[Music] In 1776, while signing the Declaration of Independence, did the founders imagine that this new nation would extend across the continent and include at its heart the place that would be called Kansas?

[Music] In this episode of Cottonwood Connections, we are taking a look at the role and impact of the land that would be Kansas during the United States' first 250 years.

For this conversation, Don Rowlison visited with Leah Heskett and Adriane Falco, two ladies who pass along the story of the sunflower state as Kansas history teachers.

Since it's the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, what happened in Kansas at that time?

Because William Allen White once said, "Whatever happens, happens in Kansas first."

And then it spreads from there.

But today we have two instructors on opposite ends of the state, but we have Hoxie Ties, so I will ask you.

Sure.

I am originally from Hoxie.

I was born and raised here, attended Hoxie schools.

I went to Kansas State University and I currently live in Stillwell, Kansas.

And I teach 7th grade world geography and Kansas history in the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas.

And what about you, Mrs.

Heskett?

I'm a transplant.

I teach 7th and 8th grade history at Hoxie Junior Senior High.

What were your origins?

My origins are from North Dakota originally and then Colorado.

And then I came to Fort Hays to run track and go to college.

So the Northern Plains.

The definitely the Northern Plains.

So we have a lot of common history with the Plains.

And there's a lot of things that happened before 1776 in the New World, as they called it.

It always gets me that Columbus discovered the New World and yet people have been living here in the central part for over 13,000 years.

And so it wasn't all that new.

It was just new to those people.

And in 1541 we had the first Spanish intrada coming in with Coronado coming in, looking for the seven cities of gold in Kansas, which he didn't find.

But that was the first time that history was written about Kansas because the indigenous people or the Native Americans may have had a written language that there's none we can interpret.

And so the people with Coronado, being a military expedition, they had to keep records.

Like we say, we had the Spanish flag coming in with Coronado.

We had the French flag flying over Kansas.

And we had the Mexican flag after Mexicans got their independence from Spain.

So here we have three different countries holding this.

The other thing was El Quartelejo, which is in Scott County, southwest of here.

That was a hub of a lot of activity with the Puebloan Indians, the Plains Apache, and also both the Spanish and the French coming in.

So there and who am I going to pick on?

So what happened after that?

What came up to the 1776?

I mean, really, I think overall it's just important for us to remember that Kansas really has been at the center of a lot of transformative things that have happened in American history as a whole, from indigenous peoples being in state to being a battleground for slavery to moving into civil rights and ultimately becoming an agricultural powerhouse.

So I think at each phase from 1776 of American history, Kansas has really been very much so part of the experience and part of the story.

I'm thinking at the beginning of the 1800s when you've got this idea, you know, we have the Louisiana Purchase, Louis the Clark have made their way, now we start to have this idea of Westward expansion and manifest destiny.

And for me, that's a good starting point for my students.

Yeah, and I think at the beginning of the 19th century, the first date that I remember in history is the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804.

You know, I'm biased towards them.

They did a good job.

They were the first ones that recorded the first archaeological site in the state because they saw the remnants of Fort Cavagnial, sixty years before that the French had started and one of the Kanza villages.

They recognized the remnants of that.

And I think with Louis and Clark in their journals, it shows the kids that you do need to document things and those are primary sources and we can use those, even though spelling is a little inventive in one of them, but it shows them how important it is to write things down.

And in the journals with the radium of what they had written, I mean, the language that isn't good.

No, and they're great to read.

I mean, the kids love reading them.

They're just doing the job.

In 1806, Zebulon Pike came through and he was talking about the great American desert.

And he did come through this area.

Following that was the Say party in 1819.

They had scientists with them and stuff and they talked about the Kanza village, which currently was east of Manhattan.

And they made sketches of that and that was the first sketches of an earth lodge.

In the 1840s, Fremont came through and so he did stuff too.

But both Pike and Fremont and also with the Long party, they talked about the great American desert.

It's contrasting that with Coronado.

Coronado came in and his record show is he went into southwestern Kansas and his description was how green and verdant everything was.

And all the cattle that were grazing and the cattle were bison to him.

So because he didn't know what they hadn't seen bison.

