USA > Kansas > Wyandotte County > History of Wyandotte County, Kansas, and its people, Vol. I > Part 15
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lot. These lots were 60 feet front with a depth of 142 feet. The sale brought $6,820, and was considered a big thing. During 1899, sixty years after the town was started, Kansas City's realty transfers totaled $18,000,000.
On May 3, 1847, the town of Kansas held its first election and Fry P. MeGee was chosen "collector."
At a town meeting held May 8, this same year, is the first mention of a newspaper. The Western Expositor was voted twenty dollars for advertising.
On July 19, 1847, the shareholders in the townsite drew lots for the lands left unsold and the new town was fairly under way.
AN UNPROMISING TOWN.
The new town was unpromising enough at first sight. It was al- most entirely confined to the levee-off the levee there was no business at all until 1851. From the farms of Westport and the region about it, the landing was reached by way of a lane that utilized the eut made by a small stream to get through the bluffs at about where Grand avenue now is. This lane was known then as Market street. The first step in public improvements by the new town was the cutting of a wagon road through the bluff at Main street. Then, as the levee became rather crowded in a year or so, the smaller stores began to climb over into the present north side district.
It was a decidly rugged site for a town; Kansas City is as level as a floor to-day, by comparison. There were practically no flat plaees tlen. The whole town at the outset was made up of steep, muddy, rocky hills, covered with towering timber, and slashed with deep ravines. plowed out by rushing streams. One of these gorge-like ravines began about where Twelfth and Broadway now is and extended in a north- westerly direction, cutting deep through clay and roek to the river, at a point just west of the present foot of Broadway.
Another similar ravine was the course of a stream that started at Twelfth and Walnut, flowed northwesterly to about Ninth and Delaware, thence northeasterly across the public square to Fourth and Grand, where it united with a spring branch from the south and ran to the river. This stream has been utilized by the builders of the city. It is now the main sewer. At the publie square it is one hundred and eighty feet beneath the surface. This same gully was responsible for Main street's erookedness. It followed the old valley to avoid, as far as possible, cuts and hills.
Some idea of the landscape in Kansas town may be gathered from an excerpt from the Reverend Father Bernard Donnelly's reminiseenees. Ile was Kansas City's first priest. In 1839 he was established in a « little log church and parsonage in a elearing at what has beeome
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Eleventh and Penn. Ile wrote: "I strolled through the tall forest of the ten acres. The site was romantic, retired and solitary. The man- ners and habits of the woodpeckers, parognets, jaybirds, black and rattle- snakes, eoons and squirrels were a sonree of amusing study to me."
WHEN CHOLERA STRUCK THE PLACE.
In 1849 the town of Kansas met with its first serious setback. It was a terrible one. The cholera came. The first day it is said to have taken off thirty of the three hundred' population. A Mormon colony on "O. K." creek was almost completely wiped out. In those days it was McGee creek, by the way, getting the name of O. K. from the "O. K. House" saloon that was established about this time just where the Westport road, now Grand avenue, crosses the creek. The cholera drove everybody who could get away out of the town. Scarcely enough people were left to bury the dead. Nearly thirty per cent of the people of the town died. But after the dread scourge had passed on the people began to come in great numbers. By March, 1853, less than three years after the plague, the trees about the town were one morning found placarded with notices to the effect that John M. Richardson had granted a charter to the "City of Kansas," and that an election for mayor and members of the council would be held on the first Monday in April.
Of course the knockers knocked. "Old inhabitants," we are told, could see no reason why their property should be saddled with the ex- pense of a city government. They submitted that the nature of its environments was such that the town of Kansas could never in the world become a real city. They were for continuing the economical town government as all that was either necessary or reasonable.
THE FIRST MAYORALTY ELECTION.
But notwithstanding the knocks the progressive citizens went ahead and held an election. Sixty-five votes were cast. William Gregory, the Whig candidate for mayor got thirty-six votes, against his Demo- cratie opponent's, D. Benoist Troost, twenty-seven. Gregory was de- «lared elected, but after he had been duly inaugurated it was found he had not lived in town long enough to be eligible and so the president of the council, Dr. Johnston Lykins, who had been connected with the Shawnee Baptist mission, was called on to take his place and served out the term.
The first couneil was Democratic. Its members were Johnston Lykins, T. H. West, W. G. Barkley, Thompson MeDaniels and M. J. Payne.
