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Unfortunately for good history, the general public has overlooked the ephemeral, the sensational, and the pathological features of the shortlived cowboy boom days.
—James C. Malin,
“An Introduction to the History of the
Bluestem-Pasture Region of Kansas” (1942)
Sentimental Illlusions are not a good basis for national creeds, and certainly the creed of the West has been among the most sentimental of all.
—Richard Bernstein,
“Unsettling the Old West” (1990)
The Romans read places like faces, as outward revelations of living inner spirit. Each place (like each person) had its individual Genius—which might manifest itself, on occasion, as a snake.
—Charles W. Moore et al.,
The Poetics of Gardens (1988)
Land speculation here [in Kansas] is about the only business in which a man can embark with no other capital than an easy conscience.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
We must allow for the possibility that we can only understand something truly by knowing its future, its fruits, its consequence.
—Frederick Turner,
“A Field Guide to the Synthetic
Landscape” (1988)
Only the growth of a global appreciation for our common human past will wipe out assumptions that a site belongs to the person who temporarily owns the land above it.
—Ellen Herscher,
“A Future in Ruin” (1989)
We’re only now learning that there’s yet another, concealed danger in indiscriminately altering the environment: by inadvertently severing connectedness and thus dulling some of our own awareness, we can begin systematically ignoring our surroundings without quite realizing that our alertness has faltered; we can damage our natural systems; we can put our own safety and health in peril.
—Tony Hiss,
“Encountering the Countryside” (1989)
Now that some veils are being lifted on national-security obscurity, indications are that military facilities are major sources of toxic pollution. Military activity, it appears, has been undermining security of a physical kind, in the name of protecting the metaphysical kind contemplated by geopolitical threat assessors.
—Wade Greene,
“An Idea Whose Time Is Fading” (1990)
History is lived in the main by the unknown and forgotten.
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Introduction to Pioneer Women (1981)
The dead take their names with them out of the world.
—N. Scott Momaday,
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
The angels in marble make it impossible to imagine back to life the bones that are buried at their feet. Inflexibly benign, they point to heaven. . . . The historian should stay away, lest he be convinced against his will of the futility of any attempt to bring back to memory the forgotten men whose mortality on earth is here proclaimed in letters of stone.
—Helen Hooven Santmyer,
Ohio Town (1963)
Life extended into death, and vice versa. Death was not the natural end of life but one phase of an infinite cycle. Life, death, and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process which repeated itself continuously.
—Octavio Paz,
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1959)
The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.
—Gilbert White,
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1778)
Brave Buffalo said: “I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but Wakan-tanka does not intend they shall do so directly—man must do the greater part in securing an understanding.”
—Frances Densmore,
Teton Sioux Music (1918)
The most important requisite in describing an animal is to be sure and give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and effect of all its parts, known and unknown. You must tell what it is to man. Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. Yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are as it were phenomena of dead matter.
[Harrier] flight has the notionateness of prairie winds, and the sudden detour as a change of mind, a leap straight on, and then a notionate, abrupt change in direction as if he had just bought wings and were trying what sort of wings they were.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
E. H. Forbush (1927) says: “As [the harrier] bounds up and down in the air, it seems to move more like a rubber ball than a bird.”
—Arthur Cleveland Bent,
Life Histories of North American
Birds of Prey, Part I (1937)
A few years ago the freight wagons and oxen passing through Council Grove were counted by the thousands, the value of merchandise by millions. But the shriek of the iron horse has silenced the lowing of the panting ox and the old Trail looks desolate. The track of the commerce of the plains has changed and with the change is destined to come other changes better and more blessed.
—Editorial,
Junction City Union (1867)
The most famous spring in Kansas ought to be a state shrine.
—Kate L. Gregg,
The Road to Santa Fe (1952)
We believe it to our interest to discourage the settlement of free negroes in Kansas. The two races never have, and never can associate together on terms of equality. But at the same time, if we have got to have them here, we would have them educated; we are opposed to ignorance in every shape.
—Samuel Newitt Wood,
Kansas Press (1859)
I advocate “negro suffrage” not because they are black, not because they are of the male sex, but because they are human beings and entitled to all the rights of other human beings. If women are not human beings, then they are not entitled to the rights of human beings; but if you once raise them above the brute creation and admit them to be human beings, that ends the argument.
I did what I believed right at the time, with the light that I then had, and I have no apology to make to the present or to posterity for the part I took. I concede some honesty of purpose to others. If any erred, let us throw the mantle of charity over their acts, for not until we reach that better country to which we are one by one surely emigrating and in which [we] will be emigrants and not pioneers, will the motives of all, and the whole work of the pioneers of Kansas, be justly estimated.
—Samuel Newitt Wood,
Kansas Historical Society address (1886)
Much of the best legislation of the state was originated by [Sam Wood], especially such as protects the poor and the rights of women and children.
—Editorial,
Lawrence Jeffersonian (1891)
They call Kansas the “Sunflower State,” not because it is overrun with the noxious weed, but because, as the sunflower turns on its stem to catch the first beams of the morning sun, and with its broad disk and yellow rays follows the great orb of the day, so Kansas turns to catch the first rays of every advancing thought or civilized agency, and with her broad prairies and golden fields welcomes and follows the light.
—Editorial,
Burlington (Kansas) Nonpareil (1887)
For a generation Kansas has been the testing-ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty, and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy. The enthusiasm of youth, the conservatism of age, have alike yielded to the contagion, making the history of the State a melodramatic series of cataclysms in which tragedy and comedy have contended for mastery, and the convulsions of Nature have been emulated by the catastrophes of society. There has been neither peace, tranquility, nor repose.
Kansas was the prologue to a tragedy whose epilogue has not yet been pronounced; the prelude to a fugue of battles whose reverberations have not yet died away.
—John James Ingalls,
“Kansas: 1541–1891” (1892)
The belief that Kansas was founded for a cause distinguishes it, in the eyes of its inhabitants, as preeminently the home of freedom. It lifts the history of the state out of the commonplace of ordinary westward migration and gives to the temper of the people a certain elevated and martial quality. The people of Iowa or Nebraska are well enough, but their history has never brought them in touch with cosmic processes. The Pilgrims themselves are felt to have been actuated by less noble and altruistic motives. . . . This may smack of prejudice, but it is no heresy in Kansas. The trained and disinterested physiocratic historian will tell us that such statements are unsupported by the documents. The documents show, he will say, that the Kansas emigrants, like other emigrants, came for cheap land and in the hope of bettering their condition; the real motive was economic, as all historic motives are; the Kansas emigrant may have thought he was going to Kansas to resist oppression, but in reality he went to take up a farm.
The frontier develops strong individuals, but it develops individuals of a particular type, all being after much the same pattern. The individualism of the frontier is one of achievement, not of eccentricity.
—Carl Becker,
“Kansas” (1910)
Seldom has a community with so much vibrant idealism in its soul, so much creative potential in its mind, become so thickly encrusted with petty bourgeois mediocrity.
—Kenneth S. Davis,
Kansas: A Bicentennial History (1976)