O 00 
 
 rent 15.
 
 UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 Donated in memory of 
 
 John W. Snvder 
 
 His Son and Daughter
 
 
 ^ f^ "^w-^ >|i^\ J^ 4 
 
 - 
 
 

 
 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 BY 
 NOBLE L. PRENTIS. 
 
 TOPEKA: 
 
 KANSAS PUBLISHING HOUSE. 
 
 1889.
 
 TO 
 
 MY BEST FRIEND, 
 
 SAFEST GUIDE, LITERARY COUNSELOR, 
 AND BUSINESS ASSOCIATE, 
 
 THIS LITTLE BOOK 
 IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BATTLE CORNERS, i 
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS MEN OF '57, ... 80 
 
 JIM LANE, 104 
 
 THE HOUSE OF BOURBON, ... ... 117 
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN, i3 6 
 
 THE MENNONITES AT HOME, 147 
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES, i55 
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL, 168 
 
 BOOKS, !93
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IT is believed that the contents of this little volume 
 will explain its title. They are miscellaneous, and every- 
 thing between the covers has some reference to or connec- 
 tion with Kansas, and Kansas people. 
 
 " Battle Corners " was suggested by a visit to the battle- 
 fields of Prairie Grove, Pea Ridge, and Wilson's Creek. 
 There is no attempt to give a historical account of those 
 battles. A critical narrative of one of those combats would 
 fill a volume like this. There is no attempt to catalogue 
 the brave. What is here are but the reflections of the 
 writer ; an effort to describe the localities as they are now, 
 with the hope that others may be led to visit them ; and 
 the recollections of three old soldiers, given after the lapse 
 of many years, and without aids to the memory, but, it is 
 believed, given so vividly that others will see with the 
 mind's eye. 
 
 "The World a School" has appeared in print in many 
 
 (5)
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 forms, and was included in the volume known as "A Kan- 
 san Abroad." It appears here at the suggestion of many 
 friends. 
 
 For the rest, it may be said that they consist of sketches 
 which appeared originally in Kansas newspapers, and of 
 addresses delivered to Kansas audiences. These are pre- 
 sented, without regard to lapse of time, in the form in 
 which they received the honor of being copied in Kansas 
 newspapers, and the kindly mention of Kansas people. 
 They are selected from a mass of writings, the labor of 
 nearly twenty years, in which there has scarcely been a 
 day when the writer has not said some word for Kansas, 
 the land of the sunflower and the breeze. To the always- 
 lenient judgment of the Kansas public they are again 
 committed. 
 
 TOPEKA, February, 1889. N. L. P.
 
 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 
 
 IT was in the closing days of the year 1888 that the writer, 
 in company with the Commissioner, visited the country 
 which will be spoken of in these pages as "Battle Corners." 
 
 In the school atlases in vogue in the early '50's, there were 
 patches of red or yellow covering the southwest corner of 
 the State of Missouri, the northwest quarter of the State of 
 Arkansas, the southeast quarter of what had recently become 
 the Territory of Kansas, and the northwest quarter of what 
 had been reduced to the present Indian Territory. In the 
 Missouri quarter there was one dot Springfield ; in the Kan- 
 sas corner a star the Government military post of Fort 
 Scott; in the fraction of Arkansas a dot it was probably 
 Fayetteville, though it may have been Fort Smith ; in the 
 Territory the solitary mark indicating Fort Gibson. 
 
 Scattered about in this region the metes and bounds of 
 which have been loosely indicated, were given in irregular 
 lines the geographer's or map-maker's idea of the Ozark 
 mountains ; an elevated region rather than a regular chain.
 
 2 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 The map-makers left this country thus unmarked and void 
 because man had left it so; and ten years later it is doubtful 
 if there was in the United States at that time a country, nomi- 
 nally under the operations of law and settlement as long as 
 the States of Arkansas and Missouri had been, more solitary 
 than these "corners," more destitute of common roads and 
 bridges; while as for railroads, the nearest approach as late as 
 1860 was far-away Holla. Yet, suddenly, as one may say, these 
 wooded hills and rugged hollows, these rough and rocky soli- 
 tudes, the banks of these swift streams accustomed to no sound 
 save their own dashings, the passes in these unfrequented 
 mountains, the scattered fields of a careless agriculture, the 
 red roads that clambered up and down, the paths that threaded 
 the brush and brake, the little prairies that stood like islands 
 in the ocean of forest, were filled with armed men. Thousands 
 of miles from the capitals of the contending governments; 
 without cities to besiege or defend; without great rivers to 
 open or close, or hold as highways; without strategic points 
 of value to either force; without fertile fields or rich pastures 
 the supply -grounds of armies to be guarded or fought 
 for, this region, the obscure corners of three States and a 
 Territory, became the scene of war long, persistent, bloody; 
 marked by the display of every heroic quality that can dis- 
 tinguish the human soul, and the commission of every fiendish 
 crime that can be conceived in a malignant heart and executed 
 by a bloody and unsparing hand. 
 
 The forces which gathered in this region to do battle in 
 open field or sudden ambush, made up the strangest mixture 
 known in the annals of warfare. White men, red foen and
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 3 
 
 black men; regular soldiers and volunteers ; Kansas borderers 
 and Texas rangers ; men from the Canadian frontier and 
 men from the Mexican boundary, men from nearly every 
 country in Europe, clad in every garb, armed with every 
 weapon, marched and camped and fought and died in the 
 " Battle Corners." With such combatants, a vast number of 
 them irregulars; partisans who came and went; robbers who 
 forsook their accustomed vocation of theft and murder to be 
 soldiers and patriots on occasion; and in such a country, des- 
 titute of railroads and almost entirely without telegraph lines; 
 with no great newspapers within a long and weary distance; 
 with no regularly organized bureau of correspondence, the 
 result in the shape of what is called recorded history has 
 been meager and confused. Enough was done and suffered 
 in a country where every old tree has its scar, and every ford 
 of every mountain stream had its fight, to furnish many a 
 winter's tale and grandame's legend, growing doubtless more 
 fearful with each passing year ; but of preserved and printed 
 history, of critical analyses of campaigns, of military memoirs 
 with maps and plans, there is and is likely to be very little. 
 This does not diminish but rather increases the enchantment 
 which time's distance lends to the view ; and it may be that 
 when the heavy volumes in which generals on both sides in 
 the civil war have recorded their operations or excused their 
 blunders in other fields, are for the most part unread or for- 
 gotten, the novelist will be exploring the old fields and resur- 
 recting the old war stories lingering in the woods and 
 mountains and prairies of Missouri and Arkansas and Kan-
 
 4 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 sas ; another Scott, the magician of a wilder and bloodier 
 Border than Tweed flows through or Cheviot looks upon. 
 
 Rising above the level of the hundreds of combats, scouts, 
 forays, raids, and even encounters owning the name and style 
 of battles, in which the casualties were serious, and, for the 
 numbers engaged, enormous, there were three pitched battles 
 which attracted the attention of the whole country, and which 
 had direct and important results. They were the battles of 
 Wilson's creek, Missouri, fought August 10, 1861 ; Pea Ridge, 
 Arkansas, fought March 6, 7 and 8, 1862, and Prairie Grove, 
 Arkansas, fought December 7, 1862. In the first and last ac- 
 tions Kansas troops bore a prominent part, and while no 
 Kansas regiments or batteries were engaged at Pea Ridge, 
 the locality was a familiar one to them, and many of the 
 troops engaged, both Union and Confederate, were known to 
 them. In this attempt, then, to blend the present and past of 
 " Battle Corners," the three old fields were visited, beginning 
 with Prairie Grove. 
 
 The writer was impelled to visit these fields by a general 
 interest growing out of the part Kansas had played in the old 
 dramas of which the old Shakesperian stage directions would 
 say, "Scene, A wood; drums and trumpets without," but he 
 had no personal recollections to indulge in, the fortunes of 
 war having led him to different and distant fields; but with 
 his companion, the Commissioner, it was a return to once- 
 familiar scenes. As a long-suffering trooper in a Kansas 
 squadron, he had ridden on his faithful steed, in truth, on 
 several different steeds, all over the triangle of which Fort
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 5 
 
 Scott and Springfield and Van Buren may be called the points, 
 many a time and oft, by day and by night, when not only man 
 but horse fell asleep through overpowering weariness, moving 
 along in dreams, if horses may dream. " Danger, long travel, 
 want and woe," was a summary of a cavalry soldier's cam- 
 paigns in "Battle Corners," and yet mixed up with this par- 
 ticular veteran's recollections of "wounds and tales of sorrow 
 done," were other recollections of army days, many of them 
 clustering round a panicky, field officer, and an especially vo- 
 ciferous and ungodly bugler; so that in riding along through 
 the Arkansas woods he was fain at the thoughts that within 
 him rose to burst into peals of laughter, so loud, so free, so 
 reverberant, that had they been uttered in war-time they 
 would have aroused that mysterious, elusive and vanishing 
 bushwhacker's camp, in search of which so many thousand 
 Union cavalrymen spent a large portion of their valuable 
 time. 
 
 Journeying first to Fayetteville, we came upon, at old 
 Keatsville, the railroad station for which now bears the rather 
 New-Englandish name of Washburn, crossing the railroad 
 track, the first reminder that we were on the " dark and 
 bloody ground." It looked like a shallow ditch with a rock 
 bottom and low sides of fiery red clay, the beginning of a 
 ravine, washed and to be washed by rain. It was in fact 
 that rock, bleached like a skull part of the skeleton of an 
 ancient thoroughfare; it was the old "Wire road." The "Wire 
 road" was in the beginning a military road constructed in 
 the earliest days from Springfield,' Missouri, to Fort Smith. 
 Along it was built, according to tradition, the first telegraph
 
 6 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 line west of the Mississippi river. The people past whose 
 fields it ran and over whose lowly roofs it sang, were not 
 versed in the science of electricity or its language. To them 
 the aerial pathway of thought's messenger was but a wire, 
 and they called the highway it followed the " Wire road." In 
 military dispatches and reports it came to be mentioned hun- 
 dreds of times; on the Union side generally as the "Main" or 
 "Telegraph" road, while by the Confederates it was nearly 
 always spoken of by its "country," and older name, the "Wire 
 road." The "wire" was maintained after a fashion to the 
 close of the war, and "wire" and "road" kept up their com- 
 panionship until the coming of the railroad, running, too, 
 from Springfield to Fort Smith, drew to its side all the tele- 
 graph lines, when the road itself began to fall into disuse, 
 being dethroned as the one great thoroughfare of the country. 
 
 It exists now, as one may say, in fragments, as it lies in 
 the way men may be going. In some cases it leads, as of 
 yore, from town to town; in other places it has become a 
 neighborhood highway; in others it has been inclosed in the 
 fenced fields and made private property; in others the forest 
 has received it again to itself as it was. 
 
 It was by the "Wire road" that both armies advanced and 
 retreated time and again. Down by the "Wire road" Herron 
 made the tremendous march to the aid of Blunt, the junction 
 being effected on the field, and amid the thunder of the guns 
 of Prairie Grove; and to gain the "Wire road," Van Dorn, or 
 rather Price, marched past the flank of Curtis's army the night 
 before the opening of the battle of Pea Ridge. The three 
 battle-fields of Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 7 
 
 may be said to have been connected by it. Let no one suppose, 
 however, that this important highway was any modern counter- 
 part of Caesar's military roads in Gaul, or elsewhere, or that 
 in its construction it gave evidence that the army of the United 
 States has always maintained a brilliant engineer corps, with 
 the motto "Essayons." It displayed nowhere any trace of the 
 invention of the late Mr. McAdam; it was a very natural road, 
 and the soldiers whose painful duty it was to march up and 
 down it, declared that not a tree had been felled in making it. 
 Winding along, up and down, guiltless of cut, or fill, or bridge r 
 mere hard and beaten path, or prolonged dust-heap, or length- 
 ened quagmire, according to the sun or the rain, the shifting 
 and uncertain elements, stretched the "Wire road," a Via 
 Dolorosa. What sufferings, what dangers, what fatigues, what 
 endings of all these, did it not witness ? Men marched along 
 it as if driven by fate. Often it was obstructed, as if it had 
 been determined to close it forever, and as often was it 
 reopened that more thousands might toil along its rugged 
 ways, or find graves beside it. The "Wire road "must now 
 be sought to be found ; the railroad does not regard it, run- 
 ning as it does on lines entirely different. The glimpse of 
 recognition we caught at Keatsville was the last until we stood 
 in the broad highway that passes by the front of the Elkhorn 
 Tavern. 
 
