Kansas

Kansas can be described as a state in the Midwestern United States. Kansas’ capital is Topeka, and its largest city Wichita. Kansas borders Nebraska to the north, Missouri to the east, Oklahoma to the south and Colorado to west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe’s name (natively kka:ze) is often said to mean “people of the (south) wind” although this was probably not the term’s original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. The western part of the state was home to semi-nomadic tribes that hunted large bison herds.

Fort Leavenworth was the first European-American settlement in Kansas. In the midst of political conflicts over slavery, the pace of settlement increased in the 1850s. When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. As these forces clashed, the area became a hotbed for violence and chaos and became known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists won and Kansas became a free state on January 29, 1861. This earned it the nickname “The Free State”.

By 2015, Kansas was one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas is the 15th largest state by area, covering 82,278 sq mi (213,100 km). It is also the 36th most populous state of the 50, with a population estimated at 2,940,865 as per the 2020 census. Residents of Kansas are called Kansans. Mount Sunflower is Kansas’s highest point at 4,039 feet (1,231 meters).