![dot [graphic]](images/orangedot.gif){kind=small} |
Kansas Sources |
| |
Content Queries: email Tom Schmiedeler |
Kansas Quotes
"I know we Kansa people have been accused of being unable to talk about anything else. We have been accused of 'blowing our own horn' to excess. They say we are much given to hot air and statistics. However, you and I know better. We know that half has not been told of Kansas, nor ever can be..." "If there's anything better than life--it's life in Kansas. "We have made the State of Kansas, "Dear Governor, "Kansas...the land of diversity...the land of unity...Kansas...both the desert and the jewel of the West...born of the prairie...with the throbbing of Indian chants for a lullaby...Kansas...once the home of countless herds of buffalo..the stamping ground of Custer...Wild Bill Hicock...Buffalo Bill Cody...Kansas...the land of dreams where once again phantom wagon trains lumber slowly over the prairies to the echo of buffalo guns...Kansas...land of sunflowers...at the crossroads of the nation...the land of people who made it Kansas." "The fact remains: if you are willing to work, you need never despair of getting a livelihood in Kansas." "...Kansas glories in her days to be, "...We believe in Kansas institutions; in the Kansas language and in Kansas ideals; in her cleanliness of society, and in her demands that honor, sobriety, and respect be maintained in public and private life; in her marvelous productiveness, and in her wondrous future." -Charles Moreau Harger in THE KANSAS CREED "How for Kansas, the land that restores us "Mine was a Midwest home--you can keep your world. "Cibola, unknown "...No reasoning, no logic can confound the Kansan. Figuratively speaking, you may knock him down, but you cannot knock him out. As an instance in point, it is related that one day, after a seemingly endless stretch of the most horrible weather, the sun came out. The air was soft and balmy, the sky took on the deep summer blue, and all the conditions were as perfect as the most exacting could demand. The Kansas man was equal to the occasion, and began to descant on the beauties of the Kansas climate. 'Now, this,' he said, 'is a typical Kansas day.' "The high plains at first gave him an overpowering impression of emptiness. Never before had he beheld such a sky--the cosmic vault of blue appeared to occupy a good three fourths of the world, making small and unimportant the scattered farm houses with their meager clumps of ragged trees and inevitable windmills. "...Kansas: Where the hen that cackles, "Mine was a Midwestern home--you can keep your world. The sun was over our town; it was like a blade. "Come, all you folks of enterprise who feel inclined to roam Our prairies all are dotted o'er with houses white as snow, Our boys, the bravest of the brave; our girls they are the best I've travelled the New England states, New York and North Carolina, "If I went West, I think I would go to Kansas." "To populate a county thirty miles square within six months, and round out the half-year with a fight over the county seat between six towns, or to build a fair-sized city within a twelve month--these achievements may seem like fiction, but they have been realities in Kansas." "When the cares o' day are done, on the plains o' Kansas, "Be a Booster" "Kansas is the Mother Shipton, the Madame Thebes, the Witch of Endor, and the low barometer of the nation. When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas. Abolition, Prohibition, Populism, the Bull Moose, the exit of the roller towel, the appearance of the bank guarantee, the blue sky law, the adjudication of industrial dispute as distinguished from the arbitration of industrial differences--these things come popping out of Kansas like bats out of hell." "During the boom of the 1880s, the GREAT BEND TRIBUNE writes that railroad construction 'Is only equalled by the number of street railways, waterworks, electric lights, colleges, and children to fill them. A town of 150 inhabitants that hasn't at least four trunk lines and all these other advantages is considered too unimportant to put on the maps.'" "General Dwight David Eisenhower once said, 'The proudest thing I can say today is that I'm from Abilene.'" "Kansas is indispensable to the joy, the inspiration, and the improvement of the world." "This flower has to all Kansans a historic symbolism which speaks of frontier days, winding trails, pathless prairies, and is full of the life and glory of the past, the pride of the present, and richly emblemaitc of the majesty of a golden future." "Neither Jayhawker winds, nor Jayhawker drought "...These things--the air, the water, the scenery and we who fill these scenes--hold many and many a man to Kansas when money would tempt him away...Here are the still waters, here are the green pastures. Here, the fairest of the world's habitations." "...What Kansas will be 50 years