Kansas River

“ The precise position of that part of the line passing through the middle of the mouth of the Kansas river, which lies north of the missouri, is unknown, but it is believed to run almost parallel with the course of the stream, so as to leave a narrow strip of land, varying in breadth from 15 to 30 miles. Great calamities are to be feared from the Indians on the frontier. ”

“ What followed makes one of the sacred memories a man does not often put into print.
We wanted to be alone, so we left the noisy hotel and strolled out toward the higher level beyond the town. There was only brown prairie then stretching to the westward and dipping down with curve and ravine to the Kaw River on the one side and the crooked little Shunganunga Creek on the other. Away in the southwest the graceful curve of Burnett's Mound, a low height like a tiny mountain-peak, stood out purple and hazy in the October sunlight. ”

“ So that, if the extreme rule of the common law were enforced, Oklahoma, having the same right to insist that there should be no diversion of the stream in Kansas for the purposes of irrigation that Kansas has in respect to Colorado, the result would be that the waters, except for the meager amount required for domestic purposes, would flow through eastern Colorado and Kansas of comparatively little advantage to either state, and both would lose the great benefit which comes from the use of the water for irrigation. The drainage area of the Arkansas river in Colorado is 26,000 suqare miles ”

“ Across the plains of Colorado and Kansas the channel of this river is very shallow, in some places the banks being less than five feet above low water, and the channel at least three-quarters of a mile in width. The stream in Colorado is almost entirely diverted to the irrigation of lands alongside, and the sandy wastes thus watered have been made veritable garden spots. This wholesale diversion of the water by that state was the cause of much complaint on the part of property owners and others along the river in Kansas who suffered considerable loss and inconvenience from the river going dry. ”

“ The Kansas River is formed just southwest of it by the union of the Smoky Hill and Republican Forks, and the topography for practice and sightseeing could not be surpassed in the State. Five miles of macadamized streets, 150,000 feet of stone and gravel walks, six miles of sewers, four miles of water and steam heating pipes, leading to every room of each of the sixty buildings, make up the equipment, which is, of course, of the highest quality throughout. All the stone is quarried on the reservation, and is of lasting variety, and makes buildings which bear a truly substantial appearance. ”

“ Add further the fact that the rainfall in Colorado is less than that in Kansas, and it would seem almost certain that reliance upon mere cultivation of the soil would not have anything like the effect in Colorado that it has had in Kansas, and that the barrenness which characterized portions of the territory of Colorado would have continued for an indefinite time unless relived by irrigation.
Turning to Kansas, the counties along the Arkansas river, commencing from the Colorado line, are: Hamilton, Kearney, Finney, Gray, Ford, Edwards, Pawnee, Barton, Rice, Reno, Sedgwick, Sumner, Cowley. ”

“ On the contrary, it distinctly asserts that the Arkansas river is not now and never was practically navigable beyond Fort Gibson in the Indian territory, and nowhere claims that any appropriation propriation of the waters by Kansas or Colorado affects its navigability.
It rests its petition of intervention upon its alleged duty of legislating for the reclamation of arid lands; alleges that in or near the Arkansas river, as it runs through Kansas and Colorado, are large tracts of those lands; that the national government is itself the owner of many thousands of acres ”

“ The Wakarusa River rises in the eastern edge of the Flint Hills and flows approximately 50 miles in an easterly direction and empties into the Kansas River near Eudora; with its tributaries, the Wakarusa drains 458 square miles in parts of Wabaunsee, Shawnee, Osage, and Douglas counties of northeastern Kansas (Fig. 1) . The average gradient is 6.3 feet per mile. Turbidity is consistently more than 100 ppm in the lower portions of the mainstream and major tributaries, but is usually lower in the upper portions of tributaries. ”

“ Whenever land can be reclaimed for agriculture or grazing on the flanks of the mountains and in the protected valleys and parks, it is done, so that the district has extensive irrigation canals, in some parts diverting practically all the available flow of water in the streams. This is particularly the case with the Upper Arkansas River, such diversion of the headwaters 464 in Colorado having robbed the river of its water to such a degree that the people of Kansas, whither it flows on its route to the Mississippi, are greatly annoyed and have protracted litigation about it. ”

“ Sand-bottomed Streams.—The Big Blue and Little Blue rivers represent this kind of stream. The bottoms of these rivers consist almost entirely of fine sand; nevertheless, their channels are primarily deep and fairly uniform in width, rather than broad, shallow, and braided as in the larger Kansas and Arkansas rivers in Kansas (Plate 11, Fig. 1) . In the Big Blue River, gravel occurs rarely on riffles, and gravel-rubble bottoms are found below dams (Plate 11, Fig. 2) . The Big Blue flows over a larger proportion of gravelly bottom than does the Little Blue. ”

“ The railroad route from Leavenworth down to the Kansas River at Lawrence certainly passed through nothing but farms and settlements, and on up the Kansas to the Smoky Hill Fork at Junction City all the country was farms, farms, farms, punctuated by towns and cities. ”

“ The glory of the new year, the fresh sweet air, the spirit of budding life, set the pulses a-tingle with the very joy of being. Like a dream of Paradise lay the Neosho Valley in its wooded beauty, with field and farm, the meadow, and the open unending prairie rolling away from it, wave on wave, in the Maytime grace and grandeur. Through this valley the river itself wound in and out, glistening like molten silver in the open spaces, and gliding still and shadowy by overhanging cliff and wooded covert. ”

