History of Butler County Kansas, Part 32

Author: Mooney, Vol. P
Publication date: 1916
Publisher: Lawrence, Kan. : Standard Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 946


USA > Kansas > Butler County > History of Butler County Kansas > Part 32


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


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CELEBRATION.


The largest celebration ever held in Butler county up to that time. and I do not think it has been surpassed since, was held in Dan Cupps Grove at Towanda, July 4. 1873. Arrangements had been made for a large crowd and it was there. Practically all of the north half of the county, and many from other places. The procession leaving Towanda for the grove going across the then unbroken valley in a diagonal direc- tion reached from the town to the grove, about one and a quarter miles. T. N. Sedgwick, of Emporia, a lawyer friend of the late Dr. R. S. Miller, was invited to make the address and was on hand for that purpose. A. L. Redden of El Dorado also had been invited to make a talk after the address of Sedgwick. When the time came for speaking, Mr. Redden said he would be unable to remain until after the speaking of Mr. Sedg- wick and that if he spoke at all he would have to speak first. This was finally consented to. Mr. Redden spoke. When it came time for Mr. Sedgwick to talk, night was approaching and the people starting home. Mr. Sedgwick made a few remarks and returned to Emporia a sadder but wiser man. In justice to Mr. Redden, it is only fair to say that he simply became enthused with his subject and failed to notice that tem- pus was "fugitin.' "


SOME THINGS.


While it is true, perhaps, that human nature is and always has been the same, yet it is also true that conditions and environment have a great deal to do with life in certain communities. In the early settle- ment of the county the people came as near having everything in com- mon as the most radical believer in that doctrine could expect or even wish for. This was the case, especially among the farmers. What one neighbor had the other was welcome to use, loan and borrow; always ready to swap work, get together, assist each other in every way possi- ble. All short of money but long in all those things that money will not buy ; clothed with garments coarse and cheap; but covering hearts that beat in unison one with another; each doing the best he could for himself, at the same time promoting the welfare of his neighbor; living most of the time upon the barest necessities, but never refusing a meal to one that was hungry. Endeavoring to make a living and accumulate property but not to the extent or exclusion of all else. Sometimes in buying supplies for the table, groceries and provisions, things were pur- chased that would look out of proportion to some people. I have per- sonally sold, not to one man only, but to different men and at different times, fifty cents' worth of sugar, fifty cents' worth of coffee and a dol- lar's worth of tobacco. And the caller at the old log house or homestead shanty was as welcome to the one as the other. In those primitive abodes, neighbors envying no one and no one envying them, visited back and forth, and friendships were formed, lasting as time itself. "God help (21)


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the man that has no friends. I'd rather be a dog and bay the moon, than such a man; I'd rather wear the wreath that friendship gives than crowns of gold."


And because of the friendships thus formed, the troubles and dis- couragements, the privations and wants that were bound to come upou all were made lighter ; the road smoother. The clouds disappeared, and all things resumed in time their normal condition.


A MURDER.


The most malicious, premeditated, willful, cold-blooded burder that ever transpired in the county, I presume, happened in the little village of Towanda in the fall of 1872, during the time the agricultural and hor- ticultural fair was being held near there, and, as often happens, booze was at the bottom or cause of it. Two men, Tom Griffith and John Bradshaw, were enjoying (?) themselves, having a hilarious, rollicking old time by partaking of that which cheers, and in sufficient quantities, also inebriates. They had each overloaded, Bradshaw to a greater extent than Griffith. Bradshaw became morose, sullen and wanted to be let alone. Griffith was joyful, merry, noisy and, in his own estimation, a little the best man physically that ever roped a broncho or branded a maverick. They were in the drug and hardware store of the late Dr. R. S. Miller and his partner, J. H. Dickey, Griffith boasting of his prowess and Bradshaw sulking. Griffith went up to Bradshaw and said, "John, I can put you on your back in less time than a minute." John replied, "Go way and lem me alone." Griffith turned and walked back to the rear of the store, wanting someone to test his strength, and again approached Bradshaw and said, "John, I can throw you over my head with one hand. I am a trantler from Bitter Creek, the further up you go. the worse they get. I am from right at the head waters. I am a coyote and it's my night to howl. Look at me. Look me in the eye !" All this time dancing and capering around him in the best of humor and endeavoring to and thinking he was having a high old time. This time Bradshaw did not reply, but went out in front of the store, mounted his pony, rode more than a mile north, procured a revolver, an old style navy, returned to the store, threw the bridle reins over his pony's head, dismounted, walked into the store where . Griffith was and commenced shooting. After firing four shots, hitting him each time, he went out, remounted his pony, rode north and, so far as has ever been ascertained, is still going. Griffith lived about six months. A reward was offered for Bradshaw, but he was never apprehended.


