USA > Kansas > Sedgwick County > History of Wichita and Sedgwick County, Kansas, past and present, including an account of the cities, towns and villages of the county, Vol. I > Part 12
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Black shale.
590
5
Blue clay.
600
10
Soapstone and clay or shale.
610
10
Light gray limestone.
615
5 Dark soapstone.
630
15 Dark shale.
637
7
Gray limestone.
642
5 Black flint (chert).
feet,
Thickness,
feet,
LOG OF THE WELL.
CHAPTER XIII.
WICHITA'S INDUSTRIAL HISTORY-IN THE BEGINNING.
Wichita's industrial history may be said, with subsequent explanations, to have begun as long ago as forty years. That many years ago, on what later became a portion of Wichita, as the Alamo addition, then an ideal camping place, a trading post, established by J. R. Mead, stood. This is believed to have been the first stationary place of business set up on what was to become Wichita. The hand-to-hand trading between men, white and Indian, and Indian and Indian, runs back before the records of civilization, but J. R. Mead, who still retains a wonderful power of recollection, recalls events in the Arkansas valley three score and ten years old. In the following, he gives the beginning of industrial life at the confluence of the Little and Big Arkansas rivers.
By J. R. MEAD.
You ask me to write something of the first industrial and mercantile enterprises of this locality. I have had some experi- ence with the present race and generation, also with a different people, who occupied the country before its present inhabitants. Of the former times, I will write. There are others to write of the country since its occupancy by its present inhabitants.
The Little Arkansas for five or six miles above its mouth always had been a favorite location on account of its abundant timber and pure water. It was surrounded by a country full of game, so here was a natural gathering place for Indians, traders and hunters.
The present inhabitants of the valley fondly imagine that before their arrival there was nothing here but earth, sky and river. In this they are in error. It is fair to assume that while Joseph was laying up grain in Egypt against years of famine,
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
there were people here laying up stores of provisions for winter use and for traffic with their neighbors.
It was the good fortune of the writer to have spent some years in this valley before the coming of its present people, on one occasion occupying what is now Sedgwick county for three weeks with no other inhabitants but two men, but there were camps, villages and townsites where people lived when it suited their convenience-unnumbered leagues of country was theirs to occupy when and where they pleased-and there were more cat- tle in the country then than now, and had been for some thou- sands of years.
Of a few things of which the writer learned or saw a part, I will briefly narrate.
IN 1835.
The first commercial enterprise that I have knowledge of was in 1835, when Jesse Chisholm guided a party from Arkansas to the mouth of the Little river, equipped with a small trading outfit, but in search of a gold mine or buried gold-the same, per- haps which parties dug in search of for two years recently in Charley Payne's park on the West Side. These enterprising Arkansas gentlemen spent some time here, but failed to find what they sought.
SOME PIONEER TRADERS.
Of what occurred here for some years after that, I have no knowledge, but in 1858 "Moxley and Mosely" were doing a mer- cantile business in a log house on the Little river at the Osage crossing, and did a thriving business for a while, until Moxley was drowned while fording the river at Lawrence. Moseley, after an eventful life, was killed by Indians at his hunting ranch on the Medicine river. Mosely was a jolly, ideal frontiersman, as fine a looking man as I ever saw. I named a street of our city for him. About the same time Jake Carey and Bob De Racken had a trading ranch where the Jewett farm (old Park City) was since located, and expected to make a fortune catching buffalo calves for market. Then, in 1860, came William Ross with his family, who built a cabin on the Big river. He was killed that fall, and his family returned East.
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WICHITA'S INDUSTRIAL HISTORY
THE WICHITAS' ARRIVAL.
Then, in 1863, came the Wichitas, who located near the mouth of the Little river, and with whom the writer and others engaged in mercantile traffic, as also with the Osages, who made this val- ley their hunting ground. Their camps or villages were four or five miles up the Little river. At about the same time came bands of Shawnees, Delawares, Kickapoos and others, who set- tled on neighboring streams, and added to the population and business of the country.
We frequently took a wagon load of goods to one of these camps and made a camp of our own from which to trade, or moved into an Indian lodge, made ourselves at home, set up our stock of goods and stayed until we were traded out, when we would load up our robes and furs, call for our horses, which the Indians herded for us somewhere in the vicinity, and pull out for home, which, in the writer's case, was at his headquarters ranch at Towanda, where there was an Indian agency, postoffice, general store, etc.