To the new city treasurer, a Mr. Chontean, who was appointed by Mayor Lykins, Samuel Geir, who had been treasurer of the "Town of
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Kansas. " turned over a full accounting of the town's affairs and its cash, $7.22! Kansas City's total revenue for the first year was estimated at $5,000; and during the year just closing the city has been cramped with $790,000.
BENTON'S FAMOUS PROPHECY.
One of the very first things the new council did was to invite Thomas Il. Benton to visit the "City of Kansas." And "Old Bullion" ac- cepted and soon after came up the river on a packet, was met at Ran- dolph with much ceremony by Mayor Lykins and Couneilmen M. J. Payne and W. G. Barkley. It was during this visit that Benton made his prophecy as to Kansas City's future which has been pointed to with pride by every Kansas City boomer. It follows:
"There, gentlemen, where that rocky bluff meets and turns aside the sweep- ing the current of this mighty river there, where the Missouri, after running its southward course for nearly two thousand nules, turns eastward to the Mississippi, a large commercial and manufacturing community will congregate, and less than a generation will see a great city on those hills."
Colonel M. J. Payne was elected mayor in 1855 and re-elected for the years 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859 and 1862. There is no telling how many more times he might have been mayor, had he kept on running.
A TRAVELING POST OFFICE.
Business in the new city was good from the first. Even while it was only "Westport Landing" the town had been a lively little place, rather like one of the far western mining camps of later times. There was business from the start. The pioneer white man was a trader. The first "general store" in the modern sense was started about 1846 by A. B. Canville. This was on the levee, of course. Canville ran it about a year and then sold out to W. J. Jarboe.
The post office was first established in 1845-and never to this day has there been a defalcation or a robbery in connection with it. W. M. Chiek was the first postmaster. The mail used to arrive and depart weekly, via Westport. Up to 1860 the office was on the levee. Francis Foster was the "war postmaster." He was appointed by President Lincoln. The first thing he did was to remove the office to a building specially fitted for it on Main street, just south of Third. This office had boxes and other regular postal fixtures-the first the city had had. In 1869 the post office was removed to Main, near Missouri avenue. In 1872 John S. Harris, appointed postmaster by President Grant, re- moved the office to the northwestern corner of Seventh and Main.
It was here that Colonel T. S. Case found the office when he was ap- Vol. I-8
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pointed postmaster in 1873. Ile broke all official records, for he, after his first appointment by President Grant, was re-appointed by Presidents Haves and Garfield and served for twelve years, until Presi- dent Cleveland was elected and superseded him with George M. Shelley.
Postmaster Case removed the office, during his third term, to the northwest corner of Sixth and Walnut, and then in 1884 to Ninth and Walnut, in what was then the "new" Federal building. Now it oecu- pies three floors of the great Federal building on Grand avenue from Eighth to Ninth street, and back to McGee street.
STEAMBOAT AND TRAIL TRADE.
The first general store. started by Mr. Canville in 1846, did not long hold a monopoly. Other stores soon followed. The Mexican trade over the Santa Fe trail was growing fast, and already amounted to abont $5,000,000 a year in the early forties. The wagon trains naturally started from here. as the farthest west reached by the Missouri river boats. While at first Independence and Westport were the recognized towns and Kansas City was a mere landing, the superior advantages of the landing steadily asserted themselves.
In 1850 the record shows that 600 wagons started from Kansas City. Ten years later, in 1860. the trade had become enormous, and amounted to 16,439,134 pounds of merchandise. To handle this there were re- quired 7,084 men, 6,147 mules, 27,920 yoke of oxen and 3,033 wagons.
The levee was a lively place, five or six big river steamers lying there loading or unloading every day. During the nine months' navi- gation of 1859 there landed at the Kansas City 1,500 steamboats.
The railroads made short work of this river trade, though they made ample return for it. The first railroad to reach Kansas City from the east was the line that is now the Missouri Pacific. Its first train came in September 21. 1865. Other roads followed fast.
And in 1873 the annual steamboat arrivals had fallen off from 1,500 to 130. Since then there have been attempts to restore the boat service. In 1890 there was a general popular uprising against railroad rates. A steamboat line, the Kansas City and Missouri River Navigation Com- pany, was established, and three first-class packets ordered. The first of these, the "A. L. Mason, " arrived at the Kansas City levee in the fall of 1890. This craft worked a revolution. As The Times of those days put it : "Every turn of her wheel cut freight rates in two." The rates came down and stayed down, and the boats were sent to other more promising territory, where the water was deeper and the railroad competition less vigorous.
