Kansas in Light in August (Location)

Located in the center of the United States, Kansas is one of the places to which Nathaniel Burden travels between 1850 and 1866. During most of that time Kansas was a territory recently opened to American and European settlers. Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed territorial residents to decide the status of the state as slaveholding or free, Kansas was known as "Bleeding Kansas" for the violence of the conflicts between the two sides. It was thus a wild borderland when Nathaniel traveled there.