WHEN TIMES WERE YOUNG. By Frances E. Mooney.


I was only fourteen when my father in Indiana decided to "go west." but even from that young age, the remembrance of that decision and its portending significance remains in detail. Or perhaps because of youth's


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intensity and eager absorption the memories are cut deeper and deeper and may be recalled more easily than the happenings of later years.


It was in the dusk of an autumn twilight, we drove up to the place on the West Branch of the Whitewater, which my father had purchased on a previous trip to Kansas, and which my mother still owns. The house was somewhat indistinguishable in the growing darkness and 1 started on a tour of inspection while the family was still busy at the wagon. With a heart filled with the excitement of actual arrival and beating with hints of the possibilities to come, I opened the front door on the west. A large new room, some sixteen feet square, opened before me. I gave a look around and crossed over to the door on the east to continue my explorations. Opening it I was brought up standing. That door led out into the night again. My feelings here I have never been able to satisfactorily express. Maybe somebody knows. There may be in somebody's heart an understanding. I was without resource. Then the situation bore down upon me. From the big brick house in Indiana to this; from the big, thick woods, where we followed a blazed trail to school, to these bare, treeless plains. Homesickness ran riot. I sat down on a box and cried.


But how soon it all changed. My father began building on to our house, as soon as possible, but even that had ceased to matter. The freedom and happiness of life in the early days in Kansas, I think, may not be equalled by anything that these days have to offer.


Women and girls were not many on the frontier and my father, arriving with a family of girls, ours was a popular place. Of course. we were too young to count, but we had to count.


IN SOCIETY.


One of my earliest advents into society was a dance given some miles north of us, at the home of the Messrs. William Spencer and Barney Doyle. And well I remember my wandering search for the host- esses ; and remembered even better is the amusement that followed upon my asking, "But where are Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Doyle. Spencer and Doyle were two unattached bachelors keeping house on the prairies and the proprieties of the occasion were unquestioned.


THE OLD HOTEL.


'Tis always around the big hotel in Towanda that memory clings deepest and longest. This hotel, built of native timber by Rev. Isaac Mooney, a kinsman of my father, and who afterward became my father- in-law, was the mecca for travellers and the seat of adventure through the pioneer years of Butler. The house was constantly filled with the merry makings of the young people of the family and the permanent boarders, with, from day o day, the added excitement of the transient.


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It was, for me, so full of attraction and interest that often my father had to come to remind me that it was time to go home. These were not the days of the telephone and easy messages ; when a message was to be, it was in person. And not only was my home two miles and a half distance away from the hotel, but a river without bridges ran between.


Unforgotten forever will be one formidable mid-winter afternoon. A party was to be given and I was invited to stay. Never had prospect seemed so alluring nor temptation pressed so heavily, but more effectual than these would be my father's appearance at the hotel that evening. My heart sank. I confided my fears to her who is now Mrs. A. Swiggett and my sister-in-law. "Ciele, I dare not stay," I said. "If he comes, I'll have to go." Now this sister has always been noted for ability to meet distress with brilliant suggestions. This one was that we walk over to my home and get permission to stay, and that we could cross the river on the ice. Now, the river was not solid ice, but floating ice ; and except that we both fell in, the flaws in this suggestion might never have been discovered. And just as we waded out on the other side, we met my father coming into town with a load of grain. We had managed to keep our outside skirts dry and my father did not notice our condition. Per- mission to stay for the party was given as we climbed into the wagon, and we sat on the grain sacks and let the water run off our shoes. Serious? We laughed, and tried to smother it, and laughed again, until my father asked what we two simpletons found so funny. Back at the hotel, we walked gingerly and with care. But we were not noticed. Another sister, Margaret, had fallen from her horse on the way home from school and had gotten her feet wet. Hot blankets and hot drinks were being prepared and Ciele and I joined the forces to help to keep Mag from taking cold. A glance toward each other would send us both from the room. And to the party we gaily went. Now this was not a season of satin slippered parties ; we wore our same wet shoes of the afternoon and either sat on our feet or kept them covered with our skirts.


Another adventure of this same class was on an occasion of a flood on the Whitewater. In company with him who is now my husband, we attempted to cross the swollen river by swimming our ponies. This was no unusual feat-many times I had done it alone. But two traveling men were trying to make the crossing in a single buggy and one of these asked me to take his place and let him ride the pony. We all effected a highly successful crossing except the polite young man. He, with my pony blundering and floundering, reached the bank, drenched and shiver- ing.


