1 | 2 Description (Page 1)
Kansas was once occupied by legions of Native American Indians; they raised their children and crops; hunted the tens-of-thousands of buffalo that roamed the vast plains, and for the most part, lived in peace.
Searching for gold and other treasures, the
Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado arrived here in 1540. He was followed in 1682 by the explorer La Salle, who promptly claimed the land for France.
Regardless of the claims of other nations, in the mid-1700s and very early 1800s, Kansas was still a wide-open Indian territory, and a land of great potential. When the
U.S. Purchased Kansas from France in 1803, as part of the
Louisiana Purchase, thousands of settlers from the east began flowing across this land.
Traveling the
Santa Fe and Oregon Trails west to the
Pacific Ocean, many pioneers, in search of a new life, found the wide-open spaces and farmable land here the perfect place to settle.
In this land of opportunity life was tough; Indians were being pushed into a corner as settlers grabbed their long-held land; fights broke out, and eventually forts (
I.E. Fort Hays, Fort Leavenworth, and Fort Dodge) were built to provide protection from the now (understandably) hostile Indians.
The Kansas Territory was formed in 1854, and soon serious disagreements over slavery erupted; pro and con forces clashed across the territory, ending in 1859 when a non-slavery constitution was finally approved.
Kansas Statehood
On January 29, 1861,
U.S. President James Buchanan signed a bill making Kansas the 34th state with the city of
Topeka as its capital.
America's Civil War soon began and this new state of Kansas sent thousands of its male population to help the Union defeat the southern Confederacy, and slavery.
The Civil War finally ended in 1865, and across
America the rebuilding process began. In Kansas, and in some other western states, the Native American Indians were now pressured to the point that violence was their only option; their historic lands were taken, and sadly they were no match for the country's military, and they faded into a tragic footnote of
American history.
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