city, seat (1876) 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 Kiowa Indians, who erected huts on the banks of the river, which is rich in magnesium sulfate, or Epsom salts; white settlers called these huts “medicine lodges.” In 1867 representatives of the Five Tribes of the Plains—the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, and Kiowa Apache—met there 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.

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. Carry Nation (Nation, Carry) (1846–1911), the hatchet-wielding temperance crusader, lived in Medicine Lodge, where in 1899 she attacked her first saloon with an umbrella; her home is preserved as a shrine and museum. A pageant reenacting the peace treaty, combined with an intertribal powwow, is held every three years. Barber State Fishing Lake is nearby. Pop. (1990) 2,453; (2000) 2,193.