James R. Mead, explorer, naturalist, and plainsman, came to Kansas Territory in 1859. He hunted buffalo, built trading posts in Towanda, on the Ninnescah River near Clearwater, and came to Wichita in 1870. He was responsible for bringing the cattle drives to Wichita, and was a good friend of Jesse Chisholm, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Mathewson, and Chief Satanta. Mead was a state senator and president of the Kansas State Historical Society. His writings encompass the territorial days through the march of civilization, and give a firsthand account of buffalo, Native Americans, and the honor of the early settlers.

"This is an abridgment by Abby Miller of the memoir of James R. Mead, Kansas pioneer, trader, and hunter: Hunting and Trading on the Great Plains 1859-1875. It is a school text for primary students in Kansas history. Only the original text is included in this abridgment--there are no additions"--Provided by publisher.

Gathering its waters from the plains of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, the Kaw is truly America’s prairie river; the only one to arise entirely on the Great Plains and traverse all three major grasslands—shortgrass, mixed-grass, and tallgrass prairies. James Locklear’s In the Country of the Kaw is a joyous exploration of the realm of the Kaw River, which stretches from the High Plains of Colorado to the Kansas City metropolitan area. The book’s first section profiles geology, landforms, and the region’s woodlands and grasslands. The second explores the rich biological diversity associated with the land and its inhabitants’ remarkable adaptations to the environment and each other. The final section is a collection of stories of human interaction with the landscape, how nature has shaped culture and culture nature. Locklear finds “astonishments” at every turn. In the Country of the Kaw is also a call to seek the flourishing of the natural and human communities of the region. Locklear describes staggering, human-wrought environmental degradations, but also finds great hope in the resilience of Nature and the inspiring work of conservation, preservation, restoration, and renewal being accomplished by individuals and organizations throughout the region. Locklear’s relationship with the country of the Kaw stretches from his childhood in Kansas City in the 1960s to his current professional life as a botanist working in the Great Plains. A half century of rambling and rooting around in this region has given him a deep awe and affection for its uniqueness and goodness, which he conveys to the reader on every page.

This unique history chronicles reciprocal relations between settlers and the native fauna of Kansas from the end of the Civil War until 1880. While including the development of early-day conservation and game laws, zoologist Eugene D. Fleharty tells of wanton wastefulness on the frontier, but also curiosity, concern, and creativity on the part of individual settlers, who hunted and fished for food and recreation or simply wondered at the animals’ antics. Using only primary accounts from newspapers and diaries, Fleharty vividly portrays frontier life before such species as the bison, beaver, antelope, bear, mountain lion, gray wolf, rattlesnake, and black-footed ferret were more or less extirpated by steel plows, reapers, barbed wire, and firearms. As the author shows the impact of civilization on the prairie ecosystem, readers will share in the lives of the early settlers, experiencing their successes and hardships much as their neighbors did. This historical account of a typical plains state’s ecology during the traumatic homesteading era will interest professionals concerned with biodiversity and global warming as well as frontier-history buffs.

The historic tales of the Sunflower State and its people are as interesting as the days are long. A pair of brothers went from making airplanes to tractors and soon became part of John Deere. Kansan Captain Donald K. Ross won the first Congressional Medal of Honor through his actions at Pearl Harbor. The first telephone exchange in the area was invented by a Mr. Strowger because a rival funeral director had a girlfriend who was an operator for the local telephone company and kept sending his business to her friend. Nannie Jones, who stood up to Jim Crow racism and won her case in court, is memorialized by a headstone at Highland Cemetery. Author Roger Ringer details these stories and more.

In 1863, the thirteen-year-old boy who would come to be called Comanche Jack was sent to the well to fetch water. Instead, he joined a wagon train bound for Santa Fe. Thus began the exploits of Simpson E. “Jack” Stilwell (1850–1903), a man generally known for slipping through Indian lines to get help for some fifty frontiersmen besieged by the Cheyenne at Beecher Island in 1868. Daring as his part in the rescue might have been, it was only one noteworthy episode of many in Comanche Jack Stilwell’s life—a life whose rollicking story is finally told here in full. In his later years, Stilwell crafted his own legend as a celebrated raconteur. Authors Clint E. Chambers (whose grandfather was Stilwell’s nephew) and Paul H. Carlson scour the available primary and secondary sources to find the unvarnished truth and remarkable facts behind the legend. In a crisp, fast-paced style, the narrative follows Stilwell from his precocious start as a teenage runaway turned teamster on the Santa Fe Trail to his later turns as lawyer, judge, U.S. marshal, hangman, and associate of Buffalo Bill Cody. Along the way, he learned Spanish, Comanche, and sign language, scouted for the U.S. Army, and became a friend of George A. Custer and an avowed, if failed, avenger of his kid brother Frank, an outlaw killed by Wyatt Earp. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Civil War, cattle drives, the Indian Wars, the Oklahoma land rush, and the rough justice of the Wild West, Comanche Jack Stilwell takes a true American character out of the shadows of history and returns to the story of the West one of its defining figures.