MEDICINE LODGE

city, seat of Barber county, southern Kansas, U.S. It lies 70 miles (113 km) west-southwest of Wichita, along the Medicine Lodge River. The site was regarded as sacred by the Plains Indians, who peacefully shared a lodge on the banks of the river, which they believed had curative powers. There in 1867 the Five Tribes met with U.S. commissioners to negotiate a treaty that opened the area to white settlement and railroads and fixed the southern boundary of Kansas. The town was laid out in 1873 and was incorporated as a city in 1879. Carry Nation (18461911), the hatchet-wielding temperance crusader, lived in Medicine Lodge, where she attacked her first saloon with an umbrella; her home is preserved as a shrine and museum. The city is now a shipping point for wheat and cattle and is the site of a large gypsum plant based on the nearby Gypsum Hills, a scenic area of canyons, towering mesas, and buttes. A pageant reenacting the peace treaty is held every three years. Pop. (1990) 2,453.