hence is beyond the comprehension of people now living." -CHICAGO JOURNAL, May 14, 1889 "Our climate is pure and invigorating and health-giving, the atmosphere being light, and singularly bright and sparkling. The breeze that constantly sweeps over the prairies is redolent with vigor, banishing incipient consumption, and uprooting the seeds of deep-seated diseases, engendered by the vassalage of a sisypian (sic) labor, or a long residence in the thickly populated places of the East; imparting an appetite and fruition which only such an atmosphere can impart--and making the climate in itself a panacea more potent than the science of physicians, and more rejuvenating than the visionary 'Fountain of Youth.'" "The Kansas of to-day is a wonder of intelligence, wealth, enterprise, comfort, and culture...With a climate unequaled, a soil rich beyond comparison, and a population made up of the best nerve and brain of New England and Germany, it is fast taking a place in the front rank of our Federal Union...Many a pioneer has purchased his 160 acres of the railroad company...Soon his orchard is planted, his farm stocked, and he has all the hay he needs without cultivation (though he needs but little, for the winters are very mild here)." Return to Top of Page
Return to Kansas Resources NEGATIVE "...this country may with propriety be called the Deserts of North America for I do not conceive any part of it can ever silted as it is deficient of or in water..." "Kansas is herself again. The wind blows and the dust and sand flies, but no rain descends. A newcomer asked one of our fellow townsmen if it always blew this way in Kansas. He replied that there were perhaps two or three days during the year that it did not." "Kansas for three years has been decried from one end of the country to the other for elevating to office cabbage-headed statesmen, corncob financiers, and the exponents of repudiation and social disorder...but the period of flat, repudiation and humbug in Kansas is past." "As regards the emigration to Kansas Territory, I do not think many will be able to settle in this part for the next twelve months, there being almost an entire failure of crops...Prospects are...dismal here for all kinds of produce. There will not be 'hog and hominy' enough for the old inhabitants, much less for a large influx emigration." "When It Gets Dry In Kansas" "When we have rain and crops, we don't want to go, and when there ain't no crops we're too poor to go; so I reckon we'll just stay here till we starve to death." "[We Kansans don't] preserve anecdotes of our politicians today...Is it because they are dull and say or do nothing worth embalming in memory? ...Are they dull leaders of a dull multitude?" "On the Road to California" "We had the milk of from four to eight cows every year...There was anything but romance in skimming twenty pans of milk and churning every other day. The butter had its first working with salt; on the next morning it had to be finished for packing or made into rolls. There were all the pans, the milk pails again at night, and perhaps milk to skim for weaning calves. Romance, indeed! The heat and perspiration make large washings. I have rubbed the skin off my hands, in places, many a times. The Kansas mud was like paste to remove, and the dust storms would undo the work of a day in five minutes. I did all the sewing for the family besides knitting socks and stockings. Work was no mere pastime in OUR lives." "When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray, also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at." "O, dear this is a hard place to live, this Kansas is. I wonder what in the world will become of all of us, anyway." "If I had know, I'd never have come. Never left the homeland! The promises he made! The letters he wrote! The country I'd come to! This! This isn't what he promised me." "No trees, only connecting dirt paths. Here the immigrants employed by the O'Leary and Flanagan Co. brought forth their youth in a desert-like barreness, sent them to the Catholic school controlled by the mine owners, got paid by scrip which they parceled out to their landlord-mine owners,...and drowned their sorrows in the home-saloons that mushroomed all around." "In Kansas, dreams do not give compound interest." "Across Kansas" "Tornado" "Towns" "Just Before Sleep" "Gossip is '...an ugly, dirty little story, of the kind that is always running through every rural community which is starved for something to vary the dull round of its existence...'" "Only when I looked out and saw the pasture lands fenced in by barbed wire and cows grazing here and there did I come to 'It must all be a horrible nightmare,' I thought." "Until 1895 the whole history of the state was a series of disaster, and always something new, extreme, bizarre, until the name of Kansas became a byword, a synonym for the impossible and