No Boundaries
Nobody knows where Kansas City is. This is because there are two Kansas Citys-though there is really only one Kansas City-and because the whole region sprawls across the border of two states.
But it's also because of a bar fight. At least, that's how it started.
It happened in November 1831 in Missouri, and the only person we know was there for certain was Gabriel Prudhomme. He lived on a plot of land in what would one day be the middle of the United States (the dead center, if you were measuring crudely), a heavily forested patch of bluffs along the Missouri River, one of the muddiest waterways on the continent.
Millions of years ago, much of North America was covered by glaciers. Mountains formed. The ice melted. The long process of glaciation left a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries crisscrossing the continent. Two of those rivers-eventually named the Kansas and the Missouri-would meet in the middle. Native American groups built what we now call Hopewell settlements, and tribes like the Osage, the Missouria, and the Kanza hunted bison and farmed in the region. The Kanza-or Kaw people-lived along the river that came to bear their name, building a village in the mid-eighteenth century forty miles northwest of what would become Prudhomme's land. The Osage, known for their skills as hunters, farmers, and warriors, built lodges with domed roofs in their Missouri settlements and facilitated trade through a wide swath of Missouri along a route called the Osage Trail. The tribes were forcibly removed from their home territories by the US government in the 1820s and '30s, around the same time more French Canadians moved in and built a few trading posts. Prudhomme was one of them, a blacksmith who purchased 257 acres from the federal government in 1831. His property contained what might've been the only valuable piece of land around: a rock outcropping that jutted into the river, ideal landing for ferries and steamboats.
Prudhomme started farming. He opened a grocery store and-fatefully, it seems-a tavern, where in the fall of 1831, a barroom brawl broke out, somebody drew a gun, and, according to an account from an early resident, Prudhomme ended up on the ground, his body in a pool of blood. The murderer was never caught.
Prudhomme left behind seven kids, a wife named Margaret, and a perfectly fine river landing, along with a legal mess that lasted seven years, until a group of fourteen men pooled their resources together and bought the land for $4,220 at an auction held on the coveted landing. One of the buyers, John McCoy, confessed years later that they were merely hoping for a quick profit. "None of them, he insisted, had any conception of town proprietorship, much less town building," wrote the historian Mildred C. Cox.
The only thing they knew was that a town needed a name. One grifter, Abraham Fonda, suggested they name the town after him, which didn't go over well. Others proposed Rabbitsville and Possumtrot. They settled on a name based on local geography. The French named the Kansas River after the Kanza tribe. The men were just miles from where the Kansas River flowed into the Missouri. They declared their new home the Town of Kansas, which would become the City of Kansas, and finally Kansas City. The new name didn't exactly feel like destiny. As McCoy said, they picked it "simply because nobody could think of anything better."
The men had no idea they had just ensured centuries of confusion.
Seventeen years before the town founders gathered in a livestock pen for the auction, Missouri entered the union as the twenty-fourth state. It was a controversial selection. Missouri was designated a slave state and granted entry through a compromise-the Missouri Compromise-that admitted Maine as a free state and held that no Louisiana Purchase lands above Missouri’s southern border would have slavery. It wouldn’t last, but it wasn’t the only issue. At that point, Missouri was also the westernmost state, and people were split about just how far west Missouri should go.
Missouri entered the United States as a territory in 1812 with a western border roughly twenty miles east of where the Kansas River collides with the Missouri River. It tried to become a state in 1817 with that original border, but Congress didn't believe Missouri was ready for statehood. The territory leaders tried again in 1818 with a border sixty miles farther west. Congress said no again, believing the territory would be too large.
This was all happening before Kansas City existed, and before the state of Kansas existed, and before anybody thought a town, much less a city, would rise up where the Kansas and Missouri Rivers met. In 1819, just as Missouri Territory leaders were negotiating again with Congress, the explorer Stephen H. Long journeyed across the middle of the country. Scoping out the vast plains aboard a steamboat with a prow designed like the head of a serpent-replete with nostrils that snorted steam-he and his expedition team described the area as uninhabitable. They helped inspire the naming of the region that stretched west of the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains as the "Great American Desert." There was no grand promise for riches here.
What did it matter if the western border was twenty miles farther east or sixty miles farther west? Nobody wanted to build a great civilization on a cliff overlooking a giant desert anyway.
So Missouri came back in 1820, proposing the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers as the boundary, and Congress accepted. The problem: The Kansas River travels east to west and does not provide a physical border, which meant Missouri ended at an imaginary straight line running north to south from the Kansas River's mouth.
It's impossible to know whether the Town of Kansas founders gave any thought to building a town at the edge of Missouri and calling it Kansas, a name that had been popping up on maps of the Midwest for years. (Given their general inability to plan anything, the answer is almost certainly no.) In their defense, they didn't know when another state might exist on the other side of the border, in the Great American Desert. Plus, in the 1830s, the land directly to the west was referred to as the Nebraska Territory, and that was still the case in 1853, when Town of Kansas was incorporated as City of Kansas. But a year later, Congress created the Kansas Territory-using the very popular name from all those maps-and now Kansas City was in a pickle. It was a city in Missouri with the same name as a new territory, a territory on the other side of an imaginary line following the mouth of a river that also shared the same name. Almost immediately, residents of the Kansas Territory falsely accused Kansas City of stealing their name, even though their territory had done the copying. Local leaders realized they were headed for a confusing disaster. In 1855, Robert Van Horn, an influential Kansas City newspaper publisher, sought the approval of the legislatures in Kansas and Missouri to move Kansas City, Missouri, into Kansas Territory. He could not have chosen a more complicated time.
