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WICHITA , about 165 miles southwest of Lawrence on I-35, is the largest city in Kansas, severed by the Arkansas River, which forks just north of downtown into the Big and Little Arkansas rivers (incidentally, Kansans take umbrage if you pronounce it "Arkansaw"; pronounce it here the way it is spelled). Originally settled by the Wichita Indians, who by 1865 had been relocated to Oklahoman Indian Territory, Wichita grew up as a stop on the Chisholm Trail, a Texas-to-Kansas cattle route celebrated in frontier lore and cowboy ballads. Its glory days were to be short-lived, however, as farmers, angry about the damage done by stampeding cattle, erected fences which forced the drives onto different trails further west, creating new cowtowns such as Dodge City. Today three of the world's major aircraft manufacturers (Cessna, Raytheon and Learjet) are based here, and the city, already with a rich arts scene, has been invigorated with a downtown revival.
Downtown Wichita is enlivened mainly by the public art and sculpture that pops up unexpectedly all over the place, in empty lots and even in tree stumps. The exceptional Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum , 204 S Main St (Tues-Fri 11am-4pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm; $2), is in Old City Hall , a heavy stone building decorated with turrets, gargoyles and arches. The cozy interior is crammed with exhibits on everything from the Wichita Indians through decorative art to Carry Nation, whose initial zeal for singing hymns to errant drunks grew into a campaign against everything from tobacco to corsets. The stately church with vivid stained-glass windows at 601 N Water St houses the Kansas African American Museum (Tues-Fri 9am-5pm, Sun 2-6pm; free), an eclectic antidote to more mainstream views of Great Plains history, with details on Buffalo Soldiers, inventors from across the country and early black Wichitans, and some African art.
Excellent museums in the Riverside stretch of parkland (which also holds walking and bike trails) include the Indian Center and Museum , 650 N Seneca Drive (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $3). The 44ft Keeper of the Plains statue, facing east at the confluence of the Little and Big Arkansas rivers, was designed in the 1970s by a Kiowa-Comanche artist, Blackbear Bosin, and dedicated by Native Americans and city officials smoking the peace pipe. It's an eerie sight at dusk, reaching into the sky with some unknown offering. The museum itself is small, with changing exhibits of traditional and contemporary Native American art.
Western artist C.M. Russell is the best represented of the veritable who's who of American painters assembled at the Wichita Art Museum , 619 Stackman Drive (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; free). Old Cowtown Museum , 1871 Sim Park Drive (March-Oct Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $7), is a seventeen-acre riverside exhibit re-creating the buildings of 1870s Wichita. Looking and feeling like a movie set, the area includes - along with some docile longhorns - the city's first one-room jail, a schoolroom, a store, a smithy, churches and stables, and old homes.
To the north of the city, the surreal geodesic Bright Spot for Health Center , 3100 N Hillside Ave (Mon-Thurs 8am-5.30pm; $4), houses the Garvey Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning, which aims, by using holistic medicine, to find a cure for cancer. It's all very worthy, but weird: road signs, for example, tell you to "de-stress to 25," and there's a 39ft food guide pyramid. In the southeast of the city, the products of Wichita's plane industry are on display at the Kansas Aviation Museum , in the old Art Deco air terminal at 3350 George Washington Blvd (Tues-Fri 9am-4pm, Sat 1-5pm; $2). A more interesting detour is to Hutchinson (on Hwy-50, 45 miles northwest of Wichita), for the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (Mon-Sat 9am-9pm, Sun noon-9pm; $5.50 museum admission, $13 includes IMAX and Planetarium) which features, among other aerospace paraphernalia, the Apollo 13 command module.
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