Take a Walk with Birkenstock

Gloss Mountains State Park, Oklahoma
Today's word is escarpment. It is a geological term referring to the edge or steep slope between two landmasses formed either by erosion or uplift. A higher plateau might have harder surface rock...

Charles & Mary Ann (Molly) Goodnight Ranch House — Texas Panhandle
Howdy! If you have seen the classic Howard Hawks western Red River with John Wayne, you can imagine the magnitude of Charles Foxwing Goodnight's life. The television miniseries, Lonesome Dove, was...

Medicine Park, OK — "America's Cobblestone community"
Medicine Park is a historic resort community on the eastern fringe of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. A young lawyer named Elmer Thomas, who later became an Oklahoma state senator, set up a...

The "Roosevelt Fountain" — South Park, Lawrence, KS
On a muggy humid day in August 115 years ago, America's most popular celebrity came to our town. He had just left Osawatomie, KS where he had delivered a 90-minute stem-winder speech. An estimated ...

Allegawaho Heritage Memorial Park, Kaw Nation, Kansas
For nearly a century, a 28-ton Sioux Quartzite boulder stood upright on a pedestal of small rounded glacial rocks cemented together to form a monument. It was perched in a park overlooking the Kans...

Eel Creek and Cold Spring Harbor at Sagamore Hill
It is doubtful that Teddy Roosevelt subscribed to the notion that "total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable." His state of inertia was constant motion, constant projects. His life wa...

Inside Sagamore Hill
Teddy Roosevelt was surrounded by wealth as a child. In 1880 at the young age of 22, he purchased the initial acreage of Sagamore Hill for $30,000 or roughly 1 million dollars in current dollars. O...

Sagamore Hill — The first Summer White House
Theodore Roosevelt not only officially named the White House, the White House, he was also the first President who escaped Washington's summer heat to a "Summer White House," which for him was Saga...

Americans — a traveling Smithsonian exhibit
A traveling Smithsonian exhibit just opened at the Watkins Museum, here in Lawrence. The exhibit was supposed to take place at Haskell Indian Nations University, also in Lawrence, but federal budge...