Kansas and Missouri

Kansas and Missouri are two bordering U.S. states with a long and tumultuous history. The relationship between these two states has its roots in Bleeding Kansas, but mutual distrust has continued off and on since then, even in sporting contexts. These states also share the Kansas City metropolitan area, where both states each have a city named "Kansas City" on either side of the Missouri River.

Kansas City twice
Sometimes there is disagreement on which of the two cities are considered to be the "real Kansas City"; they are commonly abbreviated as "KCK" and "KCMO" for Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri respectively.

As recently as 2019, the governors of the two states signed an agreement to stop offering financial incentives to pull a business from the other Kansas City. This pact was referenced in 2022 when the governor of Kansas spoke in favor of the Chiefs football team moving their arena to Kansas, from the Missouri side. As of 2024, the Chiefs remain in Kansas City, Missouri.

History
Missouri was formed out of the Missouri Territory as a slave state during the early 19th century in 1821. Northern states wanting to slow the westward spread of slavery hammered out the Missouri Compromise with southern states anxious to keep slavery legal; this compromise ensured that any state directly west of Missouri would be a free state where slavery would be illegal.

In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act that allowed the territory's residents to vote on whether slavery would be allowed. This act repealed the Missouri Compromise and spurred interest in the territory. Both pro-slavery and anti-slavery boosters flooded into Kansas, but due to the state's proximity to Missouri, most were pro-slavery men from Missouri. They successfully stacked the vote to form a temporary pro-slavery government prior to statehood. Tensions resulting from this would lead to Bleeding Kansas and the Kansas-Missouri border wars, a violent and bloody civil war that would foreshadow the much larger American Civil War.

Though Missouri was in the Union during the Civil War, “most of its population was pro-slavery.” Forty years after Missouri statehood, in 1861, Kansas was admitted as a state of the Union, a free state, as the abolitionists had won in Kansas, as the larger Civil War had begun.

The violence and war deeply harmed the relationship between the two areas, even after Kansas attained statehood and the war had ended. Violence and guerrilla warfare continued for several years thereafter until the American Civil War ended in 1865, with many unjust killings and lootings performed by partisans on either side of the border.

The two states, being neighbors, have to deal with each other regularly, but the bitterness sown during Bleeding Kansas lingers. To some extent, this is reflected in university athletics, as the Border War rivalry between the two states' main universities shows. The two states also compete economically.