ridiculous, inviting laughter, furnishing occasion for jest and hilarity." (President Buchanan) stands in the White House 'with the lurid light of the sacked and burning dwellings of Kansas flashing on his brazen brow, and with the blood of the people of Kansas dripping from his hands." "Men who sell their souls to the inland Must be patient with quiet things; Never for them the hymn of the hills And never the chanty the wild sea sings." "But happy? They had been far too absorbed in the bitter struggle for a livelihood to have time to think of happiness." "...Every school history of the present day tells under what stormy and peculiar conditions Kansas began to shape itself forty years ago. From the outset it was a Mecca for the eccentric people now commonly known as cranks, and from that day to this not an ism has presented itself to the sisterhood of States that Kansas has not felt its full force!" "Love a place like Kansas and you can be content in a garden of raked sand. For ground it is the flattest. Big sky, wheat sea, William Inge, bottle clubs, road houses--Falstaff and High Life, chili and big juke road houses--John Brown, Wild Bill Hickok, Carry A Nation, cockeyed Wyatt Erp, Pretty Boy Floyd, and shades of all those unspoken Indians..." "But what sort of people squatted in Fork City anyway? They all sold each other wheat and bacon and corn and beef and farm machinery and squeaky shoes they all talked in the same Goddamned flat, nasal voice about the same Goddamned trivial things day-in-day-out year-after-year---eating, sleeping and growing more rustic and pompous and proverbial (as if the secrets of life with a capital L were to be found in the saws and mouthed over a corner rail or a gutter: You kin ketch more flies with molasses than you kin with vinegar. Where there's that much smoke, there must be some far. First ketch your rabbit. Time is money.) They began their kin, hating each other because of the no-privacy of the place, stunned because of the sulness of the virtues they felt obliged to wear, beckoned at and tempted by the rich vices that each kept from enjoying except in deep, painful secret..." "...Therefore, Lee said, though I was a boy in this no-place, this bleak town on the prairie's edge, which now seems hardly more than an overnight encampment of ill-satisfied, overproud people so ignorant, that they had been examined closely along with their town--in truth, if they had stopped a moment and examined themselves, they would have found themselves to be a sad joke without substance or with enough to keep it sweet..." "...A town of false fronts. All the little, squalid, one-story buildings have false fronts to make them look like two-story structures; and people have assumed false fronts, too. Never in my life have I encountered so many fourflushers..." "...They spend the first sixty years of their lives in a plae which had been stuck in the eternal mud and dust and wrapped all around so tightly with the earth of a continent that it takes several decades for a new idea to filter through to the people and several more decades for them to decide whether or not the new idea (which is old then) is sinful or not. They spend their lives working for a living and living that living in the future--and then they come back after six months from Miami or Long Beach saying: Well, it's just fine there, but home's best--after all..." "John Brown of Osawatomie" "Prairie Imprisoned" Beecher's brother in THE NARROW COVERING: WOODCUTS OF KANSAS "Shelter and Higher Life" "River" "Silo" "Oil" "Religious Afternoon" "Progress" "Seven said Mrs Beecher." On Kansas City: "To anyone brought up there, as I was, Kansas City always meant the Missouri one.... Kansas, the whole state, was dry. And moralistic about everything...The truth is that Kansas was Yankee territory, windy and dry, with blue laws on its books; and the women from there wore unbecoming clothes and funny hats." Return to Top of Page
Return to Kansas Resources PEOPLE "One of the first whites to come into contact with the Kansas Indians, Etienne de Bourgmont wrote in 1717 that he visited "...the Rivers d'Ecanze and a nation of the same name, ally and friend of the French; their trade is in furs. This is the finest country and the most beautiful in the world; the prairies are like the seas, and filled with wild animals; especially oxen, cattle, hind, and stag, in such quantities as to surpass the imagination. They (the Kansans) hunt almost entirely with the arrow; they have splendid horses and are fine riders." "The honeybee exemplifies Kansans in that it is proud, only fights in defense of something it cherishes; is a friendly, energetic worker with limitless abilities; and is a mirror of virtue, triumph and glory." "Lindsborg, in McPherson County, was settled by Swedes and was so well publicized in Sweden that many Swedes knew it was a famous American city. Kenneth Davis, in his bicentennial history, "Kansas," (1976), tells the story of a "Kansas-bound Swede who, landing in New York City, was overwhelmed by the hugeness and richness of the metropolis. 