The 34th state admitted to the US was Kansas, on January 29th, 1861. Kansas' name means "People of the South Wind", and comes from the Kansa Native American tribe. It is known as the "Sunflower State" because of the many sunflowers that grow there. They harvest the flowers for their seeds and oil, and it has become the symbol of the people and the entire state itself. The nation's leading production of wheat comes from Kansas, and the Graham cracker was named after a Kansas minister named Reverend Sylvester Graham. The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart, was from Atchison, Kansas. The Kansas state capital is Topeka, the state bird is the Western Meadowlark, the state flower is the Wild Sunflower, and the state tree is the Cottonwood.
The earliest and most ancient artifacts of man were found in Flint Hills, Kansas and dated back over 13,000 years ago. Early Native American tribes of Kansas included the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kanza, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita. They lived off of the land's tallgrass prairie and bison herds. In the mid-1500's, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado arrived near the Great Bend of the Arkansas River and encountered the Wichita tribe. A Spanish Conquistador, Juan de Onate, met the Kanza Indians on his expedition in 1601. French missionary, Jacques Marquette, met with the Kanza Indians in 1750. As the colonizers began to settle in the area we now call Kansas, bringing their diseases and desires to gain land with them, various legal rationalizations allowed them to seize native lands occupied by sovereign nations. New Englanders of British ancestry and central Europeans began to populate Kansas with the promise of a job laying train tracks and free land when they completed their work. Small communities of German, Russian, Scandinavian, and Bohemian citizens arrived soon afterward. In 1803, the US government started to propose plans to move the tribes to land west of the Mississippi. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act passed, and it forced tribes of the east to move to the west. In 1829, the Delawares were the first to sign treaties that gave them some land back in Kansas. At one point, the Kaw or Kanza tribe had territory covering around 2/5 of the state of Kansas. This land was reduced to make more land open for white people, and in 1873, they were forced out of the state altogether. Today, there are four Native American Indian reservations in Kansas - the Iowa, Kickapoo, Pottawatomie, and the Sac & Fox.
Around 1870, African Americans from the Deep South arrived and established farms and settlements in the northwestern area. The New Englanders of British descendent did not believe in slavery, however, there were many groups that did. The pro and anti-slavery groups had a time of conflict between 1854 and 1861. It resulted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed for territory to settlers without designation of being either free or enslaved. Three political groups - the pro-slavery, Free-Staters, and abolitionists - fought each other violently until 1861 when the "Bleeding Kansas" era ended with Kansas entering the Union as a free state on January 29th.
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