 At Fayetteville we were in the midst of historic associa- 
 tions. The nearest point of the field of Prairie Grove is 
 twelve miles distant, and yet in the first reports the battle was 
 said to have been fought "near Fayetteville." The mention 
 on the street or in the hotel office that two travelers desired
 
 8 KANSAS MISCELLANIES 
 
 to go to Prairie Grove merely because of the battle that had 
 been fought there, brought around them old soldiers of both 
 armies, who "were there," and their conversation revealed the 
 dividing line made by the war, which ran between neighbor- 
 hood and neighborhood, and house and house, and often made 
 its mark across the family hearthstone. In the great war this 
 mountain Arkansas county of Washington was divided. A 
 full regiment of Washington county men fought on the ridge 
 at Prairie Grove under Hindman, in sight of their fields and 
 homes; while a disaster which befell a regiment of Washing- 
 ton county Federals, the First Arkansas cavalry, was the open- 
 ing event of the battle of Prairie Grove. Fayetteville seemed 
 on the day we arrived the headquarters of Brooks's Confed- 
 erates and Harrison's Federals. Both parties spoke freely of 
 the "trouble" at the opening of the Prairie Grove fight the 
 Confederates declaring that the "Mountain Feds." moving 
 along in advance of Herron's command were stampeded by a 
 small Confederate force and most ignominiously fled, tum- 
 bling off their horses and " jooking," or dodging through the 
 brush ; while the Federals maintained that, finding themselves 
 in the midst of Shelby's brigade of cavalry, the advance of 
 Hindman's army, and greatly outnumbered, they exercised 
 that discretion which has long been confessed the better part 
 of valor. Manners are everything, and the final settlement of 
 the question depends on whether the burden of proof is to 
 the effect that the First Arkansas, being in trouble, did, as an 
 officer of the regiment assured us at Fayetteville, merely obey 
 the order "By fours right about wheel," and "withdraw 
 rapidly from the advanced position it had taken," or, in other
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 9 
 
 words, "effect with little loss a withdrawal to another line" 
 or whether it unanimously and spontaneously ran off. When 
 we realize that Gen. Albert Pike did not personally retreat at 
 the battle of Pea Ridge, but merely, as he expressed it, "left 
 the enemy behind by rapid riding," we realize the niceties of 
 the English language as employed in the description of mili- 
 tary and strategic operations. To "withdraw" may be gen- 
 eralship, to "retreat" is more grievous, yet possible without 
 dishonor, while to "run" is intolerable; and yet a movement 
 tending to increase the interval between hostile forces has 
 been frequently described as all three. 
 
 On a sunny day around the public square at Fayetteville, 
 Union and Confederate Caesars open up their verbal commen- 
 taries. Old soldiers interested in the investigation of military 
 questions growing out of the civil war, from the operations of 
 the Army of the Potomac to those of the Frontier, can hear 
 them enlarged upon by critics whose critical faculties have 
 been sharpened by the profuse and frequently unpleasant 
 smell of powder, wafted from opposite directions. For an 
 exposition of affairs in which the First Arkansas cavalry was 
 interested, they are referred to Captain C. B. Harrison, a lead- 
 ing business man of Fayetteville, and to Captain Patton, both 
 of that regiment, to whom we were made indebted for interest- 
 ing particulars in regard to the defense of the place against 
 Cabell, and other operations. 
 
 Fayetteville, originally the political and commercial capital 
 of northwest Arkansas, became known daring the war to thou- 
 sands of Northern soldiers, who, sick or well, in peaceful guise 
 or on warlike errands intent, had occasion to visit it. It was
 
 10 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the most important point on the "Wire road" between 
 Springfield and the Arkansas river. Hospitals were estab- 
 lished here which received the wounded after the battle of 
 Prairie Grove, and the dead of both armies buried on the 
 field were disinterred, and the mouldering relics of the brave 
 now rest within the precincts of Fayetteville ; the Confed- 
 erates -in a rather neglected inclosure on the shelf of a high 
 hill, the Union dead in the carefully kept Government ceme- 
 tery on the summit of a gentler slope, a " green hill far away." 
 This spot, though watched and tended by an official guard- 
 ian, had less of adornment in the way of the gardener's art 
 than any Government cemetery I had ever seen, though of 
 course the season of the year, December, was unfavorable to 
 its display. The dead lie in circles widening from the center 
 like ripples, wave after wave of white headstones, ceasing at 
 the boundaries of the inclosure. Many, the larger number, 
 were marked "Unknown;" and my heart rebelled, as it had 
 often done before, at the thought that a soldier of the Union 
 army whose name as a soldier was written scores and hun- 
 dreds of times in the records of his regiment, from the 
 orderly sergeant's book on and up, should slip out of life, as 
 it were, to be lost, to have inscribed above him till his name is 
 called again at the Last Day, " Unknown." In England one 
 may see on the walls of parish churches, mural tablets in- 
 scribed with the names of English soldiers who died on the 
 other side of the world. In this country such memorials 
 scarcely exist ; but should they not ? If the memory of the 
 brave dead, laid in untimely graves for their dear country's 
 sake, is to be preserved, it certainly is not to be done by the
 
 BATTLE COSNEHS. 11 
 
 erection of monuments that merely say that their names 
 are lost and forgotten. Better nothing than that word 
 "Unknown." 
 
 Fayetteville with its old associations recalled by many ob- 
 jects is beautiful for situation. It rests the eye, accustomed 
 to level metropolises, checker-board emporiums, and " future 
 greats," open to the wind on all sides. It is a city sur- 
 rounded by high-shouldered hills, called mountains, covered 
 with forests. It stands itself on a hill the top of which has 
 been shaved like a monk's crown to make room for the public 
 square with the court house in the center. On another hill, 
 hidden to the eyes by trees, is the State Agricultural College; 
 and in the settlement it seems that the pioneer citizen, who 
 would rear his house where from his door he could have a 
 view different from any other hills, valleys, woods, a bit of 
 separate heaven and exclusive earth had only to select his 
 hill, for no one might see what he saw, unless he stood where 
 he stood. The houses in such towns, especially in the South, 
 do not stand up in straight lines to be counted. There is a 
 great want of system about this old town that has sat down 
 in its shirt-sleeves in these Arkansas mountains. The grades 
 of the sidewalks around the public square exhibit a great 
 variety, and the court house itself would blush among its 
 locust trees if it were designated as a "temple of justice:" 
 it is just an old brick "cote house." The business houses 
 about the square belong to the " since the war" period, and 
 are spacious and creditable. There is plenty of old Fayette- 
 ville to dream over, and of new Fayetteville to inspire hope. 
 It was hospitable in December. When Spring pauses on her
 
 12 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 leisurely way, pauses in these valleys and among these moun- 
 tains to make some arrangements for " peach time," which 
 never fails here, heaven and earth and sympathetic people 
 must be charming. 
 
 There was no suggestion of "peach time" in the air as 
 we rode down the steep rSd hill and through the railroad cul- 
 vert at the big fill. It was a sad, sunless, lead-colored Decem- 
 ber day, that sulked and muttered of rain, but failed to carry 
 out its threat. The rain had been falling for a week, or 
 perhaps it was weeks, and what is known in that region as 
 the road was a picturesque succession of mud-holes partially 
 filled with round boulders the size of a sixty-four-pound shot. 
 The traveling public cannot sufficiently thank Heaven for 
 Appomattox. Had the Southern Confederacy been estab- 
 lished it would never have "worked the road." 
 
 The primitive thoroughfare wound through the forest, the 
 dull russet-colored oaks predominating, covered with leaves as 
 was the ground beneath them. To the right, the road, now 
 approaching, now turning away, kept in view ranges of 
 straight-backed, wood-covered mountains, brown near at hand, 
 fading into blue ranges to the southward the Boston moun- 
 tains. Shut in by the woods, with no sound to listen to save 
 our own voices and the hoofs of the horses, "Quick" and 
 " Dead," as they picked their way, slipping and sliding and 
 floundering through the mud and boulders, there was little to 
 do save to fix our minds on our purpose of following Herron's 
 route as he marched from Fayetteville to the battle-field, going 
 through a certain lane where his advance met the retreating 
 cavalry returning from the interview with Hindman's advance,
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 13 
 
 and crossing Illinois creek where he crossed it on the morning 
 of the famous 7th of December. 
 
 But roads are subject to changes in twenty-six years, and 
 most of the people of whom we made inquiries along the 
 way, having been born since the war, indulged in rather hazy 
 recollections. We passed Walnut Grove church, a wooden 
 temple in the forest, a country tabernacle of the sort that 
 William Wirt immortalized long ago in what came to be the 
 reading-book story of "The Blind Preacher." Within this dis- 
 tance of Illinois creek we should, we thought, have come to the 
 lane. Through a rift in the forest we saw over the trees in 
 the misty distance a white house, which the Commissioner said 
 was on the battle-field; but we went on, and here were the 
 rushing waters of Illinois creek, which all the rains had but 
 given a grayish-blue tinge, but found we had crossed a mile 
 out of the way. Working along a fence-row, we came out to 
 the lowly mansion of Mr. Whit. Taylor, in the midst of a low- 
 lying valley filled with corn and here was the stream, here 
 the ford, here the road from Fayetteville; and turning about 
 we saw, lying against the sky, the long forested ridge of 
 Prairie Grove, as Herron and his soldiers first saw it when 
 they struggled through the swift icy waters of Illinois creek 
 and a warning flash and boom from the height told them that 
 Hindman was waiting for them. 
 
 It was approaching the gray close of the winter day, and 
 the air was damp and chill. The low-hung clouds that had 
 crept all day to the southward before the sluggish north-wind 
 seemed to rest on the crest of the ridge which stretched, 
 almost black, in their shadow. Around were the sodden corn-
 
 14 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 fields, near was the stream talking over its old stories to its 
 banks, while the road ran up to the ridge and was lost in the 
 forest. It was a dreary time, and the ridge took the form to 
 the mind's eye of a great altar of sacrifice. All the dreadful 
 suffering borne there, between the rising of one day's sun and 
 the shining of another, rested upon the beholder's soul. The 
 staring eyes, the clenched teeth, the mangled limbs, the blood 
 making a spreading stain on the leaves, the shrieking and 
 plunging horses all these came up unrelieved by any thought 
 of glory or victory, even as that sky darkened with the coming 
 night as if the sun were dead. 
 