We stopped to dry him out, at the home of the Ralston boys, kept by their two precise sisters. As we sat by the fire the water began to trickle from him and run around the room in a little rivulet. It was too much for me. I was young and things always were funny. Laugh, I had to and did, much to the disapproval of the precise ladies. The unfor- tunate young man had also lost his hat. Therefore my gallant escort


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galloped up to Towanda, called out his friend, Jim Clark, took Jim's hat off Jim's head without explanation and returned in triumph.


So many funny things happened in that hotel. One afternoon the two sisters, Margaret and Ciele, were chasing one another through the house. Mag made a disappearance and Ciele, following into a bed room. jumped on the outlined form under the bedclothes and pounded vigor- ously. Then she turned back the bed clothes and discovered-a hotel guest, who, being indisposed, had retired. Poor sister Ciele! not for all the days that that man remained would she once enter the dining room.


ANOTHER TIME.


Horse-back riding was not only an amusement but a means of travel. In this accomplishment I proclaimed proficiency, it having been my youthful pastime in Indiana.


My boasting was met up with, while I was yet a tenderfoot. One evening in Towanda I was persuaded upon a pony also named Towanda and which, I was informed, was a fine rider. We made a fine start and stopped ; and nothing I could do would effect another start.


Happening to look back, I discovered a group of heads at various angles, taking note of my plight. Then I knew there was something unusual about the circumstance. Vaguely a remark came to mind that Towanda would not go without spurs. Very hard I thought for a minute. That audience behind me must not get the satisfaction it was expecting. Pride was the mother of my resource. Twisting the pony over to a sunflower, (which was always near). I pulled a flower and filled it with as many pins as I could find about me ; with this I gave the pony such a cut that he did not stop again until I reached my father's door. And just now I recall that again, I was going to ask if I might "stay over a little while longer."


CHAPTER XXVIII.


REMINISCENCES, CONTINUED.


MY PARENTS-THE "QUILTING BEE" CROWD-RECOLLECTIONS OF PLUM GROVE-BACK IN THE SIXTIES-THE LAST BATTLE-"VAGRANT MEMORIES.


MY PARENTS.


By William Allen White.


My father was Dr. Allen White, a pioneer doctor, who came to Kansas in fifty-nine. My earliest recollection of my father must go back to a time when I was two or three years old and he was keeping a country store in a little wooden building which we were using as a home. . It was located where the new postoffice building site is, facing Central avenue. It was a rambling, one-story, unpainted house, with a chimney rising from every room in it-a rusty, sheet iron chimney. These chimneys sprouted all over the gray roof of the house and it was known in the ver- nacular of the town as the "foundry." My father kept the country store and sold everything that the pioneers would buy. Later he bought a drug store and moved over on to Main street, and I recollect him even more vividly than I recollect him in the little store. In the drug store I remember him chiefly as wearing nankeen trousers six or seven months in the year, a white pleated shirt (which my mother ironed with great care), and a rather broad brimmed panama hat.


He was a jovial, good natured, rather easy-going man, but I think he must have been very effective, for I can recollect that they hanged him in effegy in Augusta in the county seat election, and that he chuckled and laughed at home and that my mother was very angry and not a little afraid that they might do violence to him. I believe they said he helped in stuffing the ballot box which carried the election. Of course, I was too little. then to know the facts, but I should not be surprised to learn that he know something about it. He played life according to the rules of the game at that time in vogue, and it was his chief joy in life to get re- sults. He was a Democrat. I remember, and many and many a day I have ridden with him as he drove over the county making the first organization of the Democratic party in Butler county. The Democrats put up a county ticket and I remember this strategy-that they thought if they would concentrate their entire efforts on one man on the ticket they could elect him and so get a foothold in the courthouse. Thus Vincent


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Brown was elected, to the surprise and consternation of the Republicans.


My father sold his drug store and bought a farm seven miles north of El Dorado, where he tried to realize a lifetime dream. He had been born and reared on a farm near Norwalk, in Huron county, Ohio. His father had cleared the wilderness and my father wanted to go back to the pioneer living that he enjoyed as a child. So he built on this farm north of El Dorado, a log cabin with a great fire place and rafters whereon hung dried pumpkins and sage and onions and all sorts of festoons that held dried food during the winter. I can see him, winter nights, sitting by the fire, smoking with supreme satisfaction. He had rail fences built all around the farm, and cleared out some woodland patches, and did all he could to duplicate the farm of his childhood. But the day had changed. The farm which he laid out required hired men to work it, and a lot of hired men : for my father was fat and clumsy and could not do very much. And the hired help that crowded around the table made the farm work so hard that my mother could not do it. She broke under the strain and we had to give up the farm and move back to town-back into the old foundry.


