south of the city (and now part of it) on the state line. The Oregon Trail hugged the south bank of the Kansas River until Topeka, when the wagons crossed on Pappan’s Ferry.  The crossing was just to the left of the Kansas Avenue Bridge, the CrossRoads route over the river. The route crosses the trail on Kansas Avenue at Crane Street, which goes under the bridge a block past First Avenue. The Pony Express originated in St Joseph, Missouri, today’s destination. Never a paying proposition, it operated for only 18 months before the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in October 1861 obviated the need for it. St Joe has a Pony Express Monument at 910 Frederick Avenue and a Pony Express Museum at 914 Penn St, both about 4 miles from the hotel. The next station was in Troy, Kansas, which is north of today’s route. The northeast corner of Kansas was glaciated, which explains the hills. The SAG is in Valley Falls, which takes its name from falls on the Delaware River. (The Delaware tribe (Lenape), whose origins were in the lower Delaware River Valley, were repeatedly relocated west, including to Kansas (on the way to Oklahoma).) The bridge over the river is a composite of two different truss designs and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Up the road, the little town of Nortonville was once a “sundown town,” from which African Americans were banned after sunset on peril of arrest and fine or worse. On the Missouri River, Atchison is the last town in Kansas. It was founded in 1854 after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on the instigation of Missouri senator David Atchison, who hoped to populate it with enough Missourians to make Kansas a slave state. (He was unsuccessful. By 1858, free-staters controlled the local government.) In 1863, Atchison became the eastern terminus of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad but in name only; the line from Topeka to Atchison was not completed until 1872. It was the birthplace and childhood home of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight in 1932. Her disappearance over the South Pacific while attempting to fly around the world in 1937 still fascinates lovers of mysteries. In Missouri, Lewis and Clark State Park has a lake that impressed the explorers by its vast flocks of geese when they passed by in 1804. Saint Joseph was founded as a fur trading post in the early 19th century. At the start of the Civil War, it was the west-most place accessible by rail. St Joseph is the birthplace of Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman elected governor (of Wyoming in 1925), the sex educator Shere Hite, and the rapper Eminem. It is best known, though, as the place of death of the outlaw Jesse James. In 1882, at 34, he was shot behind the ear by the “dirty little coward” Robert Ford as he stood on a chair to straighten a picture in his home. (The novelist Ron Hansen (no relation) wrote a book about them, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a marvelous exploration of the meaning of fame and notoriety and the relationship between them.) The house is open for tours, moved from its original location a couple blocks away to a site next to Patee House (1202 Penn St), the city’s historic hotel and the headquarters of the Pony Express. The hole from the bullet that killed the legendary outlaw is visible in the wall.