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Modern Kansas ISOT to 1854

Hmm at this time there are no bridges across the Mississippi river at least in 1854 so trade would be interesting in the short term until infrastructure work is done.

Historically The first bridge on the Mississippi north of the Missouri river was completed 1855 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the first bridge across the Mississippi river south of the Missouri river wouldn't be competed until 1874.

Edit: Said 1874 bridge would be the famed Eads bridge that connects St. Louis Missouri and East Louis Illinois for which the opening publicity stunt was taking a elephant across it to show the bridge was safe and at the time at 6,442 ft or 1,964 m which at the time the longest rigid bridge in the world at the time. Indeed apparently at the time there were even only a few few suspension bridges had longer spans than the Eads bridge.
 
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SSgtC said:
So the military units in the state are extraordinarily well suited for moving off road and across undeveloped terrain.
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I was suspecting that; thanks for doing the work to prove it! But my point was that private individuals with private vehicles largely won't be able to intervene any substantial distance from the Kansas border.
 
Evan said:
I was suspecting that; thanks for doing the work to prove it! But my point was that private individuals with private vehicles largely won't be able to intervene any substantial distance from the Kansas border.
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The flip-side, of course, is that it would be hard for armed slave-holding nut-jobs to advance en-mass against Kansas. The worst I would expect would be small ad-hoc groups that lived near the border.
 
00Zy99 said:
The flip-side, of course, is that it would be hard for armed slave-holding nut-jobs to advance en-mass against Kansas. The worst I would expect would be small ad-hoc groups that lived near the border.
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Not that they could do anything when they got there. Just for considerate: a modern platoon has more firepower at it's disposal then a Civil War division has. For example, in the Civil War, the most common rifle used by the Union was the Model 1861 Springfield riffled musket. It fired at soft lead .58 caliber round at a rate of fire of 2-4 rounds per minute and a muzzle velocity of 950-1300 feet per second. The most common modern US Army firearm is the M4 Carbine. It fires a full metal jacket 5.56mm round at 2,970 feet per second and at a rate of fire of between 750-900 rounds per minute. With modern optics, it has an effective range of 500 meters (550 yards). The M1861 maxes out at 400 yards and that's only with an excellent marksman. The average soldier is probably only accurate to between 100-200 yards (possibly less with the massed volley tactics used at the time). And I haven't even gotten into the machine guns, mortars or artillery that a modern platoon would have (either organically or on call).
 
SSgtC said:
Not that they could do anything when they got there. Just for considerate: a modern platoon has more firepower at it's disposal then a Civil War division has. For example, in the Civil War, the most common rifle used by the Union was the Model 1861 Springfield riffled musket. It fired at soft lead .58 caliber round at a rate of fire of 2-4 rounds per minute and a muzzle velocity of 950-1300 feet per second. The most common modern US Army firearm is the M4 Carbine. It fires a full metal jacket 5.56mm round at 2,970 feet per second and at a rate of fire of between 750-900 rounds per minute. With modern optics, it has an effective range of 500 meters (550 yards). The M1861 maxes out at 400 yards and that's only with an excellent marksman. The average soldier is probably only accurate to between 100-200 yards (possibly less with the massed volley tactics used at the time). And I haven't even gotten into the machine guns, mortars or artillery that a modern platoon would have (either organically or on call).
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I'm not talking about conquest. I'm talking about harassment and raids. Even with modern technology the army can't be everywhere at once. But at least the number of idiots able to make that far would be very small.
 
SSgtC said:
The Kansas National Guard is the 35th Infantry Division (Mechanized). Being equipped with a shit ton of Bradley IFVs, Paladin SPA and Abrams tanks with an absolutely mind boggling amount of trucks, I'd say they're uniquely suited to doing this. And the 1st Infantry Division also is lavishly equipped with tracked vehicles and number of helicopters including the AH-64, UH-60 and CH-47. So the military units in the state are extraordinarily well suited for moving off road and across undeveloped terrain.
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Biggest issue with that is how far they could get before running out of irreplaceable spare parts. Breakdowns are a fact of life and I dont see any modern vehicles lasting more than a few years. Doubly so for military vehicles which cant use off the shelf parts like civilian vehicles can.