My mother was of Irish extraction. Her father was Thomas Hat- ton. an Irish weaver near Longford, Ireland, and her mother was Anne Kelly of Dublin, the daughter of a contracting carpenter on the docks. They were married in the Catholic Church at Longford, where presuma- bly Anne Kelly's father was working on a contract. I have seen the marriage register signed by Anne Kelly in the church at Longford. They came to America and my mother grew up at Oswego. New York. She was left an orphan at sixteen with a small brother and sister, and she went west with some friends-drifted away from the Catholic church, was converted at a great revival, joined the Congregational church-worked her way through Knox College, doing sewing and house work, learning the millinery trade. The truth is that she did anything she could to keep herself in school, and finally having got what educa- tion she could at Knox College, set forth as a school teacher. She came west, taught school in Council Grove and Cottonwood Falls-met my fa- ther at a dance and they were married in 1867.


After our farm experience, we moved back to town. and my father. who was an expansive sort of a person and liked to have a house full of company, tore down the old foundry and built what was then a com- modious residence. He had so much company that my father and mother talked it over and decided to open a hotel; hence the White House, which my father and mother ran for three or four years. My mother did not like it, but my father was never happier in his life. The nankeen pants, the pleated white shirt, shinily starched, and the panama hat and the white suspenders gleam through the gloom of that day in my memory as a joyous apparition.


I think he lost money every day he kept the hotel open and I think that was his chief pride in life that he wasn't making any money out of his guests. He was something of an amateur cook and loved a good


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table. I used to go to market with him in those days when he had the run of the butcher shops in El Dorado, and he would pick out fine, thick sirloins and porterhouse steaks, and tall, fat rib roasts and bring them home to his guests, whom he fed and roomed at $2 a day. Prairie chickens were common in those days and we only used the breasts. and a little boy and I had to pick them. We also served quail and bass, and buckwheat cakes and homemade sausage for breakfast. It was early in 1882 that my mother, seeing the family fortune failing, rebelled and the hotel closed.


As I have said, my father was a tremendous Democrat, but he was a Democrat with a little "d." One of the earliest family traditions that I now recall was a famous blow-up that he had when Kansas gave the suffrage to the colored man-a proposition which he supported-and denied it to the women. He was a woman suffragist and a prohibition- ist. We entertained St. John at our house before the days of the hotel, and in September. 1882, when the Democratic convention at Emporia nominated Glick for governor on a platform declaring in effect for the nullification of the prohibitory law, my father came home and went to bed sick. It broke his heart. He took politics that seriously. He believed in Kansas ; he believed in prohibition ; he believed in the Dem- ocratic party and the nomination of Glick was too much for him. He died in October, though I feel sure that if he had lived and had been able to toddle to the polls in his white linen trousers and his white shirt and panama hat (which he wore clear to the last day of the mild weather in the long Kansas autumn) he would have cast a vote against Glick if it had been the last act of his life.


My mother was an Abolition Republican, as one may infer when one recalls that she was educated in Knox College and sat under the altar of Lyman Beecher, but so great was her loyalty to my father after his death that when Cleveland was elected president in 1884, she set a lamp in every window of the big house the night the news came in and rejoiced mightily at the triumph of her husband's party.


As I have said. my father was born in Ohio. His father was born in Raynham, Massachusetts, and his mother was Fear Perry, who, according to family tradition, was some kin of Commodore Perry, and my father's maternal grandfather was a brother. I believe, of William Cul- len Bryant's father. and the White family runs back, near the little town of Raynham, Mass., to 1630; so he was pure bred Yankee and my mother was pure bred Irish, and it was a curious mixture that came into my blood. As I look back over my childhood days in El Dorado. I can see more and more plainly the marked traits of the Irish and the Yankee in our family life. It made a thrifty, hard-working, resourceful, cheerful family and I. more than most boys of my time, was blessed with the environment of books, for always my mother was reading to me. Night after night I remember as a child, sitting in the chair, looking up to her while she read Dickens and George Eliot, Trollop. Charles Reed and the


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Victorian English novels. My father, I remember, used to growl a good deal at the performance, and claimed that if my mother read to me so much I would never get so I would read for myself. But his prediction was sadly wrong. It was to those nights of reading and to the books that my mother had always about the house that I owe whatever I have of a love for good reading.


