Kansas: Free-State Fire, Tallgrass Prairie, and the 34th President
State #34 | January 29, 1861
Kansas is one of those states John and I have never visited.
If I am being honest, much of what I pictured came from The Wizard of Oz: flat farmland, threatening skies, a farmhouse caught in a tornado, and Dorothy desperately trying to get home.
But the real Kansas story is far more complicated—and much more interesting.
Long before Dorothy followed the Yellow Brick Road, Kansas stood at the center of a national fight over slavery. It became a place where formerly enslaved families came searching for freedom, where parents challenged segregated schools, and where a future president grew up in a modest family home.
Even the Kansas state motto seems to describe its history perfectly:
Ad astra per aspera—“To the stars through difficulties.”
The People of the South Wind
The Kansas story did not begin with pioneers traveling west.
The state takes its name from the Kanza, or Kaw, people. According to the Kaw Nation, their name is connected to the south wind, and they were known as the “Wind People.”
By the mid-1700s, the Kanza were the predominant tribe across much of what would become northern and eastern Kansas.
As settlers moved west, a series of treaties reduced the Kanza homeland from millions of acres to increasingly smaller reservations. In 1873, the Kaw people were forced from Kansas to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma.
A state whose history is so closely tied to freedom must also acknowledge the people whose land and freedom were taken away.
When a Vote Became a Battlefield
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act.
The law repealed part of the Missouri Compromise and allowed settlers in the new territories to vote on whether slavery would be legal—a policy known as popular sovereignty.
Congress may have hoped a local vote would settle the issue.
Instead, it turned Kansas into a battleground.
Pro-slavery settlers poured across the border from Missouri, sometimes arriving only long enough to influence an election. Anti-slavery settlers also moved into the territory, determined that Kansas would enter the Union as a free state.
Election fraud, intimidation, rival governments, competing constitutions, raids, and killings followed.
In May 1856, a pro-slavery force attacked Lawrence, destroying newspaper offices and burning buildings. Just days later, abolitionist John Brown and his followers killed five pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek.
The violence became known as Bleeding Kansas, and it offered the country a frightening preview of what was coming.
After years of political battles and bloodshed, Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. It became the nation’s 34th state less than three months before Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter and the Civil War began.
Kansas had chosen its side—but the struggle over freedom was far from finished.
A Free State Where Freedom Was Still Unfinished
After the Civil War, Kansas earned a reputation among formerly enslaved people as a place where they might own land and build lives of their own.
In 1877, African American settlers from Kentucky established the community of Nicodemus.
The first years were difficult. Families arrived to find an open prairie with few trees, limited supplies, and little shelter. Some reportedly lived in dugouts while they planted crops and began constructing homes, churches, schools, and businesses.
Nicodemus eventually grew into a thriving community with stores, hotels, churches, a bank, and a newspaper. Today, it is the oldest remaining Black settlement west of the Mississippi River.
But Kansas being a free state did not mean it was free from segregation or discrimination.
In 1950, the Topeka chapter of the NAACP organized 13 parents representing 20 children to challenge the city’s segregated elementary schools. Each family attempted to enroll a child in a nearby white school and was refused.
The resulting case was named for one of the parents, Oliver Brown.
On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that separate public schools were inherently unequal.
The former Monroe Elementary School, one of Topeka’s segregated schools, is now part of Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. Visitors can walk through the school while learning about the families, attorneys, students, and community members who helped change American history.
Kansas entered the Union fighting over freedom, and nearly a century later, Kansans were still helping the country define what freedom should mean.
The Prairie That Refused to Disappear
Kansas is often described as flat and empty, but the Flint Hills tell a different story.
Tallgrass prairie once covered approximately 170 million acres of North America. Today, less than four percent remains intact, much of it in the Kansas Flint Hills.
The rocky ground made large-scale plowing difficult, which helped preserve the native grasses when prairies elsewhere were converted into farms and cities.
At Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, visitors can explore nearly 11,000 acres of prairie, hike among native grasses and wildflowers, watch for bison, and tour the limestone buildings of the historic Spring Hill Ranch.
The scenery may appear simple at first—grass, hills, sky, and wind—but it changes with the light, weather, and seasons. It is also one of the few places left where visitors can begin to imagine what much of the central United States looked like before roads, towns, and farms transformed it.
Kansas is not empty.
You simply have to slow down long enough to see what is there.
State #34 Meets President #34
Kansas also gives us one of those historical coincidences that is too good not to mention.
Kansas was the 34th state, and the man most closely associated with Abilene, Kansas, became the 34th president of the United States.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was technically born in Denison, Texas, but his family returned to Abilene when he was about two years old. He grew up there with his five brothers and always considered Abilene home.
Following World War II, Eisenhower reportedly told a homecoming crowd, “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene!”
The Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home now occupies a campus in Abilene. Visitors can tour the family home, explore exhibits covering Eisenhower’s military and presidential careers, and visit the Place of Meditation, where Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower are buried.
Kansas cannot quite claim Eisenhower’s birthplace, but it can certainly claim the place that raised him.
And the State #34 and President #34 connection makes the story even better.
From the Prairie to the Stars
Kansas did not stop with one future president.
Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison in 1897 and spent much of her childhood there. She later became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Travelers can visit the house where she was born and explore the interactive Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum, which celebrates her life, accomplishments, and lasting influence on aviation.
Farther west in Hutchinson, the Cosmosphere takes the Kansas motto—“To the stars through difficulties”—in a wonderfully literal direction.
Its collection includes an SR-71 Blackbird and the restored Odyssey command module that carried the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth.
That is quite a leap from a little house on the prairie.
And Yes, There Is an Oz
Kansas may have a much deeper story than The Wizard of Oz, but it has not forgotten Dorothy.
The Oz Museum in Wamego contains thousands of artifacts related to L. Frank Baum’s books, the famous 1939 movie, and later versions of the story.
In Liberal, visitors can tour a restored 1907 farmhouse known as Dorothy’s House and follow a Yellow Brick Road through the Land of Oz.
There is even a yellow-brick sidewalk in Sedan containing more than 11,000 personalized bricks.
Kansas apparently decided that if generations of people were going to associate the state with Dorothy, it might as well have some fun with it.
Kansas Has More Than One Story
Before researching Kansas, I thought of wheat fields, sunflowers, tornadoes, and a girl wearing ruby slippers.
Now I see a state where some of America’s hardest questions were forced into the open.
It is the homeland of the People of the South Wind. It bled over the question of slavery, welcomed African American homesteaders searching for freedom, challenged segregated schools, raised the 34th president, preserved one of America’s last tallgrass prairies, and reached from aviation into space exploration.
Kansas may look flat in places, but its history is anything but.
And in Brock’s World, that’s the truth—with just enough Kansas wind to give it a twist. 🌻
