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sight, were basically honest. After that, it was because no one lived here at all.
    Can a thief break in if there are no thieves around?
    Before Kansas was Kansas, there were no towns, but there were plenty of people. Today these people are called Native Americans and few of them are left.
    Before I began being homeschooled—that is, left to figure out things for myself—I learned from my teachers that during the days of the European settlement of America these people were called Indians.
    Indians were largely treated as inconvenient savages whose presence impeded progress.
    European settlers brought with them the idea that land was something a person could own. This was contrary to the Indians' point of view. They believed that the land, like the air and the rain and the sun and the stars, belonged to everybody.
    With the notion of ownership of land came the idea of towns, each staked out into adjacent rectangles with "lots" for sale or for claim to those who would "improve" them by building structures—houses, businesses, and factories.
    Encouraged by the United States government, people came from all over the eastern United States, and parts of western Europe, Scandinavia, and even eastern Europe to "tame" the Kansas territory.
    Many people became rich convincing others who were less informed to come to Kansas to settle a town. Many other people died broke and brokenhearted trying to do just that.
    Consequently, in the nineteenth century, hundreds of towns in Kansas came and went.
    Today there are places that are simply ruts in a pasture that once were home to hundreds, even thousands, of optimistic Scandinavians and Germans.
    Two of the most influential factors in determining whether a town would prosper or wither were the owners of the railroads and the politicians who determined the locations of the county seats, the various headquarters for local government.
    Corruption among these people was rife.
    Heck, they didn't even consider their underhanded shenanigans to be corrupt. They saw themselves as being savvy enough to outsmart the next guy, a desirable American trait.
    In the D. Potts pamphlet about Paisley, the author rages about these dishonest practices, terming them "unchecked hucksterism."
    I just call it human nature.

The Sad History of Paisley, Kansas
Part Two
    LUCK HAS A LOT TO DO WITH the success of a town. But so do the schemes of strangers.
    For example, if the railroad decided to build a station in your new town, business would boom and your town would grow rapidly. If the railroad decided to lay its tracks five miles away, for whatever reason—carelessness, stupidity, or most often some form of kickback or bribery—your town was doomed.
    Similarly, if the elected officials in the state government decided that your town should house all the county records and contain the county courthouse, your town would be a magnet for visitors for all the years to come, and would thrive.
    If these politicians decided against your town and chose another, where perhaps they themselves had made investments, your town's luck had just run out.
    Add to these capricious man-made threats the fierce climate of the prairie, which has been known to wipe out entire communities with grass fires, tornadoes, or drought, or clobber thousands of head of cattle at a single blow with a sudden, blinding blizzard, and you can see that there is nothing especially permanent about a Kansas town, which the Indians, a race of experienced people who followed opportunity as opportunity shifted, knew all too well.
    "Owning land," Chief Leopard Frog once told me, "is like owning time. It is an exercise in folly."
    The influence of the railroads waned with the construction of highways. Now the deciding factor became whether the highway would pass through your town. Again, the decision was left to politicians in a distant city. The people who lived in the town were at the mercy of other people who had no reason to show mercy. Your