The land that cradles Topeka belongs to the wind, the sun, the rain and time. It is the only surviving witness to what came before us.
In its infancy, the land we now call Topeka jutted toward the skies.
"A long, long time ago, there were mountains. That was over a billion years ago," said Larry Martin, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum at The University of Kansas.
"Eventually, the mountains wore away, and an ocean came in where the mountains used to be. The area around Topeka was a sea coast for a long time. The sea evaporated and left salt deposits."
About 50 million years ago, the land where the Capitol sits was a tropical forest. Then, Martin said, the world cooled off, and the Kansas glacier formed.
"Ice formed at the (north and south) poles, and the ice came down to about 60 miles south of Topeka," he said. "The ice brought huge pink quartzite boulders (to the area)."
The Shunganunga River, an Indian name meaning "race-course," resulted from that ice-sheet invasion, as did the entire system of rivers now running through Kansas.
A painting by Albert T. Reid shows Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and a group of his men on their journey in search of Quivira.
Kansas State Historical Society
"When the glaciers were here, Topeka was a spruce forest," Martin said. "It had moose and giant bears and saber-tooth cats and the extinct muskox."
To find a similar spruce forest today, one must travel to northern Manitoba, Canada, or climb the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
Like 21st-century Kansas where it can be snowy in the morning and unseasonably warm by afternoon, the climate again changed.
"About 10,000 years ago, the modern climate was established, but even that climate fluctuated," Martin said. "There were times in the past when it was hotter and drier than it is now, and that's when the prairie formed and many of the big Ice Age animals became extinct."
Humans entered the picture toward the end of the Ice Age, Martin said. The Clovis were prehistoric big-game hunters who are thought to have migrated from Russia to Alaska and then gradually filtered south to the Great Plains region. Using a stone-tipped spear, they hunted woolly mammoth, elk and other animals.
"On the Kansas River, it was the Clovis people who hunted elephants. We find tools made of elephant bones on the Kansas River," he said. "Later on, when elephants became extinct, the people hunted bison."
Martin said a number of other prehistoric peoples lived along the Kansas River, including the ancestors of the Kansa Indians, who hunted buffalo but also lived off the land.
"They grew corn in the river bottom," he said. "They had no plows or domestic animals to pull them so they couldn't farm the prairie. They had to use the river bottoms."
All that we know about the prehistoric age comes from the objects left by people before written records were kept. The "historic" age of Kansas, which is documented by written records, began in 1541 with a Spanish expedition led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.
Scouting the land
The land now known as Kansas lured a number of explorers between 1541 and 1830. They came for four reasons: fortune, religion, adventure and knowledge.
A sword inscribed with "Gallego," the name of one of Coronado's officers, is on display at the Kansas State Historical Society Museum.
Kansas State Historical Society
The earliest known explorer was the conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who led a large expedition out of Mexico in 1540 in search of Quivira, a legendary city with streets paved with gold. He also was hell-bent on acquiring wealth and land for the King of Spain.
By April 1541, however, the expedition's food supplies were almost gone and Coronado had to send part of his men back to Mexico. He, a Franciscan priest named Father Juan Padilla and about 30 of his men continued on their journey to Quivira.
The Spaniards never found the city of gold, but they did encounter the Wichita Indians -- who had never seen horses before and thought them to be a combination of man and beast -- and other Indians living in grass lodges. And they were stunned by the thousands of buffaloes they saw roaming the land.
Many explorers crossed the now-Kansas landscape before it opened for settlement, but only four explorers passed through or near present-day Topeka, according to "Topeka: An Illustrated History of the Kansas Capital" by Topeka historian Roy Bird:
Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont, a French explorer, and his party made several trips along the Kansas River and its tributaries about 1724. Bourgmont, who noted the pink quartzite boulders left behind by the Kansas glacier, wanted to trade with the Indians and make treaties with the Padouca Indians, also known as the Comanches. His route went through the center of modern-day Topeka.
A Permian period reptile display at the Natural History Museum features dimetrodons, which are commonly referred to as sail-back dinosaurs.
Nick Krug/The Capital-Journal
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U.S. Army Lt. Zebulon M. Pike entered the Topeka area in 1806 on his way to visit the Plains Indians and to find the sources of the Arkansas and Red rivers.
According to Bird, Pike traveled a route similar to Bourgmont's along the Kansas River before turning north at the fork of the Republican River. He discovered a Pawnee village in an area claimed by both the United States and Spain. He persuaded the Pawnees to remove the Spanish flag and raise the U.S. flag.
In 1819, zoologist Thomas Say and about a dozen men were sent from the Stephen H. Long expedition to make a scientific survey of the country along the south side of the Kansas River and to visit a Kansa village near what is now Manhattan. He spent four days with the Indians and then headed north. His party had gone about six miles when they were attacked by warriors from the same village that Pike had visited years before.
Say led his party back to the Missouri River settlement along the Kansas River banks, pioneering a route now know as "the river road." The road, which follows US-24 highway, was heavily used until the railroad was constructed parallel to it.
