Medicine Lodge, Kansas

Medicine Lodge was platted in February of eighteen seventy-three near the site of the eighteen sixty-seven peace treaties that bore the creek's name. The town drew settlers quickly and became the seat of Barber County, named for Thomas Barber, an abolitionist killed during the Bleeding Kansas troubles of eighteen fifty-five. By eighteen seventy-four, raids by a group of Osage prompted residents to build a wooden stockade, a replica of which stands today.

The town's most famous resident arrived later: Carry Nation, who moved to Medicine Lodge with her husband in eighteen eighty-nine and launched her temperance crusade here in nineteen hundred, smashing saloons with a hatchet and making Medicine Lodge briefly infamous. Her home is now a museum. Kansas had been the first state to write prohibition into its constitution, back in eighteen eighty-one.