ARTICLES OF MERCHANDISE.
Our staple articles of trade were flour, coffee, sugar, tobacco, Mackinac blankets, two and three point, bolts of imported save list strouding and broadcloth, costing from $2.50 to $5 a yard wholesale, calico, Chinese vermilion, knives, small axes, hair pipe, a bead two to six inches long and pearly white, made from the lip of a conch shell on the Atlantic coast, Iroquois and aba- lone shells from the Pacific ocean, beads from Germany, and many minor articles of use, adornment or fancy.
CREDIT TO THE REDMEN.
I frequently went on these trips alone, sometimes leaving the remainder of my goods with an Indian to trade while I was away. To some of them we sold goods on credit, and had no occasion to regret it. Our traffic was mostly in buffalo robes and furs, which were as good as gold. Our usual market was Leavenworth, where we sold our robes and also bought or received our goods from the East, they being shipped up the Missouri river by boat. Sometimes the Indians had money from the sale of half-wild
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
cattle whose owners had fled the country, which they gathered down about their old homes in the territory and sold to parties that they met along the border, who took the chances of smug- gling them to a market, as at that time they were contraband of war. Not all Indians knew the value of money. During the Civil War the Cheyennes captured a paymaster's train on the Platte, and in the plunder they found a chest of greenbacks, something new to them. As they were pretty, they took them along for the children to play with at home, and for cigarette papers. Before they were used up, Colonel Bent, a famous trader, happened in their camp, and gathered in the remainder for about the price of waste paper. This was the story told to "Dutch Bill" (Griffenstein), who unfortunately arrived in their camp too late to get his share. Our people along the Little river knew the value of a dollar in paper or gold.
CREDIT UNLIMITED.
Occasionally we took a trip to Philadelphia or New York to purchase goods in quantity. A frontier trader who had proven himself capable and reliable could command almost unlimited money or credit in any of the great cities. I once drove one wagon loaded with furs and robes from this vicinity to Leaven- worth, which sold for a sum equal to thirteen carloads of wheat, estimating the average price and capacity of cars for the past ten years. I have on numbers of occasions sold as much as $3,000 worth of goods in one day, before the present race of people came to this country.
There were others in trade-"Stine and Dunlap," "Lewellen and Davis," Spooner, now of Anadarko.
On one occasion, Jesse Chisholm, a half-blood Indian and Scotchman, going south to Washita, bought of me $3,000 worth of goods, saying he would pay me on his return, whenever that might be. The next spring he returned, camped by my place with his train. I took supper with him, and he said, "I am owing you. I have no money, but have buffalo robes, wolf skins, beaver, buckskins, and you can take your pay from any of them." I chose coyote skins, which were legal tender for a dol- lar, and he counted out three thousand. We also sent wagon trains of goods to the camps of wild Indians, 200 miles southwest.
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WICHITA'S INDUSTRIAL HISTORY
WALNUT GROVE.
On another occasion he returned from the South, which included some Indian families and Mexicans whom he had bought from the Comanches when children, and trained to be expert teamsters, herders and campmen. He camped at the "Walnut Grove," a beautiful and favorite camping place between the rivers. Here he was met by two traders, Charley Rath and Louie Booth, who bought all of his furs before I arrived. How- ever, there was a big pile of buffalo robes under a walnut tree, which Chisholm asked me to buy. I looked them over and made an offer of $1,600 for the lot, which he accepted. None of us then knew the market value of such robes. On getting them to market, I found they were worth double cost.
Chisholm built some cabins, a trading house and a strong corral at "Walnut Grove," about 100 yards in front of the house later built by Sand Hill Davis, a farm now owned by Judge Wall, I believe. Close to Alamo Addition, between the rivers, and up the river on the east side a quarter of a mile, at a fine crossing, "Don Carlos," a young man with an Indian wife, built a cabin and sold goods in a small way. On one occa- sion Chisholm brought up 400 head of cattle from his home place on the Canadian river. I bought them, paying $16 a head, and held them at the Walnut Grove, using the corral and buildings he had turned over to me.
THE LAW OF THE PLAINS.