They always kept me in school. It was my father's plan to send me to Ann Arbor to be a lawyer and he left $1,000, (which was considered a vast sum in those days), to be devoted to my education, and I remem- ber that my mother's sorrow when I quit the University of Kansas with- out a college degree, was poignant, and that much of it reflected what my father would think, that I should quit school without a college degree.


Those were golden days for me. I look back upon them all with memories of the keenest joy, from the very first recollection of my par- ents in the old foundry to the day when I set out from El Dorado to make my fame and fortune in Kansas City. Always, in recalling those days, I have the feeling that I was made the special care for the loving devotion of two middle-aged people to whom I was set apart as the most wonderful child that had ever been born on the earth.


How strange it all seems, and how pathetically ridiculous-as, in- deed, everything that is pathetic is at bottom ridiculous, and everything that is absurd is profoundly sad.


THE "QUILTING BEE" CROWD. By William Allen White.


In the old days, the women of our little community bore their bur- dens bravely, and it seems now, looking back to that time, that those burdens were heavy ones. Yet they never complained at the hardships. never murmured at the deprivations, which, in secret, they must have felt. For the women, who came to the town in the later sixties and early seventies, were not used to the rough ways of pioneering. They had left comforts "back yonder," left homes of culture in many cases, left shel- tered circles and many of the softening influences of civilization which are dear to women-dearer than to men, perhaps-and had come out to the desolate, wind-swept prairie town where they were too frequently poorly housed, roughly fed, and more lonesome than anyone will ever know, unless some day he reads between the lines of the hopeful letters that these brave women sent back East-letters wherein they tried so hard to put the best foot forward, to conceal the disagreeable truth.


In other towns, where the rougher element of society came in first. where the cowboy, and the gambler and professional killer broke the sod for graves, the women folks, who came with these creatures suffered very little with mental anguish. But the pioneer women of our town saw their darkest days in the old times. Life was harsh, full of


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drudgery too often. and disheartening. They came here little more than brides-did the women who used to gather around my mother's quilting frames in those first few years. The faces that were lit up by the candles that sat on the corners of the frame, or upon the quilt, were young faces in those days, only a few of them were touched with the never melting snow, only a few of them were scarred by wrinkles then. The picture comes up so vividly to me as photographed upon a child's brain. Mrs. J. C. Lambdin, perhaps a little older than the average, was always an early comer : then came Mrs. Boswell-Aunty Boswell, the children always called her, and she brought flowers with her. Hers was one of the first canaries brought to the little town. She was young and always had a smile for every one, the same smile she wore through all the troubles that came upon her patient, kind courageous life. Then came Mrs. Louisa V. Shelden down from Chelsea-she often came with her sister. Mrs. Lambdin, and took her place quietly among the others. Mrs. Bron- son, plucky, cheerful, full of bright things to make the somber life seem easier, was always there, and Mrs. Edwin Cowles and her sister, Miss Ella McDuffee, came in from their farm below town. Miss McDuffee was one of the first musicians in the little town. She played the first church organ at the old Methodist church, when A. L. Redden was superintend- ent of the Sunday school, and Frank Hamlin led the singing. The little party around the quilting frames was never complete without Mrs. Dr. J. P. Gordon and good soft voiced Aunt Rachel. The children all loved Aunt Rachel, and she will never know what an event in many a boy's or girl's life. was the coming of Aunt Rachel to a house to "spend the day." Mrs. W. P. Flenner and her little girl came in from their farm down by Conner's. Sometimes she rode in with Mrs. Conner-Warren's mother- who was the youngest of all the party, and perhaps the one most missed when she stayed at home. Mrs. Dr. Mckenzie was one of the quiet ones who always helped pick up the dinner things when the quilting was over. Mrs. W. W. Pattison made the jokes for the crowd, and passed upon the moral and financial side of every question that came up. There was no appeal from her decision. Mrs. George A. Hawley came too, sometimes, but not as often as she was asked, for she had cares that kept her close at home, and she was from the further east, Boston, and was shy among the stranger people of the West; she did not realize that they, too, were strangers to one another. One of the quiet, helpful ones who never left the house in the evening until the last dish was wiped and put away ; who was always on hand when sickness came; who was gentle- hard- working, patient, and yet found time to make a bright home for her chil- dren, a home with books, music and flowers-always flowers the year around-was Mrs. Frank Adams.




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