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Montezuma, located in the southwestern corner of Kansas, is a small town with big bragging rights. In addition to sporting one of the first wind farms on the high plains, this quiet, largely German Mennonite community is home to the Stauth Memorial Museum.

In the late 1870s many Southern blacks saw Kansas as The Promised Land, partially because of the availability of free land through the Homesteaders Act, but also because so many Kansans had taken an anti-slavery stance in the battle for free-state status prior to the Civil War.

In Southwest Kansas, the dry and dusty bed of the once mighty R-kansas River (also called the Arkansas) gives little indication of the swirling waters of death and destruction that have periodically overflowed its banks.

After 1880, land colonizers lured a number of farmers to the Panhandle Plains of Texas by promoting the agricultural benefits that might befall a landowner in this vast area.

In 1929, Marion Talley, world-renowned Metropolitan Opera star, began a brief love affair with the Heartland when she purchased farm ground near Colby in northwest Kansas.

In 1928 the commissioners of Kit Carson County, on Colorado’s Central Plains, made a forward-thinking decision that at the time was met with disapproval and dismay by many of their constituents. They purchased a carousel that had operated for many years at Elitch Gardens Amusement Park in Denver.

The first settlers on the Great Plains had little time for fun amidst the hardscrabble toil that made up their daily existence. Yet out of this era came some of our most precious, and now fading, traditions. Box suppers, church socials, spelling bees, and barn dances each held the common essentials of food, music and neighbors that made life on the plains not only bearable, but also downright enjoyable. And of those events, none was more anticipated than the dances.

The Texas Longhorn, an icon of the past, was a work of nature, untouched by man’s attempts at breeding and crossbreeding.

In 1926, U.S. Route 66 stitched together small towns, big cities, farms, deserts, dreams, and desperation. Over the next century, the Mother Road became more than pavement—it became a symbol of movement and reinvention, of loss and possibility, of who gets to travel freely and who is pushed to the margins.

Early-day travelers on the Santa Fe Trail developed a shortened route that took them through the Southwest corner of Kansas. Known as the Cimarron Cutoff, or Dry Route, the sixty-mile stretch between the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers was a perilous route for men and animals in dry seasons, when wagon trains often ran out of water.