 The road, which runs as it did twenty-six years ago, leads 
 over the ridge through the woods and drops down into the 
 village of Prairie Grove, which has grown up in the past twelve 
 years around the Prairie Grove church, which served as the 
 Confederate hospital, and near which the greater number of 
 their dead were buried. The old church yet remains, faded 
 and shabby in the presence of two or three new churches. 
 It is a pretty little place, with probably two hundred inhab- 
 itants. It is a yellow-pine town, all of wood, save the two- 
 story brick academy, which stands in the woods well up the 
 ridge. All of the houses have great stone chimneys outside 
 their gables, and few are so poor as not to have a little porch 
 or gallery running along their front, overhung with vines, still 
 green in December. Lights were shining early in the win- 
 dows on the cloudy evening, children lingering on their way 
 from school passed by in groups, the little girls smilingly 
 returning the salute of the travelers. A bell, clear and sweet, 
 was ringing somewhere, filling the dusk with its melody. So
 
 BATTLE COENShS. 15 
 
 we drew up at the door of the house of entertainment. If it 
 was a hotel and had a name we did not hear it, but it had a 
 landlord whose name was Crowell. The house had once been 
 built as a double house, possibly a double log cabin, but 
 weather-boarded, and the space between the "houses," devoted 
 in the country to dogs and saddles, had been inclosed, making 
 a room. This style of architecture is quite common in Ar- 
 kansas, and many a substantial-looking farmhouse is one of 
 these "reformed" log cabins. In the sitting-room was a fire- 
 place and two inviting beds with blue counterpanes. The 
 landlord heaped high the fire. Ye who burn anthracite in a 
 machine, a mysterious combination of flues and dampers, 
 should haye seen that fire of nature ; wood from the near 
 forest burning on the free and open hearth, air and fire and 
 nothing more, like the fire, kindled from heaven, that warmed 
 the first man. The fire rejoiced in its own brightness, and 
 crackled and sang in the chimney, and lit every nook of the 
 pine-ceiled room, and would not let the black- browed night 
 even look in at the windows. There were but three guests of 
 the vicinage, two seeming to be commercial travelers in a 
 local way, and the other an old bachelor of rapid but imper- 
 fect speech, who told a good many times over about the size 
 of a farm he owned in the vicinity of Rhea's Mill. We slept 
 under a blue counterpane till the landlord came in before day- 
 light and roused the fire to new exertions with a turkey-wing 
 and went out again. Lying there awake, watching the rising 
 fire, it was natural to think of the battle that raged and roared 
 in the woods behind and above the house; but there, pinned 
 to the wall, was a map of the United States of America. It
 
 1H KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 was, it is true, a railroad advertisement, and across several 
 States was printed something about "through Pullman 
 sleepers;" but there it was, before as after the fierce battle 
 the map of the United States from Maine to Florida, and 
 around the lines of the Gulf of Mexico and up the Pacific 
 coast, all of the States, all in one country, one nation, the 
 United States of America. There was more in that map than 
 the railroad advertisement, more than the story about the 
 steel rails and the through Pullmans, a reminder that a nation 
 had been saved because men had been brave enough to die for 
 it at Prairie Grove, and on a hundred fields as gory oh, how 
 many, many men ! 
 
 Morning came, chill, cloudy and forbidding. We walked 
 along the business, what may be called the postoffice street, in 
 search of Confederate "cotemporaries" who could speak of 
 the Prairie Grove battle from observation. There were several 
 of them, all belonging that day to Pagan's Arkansas Brigade 
 which held the Confederate right. 
 
 They thought the Confederate guns, over which the savage 
 fight occurred at the White House, belonged to Blocher's Ar- 
 kansas Battery. They spoke of the spot where the dead men 
 were piled thickest, as "the place where the horses were 
 killed," referring to an incident to be recalled farther on. 
 All were free to speak, without bitterness, as of any past ex- 
 perience. After we had gone up the road, one ex-Confederate 
 came sauntering up to say, "I reckon if Hindman had been 
 let alone awhile, he wouldn't have left many of us for you fel- 
 lows to kill." This was an allusion to Hindman's savagely 
 severe discipline. The local sentiment did not seem to credit
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 17 
 
 Hindman with the generalship which led him to mask his 
 movement from Blunt at Cane Hill, and, moving toward Fay- 
 etteville, attempting to crush Herron before he could form 
 a junction with Blunt. The Prairie Grove village opinion 
 was, that Hindman was only trying to pass around Blunt and 
 strike Khea's Mill, where there were three hundred wagons 
 loaded with commissary stores. The ex-Confederates did not 
 believe that Hindman knew of Herron's approach until bis 
 advance struck the "Mountain Feds." as before related, and 
 pursued them beyond Illinois creek; then, they reasoned, he 
 hastily took up a position on the Prairie Grove ridge. Ac- 
 cording to their accounts, he had not been long in position 
 before Herron's artillery and infantry commenced crossing the 
 stream. This, indeed, happened, but Hindman's own state- 
 ment is, that he was aware of Herron's advance and intended 
 to attack him, but was himself attacked. 
 
 The village sentiment pointed to a Dr. Lee as the best 
 posted man in the community, a literary person who corre- 
 sponded with the newspapers, but he had come into the coun- 
 try since the battle days. By general consent Mr. Bill Rogers, 
 who lived on the ridge, and who with his family connections 
 owned a large portion of the field, they thought the best guide 
 procurable, and Mr. Rogers was found later in the morning, 
 and obligingly mounted his mule and rode over the field. 
 We went first to the white house on the right of the Confed- 
 erate line, and overlooking the ford where the road from 
 Fayetteville crosses. From near this house the Confederate 
 artillery opened on Herron's troops when crossing, and were 
 replied to first by Backhof's Battery. Here the Twentieth
 
 18 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Wisconsin and Nineteenth Iowa made the first charge of the 
 day, carrying the ridge, only to be forced back. The white 
 house of to-day is a neat cottage with dormer windows, and 
 is occupied by a family named Hall, new-comers in the coun- 
 try. The inclosure about the house seemed recent. To the 
 east, or in the rear of the house, is a young orchard taking 
 the place of the old orchard which grew there at the time of 
 the battle, and where Lieut. Col. McFarland, of the Nineteenth 
 Iowa, whose brother, Judge N. C. McFarland, is an honored 
 citizen of Topeka, and in whose memory the G.A.R. Post at 
 Muscotah, Kansas, is named, was killed. To the southward, 
 or nearer the summit of the ridge, much of the timber has 
 been cut away; to the west of the house and immediately 
 around it there seem to have been few changes, except these 
 made by the hand of nature. The trees have grown, a change 
 which occurring on all these forested battle-fields alters their 
 appearance more than anything man has done; but there 
 would be no difficulty, we should think, in a veteran of the 
 Twentieth Wisconsin, or Nineteenth Iowa, or Thirty-Seventh 
 Illinois, or Twenty-sixth Indiana, from finding again the final 
 scene of 
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S STOBY. 
 
 "It was the evening of the 3d of December, the weather 
 being mild for the season and the roads good, that just as we 
 came off drill we were ordered to strike tents and march from 
 our camp on the old Wilson's creek battle-ground. We 
 marched hurriedly, making no stop for supper, and at 11 
 o'clock at night the brigade made camp on Crane creek. 
 Long before daylight we were on the road again, and made a
 
 BATTLE CORNEES. 19 
 
 long day, the train and artillery keeping well up, and camped 
 shortly after dark ; and still the men helc* out well. The next 
 morning very early found the column still pushing on, and 
 just after the sun had set we were at the Elkhorn Tavern. 
 The men had been dropping out during the day, and at night 
 had used up their rations. I shot a hog on the historic field, 
 and the Captain's mess and the boys' mess had pork. At the 
 Elkhorn there was no talk of any enemy, and at 4 o'clock 
 the column was moving again in the fearful dust. 
 
 "The men began to fall by the wayside the road was 
 lined with them; we climbed hills and waded creeks, and 
 at 3 o'clock in the morning bivouacked in the streets of 
 Fayetteville; we had marched without stopping, the men eat- 
 ing out of their haversacks, for twenty-three hours. The 
 blisters covered the men's feet, but they wanted to fight. 
 The night was cold, and the hoar-frost lay like a light snow 
 on the ground ; the men built fires from the pickets they 
 broke from the fences. There was talk everywhere of battle. 
 In an hour we left the fires and started over a bad road in 
 the direction of Prairie Grove, my regiment leading the col- 
 umn. The sun rose clear, and shortly after, we heard scat- 
 tered musketry firing in our front, and groups of horsemen 
 came hurrying back, white-faced and terror-stricken, throwing 
 away their arms and accoutrements, when finally a lady in a 
 black riding-habit, mounted on a fine black horse, came gal- 
 loping back among the fugitives, calling out as she passed us, 
 though not in such an agony of fright as the others, ' Fall 
 back, men ! fall back for your lives, for all is lost ! ' and she 
 disappeared in the crowd that fled to the rear.
 
 20 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 "When they had gone the road was apparently clear in 
 front, with no enemy in sight or hearing. The brigade left 
 the road and formed line of battle in some fields, and the 
 skirmishers moved out along the whole brigade front and 
 disappeared in the woods. The skirmishers came back ; the 
 column re-formed and commenced moving along the road at 
 a double-qnick. We came to a stream it was Illinois creek, 
 and we moved along the bank down the stream and formed 
 in line. We could see nothing, but the enemy's shell and shot 
 began exploding over our heads and tearing through the tree- 
 tops. We moved again and took the ford, a battery dashing 
 through the stream ahead of us. The guns went up on the 
 level of the plateau ; we stopped on a lower bench, a few feet 
 nearer the river, and were sheltered by a sort of natural ter- 
 race. We caught sight of a long wooded ridge rising between 
 us and the sky, and from out the woods on the crest came 
 flashes of fire and puffs of smoke. The Rebel shells shrieked 
 and burst and our battery roared defiance, and our men, the 
 half of the regiment that had marched 120 miles in a little 
 over three days, sank on the ground and slept while the bat- 
 teries had it out. The men's clothes, soaked in wading the 
 creek, which was waist deep, froze to them, but still they slept 
 as if they would never wake, while the shells burst over their 
 unheeding heads. 
 
 "The batteries concluded their dispute for a time; the men 
 were wakened and stood up in line, and soon the brigade was 
 facing the long ridge, and then moved toward it. And the fire 
 from the guns on the crest, and a musketry fire, seemed to 
 grow thicker and louder as we neared it. I saw a white house
 
 BATTLE GOENEES. 21 
 
 on the crest and to our right. We came to the foot of the 
 ridge, the slope covered with a tangle of vines and bushes and 
 trees. Buried in this for a few moments, we were sheltered as 
 if we had gone into a fortress. It was quite still. We came 
 out nearly at the crest, and there was a newly-built rail fence, 
 and there, a few feet off, so that we were looking into their 
 muzzles, were the guns, and near by the horses standing 
 quietly attached to the caissons. But two or three men were 
 in sight. The guns which had been belching flame and smoke 
 all the morning stood there still and cold, and the horses as 
 if waiting for us. We could have taken the horses away, but 
 some officer called out to shoot the horses. Men and officers 
 called out in reply: 'Save the horses.' Again the senseless 
 order was repeated, and this time obeyed. The beautiful 
 horses were piled in a bloody heap, and the men swarmed 
 over and around the guns, and a great cheer went up. Two 
 minutes elapsed, the last stragglers were working their way 
 out of the brush and up to the crowd about the guns, when 
 discipline asserted itself, the broken mass was formed in line 
 and began to sweep up the crest and over it, and down the 
 farther slope, and coming to another rise, we saw five gray 
 lines, one behind the other, and they blazed, one after the 
 other, down in our faces. 
 
 "The impetus of the charge lasted until the regiment 
 reached a ravine at the feet, so to speak, of the enemy. 
 Here we stood and fired up the slope, and a hail of bullets 
 answered, smiting our line, and then the men lay down and 
 fired as they had been taught to do. 
 
 "The line in the ravine began to thin out; wounded men
 
 22 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 dragged themselves back out of the fire, and occasionally an 
 unhurt man arose and made a dash for the rear. There were 
 fifty men that never went back. The Confederates could 
 have taken us all in ; it was a mercy they did not come. 
 After awhile I felt a pain in the foot, and a feeling as if one 
 leg had died. Then I took a dead man's gun for a crutch, 
 and limped back ; there were no more men alive and un- 
 wounded in the ravine by that time. I passed the battery 
 we had taken. The guns stood as we had left them. I saw 
 our Colonel's horse stagger riderless down the slope and 
 fall dead ; the Colonel limped after, using his sabre as a sup- 
 port ; he was covered with blood. The Major was forming 
 the men as they came back from the ravine down the slope 
 below the guns, but our fight for that day was done. Of 425 
 men who went up to the guns, 50 had been killed and 175 were 
 torn and marked and maimed for all their days." 
 
