Kansas is included by most people in the list of Western States; by many it is regarded as in the extreme West.  If the Pilgrim Fathers had been told that the haven of refuge they had selected would, within two or three hundred years, be part of a great English-speaking nation with some 70,000,000 of inhabitants, and with its center some 1,500 miles westward, they would have listened to the story with pardonable incredulity, and would have felt like invoking condemnation upon the head of the reckless prophet who was addressing them.

Yet Kansas is to-day in the very center of the United States.  This is not a printer’s error, nor a play upon words, much as the New Englander may suspect the one or the other.  There was a time when the word “West” was used to apply to any section of the country a day’s journey on horseback from the Atlantic Coast.  For years, and even generations, everything west of the Allegheny Mountains or of the Ohio River was “Out West.”  Even to-day it is probable that a majority of the residents in the strictly Eastern States regard anything west of the Mississippi River as strictly Western.

There is no doubt that when Horace Greeley told the young men of the country to “Go West and grow up with the country,” he used the term in its common and not its strictly geographical sense, and many thousand youths, who took the advice of the philosopher and statesman, stopped close to the banks of the Mississippi River, and have grown rich in their new homes.  It cannot be too generally realized, however, that the Mississippi River slowly wends its way down to the Gulf of Mexico well within the eastern half of the greatest nation in the world.  At several points in the circuitous course of the Father of Waters, the distance between the river and the Atlantic Ocean is about 1,000 miles.  In an equal number of points the distance to the Pacific Ocean is 2,000 miles, showing that whatever may be said of the tributaries of the Mississippi River, and especially of its gigantic tributary the Missouri, the Mississippi is an Eastern and not a Western river.

We give an illustration of the point which competent surveyors and engineers tell us is the exact geographical center of the United States proper.  The monument standing in the center of this great country is surrounded by an iron railing, and is visited again and again by tourists, who find it difficult to believe the fact that a point apparently so far western is really central.  The center of the United States has gone west with the absorption of territory, and the Louisiana purchase, the centenary of which we shall shortly celebrate, had a great effect on the location.

The center of population has moved less spasmodically, but with great regularity.  A hundred years ago the City of Baltimore was the center of population, and it was not until the middle of the century that Ohio boasted of owning the population center.  For some twenty years it remained near Cincinnati, but during the ’80s it went as far as Columbus, Indiana, where it was at the last Government census.  At the present time it is probably twenty or thirty miles west of Columbus, and in the near future Fort Riley will be the population, as well as the geographical, center.