Garden City: Feedlots, Refugees, and the High Plains

Garden City sits in southwest Kansas along the Arkansas River, and its history is a study in reinvention. Founded in eighteen seventy-eight, it boomed as a cattle shipping point and briefly rivaled Dodge City for frontier lawlessness before irrigation agriculture stabilized it. The Arkansas River's flow through here has been nearly exhausted by Ogallala Aquifer pumping since the nineteen fifties, but the beef industry that replaced the old cattle drives never left.

Garden City today hosts some of the largest meatpacking plants in the world, and the IBP and National Beef plants here draw workers from Southeast Asia, Central America, and East Africa, making the city one of the most ethnically diverse small cities on the Great Plains. In two thousand twenty the community was more than half Hispanic, about five percent Asian, and about five percent Black, an unlikely demographic portrait for a west Kansas town of about twenty-eight thousand.