The real development of Kansas began in 1865, and it has known few interruptions since. The census of 1870 showed a population of 364,399—an increase of 124,220 in five years, or nearly double the population of 1865. Railroad building also began in 1865, and 1,283 miles were completed by 1870. The home-returning soldiers and the railroads came together. Immigrants to other States came in slow-moving canal boats or canvas-covered wagons, but they came to Kansas in the lightning express, and most of them went to their claims in comfortable cars drawn by that marvel of modern mechanism, the locomotive. Our State has never had a "coon-skin cap" population. It is the child of the prairies, not of the forest. It has always attracted men of intelligence, who knew a good thing when they saw it. They brought with them the school, the church and the printing press; they planted an orchard and a grove as soon as they had harvested their first crop; and if they were compelled to live in a dug-out the first year or two, they were reasonably certain to own a comfortable house the third.
The period from 1865 to 1875 was, however, a period of uncertainty. Kansas remained an experiment. The drouth and grasshopper invasion of 1860, a menacing memory for many years, had just begun to grow dim when the drouth of 1873 and the still more disastrous drouth and locust invasion of 1874 revived its recollection, and intensified the uncertainty it had inspired. The intervening years were not, it is true, without their exaltation and triumphs. Luxuriant harvests followed the disaster of 1860, year after year in unbroken succession, until 1873, and we indulged in much jubilant boasting and self-gratulation over our fruitful soil, our benign climate, and our gracious seasons. But over and through it all brooded and ran a feeling of question or uncertainty, which manifested itself in many ways. The newspapers, while affecting to sneer at those who did not believe Kansas to be a country where rains always came just when they were wanted, nevertheless recorded every rain with suspicious prominence. Even the corner-lot speculator watched the clouds while he was denouncing the slanderers who asserted that Kansas was "a dry country." "Methinks the lady doth protest too much," might have been said of the Kansans who, from 1865 to 1875, vehemently maintained that the normal condition of Kansas was that of a quagmire.
