Downtown Pittsburg seen from above in autumn light, brick blocks along Broadway stretching toward a tree-covered horizon.
Sarah Runyon / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Kansas · Region

The Little Balkans & the Southeast

Fort Scott and Mine Creek on the old border, Big Brutus in the strip pits, the Amazon Army's coal camps, Route 66's rainbow bridge and the Ingalls claim.

8 places to explore

Southeast Kansas was Osage country. An 1865 treaty left the Osage Nation (Wazhazhe) 4.8 million acres here, the Osage Diminished Reserve, and within a few years settlers were squatting on it by the thousands. By 1871 the Osage had been removed to Indian Territory. The Little House on the Prairie Museum southwest of Independence stands on one of those squatters' claims, and it is the place to start with whose land this was.

For a driver the region splits along its roads. US-69 runs up the old Missouri border past the Mine Creek battlefield, where Union cavalry broke Sterling Price's army in October 1864, to Fort Scott, where the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry was mustered in January 1863. In the far southeast corner, Crawford and Cherokee counties are coal and zinc country, settled by miners from Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Britain and the lands that became Yugoslavia, a mix that gave the field its name, the Little Balkans. Franklin's museum keeps the story of the Amazon Army, the miners' wives who shut the mines in December 1921, and Big Brutus, a 16-story electric shovel, stands among the strip pits near West Mineral.

Kansas has only about 13 miles of Route 66, across that same corner through Galena, Riverton and Baxter Springs, and the last Marsh rainbow arch bridge on the old road still crosses Brush Creek there.

What to See in The Little Balkans & the Southeast

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Historic Sites

The restored Perkins Building in Coffeyville, which held the Condon Bank, with BANK lettered on its corner turret above a small plaza.

Dalton Defenders Museum

Coffeyville

Coffeyville's museum named for the four townsmen killed on October 5, 1892, when the Dalton gang tried to rob two banks at once, across the street from the bank where the plan fell apart.

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The post hospital at Fort Scott, a two-story white building with wide porches, at the end of a brick walk across the parade ground.

Fort Scott National Historic Site

Fort Scott

An 1840s army post on the old Missouri border where officers kept enslaved servants, and where twenty years later the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry was mustered onto the parade ground.

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Little House on the Prairie Museum

Independence

The Ingalls family's claim of 1869 and 1870 southwest of Independence, a squatter's homestead on the Osage Diminished Reserve, with a replica cabin, schoolhouse and post office.

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Mine Creek Battlefield State Historic Site

Pleasanton

The Linn County ford where some 2,500 Union cavalrymen charged about 7,000 of Sterling Price's retreating Confederates in October 1864 and broke them against the creek.

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Miners Hall Museum

Franklin

Franklin's museum of the Crawford County coal camps and their immigrant families, and of the December 1921 morning the miners' wives marched to shut the mines.

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Towns & Gateways

Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum

Chanute

Chanute's museum of the hometown singer and the jeweler's son who filmed the South Seas, East Africa and Borneo for paying audiences, and of the West African art that now shares their building.

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Industry & Mining

Big Brutus, a giant orange-and-black electric shovel with a tall boom, towering over visitors on a gravel path at West Mineral.

Big Brutus

West Mineral

A 16-story electric coal shovel parked in 1974 where it stopped digging, among the flooded strip pits and reclaimed grassland of the Cherokee County coal field.

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Roadside Stops

Old Route 66 pavement, painted with route shields, leading to the white concrete arch of the Brush Creek Bridge.

Brush Creek Bridge (Rainbow Bridge)

Baxter Springs

The last of three Marsh rainbow arch bridges on Kansas's short stretch of Route 66, built in 1923 and kept standing in 1992 when the road association refused to let it go.

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The Little Balkans & the Southeast rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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