'If this is New York,' cried he in his native tongue, 'what must LINDSBORG be like!'" "Captain Henry King, early Kansas newspaperman, said the press '...came in even before our sins...Here was a printing press in the very vane of affairs, standing upon the yet untrodden weeds, and canopied by the leaves and the sky, waiting to catch and record the earliest whispers of history in this new land of promise." "A local headline at the time read: HOW WOMEN LOSE SELF RESPECT--ARGONIA? SYRACUSE AND OSKALOOSA UNDER FEMALE GOVERNMENT. Another newspaper complained: 'There is reason to believe that all billiards will soon become a lost art in all the smaller towns of Kansas, for the women have entered politics for the purpose of reforming the men..." E.W. Howe writes in the ATCHISON GLOBE: 'When it is announced that a Kansas girl will give a party, one doesn't know whether he is expected to take his dancing pumps, or study up arguments on suffrage." 1894 "...as I drove down through the northern Flint Hills into the valley of the Kaw...my sense of homecoming, of having returned to the vital center of my experience of life, became overwhelming." "There is a certain wholesome manhood in this chapter of the Kansas man that is very comforting to know. His talk, his point of view, his something of sprightly picturesqueness of speech is good to know. Not everyone can talk the Kansas language. It is an accomplishment. There is no dialect in it--especially--it is a form of imaginative poetic hyperbole. It is full of short cuts to meanings. Single words speak paragraphs." "A citizen of a country so hilly as some of our Eastern states, that one has to look up the chimney to see the cows come home, is, as a rule, quite universally of rugged character, but close and conservative and as narrow in his thoughts as the hills in which he lives. This is in marked contrast with Kansas, a prairie country with nothing but waving grain to obstruct the vision between observor and horizon, where the climate is balmy, breezy, invigorating and robust and the citizen is full of vim and energy, and as progressive, liberal and broad as her boundless prairies." "With Kansas history back of him, the true Kansan feels that nothing is TOO MUCH for him. How shall he be afraid of any danger, or hesitate at any obstacle, having succeeded where failure was not only human, but almost honorable? Having conquered Kansas, he knows well that there are no worse worlds to conquer. The Kansas spirit is therefore one that finds something exhilirating the challenge of an extreme difficulty." "Admiring the determination, hard work and steadfastness of the German imigrants in Kansas, the KANSAS CITY STAR writes: 'They farm, not by the year, but by the decade or the century.'" 1911. "Moving on. Always moving on. And that is the potent evocative image. The prairie schooners lurch, creak, sway--a long line of white sails on the sea of grass--as they beat their way slowly, inevitably, into the mystic West, bearing young men and women with dreams in their eyes." "...You couldn't analyze those people-- "I envied him the places where he had not been." "...We ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love where we are, sturdy for common things." "Reluctantly he found and kept on finding himself the man the land meant. It subsided and became a state." "I happen to be so joined together that I like stayin put in one place--in a little town right in the heart of America...I have interesting work...I have stimulating contacts--charming women, adventurous men, law-breakers, bootleggers who really know their stuff. So here I am." "...In Kansas, it was against the law to strike, but the miners nevertheless went out. Governor Allen ordered them back, just as the slaves of old used to be ordered back into the cottonfields. Again they refused--refused--refused to desert their brothers and produce scab coal." "...If there are any unfortunate idiosyncrocies in the Kansas people they are only skin deep, and time will remove them." "...If the liquor men could bring back saloons into Kansas, then a great blow would be struck against prohibition in all the states." "Except beneath the blur of a winter sky, "Today the men begin the harvest "A two weeks' stubble was on his chin, "The village derelict "...The wire stretchers hammers "...An old Indian recites "No photographs exist. This man His horse is plain; he has and around his body a stormy light And when the time comes to describe his face "My husband was a farmer. But he could see beauty in the land. He could see the promise of the seed. Now he was no literary man, but he could almost make a poem out of a clod of dirt." "The Son of the Kansas Emigrant" We go to