THE KANSAS RIVER

When Kansas became a territory in 1854, the rush to settle the west had rivermen considering the potential of plying the Kansas River system for commerce and travel.

The steamer Excel was the first steamboat to travel up the Kansas River in April 1854. That October, the 79-ton Excel with a two-foot draft encountered scant trouble navigating the Smoky Hill River. But boats with deeper drafts found every snag and lost sight of the shallow channel.

With navigation limited to 200 miles from the mouth of the Kansas River at Wyandott to a point beyond Fort Riley, the dream of taking a steamer all the way into Colorado fizzled.

But steamboats traveling the Kansas River between Fort Riley and Wyandott surged. In a ten-year span, 33 steamers plied that 178-mile stretch of the Kaw.

With many settlers pushing into the interior of the territory by steamboat, small ferry and port settlements boomed into cities, such as Topeka, Manhattan, Lawence, and Junction City. But towns who depended upon the river trade for their livelihood saw a rapid decline to their growth by February 1864.

At that time, railroad barons, eager to lay iron tracks across Kansas, pressured the legislature to declare the Big Blue, Solomon, Smoky Hill, Republican and Kansas rivers unfit for navigation. The bill allowed railroads to build bridges across those rivers, obstructing steamboat travel and thus eliminating the railroads' major trade and travel competitor.

In 1866, the big side-wheeler Alexander Major was the last steamer to travel the Kansas River.

An 1879 survey conducted by the U.S. Army Engineers looked into the feasibility of making the Kansas navigable for small steamers. It would have cost $450,000 to build canals, remove snags and remodel the railroad bridges.

The powerful railroad companies balked, successfully putting an end to navigation on the Kansas River.

source: Ghost Towns of Kansas by Daniel Fitzgerald, More True Tales of Old-Time Kansas by David Dary, An Account of Upper Louisiana by Nicolas de Finiels

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