News > State > To the Stars: The Story of Kansas

Posted on Mon, Oct. 13, 2008

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An eyewitness account of the state's progress

BY BECCY TANNER

The Wichita Eagle

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."

It was 1859, and a young minister's son was stepping into Kansas Territory for the first time. He would stay and become one of the most respected frontiersmen in Kansas.

There was little James R. Mead didn't do in the early days. He was a hunter, a trapper and a tradesman.

He was friends with other legends of the Old West: Buffalo Bill Mathewson and Kiowa chief Satanta. During the Little Arkansas River Peace Treaty of 1865, he also came to know frontiersman Kit Carson.

Mead's eyewitness accounts of Kansas -- as the state changed from a buffalo-covered prairie to a land dotted with small cities -- provide today's historians glimpses of a Kansas that disappeared long ago.

Mead's writings have been republished and are available in the book "Hunting and Trading on the Great Plains, 1859-1875."

"The changes that have taken place in central Kansas since the days when I roamed among the buffalo and Indians are so wonderful that it is almost impossible for any person not familiar with the facts to believe them," Mead wrote more than a century ago. "Where I used to hunt buffalo, elk and deer, and where Indian villages were located, are now found commercial cities with railroads branching in every direction."

A good example was the city of Wichita.

When pioneer settlement was just beginning at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers in 1868, Mead suggested naming that gathering of houses and buildings Wichita after the Wichita Indians who had earlier occupied the area.

Mead was born in New Haven, Vt., in 1836. When he was 3, his family moved to Davenport, Iowa. He lived there until 1859, when at 23 he left home and traveled to Burlingame, Kan., to trade with Indian tribes.

At that time, the territory of Kansas extended from the Missouri River to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. Mead explored the territory, became adept at hunting buffalo and soon established a trading post at what is now Salina.

In 1863, he started trading posts near Towanda in Butler County and what is now 17th Street and the Little Arkansas River in Wichita.

In 1864 and 1868, he represented Butler County in the Kansas Legislature.

He would later serve as a U.S. Marshall's deputy, mine for gold in Colorado and live to promote Wichita as a cowtown and railroad hub.

In time, he would grow nostalgic for the days when Kansas was young.

"The sun does not shine as bright, the grass is not as green, the air is not as pure, and the water is not as sweet as it was before the white men came," he wrote.

In the spring of 1910, Mead contracted a severe cold that developed into pneumonia. On March 31, he died at his home in Wichita.

Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.