Winfield, for the deaf at Olathe, and for the blind at Kansas City. These institutions are under the supervision of a state board of control. The state contributes also to many institutions on a private basis. Most of the counties maintain poor farms and administer outdoor relief, and some care for insane patients at the cost of the state. _History._--The territory now included in Kansas was first visited by Europeans in 1541, when Francisco de Coronado led his Spaniards from New Mexico across the buffalo plains in search of the wealth of "Quivira," a region located by Bandelier and other authorities in Kansas north-east of the Great Bend of the Arkansas. Thereafter, save for a brief French occupation, 1719-1725, and possibly slight explorations equally inconsequential, Kansas remained in undisturbed possession of the Indians until in 1803 it passed to the United States (all save the part west of 100 deg. long. and south of the Arkansas river) as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The explorations for the United States of Z. M. Pike (1807) and S. H. Long (1819) tended to confirm old ideas of sandy wastes west of the Mississippi. But with the establishment of prairie commerce to Santa Fe (New Mexico), the waves of emigration to the Mormon land and to California, the growth of traffic to Salt Lake, and the explorations for a transcontinental railway, Kansas became well known, and was taken out of that mythical "Great American Desert," in which, thanks especially to Pike and to Washington Irving, it had been supposed to lie. The trade with Santa Fe began about 1804, although regular caravans were begun only about 1825. This trade is one of the most picturesque chapters in border history, and picturesque in retrospect, too, is the army of emigrants crossing the continent in "prairie schooners" to California or Utah, of whom almost all went through Kansas. But this movement of hunters, trappers, traders, Mormons, miners and homeseekers left nothing to show of settlement in Kansas, for which, therefore, the succession of Territorial governments organized for the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase had no real significance. Before 1854 Kansas was an Indian land, although on its Indian reservations (created in its east part for eastern tribes removed thither after 1830) some few whites resided: missionaries, blacksmiths, agents, farmers supposed to teach the Indians agriculture, and land "squatters,"--possibly 800 in all. Fort Leavenworth was established in 1827, Fort Scott in 1842, Fort Riley in 1853. There were Methodist (1829), Baptist, Quaker, Catholic and Presbyterian missions active by 1837. Importunities to Congress to institute a Territorial government began in 1852. This was realized by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.