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Rh region salt is produced in immense quantities, within a great north to south belt about Hutchinson. The beds, which are exploited by the brine method at Hutchinson, at Ellsworth (Ellsworth county), at Anthony (Harper county) and at Sterling (Rice county), lie from 400 to 1200 ft. underground, and are in places as much as 350 ft. thick and 99% pure. At Kanopolis in Ellsworth county, at Lyons in Rice county and at Kingman, Kingman county, the salt is mined and sold as rock-salt. In the south-west salt is found in beds and dry incrustations, varying in thickness from a few inches to 2 ft. The total product from 1880–1899 was valued at $5,538,855; the product of 1908 (when Kansas ranked fourth among the states producing salt) was valued at $882,984. The development has been mainly since 1887 at Hutchinson and since about 1890 in the rock-salt mines. In the west portion of the state, which belongs to the Cretaceous formation, chalks and a species of native quicklime are very prominent in the river bluffs. The white and cream-coloured chalks are much used for building purposes, but the blue is usually too soft for exposure to the weather. The quicklime as quarried from the bluffs slakes perfectly, and with sand makes a fairly good mortar, without calcination or other previous preparation. The lignite found near the Colorado line makes a valuable domestic fuel.

Natural gas, oil, zinc and lead have been discovered in south-east Kansas and have given that section an extraordinary growth and prosperity. Indications of gas were found about the time of the Civil War, but only in the early ’seventies were they recognized as unmistakable, and they were not successfully developed until the ’eighties. Iola, in Allen county, is the centre of the field, and the gas yields heat, light, and a cheap fuel for smelters, cement-works and other manufacturing plants throughout a large region. The pools lie from 400 to 950 ft. below the surface; some wells have been drilled 1500 ft. deep. The value of the natural gas produced in the state was $15,873 in 1889, $2,261,836 in 1905 and $7,691,587 in 1908, when there were 1917 producing wells, and Kansas ranked fourth of the states of the United States in the value of the natural gas product, being surpassed by Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. Petroleum was discovered about 1865 in Miami and Bourbon counties, and about 1892 at Neodesha, Wilson county. There was only slight commercial exploitation before 1900. The production increased from 74,714 barrels in that year to 4,250,779 in 1904; in 1908 it was 1,801,781 barrels. Chanute has been the most active centre of production. The field was prospected here in the ’nineties, but developed only after 1900. In 1877 an immense deposit of lead was discovered on land now within the limits of Galena. Rich zinc blendes were at first thrown away among the by-products of the lead mines. After the discovery of their true nature there was a slow development, and at the end of the century a notable boom in the fields. From 1876 to 1897 the total value of the output of the Galena field was between $25,000,000 and $26,000,000; but at present Kansas is far more important as a smelter than as a miner of zinc and lead, and in 1906 58% of all spelter produced in the United States came from smelters in Kansas. In 1908 the mines’ output was 2293 tons of lead valued at $192,612 and 8628 tons of zinc valued at $811,032. Pottery, fire, ochre and brick clays are abundant, the first two mainly in the eastern part of the state. Coffeyville has large vitrified brick interests. In 1908 the total value of all the mineral products (incompletely reported) of Kansas was $26,162,213.

Industry and Trade.—Manufactures are not characteristic of the state. The rank of the state in manufactures in 1900 was sixteenth and in farm products seventh in the Union. The value of the manufactured product in 1900, according to the Twelfth United States Census, was $172,129,398, an increase of 56.2% over the output of 1890; of this total value, the part representing establishments under the “factory system” was $154,008,544, and in 1905 the value of the factory product was $198,244,992, an increase of 28.7%. Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita, Leavenworth and Atchison were the only cities which had manufactures whose gross product was valued in 1905 at more than $3,000,000 each; their joint product was valued at $126,515,804, and that of Kansas City alone was $96,473,050, almost half the output of the state. The most important manufacturing industry, both in 1900 and in 1905, was slaughtering and meat-packing—for which Kansas City is the second centre of the country—with a product for the state valued at $77,411,883 in 1900, and $96,375,639 in 1905; in both these years the value of the product of Kansas was exceeded only by that of Illinois. The flour and grist mill industry ranked next, with a product valued at $21,328,747 in 1900 and nearly twice that amount, $42,034,019, in 1905. In 1900 a quarter of the wheat crop was handled by the mills of the state. Lesser manufacturing interests are railway shop construction (value in 1905, $11,521,144); zinc smelting and refining (value in 1905, $10,999,468); the manufacture of cheese, butter and condensed milk (value in 1905, $3,946,349); and of foundry and machine shop products (value in 1905, $3,756,825).

