Grass is the most widely distributed of all vegetable beings and is at once the type of our life and the emblem of our mortality . . . the carpet of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead.

--John James Ingalls, 'In Praise of Blue Grass' (1872)

The question comes up, if whites couldn't get a three- or six-letter name correct, what else couldn't they get right?  The meaning of the word for one thing: Kansa and its forms have been translated as wind, windy, wind people, south wind people, those-who-come-like-wind-across-the-prairie, swift, swift wind, swift river, swift water, smoky water, fire people, plum people, disturbers, troublemakers, filthy, and cowards.  Dispense with the freak translations like the last four, and you have a people defined by three of the four ancient elements. 

Women achieved the right to vote in stages in Kansas.  They could vote in school elections after 1861 and in municipal elections after 1887, the year Susanna Moore Salter of Argonia became the first woman to be elected to the office of mayor of any town in the United States.  The right of Kansas women to vote in state and national elections came eight years before the Nineteenth Amendment.

Leo E. Oliva, "Kansas: A Hard Land in the Heartland" (1988)

Kansas, as now accepted, written and spoken, is one of the most beautiful Indian words adapted to use in the English tongue.  As a name for a state it is unequalled.

-- William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (1918)

The name of this tribe is variously spelled Kanzas, Kansas, Cansas, Konzas, and Conzas; and to cap all absurdity, they scarcely know themselves by any other word than Kaw.  Should the Territory be erected into a slave state, it might be advisable to adopt this latter as the title, being the ominous croak of the raven.

-- Max Greene, The Kanzas Region (1856)