 Not far from the house were depressions in the ground, and 
 piles of gravelly and barren earth covered with green mould. 
 These mark the trenches where the Union dead were buried, 
 and from whence their poor bones were afterward removed. 
 There were other trenches in the orchard now inclosed. The 
 family were absent and a flock of turkeys seemed in charge of 
 the premises. All this ground was fought over, the combat- 
 ants being generally the troops of Herron's command and the 
 Arkansans; Frost's Missourians, who in the original Confed- 
 erate plan of battle were placed on this flank, were soon sent 
 to the Confederate left. 
 
 Leaving the Hall house, and keeping along the foot of the
 
 BATTLE COBNEBS. 23 
 
 ridge, the Fayetteville road is reached and with it the little 
 weather-beaten structure known at the time of the battle, and 
 still, as the "Rogers house." It was in its prime in the war 
 days. Mr. Rogers said that Generals Blunt and Hindman 
 took breakfast together here on the morning after the battle. 
 The present occupant of the premises is a Mr. Jackson, an im- 
 migrant from Texas. A "dry well" here is said to be filled 
 with unexploded shells picked up on the field and buried as 
 a matter of precaution. To the west of this road and house 
 are the remains of an old orchard, a few dead and shattered 
 trunks of trees, with broken and mangled limbs scattered 
 over the sward. This orchard, Mr. Rogers stated, the season 
 after the battle bore bountifully in spite of the wounds it 
 received during the action. 
 
 The Confederate lines along here were held by Parsons' 
 Missourians, while it was in this part of the field that the 
 Twentieth Iowa and Weer's brigade of Kansas troops charged 
 and charged again. 
 
 Beyond the orchard, to the west, the slope of the ridge, still 
 covered with heavy oak timber, is cut up with high rail fences 
 marking the line of the Morton place, and here at the foot of 
 the ridge is the cluster of cabins, sheds and outbuildings called 
 generally the " Morton house." The original Morton erected 
 his domicile here more than 50 years ago, and to the pioneer 
 cabin additions have been made on all sides and of all mate- 
 rials. It would puzzle anybody to know which is the front 
 and which the back door of the "Morton house." The mis- 
 tress of the mansion now is Mrs. Staples, nee Morton, who was 
 a young woman at the time of the fight. The storm of battle,
 
 24 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 drifting from the east end of the ridge to the westward, drove 
 the women and children to the Morton house, where they took 
 refuge in a shallow cellar which Mrs. Staples shows to visitors. 
 The Kansans and Missourians "took out" their ancient ani- 
 mosity around the house and among the outbuildings and 
 about the spring. The house was between the batteries of the 
 contending forces, but seems to have suffered little injury. 
 Mrs. Staples was found in the room locally called the "loom 
 house," weaving, while a handmaiden woke the echoes with a 
 buzzing spinning-wheel. The room presented an Arkansas 
 interior; a fire-place nearly filled one end, a "spider" stood 
 on the hearth in front of the fire, and a powder-horn hung on 
 the wall. Mrs. S. exhibited a part of the loom struck by a 
 musket ball during the fight. The Fates spun that day and 
 cut short the thread of many a human life. She spoke of the 
 war and the bloody scenes enacted under her own eyes in the 
 same impassive way that marked all the people of the neigh- 
 borhood in speaking of the war ; exhibiting neither exultation 
 nor depression nor resentment. The incident most vivid in 
 her mind was her coming up from the cellar to get some gar- 
 ments to cover the children, who were suffering from cold. 
 She kept, she said, between a couple of stairways where she 
 thought shot less likely to penetrate, and returned to the cel- 
 lar with her burden in safety. 
 
 From this point, facing northward, may be seen the valley 
 skirting the Prairie Grove Ridge, and the rising grounds and 
 farms and woods beyond. The valley is now, as it was on the 
 7th of December, 1862, filled with cornfields. On the farther 
 ridge but one house looks upon the field, a white mansion, the
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 25 
 
 property of a family named West, in former years the wealthy 
 family of the neighborhood, and the only one who owned any 
 considerable number of slaves. Mr. Rogers said that this 
 house was occupied as Gen. Blunt's headquarters, for which it 
 was certainly adapted, overlooking the whole field, including 
 the contending lines of both armies from one end to the other. 
 
 The lines of battle seemed very short, the Confederate front 
 being embraced, in general terms, between the Hall house and 
 the Morton house. East of the former and west of the latter, 
 the battle seemed to fray out, so to speak, and we could find 
 no tradition or landmarks. Our guide undertook to point out 
 from the high ground the positions occupied by the Union 
 batteries, but this, of course, could be done only in a very gen- 
 eral way ; the great cornfield looks everywhere alike, and be- 
 sides, the batteries frequently shifted their positions. 
 
 Since the visit here recorded, to the field of Prairie Grove, 
 the complete story of the battle has been published for the first 
 time. It is to be found in the twenty-second volume of the 
 " Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies," pub- 
 lished by the Government of the United States. Here are the 
 reports of Generals Blunt and Herron,.of the Union army, and 
 of thirty-two other Union officers, and of Generals Hindman 
 and Marmaduke, of the Confederate army, and six other Con- 
 federate officers. These, written within a few days of the bat- 
 tle, tell its story in such words of fire as can never again warm 
 or illumine. Reading these accounts it is very easy to under- 
 stand why the Union line was no longer. Gen. Herron 
 brought on the field of Prairie Grove but six infantry regi- 
 ments, worn down by one of the most toilsome marches of
 
 26 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the war; they were the Nineteenth Iowa, the Twentieth Iowa, 
 the Thirty-seventh Illinois, the Twenty-sixth Indiana, the 
 Ninety-fourth Illinois, and the Twentieth Wisconsin. With 
 these were four batteries, Murphy's Missouri, Boris' Illinois, 
 Backhof's Missouri, and Foust's Missouri ; and beside these 
 some five hundred cavalry, the rest having been sent to Blunt. 
 It was with this force that Herron joined battle with Hind- 
 man's army, believed to number 25,000 men. General Blunt 
 reports taking on the field, Weer's Second brigade of the Fir^t 
 Division of the Army of the Frontier, the Tenth and Thirteenth 
 Kansas infantry, the Third Indian, and Tenney's battery, and 
 Cloud's Third brigade, the First Indian, the Second Kansas 
 cavalry, the Eleventh Kansas infantry, Rabb's Indiana bat- 
 tery, Hopkins's Kansas battery, and Stover's two howitzers. 
 A brigade sounds large, but Weer's brigade went into the ac- 
 tion with 902 men. Col. Weer in his report expresses his be- 
 lief that Blunt's line of battle did not contain over 1,200 men. 
 Six Western States furnished the men for this fight ; they 
 were Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri. 
 They fought Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. The officers re- 
 ceiving special mention for gallantry and efficiency, in Gen. 
 Blunt's report to Gen. Curtis, are Col. William Weer, Col. T. 
 M. Bowen, Major H. H. Williams, Capt. S. J. Crawford, Col. 
 Thomas Ewing, Lieut. Col. Moonlight, Major P. B. Plumb, 
 Capt. John H. Rabb, Capt. Henry Hopkins, Lieut. Marcus D. 
 Tenney, and Lieut. E. S. Stover. Kansas has remembered 
 these and many more that Gen. Blunt did not mention ; but 
 this sketch is not history, or an attempt to discuss the justice 
 of its awards, but the explanation why so limited a stage was
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 27 
 
 found sufficient for the exhibition of the drama, the great 
 scenes of which were the charges of the Nineteenth Iowa and 
 the Twentieth Wisconsin and the Twenty-sixth Indiana and 
 the Thirty-seventh Illinois on the Confederate batteries about 
 the white house; the fight of the Kansans for the ridge beyond 
 and above the Morton house; what may be called the charge of 
 Tenney's battery, that checked the Confederate advance; the 
 charge of the Confederates on Rabb's and Hopkins's batteries, 
 supported by the Eleventh Kansas, and the bloody repulse; 
 and the final roaring fire of musketry and artillery that closed 
 the day. 
 
 The "strategy" of Prairie Grove will be an open question 
 while the veteran, assisted by his pipe, continues to discuss 
 the art of war. The Commissioner credited that good soldier 
 Col. Weer with the observation: "We blundered in and we 
 blundered out." Reduced to the fewest words the story is, 
 that Hindman wanted a battle ; that Herron, regardless of 
 odds, position, and all the rules, fought his enemy as soon 
 as he found him ; and that Blunt " marched to the sound of 
 the guns," with the instinct of combat born in him, and 
 nursed by his sailor youth amid the white-capped waves in 
 the black night, when lightnings burn the skies and stormy 
 winds do blow. 
 
 After going over this field, as we have said, we went to din- 
 ner with Mr. Rogers, our guide, where the talk was of peaceful 
 themes, and of a certain progress in Battle Corners of which 
 we may speak farther on. The meal ended, we were presented 
 with certain apples, with the injunction not to eat them by 
 the way but to carry them to our Kansas households with
 
 28 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the information that they were "Shannon" apples, and that 
 they grew on the battle-field of Prairie Grove. Mr. Rogers 
 mounted his mule again and rode with us directly across the 
 west end of the valley to the high ridge beyond on which the 
 West house stands, and turning about we looked back, and 
 just then the sullen sky relented and a few rays of sunshine 
 fell upon the valley and the ridge, "the place where the battle 
 was fought." 
 
 The Commissioner, although he had twice visited the lo- 
 cality since the war, had seemed at fault in our journeyings 
 about, but at this point of view the field was, as it were, re- 
 stored to him, and again he saw the curtain of smoke that for 
 an hour before the sun set on that 7th of December rose from 
 the valley to the sky, and heard again that unbroken, pulse- 
 less roar, like the voice of many waters, from the stricken 
 field. 
 
 The fight at Prairie Grove was girt about with a great cloud 
 of witnesses. While that light battle-wave rippled along the 
 foot of the embattled ridge, rushed up to its crest, and ebbed, 
 stained with blood, to its foot again, four thousand cavalry- 
 men sat on their horses, held back from the fray. What one 
 of these saw is told in 
 
 THE COMMISSIONEE'S STOBJ. 
 
 " The regiment to which I belonged was a sort of travelers' 
 life insurance company. It did business in several States and 
 Territories, from the headwaters of the Platte to the mouth 
 of the Arkansas, with perfect impunity, and it is doubtful 
 whether the eighteen hundred members whose names ap- 
 peared on its muster-rolls from first to last, were ever safe
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 29 
 
 from death except during their term of service in that regi- 
 ment. And yet I think braver or better men never went 
 to war. They did their duty well, but for that regiment, 
 glory, like the 'milk sickness,' was always over the next hill. 
 In the drama of war it performed the culinary act. In this 
 way on the long zig-zag route down from Scott, in the fall of 
 1862, it was going back and forth to that kitchen of the 
 army while the other boys did the fighting. 
 
 "But after Maysville and Cane Hill there came a time when 
 we were ordered to the front. At 2 o'clock on the morning 
 of December 7 we were set in motion along a new route, under 
 the incubus of great quantities of ammunition, and the in- 
 junction of silence in ranks. At daylight we were formed in 
 line in an old wheat-field on the side of a ridge, and halted. 
 Other regiments took position on our right, and as the day 
 dawned we could see a line of battle extending to the crest of 
 the ridge with a battery of black guns in the distance, in front 
 of which sat an officer on a large white horse. In our imme- 
 diate front lay the open field for a few hundred yards, and 
 beyond this a dense forest of oaks. In our rear was a steep 
 hillside, also covered with woods, through which the road we 
 had come wound along from the valley below. 
 
