Collyer-Quinter, Kansas. September 29, 2008.

The vast lands between the Missouri and the Rockies were legally opened to white settlement by passage of the bitterly debated Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854. the new law abrogated the Missouri Compromise and instituted the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which allowed the settlers to decide whether their territories should become free states or slave states. Contesting factions, North and South, came into sometimes violent conflict, and “Bleeding Kansas” gained national attention. Finally, Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861, when Southern states were seceding …

Conditions in eastern Kansas and Nebraska were not much different from those in the settlers’ native states, but the open prairie farther west presented various difficulties. There, timber was scarce, water had to be taken from deep wells, and manual farming operations were futile because of the tough sod. From this new farmland came innovations peculiar to the Plains: windmills, barbed wire, and sod buildings. The sod-house frontier eventually stretched from the Canadian border to the Texas Panhandle and into the eastern portion of the Rocky Mountain states.

Excerpted from A Nation Moving West: Readings in the History of the American Frontier by Robert W. Richmond, chapter XX, ‘Settlement of the Great Plains.’ Published by University of Nebraska Press, 1966.