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                    "A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often, he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it."  -- Mark Twain

            It is a philosophical conundrum that I first encountered in college. A professor, looking at stadium seats filled with students nursing hangovers, asks the class “do you want to know where you are going to die?” Someone stifles a yawn. A jock in the back-row T’s off “nah . . . it’d spoil the fun.” A bookish girl in the front row wades in deliberately, “knowing would enable a person to plan and live life to the fullest.” The classroom splinters over the next twenty minutes as students interject answers that are subtle variation of those two camps. This question has troubled scholars and teenage potheads since time immemorial.

I do not know when you are going to die, but I can tell you exactly where the death will originate. The place has produced every near apocalypse in American history. The death toll runs into the hundreds of millions and counting. And it is the very last place that you’d expect to be on the forefront of the next, great American catastrophe.  

The place is a sleepy little town in Kansas. The birthplace of madness and the garden of the future apocalypse.  Kansas is a paradox, a difficult thing to pin down, a place so backwards that the land itself can’t even make up its mind. Most think that the history of Kansas is all progress propaganda and the pioneer spirit. The iconic image of the brawny settler perched atop a wagon squinting his eyes while he surveyed the “Great American Desert” is the Great Plains’ version of Betty the Riveter. The settlers came, they saw, and they kicked Kansas’ grass covered ass. It is the version that Hollywood portrays in its movies about the Sunflower State. It is a secret history that hides the true excitement behind the Wizard’s purple curtain. For there is another side to the tale that few writers or historians have ever touched.

Kansas prairies were occupied long before the Egyptians built pyramids in the Valley of the Kings. The history is ancient, the mystery is unsolved. The tale that most American’s know is a half-truth; a partial representation that filters the State’s macabre history through the canvas of Norman Rockwell that is closer to cliché than reality. The people that could tell this tale are dead, murdered by white settlers coming to terminate the “great market for bodies and souls” or pursue the dream of free land riches.

But if you listen to Kansas’ history, the real history, you can hear it whispering its enigmatic legacy. An amazing string of evil coincidences defines the region. For Kanas has had its finger on nearly every American war, international disaster, and global pandemic since the human beings crossed the ice bridge.  And that evil is still here waiting under an ocean of winter wheat waiting . . .

Brief Revision

For those of you who missed the minute history class devoted to Kansas history let me take you back before human beings. Eons before the Great Plains stretched across the borders of Kansas, the whole place was the Western Interior Sea. Even today, it is not uncommon to find a fossilized tooth shark in the middle of a wheat field. Geology indicates that Kansas was once home to a great mountain range. Once mountains, then ocean, and now the largest tall grass prairie in the world. You might say that confusion is in Kansas’ blood.

There is a wildness to Kansas. A mixture of uncontrolled rage and relentless ambition that have made the state a breeding ground for a special kind of “madness.”

The madness—if it can even be called that—originated in the geographical enter of the United States thousands of years before the signing of the constitution. Resting inside of the rib cage of the burgeoning nation, within the heartbeat of a vast Indian community, was a hidden power that would dictate the outcome of world history.

The madness is ancient, perhaps as old as the land itself. Some say it began after the Indians were forced off their land, taught Christianity and beaten till their tan plains skin bled a socially acceptable brand Uncle Sam blue. An ancestral curse, or some form of national karma for the wrongs done to the Indians.

Various Indian tribes inhabited Kansas throughout the ages, but the dominant tribe was the Osage. A proud people whose Indian name, Ni-U-Kon-Ska, means little children of the middle waters, the Osage inhabited a swath of prairie stretching from the Kansas plains all the way down to the deep canyon cut rocks of the Texas panhandle. The Osage were not specifically a warrior-like tribe, nor where they agrarian. They were a nomadic band of hunters that managed their massive prairie land. For centuries stretching back millenniums before Columbus, the Osage grew into the land. The earth, much like the buffalo they hunted, become an integral part of the tribe. They listened nature, respond to her wisdom, and adapted their lifestyle to suit this knowledge. This connection ran deep, and the prairie flourished.

