Leavenworth, Kansas

The First City of the Sunflower State celebrates its Western heritage.

- PETER CORBETT

Leavenworth is known as the First City of Kansas, but its importance in settling the West transcends that provincial title.

The town was founded in 1854, 27 years after Col. Henry Leavenworth led a garrison of soldiers from Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, to a site overlooking the Missouri River northwest of present-day Kansas City. There he established Cantonment Leavenworth in 1827, later called Fort Leavenworth, to protect the Western trade routes from Plains Indians and caravans traveling on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails.

Fort Leavenworth, still operating after 195 years, has been described as the “most significant military post in the Trans-Mississippi West” and the “Post that opened the West.”

Colonel Leavenworth, after defeating the Pawnee Indians in a brutal campaign, was named a brigadier general, but the word of that promotion never reached him before his death in 1834. That was two decades before his namesake town was established south of the fort. Leavenworth City, as it was initially known, was established amid bitter conflict over Kansas and Nebraska entering the Union as slave or free states.

Today, Leavenworth is known nationally for its fort, the oldest west of the Mississippi, and the federal penitentiary, which incarcerated notorious criminals George "Machine Gun" Kelly, George "Bugs" Moran, and Robert Stroud, better known as the Birdman of Alcatraz, who had an aviary at Leavenworth before he was transferred to Alcatraz.