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Page 17 text:
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VERY SOON after the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, Kansas fell within the region claimed by England, based on the exploration of the Cabots. Spain next claimed this land as a result of the discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto and the exploration of Coronado the first white man to tread the Kansas soil. LaSalle next won this land for France. Then it became part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Kansas was first made famous by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and by the struggle between the free-state men and the pro-slavery forces that followed. The first legislature met at Pawnee, near Ft. Riley, the center of the United States. It soon adjourned to Shawnee Mission, near the Missouri border, where it passed the famous pro-slavery bogus laws. This was the heroic period of Kansas history when Governor Charles Robinson, Senator Jim Lane, and John Brown were among the chief leaders. First the steamboat and later the railway reached as far west as Kansas City (first known as Westport Landing). From this point the pony express raced for California, and the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails made Kansas a pathway. In this western world the Indians, being crowded from their last hunting ground, waged their final war, while Kansans played well their part in the winning of the prairie. On January 29, 1861, President Buchanan signed the bill that admitted Kansas to statehood as the thirty-fourth star in the blue field of Old Glory. On February 9, Dr. Charles Robinson was inaugurated the first governor of the new state, and on the same day Jefferson Davis was elected President of the Confederate States of America. Thus directly was the story of bleeding Kansas linked to that of Civil War. Well has it been said that Kansas is the focus of freedom where the rays of heat and light con- centrated into a flame that melted the manacles of the slaves and cauterized the heresies of state sovereignty and disunion. In the supreme test of Civil War, Kansas furnished to the Union army a larger proportion of her population than did any other state or territory. It is impossible, says Ingalls, to overestimate the value of citizenship in a state that sent more soldiers into the Union armies than it had voters when Sumter fell. As one of our historians has said, Kansas has a significant and memorable history; the territorial struggle converted a wilderness, which had little claim upon the interest of mankind, into historic ground. After the Civil War the homestead act, the rich prairie soil, and the halo of the Kansas struggle, materially aided by the railroads, all conspired together to make Kansas become a great soldier state which grew with startling rapidity. Drouth and grasshoppers and prairie fires could not conquer these Kansans now any more than the wrath of man could conquer them in the territorial period. Kansas became a typical frontier state, a land of faith and hope and charity. The frontiersmen believed in the future. They believed in democracy and the square deal. As we review ever so briefly the history of our State, we do not wonder that Senator Ingalls was led to declare: The history of Kansas is written in capitals. It is punctuated with exclamation points. Its verbs are imperative. Its adjectives are superlative. The commonplace and prosaic are not defined in its lexicon. Its statistics can be stated only in the language of hyperbole.
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Page 18 text:
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FRANCIS DAVID FARRELL, B. S., D. Agr. President Kansas State Agricultural College
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