The cattle ranged between the rivers that summer among the Indians, with one man to look after them. Here I might remark with enlightenment to many that during these years in which I personally was in business in the valley, there was no law but the law of the plains, "Do as you would be done by," no courts. no officers; yet life and property were as safe as they are today. A man could ride all over the country alone with thousands of dollars of money in his pocket, among Indians, whites, classed as outlaws, half-breeds, anybody, camping alone at night with a load of valuable goods, as I have done many a time, without the slightest apprehension of danger. During these years no intox- icating liquors were sold or used. But one crime was committed to my knowledge in that time, and that by a renegade white man. It was not until after the country was surveyed, in 1867, and
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
opened to settlement, that there came the saturnalia of crime, debauchery, craft and graft.
In the spring of 1865 came John Stevens with men, teams and goods, and, with Chisholm's assistance, employed Indians (mostly Caddoes) to gather and drive up cattle from the ter- ritory, paying for them in goods. In the course of a summer they had collected a herd of over 3,000 head, which they held on the West Side, the Indians herding them over several miles of country between the rivers and the Cowskin. Their camp was about where the watch factory was built on the West Side. These cattle were first driven east, where Stevens was drowned, crossing a river, and then driven to New Mexico on a government contract, as originally intended.
AT COWSKIN GROVE.
About this time I had a stock of goods at an Indian village at Cowskin Grove, in charge of Davis Ballou, a Cherokee Indian. During June and July he collected for me 1,500 buffalo hides, but the Big Arkansas was such a great river that summer we could not cross, except by swimming on horseback, which we often did. Soon the moths commenced eating the hides. We moved them, beat them, put them on platforms with a big smoke under- neath, yet still the moths ate them. Finally, towards the last of August, we got the running gear of a wagon across by men riding the horses and standing on the axles. We made a rack and hauled the hides to the bank of the river. Still it was im- passable, and they lay on the banks for two weeks, waiting for the river to fall, which it failed to do. At last a party of thirty- five Kaw Indians came along, to whom I told my woes. They kindly offered to swim them over, so we built rafts of dry cotton- wood logs, on which they would pile a lot of hides. Then one or two would swim ahead with a rope to a possible standing place and pull while others swam and pushed, sometimes landing a quarter of a mile below. They got them across finally, losing but a few hides. The great impassable river cost me in this instance $1,500, for on taking the hides to the market they were docked one dollar each for being moth-eaten.
These are a few of the many facts and incidents I might write of trade and traffic here before the white man came. I look back to those days of absolute freedom as among the happiest of my life.
CHAPTER XIV. THE LITTLE ARKANSAS.
By
J. R. MEAD.
The central third of Kansas was bountifully provided by nature with rivers and streams of pure running water, bordered by lines of stately trees. No more beautiful or diversified pas- toral landscape could be found on the North American continent.
There was no monotony. At short intervals the traveler would find a convenient camping place in the shelter of tall trees, beside a running stream or spring coming out of a cliff. He could usually supply his larder with fish, turkey, venison or buf- falo within a few minutes' walk of camp, while his horses were grazing in the sweet grasses and many-colored flowers which covered valley, hill and prairie alike. As he proceeded on his way, he might observe the many forms of animal life grazing on the abundant herbage or basking in the warm sunshine. Occa- sionally would be seen the stately elk, with his head-dress of immense horns, from two or three old bachelors to bands of several hundred. To vary the landscape were occasional hills of the red Dakota sandstone, or strata of white magnesian lime- stone cropping out of the river bluffs, broken blocks covering the slopes, quarried ready for use. In another locality would be seen cedar hills crowned with heavy formations of gypsum, which sometimes formed cliffs along the water courses, while at con- ยท venient distances were salt streams, springs or marshes to supply the needs of the animal life, suggesting the sea of rock salt which underlies much of this portion of the state. What more could nature or art do to improve upon this natural park?
I write of the country as I saw and explored it in 1859 and later years as it then was and had been for untold ages in the past. All of these streams were tributaries of our two great rivers, the Kansas and the Arkansas-appropriate names for the
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
rivers of Kansas. All of these rivers and nearly all of the streams flowed eastward or southeastward towards the morn- ing sun.
These streams had some interesting history before civilized man came upon the scene, and many of them much interesting history since. There should be a local historical society in each county to gather and preserve the tragedies, comedies and ro- mance of the early days.
