Central Kansas Library System

A collection of letters by nineteenth-century homesteader Howard Ruede in which he chronicles his first year in Kansas while writing back to his family in Pennsylvania, covering topics such as poverty, unsanitary conditions, and starvation.

Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent...

Deeply moved by his mother's memories of a waning era and rapidly disappearing lifestyle, John Ise painstakingly recorded the adventures and adversities of his family and boyhood neighbors—the early homesteaders of Osborne County, Kansas. First published in 1936, his "nonfiction novel" Sod and Stubble has since become a widely read and much loved classic. In the original, Ise changed some identities and time sequences but accurately retained the...

"Bethany Herbert, daughter of a legendary healer, leaves the South for the new black community of Nicodemus, Kansas. Despite the hardships, the community comes to love the prairie. Bethany's mother, Queen Bess, comes to Nicodemus, as does the handsome lawyer Jed Talbot, who galvanizes the settlers. Bethany resists the call of her heart because Queen Bess warns her the best healers are chaste and single. When the Herbert women's medical procedures...

When Isaac Goodnow and five fellow New Englanders arrived at the junction of the Kansas and Big Blue rivers in March of 1855, they pitched a tent and launched a town. Harassment and homesickness almost drove them back east, but they held their ground to establish an anti-slavery and educational stronghold: the town of Manhattan, Kansas.

"In 1854, after recently arriving from England, twenty-two-year-old Reuben Smith traveled west, eventually making his way to Kansas Territory. There he found himself in the midst of a bloody prelude to the Civil War, as Free Staters and defenders of slavery battled to stake their claim. The young Englishman wrote down what he witnessed in a diary where he had already begun documenting his days in a clear and candid fashion. As beautifully written...