 "Many of the men dismounted and built fires and laid 
 down to sleep. They had been under arms for two days and 
 nights. Others danced a hornpipe to the music of the com- 
 pany whistler, and still others indulged in sparring scraps 
 which ended in a rough and- tumble on the stubble. A band 
 far to the right played Annie Laurie with variations, and the 
 men cheered. There was an old straw-stack in the field, and
 
 30 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 directly it was covered with men burrowing into it to get 
 warm. It was a crisp winter morning; the hoar-frost lay like 
 snow on the ground and the trees were hung with crystals. 
 The air was deathly still, and the smoke of the fires rose in 
 graceful columns to the tree-tops. The sun came up out of 
 the depths of the forest in our front, and kindled the trees 
 into a golden glow forest and field and battle-line were 
 greeted with a radiant good morning. Occasional shots over 
 the hill told how the pickets on the two lines were feeling of 
 each other, and this and the belated arrival of a regiment or 
 battery, now and then, created a slight diversion; but I think 
 that sunrise engrossed all hearts. Gradually the men began 
 to inquire why we didn't do something, and a restlessness be- 
 came apparent along the line. As the morning grew warmer 
 they relaxed into drowsiness and indifference, and the whole 
 line fell to pieces and became merely a prolonged group 
 of idlers lying on the ground. The sun had cleared the tree- 
 tops about an hour or so, when Gen. Blunt and his staff rode 
 to the front of our regiment and began chatting with the 
 Colonel. 
 
 "The party happened to be directly in front of our own 
 company, and we could hear what was said. Blunt thought 
 he had taken an admirable position, but the Colonel thought 
 it could be improved by advancing the right, so as to put 
 the men's backs to the sun. Blunt said this would be done 
 as soon as the fight was on, and then they both agreed, and 
 repeated it several times, in a reassuring way, that we would 
 ' pound hell out of 'em this time.' 
 
 "An orderly rode up and presented a bottle of liquor 'with
 
 BATTLE COBNEKS. 31 
 
 the compliments of Gen. Salomon.' Blunt stuck it in his sad- 
 dle-pocket and dismounted to tighten his saddle-girth. 'Oh, 
 by the way,' said he, 'perhaps you would like to inaugurate 
 this battle by taking a drink of whisky, Colonel ? ' When the 
 Colonel declined which he actually did Blunt remarked, 
 'Yes, I think we've more important business on hand just 
 now.' 
 
 "Still nothing was being done, except that the officers 
 drove the men into ranks again and again, and dressed the 
 line, and repeated the injunction to 'remember your num- 
 bers,' and then faced to the front and waited. What did it 
 all mean? It was eleven o'clock; the delay was ominous. 
 Even Blunt was becoming nervous, and stroked the mane of 
 his pawing steed in an absent-minded sort of way. Just then 
 there was the faint boom of a gun far off to the northeast, 
 and Blunt exclaimed: 'What was that?' Before the Colonel 
 could answer there was another, and another, and Blunt 
 blurted out in a disgusted sort of way, as though somebody 
 had blundered : ' My God, they're in our rear I ' 
 
 Instantly, drums and bugles sounded, and that long, strag- 
 gling line became as straight and as inflexible as a bar of 
 steel, and then, forming column, marched to the rear and 
 rushed pell-mell down the hill, up which in stealth and dark- 
 ness, it had crept but a few hours before. 
 
 "In a few moments there was inextricable confusion; in- 
 fantry filled the road in spite of all command to the contrary, 
 cavalry rushed in, knocking them right and left in a frightful 
 manner, and the artillery in turn overrode both and beat its 
 way through. There wa? a tumult of voices, in which oaths
 
 32 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 and execrations predominated, but no attempt at military 
 order in the horde of armed men who swarmed through the 
 woods down that mountain-side. 
 
 "The first I remember that sounded natural, was the fa- 
 miliar voice of Blunt shouting to somebody, 'Tell the 
 
 fool to turn to the right and come on.' When we 
 
 heard the old man the boys raised a yell and felt safe. The 
 profanity sounded sublime. There was after all, one man who 
 knew what he was about, and he was the commanding general. 
 I think this must have been two miles from our position at 
 Cane Hill, and here we 'turned to the right,' and soon struck 
 a prairie. The black guns were already a quarter ahead, the 
 horses lying close to the earth, and flying like the wind; while 
 the scouts, Jack Harvey, Jeff. Clogston, Ed. Monroe and Andy 
 Hammond, were leading the way. Another battery burst out 
 of the woods and ran alongside of our regiment for we fell 
 into column the moment we reached the prairie Blunt and 
 his staff being between us. Every horse had a rider who was 
 lashing at every leap, and the gunners were lying flat on the 
 guns and caissons and holding on for precious life as the 
 wheels bounded from hummocks and boulders that lay in the 
 way. 
 
 "Blunt's horse outwinded them all, and presently that 
 black steed and its restless rider had left batteries, squadrons 
 and staff behind, and disappeared in the direction of the 
 firing. 
 
 "The prairie was now alive with men, rushing in four or 
 five parallel columns toward this wooded hill where a cloud of 
 smoke hung and we heard the sound of battle. Incredible as
 
 BATTLE CORNER S. 33 
 
 it may seem, the infantry kept well up with the cavalry. I 
 remember one regiment on the right, which I took to be the 
 Eleventh Kansas, that passed us almost the moment we 
 stopped. They were leaning to the front as though a great 
 wind was sweeping them down, and their trail was strewn 
 with blankets and overcoats they had thrown away. 'Coffee 
 Pot,' of our company, remarked that they were 'taking a 
 splurge towards the New Jerusalem.' In a few minutes they 
 were under fire. Other regiments went by in much the same 
 way, and soon passed through a thin curtain of woods in our 
 front and engaged the enemy ; but the cavalry stayed out. 
 Four regiments and several battalions, as they came up, were 
 formed in line of battle as a reserve force, and sat on their 
 horses while the battle raged. I think ours was the only 
 Kansas regiment on the field that was not engaged. A host 
 of Kansas men whom we saw pass through that curtain of 
 woods had before sunset made their names immortal. 
 
 "In the course of an hour or two, when it became evident 
 we would not be ordered in, one of our men who was always 
 supposed to be well reconciled to peace, burst into tears and 
 
 sobbed out, 'Just our luck; there is no glory for us.' 
 
 On a later occasion, when the regiment was preparing to fight 
 dismounted, this same man gave a comrade five dollars for 
 the privilege of holding horses in the cover of a ravine in 
 the rear ! 
 
 "The firing was heavy all the afternoon, from the time 
 Blunt reached the field until after dark, except for occasional 
 intervals when the forces were changing position, after which 
 
 it would resume harder than ever. Once this hill seemed to 
 3
 
 34 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 lift, and the sound was like the explosion of a mine. Several 
 times there was a tearing sound, like the ripping of strong 
 cloth, but about half an hour before sunset there was a steady 
 roar like a waterfall, or train of cars, that lasted until dark. 
 
 " After this the firing gradually grew less, until there were 
 only a few fiery arches in the gathering darkness, and then 
 these ceased and the silence was painful. 
 
 "The next day we went to the field and saw the burial de- 
 tails putting the dead in trenches. The piles of dead where 
 the battery was fought over, near the Hall house, were fright- 
 ful. The ground was muddy with blood. Gen. Steen's body 
 was dressed for burial in a linen duster and laid in a rail pen. 
 Two or three crying women were moving about among the 
 throngs of men, but did not seem to be looking for anyone 
 in particular. Our Lawrence boys discovered in the person 
 of a dead rebel near the Rogers house, a former desperado of 
 Douglas county, whose sudden disappearance at the com- 
 mencement of the war had never been explained before. 
 
 " Down on the slope, between the orchard and the spring, 
 Hindman massed his men and sent them again and again 
 to take Blnnt's batteries, but they never passed a certain 
 point, and on that fatal line from which they fell back, every 
 ebb of the human tide left its ghastly wrecks. One could 
 have walked for a long distance on dead bodies. The 
 slaughter was terrific. What made the sight peculiarly dis- 
 tressing was the discovery that very many of the dead were 
 conscripts, and, strange as it may seem, Union men. They 
 had bitten off the bullets and fired blank cartridges at Blunt's 
 forces. There was the proof in the hundreds of bullets lying
 
 BATTLE COBNEB8. 35 
 
 at their feet. It was a hard fate to be driven thus against 
 those batteries, but even in that awful moment they refused 
 to fire on the old flag. They also perpetrated a ghastly joke 
 on Hindman. 
 
 "Almost every commissioned officer from Kansas who 
 fought at Prairie Grove became prominent in civil life, and a 
 large number have stamped their names indelibly on the his- 
 tory of the State. Plumb, Ross, Harvey and Bowen have all 
 been United States Senators, and the former has just been 
 elected unanimously for a third term. Ross is Governor of 
 New Mexico; Moonlight of Wyoming. Root became Minister 
 to Chili. Harvey and Crawford became Governors of the 
 State, and Stover Lieutenant-Governor. Hopkins made our 
 penitentiary the model penal institution of this country, and 
 was Railroad Commissioner when he died. Ewing, who had 
 been Chief Justice and who might have been United States 
 Senator if he had remained in Kansas, went to Ohio and to 
 Congress. Alfred Gray made the State Board of Agriculture. 
 H. H. Williams and Nate Adams became State-House Commis- 
 sioners. Sergeant Booth is Speaker of the House of Rep- 
 resentatives and Department Commander G. A. R. Jeff. 
 Clogston is now Judge Clogston, Supreme Court Commis- 
 sioner; Andy Hammond is a banker in New York city. Hayes 
 became State Treasurer. McAfee was Governor Crawford's 
 private secretary, and afterward Adjutant-General. Perry 
 Hutchinson, John Schilling, Cy. Leland, E. C. Manning, Ed. 
 M. Hewins, John K. Rankin, Dan. Home, W. B. Stone, Oliver 
 Barber and others have been Presidential Electors or mem- 
 bers of the Legislature again and again. Bassett and Nate
 
 36 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Price became district judges. Cloud has been a Federal of- 
 ficer much of the time since, and has always been prominent 
 in politics. Martin Anderson was State Treasurer. J. K. 
 Hudson, who, when a beardless boy, was chief of Weer's staff, 
 and who was under fire for six hours, has been under fire in 
 Kansas ever since, and is yet unscathed. Veale has been 
 in the Legislature whenever he wanted to be, since. Weer, a 
 splendid soldier and a man of exceptional brain-power, shared 
 the glory of the day equally with Blunt. The name of Rus- 
 sell, a perfect soldier who fell here,' has been given to one of 
 our counties. Cloud county was named for the colonel of the 
 gallant Second Kansas, which fought here. Private Sam 
 McFadden, who was brevetted captain for gallantry on this 
 field, has been a part of the State government ever since; first 
 as chief clerk in the Adjutant General's office, then as chief 
 clerk in the Treasurer's office, and for fifteen years past as 
 chief clerk in the Auditor's office, and is now Assistant Auditor 
 of State. These names prove that the 7th of December, 1862, 
 was a great day for Kansas and for Kansas men." 
 
 Our guide took his leave and returned across the valley to 
 his home and we rode back to Fayetteville by a better road 
 for the most part than we had come, turning aside before 
 we entered the town to visit the Silent City, 
 
 " Where the houses are all alike, you know, 
 All alike, in a row." 
 
 The steel-blue sky seemed to form a steeper and higher arch 
 to clear the mountain-tops as in the early morning, between 
 the moonlight and the dawn, we left Fayetteville by the 
 "Frisco" train, bound northward.
 