When the writer roamed over the hills and valleys of the Solomon, Saline and Smoky Hill, from 1859 to 1862, he imagined that the most beautiful country on earth. Then his red brethren warned him of impending wrath soon to come, and thinking of his loved companion and baby boy, he wisely decided to seek a new field of activity toward the sunny South. Here he discov- ered that the "raging Walnut," as it was called, and the Little Arkansas were just as beautiful and interesting as the country to the north, and in later years has found that all of Kansas is very good. The Flint Hills, which were once considered utterly worthless, are now the choice natural grazing grounds of the state. .
The Little Arkansas was a gem; a ribbon of stately trees winding down to the parent river through a broad, level valley of green, as I first saw it, dotted over with the black bodies of fat, sleek buffalo and an occasional group of antelope or straggling elk, and not a living human soul in all the country now known as Sedgwick county. Such was the Little Arkansas as the writer first saw it from the highlands to the east, overlooking the valley, on a sunny afternoon in June, 1863.
From whom or when the Little Arkansas obtained its name, or why, of all the many tributaries of the big river, it should have been given its diminutive, I have not been able to learn. The earliest explorer of whom I have knowledge called it by that name. The river was the western hunting ground of the Osage Indians when the first explorers visited them on the Osage river. At that time they had a name which signified it was the young or offspring of the big river. The Arkansas was "Ne Shutsa" (red water) ; the Little Arkansas river, "Ne Shutsa Shinka" (the young or little red water), associating the two rivers as parent and child. Or perhaps some early explorers or trappers, coming down from the mountains, following the almost treeless Arkansas (all trails on Kansas rivers were on the north side), came to the
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THE LITTLE ARKANSAS
beginning of the continuous body of timber on the big river, ten miles above the junction, and a short distance to the east saw another heavily timbered river, with a V-shaped valley between, and considered the two equally entitled to the name.
The Santa Fe trail crossed the head of the Little Arkansas near its source, where it was a small stream, and there it was known by the same name. The writer's description is intended for the lower portion of the river, in Sedgwick county. The Little Arkansas was the dividing line between the plains proper, the range of the wild Indians, and the country to the east, the home of the reservation Indians, and was near the eastern limit of the main range of the buffalo at the time of which I write. It was the dividing line between the limestone formations, with their black, heavy, waxy soil, and the sandy, loamy soil to the west. It was the western limit of the oak in this part of the state, some fine oak timber growing in the wooded bends near its mouth, and was the last heavily timbered stream in Kansas as the traveler proceeded directly west, and south of the big river.
In Sedgwick county it lies under the sixth principal meridian, which divides the State of Kansas. Commencing at this meridian, the ranges are Nos. 1 to 25 to the eastern boundary, and Nos. 1 to 43 to the western boundary. It is about the eastern limit of the cretaceous formation.
Its pure waters were fed by springs issuing from the sheet of sand and gravel underlying the valley, and abounded in fish and molusks. Of the latter, Unio purpuratus grew to maximum size and beauty, while Unio arkensensis was first found here and named from the stream. Beavers made their home in its banks as late as 1878.
About six miles above the junction was the western terminus of the great Osage trail from the Neosho and Verdegris to the Little Arkansas, evidently long in use, from the deep gullies washed in the trails on the slopes of the hills. Hunters and traders followed the trail and came to the little river at the same gravel ford.
The country beyond to the south and southwest was almost unknown, and none ventured very far in that direction, both hunters and Osages being in fear of the wild Indians, referred to by the Osages as "Paducas," who, they said, were as plenty as the grass, somewhere to the west. No one on the Southwestern
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
frontier knew of such a river as Medicine Lodge or Salt Fork, or of there being timber in that direction.
Of the history of the Little Arkansas prior to 1860, but little is known. In Du Pratz's map of Louisiana, published in 1757, in which the course of the Arkansas is properly laid down, at the junction of the two rivers is marked "A Gold Mine." In 1836 Jesse Chisholm guided a party from Arkansas, in search of this mine or of buried treasure, to the mouth of the Little Arkansas. There is a tradition that long ago a party from New Mexico, descending the river in boats, were surrounded by Indians in the night at this point, and after a siege of several days were all killed but one, who escaped, after he had buried their gold and silver. Recently parties dug for two years in search of this treasure. Whether found or not, this valley has proven to be a gold mine to the industrious agriculturist.
