For over 80 years, Route 66 has provided, first, a highway, then a byway, for travelers motoring between Chicago and Los Angeles. One of the major stops along the way sits in Amarillo, on Old Route 66 – between 6th and Georgia.

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, throwing a lifeline of meaningful work and wages to a nation in the grip of the Great Depression. The federal program had far-reaching effects for the nation's poor and downtrodden, at one point employing more than three million people across the country.

Women of the old West usually fell into two basic categories: respectable women who worked at homesteading, school teaching, or storekeeping; – OR– ‘soiled doves’ who worked at saloons and dancehalls. However, one young woman who became a legend in the Texas Panhandle was able to embody BOTH worlds, while never revealing who she really was… or where she came from.

No one really knows why a strong and widely-based love of flying developed in the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. Perhaps it was the prairie itself, with its wide open spaces and lack of obstacles like mountains, forests, and other natural outgrowths. Perhaps it was the shifting currents of air that rose and fell from those flatlands.

After the U.S. Government encouraged the extermination of approximately 30- 60 million bison on the Great Plains, and before the cattle barons built their huge herds, there stood a brief time when sheep grazed on the lush grasses of the Texas Panhandle. For many years prior to 1874, sheep from the New Mexico Territory, Spanish settlers and Indigenous sheep farmers herded sheep along the Canadian River. The Spanish called them “Pastores.”

A conventional description of the Great Plains landscape of Kansas may include references to open skies, treeless flatlands, rolling hills of shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies, and colors tending toward tan and brown. However, when we look at areas in Southwest and South-Central Kansas, the former description may not always fit. Located mostly in Clark, Comanche and Barber counties along the southern border of Kansas, there exists a physiographic province known as the Red Hills. This undulating terrain of red-tinted sediments comes from an underlying geological structure that developed when the Great Plains spanned an ancient ocean.

The town of Dumas sits north of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. Founded by a farmer and rancher named Louis Dumas in 1891, it’s known for its livestock, oil and gas industries as well as an impressive record of high school sports championships. But perhaps the most famous identifying element for Dumas, Texas, is indeed ‘note’ worthy.

In most people’s minds, the image of a diner is usually associated with shiny stainless steel structures straight out of the 1940s and 50s. These imagined eateries are also linked to the East Coast, with their counter stools occupied by guys from Jersey or Brooklyn having serious encounters with a piece of pie and a mug of coffee.

Some researchers suggested that the Great Influenza Pandemic derived from illnesses recorded in China and in France.  A writer named John Barry suggests it may have had its origins in southwest Kansas.

One of the darker elements of the dust bowl days came from the advent of “rabbit drives” in an attempt to control the destruction caused by hordes of black-tailed jackrabbits.