When we think of ancient places we commonly think of Rome, Greece, and many other hotbeds of early European civilization. A place that probably doesn’t immediately come to mind is North America. This could be for many different reasons but the most probable one is that we commonly focus on a Euro-centric historical curriculum in school. I think one of the biggest crimes of our modern-day history curriculum is that we don’t celebrate the history of North America quite as much. Then again, Native history is significantly less documented than anything of European origin. However, that doesn’t make it any less important. For that reason, let’s take a look at a couple of pretty cool facts about our homeland that may not have been covered in History 101.
First of all one of the more well-known facts, is that Kansas used to be a shallow sea where primeval waters flowed, shallow salt-water deposits are left over in our soil and left more than enough evidence to prove it, such as fossilized sea creatures of various shapes. After these seas left, rivers of freshwater formed what we agricultural folks know as the Ogallala Aquifer. The source of all groundwater for the Midwest. Unfortunately, overuse of the aquifer has led to an increasingly worrying loss of the groundwater resources we have available in recent years.
After this period, jumping forward to about 11,000 years ago to the last Ice Age when megafauna such as mammoths and giant sloths roamed the great plains and other locations. Many of you may know of these creatures but how about what they eat? Lucky for you, we have just a real-life example. The Osage Orange tree is a thorny tree of yellowish hardwood that was prized in the early settlement days for natural fences. The thing that many don’t know is that Osage Oranges, or “hedge apples” were a natural fruit delicacy to the megafauna of the plains during the ice age. The massive size of the fruit was easy for creatures such as giant sloths to eat and digest. Nowadays, no animal eats the fruit itself, however, some, such as deer, have a tradition of eating the seeds within it.
There is evidence to suggest that early peoples of the Native Americans lived during the same time as these megafauna too, early indigenous populations lived nomadically hunting mammoths, mastodons, and giant bison across the plains. Can you imagine hunting an animal so massive? There must have been something in the water all those years ago to give them the strength required to do such incredible things.
After this long length of time of Native Americans living in harmony with nature, Europeans came along, and many of you know the story from there. The incredibly detrimental and horrid forced migration of indigenous populations, and development of the land into what it is today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the lives we have in the modern day and age, but we can always take care of the land as well.
This was an incredibly brief description of the last hundreds of thousands of years of history for our great state, but it’s certainly something to start off on. I used information from the Kansas Historical Society webpage, if you are interested, you can certainly find more information on everything I mentioned and didn’t. After learning these things, I hope you can call yourself proud to be a Kansan for the rich history we have to offer. I know I certainly am.
