five banks, an opera house which cost about $100,000, an electric lighting plant, a fine waterworks system which was first installed in 1881 and has been enlarged to keep pace with the growth of the city, a fire department, a street railway, a good sewer system, and two beautiful public parks. The first school was taught in 1871 by T. A. Wilson in a house that cost about $400. The present public school system comprises four modern ward school buildings and a high school building which cost about $40,000. A number of fine church edifices add to the beauty of the city, the jobbing trade covers a large territory, and the press is well represented by two daily and three weekly newspapers. The Arkansas City Commercial club is composed of energetic citizens, always alert to the interests of the city, and that its efforts in this direction have been successful may be seen in the fact that the population increased from 6,140 in 1900 to 7,508 in 1910.
Arkansas River.—Undoubtedly the earliest account of this river is to be found in the narratives of the Coronado expedition, 1540–1541, in which the stream was given the name “St. Peter's and St. Paul's river.” Marquette names it on his map of 1673. The Mexicans named it “Rio Napete,” but the stream acquired the name “Akansa” from the early French voyagers on account of a tribe of the Dacotah or Osage stock which lived near its mouth. The stream has its source in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, in latitude 39 degrees 20 minutes north, longitude 106 degrees 15 minutes west. It flows in a southerly and easterly direction, passing through the royal gorge to the city of Pueblo, from which place it takes an eastward course, traversing what was once a portion of the “Great American Desert,” and entering Kansas in Hamilton county, just south of the town of Coolidge, thence flowing in a general easterly direction through the counties of Hamilton, Kearny, Finney, Gray and Ford, at which point the stream makes an abrupt turn to the northeast, passing through the counties of Edwards, Pawnee and Barton, the “great bend” of the river being in the last named. From here the river turns to the southeast, passing through the counties of Rice, Reno, Harvey, Sedgwick, Sumner and Cowley, leaving the state at a point almost due south of the village of Davidson. It then flows across Oklahoma and Arkansas, emptying into the Mississippi river at Napoleon, Ark.
The Arkansas is accounted the most important of the western tributaries of the combined Mississippi and Missouri rivers, is about 2,000 miles in length, of which 310 are in the state of Kansas. The stream is rarely navigable to a point above Fort Smith, though in times of flood the channel is open to boats of light draft to a point much higher up. In 1854 a writer in the New York Tribune, in describing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, gave Fort Mann (near Dodge City) as the “head of navigation” on the stream. (See Early River Commerce.)
Across the plains of Colorado and Kansas the channel of this river is very shallow, in some places the banks being less than five feet above low water, and the channel at least three-quarters of a mile in width.
