Wichita Incorporated: The Town That Came From Nowhere
Near Wichita, Kansas
On July twenty-first, eighteen seventy, one hundred twenty-three men and one woman signed a petition to incorporate a new city on the east bank of the Arkansas River in south-central Kansas. The woman was Catherine McCarty, who owned and operated a laundry. She was the only woman allowed to sign. The city was Wichita, and it had existed in any formal sense for a matter of months.
The settlement before it was a genuine frontier improvisation. James Mead, a commercial buffalo hunter and trader from Iowa, had established a trading post in the area in eighteen sixty-four, assisted by Jesse Chisholm. William Greiffenstein, a German immigrant merchant, and another trader known as Buffalo Bill Mathewson, added commercial weight to the settlement. By eighteen seventy, enough of a town had assembled around these interests to justify incorporation.
The new city immediately faced a problem: it had incorporated just as the Texas cattle trade was arriving at the railhead. The city of Abilene to the north had hosted the cattle terminus since eighteen sixty-seven, but Abilene's citizens were tiring of the cowboys and the chaos, and the railroad had extended south. Wichita was the new terminal point, and within two years of its founding, it was processing hundreds of thousands of longhorns per season and handling millions of dollars in transactions.
The original Wichita was so new that its founders were still arguing about street grids when the first cattle drives arrived. What they built, improvised under extraordinary pressure, was a working city in essentially two or three years of existence. Most boomtowns collapse when their boom ends. Wichita found two more booms: wheat farming in the eighteen eighties, and aircraft in the nineteen twenties. The signature on that eighteen seventy petition, written by one hundred and twenty-four people on a Kansas riverbank, outlasted everything anyone expected.
