Intolerance cuts into vice, but sometimes takes a slice of virtue too, even in Kansas. I believe, however, that the Kansan is nearest to being an average normal American. He is the representative American.
South of Kansas the people are mostly Southerners; West of it they are certainly Western; North of it and East of it they are certainly Middle West. But Kansas itself is a New England seed in Middle Western soil.
"You are the people who have taken away our wine," say Easterners, reproachfully.
The Kansans smile.
"We are the people!" they say, and are not at all ashamed.
Ewart and I traveled across Kansas and its many farms, and the vague thought of Quivira crossed my mind. This was the country in which Coronado and his followers in 1541 gave up their quest of gold, being brought to Wichita by an Indian who wished to lead them to their doom. In this country, the Indian said, lay the Kingdom of Quivira, where the King and his princes wore golden armor. And he brought them to a camp of nomads near the great bend of the Arkansas River, and there was naught there but the invisible possibility of what is now Kansas. The enraged Spaniards, therefore, strangled the Indian and turned their faces southward once more toward Cibola and the deserts in New Spain.
But golden Quivira is golden to-day, golden with corn, and Kansas is the richest State in the Union; a State literally without poor, a State of empty prisons, without doss-houses, without out-door relief. Kansas of to-day wears golden armor against Fate and has proved the Indian to be right.
"Ho for Kansas, land that restores us!" as Lindsay cried. And then, farewell. The train on its iron tracks rolls onward, following its predecessor, followed inevitably by its successor, sootily, dustily, heavily, to the steeps of Colorado; out of the green country up to the gray and bare, up to the hills and broken cliffs, to the pasture lands and the cowboys. The pipe smokers of Colorado fill the black-leather section of the ordinary cars, the smoking section; in come horse-faced men who have lived with horses so much that their features have caught a reflection of horses' features, men with sun-dried complexions and bodies; not so witty as the people of the East, more humorous though, and full of a new kind of talk. All the linen collars have gone, and with them the comparative stiffness of business life. Not that there are not collars on the train. God forbid! There are Pullman cars lagging on to us somewhere, and respectability sitting perched on plush, as everywhere else. But in the smoking section of the ordinary car is the real life of the country.
Ewart would have liked to dismount at Trinidad, Colorado, and at Dodge City, but our tickets were nearly out of date. So we let ourselves be hoisted on to the New Mexican plateau with its wide stretches of sand dotted with dwarf pines, with its dried-up river channels, its mud heads of mountains and strange bluffs, its Mexicans and Indians. Next day we were at Santa Fe.