In July 1945, at the end of World War II, President Harry Truman toured the ruins of Berlin with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, the largest army in U.S. history. The three men stood at the apex of U.S. power at a moment of triumph.

Yet these three men were also connected to one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history: the violent anarchy that engulfed the Kansas-Missouri borderlands in the 19th century.

In July 1945, at the end of World War II, President Harry Truman toured the ruins of Berlin with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, the largest army in U.S. history. The three men stood at the apex of U.S. power at a moment of triumph.

Yet these three men were also connected to one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history: the violent anarchy that engulfed the Kansas-Missouri borderlands in the 19th century.

Truman came from a pro-Confederate family in western Missouri. Eisenhower, in contrast, was the son of German American parents with Union sympathies who settled in Kansas after the Civil War. Young Ike grew up listening to the town’s Union veterans tell combat stories. Bradley grew up in central Missouri only a short distance from the site of the Centralia Massacre, where 22 unarmed Union soldiers were executed in 1864.

As the United States turns 250—and stands at the precipice of another era of political violence—it is worth returning to the history of its most interior of regions, the Kansas-Missouri borderlands.

No place has embodied the extremes of U.S. history more than this place. In the 19th century, this was arguably where the Civil War started, and where its violence fell most heavily on civilians.

Yet a century later, the same place had become a stable core of U.S. power, underpinning a dynamic political order that yielded wide prosperity and popular support for U.S. global leadership. The region produced successive presidents (Truman and Eisenhower) and leading generals in the two world wars (John J. Pershing and Eisenhower), and served as the site of military industries and installations.

In short, the history of the Kansas-Missouri borderlands traces the United States’ path from failed state to global power—and into our own moment, when U.S. constitutional democracy is once again on shaky ground.

John Brown is depicted in a mural titled Tragic Prelude, painted by John Steuart Curry, circa 1938-40, at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. united Missouri Bank of Kansas City

In 1776, the lower Missouri River Valley remained lightly settled by Europeans. This was Indigenous country. The Osage controlled much of the region, while larger Indigenous powers such as the Lakota and Comanche dominated the wider plains.

The transformation began after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Acquiring territory on paper was easy. Imposing control over it was not. The United States spent decades dismantling Indigenous landholdings through treaties, military coercion, and forced removal.

The key figure was William Clark. Remembered today mainly as Meriwether Lewis’ explorer sidekick, Clark was more significant as a territorial administrator. Over the course of his career, he negotiated dozens of treaties that liquidated Indigenous control over vast stretches of land.

Military power underwrote this process. A chain of forts soon stretched across the region. Fort Osage, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Scott, and other outposts secured U.S. settlement and protected overland migration routes. The colonization of Missouri and Kansas was not just settlement but protracted military occupation.

The conquest of the region brought explosive economic growth. River towns in Missouri such as Independence, Weston, and St. Joseph became major commercial centers linked to the Santa Fe Trail and the migration routes to Oregon and California. The region emerged as a gateway between the agricultural interior and an........

© Foreign Policy