This was the favorite hunting ground of the Little Osages, who usually came out in June and again in September, under their chief, Mint-sho-shin-ka (Little Bear), and No-po-wal-la, second chief. They camped along the Little Arkansas in the tim- ber and made their lodges of rows of green poles set in the ground about eight feet apart, bent over and tied together, form- ing an arch about six feet high; other poles would be lashed to the sides with willow withes, and all covered with dry buffalo skins, forming very comfortable houses, ten, twenty or more feet in length.
Buffaloes were here in endless numbers, except in the winter months, when they, along with the other countless herds from the North, moved off southwest to their vast winter home, west- ern Oklahoma and Texas, the Pecos river and the Gulf, which they had abandoned in the summer for the cooler uplands of the North, leaving the grass to grow undisturbed for use on their return. Some wintered in the broken hills of Medicine Lodge and along the Salt Fork, as they did in the hills of the Solomon and the Saline. The last buffalo seen on the Gulf were two bulls killed on a peninsula below Corpus Christi, in the winter of 1868.
The Osage (Wa Sashes), Wichita and plains Indians used the bow and arrow in killing buffalo. I have witnessed a run which left the prairie strewn with dead cows for ten miles, and it was pitiful to see the little red calves gather on the slight elevations, looking for their mothers to come back to them.
Of the first attempts to settle on the little river, I have learned
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THE LITTLE ARKANSAS
that in 1857 a party of men came from Coffey county, Kansas, for the purpose of hunting and trading. Of these, Moxley and Ed. Moseley built a trading house at the Osage crossing and engaged in trading with the Osages. C. C. Arnold, Bob Juracken and others went up the big river a few miles and built a cabin, and, it is said, broke up some ground and undertook to make a fortune catching buffalo calves for the Eastern market. Moxley was drowned not long afterward, fording the river at Lawrence. Moseley returned to Humboldt, and their trading house was burned. . Arnold and his associates left for Butler county, and soon no trace of their occupation remained. These parties were hunters and traders and could hardly be classed as settlers. But in 1860 came John Ross, with his wife and two children and a hired man, equipped with tools and utensils for farming and housekeeping. He built a comfortable cabin, stables, etc., about three miles beyond the Osage crossing, on a high bank of the big river, broke up some ground and planted a crop. All went well with him until, in the fall, he, with his man and team, went for a load of meat a few miles across the river in the direction of Cowskin Grove. They did not return. A party of horsemen from the Walnut came out, and after a long search found Ross' body, nothing more. How he came to his death is not known-probably killed by Indians. His man and horses were never found. The body was buried on the bank of the river and a mound of stones placed over it. His fate was that of many of the pioneers, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. His family returned East, and the two Arkansas rivers reverted to their original solitude.
When, in June, 1863, the writer, with two men, visited this valley on a three weeks' hunting and exploring trip, and camped in the Ross cabin the first night, there was not another human being in what is now Sedgwick county, nor another vestige of human habitation, as we learned by driving all over it. But of animal life there was plenty. Close by the Ross cabin the writer killed sixteen buffaloes and a big horned elk within an hour. Yet some time in the dim ages of the past a people had lived here, for the floodtide of the Arkansas, in cutting into the natural strata of the valley, disclosed a pottery vessel of good workman- ship, five feet below the surface, made, perhaps, by the Lansing man's wife. The valley here was above high water.
In the fall of 1863 came the affiliated bands comprising the Wichita Indians. They made their village on the little river,
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HISTORY OF SEDGWICK COUNTY
near its junction, in the timber, some 1,500 of them. They flour- ished on buffalo meat and the fine gardens of corn, beans, squash and melons they raised the next summer. They built cone-shaped houses of poles, thatched with grass, ten to twenty-five feet in diameter, fifteen to twenty feet high, very comfortable and dura- ble. They were a kind, gentle, honest people. At the same time there came from the South camps of Kickapoos, Shawnees, Dela- wares and others, who settled on the Walnut and White Water. These Indians were the friends of all the wild Indians of the plains, and so long as they remained the Southwestern frontier was safe from hostile attack. With these Indians as guides, we traveled all the plains in safety, and visited the wild tribes and thoroughly explored the country of the Cimarron, Canadian and Washita, the winter home of the wild tribes. These rivers some years later were stated by military men to be an unknown coun- try, when the fact was that some of us knew that country well as early as 1864, and visited the wild tribes in their winter camps with teams and wagons for the purpose of trade, and came and went at all times, winter or summer, without difficulty, loss or hardship.
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