Now there is another great movement for the restoration of river traffic to which a million dollars has been subscribed; boats are being built and the river is being improved.
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FIRST PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS.
Things were booming in Kansas City in the later fifties. A tidy part of the millions involved in the Santa Fe trade stuck in town. In 1855 the little city began to feel ashamed of its unkempt appearanee, and besides the mud streets-hub-deep a good part of the time-were hin- dranees to trade. The council decided on a grand spurt of public im- provement. That first year Market street-now Grand avenue-was graded. And Contractor Michael Smith got $1,200 for the job.
Then the knockers took a hand and it was nearly two years before they were quieted. But in 1857 the wheels of progress began to move again. The city spent $26,229 in street improvements, as follows: On the levee, $10,387; Broadway, $4.771; Wyandotte street, $5,539; Dela ware street, $715; Commercial street, $2,918; Main street, $893; Third street, $285: Second street, $721. Besides all this the eity invested $4,637 more in a new city hall and court house building on the public square.
In this same year (1857) the old town grave yard, in front of the present Jackson county court house, and of late years known as "Shel- ley park." was seen to be altogether too small and too near the center of population. Westport had been making a similar discovery. A committee of representative men of both places met and discussed the problem. A company had just finished grading and macadamizing the Westport turnpike between Westport and Kansas City, along what is now Grand avenue. It was decided to establish a cemetery on this pike, midway between the two eities. for the use of both. This was done, and from the idea that both cities were to use it the new burying ground was called the "Union cemetery." This cemetery was in those days thought to be far beyond the reach of either city-and it is now only about ten minutes from Kansas City's busiest center, considerably further inside than it used to be outside the city limits.
THE CIVIL WAR BROUGHT RUIN.
When the war began, according to the census, Kansas City had a population of 4,418. It had three banks and an insurance company, all sorts of stores and warehouses, one daily and three weekly news- papers (one German)-all was bright and promising. But the war paralyzed everything. The city was almost ruined. The bitterest sectional feeling divided the people. At the spring eleetion the issue was "north or south ?" The northern element won by 109 votes, elect- ing Colonel Van Ilorn mayor. But from the narrow margin it can be appreciated that Kansas City was not then the pleasantest place in the world to live in. Business stopped. The Sante Fe trade was elosed All the newspapers in town went broke and shut down. All school children were dismissed on holiday-no money for teachers.
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A military post, Fort Union, was established at the southwest corner of Tenth and Central streets and about all the northern sympathizers in the city used to assemble there and drill. One or two companies of them went out to battle-at Lexington and other nearby points.
The population dropped about 25 per cent, to 3,000 or so. City warrants tumbled to 50 cents on the dollar; and at that figure there were almost no buyers. The city treasurer published a statement showing that the municipal assets were $16,120.20 and its liabilities, $13,090.84; balanee in favor of assets, $3,029.26; cash actually on hand, $87.73.
THE RETURN TO PEACE.
Things reached the lowest ebb in the winter of 1862. After that they began to pick up. In 1863 the government sent troops to pro- tect the Santa Fe traders and that business began to thrive once more; in six months it amounted to $1,000,000. The chamber of commerce was organized. Real estate became salable once more. A vacant lot on Sixth near Main brought $500; another on Walnut near Fifth sold for $305.
But at the close of the war the city was in deplorable shape, after four years or more of absolute neglect. The streets were perfect quag- mires. hub-deep with mud even weeks after a rain, and on all the hills there were washouts and gullies that made traffic almost impossible. Peace came none too soon. But in the spring of 1865 the city negoti- ated a loan of $60,000 for public improvements; the money was spent in opening and grading Third. Fourth, Fifth and Ottawa (Twelfth) streets, and leveling the other thoroughfares, and once more things be- gan to hnm.
In the spring of 1865 the city's first local bank was established by the Kansas City Savings Association, with a capital of $10,000. There had been two banking honses before; founded since 1849, but both were mere branches of two St. Louis institutions-the Mechanics' and Union banks. Kansas City's new bank flourished finely from the start. In five years it doubled its capital and shortly after raised it again to $50,000. In 1881 it had become too big for its savings-bank charter. which limited it to a capital of $100.000, and it took up a state charter and later still became a national concern. Kansas City's banking in- stitutions to-day have a combined eapital of more than $20,000,000.
