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Famous for Wheat

Economy: wheat, corn, sorghum, hay, cattle, meat packing, dairy,
computer equipment, machinery, helium, salt, oil, natural gas.

Kansas will always be famous for Dodge city, the Texas cattle drive to the rail road at Dodge, creating many gun fights, and famous western marchels such as Wyatt Earp,Wild Bill Hickok the Long Branch Saloon is still an fun place to visit. Western History is at its best in Kansas.
This is where Women were first allowed to vote.

Today's cutesy, gingham-pinafore image of KANSAS , associated with Little House on the Prairie and The Wizard of Oz , is a far cry indeed from the troubled history that made it known as "bleeding Kansas." It took three hundred years after Coronado came in search of gold in 1541 before pioneers established trails across the region, and Kansas's bid for statehood in 1861 is often cited as the catalyst for the Civil War. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave both territories the right to self-determination over slavery, led to fierce clashes between Free Staters and pro-slavery forces. Runaway slaves from the South were given passage through the area, aided by abolitionist John Brown, and Kansas eventually joined the Union as a free state.

After the war, the mighty cattle drives from Texas made towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City centers of the " Wild West ." The debauched, male image of the West, spawning such "heroes" as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, is, however, challenged in Kansas, which as well as being the first state to give women the vote in municipal elections, boasts the nation's first female mayor and senator, as well as aviator Amelia Earhart and the battling Prohibitionist Carry Nation.

In 1874, Russian Mennonites brought the grain that was to transform the state into the bountiful "bread basket" that now harvests most of the nation's wheat. However, only in the west do miles of golden corn sway in Kansas's infamous gusty wind. The green and hilly northeast, patterned with woods and lakes, is home to the unattractive industrial city of Topeka, liberal college town Lawrence , and the dull suburbs of Kansas City (though downtown lies across the state line in Missouri). The wild and sparse northwest is pioneer country, while the once-wicked cowtown Dodge City is in the southwest. Wichita , the state's largest city, lies in the south central area.

DODGE CITY , 150 miles west of Wichita, is perhaps the most famous of all America's cowtowns. It has certainly been committed to celluloid more times than any other, especially in 1930s Westerns like My Darling Clementine and Dodge City . However, this wildest of Wild West cities had a heyday of only a decade, from 1875 until 1886. Established in 1872 with the Santa Fe Railroad, which transported the hides of millions of plains buffalo, by 1875 the town of traders, trappers and hunters had to find a new economic base - the buffalo had been exterminated. The era of the great cattle drives was already underway, and Dodge City became a den of iniquity where gambling, drinking and general lawlessness were the norm. Such wickedness led to gunfights galore, and the notorious Boot Hill cemetery (where the villains were buried with their boots on) was kept busy by charismatic lawmen such as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.

WICHITA , about 165 miles southwest of Lawrence on I-35, is the largest city in Kansas, severed by the Arkansas River, which forks just north of downtown into the Big and Little Arkansas rivers (incidentally, Kansans take umbrage if you pronounce it "Arkansaw"; pronounce it here the way it is spelled). Originally settled by the Wichita Indians, who by 1865 had been relocated to Oklahoman Indian Territory, Wichita grew up as a stop on the Chisholm Trail, a Texas-to-Kansas cattle route celebrated in frontier lore and cowboy ballads. Its glory days were to be short-lived, however, as farmers, angry about the damage done by stampeding cattle, erected fences which forced the drives onto different trails further west, creating new cowtowns such as Dodge City. Today three of the world's major aircraft manufacturers (Cessna, Raytheon and Learjet) are based here, and the city, already with a rich arts scene, has been invigorated with a downtown revival.
The City
Downtown Wichita is enlivened mainly by the public art and sculpture that pops up unexpectedly all over the place, in empty lots and even in tree stumps. The exceptional Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum , 204 S Main St