Every tank and helicopter in kansas is going to be carefully husbanded until it's absolutely needed.
 
Evan said:
I was suspecting that; thanks for doing the work to prove it! But my point was that private individuals with private vehicles largely won't be able to intervene any substantial distance from the Kansas border.
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"Gosh darnit, with all this turmoil, I'm afraid our military personnel have been forced to pull back from security on our materiel. Some enterprising and not terribly law-abiding folksseem to have taken a fair number of vehicles around the neighboring areas, but I'm sure all they've done is invite people along for a ride."
 
Yup, I think I could make a fair argument to a fair few friends, get a fair few firearms, and go a fair way's down the Missouri to the Mississippi.

The other thing to keep in mind is yes, you can get a truck on a barge or a riverboat. Yes once outside Kansas transportation drops. But that doesn't make it non-existent, so use the options you have. Railroads are okay, but predictable and some militia's could catch you, detain or stop you, ambush you etc. Doing so on the river would be harder and it would be a great way to reach far more of the country.

So onto the Missouri with a modern riverboat, down to the Mississippi, and there would rather quickly be a corridor all the way down where within a day's travel of the river slaveholding is a bad plan.

After the first few raids were done by modern ships, I would expect period riverboats to be purchased or otherwise obtained, (depending on their providence) and used in their place for more clandestine or at least non-obviously uptime operations.
 
The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi river which connected Iowa and Illinois was built wasn't built in 1856, at the point of 1854 like noted before in my earlier post there are no bridges across the Mississippi river...

Beyond that any attempts at traveling on the downtime Mississippi would almost certain need downtime experts to safely pull off as the Mississippi river was a very dangerous only partly tamed river and even steamboats with experienced crews often lost vessels to various dangers.

The average lifespan a riverboat on the Mississippi was four to five years which always admittedly better than the Missouri river where the average lifespan was two years and there were various dangers from sandbars and gravel bars to trees(it was fairly common to lose riverboats to tree snags) and at times the boats themselves boiler explosions were fairly common.
 
I wonder if the Kansas Water office has any river dredging equipment. I have found some articles that indicate that they may have some of the army corps of engineers around for flood risk management.
 
Alane1 said:
The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi river which connected Iowa and Illinois was built wasn't built in 1856, at the point of 1854 like noted before in my earlier post there are no bridges across the Mississippi river...

Beyond that any attempts at traveling on the downtime Mississippi would almost certain need downtime experts to safely pull off as the Mississippi river was a very dangerous only partly tamed river and even steamboats with experienced crews often lost vessels to various dangers.

The average lifespan a riverboat on the Mississippi was four to five years which always admittedly better than the Missouri river where the average lifespan was two years and there were various dangers from sandbars and gravel bars to trees(it was fairly common to lose riverboats to tree snags) and at times the boats themselves boiler explosions were fairly common.
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For riverboats of the time sure. Modern craft are a good bit more handy, and I'll grant getting experienced riverboat captains would be of great help it is still a much easier path to take into the south and back north. Even if it is just pleasure craft or perhaps especially so they could be used to get south and north quite quickly, without much risk from river forts, and the firepower available to them would make most, not all, shore or ship based ambushes a bad call. Not to mention it would only take 1 or 2 cases of non-violent-non-abolitionist's being shot at for being in an up-time boat for the state national guard to step in in a more... official and heavy handed way. Likely because they were looking for the excuse.
 
Shit, I just realized that there's literally nothing stopping the local news team from taking a chopper ride to the nearest plantation and shooting an expose. Or anyone with access to a helicopter (or who can hire a helicopter) shooting one on their own.
 
I think everyone is vastly overestimating the capabilities of vehicles that are far beyond the last gas pump. Even a few gas cans won't get you far in the terrain we're talking about. Traintracks and glorified cow paths. Even cities were mostly unpaved muddy shitholes. Unless your vehicle can get by on rotgut moonshine, you aren't going too far beyond the Kansas borders.
 
