Kansas Day in OK

I’ve always loved numbers.  They put arguments to rest.  Every once in a while I meet a Southerner who alleges that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but about states rights.  The South seceded because they loved states rights.  Kansas disproves this.  It was the 34^th state of the nation on Jan. 29, 1861.  Kansans decided to be a free state. Congress accepted their charter.  So what difference did it make to South Carolina?  Kansas was exercising their state’s rights.  Ah, the South Carolinians were mad because Kansas, the 18^th free state would outnumber the 16 slave states on matters.  So SC seceded along with 6 others in rapid succession. 

A lot of people think that just about every southerner owned slaves back then.  Only 10% of them did.  In fact, there were 13 abolitionist churches in the Carolinas.  But Cotton was King and most people from the area thought that to upset the slave system would destroy their economy.  True perhaps.  Thomas Sowell did landmark work on the sociology of slavery.  A slave typically cost about the price of a house in a rural area.  That might mean $100,000 in today’s terms.  Often the value of a gang of slaves was worth far more than the land they tilled.  Slaves were so valuable that they were rarely used in mining—a dangerous job where only fortune-hunters would risk their own lives.  And they were vital for cotton.  Interestingly, defense-of-slavery attitude developed after 1820.  In 1787, Virginia bequeathed all the land north of the Ohio River to the nation provided the states carved out would be free states (Northwest Ordinance). But when Ely Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, a new agricultural industry was founded that provided 40% of the exports of USA.   

In the Civil War, 600,000 were killed, 5% of the population and nearly 20% of the adult males.  The dominance of so many women in society in the aftermath was an impelling factor in the temperance movement, the Victorian age and its desire for a quiet, productive home life, and the suffrage movement because women often rose to positions of civic importance.  At the epicenter of was Kansas.  Kansas became the state everyone watched for trends.  And that continued until the 1920’s when the Prohibition movement (a Kansas idea) flopped. 

Oklahoma was once heavily Democrat, but that was never true in NW Oklahoma.  Kansans were mostly Republican and the last land run comprised 60% Kansans.  I live in that Cherokee Outlet territory.  The run was two counties wide from Kay-Noble to the panhandle, about 1/6 of the state.  Today Kay county is 55% R , 38% D, 7% I.

And why did Kansans want the Indian Territory opened for settlement?  The cattle business in the 1880’s was where people often made enormous profits --30% ROE or more.  After the civil war 3 million head of wild cattle lived in Texas and from 1867-79 Kansans watched 1.2 million head sold in cow towns at rail terminals.  Often the trail drives grazed to fatten the beeves in the Oklahoma grasslands, seemingly for free, since the Cherokees didn’t occupy that area and didn’t collect rents very well.  The Texas cattle carried a disease, called Spanish fever, that we now know was caused by Hill Country ticks.  Texas cattle infected northern cattle who then died in large numbers.  But about 100,000 cattle were lost by trail drives and another 50,000 were sold to northerners who interbred the longhorns with Scottish Herefords.  Original Herefords were winter hardy but not good grazers in sparse grass.  The longhorns were unequalled grass finders.  And they passed-on their resistance to southern ticks to their offspring.  In a decade and a half, this new crossbred super Hereford was shipped north.  As the song goes, git along little doggie, you know that Wyoming will be your new home. Hence the settlers killed off 20 million buffalo (driving the hapless Indians onto reservations) and replaced them with 10 million head of cattle.  That is how the West was won.   

And so in 1892 the federal government offered to buy the western Cherokee Outlet for $1.20 an acre to make a new state.  Nearby Kansas cattlemen quickly countered with a $3.00 offer.  But true to form, the government had a host of lawyers go to court and nullify the offer of the cattlemen, leaving the Cherokees with a gun-to-the-head deal of buck twenty.  This is one more reason why Okies were often registered Democrats but voted Republican in national elections. (With 38.6% part blood Native Americans and 20% other minorities, one would expect Okies to be loyal Dems!) They trust Washington like an egg gatherer trusts a snake.  And that is why Kansas Day should be important even in Oklahoma.