Then the Spaniard came. He was one of the firsts in a maddening string of Kansas’ firsts. It was the promise of riches that brought Spaniards 5,000 miles across the Atlantic. In 1540, at the height of Spanish power, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján marched his army right through the center of the Osage country. He brought only 330 armed Spanish soldiers clad in plate metal and morion helmets capped with a steel Mohawk and a single read feather. He had a thousand Indians in tow. Some as scouts, most as slaves, Coronado’s Indians spearheaded north through the center of the Osage country in search of Quivira, the mythical seven cities of gold. Coronado was especially interested in gold bars and rumors of hyper-sensuous virgins. He marched for years and ended up stopping in what is now Token-Oak, Kansas.  He set up camp on the top of black hills now known as the Hollows and stopped. After three years marching, Coronado stood on those barren hills and decided to return home.

Shortly thereafter, things went to shit. He never found the gold to fill Spanish coffers, only Indians, buffaloes, and grass as far as the eye could see. When he left the rolling hills of Token-Oak, he walked west back into the prairie. With such flat land, there were no landmarks for the Spanish use for navigation. The ominous prairie sky, unobstructed by trees and mountains, closed in on the party. The elements and the Osage descended.  

Then the madness came—as it comes to all people in this narrative—and seized Coronado. As his party began to fracture, he wanted to make an example out of the discontent. In the open prairie, just outside of Token-Oak, he tortured, raped, and dismembered Indian members of his party.  And sleeping under the vast sky, surrounded by natives, listening to the strong night winds sweep the ocean of prairie grass across the flat plains, the madness tickled Coronado. The subtle sound of millions of bottlebrush husks floating on top of the wind like barely audible whispers. Underneath the wind, all the time, was the fear.

Coronado left the state forever, but it never left him. The madness walked within the conquistador’s ranks taking the life of his compatriots in an endless series of bizarre accidents. Starving Spaniards stumbled off the edge of cliffs. One soldier cut off his own scrotum. Another got syphilitic dementia so bad that he gorged himself on his own flesh. Of three hundred Spaniards, less than twenty made it home. Coronado lost his considerable fortune and, due to the atrocities that he committed on those Kansas Plains, his respect. Penniless and ostracized from the government, he died in Mexico City.

Only a handful of Coronado’s party made it back to Spain. The Spanish Empire, which crossed oceans with its mighty navy and dominated indigenous people the word over, collapsed.  The greatest import—at least in terms of impact on the nation—that the Spaniards ever brought back was not Aztec gold, Chinese silks, or African diamonds. It was Kansas crazy. And that crazy brought the empire to its knees.

The second explorer to visit Token-Oak, Kansas, was the world-renowned Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Duo. As manifest destiny began to sweep the nation, and the burgeoning country “bought” millions of acres of unexplored territory. Thomas Jefferson commissioned a small band of explorers to chart the newly acquired land. Lewis and Clark shot up the raging waters of the mighty Mississippi river and paddled up its largest tributary, the Missouri River, on their way to the west coast. The two men left the river and explored the Northeastern corner of Kansas for a three -week period.

Lewis and Clark encountered small bands of mounted Osage Indians in the areas surrounding modern day Token-Oak. Meriwether, a man that had a legendary drinking problem and a rapier wit, took things too far and had his way with some of the local. He tasted all the local fare he could wrap his nasty prairie-caked hands around. Allegedly, there were three scourges of the Plains Indians: whiskey, disease, and Meriwether Lewis. Lewis and Clark pushed their way up the Missouri River, all the way to the pacific shores of Oregon leaving Token-Oak and its bizarre black hills behind.

After “conquering” the great unknown, Lewis and Clark returned to their respective homes, Clark to St. Louis and Lewis to Louisiana. Conquering Indians became a passion for Lewis as he became the head of the newly formed Bureau of Indian Affairs and directly assisted in white settling of the plains. For years, Lewis cleared land and managed various tribe’s relocation.

When the madness overcame Lewis, it brought him down in style. Apparently, the old Indian slayer checked himself into a hotel on his way from Louisiana to Washington D.C. He was speaking some crazy shit. He demanded a bowl of soup with three spoons. Hotel proprietors heard him orating to himself as if giving a thunderous closing statement at a trial. He secluded himself in his room. The end came in the predawn hours of October 11th, Lewis pulled a shotgun from his horse saddle next to his bed, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Now, here is the crazy part. The proprietor noted two clear shots and Lewis had two wounds. Wrap your mind around this thought. Lewis pulled the trigger and probably blew the lower set of teeth and a cheek out of his face. The blast burn alone would be enough to sear exploded flesh. After the first shot, with half his face gone, Lewis picked up his rifle, loaded the gun powder and ball, and fired a second shot into his stomach. That, my friends, is Kansas crazy. The madness in it rawest, physically overcoming, other worldly form.

