THREE PERIODS OF DEVELOPMENT.
The development of Kansas, it seems to me, has had three periods, which may properly be called the decades of War, of Uncertainty, and of Triumph. From 1855 to 1865, Kansas was an armed camp. The border troubles, outbreaking late in 1854, continued until the Rebellion was inaugurated. Kansas, in fact, began the war six years before the Nation had fired a shot, and the call to arms in 1861 found here a singularly martial people, who responded with unparalleled enthusiasm to the President’s demands for men. In less than a year ten full regiments were organized, and before the close of the war Kansas had sent over twenty thousand soldiers to the field, out of a population of but little more than a hundred thousand. Fields, workshops, offices and schools were deserted, and the patient and heroic women who had kept weary vigils during all the dark and desolate days of the border troubles, now waited in their lonely home for tidings from the larger field of the civil war.
It is doubtful whether Kansas increased, either in population or wealth, from 1861 to 1864. But the young State grew in public interest and reputation, and when the heroic men, whose valor and patriotism had saved the Republic, began to be mustered out, Kansas offered an inviting field for their energy, and they came hither in great numbers. The population of the State, which was 107,206 in 1860, had increased to 140,179 in 1865. The assessed value of its property increased from $22,518,232 to $36,110,000 during the same period, and the land in farms from 1,778,400 to 3,500,000 acres. It was not a “boom,” nor was it stagnation and decay. Yet it is probable that nearly the whole of the growth shown by these figures dates from the spring of 1864.
The real development of Kansas began in 1865, and it has known few interruptions since. The census of 1870 showed a population of 364,399—an increase of 124,220 in five years, or nearly double the population of 1865. Railroad building also began in 1865, and 1,283 miles were completed by 1870. The home-returning soldiers and the railroads came together. Immigrants to other States came in slow-moving canal boats or canvas-covered wagons, but they came to Kansas in the lightning express, and most of them went to their claims in comfortable cars drawn by that marvel of modern mechanism, the locomotive. Our State has never had a “coon-skin cap” population. It is the child of the prairies, not of the forest. It has always attracted men of intelligence, who knew a good thing when they saw it. They brought with them the school, the church and the printing-press; they planted an orchard and a grove as soon as they had harvested their first crop; and if they were compelled to live in a dug-out the first year or two, they were reasonably certain to own a comfortable house the third.