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 Forklift Attachments Kansas - Kansas is a U.S. state located within the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, that in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is usually said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was most likely not the term's original meaning. Inhabitants of Kansas are called "Kansans."
For thousands of years what is now the state of Kansas was home to diverse and numerous Native American tribes. Tribes in the Eastern part of the state generally resided within villages along the river valleys. Tribes within the Western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted big herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery problem. When opened officially to settlement by the U.S. government during 1854, pro-slavery settlers from nearby Missouri and abolitionist Free-Staters from New England rushed to the territory to find out if the state of Kansas would become a slave state or a free state. Hence, the area was a hotbed of chaos and violence during its early days because these forces collided, and was called Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists ultimately prevailed and on the 29th of January, the year 1861, the state of Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the people of the state of Kansas grew rapidly, when waves of settlers turned the prairie into farmland. At present, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of sunflowers, wheat and sorghum.
The agricultural outputs of the state are cattle, sheep, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, cotton, salt, hogs and corn. Eastern Kansas is part of the Grain Belt, an area of major grain production within the central United States. The industrial outputs are transportation equipment, private and commercial aircraft, food processing, publishing, machinery, chemical products, apparel, petroleum and mining.
The state of Kansas ranks 8th in United States oil production. Production has experienced a natural, steady decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to extract oil over time. Since oil prices bottomed in the year 1999, oil production in Kansas has remained fairly constant, with an average monthly rate of about 2.8 million barrels in the year 2004. The recent higher prices have made carbon dioxide sequestration and other oil recovery techniques more economical.
Kansas likewise ranks 8th in natural gas production, even if production has declined since the 90's. This is mainly due to the gradual depletion of the Hugoton Natural Gas Field, which is the biggest natural gas field in Kansas. During the year 2004, slower declines in the Hugoton gas fields and increased coalbed methane production contributed to a smaller overall decline.
The economy of Kansas is also heavily influenced by the aerospace industry. Some huge aircraft companies have manufacturing facilities in Kansas City and Wichita, including Boeing, Spirit Aero System, Learjet, Cessna, and Hawker Beechcraft (formerly Raytheon). A lot of these major company's have their head office within Kansas, such as: the Sprint Nextel Corporation, Embarq, YRC Worldwide, Garmin, Payless Shoes, and Koch Industries.
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