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James Cox - My Native Land
value of her farms and farm products, and in her manufacturing industries, she is the first State in the
Union. She sustains over 1,000 newspapers and periodicals, has $80,000,000 invested in church property,
and spends $12,000,000 a year on popular education. Upward of 300 academies and colleges fit her
youth for special professions, and furnish opportunities for liberal learning and the highest culture, and
stately edifices all over the State, dedicated to humane and benevolent objects, exhibit the permanence
and extent of her organized charities. There are $600,000,000 in her savings banks, $300,000,000 in her
insurance companies, and $700,000,000 in the capital and loans of her State and National banks. Six
thousand miles of railroads, costing $600,000,000, have penetrated and developed every accessible
corner of the State, and maintain, against all rivalry and competition, her commercial prestige."
CHAPTER IV. IN THE CENTER OF THE COUNTRY.
The Geographical Center of the United States and its Location West of the Mississippi River - The
Center of Population - History of Fort Riley - The Gallant "Seventh" - Early Troubles of Kansas -
Extermination of the Buffalo - But a Few Survivors out of Many Millions.
Kansas is included by most people in the list of Western States; by many it is regarded as in the extreme
West. If the Pilgrim Fathers had been told that the haven of refuge they had selected would, within two
or three hundred years, be part of a great English-speaking nation with some 70,000,000 of inhabitants,
and with its center some 1,500 miles westward, they would have listened to the story with pardonable
incredulity, and would have felt like invoking condemnation upon the head of the reckless prophet who
was addressing them.
Yet Kansas is to-day in the very center of the United States. This is not a printer's error, nor a play upon
words, much as the New Englander may suspect the one or the other. There was a time when the word
"West" was used to apply to any section of the country a day's journey on horseback from the Atlantic
Coast. For years, and even generations, everything west of the Allegheny Mountains or of the Ohio River
was "Out West." Even to-day it is probable that a majority of the residents in the strictly Eastern States
regard anything west of the Mississippi River as strictly Western.
There is no doubt that when Horace Greeley told the young men of the country to "Go West and grow up
with the country," he used the term in its common and not its strictly geographical sense, and many
thousand youths, who took the advice of the philosopher and statesman, stopped close to the banks of the
Mississippi River, and have grown rich in their new homes. It cannot be too generally realized, however,
that the Mississippi River slowly wends its way down to the Gulf of Mexico well within the eastern half
of the greatest nation in the world. At several points in the circuitous course of the Father of Waters, the
distance between the river and the Atlantic Ocean is about 1,000 miles. In an equal number of points the
distance to the Pacific Ocean is 2,000 miles, showing that whatever may be said of the tributaries of the
Mississippi River, and especially of its gigantic tributary the Missouri, the Mississippi is an Eastern and
not a Western river.
We give an illustration of the point which competent surveyors and engineers tell us is the exact
geographical center of the United States proper. The monument standing in the center of this great
country is surrounded by an iron railing, and is visited again and again by tourists, who find it difficult to
believe the fact that a point apparently so far western is really central. The center of the United States has
gone west with the absorption of territory, and the Louisiana purchase, the centenary of which we shall
shortly celebrate, had a great effect on the location.
The center of population has moved less spasmodically, but with great regularity. A hundred years ago
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