Communications.—Kansas is excellently provided with railways, with an aggregate length in January 1909 of 8914.77 m. (in 1870, 1880, 1890 respectively, 1,501, 3,244 and 8,710 m.). The most important systems are the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, the Missouri Pacific, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, the Union Pacific, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the St Louis & San Francisco systems. The first train entered Kansas on the Union Pacific in 1860. During the following decade the lines of the Missouri Pacific, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas and the Santa Fé were well under construction. These roads give excellent connexions with Chicago, the Gulf and the Pacific. Kansas has an eastern river front of 150 m. on the Missouri, which is navigable for steamboats of good size. The internal rivers of the state are not utilized for commercial purposes.

Population.—In population Kansas ranked in 1900 and 1910 (1,690,949) twenty-second in the Union. The decennial increases of population from 1860 to 1900 were 239.9, 173.4, 43.3 and 3.0%, the population in 1900 being 1,470,495, or 18 to the sq. m. Of this number 22.5% lived in cities of 2500 or more inhabitants. Nine cities numbered more than 10,000 inhabitants: Kansas City (51,418), Topeka—the state capital (33,608), Wichita (24,671), Leavenworth (20,735), Atchison (15,722), Lawrence—the seat of the state university (10,862), Fort Scott (10,322), Galena (10,155) and Pittsburg (10,112). The life of all of these save the last two goes back to Territorial days; but the importance of Fort Scott, like that of Galena and Pittsburg, is due to the development of the mineral counties in the south-east. Other cities of above 5000 inhabitants were Hutchinson (9379), Emporia (8223), Parsons (7682), Ottawa (6934), Newton (6208), Arkansas City (6140), Salina (6074), Argentine (5878) and Iola (5791). The number of negroes (3.5%) is somewhat large for a northern and western state. This is largely owing to an exodus of coloured people from the South in 1878–1880, at a time when their condition was an unusually hard one: an exodus turned mainly toward Kansas. The population is very largely American-born (91.4% in 1900; 47.1% being natives of Kansas). Germans, British, Scandinavians and Russians constitute the bulk of the foreign-born. The west third of the state is comparatively scantily populated, owing to its aridity. In the ’seventies, after a succession of wet seasons, and again in the ’eighties, settlement was pushed far westward, beyond the limits of safe agriculture, but hundreds of settlers—and indeed many entire communities—were literally starved out by the recurrence of droughts. Irrigation has made a surer future for limited areas, however, and the introduction of drought-resisting crops and the substitution of dairy and livestock interests in the place of agriculture have brightened the outlook in the western counties, whose population increased rapidly after 1900. The early ’eighties were made notable by a tremendous “boom” in real estate, rural and urban, throughout the commonwealth. As regards the distribution of religious sects, in 1906 there were 458,190 communicants of all denominations, and of this number 121,208 were Methodists (108,097 being Methodist Episcopalians of the Northern Church), 93,195 were Roman Catholics, 46,299 were Baptists (34,975 being members of the Northern Baptist Convention and 10,011 of the National (Colored) Baptist Convention), 40,765 were Presbyterians (33,465 being members of the Northern Church) and 40,356 were Disciples of Christ. The German-Russian Mennonites, whose immigration became notable about 1874, furnished at first many examples of communal economy, but these were later abandoned. In 1906 the total number of Mennonites was 7445, of whom 3581 were members of the General Conference of Mennonites of North America, 1825 belonged to the Schellenberger Brüder-gemeinde, and the others were distributed among seven other sects.