About fifty years later, the madness went national. The most devastating war ever to strike the United States. A conflict that killed over 600,000 civilians and burned dozens of American cities to the ground . . . yep, that started just outside of Token-Oak, too.

With the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the growing nation decided to allow residents of the new territories to decide if the area would be a slave-bearing state. In that sense, moving out to Kansas was either a noble endeavor or to ensure the furtherance of the slavery establishment. To Kansas went prophets, hermits, abolitionists, fundamentalists, pro-slavery settlers, and profiteers. Kansas was the first “actual” battle ground of the Civil war. The idea of popular sovereignty—the agreement that each new state would decide by popular vote to be anti- or pro-slavery—became a lightning rod. Slave states, especially Missouri, sent thousands of pro-slavery settlers to win a majority in the vote for slavery in Kansas. Conversely, abolitionists from Iowa to New England sent people, too. Two governments sprung up in Kansas each vying for control of the new constitution. Conflicts raged around the newly established territory. Bombs went off. Cannon boomed hot. Years before the War consumed the nation it soaked Kansas soil red. A mere reference to “Bleeding Kansas” had a one southern member of the House of Representatives brandish a walking cane and nearly bludgeon his northern colleague to death on the floor of the United States Senate.

About eighty miles southeast of Token-Oak, a northern abolitionist, John Brown, attacked a gang of slave drivers with a broad sword. Brown had a giant set of testicles and a stare that could burn a hole through steel. He hatched a plan was to drive a small group of followers into the heart of the south, seize the weapons stash, and lead an army of slaves across the southern United States on a veritable romp in the name of the Lord. Brown died in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, but his ideas lived on. The long-held fear that he exposed in Southerners ignited the conflict. Slaves made up nearly half of the Confederate population. The simple thought that a man could run into the South, arm slaves, and lead a rebellion was too much for the slave drivers. The roots of that fear were planted in Kansas soil and sprouted the bloodiest conflict in American history.

And the madness was just getting warmed up.

In 1881, Kansas was the first state to outlaw the sale of alcohol in its state constitution. A fierce lady named Kerry Nation burst into salons with a hatchet and smashed barrels of whiskey and bottles of beer. She described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like.” Arrested some thirty times for her raids on saloons and unabashed temperance, Ms. Nation never backed down from a fight. She personally sowed the seeds of the prohibition movement that led to the birth of organized crime and the development of the drug trade.

Then the madness went global. In 1918, in an army barracks just outside of Token-Oak, a soldier in Fort Riley, Kansas, came down with the flu. A few days later, that soldier was dead, and half the barracks were sick. A global pandemic had ignited outside of an eerie Kansas town that sat on the Smoky River and spread across the world. This flu infected over five hundred million people at its peak. Once the dust settled, estimates state that seventy million people across the world died from H1N1.

About twelve years after the Kansas-based super flu nearly crippled the planet, another sinister disaster sprung from Kansas soil. Just west of Token-Oak, farmers watched two-thousand-foot-tall clouds roll across the ground towards their homes. The low moving blackness sent waves of birds and jackrabbits screaming ahead of the dirt like an army of half a billion Paul Reveres warning of hell. Trillions of dust particles carried static energy so strong that it fried the electrical systems in cars and shorted radios. Waves of grasshoppers descended upon any scraps of plants in an Old Testament style reaping.

Before the Great Depression, people fled to Kansas in droves. Towns sprung up along newly established railway roots. Settlers came to farm the prairie and plant Kansas' biggest cash crop: red winter wheat. A family could cheaply buy a section of land (640 acres) and begin to plant. Brand new Kansans turned millions of acres of centuries old prairie grass upside down in the span of a few months. As the hopeful inhabitants carved up the prairie on the backs of their lumbering John Deere’s, the land struck back. The rains stopped. The winds came. And they blew—and blew—and blew rolling mountains of earth across the plains.

