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

Kenneth S. Davis "I've never met a Kansan anywhere whose heart wasn't buried in Kansas." 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."

"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.