Johnny Kaw

The wind comes off the wheat in July and hits the concrete like a flat hand. Twenty-four feet up, a man with yellow hair and a scythe on his shoulder looks out over Poyntz Avenue and does not blink. Children climb the plinth below him. Tourists photograph his boots. He has stood in Manhattan City Park since 1966, and he is younger than the interstate that brings most people to see him.

Johnny Kaw is the giant wheat farmer of Kansas, and the first honest thing to say about him is what the roadside signs tend to leave out. He was invented on purpose, by a man with a name and an office, in living memory. George Filinger, a professor of horticulture at Kansas State University, made him up in 1955 for the hundredth birthday of Manhattan. The student paper had the story by November 1954, under a headline announcing that a K-State professor had started a legend, which is an odd sentence to be able to date to the week. Filinger was irritated that Kansas newspapers ignored Kansas history. He wanted his state to have what Maine and Texas had. So the tales ran in the Manhattan Mercury through the centennial year and were gathered into a thin book, The Story of Johnny Kaw, with ink drawings by Elmer Tomasch from the university art department.

What Filinger built was a creation story for a grain economy. Johnny dug out the Kansas River valley. He planted the wheat that made the state famous and invented the sunflower, which is now the state flower, a detail the city parks department still repeats in its own trivia. He grew potatoes that had to be measured rather than weighed. The same department credits him with carving the Mississippi, excavating the Grand Canyon and heaping the spoil into the Rocky Mountains, which gives a fair sense of how seriously the scale was meant to be taken. His shoe size was fifty-five.

On an ordinary afternoon he walks a section with the scythe swinging low, and the wheat goes down in acres rather than rows, so the sound is one long hiss instead of the dry individual crack of a single cut. Chaff hangs behind him in the heat. Grasshoppers go up ahead of the blade in a moving wall.

The weather work is what people remember. A funnel comes across the flat with the noise of a freight train and the smell of wet dust running out in front of it, and Johnny lets it reach him, takes the top off it with one swing and stands in the sudden rain while the clouds empty over the corn. Droughts he ended by wringing the clouds out like washing. He kept two animals, a wildcat and a jayhawk, the mascots of the two state universities, and they fought each other constantly. The Dust Bowl, in Filinger’s telling, was their fault.

The trouble sits in the name. Filinger gave his giant the full surname Kawmandokansan, Kaw for short, and in his version of Kansas history the river and the state were named after Johnny. The real derivation runs the other way. The Kansas River is the Kaw, and both it and the state carry the name of the Kanza, who lived across what is now Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska for centuries before the United States forced them out in 1873. The legend quietly reverses that, and in one passage it goes further. Filinger has Johnny get thirsty, drive his hoe handle into the ground, wallow it around and pull up water, and the spring that results is Waconda Springs. The Kanza called that place Ne Wohkondaga, medicine water, and held it sacred. After the removal, white settlers sold its water for its healing properties, built a health spa on the site in 1884, and in 1965 bulldozed the whole thing into the spring and destroyed it. A 2022 research project in the K-State English department set the two accounts side by side and let them argue. The legend hands a sacred Kanza site to a white settler who never existed.

The statue took longer than the story. Three small versions came first. Mrs. Walter O’Neill of Manhattan sculpted one for the 1955 centennial; vandals beheaded it, it was moved out to a farm, and somebody backed a wagon over it. Eleven years of fundraising followed, with dollar memberships in the Johnny Kaw Club, donated steel and concrete, and a final bill of about seven thousand dollars against an estimate of three. The figure that went up in May 1966 is concrete over a steel beam frame, built deliberately to shrug off wind and need no upkeep. Weeks after the dedication a tornado went through Manhattan and left him standing. In Manhattan this is still quoted as evidence.

His powers follow from the job he was invented to do. He is strong in the way weather is strong, and his gifts are all agricultural: rain on demand, soil where there was none, a harvest that outruns the season. Set against that is a limitation no amount of concrete fixes. He has no death, no birth, no rival, no second version of any story, because no tradition ever took hold of him and worked him over. There is one author, one out-of-print book that stopped being reprinted in 1969, and whatever the town chooses to keep alive: a children’s picture book by Jerri Garretson in 1997, an anthology appearance in 2008, a refurbished plaza in 2018, a bar in Aggieville. Manhattan’s own visitor bureau calls him fakelore, which is a more candid word than most towns would use about their giant.

The wheat is real. The river is real. The Kanza are a nation with a government and an office. Johnny Kaw is twenty-four feet of painted concrete holding a scythe he has never needed, and Kansas keeps him because Kansas decided to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Johnny Kaw?

Johnny Kaw is a fictional giant pioneer wheat farmer created as a Kansas folk hero. He was invented in 1955 by George Filinger, a horticulture professor at Kansas State University, for the centennial of Manhattan, Kansas. The stories ran in the Manhattan Mercury and were collected into a short book, The Story of Johnny Kaw.

Is Johnny Kaw a real folk legend?

No. Johnny Kaw is what folklorists call fakelore, a modern invention written to look like inherited tradition, and Manhattan’s own visitor bureau uses that word for him. He has one named author, one book and a fixed date of creation, unlike genuinely oral figures whose stories circulate in many versions.

What did Johnny Kaw do?

In Filinger’s tales Johnny Kaw dug out the Kansas River valley, planted the state’s wheat, invented the sunflower and grew enormous potatoes. He also controlled the weather, cutting the funnels off tornadoes with his giant scythe and wringing rain out of the clouds to end droughts. The city of Manhattan additionally credits him with carving the Mississippi, digging the Grand Canyon and piling up the Rocky Mountains.

Why is he called Johnny Kaw?

Filinger gave him the full surname Kawmandokansan, shortened to Kaw, and wrote that the Kansas River and the state were named after him. In fact both are named after the Kanza people, who lived in the region for centuries before the United States forced them out in 1873. The legend also credits Johnny Kaw with creating Waconda Springs, a Kanza sacred site called Ne Wohkondaga that white settlers later commercialised and then destroyed in 1965.

Where is the Johnny Kaw statue?

The statue stands in City Park in Manhattan, Kansas, on Poyntz Avenue. It is twenty-four feet tall, built of concrete over a steel beam frame, and was dedicated in May 1966 after eleven years of community fundraising that cost about seven thousand dollars. An earlier small statue made for the 1955 centennial was beheaded by vandals and later crushed by a wagon.

Related Entries

Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, Pecos Bill, Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, Joe Magarac, John Henry, Br’er Rabbit, Hodag, Hidebehind, Jackalope, Wampus cat, Snallygaster