A Land Misjudged in Kansas – location and geographic

Fall all the States in the Union, this is the most misunderstood. It is supposed to be dead flat, and, by implication, dull and monotonous. People who have never been to Kansas think of it as a great rectangle with nothing in it but everlasting acres of wheat. True, it has no spectacular mountains, no natural lakes, and no really navigable rivers. But far from being flat, it climbs from 686 feet above sea level (on the Verdigris River where it crosses the line into Oklahoma in the southeast of the state), to 4,135 feet on the upland plain at the Kansas-Colorado border. Except for the northeast corner, where an irregular triangle is sliced off by the channel of the Missouri River, Kansas is an almost perfect rectangle, 411 miles east to west, 208 miles north to south, an area of 82,264 square miles, and so fourteenth state in size in the United States. Within its straight line borders the land varies from the smooth rolling vistas of lushly fertile eastern Kansas to the upland pastures of the Flint Hills, where the bluestem grass grows; then to surfaces marked by tremendous upheavals of the Ice Age in pinnacles and escarpments and canyons, and to the high, treeless plains of the west. It is bounded on the north by Nebraska, on the south by Oklahoma, on the east by Missouri, and on the west by Colorado.

The soil is rich everywhere: the yellow gold of wheat and the black gold of oil spring bountifully. But scarcity of water alternating with devastating floods plagued the country from its earliest days, until the disastrous droughts and dust storms of the 1930's threatened to turn all Kansas into one forlorn dustbowl. Only then did scientific control step in to fight the dangers of soil erosion and counter the destructive cycles of drought and flood.