“ In Kansas, a few ridges, mainly (I believe) of lime, rise to the surface; beyond these, and near the west line of the new State, stretches a thin-soiled, rolling sandstone district, perhaps forty miles wide; then comes the Buffalo range, formerly covering the entire valley of the Mississippi, and even stretching fitfully beyond the Rocky Mountains, but now shrunk to a strip hardly more than one hundred and fifty miles in width, but extending north and south from Texas into the British territory which embosoms the Red River of the North. ”

“ The country along the shores is comparatively little cultivated, the constantly washing power of the water keeping back any active efforts for agricultural improvements. A great number of quite respectable towns are met with along the river, as Alton, Washington, Jefferson, Booneville, Lexington, Independence (starting point for California, Oregon and Texas) then, Kansas and last St. Joseph. The Kansas River coming from the West, separates Missouri from the Indian Territory, the latter still peopled by the Indians as their last and only resting place in this country. ”

“ The water which flows in the river from Colorado into Kansas furnishes the principal and almost the entire supply of water for the underflow of the valley, and at its normal height the underflow is of great and lasting benefit to the bottom lands, both as to those which abut on the river and as to those which do not; and is of great benefit to the people owning and occupying such lands, 'for that it furnishes moisture sufficient to grow ordinary farming crops in the absence of rainfall, and furnishes water at a moderate depth below the surface for domestic use and for the watering of animals. ”

“ Wind movement is great; Flora (1948:6) states that south-central Kansas ranks close to some of the windiest inland areas in the United States.
The area has been periodically subjected to droughts and floods. Such phenomena are of special interest to ichthyological workers in the area. At the time of this study drought conditions, which began in 1952, prevailed. Even in this period of drought, however, flooding occurred on Grouse Creek and water was high in Big Caney River after heavy local rains on the headwaters of these streams on June 22, 1956. ”

“ Kansas clearly has failed to prove that there was a single channel of the river which gradually moved over to the farthest erosion point, meanwhile accreting this land to her soil, then suddenly moved back, either in 1917 or in 1927, to a new channel cut through the accreted soil. Only by accepting the evidence given by the few witnesses who supported this theory, which was contradicted both by the weight of her own evidence concerning island formation and by substantially all that was offered for Missouri, could a finding in Kansas' favor be made under the theory of accretion and avulsion. ”

“ Quitting the river bottom, the road ran along the uplands, over a rolling country, generally in view of the Kansas from eight to twelve miles distant. Many large boulders, of a very compact sandstone, of various shades of red, some of them of four or five tons in weight, were scattered along the hills; and many beautiful plants in flower, among which the amorpha canescens was a characteristic, enlivened the green of the prairie. At the heads of the ravines I remarked, occasionally, thickets of saix longifolia, the most common willow of the country. ”

“ He had what the latter-day students of psychology call "poise," a grip on himself. It is by such men that the Plains have been won from a desert demesne to fruitful fields.
"I gave you warning it was no boy's play," he said simply.
I nodded and we rode on in silence. We pressed westward to where the smaller streams combine to form the Republican River. The trail here led us up the Arickaree fork, a shallow stream at this season of the year, full of sand-bars and gravelly shoals. ”

“ Along the lower bank of the Republican Fork, where the new settlers now found themselves, the country is gently undulating. Bordering the stream they saw a dense growth of sycamores, cottonwoods, and birches. Some of these trees were tall and handsome, and the general effect on the minds of the newcomers was delightful. After they had emerged from the woods that skirted the river, they were in the midst of a lovely rolling prairie, the forest on the right ”

“ Aside from this river advantage, if one studies the course of streams and the incline of the land in a wide circle to the westward, he is impressed with the fact that the natural business drainage of a vast area is Kansas City. ”

“ In Kansas, outcrops of Pennsylvanian and Cretaceous age occur along the extreme eastern and western sides of the Big Blue River Basin, respectively, whereas Permian beds (overlain by Pleistocene deposits) occur throughout most of the remainder of the watershed (see Moore and Landes, 1937) . The Big Blue and Little Blue rivers and their tributaries have deeply incised the Permian beds of the Flint Hills in Kansas, exposing limestones and shales [406] of the Admire, Council Grove, Chase, and Sumner groups (Wolfcampian and Leonardian series) (Walters, 1954:41-44) . ”

“ This is a point on the Kansas bluffs about a mile or a mile and a half below the mouth of Wolf Creek. The current, striking this rock with force, was thrown over to the north or Missouri bank.
The soil composition of the north bank is a common formation in the Missouri River valley. Underneath the surface soil is sand or quicksand. This is covered by a layer of gumbo soil. Testimony in the record discloses there is no great erosion when the water is very high or very low. ”

“ More than three fourths of these Kansas bottom lands were and are occupied by persons owning or leasing them, and residing thereon with their families; and more than two fifths, including more than two fifths of those on the river bank, are and have been for years in actual cultivation, with an agricultural population of more than 50,000, raising all products 'common to the latitude and climate,' while numerous cities, towns, and villages are situated on the bank of the river, including ten county seats, with an aggregate population of over 50,000. ”