 BATTLE COENEE8. 37 
 
 Visitors to the battle-field of Pea Ridge have a choice of 
 several routes. They can reach Bentonville by the spur rail- 
 road which connects with the main line at Rogers, and drive 
 fourteen miles, thus going over the line of Sigel's march from 
 Cooper's farm, and seeing the ground of his operations on 
 the 6th of March, which are included in the battle of Pea 
 Ridge. Or they can reach the field in nine miles from Rogers ; 
 but to those who propose to reach the ground by the same 
 methods employed by those who made it famous in March, 
 1862, on foot or on horseback, the best way is to leave the 
 train at Garfield station, which is but a little over two miles 
 from the Elkhorn Tavern. Garfield is the successor of what 
 was a "tie station," called Blansett's, and its very name is an 
 evidence of certain changes that are occurring in "Battle 
 Corners." There is now the beginning of a little town in the 
 gravelly hills ; a place where a meal may be procured by 
 visitors not too fastidious to be spoken of as "You fellers" 
 by the young woman who acts as assistant landlady. Horses 
 and conveyances may also be procured in the neighborhood. 
 
 It was at Garfield that we arrived in an hour's run from 
 Fayetteville, and just as the round, white moon gave way to a 
 sun as round, but of red and fiery brightness. It was decided 
 to walk over to the field and take the chances of securing 
 horses at the Tavern to make a further survey. 
 
 The road ran all the way through the oak woods, and 
 seemed to lie on the summit of a high plateau. The frosty 
 air, the rising sun, and some old fields, by the way, brought 
 to the Commissioner's mind the scene on the morning of 
 Prairie Grove, when he saw the soldiers crawling out of the
 
 38 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 straw-stacks, the black guns of the battery waiting at the edge 
 of the woods, and the lines of cavalry and infantry waiting 
 for the word which came in that one dull boom in the south- 
 east. As we went on the traces of the battle became evident 
 in the broken tops of the old oaks, wounded so that a quar- 
 ter-century has not healed them. It is doubtful if a human 
 being ever entirely recovered from a square blow from an 
 ounce or half-ounce ball, and trees do not seem to outgrow 
 their battle-scars. Saying nothing of the effects of artillery 
 fire, the mark of a musket-ball on a tree is permanent. The 
 trees on the field of Pea Ridge have been carefully searched 
 for bullets as relics, and in some cases it has been found that 
 the ball after striking the tree has bounded back, but there is 
 the blue-black mark in the wood at the point where the mis- 
 sile ceased to penetrate. 
 
 While sauntering along looking at these traces of war in 
 the woods, we came suddenly and without warning into a 
 clearing, or rather cleared country, as it might be described, 
 miles in extent, and a large two-story white building, with a 
 piazza, fronting a high road running north and south at right 
 angles to the road on which we were traveling. The house was 
 the Elkhorn Tavern, and the highway was the " Wire road." 
 
 The present Elkhorn Tavern, it may be said, is the succes- 
 sor to the original tavern which gave its name, in Confederate 
 annals, to the battle which in the Union histories is called the 
 battle of Pea Ridge. The present is a close copy of the orig- 
 inal structure, even to a pair of elk-horns in the center of the 
 ridge of the roof. The outside chimneys of rock have even 
 been repeated, and the letters and figures "J. M. 1885," high
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 39 
 
 up on the south chimney, would indicate that as the year of 
 restoration. The tavern was established fifty years ago, which 
 seems to have been the period of the white settlement of this 
 part of Arkansas, by an Indiana immigrant named Cox, and 
 his son is the present landlord of the Elkhorn. Three genera- 
 tions of the Cox family have thus called the wayside hostel 
 their home. 
 
 In the great days of the "Wire road" the Elkhorn must 
 have been a famous-stopping place, as Bentonville, the nearest 
 town until within a few years, is fourteen miles away. Many 
 an honest man, in the old days, must have satisfied his hunger 
 and quenched his thirst at the Elkhorn; and from its neighbor- 
 hood to the Indian Territory, and its nearness to the State 
 line of Arkansas and Missouri, it is reasonably certain that 
 many a scoundrel, keeping one eye on his plate and the other 
 on the door, dispatched his meal under its roof in fear and 
 haste and went on his evil ways perchance with a stolen beast 
 between his legs, and prudently unquestioned by his host. 
 
 Very pleasant on the December morning of our visit looked 
 the Elkhorn and its surroundings. The day seemed to have 
 dropped from the middle of April or even May into this last 
 week of December. The sun was bright in a spotless sky, and 
 the illusion of Spring was the further perfected by the green 
 wheat-fields which spread away from the Elkhorn to the south- 
 ward, being the largest scope of plow-land we had seen in 
 Arkansas. The barns and stables of the tavern rose on the 
 opposite side of the road, and a little to the north, leaving 
 the view unbroken of the road leading to Garfield station over 
 which we had come. The next house to the north and near
 
 40 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 at hand, was a log cabin inhabited by a Mr. Cox, a brother of 
 the thrifty host of the Elkhorn, but to whom Fortune seemed 
 to have shown the back or convex side of her hand. Like all 
 the men of the Elkhorn neighborhood we met, he was meager 
 and of sorrowful countenance, even as Don Quixote de la 
 Mancha. 
 
 The first thing we met at the tavern was a disappointment. 
 Expecting to procure horses there to ride over the field, we 
 were informed by Miss Cox, the eldest daughter of the house, 
 who seemed to be the sole occupant of the inn, that her father 
 and mother had gone to town with the only shod animals, and 
 that the numerous other horses of all sizes and ages about the 
 premises were all smooth, and not fit to be ridden. The prac- 
 tice of keeping a great drove of horses about, each of whom, 
 for some separate and distinct reason, is not fit to either ride 
 or drive, is a peculiarity of agricultural life all over the West 
 and South. 
 
 As a walk over the whole field would involve from twenty- 
 five to thirty miles' travel, the idea of exploration was 
 abandoned. 
 
 At Prairie Grove as at Wilson's Creek, it may be said of 
 both armies that they have "carved not a line and raised not a 
 stone," but for some reason the Confederates seem to have 
 reoccupied the field of the battle of Elkhorn Tavern or of 
 Pea Ridge. A few years ago, in the presence of a great as- 
 semblage of people, Gov. Ross of Texas being one of the 
 orators, a monument was dedicated to the Confederate dead. 
 It stands near the Tavern, and was first visited. It is a slen- 
 der shaft of white marble, such as may be seen in many ceme-
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 41 
 
 teries erected by individuals, and the work was done by some 
 stonecutter in Bentonville. Considering that it is supposed 
 to represent the generous remembrance of three States, it is 
 not a magnificent monument, and certainly not commensurate 
 with the hardy and patient valor of the men it is designed 
 to commemorate. It stands in an inclosure surrounded by a 
 rail fence, a little pasture in fact, and we noticed that the 
 foundation-stone was the native friable sandstone of the 
 neighborhood, which will crumble to pieces in a few years, in 
 which event the monument will fall to the ground. 
 
 The four faces bear inscriptions, one reciting that the 
 monument honors all the Confederate dead who fell in the 
 battle ; another that it is sacred to the memory of Gen. Ben. 
 McCulloch, of Texas ; another that Gen. James Mclntosh, of 
 Arkansas, died on this field ; another that Gen. James Y. 
 Slack, of Missouri, here met his fate. The inscriptions con- 
 vey the impressions to be obtained also from all historical 
 sources, that Gen. McCulloch was a bold soldier, and Gen. 
 Mclntosh a greatly beloved man. 
 
 We sat down by the monument and saw in it an emblem of 
 the ill-fated Confederacy, which called out so much bravery, 
 so much sacrifice, so much enthusiasm, so much poetry, as 
 typified by the white marble shaft and its sounding inscrip- 
 tions, yet, after all, based on nothing tangible, as shown in 
 the crumbling stone at the foot and surrounded during all its 
 history by a certain squalor, rudeness, and poverty of re- 
 sources, which could neither build nor rebuild ; rendering 
 courage futile, and even victory useless. 
 
 It must be confessed that these and all other serious re-
 
 42 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 flections vanished in a short time. The sunlight and the 
 warmth, as of May, was very seductive. There were some 
 black walnut trees near by, the ground beneath covered with 
 the black-hulled fruit, and a little farther on there were trees 
 covered with persimmons. Black walnuts and persimmons 
 and a sunny day, these made a couple of middle-aged men 
 forget wars and rumors of wars, and things present and things 
 to come, and to find for a time that fountain of youth which 
 Ponce de Leon sought in vain. 
 
 Resuming our wanderings we noted the high, wooded and 
 rocky hill to the west, and as one may say, in the rear of the 
 tavern, and climbed to the top of it. Its natural ruggedness 
 on its east front has been increased by quarrying operations 
 in the soft sandstone, perhaps to obtain material for the big 
 chimneys of the Elkhorn. This hill is the easternmost of a 
 high range of hills sometimes called Sugar Mountains. It 
 runs off toward the southwest in a succession of conical for- 
 ested hills, and toward the northwest becomes higher, rougher 
 and more heavily timbered. This hill commands a view of the 
 ground occupied by the Union forces. It was itself occupied 
 by the Confederates in their advance, and from it they were 
 driven in the closing hours of the battle. 
 
 The Elkhorn Tavern may be said to be on the dividing line 
 between a good country and a very rough and poor one. Such 
 a thing as a good farm or a moderate competency does not ex- 
 ist north of the Tavern for some distance. The "Wire road," 
 after passing the Tavern, drops down a tremendously steep 
 hill and enters a wooded ravine, really a wooded canon, Cross- 
 Timber Hollow. The term Cross Hollows, which several times
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 43 
 
 occurs on the map of the Battle Corners country, means what 
 it says : a point where two great gashes in the face of Mother 
 Earth cross each other ; or where, seemingly, four hollows con- 
 verge. Although the sun was now high in the heavens it did 
 not yet penetrate this narrow and somber valley, nearly filled 
 by the road. At the foot of the steep hill there was formerly 
 a tannery. All above ground evidences of the tannery have 
 now disappeared, but by searching we found the old vats now 
 filled with grass and bushes. There was not much of human 
 life stirring in the gorge ; a man drove along with a collection 
 of bones, horse-hide and ropes, in the shape of team and har- 
 ness, and a deformed woman limped past, with one dull glance. 
 
 The popular tendency to "locate," in Western parlance, 
 on poor land, must have puzzled many observers. On the fair 
 lands stretching to the southward from the Tavern, there was 
 scarcely a house visible, while as far as we walked along this 
 Canon Diablo, the road was lined with cabins, and these cabins 
 were filled with people. These were the " poor whites," of the 
 same family as the "Crackers," the "Sand-hillers," the "Clay- 
 eaters," everywhere, regardless of altitude, latitude, longitude, 
 soil, climate or circumstances, the same. Once it was said 
 that they were the result of the presence of black slavery, but 
 slavery has been dead twenty-five years and over, and still 
 these people exist, the great American ethnological enigma. 
 
 Stopping at several of these cabins, as we retraced our 
 steps toward the tavern, we endeavored to gain some idea of 
 the local understanding of the battle. While standing inside 
 the door of one of these habitations, talking to a family 
 group, we were astonished momentarily by finding ourselves
 
 44 NANS AS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 in almost total darkness. The door had been shut, and we had 
 forgotten that the home of the "Cracker" has no windows. 
 
 As we worked our way toward the tavern, the standard of 
 intelligence seemed to rise, and we finally listened to an old 
 man who opened his mouth and spake: "Right h'yer," said 
 he, indicating a wooded ridge running off to the southeast, 
 "Gineral Price tuk his cannon off en the road. He palled his 
 cannon along up the ridge by hand, and ever sence, we've 
 called this Price's Peak. My wife's father, Passen Williams, 
 was a smart man and a powerful preacher, an' I've heern him 
 say that when Gineral Price cut loose with his cannon, he 
 killed fifteen hundred Federals in fifteen minutes. After that, 
 he killed some mo', but not so many." 
 
