“ I have long been looking for the West, and here it is at last.”1 wrote founder and publisher of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley when he reached Atchison in 1859. Greeley, who popularized the dictum “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” was on an overland journey to California to promote the transcontinental railroad.

	Horace Greeley. Matthew Brady's studio circa 1851. Retouched. photograph of original from Daguerreotype Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Although depressed by “too many idle, shiftless people in Kansas,” Atchison filled some of the Easterner's hopes for the American west. Greeley had editorialized for nearly two decades in support of a government-financed railroad to the Pacific, arguing that the agrarian West, was the key to economic and social renewal of a country torn by regional and class differences.

But goods and services were required to build the west of Greeley's vision, and he saw Atchison as an ideal distribution point through which people and supplies necessary for development would pass.

The town had already begun to evolve as a transportation center and although a ruged frontier atmosphere dominated the early years, underneath, a planned and rapidly developing civil and economic urban infrastructure of private and public institutions— newspapers, churches, schools, a four-year college, small business and manufacturing enterprises, theatre, town hall, and jail—progressed incrementally.

	This 1866 view of Commercial Street, the main business street of Atchison depicts a town in transition. Soldiers, African-Americans and roughly-dressed men mingle as animals run wild in the streets. Prominently in the front of the image, a man and child in sophisticated urban clothing walk on the boardwalk. (View larger image) 2

Atchison's beginning reflected a common pattern in the development of urban frontier towns. Their founding preceded settlement: “. . . these urban centers did not take shape through a process of gradual and random incremental growth that transformed a crossroads hamlet into a town and then perhaps to a major city. Instead, the typical procedure involved the selection of a promising site by an individual, group, church, railroad, corporation, or governmental agency.”3

Atchison's developmental pattern also conformed to a template common to gateway towns. Gateway cities offer an entrance into an area, the connection between one area and another—generally long-distance trade connections. According to historical geographer A. F. Burghardt, “Gateway cities often develop in the contact zones between areas of differing intensities or types of production. ...Since entrance into an extended hinterland is of the essence of a gateway, such a city will tend to be located on a site of considerable transportational significance.” 4 Burghardt further points out that "In the dynamic situation, there is an initial stage of development in which the gateway city grows rapidly as it profits from the sudden influx of weath and effort into an extended tributary region."5

Gateway cities grew up wherever the machine of development inexorably extended the boundaries of the country; therefore, they often originated along the lines of advancing settlement of the country. “As the horizon of contiguous settlement advances, gateway cities are spawned along the moving edge.” 6

[1] Greeley, Horace. An overland journey, from New York to San Francisco in the summer of 1859. (New York:C. M. Saxton, Barker & Co.; San Francisco, H. H. Bancroft & Co., 1860), 18. An electronic version of An overland journey is available through Making of America, digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction at <http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/>. (Link current April 6, 2003)

[2] John W. Reps, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning. (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1981),431.

[3] Reps, The Forgotten Frontier, x.

[4] Burghardt, A. F. . "A Hypothesis About Gateway Cities," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 61, Issue 2 (June 1971), 269-270.

[5] Ibid., 272.

[6] Ibid, 284.