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THE WIRED PRAIRIE

The people of Garden City, Kans., have always lived at the end of the world. In the 1870s and '80s, wagon trains plodded along the Santa Fe Trail for a month or more from Kansas City, on the state's eastern edge, to the scrappy little community near its western border. Even today the trip takes eight mind-numbing hours by car. No wonder Garden City (pop. 24,072) and hundreds of other rural communities in western Kansas have had a tough time persuading physicians to come and set up a practice. In fact, more than half the state's 105 counties are considered critically...

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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