The giant dusters brought a hundred thousand tons of earth in tiny dust particles. Houses in the wake of these black monoliths were stripped of paint and buried in sand-like dunes of dirt that drifted fifteen feet high. Kansas dust filled the lungs of children and the elderly choking their capillaries creating a wheezing cough the produced pitch-black phlegm. As gritty Kansas earth invaded people's lungs, they expelled it with a hacking cough mixed with blood. Every American in those black days swallowed a little piece of the prairie. The dry dirt drowned the oceans of freshly planted wheat and caused entire herds of cattle to go blind. For nearly a decade, these storms romped across the Great Plains at it most vulnerable point in history. It took the French and then the Americans nearly 50 years to dig the Panama Canal. Each dust storm produced three times that much dirt in 5 minutes. 

Then the madness began appearing in world events like a drive by shooter. Right at the end of the Dust Bowl, the eyes of the world were fixated on the massive Zeppelin landing in Manchester Township, New Jersey. The Zeppelins were a scientific marvel that would surely soon be frequented by bourgeoisie travels from across the world. Initially, the monstrous blimps were designed to use helium as their lifting agent. Helium, after all, was not nearly as explosive as hydrogen. Ironically, the largest supply of helium in the world rested underneath the prairie grass of Kansas. Poor Kansas had the most bountiful source of rare gas and, due to a trade embargo, was not sharing. A spark of static caused the hydrogen-fill blimp to ignite. Kansas gas claimed the first lives of WWII through the trade embargo that kept its helium locked beneath its soil.

In the mid-1940s, at the beginning of the United States nuclear weapons testing boom in Nevada, scientists began studying nuclear fallout. After the Trinity detonation in July of 1945, the government started receiving complaints across the nation from Kodak about foggy X-ray film. Fact is that film canisters were packed in a corn derivative from Kansas that had become irradiated. Turns out Kansas was especially susceptible as heavy plains storms pulled iodine 131 out of the air and bathed the ocean of buffalo grass in radioactive soup. If someone passed a Geiger counter across the Midwest, Kansas will betray the Chernobyl-like fallout.

Kansas kids were the most affected by this governmental misstep. As cows consumed the contaminated grass; kids drank the milk. Long before the milk industry launched its “got milk” campaign that glorified consuming the opaque cow product by shooting celebrities with yogurt-stained upper lips, there was a twenty-year decline in milk drinking. Why? Because the milk went bad. It picked up radiation and the kids—the poor effin’ kids—drank the shit like it was straight from their momma’s teat. Does a body good my ass! The radiation, though it did not originate craziness in Kansas, certainly compounded the problem. But that was just the beginning of Kansas’ nuclear worries.

Kansas does not just create disasters, wars, and madness; it also creates hall of fame college basketball coaches. It is a virtual mecca of the sport. James A. Naismith, the inventor of the game was the University of Kansas’ first coach. His predecessor, Forrest “Phog” Allen brought accolades galore. The paragon of other tradition powers—North Carolina’s Dean Smith and Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp—both played from the Jayhawks before coaching their teams to multiple titles at their respective schools. Moreover, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain was born and played his college ball in Lawrence. That’s right, the only guy to score 100 points in a game and, I will argue the more astounding accomplishment, is the only man to have slept with 20,000 women.

20,000 women. Imagine that. Essentially, “the Stilt” was able to rise above the limitations that the Lord gave him. He battled through STDs, fatigue, a depleted sperm reserve, and the inevitable road rash to tap twenty . . . thousand . . . women. Mathematically, he had to have a woman a day since he was 15 years old. It sounds impossible, I know, but when you start throwing in the weekend orgies it is totally doable. It took devotion, a high pain threshold, and a hell of sex drive, but the Stilt swung is stick with more consistence than DiMaggio's 56 in 41’. When all is said in done, and centuries pass, and governments rise and fall, the people of the future will look back on Chamberlain’s 20K lay. It is a record that will never be broken.  

Kansas’ sports acumen is not limited to the hardwood of the basket basketball court or the bedpost. The madness has created an innate desire to run. The town of Wichita, Kansas is home to some of the best runners in world history. Local Wichita track speedster Jim Ryun was the first human being to break the four-minute mile. The greatest running backs ever to play were born or played their football in Kansas. Jim Thorpe played his college ball at Haskell University. John Riggins, a bruising runner nicknamed “the diesel” nearly two decades before Shaq. The “Kansas Comet” Gale Sayers also came from the city. Perhaps the greatest of them all; the slipperiest small man to ever tote the pigskin, was Barry Sanders. Watching Barry play the game was like watching smoke slide through keyhole. His diminutive frame could devilishly contort through the smallest spaces. He was an ankle breaker, a shake-and-bakester, that could have had all the records but quit after only a decade.

