Wichita Audio Tours

Wichita built two distinct American industries: the cattle trade and commercial aviation. The Chisholm Trail passed through here in the 1860s and 70s, bringing longhorns north from Texas to the railheads, and the saloons, gunslingers, and brothels that followed made it briefly one of the most violent cities on the Great Plains before the cattle trade moved west. The Old Cowtown Museum on Sim Park Drive reconstructs that period with authentic period buildings and living history demonstrations across 17 acres of Arkansas River bottom land.

The aviation industry that replaced the cattle era was equally defining.

In the 1920s, Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman all started building aircraft in Wichita, and by World War II the city was producing more aircraft than anywhere else in the world. Boeing built B-29 Superfortresses at the plant on East Central, and small aircraft manufacturing never left. The Kansas Aviation Museum in the original 1935 Wichita Municipal Airport art deco terminal is the institutional memory of this legacy. Downtown Wichita along the Arkansas River, after decades of suburban flight, has reinvested with the Keeper of the Plains, a 44-foot steel sculpture standing at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, as its visual anchor.