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The Kansas River, also known as the Kaw, is a meandering river in northeastern Kansas in the United States. It is potentially the southwestern most part of the Missouri River drainage, which is sometimes in turn the northwesternmost portion of the extensive Mississippi River drainage. Its two names both come from the Kaw people who once inhabited the area; Kansas was one of the of the French language transcription Cansez () of the original .. The Encyclopedia of Kansas (1994) Connelley, William E. 1918. Indians . A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, ch. 10, vol. 1 The city of Kansas City, Missouri, was named for the river, as was later the state of Kansas. The Encyclopedia of Kansas (1994)
The river valley averages in width, with the widest points being between Wamego and Rossville, where it is up to wide, then narrowing to or less in places below Eudora and De Soto. Much of the river's drainage basin is dammed for flood control, but the Kansas River is generally free-flowing and has only minor obstructions, including diversion and one low-impact hydroelectric dam.
All of the rocks in the eastern Kansas valley are Sedimentary rock, ranging from Late Pennsylvanian (300 million years ago) through the Permian, with three notable exceptions from the Quaternary Period. The first is river sand and gravel deposits, which have been carried in largely from erosion of the Ogallala and Cretaceous rocks by the western extents of the Kansas River tributaries. Second, the retreat of the Kansan glaciation left behind a combination of ice- and meltwater-deposited known as drifta, a poorly sorted mixture of clay, sand, gravel, and even large boulders that cover parts the Kansas River basin from the Big Blue River and eastward. The third is loess, a fine silt that may have originally been deposited by the melting water of the receding glaciers, then redeposited by the wind. The thickest loess deposits can be found in the northwest and north-central part of the Kansas River basin from southern Nebraska into northwest Kansas, as well as near the river's mouth.
From June 26 through 29, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped at Kaw Point at the Kansas River's mouth. They praised the scenery in their accounts and noted the area would be a good location for a fort.
In August 1819, Maj. Stephen H. Long steered the first steamboat into the Kansas River with his 30-ton boat Western Engineer. He made it scarcely a mile up the river before turning back, citing mud bars from the recent floods.
The mouth of the Kansas River in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City (at a longitude of 94 degrees 36 minutes West) was the basis for Missouri's western boundary from Iowa to Arkansas when it became a state in 1821 (Kansas entered the Union in 1861.) South of the Missouri River, that longitude still remains the boundary between Kansas and Missouri. North of the Missouri River, the state of Missouri extended its boundary further to the west in 1836 with the Platte Purchase. The river has moved slightly since this designation, but the state boundary has remained the same. This line is known as the Osage Boundary.
From the 1840s through the early 1870s, the southern of the lower section of the Kansas River were the beginnings of the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Santa Fe trails as they left Kansas City.
Beginning in 1854, steamboats operated regularly from Kansas City to Lawrence and Topeka, and sometimes as far as Manhattan, Junction City, and Fort Riley. This traffic continued through the territorial period and the early years of statehood, falling off rapidly about 1860. The last steamer to travel the Kansas was the Alexander Majors, which was chartered in 1866 to run between Kansas City and Lawrence until the railroad bridge at the mouth of the river, which had been destroyed by floods, could be rebuilt. This traffic into statehood gave the Kansas legal status as a navigable stream in the eyes of the Federal government. In the 1860s, the country's goods were increasingly transported by the extensive and comparatively efficient railroad system.
On February 25, 1864, the state legislature declared the Kansas River nonnavigable, allowing railroad and bridge companies to build bridges and dams without restriction. The first train to operate in Kansas south of the Kansas River did so by crossing the river in Lawrence on November 1, 1867. The Kansas Historical Quarterly, August 1947 (Vol. 15, No. 3), pages 225-239. This law remained in effect until 1913, when, after it had been characterized as "a crime against the public welfare of Kansas", it was finally repealed and the river's status was restored to a navigable stream. The status has not since changed, though modern commercial navigation on the river is largely confined to dredging.
Étienne de Veniard Sieur de Bourgmont's expedition into the Kansas River valley and the history of the Kaw people in their villages along the river is discussed in The Last Wild Places of Kansas, a book by George Frazier.
In Sara Paretsky's 2017 detective novel "Fallout", in which Paretsky's Chicago-based private detective V.I. Warshawski carries out an investigation in Lawrence, Kansas, a Lawrence resident tells her: "You should always say 'The Kaw' when you speak of our river. Only strangers and Google Maps call it 'The Kansas River'"(Ch. 32).
Johnny Kaw is a fictional Kansas settler created in a series of tall tale publications started in 1955 — one of his fictional feats was to have dug the Kansas River Valley.
The "Kaw River" is mentioned as a location in the western series Wagon Train, in the opening scene of The Tom Tuckett Story episode (March 2, 1960).
| Kansas City | ||
| Shawnee | ||
| Edwardsville | ||
| Bonner Springs | ||
| De Soto | ||
| Lawrence | ||
| Lecompton | ||
| Perry | ||
| Tecumseh | ||
| Topeka | ||
| Willard | ||
| Belvue | ||
| Wamego | ||
| St. George | ||
| Manhattan | ||
| Ogden | ||
| Ft. Riley | ||
| Junction City | ||
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