Leap into Industry in Kansas, Great land for agriculture

Altogether, Kansas has some 50 million acres of farmland and pasture, or about ninety-five per cent of the land area of the state. The leading crops include oats, barley, alfalfa, flax, soybeans, potatoes, and sugar beets, besides apples and other fruits. Farms are fewer but much larger (averaging 494 acres against the 160 that was the settlers' standard), and production has increased. Less than 150,000 persons are employed on the land, fewer than at any time since 1909. Machinery has taken over agriculture, and the whole of Kansas, too. Agriculture is now only the second most important earner. In a recent ten-year survey of personal income by the Kansas Industrial Development Commission, manufacturing payrolls come first—by nearly a billion dollars in the decade.

This fast-growing industrial empire includes more than 2,500 plants turning out a bewildering variety of things, ranging from jet bombers to paper cups. One-third of the more than 100,000 workers build airplanes and aircraft parts, both civilian and military. Among other products are cars, candy, plastics, rocket components, tugboats, storm and shower doors, and pipe organs.

Wheat ripening for harvest in Smith County. Thanks to new scientific methods of agriculture and soil conservation, farmers no longer dread the dust storms that desolated these prairies in the 1930's.

Oil rigs, topping 47,000 Kansas oil wells, rake the wide-open skyline of the south-central part of the state. Great Bend, on the Arkansas River, is known as the "oil capital in the heart of the wheat belt," and its Tenth Street has been called the oil artery of Kansas because so many petroleum firms are located there.

Ulysses, a small town in southwestern Kansas, is a natural gas center. These stripping plants serve the Hugoton gas field. Kansas ranks sixth in the nation in the production of natural gas. This region is also noted for onions and cantaloupe and honeydew melons, grown on irrigated land.

Another name of Kansas called Turkey Red

Kansas is the greatest of all this nation's wheat states. Skyscraper-tall grain elevators tower white across the vast landscape of the farmlands. The five-year average wheat production from 1957 to 1961 was more than 257 million bushels a year. In recent years production has exceeded 215 million bushels, or about one-fifth of all the wheat produced in the country. The vast seas of rippling gold that flood the Kansas prairies in June were originally sown in the 1870's, when German-speaking Mennonites from Russia came as immigrants, bringing with them a hard, drought-resistant winter wheat called Turkey Red—red from its color, and Turkey because it had originally come from that country.

This was just what Kansas farmers needed, for some of their winter wheat normally failed to survive, and corn was far and away their most important crop. But wheat did not outstrip corn in Kansas until the beginning of World War I, when more than 1 2 million acres of fresh land were brought under the plow. After that, wheat was king. Recently sorghums have come into the picture. Now Kansas produces more than 144,000 bushels of sorghum a year, from more than 3.7 million acres.

Vast grain elevators tower like sky-scrapers above the plain at Hutchinson, in south-central Kansas. This town of more than 37,000 people is the biggest primary wheat market in the nation, and it is built on top of a productive salt mine.

Pittsburg (unlike its big namesake in Pennsylvania, it has no final "h") is the center of important strip coal-mining operations in southeastern Kansas. Here a monster power shovel is stripping the earth from nearby coal beds. More than 600,000 tons of coals are mined in Kansas each year.

Marsh of the Swans the beautiful natural scenery of Kansas

Two main natural watersheds drain the land. In the northern portion of the state, the Kansas River with its more than ten important tributaries flows eastward; through the southern half runs the Arkansas River with its fan of tributaries, flowing in a southeasterly direction. Between them, in the east, a small area is drained by the Marais des Cygnes River (Marsh of the Swans), which used to be the Osage River but was, according to legend, renamed by Longfellow's Evangeline. The story is that Evangeline, abandoned by the British near the Canadian line, wandered with her French companions up the Missouri, came upon the Osage Indians and heard how Osa, a Potawatomi princess, and her sweetheart Coman, war chief of an enemy tribe, had fled in a canoe which sank in a flooded river. As the lovers drowned, two white swans rose from the spot. From a hill Evangeline supposedly spread her arms to the lovely valley of the winding Osage River and exclaimed, "C'est le marais des cygnes!" Local people pronounce this "Merry Deseen," and they have fought successfully to keep the poetic name against reformers who thought it too fanciful.

Kansas produces about one-fifth of the nation's total supply of wheat —and a huge wheat surplus. Here a combine harvester is reaping a bumper crop. Towering grain elevators store more than 700 million bushels of wheat.

A peaceful scene on the Kansas River. The 540-mile-long Smoky Hill River flows from Cheyenne County, Colorado, to join the Re-publican River (which rises in eastern Colorado) in Kansas; together they form the Kansas River.

The Sun Is King always in Kansas

Today, huge man-made lakes provide flood control reservoirs for the farmer and also wonderful recreational resorts for fishing, sailing, swimming, and water-skiing. A million acres of farmland, formerly parched by drought, are now green and fertile. Strategically planted trees conserve the soil.

Rainfall averages twenty-six inches a year; in the southeast, the norm runs as high as forty inches, but it is only fifteen inches towards the arid western border, and the western third of the state is one of the windiest inland areas of the nation. Tornadoes do occur, but no more frequently than in other plains states. Above all, Kansas is sunny: there are rarely more than 100 cloudy days in the year.

Kansas has few natural lakes, but man-made ones are enjoyed by vacation crowds in search of boating, swimming, water-skiing, and other summer sports. Here is Fall River dam and reservoir, between Eureka and Fredonia in the southeastern section of the state.

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.

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.