He came up through the Sonoran desert through the Texas panhandle and was seeing all this grim country.

It's all relative and all of a sudden the grass is here.

There's buffalo here and there's rolling hills and just beautiful running water, which he wasn't used to seeing.

So there's they saw the same country, but totally different opinions.

And as far as exploration trails, I know that's a big one for my students because in the eastern side of the state, we have places like the Mahaffey farmstead or Grinter farms where they can go visit.

They can see what it was like to have a working ferry to try to get people across or a stop on the Santa Fe Trail.

And as it is close to them and it does make sense to them, they've often taken field trips to these places.

And so that starts to really make a connection for them of people and different types of people in the part of the state.

And where you are with the military road of Highway 69, going from Fort Leavenworth down to Fort Scott and then on down in Oklahoma.

So you have this military mixed in too.

Right.

And Fort Scott really has been really informative to students because it lasted for a while.

Well, in Fort Scott, Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth are really to guard the trails and to hold the settlers back.

But Fort Scott was unique in as much as they had is both pre-Civil War during Civil War and lasted a short time afterwards.

So the trade routes did go through and the transportation, yeah, Santa Fe Trail gets a lot of color too, but it is a trade route.

The Oregon Trail went through Northeastern Kansas.

They had travelers.

They went on.

Only for about 100 miles or something like that.

During this period of explorations and trails, maps marked the area as Indian territory.

This changed as Kansas moved towards status as a territory itself and eventually a state, a hotly contested progression.

I have my students do a scavenger hunt within our text about what are the highlights?

What are some things that led it to it?

Because Bleeding Kansas wasn't just one big event.

It was several that built upon each other.

Right.

And so starting with the Missouri Compromise, going with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the idea of popular sovereignty was something that was practiced and it was you got to decide by vote whether where you were living was going to be pro-slavery or anti-slavery.

During this time, people were coming across state lines from Missouri and other states or Massachusetts or anywhere else and were being asked to come out to try to sway the vote one way or another.

And then you have guerrilla warfare taking place on both sides of the state line.

You have abolitionists coming from all over the country.

You have Lawrence, which is primarily an anti-slavery town.

You've got the New England Immigrant Aid Society bringing people in.

And so then you have other groups that are pro-slavery really taking aim at some of these places.

You have several times where Lawrence is burned and Quantrill's raid in which they killed almost 200 men and boys and burned half the town.

On the flip side of it, you've got anti-slavery abolitionists coming in and you see this large fanatic figure of John Brown that is becoming more of a national figure than just isolated to Kansas.

And once it gets to the point where, okay, we've got to write a constitution that needs to be accepted by the government to be able to become a state and you can't get anyone in the area to agree on that.

You have four different constitutions before something is actually decided upon.

One of the things I loved about our constitution though was that it was anti-slavery.

That was one of the big things.

And another thing that I really like to get students to focus on too is women right away in this constitution have the right to own land, have the right to vote in a municipal election which ultimately leads to another "It happened here first" with Susana Salter being elected as the first female mayor in the entire country right here in Kansas.

But when something is finally decided upon, then the application for statehood to be anti-slavery ultimately wins and that is when Kansas as a state in the union, we know it begins.

Then it erupts into a national issue.

So Kansas really was the stage, the first battleground for the Civil War in the United States and again it's one of those it happened here first.

Right?

We were the first to really kind of show the rest of the nation what this could look like and how big of a conflict this is really going to be.

But conflict in the area was not limited to a question of slavery.

The Indian wars were very important but then after the Civil War they found out that the Plains Indians primarily lived on the bison, the buffalo, the meat.

That's where their supplies were and they could live on it.

So actually the government were subsidizing the buffalo hunters by giving them ammunition and sometimes rifles to kill the buffalo.

So if you kill the people's food supply then you have them defeated.

It would be like us today if somebody came through and destroyed all our wheat fields and corn fields and tore up irrigation wells.

I mean you're kind of miffed and so you did put up a big fight.

Once they cleared the plains of the commissary and centralized those groups and put them on reservations it really opened it up for settlement.

