Great Seal of Kansas

A sun rises on the eastern horizon of the seal's landscape, specifically located in the east, the direction from which American settlement came into Kansas. In 1861, Kansas was the new edge of the organized United States.

In the foreground left, a farmer plows a field with a team of two horses, and a log cabin stands behind him. Kansas would be an agricultural state, built on the cultivation of the Great Plains. The log cabin places the scene at the frontier stage of settlement, before frame houses replaced the first shelters.

In the middle distance, a steamboat moves along the Kansas River. Steamboats were the primary commercial arteries of inland America in 1861, and their presence on a state seal was a claim that the state had viable waterway commerce. The Kansas River, also called the Kaw, runs east across the state before joining the Missouri River near Kansas City.

On the right side of the seal, a wagon train moves westward. Kansas in 1861 was the starting or crossing point for the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, and the California Trail, the three great overland routes that carried American migrants toward the Pacific. Hundreds of thousands of people had crossed Kansas on these routes before it achieved statehood.

In the upper portion of the seal, two Native Americans on horseback chase a herd of bison. In 1861, the Great Plains bison herds were still enormous, and the Plains tribes, including the Kansa, Osage, Pawnee, and Cheyenne peoples, still hunted them across the region that had just become the state of Kansas.

Thirty-four stars are arranged along the upper arc of the seal. They represent the total number of states in the Union at the moment Kansas was admitted on January 29, 1861, with Kansas counted as the 34th. The stars function as a timestamp, recording the exact size of the Union at the moment Kansas joined it.

Ad Astra per Aspera is Latin for "To the Stars Through Difficulties." It appears on the seal as Kansas's official state motto. The phrase was proposed by John J. Ingalls at the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention in 1859 and was adopted as part of the founding documents that led to statehood in 1861.