For millennia, the Great Plains of North America were inhabited by nomadic Native Americans.

It produced the common influenza symptoms with a new intensity: "violent headache and body aches, high fever, non-productive cough...

Soon dozens of patients—the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county—were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot."

[7] Haskell County, Kansas, is the first recorded instance anywhere in the world of an outbreak of influenza so unusual that a physician warned public health officials.

It remains the first recorded instance suggesting that a new virus was adapting, violently, to man.

And unlike the 1916 outbreak in France, one can trace with perfect definiteness the route of the virus from Haskell to the outside world.

It was not until after 2000 that historians' research revealed the origin of one of the deadliest epidemics in human history.

Historians have generally reported that the path of the disease from Haskell to the world occurred when newly inducted soldiers from the county traveled 200 miles from the county to Camp Funston (now Fort Riley) and were then deployed to Europe at the beginning of United States involvement in World War I.

Many pathologists believe that Haskell County did not play a role in the virus's origin and that historical accounts are entirely coincidental.

[citation needed] The railroad and the development of oil and gas fields in the 1930s, and the locating of many deep wells for irrigation significantly improved the economy of the area helping overcome the "dust bowl" of that period.

Amanda I. Watkins, who owned a considerable amount of land in the county, was named "World Wheat Queen" in 1926.