A long-lost city in south-central Kansas could put south-central Kansas on the map as the second-biggest settlement of Native Americans found in the United States.
As The Wichita Eagle reports, Etzanoa, near Arkansas City, has remained a mystery for 400 years. Archaelogists could not find it and historians thought reports of a permanent settlement with 20,000 Native Americans in it were exaggerated.
Wichita State University Anthropologist Donald Blakeslee has found evidence of a town that stretches across thousands of acres of bluffs and rich bottomland at the confluence of the Walnut and Arkansas Rivers – what he described as a lost city, a forgotten mythology – the story of the once-great Wichita Nation, decimated by European diseases and then pushed aside by American settlers and the United States Army.
Arkansas City officials believe the discovery could boost visitation and tourism to the small town.