IIOTELS ON THE LEVEE.
Kansas City's first hotel was established in 1846 by Thompson Me- Daniel. It was a two-story frame at Main and the levee. This was followed by a second house which Dr. Troost opened in 1849 on the levee, between Wyandotte and Delaware. This last was known at first
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as the Western hotel. Later on it became the American House, and still later the Gillis. In the season of 1856-7 this house registered 27,000 arrivals.
In 1853 Mine Host MeDaniel opened a new hotel, known as the Union house, at Missouri avenue and Main -- "away out of town," on the site the Nelson building now occupies. This hotel was considered A No. 1, but was closed by the war and never recovered ..
Since the war, Kansas City has held its head up proudly in the mat- ter of hotel accommodations. It has always been far and away super- ior to other eities of its elass.
THE HANNIBAL BRIDGE HELPED.
In those days Leavenworth was a lusty rival of Kansas City and Wyandotte and it was a serious question which would eventually be the great center. The matter was settled in 1866 and 1867. The Hannibal and St. Joseph bridge was projected. The railroad people had little choice between Leavenworth and Kansas City. It became largely a question of inducements, which town would make the best bid. Of course the Kansas City knoekers got up and knocked. They were op- posed to giving any bonus whatever for anything. If the railroad people really intended to build a bridge, they would build it, bonus or no bonus, and if they didn't-why, Kansas City had worried along very well all these years without any bridge, and it could probably do so in years to come-and all that sort of thing. But, fortunately, the knoek- ers knocked in vain. A few live men pulled together and brought the new bridge to their town, and on August 21, 1867, the cornerstone of the new structure was laid. On the eve of the Fourth of July, two years later, the bridge was opened, amid great rejoicing.
After the bridge matter was decided, new railroads came to Kansas City from all directions, until the present great aggregation of railroad systems was built up and Kansas City's future was assured.
BENTON'S PROPHECY VERIFIED.
Surely the events of a little more than seventy years have vindicated the judgment of Senator Benton, in the building of the great city at the state line on the Missouri side. Of the rest of the history of Kansas City, Missouri, it is scarcely necessary to touch here, save to observe that that city owes much of its greatness to the loyal support of the people of Kansas, and to the many strong men of that state who have given the best of their lives to help make it the great metropolis it now is. The knockers of Kansas City, Missouri, were not Kansans. It was the progressive men of the city that years ago sought to have the state line twisted so their city would be in Kansas-and failed of course. But that is another story, to be told by Hon. George W. Martin in his article in this work in the boundary line fights.
CHAPTER XII.
IN THE OLD STEAMBOAT DAYS.
FIRST GLIMPSE OF KANSAS-WIIEN THE YANKEE FREE STATE MEN CAME-DELIGIITS OF PIONEER TRAVEL BY STEAMBOAT-WHEN GOVERNOR REEDER CAME AND WENT-FIRST STEAMBOATS TO NAVIGATE THE KANSAS RIVER -- THE "EMMA HARMONS" FAMOUS TRIP-THE "LIGIITFOOT" BUILT IN KANSAS-A NOTABLE VOYAGE UP THE KANSAS RIVER-QUIN- DARO'S FAMOUS SIDE-WHEELER-KANSAS RIVER STEAMBOATS-STEAM- BOATS THAT WENT DOWN-WHEN BOATS WERE OPERATED FOR THE RAIL- ROADS-AN END TO STEAMBOATING.
The steamboats that plied the Missouri and Kansas rivers in the fifties and sixties, before the railroads were builded, had an important part in the making of Kansas and Wyandotte county. The hulks of steamboats of those early days that lie buried in the shifting sands of the Missouri round about the Wyandotte levee above the mouth of the Kansas river, or a few miles up stream or down stream, if only they might speak, could tell many delightful tales of that most charming. most picturesque and most potential epoch which our state, our county and our city has ever known. They were the common carriers of the commerce of the new west. More than that, they were freighted down with the ideals, the hopes and the ambitions of the Kansas emigrants, men and women, makers of Kansas.
