Kansas

For centuries the tallgrass prairies of Kansas were home to the Kaw (Kansa), Osage, Wichita, and Pawnee peoples, who hunted bison across the Flint Hills long before European contact. Spanish and French claims gave way to American control after the Louisiana Purchase, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act triggered violent conflict between pro- and anti-slavery settlers known as 'Bleeding Kansas', a bitter prelude to the Civil War.

Kansas joined the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. In the following decades it became the endpoint of the great cattle drives from Texas, with railhead towns like Dodge City and Abilene earning Wild West notoriety for saloons, gunfights, and lawmen. Agriculture, especially wheat, soon replaced cattle as the state's economic backbone.

Today Kansas remains an agricultural powerhouse and a centre of aviation manufacturing around Wichita, while preserving vast stretches of native tallgrass prairie found almost nowhere else in the country. Its history of frontier grit, abolitionist struggle, and wide-open sky is woven into small museums and monuments across the plains.