The greatest turnaround in college football history occurred in Manhattan, Kansas. For half a century, the Wildcats where the epitome of suck. There are two eras of football in Manhattan, that before Bill Snyder and that after. Before Snyder, K-State had lost 500 games, by far the most of any division one program. The team had the fewest scholarship players of any program in the country. There was serious talk of demoting the Wildcats to division two. Players on the football team didn’t wear letter jackets out of sheer embarrassment. The school didn’t even have carpet in most of the athletic facilities. After Snyder, the team has two conference championships against schools with quadruple its athletic budget and played in several New Year’s Day bowl games. Bill Snyder, the “Purple Wizard”, used Kansas madness to his advantage. The Wildcats now romp around in a $300 million dollar stadium aptly named after the man who resurrected the team from the dead.

Some of you from bigger states might be saying to yourself that any state could produce a list as astounding. Fact is that Kansas accounts for less than a single percentage of the national population, yet it is involved in over 95% of the shit that goes on in the nation. There is something in the water out here. Something that drives tragedies and fuels success stories. And that something is the madness.

Kansas is the great initiator of events that have shaped national and even world history. It is the place myths and dreams. This fact has not gone unnoticed in popular culture through the years. After all, it is the birthplace of Superman, the home of the man behind the curtain from the Wizard of Oz, and the home at least one blonde haired, squared-jawed soldier in every Hollywood war movie since the development of moving pictures. The poor bastard that got blown to bits attaching sticky bombs to German panzers in the Opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, you know that fucker was from Kansas! Holla! The iconic phrases “WWJD” and the “Great White Hope” originated here in the boyhood home of the man of steel, the place where Dorothy desperately wants to get back to. “I can't see my hand in front of my face” developed in the middle of one of Kansas’ dust storms. It is a land of flying monkeys, town destroying tornadoes, and Governors who campaign on a platform of implanting goat testicles into humans to cure impotence (true story . . . and the bastard almost won the race). If find myself wondering, at least once a day, how it is the nation has missed the enigma is the clipped rectangular state of Kansas.

For those Kansas prairies hold a unique history and a vibrant heritage of conflict, confusion and “madness.” Kansas represents a wide-open frontier that sits between America's two dominant ideologies of rugged western individualism and reserved eastern puritanism. Kansas is the space at the beginning of the sentence. It’s the place that people look down upon from 35,000 feet and see irrigation circles and an ocean of grass and think of nothing at all. What people fail to see from the sky are the roots. The roots of the nation’s deadliest war and the worst modern, global pandemic began a stone’s throw from Token-Oak. The nation's most devastating natural disaster sent suffocating Kansas soil on a ten-year smothering spree. The first legal abortion occurred inside the clipped rectangular borders of Kansas. Electroshock therapy was invented in Kansas. The most psychologically devastating food item, the White Castle tiny, dog-flavored, shit burger, started in Wichita. These little sliders have tortured a billion buttholes across the world. Fact is, whatever you ate today, whatever pissed you off politically last week, and the next time you fucking snap; chances are whateveritis originated in the Sunflower State.

It is not just Kansas, but a sleepy little town in Kansas that sits on the Smokey Hill River and nestled at the edge of the Flint Hills. It is a place that has been the epicenter of the all of the above. It is a place that has taken current events of the day—slavery, poor farming practices and influenza—and magnified them into national and global crises.

Now there are two issues in Token-Oak, both related to drug abuse. It is a town that has long suffered from the methamphetamine epidemic. For decades, the local jail has been full of meth cooks and addicts. In the past few years, a new addiction has hit Token-Oak with a vengeance. Somewhere in the black hills northeast of the Token-Oak, the roots of the next great America apocalypse will spring anew on those Kansas prairies that have long been the garden of the apocalypse.

Per aspera ad astra

It is the State's iconic mea culpa. An admission that the environment is totally fucked, and the expectations of the people are even more out of whack. It is like saying “sure . . . we got problems, but when we get through this shit, we're gonna conquer the fucking world.” That is the driving force inside of us all. It is a great motivator of passions, a destroyer of rational perspectives, and a perfect place to begin this dizzying little jaunt through the craziest thing of all: the story of Token-Oak, Kansas.

Per aspera ad astra