West of Wichita: Settling the high plains of Kansas, 1865-1890

Miner, Craig

University Press of Kansas

This volume, which presents a "slice-of-life" on the Plains during its early settlement, adds rich detail to our understanding of the struggle for survival in a harsh landscape that tested the hardiest pioneer. Miner concentrates not only on the major economic events of the period—railroad building, Indian raids, the grasshopper invasion of 1874, the blizzard of 1886—but also on the more personal experiences equally important: building sod houses, choosing crops, filing of claims, fighting varmints, and dealing with the deaths of children on the prairie.

West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890

History

Americas

When Kansas became a U.S. territory in 1854 literally all of its land area was guaranteed by treaty to Indians. More than 10,000 Kickapoos, Delawares, Sacs, Foxes, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kansas, Ottawas, Wyandots, and Osages, not to mention a number of smaller tribes, inhabited Kansas. By 1875 there were only a couple of bands left. The forced removal of thousands of Indians from eastern Kansas between 1854 and 1871 affected more Indians and occupied more government time than the celebrated exploits of the military against the more warlike western tribes. In this volume Miner and Unrau show Kansas at mid-century to be a moral testing ground where the drama of Indian disinheritance was played out. They relate how railroad men, land speculators, and timber operations came to be firmly entrenched on Indian land in territorial Kansas. They examine remarkable incongruities in Indian policy, land policy, law, and administration, pointing to specific cases in which legal maneuvers by the federal government—within the framework of treaties, statutes, and executive pronouncements—helped to insure the pattern of tribal destruction. Separate chapters deal with internal factionalism in the Indian tribes, the practice of government chief-making, and the "Indian Ring"—the sub rosa alliances influencing the treaty or sale process. The authors also include revealing portraits of the individuals, from territorial governors to railroad officials, who helped engineer the end of Indian Kansas. "The reader's perception of those brave, hard-working sod-house settlers may never be the same after reading this book."—American West.

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study in Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

Unrau, William E.

The semiarid plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado are hardly the setting for an agricultural empire, but it was here that former field hand John Kriss managed G-K Farms for Wichita entrepreneur Ray Garvey. Their enterprise became one of the largest wheat operations on the plains and yielded Kriss a one million bushel crop. Harvesting the High Plains is the rags-to-riches story of how Kriss applied hard work and common sense to make large-scale farming work under the most adverse conditions. Drawing on correspondence between Kriss and Garvey, it tells how the two men had to make innumerable decisions about the purchase of expensive machinery and of ever larger tracts of land, and how Kriss kept detailed records of crops and rainfall to manage the land carefully, farming thousands of acres in an environmentally sensitive way and retaining a viable operation even during the Dust Bowl years. In chronicling the story of Kriss's success, historian Craig Miner provides a bold counterpoint to the argument that large, technology-based farming is inherently bad or that only small farmers can be conscientious stewards of the land. He sets his narrative in the context of local and agricultural history-as well as the Kriss family's own story-in order to document the transition to mechanized, specialized farming on the plains. He addresses philosophical and historical questions about the relation between agriculture and nature in a semiarid region, showing that G-K Farms managed to strike a remarkable balance between profit and ecology. He also suggests that G-K may even have done its region more economic good than small farms simply by staying in business during bad times. The Kriss family still works the land, and although their operation is huge, it still depends on traditional family farming values and approaches. Harvesting the High Plains provides keen insights into their special approach to large-scale farming and gives a human face to the faceless statistics of other agricultural studies.

Harvesting the High Plains: John Kriss and the Business of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950

Kansas is not only the Sunflower State, it's the very heart of America's heartland. It is a place of extremes in politics as well as climate, where ambitious and energetic people have attempted to put ideals into practice-a state that has come a long way since being identified primarily with John Brown and his exploits. Craig Miner has written a complete and balanced history of Kansas, capturing the state's colorful past and dynamic present as he depicts the persistence of contrasting images of and attitudes toward the state throughout its 150 years. A work combining serious scholarship with great readability, it encompasses everything from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the evolution-creationism controversy, emphasizing the historical moments that were pivotal in forming the culture of the state and the diverse group of people who have contributed to its history. Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State is the first new state history to appear in over twenty-five years and the most thoroughly researched ever published. Written to enlighten general readers within and well beyond the state's borders, it offers coverage not found in previous histories: greater attention to its cities-notably Wichita-and to its south central and western regions, accounts of business history, contributions of women and minorities, and environmental concerns. It presents the dark as well as the bright side of Kansas progressivism and is the first Kansas history to deal with the post-World War II era in any significant detail. Craig Miner has spent almost forty years researching, teaching, and writing Kansas history and has dug deeply into primary sources-especially gubernatorial papers-that shed new light on the state. That research has enabled him to assemble a wider cast of characters and more entertaining collection of quotations than found in earlier histories and to better show how individual initiative and entrepreneurial aspirations have profoundly influenced the creation of present-day Kansas. Ranging from the days of cattle and railroads to the era of oil and agribusiness, this history situates the state in its own terms rather than as a sidebar to a larger American epic. Miner brings to its pages an identifiable Kansas character to preserve what is distinctive about the state's identity for future generations, echoing what one Kansan said over half a century ago: "Kansas is simply Kansas. May she never be tempted to become anything else."

Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000

Kansas is not only the Sunflower State, it's the very heart of America's heartland. It is a place of extremes in politics as well as climate, where ambitious and energetic people have attempted to put ideals into practice-a state that has come a long way since being identified primarily with John Brown and his exploits. Craig Miner has written a complete and balanced history of Kansas, capturing the state's colorful past and dynamic present as he depicts the persistence of contrasting images of and attitudes toward the state throughout its 150 years. A work combining serious scholarship with great readability, it encompasses everything from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the evolution-creationism controversy, emphasizing the historical moments that were pivotal in forming the culture of the state and the diverse group of people who have contributed to its history. Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State is the first new state history to appear in over twenty-five years and the most thoroughly researched ever published. Written to enlighten general readers within and well beyond the state's borders, it offers coverage not found in previous histories: greater attention to its cities-notably Wichita-and to its south central and western regions, accounts of business history, contributions of women and minorities, and environmental concerns. It presents the dark as well as the bright side of Kansas progressivism and is the first Kansas history to deal with the post-World War II era in any significant detail. Craig Miner has spent almost forty years researching, teaching, and writing Kansas history and has dug deeply into primary sources-especially gubernatorial papers-that shed new light on the state. That research has enabled him to assemble a wider cast of characters and more entertaining collection of quotations than found in earlier histories and to better show how individual initiative and entrepreneurial aspirations have profoundly influenced the creation of present-day Kansas. Ranging from the days of cattle and railroads to the era of oil and agribusiness, this history situates the state in its own terms rather than as a sidebar to a larger American epic. Miner brings to its pages an identifiable Kansas character to preserve what is distinctive about the state's identity for future generations, echoing what one Kansan said over half a century ago: "Kansas is simply Kansas. May she never be tempted to become anything else."

West of Highway 81, there lies another Kansas. While it accounts for two-thirds of the state's land area, it is sparsely populated and nearly desert dry. Before 1940, it was still distinctly rural-a place that some residents called the "Edge of the World." Several generations of the Miner family have lived and farmed in Ness County, providing Craig Miner with a rich and very personal backdrop for this heartfelt and compelling portrait of western Kansas. In Next Year Country he recounts the resilience of his fellow Kansans through two depressions and the Dust Bowl, showing how the region changed dramatically over fifty years-not for the better, some might say. In this striking regional history, Miner blends the voices of real people with writings of small-town journalists to show life as it was really lived from 1890 to 1940. He has fashioned a richly textured look at determined individuals as they confronted the vagaries of raw Nature and learned to adapt to the machine age. And he captures the drama and vitality of rural and small-town life at a time when children could die in a blizzard on their way home from school, in a place where gaping holes of cellars and wells from abandoned homesteads posed real hazards to nighttime travelers. No mere nostalgic reverie, Miner's book chronicles the hard challenges to these Kansans' ambitious efforts to create a regional economy and society based on wheat, in an area once thought only marginally suitable for cereal crops. His diverse topics include the history of agricultural experiment stations, new approaches to irrigation, and the impact of the tractor and the combine; the role of women's clubs in developing culture, the growth of higher education, and the rise of the secession movement; and how people responded to pests, from prairie dogs to grasshoppers, and to radical groups, from the IWW to the KKK. Next Year Country depicts the kind of rugged individualism that is often touted in America but seldom seen anymore, a testament to how people dealt with both Nature and transformative change. It is both a love song to Kansas and the best kind of regional history, showing that life has to be taken on its own terms to understand how people really lived.

Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Kansas Territory was a national issue that dominated America's press, not to mention three sessions of Congress. Hundreds of thousands of articles and editorials—4,500 in the New York Herald alone—were published about Bleeding Kansas during those four tumultuous years leading up to the Lecompton Constitution. Craig Miner now offers the first in-depth study of national media coverage devoted to the beleaguered territory, unearthing new examples of what Americans were saying about Kansas and showing how those words affected the course of national events. Miner draws on dozens of newspapers and magazines from all parts of the country and of all political persuasions: a trove of rich quotations and unvarnished epithets, nearly all of them published here for the first time. He reveals how the heated, polarizing rhetoric widened the sectional rift, weakened chances of accommodation, and contributed more to the onset of civil war than has been previously recognized. Miner shows what a tremendous obsession Kansas was for the nation-a whipping boy for sectional and political emotions-and how thoroughly it dominated the press in cities large and small, North and South. He argues convincingly that the endless, seemingly fruitless debate was important more because of the way events were discussed than because of the significance of the events themselves and that it contributed to the cynicism that made war inevitable-for some, even desirable. Along the way, he addresses such topics as the vagaries of voting as a democratic solution to moral divisions, the Kansas issue as a religious debate, the media creation of martyrs, and Kansas governors as examples of leadership, for good or ill. After reading Seeding Civil War, Kansans will never be able to regard Lawrence and Lecompton the same way again, while national readers will gain surprising insights about their own towns during this critical time—and experience firsthand the unfolding of a national disaster.

Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858

Just as the railroad transformed America's economic landscape, it profoundly transfigured its citizens as well. But while there have been many histories of railroads, few have examined the subject as a social and cultural phenomenon. Informed especially by rich research in the nation's newspaper archives, Craig Miner now traces the growth of railroads from their origins in the 1820s to the onset of the Civil War. In this first social history of the early railroads, Miner reveals how ordinary Americans experienced this innovation at the grass roots, from boosters' dreams of get-rich schemes to naysayers' fears of soulless corporations. Drawing on an amazing 400,000 articles from 185 newspapers-plus more than 3,000 books and pamphlets from the era-he documents the initial burst of enthusiasm accompanying early railroading as it took shape in various settings across the country. Miner examines the cultural, economic, and political aspects of this broad and complicated topic while remaining rooted in the local interests of communities. He takes readers back to the days of the Mauch Chunk Railway, a tourist sensation of the mid-1820s, navigates the mixed reactions to trains as Baltimore's city fathers envisioned tracks to the Ohio River, shows how Pennsylvanians wrestled with the efficacy of railroads versus canals, and describes the intense rivalry of cities competing for trade as old transportation patterns were replaced by the new rail technology. Miner samples individual railroads to compare progress across the industry, showing how it became a quintessentially American business-and how the Panic of 1837 significantly slowed the railways as a major engine of growth for many years. He also explores the impact of railroads on different regions, even disproving the backwardness of the South by citing the Central of Georgia as one of the best-managed and most profitable lines in the country. Through this panoramic work, readers will discover just how the benefits of what became the country's first big business triumphed over cultural concerns, though not without considerable controversy along the way. By identifying citizens' hopes and fears sparked by the railroads, A Most Magnificent Machine takes readers down the tracks of progress as it opens a new window on antebellum America.

A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862

Business & Money

Economics

An entrepreneurial and engineering genius, Leroy Hill left his mark on 20th century aviation. But that was just the beginning.As a gifted Berkeley engineering graduate in the late teens, Hill succeeded in reengineering the famous "Liberty Engine" of World War I to fit into the legendary fighter DH-4, or "Flying Coffin." In the late 1920s his passion for aviation brought him to a new marketplace as twelve-year president of Air Associates—that remarkable aviation catalog of everything from plane parts and repairs to whole aircraft. Later, in World War II, he founded the company that manufactured and distributed all the hose-clamps for the popular P-51 Mustang Fighter.A true entrepreneur, Leroy Hill was involved in sixty different companies either designing new technologies or marketing improved versions of the old. Politically, he was a lifelong anti-union activist working in the most unionized industries in the nation. Though he marched lockstep with no one, Hill remained to the end of his life a hardbitten opponent of big government who championed many conservative movements of his day.From Leroy Hill's substantial archives, including his voluminous diaries, author Craig Miner has distilled the heady public and private dynamics of an extraordinary life.

So Many Worlds: Invention, Management, Philosophy, and Risk in the Life of Leroy Hill

Industries

Texas Tech University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miner, Craig. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Miner, Craig

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miner, Craig. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

West of Wichita: Settling the high plains of Kansas, 1865-1890

West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890

The End of Indian Kansas: A Study in Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871

Harvesting the High Plains: John Kriss and the Business of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950

Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000

Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000

Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940

Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858

A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862

So Many Worlds: Invention, Management, Philosophy, and Risk in the Life of Leroy Hill