Kansas
The State of Kansas is a Midwestern state in the central region of the United States of America, an area often referred to as the American "Heartland". It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, from the French "Cansez", by explorer Etienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, and after the Kansa tribe, who inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kka:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind", although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans."
Historically, the area was home to large numbers of nomadic Native Americans that hunted bison. It was first settled by European Americans in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue. When officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionists from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine if Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas exploded when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into productive farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing many crops, and leading the nation in wheat and sunflower production.
Geography
Nebraska on the north; Missouri on the east; Oklahoma on the south; and Colorado on the west. The state is divided up into 105 counties with 628 cities. It is located equidistant from the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states is located in Smith County near Lebanon. The geodetic center of North America was located in Osborne County until 1983. This spot was until then used as the central reference point for all maps of North America produced by the U.S. government. The geographic center of Kansas is located in Barton County. Kansas is also one of the six states located on the Frontier Strip and one of several within Tornado Alley.
The western two thirds of the state, lying in the great central plain of the United States, has a generally flat or undulating surface, and on a large scale appears almost perfectly flat. However, the eastern third is more hilly and forested. The land displays a gradual slope up from east to west; its altitude above the sea ranges from 684 feet (208 m) along the Verdigris River at Coffeyville in Montgomery County, to 4039 feet (1,231 m) at Mount Sunflower, one half mile from the Colorado border, in Wallace County.
The Missouri River forms nearly 75 miles (120 km) of the state's northeastern boundary. The Kansas River (locally known as the Kaw), formed by the junction of the Smoky Hill and Republican rivers at appropriately-named Junction City, joins the Missouri at Kansas City, after a course of 170 miles (274 km) across the northeastern part of the state. The Arkansas River, rising in Colorado, flows with a bending course for nearly 500 miles (800 km) across the western and southern parts of the state. It forms, with its tributaries (the Little Arkansas (pronounced Ar-Kansas), Ninnescah, Walnut, Cow Creek, Cimarron, Verdigris, and the Neosho), the southern drainage system of the state. Other important rivers are the Saline and Solomon, tributaries of the Smoky Hill River; the Big Blue, Delaware, and Wakarusa, which flow into the Kansas River; and the Marais des Cygnes, a tributary of the Missouri River.
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