Bleeding Kansas
“Bleeding Kansas" was a term used by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to describe the violent hostilities between pro and antislavery forces in the Kansas territory during the mid and late 1850s.
For many years the Great Plains area was labeled the Great American Desert, implying that the lands offered little in the way of economic benefits. The federal government relocated a number of Native American tribes to the Plains as further testimony to the area’s lack of appeal to white settlers.
Attitudes began to change as people traveled westward across the Santa Fe Trail and discovered the area’s richness. However, the most important factor that brought Kansas into the national consciousness was the strife that occurred following the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.
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