I’m in the history business.
No, I cannot claim the title historian. I think that title more accurately belongs to those who hold history degrees and create academic works.
I prefer the title storyteller.
I spent 35 years as a professional storyteller — a newsman.
“News is the first, rough draft of history,” is often attributed to the late Washington Post Publisher Phil Graham. I thought that when I left daily journalism to become executive director of Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, created by Congress to tell the story of the Kansas-Missouri border, I was leaving that “first, rough draft of history” behind.
I was wrong.
Whenever I hear people today say “it’s never been this bad” or “we have never faced such challenges,” I know they haven’t listened to my stories.
There are striking similarities between the fight by women for suffrage and equal rights along this border more than 100 years ago to the current battle of Black Lives Matter, Native American rights and other fights by oppressed groups today. We may have fought for freedom along this border, but we then created a system of exclusion in our neighborhoods that gave us our segregated Kansas City of today. Slave patrols and fugitive slave hunters often set the relationship for policing norms of the present.
That is why stories have such relevance today.
When people ask me, “What is Freedom’s Frontier?” I answer that we “tell the stories that changed the nation.”
What are those stories?
It was along the Kansas-Missouri border that thousands of white Americans stepped off to settle the west. It was along this border that Americans fought each other over whether Kansas would be a free state or a slave state. It was along this border that we continue the enduring struggle for freedom.
It often is tough for a Midwest resident to face our unflattering past. Yes, we are proud of the pioneers’ bravery and strength in overcoming the odds in striking out for the west. Yes, we are proud of the individual citizens that fought for freedom for themselves and for others. Yes, we are proud of those who continued to fight for freedom for women, Black people, Native Americans and LGBTQ people.
In that pride, we also must remember the unflattering parts of our past. We must all remember that settler’s success begat sorrow for the Native Americans who the government forced to move or took their land. While individual citizens did work to make Kansas a free state, most had no intention of granting African Americans the same rights as whites. Women knew that few men of any race would support the female claim to equal rights.
Those who mark William Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence must also remember the prior raid of Osceola, Missouri, led by Lawrence-based Jim Lane. The Jayhawkers killed citizens and destroyed what was then one of Missouri’s richest and most populous communities.
The Union Army used Quantrill’s Raid as justification for its infamous Order Number 11 — the first time the federal government forcibly deported United States citizens from their homes. Sadly, Order Number 11 set the stage for the federal government to force Japanese Americans to make the same move in World War II.
You cannot understand these individual stories in isolation. They are all connected. To grow solutions to our challenges, you have to understand the soil in which you plant the seeds of a solution.
Congress created the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area in 2006 with a mission to tell all those stories, the ones that inspire our dreams as well as the ones that are difficult to acknowledge.
We bring together 185 historical sites or museums — from the Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri (our northernmost site), to the Baxter Springs, Kansas, Heritage Center (our southernmost site), and from the First Territorial Capital in Junction City, Kansas (westernmost) to the Confederate Memorial State Historical Site in Higginsville, Missouri (easternmost).
These sites tell those stories: the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly.