I think this is a really sad part for our students to learn is that yes there were treaties made between tribes that were still able to be in Kansas and the government and those treaties never really followed through with and kept changing eventually until it was that indigenous tribes were pushed out and moved somewhere else.

To move those a lot of the different tribal groups in from the east in the 1820s and then they had big lands, big reservations with outlets, well Euro-Americans would come in and want that land.

So they would squeeze them out and squeeze them out and squeeze them out so there was nothing left.

And it just continued and continued.

It is a really harsh reality I think for students to really grasp.

It does allow us to continue talking about ushering in how Kansas really starts changing and its landscape from there but it's a harsh reality I think for students to really try to grasp.

So post-Civil War you have alright you have Civil War vets that are taking advantage of the Homestead Act.

You have just opportunity for anyone.

You have women that could possibly make a go of it.

And so just that last grab to have a part of the American West that is yours.

But even during Bleeding Kansas too when you talk about so-called unregistered voters, the homesteading was the same way.

You had no identification, no social security number, no picture driver's license and you could be anybody you wanted and there was no way they could prove you wrong.

So you could homestead a lot of places by using a different name.

But how awesome that there was the opportunity.

I mean if you were someone who there was no land for you to farm or there was no nothing that you had but you had skill.

Along with this you have this large wave of immigrants from Europe.

It's being advertised in Europe.

Come here, come live here.

So you see different cultural groups moving over and settling together.

But on the flip side you have emmigration within the United States.

You have people that are just moving west for the opportunity in itself.

And then you have the Exodusters as well that came to Nicodemus.

So it allowed for African Americans to come settle this area as well.

Several different parts of Kansas.

Southeast Kansas as well.

And you have the Potato King, Junius G. Groves.

Have you heard of him?

No.

I hadn't either.

Oh he was a millionaire.

Growing potatoes.

Very interesting time.

What I love about this though is that now we have photographs that right in this time in history.

You know Civil War and after that are really capturing what it's like, what those original settlers are looking like.

What their farmstead looked like.

And when I show students those pictures of this is a windmill and they had to dig this well themselves.

And this home was built out of dirt and this is how they made it.

It just kind of highlights the perseverance of these young Kansans.

And I really think it's a super pivotal point in when we think about who we are as Kansans and how there still are so many descendants of these early settlers that are all over the state.

So with your ancestors, Joseph Conard was buried in the Studley Cemetery and he was with the I think 11th volunteer Pennsylvania Cavalry.

You know that more than I do.

Yeah but I do know Joseph and Phoebe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting too because I show a picture of my family to students too.

And it's like oh my gosh there's so many children.

These families are large.

Well it did take a lot to, it took manpower to make this happen.

You didn't have the technological advances in agriculture and things like that that you do today.

You know and also the reality for those students who are involved in agriculture, you're not having large acreage to farm.

You are having just a few and you're planting and it takes a day to get through a certain amount and it was not incredibly lucrative.

You were just there trying to make it work.

To consider Western Kansas there were no resources.

Okay, you didn't, how do you get stuff out here?

There weren't any rivers to bring them in steamboats.

And if you were lucky and were profitable and grew excess crops you couldn't sell them here.

The railroads really changed the whole look at it.

Was it Thomas Jefferson that thought it would be 300 years before we could connect across the entire country and it was done in a matter of months, right?

And so just the building of the railroad itself is an interesting story.

It's kind of an eye opener of okay this is really what started settling the West.

This is really what made it possible.

This is also the time where I see with this immigration and with railroads and expatriates really when agriculture starts to become more dominant as the, I mean it's always been agricultural but this is now a large industry here.

Kansas is agriculture.

It is agriculture, always has been.

As the state was settled and agriculture became dominant by the beginning of the 1900s, challenges arose economically and politically.

We've got an issue with our economy nationally and we're looking at some things that are happening on the national and world stage that is causing a lot of inequity within people in the United States.

But you start to see this like getting together of farmers, of people in the Great Plains who are saying hey we have some ideas, we're not as dumb as you think we are, here's what we would like to see.

Where we have this populist movement start to begin with the bi-middle standard and things that income tax reform things like that that they're trying to get pushed through.

So we start to see that hey you've got this group of people right here in the state that you live in that ended up forming the largest third party movement in the history of the United States.