A year earlier, Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, invalidating the Missouri Compromise. It stated that new territories, even those north of Missouri's southern border, would decide whether to allow slavery based on the popular vote.
Thousands of Border Ruffians from Missouri swarmed into Kansas for an 1855 election, voting a proslavery legislature into office. Antislavery Kansans, many of whom had migrated from New England, formed their own government, but President Franklin Pierce recognized only the proslavery legislature.
These proslavery lawmakers were open to Van Horn's idea, believing they could cement a voting majority to support entry to the union as a slave state if they annexed Kansas City and its growing population. Missouri's leaders wanted more slave states, too, so they agreed to give away their city.
Van Horn now only needed approval from Congress and he sent a buddy to Washington, DC, as an emissary to seal the deal. And then he waited. The story, recounted by a local judge, goes that Van Horn didn't hear anything from the politicians in the Capitol or from his buddy. Two years later, Van Horn's friend returned. Instead of lobbying Congress so that Kansas City could make sense, he had met a woman in DC, started an affair, and moved with her to Europe. By this time, any momentum for moving Kansas City into Kansas had dissipated in a torrent of violence. Kansas became a free state in 1861, spurred on by abolitionists and "Free-Soilers." The guerrilla warfare of "Bleeding Kansas" gave way to the Civil War. Missouri no longer considered giving anything to Kansas.
The fighting eventually abated and gave way to more confusion. After the Civil War, a city sprang up in Kansas's northeastern corner. It was inhabited by many former Kansas City residents who had spilled over, and it felt like a simple extension of Kansas City, so much so that the locals decided they should just call it Kansas City, too: Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City was now a city in Missouri that shared a name with a different statethat was separated from Missouri by an imaginary border running from the mouth of a river with the same name, and on the other side of that border was not only that other state but that other state's most prominent city, which had the exact same name as the state and the river. This proved to be way too much, and the Kansas City (Missouri) mayor lobbied for Kansas to annex Kansas City (Missouri) in 1879, weeks after The Kansas City Times released a poll showing strong support for annexation among the people of Kansas City (Missouri). "Half the people of the East," one respondent said, "think the city is in the state of Kansas." But the suggestion died on arrival in the Missouri State Capitol. The same border remained, as one Kansas official noted in the early 1900s, "cutting in almost equal parts the most interesting and promising city in the land." And today that imaginary line has a name: State Line Road.
The weirdest part of State Line Road is a quarter-mile stretch in the West Bottoms neighborhood, an industrial hub that sits below downtown and, at various moments, was home to the Kansas City Stockyards, which were world-famous, and to the moribund NBA franchise that tormented the city from 1972 to 1985, the Kansas City Kings, who were not.
Before the Kansas River flows into the Missouri, it bends northwest for a mile and a half before winding back east and meeting the "Mighty Mo." The geography of the rivers creates a small peninsula that is west of the imaginary mouth of the Kansas River-the dividing line between states-but east of the Kansas River itself. If you are standing on State Line Road here, you can walk past a light pole and step onto a small patch of grass where you're no longer in Missouri. You're in Kansas. You don't have to cross a river, a major intersection, or even a median.
On this Kansas side of the light pole, you're still in the other Kansas City. Kansas City, Kansas, has its own mayor and police department and central business district, some of the best taco joints in the entire country, and the home stadium of the Sporting Kansas City Major League Soccer franchise. Everyone calls it KCK.
South of the West Bottoms, State Line Road keeps going. It turns into a bustling residential street, separating Kansas City, Missouri, from not only KCK but also leafy Kansas suburbs with names like Westwood, Prairie Village, and Leawood. Janelle Monáe, Paul Rudd, and Jason Sudeikis are among the famous people from the Kansas side of the metro. They and nearly everyone else from Kansas like to say they are from Kansas City, and nearly everyone on the Missouri side likes to remind them that, officially, they are not.
What if Congress had approved Missouri's original border, placing the entirety of the Kansas City metro in Kansas? What if the Town of Kansas founders had tried a little harder to come up with a name? What if Van Horn's friend had met his mistress after he stopped at the Capitol? Things would certainly be easier, and not just for Kansas City residents trying to explain where they live to their new roommates when they go away to college.
The division of Kansas City between two states has real political and economic consequences. Only once have Kansans and Missourians in the Kansas City metro united to pay taxes for a development project, the restoration of a dilapidated Union Station into a science museum in the late 1990s. The influence of a region of 2.3 million people is effectively split in half-and not by a mountain range or river. It's literally by a road.
But on an everyday basis, State Line Road serves as more of a unifier than a divider (just don't bring up abolitionist John Brown, Confederate William Quantrill, or college basketball). From the top of the Liberty Memorial, you can almost see the part of the West Bottoms that is actually Kansas. And in the blocks on either side of State Line Road, it feels like traditional directions and geography cease to exist. Wealthy Missourians drive to the Kansas City Country Club, located in the Kansas suburb of Mission Hills. University of Kansas Hospital nurses cross State Line Road to eat lunch in Missouri at a restaurant with "Louisiana" in its name. You pass between Kansas and Missouri and never notice, much less care, which state you are in. As the actor and tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch once put it, "Kansas City is, therefore, a capital city of boundary-disillusion; a place where the biggest border has almost no significance or visibility throughout the average day."
If a New York cabdriver were to ask Paul Rudd where he is from, he would simply say "Kansas City," and if the cabbie happened to know his geography and asked the pertinent follow-up . . . well, they might have a conversation on their hands. Kansas City is open and free and always in the middle of something: in the middle of two states, in the middle of the country. But the downside to having no boundaries means people often have questions or doubts. Nobody knows exactly where you are and what you are.
Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dent. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
