Kansas City and How it Grew, 1822-2011

KANSAS CITY AND HOW IT GREW, 1822-2011. By JAMES R. SHORTRIDGE. xi and 288 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780700618828. Geographers, historians, and students of the Midwest in general will be pleased with James R. (Pete) Shortridge's latest work, an in-depth study of the life and times of City. A City native who has spent his entire professional career not far away at the University of Kansas, he comes well prepared for the task. Shortridge does not entitle the book a geography of City, although geographers of his generation will recognize it as a work of scholarship that only a dyed-in-the-wool geographer would produce. Statistics and observations from fieldwork, map work, and painstaking calculation are evident throughout the text and are sometimes cited casually as compiled from multiple sources, which anyone who has ever tried a project like this surely knows is the case. The many excellent maps and photographs, which are the work of Barbara Shortridge, add yet another level of detail and support to the text. City was something of a geographical inevitability. Located at the elbow of the great bend of the Missouri, where the river's southward flow turns abruptly eastward, City was as far west as practical river commerce would extend. The old river here was the (Kaw), whose eastward flow captured the diverted drainage from the north when the Missouri found a course along the margins of the wasting Pleistocene glacier. The natives and fur traders who once portaged their canoes across the swampy drainage divide that became Chicago were to have their counterparts more than a century later at City, where cargoes off the Missouri River side-wheelers were skidded up the river's bank and reloaded onto wagon trains bound for the Santa Fe Trail. Chicago would become the nation's largest freight railroad center; City, the second largest. The same order held true for stockyards and for meatpacking in the early twentieth century. Flour milling added to City's industrial mix once the winter wheat crop of became the nation's largest around World War I. The state line of Kansas, which begins where the Kaw enters the Missouri, had the effect of bisecting the natural urban growth that would have been anticipated from the start. Surely unanticipated was the era of aggressive hostilities across this line in the Bleeding Kansas years leading up to the Civil War. Shortridge suggests that the real rivalries across the state line were economic and that they developed between City, Kansas, and City, Missouri, in later years. But he does allow that a prominent real estate developer's attempts to sell residential lots west of the line to Missouri buyers even after 1900 violated cultural codes dating to the Civil War and before. The upscale real estate developments that began in City in the late nineteenth century were to have a lasting impact. J. C. Nichols, a local property developer, witnessed the expansion of residential neighborhoods on City's southwest side and began to lay his own plans for even grander projects

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