History
The earliest known reference to the river was on a 1732 map by French cartographer d'Anville who labeled it the River of the Padoucas. A 1758 map referred to it as the Padoucas River. An early reference to the river as the Smoky Hill was by American explorer Zebulon Pike during his 1806 expedition to visit the Pawnee. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established Kansas Territory, which included the entire length of the Smoky Hill River.
With the onset of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush in 1858, an ancient Native American trail along the Smoky Hill River provided the shortest, fastest route west across Kansas, becoming known as the Smoky Hill Trail. Beginning in 1865, the trail served as the route for the short-lived Butterfield Overland Despatch. To protect travelers, the U.S. Army established several forts along the trail, including Fort Downer, Fort Harker, Fort Hays, Fort Monument, and Fort Wallace. Before American colonization, the land along the Smoky Hill River was favored hunting ground for the Plains Indians. In 1867, the Comanche and the Kiowa, and in 1868, the Sioux and the Arapaho signed treaties withdrawing their opposition to the construction of a railroad along the Smoky Hill River. The Kansas Pacific Railway was completed in 1870, rendering the Smoky Hill Trail obsolete.
In 1948, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished construction of a dam on the Smoky Hill for flood control in southeastern Ellsworth County, Kansas, creating Kanopolis Lake. In 1951, the United States Bureau of Reclamation completed another dam on the river, this one for irrigation as well as flood control, in southeastern Trego County, creating Cedar Bluff Reservoir.
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“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)