Album: Kansas Ad Astra per Aspera - "To the Stars through Difficulties"

Abraham Lincoln "If I went West, I think I would go to Kansas." Kenneth S. Davis "I've never met a Kansan anywhere whose heart wasn't buried in Kansas." St. Augustine "No one loves what he endures, though he may love to endure." "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted." William Inge 'A Level Land' "Men in the prairie states have long had to deal with forces they cannot always control. They often have to surrender to these forces and deal with them as best they can. This surrender to forces greater than one's self cannot but create a humility in human character that is a part of all religious faith. Prairie people, most of them descendants of Puritan (and Methodist) New Englanders or of God-fearing Scandinavians or Central Europeans, know and live with the knowledge that man is not all-powerful. The general tendency in this land is to be conservative in all things, and to be suspicious of all extremists." Carl L. Becker "It thus happens that while no people endure the reverses of nature with greater fortitude and good humor than the people of Kansas, misfortunes seemingly of man's making arouse in them a veritable passion of resistance; the mere suspicion of injustice, real or fancied exploitation by those who fare sumptuously, the pressure of laws not self-imposed, touch something explosive in their nature that transforms a calm and practical people into excited revolutionists." William Allen White, 'The Sage of Emporia' "Kansans are marked by Puritanism. The first Kansans were crusaders, intellectual and social pioneers, conventers of various sorts...Slavery being abolished your Kansans had to begin abolishing something else. Abolitionism was more than a conviction; it was a temperamental habit." "Abolition, Prohibition, Populism, and Bull Moose, the Blue Sky law...these things come popping out in Kansas like bats out of hell. Sooner or later other states take up these things, and then Kansas goes on breeding other troubles." John J. Ingalls "Kansas has been the testing ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerated or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibiton, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brain of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty, and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy." Walt Whitman 'Leaves of Grass, Starting from Paumanok' "Chants going forth from the centre of Kansas, and thence equidistant shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all..." William Least Heat-Moon 'Great Kansas Passage' "The kindest remark about the region I ever heard from a New Yorker was, "There's a lot of air out there." Indeed, it is a fact of history that the massiveness of air, sky, and horizon disturbed even the first settlers who quickly found themselves longing for the protective enclosures of forest." Kenneth S. Davis 'Portrait of Kansas' "...the sky is everywhere around us in this land of far horizons: it constantly impinges upon the Kansas consciousness...and even when the sky is closed off and lowering in gray glooms it remains a vast brooding presence. It conveys a sense of high, far, lonely distances." T.A. McNeal "...for Kansas in the past has had some towns that in a competitive examination for wickedness would have given Hell a neck-and-neck race."

Kansas Scenic Byways http://www.ksbyways.org/ Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve http://www.nps.gov/archive/tapr/prairieviews.htm Kansas State Historical Society http://www.kshs.org/ http://www.kansashistory.us/ Bleeding Kansas http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2952.html http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/Kansas/default.html "The Jayhawker State" traces its history back to 1856 and the conflicts between Kansas and Missouri. When an Irishman named Pat Devlin was asked what he was doing participating in raids crossing the border into Missouri, he replied, "You know, in Ireland we have a bird we call the Jayhawk, which makes its living off of other birds. I guess you might say I've been Jayhawking!" Originally, this term may have applied to Kansans and Missourians alike, but eventually the term came to refer only to Kansan free-state guerilla fighters. Missouri Partisan Rangers became known as "Bushwhackers" and included William Quantrill, Frank James, Cole Younger, and William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. Federal Occupational troops in Missouri were called "Red Legs." On January 29, 1861, Kansas joined the Union as a free state.