Air Capital of the World — Cessna, Beechcraft, and the Keeper of the Plains
Wichita is where the general aviation industry was born — Cessna, Beechcraft, and Learjet all started here, and the city still produces more general aviation aircraft than anywhere else in the world. The Kansas Aviation Museum, in a 1935 Art Deco airport terminal, covers the full story. The Keeper of the Plains — a 44-foot steel Native American sculpture by Blackbear Bosin — stands at the confluence of the Arkansas rivers, with a Ring of Fire ceremony performed nightly. Pizza Hut and White Castle were both founded here in the 1950s.
Wichita was a cattle-drive terminus on the Chisholm Trail in the 1870s — the town where cowboys delivered Texas longhorns to the railroad for shipment east, briefly policed by Wyatt Earp as a deputy marshal in 1875. Oil was discovered in the region in 1915 and aircraft manufacturing came in the 1920s, transforming the frontier cattle town into an industrial city. Today Wichita's aerospace sector employs 35,000 workers at Cessna, Textron Aviation, Spirit AeroSystems, and dozens of suppliers, making it the most aviation-intensive mid-size city in North America.