Wichita, Kansas

“ Abilene was abandoned, yet a rival to Wichita had sprung up at Ellsworth, some sixty-five miles west of the former market, on the Kansas Pacific Railway. The railroads were competing for the cattle traffic, each one advertising its superior advantages to drovers, shippers, and feeders. I was impartial, but as Wichita was fully one hundred miles the nearest, my cattle were turned for that point.
Wichita was a frontier village of about two thousand inhabitants. We found a convenient camp northwest of town, and went into permanent quarters to await the opening of the market. ”

“ When the Santa Fe Railway was built, Wichita, being farther south, became the chief shipping point. As the country became more thickly settled the cattle trade was pushed farther west. Finally it reached Dodge City which remained the shipping center 159 for many years. The building of railroads into the Southwest made it unnecessary for the Texas cattlemen to drive their stock to a Kansas shipping point, and about 1885 the practice was abandoned. While the trade flourished, the cowboy, with his boots and spurs and broad-brimmed hat, was a familiar figure on the plains of western Kansas ”

“ Today Wichita is served by six trunk lines, reaching into Western Kansas, Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico.
The development of Wichita in the last ten years has been many-sided. Perhaps its most important growth has been in the live stock and grain markets. In 1912, 14,465 cars of grain came to the Wichita market and 10,759 cars of live stock were received at the Wichita Union Stockyards. Wichita is the largest broom corn market 3 in the United States, parts of Oklahoma and Western Kansas being peculiarly adapted for the growth of broom corn. ”

“ Reference has been made to the settlement of the Wichita in the country of the Wichita mountains in the present Oklahoma, after having occupied the so-called Quivira country of Kansas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further evidence of the connection of the Wichita-Tawehash people with the Jumano is afforded as late as 1844 by Josiah Gregg, who was engaged in the Santa Fé trade and was personally familiar with the plains and their aboriginal occupants. ”

“ Upon this ground they insist that the bill should have been, and must be now, dismissed for want of jurisdiction and without any inquiry into the other issues of law and fact. The original bill set out two grounds of jurisdiction, first that of diverse citizenship, and, second, that the case arose under the federal Constitution in that the order violated the contract clause of the federal Constitution, and also the Fourteenth Amendment. The intervention of the Kansas Company, a citizen of the same state as the Wichita Company, its opponent, did not take away the ground of diverse citizenship. ”

“ KANSAS, Sedgwick County, Wichita, Wichita Wholesale Grocery Company, 619 E. William St. (08/11/83)
KENTUCKY, Kenton County, Covington, Wallace Woods Area Residential Historic District, Roughly bounded by 24th St., Glenway, Wallace, and Madison Aves. ”

“ He is an extensive shipper to all parts of the United States. His reputation as a breeder is firmly established among cattle men all over the country. He is almost sure of one or two first prizes whenever he enters his cattle in a fair. Mr. Gigstad also has a fine three acre orchard. He is a hard working man and has succeeded despite great handicaps, and his financial success has not caused him to neglect the welfare of his county, as he has always been active in supporting measures for the good of Atchison county. ”

“ Ole Gigstad attended school in Norway, but when he sailed for America he could not speak the English language, and when he arrived here he was in debt to the extent of fifty dollars, which was an additional handicap. But his industry has brought him to the front rank of Atchison county farmers. He owns a fine herd of graded stock and is a successful farmer and stockman. He rented eighty acres additional in 1915 and he had 100 acres in corn last year. ”

“ When one thinks of Atchison it is only natural to refer to the city as the home of Balie Waggener, who is indisputably grouped among the prominent and widely known figures who have shed fame and luster upon their home city. A leading attorney, statesman, progressive citizen, builder, farmer and stockman, friend of all children, capitalist, and public benefactor are some of the terms which might be applied to him without fear of contradiction from the mass of the people who know him best. ”

“ She was born in 1866. Her parents are natives of Norway and her father was an early settler of Atchison county. Mr. and Mrs. Gigstad have eleven children: Anna Flattre, of Lancaster township; Mrs. Julia Henz, of Lancaster, Kan.; Harry, Clara, Gena, Gilbert, Matilda, Lillian, Gladis, Carl, Charles, all living at home. Mr. Gigstad is a Republican and a member of the Lutheran church.
ALBERT BARNES HARVEY. The memory of a good and noble man lingers long after his demise in the hearts and minds of those who knew him best. ”

“ The first permanent white settler of what is now Atchison county was a Frenchman, Paschal Pensoneau, who, about 1839, married a Kickapoo Indian woman and about 1844 settled on the bank of Stranger creek, near the present site of Potter, where he established a trading-house and opened the first farm in Atchison county on land which had been allotted him by the Government for services in the Black Hawk and Mexican wars. ”

“ I speak of the future thus confidently, because, after all, the richest heritage of Kansas is the imperial manhood of its citizenship. No State in the Union, no country in the world, can boast of a braver or more intelligent, enterprising, liberty-loving, and law-respecting population. From the date of its organization up to the present time, Kansas has been receiving the best blood and brain of the civilized world. Hither, thirty years ago, came thronging a host of bright and generous men, to protect this fair land against the aggressions of slavery. ”