 Thanking our aged friend for his cheering information, we 
 proceeded along the " Wire road," as so many people interested 
 in war had done before us, and from a wretched hovel, in the 
 midst of a correspondingly miserable field, a boy came forth 
 to ask us to buy relics of the battle-ground. He had a rather 
 good, boyish face, but had the sharp whine, that can turn 
 easily enough into a curse the voice of the mendicant the 
 world over. He followed along, and we asked him if many 
 men had been killed thereabouts, and he answered : " Oh, lots 
 of the Ninth Iowa, a little ways up the road." 
 
 Taking, thus the Hotel Elkhorn as a center, and making 
 little excursions therefrom, the stage on which was performed 
 the last act of what should be called by everybody the battle 
 of Elkhorn Tavern became familiar. 
 
 Not far to the east of the tavern, on the road by which 
 we came from Garfield station, we had noticed a cluster of
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 45 
 
 locust trees, which is, like an old and abandoned orchard, a 
 sure sign of a former human habitation. Why the locust, left 
 to itself, does not run wild and spread over the country, is a 
 mystery, but it does not. When fire destroys the roof-tree the 
 locust stands shriveled and scorched but living for years to 
 mark the spot and the calamity. When the family deserts 
 the hearthstone, and the house is left to silence and decay, 
 and the floors sink into the cellar, and the roof settles to the 
 floor, the locust remains and scatters its white and clustered 
 blossoms as of yore. These locusts mark the spot where 
 stood at the time of the battle the "Clemens house," and the 
 fields across the road were fields then, and do not cover a 
 much larger area now than then. 
 
 Of this part of the field, the Elkhorn Tavern is the "head 
 center." The last fighting of the battle was immediately about 
 it, and nearly every general on both sides at one time or 
 another during the three days' fighting visited it. There 
 General Van Dorn had for one night his headquarters. With- 
 in a few hundred feet of it Churchill Clark who seems to 
 have been the favorite artillerist of the Confederate army 
 was killed, and also another distinguished officer, Col. Rives. 
 So. while the accident of the "smooth" horses prevented our 
 going to Leetown and Pratt's store and the scenes of the first 
 fighting done by Sigel's people, and the ground of Gen. Albert 
 Pike's remarkable operations, which are described in a yet 
 more remarkable report, and the spots, now marked, where 
 Generals McCulloch and Mclntosh were killed, we made a care- 
 ful study of the ground about the tavern, and at the tavern
 
 46 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 we found an unexpected help to the understanding of the 
 whole three-days struggle. 
 
 The reception-room, if that high-sounding name may be 
 applied to it, of the Elkhorn Tavern, has become a sort of mu- 
 seum as visitors to the field have become numerous, and on the 
 wall hung a blue-print of the field with the positions of the 
 contending armies on the three days, drawn by Mr. Hunt P. 
 Wilson, of St. Louis, who was present at the battle with 
 Guibor's Confederate battery, assisted by Gen. John W. Noble, 
 at the time of the battle adjutant of the Third Iowa cavalry, 
 and by Mr. Joe C. Cox, of the Elkhorn Tavern. While this 
 is hardly a non-partisan and impartial blue-print, it is of 
 value to the visitor, besides being an ornament to the room. 
 It was not the only ornament, however ; over the mantel was 
 a picture rudely representing the moment when the Confed- 
 erates captured the tavern. Gen. Price, wearing a white suit 
 and with his arm in a sling is cheering on his Missourians. 
 A figure on horseback, supposed to be Capt. Churchill Clark, 
 is directing the movements of a battery near the tavern ; 
 shells are bursting all over the neighborhood, and there is a 
 great deal of smoke. 
 
 The story of the battle of Pea Ridge is somewhat compli- 
 cated, as it consisted of three different series of fights. Gen. 
 Curtis commenced concentrating his army, which was scattered 
 about the country for subsistence, on the line of Sugar-creek 
 valley, on the 5th, and had two divisions in line by noon on 
 the 6th. General Sigel, ordered up from Cooper's farm near 
 Bentonville, lingered as usual, was attacked on the road, and 
 it was necessary to send troops to help him through, which
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 47 
 
 resulted in tight No. 1. In the meantime Gen. Curtis, foreseeing 
 a flank movement, had blockaded the woods to the west of 
 his position with fallen timber, but while it delayed, it did not 
 prevent the movement by Price on the Bentonville and Cassville 
 road to the north and rear of the Union army. He struck 
 the Telegraph or "Wire road," north of the Elkhorn Tavern, 
 turned into that road and moved south directly on the tavern, 
 sending batteries up a ridge commanding the tavern and the 
 plateau on which it is situated, as narrated by the son-in-law 
 of "Passen Williams." In the meantime, that portion of the 
 Confederate army commanded by McCulloch and Mclntosh, 
 including the unique Gen. Pike and his Indians, was encoun- 
 tered near Leetown, and here the Indians ran over a Union 
 battery, ran back, and finally ran off. The regular Confeder- 
 ate forces commanded by McCulloch met the Union forces 
 commanded by Gen. Asboth, Col. Osterhaus, Col. Jeff. C. Davis 
 and others. This was a second battle, and resulted in a change 
 of front from the Sugar-creek line, substantially from south 
 to west. This battle was ended as far as the Confederates 
 were concerned, by the death of Generals Mclntosh and 
 McCulloch; the latter being killed by Peter Pelican, a soldier 
 of the Thirty-sixth Illinois, who served as a private till the 
 end of the war. Beginning on the morning of the 7th, and 
 continuing with great severity, and independent of the Lee- 
 town battle, occurred the fighting between Carr's division, 
 and Price's artillery and infantry, all Missourians. This was 
 the third fight in the series. Price's batteries, Gnibor's, 
 McDonald's, Bledsoe's and Wade's went to the east of the 
 "Wire road;" a large force of. infantry under Little and Slack
 
 48 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 went to the west of the road; and our advance, consisting of 
 the Ninth Iowa and Boyd's Missourians, stationed on the road 
 between the tavern and the tanyard, was between two fires. 
 Here Lieut. Col. Herron, the Capt. Herron of Wilson's creek, 
 afterward the Gen. Herron of Prairie Grove, had his horse 
 killed, and was himself wounded and taken prisoner. His 
 regiment, the Ninth Iowa, sustained a loss in killed and 
 wounded of 213 men. 
 
 The lines facing north and east inclosing the Clemens 
 fields were held by Gen. G. M. Dodge, who was wounded, and 
 whose horse was struck by twenty musket-balls. The result 
 of the combat on the 7th was, that after desperate fighting, 
 the Union lines were forced back past the Elkhorn Tavern ; 
 General Van Dorn establishing his headquarters at the tavern. 
 The hill to the west of the tavern was held by the Confederates. 
 On the night of the 7th, the divisions of Jeff. C. Davis and 
 Sigel joined Carr's, still holding on near the tavern, General 
 Curtis reasoning that with four divisions he could hold the 
 ground from which one division could hardly be driven the day 
 before. All the artillery, on both sides, was brought up, and 
 at sunrise on the morning of the 8th the battle was renewed. 
 Both armies had slept without fires during the night, and 
 Editor Kennedy, now of Springfield, Mo., then of Guibor's 
 battery, told me that on waking the next morning he saw two 
 or three dead men lying near him. The fight was ours from 
 the start on that morning. Greusel's Thirty-sixth Illinois 
 carried the high hill; the Union artillery fire was overwhelming, 
 and at about 10 o'clock the Confederates retreated, Price 
 taking the road east, then called the Van Winkle road, from
 
 BATTLE COBNEBS. 49 
 
 its use by a famous lumber contractor of that name, but which 
 now forms part of the road to Garfield station. This portion 
 of Van Dorn's army passed entirely around the Union army. 
 The other portion fell back to the southward, from whence 
 they came. The Confederate forces were divided. A great 
 cavalry general might have pursued one or both fragments 
 with destructive effect, but Philip H. Sheridan was in those 
 days a quartermaster. Of Gen. Curtis it must be said, that 
 while it has been stated that he was whipped at Pea Ridge, 
 or at least thought he was, there is nothing in the official re- 
 ports, or in the local traditions, to indicate anything of the 
 kind. He did not happen to be a popular favorite during the 
 war. It did not occur to anybody to call him a "Little 
 Napoleon," or to insist that his blunders were evidences of 
 a great military mind; but he was, nevertheless, a pure patriot 
 and a good soldier. When the living Union raises a monu- 
 ment on the field of Pea Ridge, as the dead Confederacy has 
 done, his name should be remembered. 
 
 The nucleus of the Confederate army at Pea Ridge seems 
 to have been the army that fought at Wilson's Creek. Gen. 
 Slack, who was killed at Pea Ridge, was at Wilson's Creek, and 
 Col. Hubert fell at the head of the Third Louisiana regiment, 
 which he commanded at Wilson's Creek, and which will be 
 found mentioned in these "memoirs." The Union army, on 
 the other hand, was a new army. Gen. Sigel, Col. Osterhaus, 
 Col. Carr and a few other officers had taken part in the Wilson's 
 Creek campaign, but the mass of the troops came from be- 
 yond the Mississippi, and returned thither. One regiment 
 must be excepted, the Thirty-seventh Illinois, commanded by
 
 50 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Col. Charles James Black, since Commissioner of Pensions, 
 which command remained west of the river and fought bravely 
 at Prairie Grove. Asboth and Osterhaus distinguished them- 
 selves in the Vicksburg campaign under Grant. Col. Jeff. C. 
 Davis afterward became a Major General and commander of 
 the Fourteenth Army Corps. For two years the writer was 
 accustomed to see him every day, a silent, lonesome-looking 
 man, with sharp features, cold eyes of an uncertain color, and a 
 complexion as if suffering from a perpetual case of jaundice. 
 He lived entirely in his headquarters, and seemed to take very 
 little comfort in his existence. The men attributed his solemn 
 looks to his having killed Gen. Nelson, an act, however, which 
 every soldier approved. In a volunteer army, speeches from 
 officers of high rank to the men are not uncommon, but Gen. 
 Davis is known to have addressed the rank and file but once. 
 When the news came that the National flag was again waving 
 over Fort Sumter, he rode, as if moved by a sudden impulse, 
 into the midst of the division, and as the men gathered about 
 him he in a few words announced the fact. He was a lieuten- 
 ant of artillery in Fort Sumter when it was surrendered by 
 Major Robert Anderson. He was much respected by the 
 soldiers of his command, whose eulogy was that he was " a 
 good marcher and a good feeder." He has been dead for 
 some years. 
 
 We lingered about the Elkhorn till the sun was sinking; 
 making one trip over the broken ground to the northwest in 
 the woods where a board nailed to a tree announced that 
 "Here fell General Slack." Near this tree the Commissioner 
 secured a memento of the field, as he did from the spot where
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 51 
 
 some yet unfilled trenches by the roadside mark the place 
 where the Ninth Iowa fought and where so many died. Mr. 
 Cox said the field had been scoured by relic-hunters; he 
 thought that since the coming of the railroad, four or five 
 tons of shot and shell and bullets had been carried away. 
 