John C. Fremont made several trips across Kansas in 1842. In Shawnee County, he climbed to the summit of a mound known then as Webster's Peak and later named after Abraham "Abram" Burnett, a Potawatomi chief. The mound is four miles southwest of Topeka.
The first inhabitants
Kansa, Osage, Pawnee and Wichita Indians lived on the prairie long before Euro-American explorers stepped foot on its rich loam soil. Although the Pawnee were probably the most historic tribe, the state was named after the Kansa, whose name means "people of the south wind."
"The Kansa were a Siouan people who drifted in from the north and south," said Virgil Dean, a historian with the Kansas State Historical Society.
Read an online-exclusive story about reptiles and other creatures that once called Kansas home.
Dinosaurs, other creatures once roamed Kansas
The Kansa lived in permanent villages of earth lodges typically situated near a river. They took trips in the spring and autumn to the buffalo grounds southwest of their villages. During the trips, they lived in teepees and hunted bison on horseback and with bows and arrows.
"The Kansa also lived along the trails from here to Council Grove," Dean added.
But in the 1820s, the federal government was making some decisions that would forever change the lives of the Indians living on the prairie.
The Rev. Isaac McCoy thought that Indians on the East Coast were being crowded too much by white people and suggested that the Indians be moved west of the Mississippi River to avoid friction between the two peoples. Of course, the Indians -- the Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Potawatomi, Delaware, Kickapoo and others -- weren't asked if they wanted to move.
"In the late 1820s and 1830s, there was an Indian removal that impacted this part of Kansas," Dean said. "Twenty or more tribes were assigned to reservations in the area."
In June 1825, the government signed treaties with the Kansa and Osage that gave land claimed by those tribes to Indians from the East. Many of the Eastern Indians died during the emigration because of the change in climate, lack of food and exposure.
The Kansa left their principle village near the junction of the Kansas and Big Blue rivers in 1829 and moved east to be near the Kansa Indian Agency and trading posts, according to Bird's research.
Within two years, the tribe was split into three different bands: American Chief and Hard Chief set up villages south of the Kansas River near present-day Topeka, while Fool Chief settled his larger band, numbering about 800, on the north side of the Kansas River. A 1843 census recorded 1,588 Kansa in the area.
In 1846, the Kansa sold their property in the Topeka region and moved further west to a site that includes present-day Council Grove. Eventually, that land was turned over to the government and the tribe was moved to a reservation in Oklahoma.
"Most of the treaties were exploitative," Dean said. "They sold the land for $1.25 an acre. They were building white settlements on the backs of the Indians. There were not many incidences of force being used, but there was always a threat."
Most of the land vacated by the Kansa became the new home of the Potawatomi, who originally came from Michigan and whose name means "place of the drowned skunk." With the relocated Indians, of course, came missionaries.
The Potawatomi Baptist Manual Labor Training School was on a 576,000-acre reservation about two miles west of Topeka. The goal of the school was to teach Indian children the "virtue of labor, industry and economy supported by European character and civilized custom," according to the Kansas State Historical Society's Web site.
The students, who dressed in European-style clothing, studied reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and religion. While whipping wasn't permitted, misbehavior was punished by long periods of standing in uncomfortable positions, sitting with a hood over the head or imprisonment, according to the Web site.
The boys' chores included cutting wood, building fires, feeding cattle and working in the fields; the girls cooked, baked, washed, ironed, spun, knitted, made candles and processed food.
After 11 years, the mission closed -- the result of disease, dwindling funds and the Civil War -- and the land was sold. The property changed hands many times before it was purchased in 1983 by the state of Kansas.
Today, the Baptist mission sits on the grounds of the Kansas State Historical Society and is home to the Koch Industries Education Center. The mission is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday on the third weekend of the month; and for special tours by appointment.
Jan Biles can be reached at (785) 295-1292 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Information for this story was gleaned from these sources, which are available at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library:
"Historic Kansas: A Centenary Sketchbook" by Margaret Whittemore, 1954
"History of the State of Kansas" by A. T. Andreas, 1883
"Thirty Years in Topeka: a Historical Sketchbook" by F.W. Giles, 1886
"Topeka: An Illustrated History of the Kansas Capital" by Roy Bird, 1985
"Bulletin of Shawnee County Historical Society" by Douglass Wallace and Roy Bird, 1976
Additional information is available at the Kansas State Historical Society's Web site, www.kshs.org
Editor's note: Topeka will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year -- and there is much to learn about the city before then. "Our Town: Topeka," a weekly series that will appear on Sundays through September, will explore Topeka's rich history and the people who have made the city what it is today.
Did your ancestors settle in the Topeka area in the 1800s? If so, we want to hear their stories and see any photographs that you might have of that time. We are particularly interested in learning about the daily life of early settlers.
Please send your stories by Jan. 12 to Jan Biles, weekend editor, Topeka Capital-Journal, 615 S.E. Jefferson, Topeka, 66607; e-mail to email@example.com; or call (785) 295-1292.
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