It’s all about Kansas you must know

"Abolition, prohibition, Populism and the Bull Moose, the exit of the roller towel, the appearance of the bank guarantee, the blue sky law—these things came popping out of Kansas like bats out of hell. . . . There is just one way to stop progress in America, and that is to hire some hungry earthquake to come along and gobble up Kansas."

William Allen White in the Emporia Gazette, April 25, 1922.

This is the Sunflower State. The seeds, brought from New Mexico on the muddied wheels of the freight wagons that lumbered up the Santa Fe Trail, flourished in the rich soil of Kansas, and today the garish yellow flowers grow wild all over the land. Sometimes they call it the Jayhawker State, but this is not so pretty a compliment, for the Jayhawker of the old days of "Bleeding Kansas" was a tough guerrilla, marauding and plundering in the good cause of anti-slavery, and named after a non-existent bird that was a cross between the quarrelsome blue jay and the fighting sparrow hawk. Kansans take pride in both titles, especially the second, as the nation knows from the famous college basketball yell, "Rockchalk, Jayhawk, K.U."

Kansans have been called many things, most frequently puritanical and pig-headed, but their essential quality is toughness. They took their name from the Kansas or Kaw Indians, and the word is variously translated as "smoky," "hazy," "south wind," or "swift water." But there is nothing hazy about the Kansas character. Theirs is the country of blizzards, cyclones, and border war; of badmen and bushwhackers, of gunslingers, first-draw champions, Dodge City, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp. Even if the last three were nothing like the supermen we see on television, that period took some living through. "Ad astra per aspera" is the state motto, and if Kansans have not yet reached the stars, they have surely endured rugged times.

Before Alaska and Hawaii entered the Union, the geographical center of the United States used to be at Lebanon. Tiny Lebanon (pop. 538 in 1960) is in the north-central part of the state.