Topics in Kansas History: Environment

Essay on Landscape

"The country here is just beautiful. . . . Yesterday was right cool and very windy, but this morning the sun shines warm & it is still. I think we surely have a good farm. . . . I am so glad we came west, for this country is bound to make its mark." Flora Heston, Clark County, April 1885

Although Kansas is often portrayed as flat and monotonous, a true picture of the state would reveal a wide variety of terrain. From the Ozark Plateau of the southeastern corner to the High Plains of the west, the state's simple beauty and diversity was recognized by the earliest travelers and settlers who recorded their impressions of the region. Kansas, it is true, has no spectacular mountains and does lack for a great deal of native timber, but it was this very "treelessness" and relative flatness that attracted a good many of the state's early farmer/pioneers.

In 1870, a Crawford County settler observed: "Of timber we have but little, and lumber is consequently higher here than in the East. Yet it costs not nearly so much to fence a farm here as it does to clear a timbered country." The previous year a Clay County woman had written that "There is not a foot of our 80 acres where a plow cannot run unobstructed, yet within a short distance is a plenty of stone for building purposes. We have not a tree or shrub, or any water upon our place; but we hope that perseverance and a few years will remedy the one fault, and wells and cisterns must make up for the other."

Back to Topics in Kansas History: Environment: Landscape.