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Informationen zum Autor Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd Klappentext "Fresh off of a gutsy, thrilling 2023 Super Bowl win for the Kansas City Chiefs, two inspiring stories that fit perfectly together--a biography of superstar quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, who brought the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl win in fifty years in 2020 as well as a second in 2023, along with the historical struggles and recent resurgence of the former "Paris of the Plains," Kansas City"--]cProvided by publisher. Leseprobe No Boundaries Nobody knows where Kansas City is. This is because there are two Kansas Citys-though there is really only one Kansas City-and because the whole region sprawls across the border of two states. But it's also because of a bar fight. At least, that's how it started. It happened in November 1831 in Missouri, and the only person we know was there for certain was Gabriel Prudhomme. He lived on a plot of land in what would one day be the middle of the United States (the dead center, if you were measuring crudely), a heavily forested patch of bluffs along the Missouri River, one of the muddiest waterways on the continent. Millions of years ago, much of North America was covered by glaciers. Mountains formed. The ice melted. The long process of glaciation left a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries crisscrossing the continent. Two of those rivers-eventually named the Kansas and the Missouri-would meet in the middle. Native American groups built what we now call Hopewell settlements, and tribes like the Osage, the Missouria, and the Kanza hunted bison and farmed in the region. The Kanza-or Kaw people-lived along the river that came to bear their name, building a village in the mid-eighteenth century forty miles northwest of what would become Prudhomme's land. The Osage, known for their skills as hunters, farmers, and warriors, built lodges with domed roofs in their Missouri settlements and facilitated trade through a wide swath of Missouri along a route called the Osage Trail. The tribes were forcibly removed from their home territories by the US government in the 1820s and '30s, around the same time more French Canadians moved in and built a few trading posts. Prudhomme was one of them, a blacksmith who purchased 257 acres from the federal government in 1831. His property contained what might've been the only valuable piece of land around: a rock outcropping that jutted into the river, ideal landing for ferries and steamboats. Prudhomme started farming. He opened a grocery store and-fatefully, it seems-a tavern, where in the fall of 1831, a barroom brawl broke out, somebody drew a gun, and, according to an account from an early resident, Prudhomme ended up on the ground, his body in a pool of blood. The murderer was never caught. Prudhomme left behind seven kids, a wife named Margaret, and a perfectly fine river landing, along with a legal mess that lasted seven years, until a group of fourteen men pooled their resources together and bought the land for $4,220 at an auction held on the coveted landing. One of the buyers, John McCoy, confessed years later that they were merely hoping for a quick profit. "None of them, he insisted, had any conception of town proprietorship, much less town building," wrote the historian Mildred C. Cox. The only thing they knew was that a town needed a name. One grifter, Abraham Fonda, suggested they name the town after him, which didn't go over well. Others proposed Rabbitsville and Possumtrot. They settled on a name based on local geography. The French named the Kansas River after the Kanza tribe. The men were just miles from where the Kansas River flowed into the Missouri. They declared their new home the Town of Kansas, which would become the City of Kansas, and finally Kansas City. The new name didn't exactly feel like destiny. As McCoy said, they picked it "simply because nobody could think of anything better." ...