Okay, I live in Lawrence, KS, which is pretty liberal/leftist for someplace not on the coast. Also, we are very aware as a city that we were targeted and burned down by confederate irregulars from Missouri. So, I feel pretty sure that from Lawrence at least there will be an amount of infiltrators of all sorts spreading out to help and "help" with the liberation of slaves as immediately as possible.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the existence of this place right here:
Home | Haskell Indian Nations University . I have a strong suspicion that a large percentage of the young people who attend that institution are going to return to the homes/lands their ancestors currently occupy and take with them sundry items and equipment with the strong intention of stopping their genocides.

As for myself? I'm a huge fan (no, really, HUGE) of Walt Whitman, the temptation to just slip out of Lawrence and fanboy in his presence might be too strong to resist...but, out of respect, I would try....

As a side note, when Lawrence was observing the Sesquicentennial of the Burning of Lawrence, on Aug. 21 2013, the thought did cross my mind of what an ISOT of Lawrence from that date to the date of the massacre itself would be like..of course, I lived on the west side of town then, now I'm uncomfortably far to the east and would be in much more immediate danger lol...
 
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AntaeusTheGiant said:
. I have a strong suspicion that a large percentage of the young people who attend that institution are going to return to the homes/lands their ancestors currently occupy and take with them sundry items and equipment with the strong intention of stopping their genocides.
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It would be interesting to see how many come right back due to the culture shock from just how different their ancestors are from both them and their romanticized views of history. Many native American tribes were active participants in the slave trade, and a few sided with the south during the civil war. That is only a surface level example that doesn't really get into the massive values dissonance between historical people and modern.
 
Doomsough said:
It would be interesting to see how many come right back due to the culture shock from just how different their ancestors are from both them and their romanticized views of history. Many native American tribes were active participants in the slave trade, and a few sided with the south during the civil war. That is only a surface level example that doesn't really get into the massive values dissonance between historical people and modern.
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That's a good point. Life in 1854 was far more brutal than it is today. Law enforcement varied from place to place and was often a matter of the law being whatever the man with the gun said it was.
 
SSgtC said:
That's a good point. Life in 1854 was far more brutal than it is today. Law enforcement varied from place to place and was often a matter of the law being whatever the man with the gun said it was.
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Well, I was more thinking that pre-reservation Indians were intact nations with all their power structures intact and both the will and capacity for warfare, including slave raids. Indians slavery practices sometimes included dangerous rituals after which the slave would be forced to fill in for a dead member of the master tribe.
 
What would happen if it came to light that groups that were well loved downtime got up to some horrific crimes.

E.g. the church and pedo priest's and the slavery with women who came for shelter and killing the children
 
This was a period where there were anti-Catholic violent riots, burnings of catholic churches and murdering of priests with a side order of massive bigotry with a entire American party complete with its own militant arm that was all about hating the 'evil and unamerican' Catholics and immigrants out to corrupt and destroy america was a thing and encouraging such acts.

It would likely just enflame already existing bigotry to bloody effects.
 
Buba said:
Drama queen much?
Simply ignorant?
The slave population in the USA was increasing due to natural growth, not imports. And this has been ongoing for several generations.

AFAIK admitting a new State is the Congress' prerogative, not the Administration's. Not going to happen unless Kansas forces the issue using its military and demands "admittance - or else".
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Just because millions are worked to death does not mean negative population growth. Nor does it mean that working them to death is the goal but they were slaves, and were forced to work, hard, for all of their lives. Saying that this is working someone to death is not someone being a drama queen, it does not make them particularly ignorant. Maybe it isn't the most accurate description. Such as "working them as hard as their bodies can stand for as long as they can stand it for the benefit of their so called masters." But it doesn't change the situation, it does not make it any less reprehensible or horrible.

Just to point out how completely off base your mention of the slave population growing is as a reason for why people are not being worked to death let me point to something else in the farming sector. The fact that I can do this should reveal just how wrong slavery is due to the fact that the comparison can even be made. We slaughter millions of pigs each year, and yet the number of pigs in the USA has grown since the time of the civil war.

That right there should show that you can have both "natural growth" along with "intentional killing". Calling someone ignorant by implying that you can't both have a growing population and work a people to death is either argument in poor faith or a result of not actually considering the issue you are arguing over.

Edit: On the creation of a state you are correct, it takes Congress, not the people living in a territory to make a state official.
 
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