“ Thousands of the men and women who came into Kansas in their wagons and drove across the unfenced plains are still among us, but now when they journey over the same country they go in swiftly moving trains or automobiles. Where once they saw only the prairie and a few settlers’ cabins they now see roads and bridges, farms and 136 ranches, stores, banks, mills, mines, and factories. They see what they have helped to build, a great state, and they may well be proud of it. By their unconquerable faith and courage and their unremitting toil they have made Kansas what it is to-day. ”

“ The richest and most valuable farming land in Atchison county is very generally distributed. There are parts of each township that are rough and broken, but as the population increases land not now regarded as choice will be made to produce abundant crops. The river bluffs, which have stood so long in timber, are gradually being cleared and the bare hills which are left, are admirably adapted to fruit, wheat and alfalfa. Much of this land is as well adapted to fruit raising as is the already famous Wathena district, some of it being exactly the same type of soil. ”

“ Fields and meadows are rich with herds and flocks. The face of the land has been transformed with forests, orchards and hedge-rows. Everywhere is growth, improvement, increase; everywhere are the evidences of culture, thrift, and enterprise; everywhere the promise of a larger, broader life, and a firmer, deeper faith in the greatness and glory of Kansas. Here is the Central State, the Sunflower State, the Soldier State, and within its borders prosperity and order, intelligence and sobriety, industry and enterprise, go hand in hand. ”

“ Born in the storm and stress period of national political controversy, cradled in the tumult of civil war, and reared to full statehood in an era unparalleled in the arts of peace, the life of Kansas has been one of intense activity. Carved out of territory once known as part of the Great American Desert, by the industry of her people it has become one of the most productive and wealthy states of the Union in proportion to its population. From the political unrest of the early life has sprung a people alive to progressive forms of government. ”

“ And when, in the end, you had conquered peace, and the last of the baffled border ruffians had left your territory, I felt that the doom of the accursed institution was sealed, and that its abolition was but a question of time. A state with such a record will, I am sure, be true to its noble traditions, and will do all in its power to aid the victims of prejudice and oppression who may be compelled to seek shelter within its borders. I will not for a moment distrust the fidelity of Kansas to her foundation principle. God bless and prosper her! ”

“ THE RISE AND FALL OF SUMNER. “Three miles south of Atchison, Kansas, is the site of a dead city, whose streets once were filled with the clamor of busy traffic and echoed to the tread of thousands of oxen and mules that in the pioneer days of the Great West transported the products of the East across the Great American Desert to the Rocky mountains. It was a city in which for a few years twenty-five hundred men and women and children lived and labored and loved, in which many lofty aspirations were born, and in which several young men began careers that became historical. ”

“ All Kansas was in its Maytime glory. From the freshly ploughed earth came up that sweet wholesome odor that like the scent of new-mown hay carries its own traditions of other days to each of us. The young orchards—there were not many orchards in Kansas then—were all a blur of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended with the shifting shades of green. ”

“ Kansas City.—I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of "gentility" in face, manner and action, but they do not have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) ”

“ In the year of our Lord 1900, there will be two million people in Kansas, with cities like Providence and Worcester—perhaps like Chicago and Cincinnati. She will have more miles of railroad than Maryland, Virginia and both the Carolinas can now boast. Her land will be worth twenty dollars an acre, and her total wealth will be five hundred millions of money. Six hundred thousand children will learn in her schools. What schools, newspapers, libraries, meeting-houses! Yes, what families of educated, happy and religious men and women! ”

“ THE KANSAS EMIGRANTS. This poem and the three following were called out by the popular movement of Free State men to occupy the territory of Kansas, and by the use of the great democratic weapon—an over-powering majority—to settle the conflict on that ground between Freedom and Slavery. The opponents of the movement used another kind of weapon.
WE cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!
We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom's southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine! ”

“ There is no State where so many men sit down every day to substantial meals, nor where so many wives and children are comfortably clad—no people anywhere on earth of whom so large a proportion are sober, intelligent and contented with their lot, as here in Kansas. And this great State, as I have said, is the child of the Republican party—bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh. ”

“ Sumner’s first citizens came mostly from Massachusetts, and were imbued with the spirit of creed and cant, self-reliance and fanaticism that could have been born only on Plymouth Rock. They had come to the frontier to make Kansas a free State and to build a city, within whose walls all previous conditions of slavery should be disregarded and where all men born should be regarded equal. The time—1856—was auspicious. Kansas was both a great political and military battlefield, upon which the question of the institution of slavery was to be settled for all time. ”

“ Vaclav Aksamit, formerly of Noble township, Ellsworth county, retired from farming, lives in his comfortable residence in Lucas with his better half, enjoying a well-deserved rest in the evening of their long and varied life.
About all of the settlers joined the Farmers’ Union, and have in town, besides the grain elevator and coal shed, their own creamery. South of town three and a half miles they have built a “National Hall,” which they make their social center. ”

“ What we need is not the respect of our fellow men but the chance to get something for nothing.
Oh, yes, Kansas is a great state. Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars; and every industry but farming paralyzed, and that crippled, because its products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work; who can afford to buy them. Let's don't stop this year. Let's drive all the decent self-respecting men out of the state. ”

“ On these broad prairies to-day are thousands of cattle, and great fields of corn, wheat, and alfalfa. Towns and cities are scattered over the State, and the country between is dotted with the homes of farmers. There are mines, factories, churches, schools, and colleges. Uniting all are miles and miles of railroad. Kansas is now the home of more than a million seven hundred thousand of busy, prosperous people. ”