Leavenworth had a shot at being Kansas City rather than a satellite to it. Newton might have trumped Wichita. And Beloit and Marysville could easily have vanished.

But none of that happened.

A new book by Kansas University geography professor James Shortridge seeks to make sense of why cities established in Kansas by schemers and dreamers sometimes flourished and sometimes didn’t.

In “Cities on the Plains: The Evolution of Urban Kansas” (University Press of Kansas), Shortridge focuses on the 118 Kansas cities that ever reached a population of 2,500.

Shortridge says he was struck, in writing the book, by an “amazing resilience” among the cities he studied.

Shortridge says of them, “Once established, even for some reason that no longer exists, such as lead mining or a stop on the Pony Express, they nevertheless tend to continue to exist.”

Railroads drove much of the initial growth. Their routes dictated where towns would appear and prosper.

Other influences since the 1850s have included mercantile interests, discoveries of natural resources like salt and gas and oil, and the emergence of the interstate highway system.

But surprises abound. Newton was on a railroad mainline while Wichita was on a branch. But then came oil discoveries just east of Wichita, and Newton’s prospects declined.

Some cities have made it without being on an interstate. Shortridge notes that Garden City, for example, is slowly becoming dominant in southwest Kansas without any connection to the superslab.

The placement of public institutions also affected settlement. Business-minded Leavenworth sought the penitentiary, thinking it would provide construction jobs during the building phase and later an inmate labor force for manufacturers who set up shops inside the prison.

Leavenworth didn’t jockey for the university that wound up in Lawrence, reasoning, according to Shortridge, that a university would “employ only a handful of professors and would require no more than a single building.”

Development of southeast Kansas has been chaotic, Shortridge says, because of multiple stimuli to its growth, including the establishment of county seats, the laying of rail lines and the unexpected discovery of zinc, lead and coal.

No single town became dominant, though Shortridge sees Pittsburg inching ahead there because of the presence of a university and a flourishing medical center.

Health-care facilities are key to the growth of Kansas cities today. Shortridge says that Hays dominates northwest Kansas not just because of a university, transportation, and manufacturing, but because of a large hospital and heart-care center.

Among the most mysterious and heartening stories in Shortridge’s book are those of towns like Beloit, Marysville, Neodesha and Sabetha.

Beloit has a manufacturing company that makes specialized tillage equipment used by conservation-minded farmers, Shortridge says, and Marysville an entrepreneur, Don Landoll, who started a company that makes deicing equipment for airplanes.

“It’s almost a cult of personality that holds some of the small towns together,” Shortridge says.

Yet these are exceptions to the general rule in Kansas history that the wishes of capitalists from outside the state trump those of local entrepreneurs.

Nevertheless, why a place endures or prevails is a bit of a mystery, and the longer the time span involved, the more the mystery grows.