The largest city in Kansas has a definite metropolitan flavor, with its tall buildings, wide streets, and bustling tempo. Still a major marketing point for agricultural products, it is now best known as an aircraft production center. McConnell Air Force Base is here. Wichita is the petroleum capital of Kansas, with many independent oil companies represented. Some of the nation's largest grain elevators for wheat storage are here.

The town's first settlers were the Wichita, who built a village of grass lodges on the site. The following year James R. Mead set up a trading post and in 1865 sent his assistant, Jesse Chisholm, on a trading expedition to the Southwest. His route became famous as the Chisholm Trail, over which longhorn cattle were driven through Wichita to the Union Pacific at Abilene. As the railroad advanced to the southwest, Wichita had its turn as the "cow capital" in the early 1870s. By 1880, farmers drawn by the land boom had run fences across the trail and the cattle drives were shifted west to Dodge City. The interrupted prosperity was restored by wheat crops of the next two decades and the discovery of oil after World War I.