Where to Stay in Wichita, Kansas

What is Wichita known for?

Wichita is known as an old cattle town on the Arkansas River. The Old Cowtown Museum rebuilds the frontier settlement, and the Wichita Art Museum and the Museum of World Treasures hold its collections along the water. Museums line the river.

Exploration Place and the Mid-America All-Indian Museum stand near the banks, and the Great Plains Transportation Museum keeps its old engines. The Sedgwick County Memorial Hall and Soldiers and Sailors Monument marks the county at the heart of Kansas.

What are the main landmarks in Wichita?

Wichita's landmarks run from a frontier town to modern galleries. The Old Cowtown Museum rebuilds the early settlement, and the Wichita Art Museum and the Museum of World Treasures hold its collections. Science and rails have their halls.

Exploration Place and the Great Plains Transportation Museum stand near the water, and the Mid-America All-Indian Museum records the plains peoples. The Sedgwick County Memorial Hall and Soldiers and Sailors Monument honours the county's dead.

What is the history of Wichita?

Wichita was founded in 1868 on the Arkansas River, in Kansas, and it began as a cattle town on the plains. Herds driven up the trails from the south crossed the river here, and the settlement grew fast as a market and a shipping point for the drive. The trail made the town.

Cattle pens and traders lined the banks, and the frontier settlement that the Old Cowtown Museum now rebuilds rose in a few short years along the water. The Darius Sales Munger House survives from that first decade near the river. Over the generations that followed, the cattle town became a settled city of the plains.

Grand houses rose among the streets, among them the B. H. Campbell House and the Governor L. D. Lewelling House, and museums gathered the region's record. The Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum and the Mid-America All-Indian Museum keep the county's past and the plains peoples who came before the drive. The Sedgwick County Memorial Hall and Soldiers and Sailors Monument honours the war dead.

Wichita grew from a river crossing on the trail. The old cowtown still stands beside the water.

Where is Wichita?

Wichita stands on the Arkansas River, in Kansas, one of the states of the United States. The city sits deep inland at the heart of the Great Plains, far from any coast, where the land runs flat to the horizon. Grassland spreads on every side.

The river winds through the grid from the north, but no hills break the reach of the plain around Wichita.

What is the climate of Wichita?

Wichita has a temperate continental climate, exposed on the open plains of Kansas. Summers are hot and dry, and storms sweep in fast across the flat land, for the city sits in the belt where the great thunderstorms of the plains build through spring and summer. The wind rarely stops.

Winters turn cold and clear over the Arkansas River, and the swing between the seasons runs wide here.

How do you get to Wichita?

Wichita is reached by road and by air. Interstate highways cross Kansas and meet at the city, carrying traffic from across the United States, and the old trails and rail lines converged here long before them. An airport lies west of the grid.

The plains routes still gather at the crossing on the Arkansas River, and most travellers reach Wichita by car.