Kansas City

Origins

Situated at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the twin cities of Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, grew both in population and physical size from initial settlements in the mid-nineteenth century. Early beginnings were influenced greatly by the larger context of the escalating western national expansion of the 1850s as well as the remnants of the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to statehood with an option of allowing slavery based on popular sovereignty. The term border ruffians was coined by newspaper editor Horace Greeley to refer to proslavery activists from Missouri who crossed the border into Kansas in an attempt to vote on the issue. While voting irregularities were common, it was skirmishes along the border between Missouri and Kansas that led to the term “Bloody Kansas.”

A number of weekly newspapers began operation in the 1850s and 1860s, many of them ceasing publication within a few years; others were purchased and their names changed with new ownership. Notable among early newspapers was the Quindaro Chin-do-Wan (1857), a Free State publication that ceased publication during the Civil War. Another prewar newspaper, the Wyandotte City Register (1857) became The Citizen, and then The Western Argus, which in 1861 became The Wyandotte Gazette. The Kansas City Enterprise started in 1854 and survived for 88 years, although the name changed several times before ceasing operation as The Kansas City Journal-Post. Reportage in these very early Kansas City newspapers consisted of anecdotal renderings of a variety of topics, including chronological accounts of local occurrences, especially border skirmishes. Occasionally, even some European social events were covered. Provisions for overland trips to the west were also conspicuous in advertising.

Following the Civil War, the two cities expanded rapidly, and a manufacturing sector grew up along the river. With the added population media became more formalized, with one newspaper, The Kansas City Star, growing in readership, advertising, and influence.