The State of Kansas is located in the Midwestern United States.It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kk?:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans."
Historically, the area was home to large numbers of nomadic Native Americans who hunted bison. It was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue. When officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine if Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas exploded when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into productive farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing many crops, and leading the nation in wheat, sorghum and sunflower production most years.
Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north; Missouri on the east; Oklahoma on the south; and Colorado on the west. The state is divided into 105 counties with 628 cities, and is located equidistant from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states is located in Smith County near Lebanon. The geodetic center of North America was located in Osborne County until 1983. This spot was used until that date as the central reference point for all maps of North America produced by the U.S. government. The geographic center of Kansas is located in Barton County.
Kansas is underlain by a sequence of horizontal to gently westward dipping sedimentary rocks. A sequence of Mississippian, Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks underlie the eastern and southern part of the state. The western half of the state consists of Cretacous through Tertiary sediments derived from the erosion of the uplifted Rocky Mountains to the west. The northeastern corner of the state was subjected to glaciation in the Pleistocene and is covered by glacial drift and loess.
The western two-thirds of the state, lying in the great central plain of the United States, has a generally flat or undulating surface, while the eastern third has many hills and forests. The land gradually rises from east to west; its altitude ranges from 684 ft (208 m) along the Verdigris River at Coffeyville in Montgomery County, to 4,039 ft (1,231 m) at Mount Sunflower, one half mile from the Colorado border, in Wallace County. It is a popular belief that Kansas is the flattest state in the nation, reinforced by a well-known 2003 study[11] stating that Kansas was indeed "flatter than a pancake".[12] This has since been debunked, with most scientists ranking Kansas somewhere between 20th and 30th flattest state, depending on measurement method. Its average elevation is 2,000 feet, higher than 36 states.