“Crackheads,” muttered Richard disparagingly, as two younger locals walked into Kat’s Korner in Chase, Kansas. I encountered Richard soon after strolling into the gas station mini-mart, as he lounged in a booth just inside the door. I grabbed a coffee and joined him, as he was eager to chat while waiting on his biscuits and gravy.
After a brief inquiry into my plans, Richard launched into his own stories. “I drove up through Denver once,” he says, struggling to recall the exact route they followed. “We were headed to Wyoming, so that my wife could see Yellowstone before she died.” The drive was a struggle, as his wife suffered through some of the twisting roads, but Richard was clearly wistful as he reflected on the trip, as though my role as audience had drifted into irrelevance.
The youngsters’ arrival, though, pulled Richard back to the present, setting in motion a series of complaints about the challenges facing Chase. “Are drugs really such a major challenge in this small, Kansas town?”, I asked, still grappling with his claims. “Oh yes,” he reinforces, “crack and heroin, in particular. Marijuana, too, but I don’t care about marijuana. I don’t use it, I stopped when I was 17. I actually have a prescription to use it, for cancer treatment, but I would get fired if I did that.”
Richard found his way back into more physical farm work in his later years, after 19 years spent supervising an organic chicken farm in Chase. “I’m prouder of that work than anything else I’ve done in my life,” Richard says. “I never got along with my boss, and ultimately that forced me out, but I loved the work.”
A woman walked in towards the end of our conversation, who I first identify as African American. “That’s my niece,” Richard said, grinning widely. He heckled her from across the mini-mart and she proved herself more than willing to return fire. After enjoying the show for a bit, I shouldered my pack and moved on.
————
A giant cement cross towers above the southern side of Highway 56, just west of Lyons. While most of the historical placards in Kansas have told the stories of the region’s indigenous populations and the European settlers, another group made an impact here, well before the wagon trains. Indeed, this was a focal point for long-standing myths that drove many Spanish explorers deep into North America–the promise of the “Seven Cities of Gold” that always proved to be just out of reach.
“Quivira,” the name given to those unrequited hopes, by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540, has been situated by historians in the area around Lyons. Coronado made it here after two years on the road; every tribe he encountered was engaged in humble farming practices, but they consistently shared rumors of great wealth, just a little further down the road. Conveniently enough. Ultimately, Coronado gave up and returned to Mexico, but as he did so he left behind several Catholic priests, one of whom, Fray Juan de Padilla, stayed in Quivira to proselytize. Padilla is credited with the erection of the first Christian cross in the prairies (not the aforementioned giant concrete one), though he didn’t have long to enjoy it, as he was killed by Quivirans in 1542
————
A few hours later, I ambled into Casey’s General Store in Ellinwood, a town founded in 1871, the year before the Santa Fe railroad was established through here. (Apparently, the band Kansas held a performance here to woo a major label contract, so there’s your fun fact on Ellinwood–thanks, Wikipedia!) This Casey’s had everything I could possibly want–slices of cheese pizza, tables and chairs inside, and a sink for filling my water bottles. In most cases, two out of three is the best I can hope for on that front.
An older gentleman waited in front of me to purchase a couple of candy bars and a pack of smokes. “How are you doing?”, I asked. “Hanging in there.” That was the extent of our conversation. As the clerk rang up his goods, he quietly instructed her to put my meal on his bill as well. I shook his hand, he wished me well, and he was out the door. It does not reflect well on me, perhaps, that my first thought as he walked out was: “Damn! Should have gotten that second piece of pizza.”
———————
There has been a demographic shift in Kansas as I’ve headed further west, but it didn’t really click until I arrived in Great Bend. As I followed Highway 56 into the center, I passed the following restaurants: Kiowa Kitchen (Mexican food), La Pasadita, Delgados, Gorditas Yoli, Great Bend Tacos, Maria’s Mexican Grill. There were other cuisines mixed in, of course, but this was a striking concentration.
In the 2010 census, people of Hispanic/Latino heritage comprised roughly 20% of Great Bend’s population, or around double the rate for Kansas as a whole. We should expect to see much higher numbers in the 2020 version; current projections anticipate that Kansas’s Hispanic/Latino population will represent 36% of the population in 2066, while non-Hispanic white Kansans will drop to less than half the population.
Kansas is changing and the general trend is clear–non-Hispanic white populations are declining, while all minority populations in the state are on the rise, albeit at a rate that is slower than many other US states. Those changes are most striking in the western half of Kansas.