The wooden canoes of the Indians, the flotillas of pirogues of the French voyagers and traders, and their successors, the keel boats, had disappeared from the western rivers and in their place had come steam- boats, some of them of splendid construction and magnificent in appoint- ments. It was said that in 1856 upwards of sixty steamboats were running on the Missouri from St. Louis up to Kansas City, Wyandotte, Quindaro and Leavenworth, and some of them to St. Joseph. The Kansas river also was traversed by steamboats of lighter draught, its navigability recognized, and the ports along the river as far up as Junction City felt the life-giving throb of their commerce until a legis- lature was hoodwinked by the railroad interests into a declaration of its unnavigability.
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FIRST GLIMPSES OF KANSAS.
Nearly all of those pioneers who figured in our early history caught a first glimpse of Kansas from the deek of a steamboat in the Missouri river at the mouth of the Kansas river, and many are the delightful stories of the impressions of that first glimpse and of the emotions that were awakened. Ilon. Albert R. Greene, one of those early day pio- neers, writing for the Kansas State IHistorical Society from Portland, Oregon, recently, gives the following first glimpse in 1855 of Wyandotte :
"The first glimpse of the territory, obtained from the deck of a steamer ascending the Missouri, was at Wyandotte, where the Kansas river emerges fron the bluffs and mingles its clear waters with the turbid and tawny flood of the greater stream. That was Kansas, the New England of the west, and the immi- grant in his enthusiasm as gladly gave up the Missouri for the Kansas as he exchanged the land of sloth, superstition and slavery for the heritage of freedom and honest labor. The writer speaks from experience. My father's family had been nearly ten days in coming from Peoria, Illinois, the most of the time on an over-crowded boat on the Missouri river, and when the clerk of the boat, the "A. B. Chambers," Mr. J. S. Chick, since prominent in the history of Kansas City, pointed out a yellow hillside with a few unpainted shanties scattered along a winding road that led from the river to the dense oak woods at the top, and said, 'That's Kansas,' it seemed good to us. We were dumped out on the sandy shore of the river at the mouth of the Kansas, and pitched our tent among a com- munity of immigrants similarly situated, and waited for the promised boat to carry us and our effects up the river. A number of boats came down the river during the two weeks that we waited, but none ascended the river while we stayed there. Our experiences in this camp dispelled, in a large measure, the romantic illusions, received through the magnifying lenses of immigration literature. The gales which kept the sand in constant motion and deposited a portion of it regu- larly in the cooking utensils around the camp fire; the numerous muscular mosquitos that paid us nightly visits; the carousals of grog-soaked Indians, who made in- formal calls on us daily; the betrayal of confidence in a fellow immigrant, by which we suffered the loss of the family pictures, a wooden-wheel clock, a grindstone and Butterworth 's Concordance of the Holy Scriptures, etc., all tended to the conclusion that life in Kansas was not all an elysian dream. My pleasantest recollection of that camp is a wonderful spring that issued from the base of the cliff and poured its clear, cold waters into a basin in the yellow clay, and, brimming over which, it trickled down the bank into the Kansas river. Many a time I went there, a disappointed, half siek, lonesome boy, and played that this was the same old spring that had bathed the butter crocks in the milkhouse at our Illinois home, and the fancy brought a pleasure that warms my heart to-day."
John J. Ingalls never tired of telling of his first view of Kansas from the deek of the "Duncan S. Carter," which bore him up the Mis- souri river in 1858. The impression on the then young man made him a loyal and true Kansan, heart and soul, the evidence of which was observed in his public acts and his private life from the time he sat in the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention, all through the years of his splendid serviee in the United States Senate and on to the close of his long and useful career.
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It was the "Nodaway," an early side-wheel boat, that brought a part of the Wyandots to this section in 1843. Other steamboats were on the rivers before and after that, carrying emigrant Indians, mis- sionaries, explorers, adventurers and soldiers, and quite a few of these had thrilling adventures. One of these was of a boat that did not come into port at Wyandotte. That was the "Haidee." It started up the Missouri river from St. Louis in December, 1849, and was caught in an ice jam at Portland, Missouri. Percival G. Lowe, of Leavenworth, author of "Five Years a Dragoon," once president of the Kansas His- torical Society, was caught on the boat. He and a detachment of sol- diers, made the march of three hundred miles to Fort Leavenworth through ice and snow.
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