rear a wall of men We're flowing from our native hills, We go to plant her common schools Upbearing, like the ark of old, No pause, nor rest, save where the streams We'll treat the prairies as of old "...Many, to their former home-- "...But in his veins the blood of sturdy pioneers "His face was weathered like the calf-hide hung on a nail "Whoever travels into Kansas Suddenly his hair turns white The wind touches his face At sunset and feels buffalo hooves and lie with dead He shall lie with Jedediah Smith And he shall be at home." The Kansas Magazine brought out its first issue in 1872. In it, John J Ingalls writes: "...no genuine Kansan can emigrate. He may wander. He may roam. He may travel. He may go elsewhere, but no other State can ever claim him as a citizen. Once naturalized the allegiance can never be forswarn." "There was an old woman, and what do you think? "'I guess Kansas is getting like the South, isn't it, ma?' Sandy said to his grandmother as they came out on the porch that evening after supper. 'They don't like us here either, do they?' "I've been in Dodge every summer since '77,' said the old cowman, 'and I can give you boys some points. Dodge is one town where the average bad man of the West not only finds his equal, but finds himself badly handicapped." "Gals is havin' lots o' fun,--smashin' things in Kansas. Return to Top of Page Return to Kansas Resources HUMOUR "Bleeding, cyclone-swept, grasshopper-devastated Kansas is a thing of the past. Now it is a proud, triumphant, glorious Kansas that produces the biggest crops, the most beautiful women and some of the greatest cranks in the county." When a camel in the Barnes Brothers Circus dies at Winfield, the newspapers explain that the camel was not accustomed to a climate drier than the Sahara. 1913 "Cyclones, grasshoppers and populists have existed to prove that Kansas cannot be ruined." "Is it a good country for corn, you ask? Stranger, you'll never know what corn country is until you go to Kansas. "...the dust was so thick that a prairie dog was seen digging a burrow ten feet in the air and...a man was hit by a raindrop and his friends had to throw a bucket of sand in his face to revive him. The birds...(flew) backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes." Bank accounts are red "When I came here forty years ago there was not a stick on the place and now it is all sticks." "from DOWN IN KANSAS" Now with whiskers of a Peffer, "A man in Kansas City is jailed for allegedly selling two Bonner Springs men a 'cyclone cable,' a device which would prevent a house from being blown away, in 1889." "The Three Pals" "Grasshoppers Starved to Death" "Mrs. Bales lost an eye in the storm and it was several weeks before it was found. Her son, C.R. Bales, was one day walking in the wheat field north of the Bales' house and he accidentally stumbled on it. As he was walking he happened to look down at his feet and there was that eye staring up at him. He picked it up and found the glass was as good as ever, so he gave it to his mother and now she can see as well as ever." "'It was a cyclone that gave me my start in business,' W.C. Tandy announced. 'I was in the moving business. Two men in different parts of town decided to trade houses. Each wanted the other fellow's house, and I took a contract to move them. The men decided to leave town and so went on a vacation to avoid the inconvenience which would result while the houses were being moved. "The fame of Kansas is world-wide. Puck says in Italy children are taught that when they die they will go to Kansas." "The Boasting Hen" "Kansas mud is incomparable; in the mudline it is a perfect triumph--slippery as lard, adhesive as tar, cumulative as a miser's gold and treacherous as hope." "Kansas in known as the state of ideals and pests..." "...Cyclones fan the people to sleep "Three thousands days of Kansas sun, "The Ghosts of Buffalo" "The Ghosts of the Buffalo" "Dog Days in Coal Camp" "No Kansan likes to do anything easy. He raises his crops hard. He takes his religion hard. To be able to get licker easy would jest be contrary to nature for him. So he makes laws to keep him from gettin' it...which makes it harder, which give mo' of a oint to drinkin' it, an behold, yo' Kansan thereby derives greater satisfaction of soul ou'n it..." "...The Kansas Seven were: dancing, cards, the theater, non-attendance at church, tobacco, drinking and profanity. To the peculiar mental bent, the chief zest of which is the regulation of the lives of others, not even theft, murder, or adultery seemed somehow so important as these seven sins..." "If you want to enjoy all the sensations of genuine 'sea sickness,' go out and stand in a large wheat field on a windy day. If you are at all suceptible..the waving, billowing motion of the grain will give you the jim-jam in short order." Return to Top of Page
Return to Kansas Resources |