And there were prominent politicians going to Washington with the populist party and stuff and here in the state at the same time people were organizing such as a Grange which was farmers and stuff.

But the Grange was responsible say starting in the 1920s in this side of the state of having the cooperatives.

And so these farmers could get together and they could buy in volume and get cheaper things and they had the power to get quality stuff at the time, really good quality stuff.

Yeah so now you've got one generation of farmers that have altered prairie into now fields for planting.

There's more mechanization due to industrialization in the United States at the turn of the century so now you've got farm equipment that is allowing you to plant more or plant faster or to till.

And then World War I ushers in and hey what can Kansas do?

We can win the war with wheat.

Yeah win the war with wheat, feed Europe.

Yep our governor was giving this slogan.

Even schools were adjusting this.

They were allowing students to go home during harvest times.

You shouldn't be in school.

You should be at home helping to harvest.

You're feeding the world for a cost.

Right, right.

And ultimately we know looking back in history that this cost a lot of environmental issues.

But at the time you've got to set that stage of this was the mentality during World War I in Kansas if you were on a farm.

And then after that the 1920s were tough.

The markets kind of collapsed in a way so it was that idea you farm more land, you create more crops to make up for the loss of price.

You produce more.

And that caused a lot of surplus.

And of course with the torn up land and then the dust bowl years hit in the 1930s with the stock market crash on top of that with the economic depression.

For sure.

So coming out of the Great Depression World War II, this is where we kind of go back to those forts in my classroom a little bit about it.

Kansas was a really great place to be able to train military personnel.

But that's where I think as another connection that students have is in Kansas you were training those people that were ultimately being sent overseas.

This period also ushered in Kansas' reputation as the air capital.

So you're starting to see the rise of more industrialization in the aviation industry.

And air transportation, air mail.

But Wichita was a great spot to be the air capital of Kansas.

I mean you're looking at a really great midwest work ethic, the people that you're putting into your manufacturing and your factories.

And it did in World War II, especially with Rosie the Riveter and stuff, got women indirectly into the war service.

And so you had some of these groups that were just flying planes to deliver them all over.

And the men were gone, so Rosie the Riveter stepped in and had all these women working on the airplanes in the manufacturing.

Following World War II we see Kansas on the main stage in the United States as a whole.

We see Eisenhower a Kansan in office starting in 1953.

We have the Brown versus Board case that is the tipping point of the Supreme Court case that eventually ends segregation in education right here in Kansas.

Well the 60s were an upheaval, Vietnam was going on.

And that's another separate thing.

When the veterans of Vietnam came back to Kansas they were mostly accepted.

When I got home, thanks for serving.

And they fit in really well with the rest of the population.

And so, but then too with the 60s coming in you still had that so-called hippie element.

I wasn't a hippie because I was from western Kansas.

But anyway it made a vast improvement in the culture.

It sure did.

It enlightened a lot of people to do things a little bit differently.

During this time in the 60s and 70s you start to see some of that change really forming some of those, I think politicians like Bob Dole, this is where some of those ideas start to form who he was at his core that lasted decades later.

And not just him but also within everyday Kansans.

Yeah Dole was a big influence on a lot of stuff.

He was a Russell native, horribly wounded in World War II and came back and had a great law practice and got into the politics and he just had a lot of respect.

And he was a very personal person.

Kansans and Nebraska have always been grassroots people.

You could do anything you wanted if you tried.

Bob Dole, a good example from the small town of Russell became a senator.

Arlen Spector.

Yes.

He ran from Pennsylvania.

He went to Pennsylvania but he had Kansas roots.

And you think of people like Alf Landon that had it.

His daughter Nancy Landon Kassabaum did the same thing.

And so there's a certain thing with the culture of Kansas that makes you work and makes you look at other places.

A big variety of people from a whole lot of places.

In my opinion Kansas has a really good balance of its past and its progress.

I think that always at the surface of anything moving forward in Kansas is its past.

It's always directly beneath and we're building on it.

And ultimately I think that Kansas' unique personality really has a lot to offer the United States as a whole.

I think that we're definitely a big part of it and that we are an integral part of the story of how America is today.