Trails, Wheat and the Black Hills: An Atlas of the Plains

Atlas of the Plains, Plate 12: Trails, Farms and Nations

1The Great Plains stretch from about the Missouri River west to the Rocky Mountains. The land rises slowly toward the west, and trees grow mostly along rivers. Rain grows scarcer toward the west as well. In 1878, the scientist John Wesley Powell reported that west of about the 100th meridian, a line of longitude that crosses western Kansas, most places get less than 20 inches of rain a year, too little for most crops without irrigation.

2Travelers crossed the Plains along routes that geography made possible. Starting in 1821, the year Mexico won independence from Spain, traders carried goods from Missouri to Santa Fe, then a Mexican town. For much of the way they followed the Arkansas River, where they found water and grass for their oxen and mules. In 1846, Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons, left Nauvoo, Illinois, after years of violent conflict with their neighbors. Led by Brigham Young, they settled in 1847 in the dry valley of the Great Salt Lake, then part of Mexico, where few other settlers lived, and dug ditches to bring water from mountain streams to their fields. After the Civil War, cowboys, many of them Black or Mexican American, drove Texas cattle north across Indian Territory, letting the herds graze on open grass along the way. In 1867, a railroad reached Abilene, Kansas, and cattle cars carried the herds from there to Chicago. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, and a railroad reached Santa Fe in 1880.

3Railroads also changed who farmed the Plains. Congress gave railroad companies millions of acres of public land, and the companies sold farms on easy terms, sending agents as far as Europe. Mennonite families from the Russian Empire, who began arriving in Kansas in 1874, are often credited with bringing Turkey Red wheat, a hardy wheat planted in the fall and harvested in early summer, before the hottest, driest weeks. Black families from the South came too. Black settlers founded Nicodemus, Kansas, in 1877, and in 1879 thousands of "Exodusters" left the South to escape violence and unfair treatment after Reconstruction. Nicodemus still exists today.

4The Plains were also the homelands of many nations, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Pawnee, Osage and Kaw. Kansas takes its name from the Kaw, or Kanza, people. As farms and railroads spread, the United States pushed these nations onto smaller reservations; in 1873 it moved the Kaw to Indian Territory, and the Kaw Nation is governed today from Kaw City, Oklahoma. Farther north, an 1868 treaty recognized the Black Hills, which the Lakota call Paha Sapa and hold sacred, as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. In 1874, an army expedition reported gold in the hills' streams, and thousands of miners rushed in. In 1877, Congress passed a law taking the Black Hills. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the hills had been taken unlawfully and awarded money to the Sioux nations, including the Lakota, who have refused it, saying the Black Hills are not for sale.