Editing Manhattan, Kansas (section)

===Early events===
[[File:Bluemont.jpg|thumb|[[Blue Mont Central College]] building, built in 1859]]
Early Manhattan settlers sometimes conflicted with Native tribes, and the town was threatened by pro-[[History of slavery in the United States|enslavement]] Southerners. Manhattan was staunchly Free-State, and it elected the only two Free-State legislators to the first Territorial Legislature, commonly called the "Bogus Legislature".<ref name=Frontier/> However, nearby [[Fort Riley]] protected the settlement from the major violence visited upon other Free-State towns during the "[[Bleeding Kansas]]" era. This allowed the town to develop relatively quickly. On January 30, 1858, Territorial Governor [[James W. Denver]] signed an act naming Manhattan as [[county seat]] for [[Riley County]].<ref name=Frontier/> Ten days later, on February 9, 1858, Governor Denver chartered a [[Methodist]] college in Manhattan, named [[Blue Mont Central College]].<ref name=Frontier/>

The young city received another boost when [[Pike's Peak Gold Rush|gold was discovered]] in the [[Rocky Mountains]] in 1859 and [[Fifty-Niners]] began to stream through Manhattan on their way to prospect in the mountains. Manhattan was one of the last significant settlements on the route west, and the village's merchants did a brisk business selling supplies to miners. Manhattan's first newspaper, ''The Kansas Express'', began publishing on May 21, 1859.<ref name=Frontier/>

In 1861, when the State of [[Kansas]] entered the Union, Isaac Goodnow, who had been a teacher in [[Rhode Island]], began lobbying the legislature to convert Manhattan's Blue Mont Central College into the state university. The culmination of these efforts came on February 16, 1863, when the Kansas legislature established [[Kansas State Agricultural College]] (now [[Kansas State University]]) in Manhattan. When the college began its first session on September 2, 1863, it was the first public college in Kansas, the nation's first [[land-grant university|land-grant institution]] created under the [[Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act|Morrill Act]], and only the [[List of mixed-sex colleges and universities in the United States|second public institution of higher learning to admit women and men equally]] in the United States.<ref name=Frontier/><ref name=Willard>{{cite book|last=Willard |first=Julius |title=History of Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science |publisher=Kansas State College Press |year=1940 |url=http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=hearth;cc=hearth;rgn=full%20text;idno=5725255;didno=5725255;view=image;seq=0003;node=5725255%3A3 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140720120839/http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=hearth;cc=hearth;rgn=full%20text;idno=5725255;didno=5725255;view=image;seq=0003;node=5725255%3A3 |url-status=dead |archive-date=July 20, 2014 }}</ref><ref name= Nation>{{Cite journal | title = The National Schools of Science | journal = The Nation | page = 409 | date = November 21, 1867 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=Mf0xAQAAIAAJ&q=land+grant+kansas+february+16%2C+1863+pennsylvania+April&pg=PA409 }}</ref>

By the time the [[Kansas Pacific Railroad]] laid its tracks west through Manhattan in 1866, the 11-year-old settlement was permanently ensconced in the [[tallgrass prairie]]. Manhattan's population has grown every decade since its founding.