 General officers and others, in their reports of battles, 
 frequently omit to make any mention of the weather. Of 
 Pea Ridge, it may be said that on the 5th, the day before, it 
 snowed, and was bitter cold. During the days of the fighting 
 it was chilly and the nights cold. On the flank march by 
 Price, it is said that many of the thinly-clad Confederates lay 
 down on the ground and never rose again; they were chilled to 
 death. So close together were the opposing lines that a cais- 
 son of a Union battery was driven into the Confederate lines 
 after dark and captured. Of course no fires could be kindled. 
 But when the battle was over, the weather grew warmer and it 
 rained. How often does that idea of the forgiveness of Nature 
 come back to us. Again and again after the battles of the 
 great war, the rain came softly in the night, dropping down 
 in darkness to the tree-tops, and then dropping down from 
 limb to limb, from leaf to leaf, to the ground. Dropping, 
 dropping down, to cool the parched tongues of wounded men; 
 to check the fever's flame ; to wash the blood from drawn 
 faces and from matted, gory hair. Dropping down in heavenly 
 mercy to put out the cruel fire that had started among the 
 leaves, crackling and creeping nearer to those who could not 
 drag themselves out of its way. So sang the rain in the trees, 
 so it pattered on the ground, so it gurgled as it trickled into 
 streams in the ravines, that the dying heard in it familiar
 
 52 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 voices, and there were those who heard in it even the singing 
 of "the choir invisible." So came the rain over the wide bat- 
 tle-field of Pea Ridge; so it fell on hillside and field. It 
 washed the blood from the stained earth, and filled the ruts 
 made by the cannon wheels, and ran from these into the little 
 hollows, and then into the great ravines, and then into the 
 great Cross-Timber Hollow, and on to the river, and far, far 
 away to the Mississippi and to the sea. Then in a month 
 after the battle came the Spring, filling the forest with green 
 leaves, and then the Autumn, to sprinkle the leaves upon the 
 earth. So it has gone on, Spring and Autumn, since, till now 
 there are but these old, crippled and shattered oaks, to groan 
 and creak in the blasts of the wintry night, as if talking to 
 each other of all they saw in the great battle, and all that was 
 dared, and suffered, and done. 
 
 It was dusk by the time we had reached Garfield, but there 
 was time for supper before the "Frisco" train came up from 
 the south, and somewhere about midnight we were out of the 
 woods and amid the sounds and lights of Springfield, and 
 while we had been but a few days "off the road," the electric 
 lights and bells seemed like things long lost and come back 
 again. In the morning we woke up and discovered that cer- 
 tain carefully laid plans about a careful study of the battle of 
 Wilson's Creek had, somehow, got lost. The guides we were 
 to meet, the authorities we were to consult, and various other 
 items in an elaborate program, were, we found, to be omitted. 
 Of course a conveyance could be procured; we were back again 
 where money could procure anything, and we were not de-
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 53 
 
 pendent on Farmer Cox's attention to having his horses shod; 
 but the drivers of "livery rigs" are not the most learned, in- 
 structive or reliable guides in existence, and it happened the 
 driver who guided our chariot had never even visited the 
 battle-field. 
 
 The fair weather of the day at Pea Ridge continued, and 
 the drive of ten miles southwest was a pleasant one. The 
 country would have been, had it not been for the numerous 
 streams, an open, rolling prairie, but the growth of brush and 
 trees along these streams fairly divided the land into what 
 New-Englanders call "woodland" and "tillage." It was all in 
 such cultivation as one may see in the old counties of Illinois 
 and Indiana, and, it being Saturday, the roads were lined with 
 farmers coming to town. They looked like Ohio and Penn- 
 sylvania people, and every wagon was loaded with something 
 for the Springfield market. The road has been changed many 
 times, and we did not know whether we were on Lyon's road, 
 or not; we only knew that it was the "near" road to Wilson's 
 creek. Guide-boards were unusually numerous, but none told 
 the distance or direction to the battle-field; yet such a guide- 
 board would have answered more questions than any other. 
 After driving up and down hill for a certain length of time, we 
 felt, rather than knew, that we were on the field of Wilson's 
 Creek. 
 
 Here was a valley between two sharp prairie ridges not 
 a creek-bottom, exactly, as that implies a level surface, but a 
 broken valley a succession of ridges, their points to the 
 south, and covered with brush so dense it seemed that a rabbit 
 could hardly make his way through it. Along the east side of
 
 54 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 this brushy region flowed Wilson's creek a bright, rippling, 
 clear stream, lacking only a mill to be called a mill-stream. 
 This was the upper part of the valley ; to the south there 
 were cornfields, and a body of heavy timber. The road went 
 down the hill and straight across the valley, crossing a small 
 stream called Skegg's branch, which empties into Wilson's 
 creek, and then ran up a sharp ascent to the open prairie, past 
 a many-pinnacled white cottage. There are several houses 
 about. At the time of the battle, it is said, there was but one 
 settler in the neighborhood a Mr. McNairy, who, finding his 
 dooryard was likely to be the location of a civil war, packed 
 up and went back to that land of refuge Indiana. We 
 found that the house of many gables was beyond the limits 
 of our investigation. All the holy ground was in the narrow 
 valley we had crossed. W T e turned back and found, near the 
 creek, a road leading up a ridge through the brush it was a 
 mere trace and passed a deserted wooden shanty, coming out 
 in an open space near the summit of the ridge. This open 
 space was a sterile expanse of an acre or so, covered with flat 
 rocks, with here and there a stunted bush; a veritable "blasted 
 heath." At the higher and upper end of the open space there 
 was a pile of loose stones; not a cairn, but rather as if one 
 had been piled there and then scattered about. On one stone, 
 "Newsom," late of "Hughes's" regiment, Missouri (Confed- 
 erate) troops, had carved his name. This is said to be the 
 spot where Gen. Nathaniel Lyon who, had he lived, would 
 have been the Stonewall Jackson of the Union army sank 
 from his horse, dead. And this ridge is marked on Confeder- 
 ate maps as "Bloody Hill." From it may be seen all there
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 55 
 
 was of the battle of Wilson's Creek, and that was very simple. 
 Gen. Lyon marched out from Springfield, passed through the 
 enemy's pickets, gained these high grounds, and was almost 
 upon the enemy, who were camped along the creek to the 
 south, before they were aware of it. Gen. Sigel had marched, 
 meanwhile, by another road, to gain the enemy's rear. He 
 did so, made a slight attack, was attacked in turn, lost his 
 guns, and went back to Springfield, arriving there as early as 
 nine o'clock in the morning. This left the entire Confederate 
 force free to attack Lyon, and Lyon's slender line, stretching 
 across these ridges, charging and being charged, till, after the 
 death of Lyon, they left the field and returned to Springfield, 
 having fought from sunrise to twelve o'clock this made up 
 the battle of Wilson's Creek. 
 
 The field will always be of interest to Kansans, for of the 
 four full volunteer infantry regiments who fought here, two 
 were from Kansas, and they were the First and Second; here, 
 too, Iowa had her First, and loyal Missouri her First. These 
 were the " first-fruits " offered by Kansas on the altar of our 
 common country. These were the "boys" who went into the 
 war before the days of calculation; before drafts or bounties 
 had been heard of. The Kansas "boys" went into the battle 
 raw volunteers, they came out of it veterans. They fought 
 beside regular soldiers of the United States army, and they 
 fought as long and as well. The battle was a field of honor 
 to all concerned. From it came seven Major Generals and 
 thirteen Brigadier Generals of the Union army, and of these 
 the two Kansas regiments furnished their quota, when it is 
 remembered that with Lyon's column there were three battal-
 
 56 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 ions of regular infantry and two light batteries, the officers of 
 which were more naturally in the line of promotion. 
 
 -The great figure of the battle was Gen. Lyon ; his death 
 sanctified the field. If every other event that occurred there 
 were forgotten, it would still be remembered that Lyon died 
 there. Kansas in her proud sorrow remembers that it was as 
 he led the Second Kansas to one more desperate charge that 
 he fell. 
 
 The volunteer force engaged was a very small one ; to all 
 it was their first pitched battle; all were young; and the ex- 
 perience of one young volunteer was the experience of all. 
 The field was so limited that what one saw all saw. As speak- 
 ing not only for the Iowa volunteer, but for the Kansas vol- 
 unteer, and for the " brave boys of '61," who, as a triumph- 
 ant melody of the war period assured us, were the boys 
 who feared no noise, though they were far from home, let us 
 give heed to 
 
 PBIVATE IBONQUILL'S NABBATIVE. 
 
 "The First Iowa infantry, that marched with Gen. Lyon, 
 was composed of select young men from the leading families 
 of Iowa. The rush to get into the regiment was so great 
 that in many instances money was paid, and social and family 
 influence worked to obtain admission, even as a private sol- 
 dier. Mr. Seward, President Lincoln's Secretary of State, 
 having announced that the war would be over in ninety days, 
 the boys all wanted to get into the regiment, thinking it would 
 be the only Iowa regiment, and they worked on the same 
 principle as many do who desire to be made delegates to 
 State Conventions or get into the Legislature, or into an office
 
 BATTLE COENERS. 57 
 
 of trust and profit. The companies were full to overflowing, 
 and, in the process of making up, many young men were re- 
 jected, because they did not come up to their comrades' ideas 
 of strength, activity and style, and when the final winnowing 
 process came, being the examination which the United States 
 army officer made, those retained were the athletic and com- 
 panionable. 
 
 "Along in July, of 1861, during a campaign in which they 
 displayed a wond'erful durability, their term of service ex- 
 pired, and yet they had been engaged in no notable battle, 
 nor had the war been closed in ninety days. The officers of 
 the regiment in consultation with Gen. Lyon promised him 
 that it would stay until such a decisive battle had been fought 
 as would give Gen. Lyon the power to hold his position, and 
 time to be reinforced. 
 
 "About the 1st of August, 1861, large bodies of Confederate 
 volunteers from northern Arkansas and southern Missouri 
 occupied the line in front of Gen. Lyon, south of Springfield, 
 Mo. About sundown on the 1st of August, we were drawn up 
 in line, marched all night, came to the enemy at 9 o'clock 
 in the morning of the 2d, southwest of Springfield, and 
 fought the battle of McCulla's store. On the next day, Satur- 
 day, the 3d, other engagements in that neighborhood took 
 place, and on Sunday morning we started back to Spring- 
 field; the loss of the enemy being, as was then stated, from 
 175 to 200. The weather, for five days, had been terrifically 
 hot. Gen. Lyon appeared fatigued and worried. Gen. Totten, 
 who commanded the artillery, was in a chronic state of anger. 
 His lurid oaths could be heard all day, and the private soldiers
 
 58 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 listened with a strange dread when they heard his deep voice 
 requesting the artillery boys to do something in about the 
 following way : ' Forward that caisson, you, sir.' 
 
 "The boys in the First Iowa Infantry ranged in age from 
 nineteen to twenty-five; perhaps the majority was under 
 twenty-two. It seemed as if the younger the soldier, the bet- 
 ter he stood the trip. Returning to Springfield, our regiment 
 was sent out to the south of the city and were used princi- 
 pally as outlying pickets, being sent far but in companies 
 at night, in supporting distance of other troops, and brought 
 back at daytime to sleep in the shade of the sumacs and 
 bushes near camp. Our rations were so diminished that the 
 boys felt dissatisfied, being practically reduced to corn-meal 
 and beef. As the days went by, strange rumors of the number 
 of Confederates around us began to circulate in camp. Every 
 night while on picket large bodies of reconnoitering cavalry 
 appeared. When going on picket, a company tore down rail 
 fence and built bastions. The rations were supplemented at 
 night by the sending of details down into the heart of large 
 cornfields; and with rails roasting large quantities of green 
 corn, it being the rations of the pickets. The condition of the 
 moon was that it rose late, and this assisted the cavalry to 
 reconnoiter; ere morning they stole back. Sometimes during 
 the night before one of the rail bastions a fusilade began, 
 and the pickets were reinforced. And frequently a straggling 
 Confederate crawling through a cornfield would shoot a 
 picket, and frequently one or two from a picket-post would 
 crawl out and unhorse a conspicuous cavalryman. 
 
 "The 9th of August, 1861, was an exceedingly hot day. All
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 59 
 
 night before we had been on picket, and with difficulty some 
 of the companies escaped being taken in; and the company 
 to which I belonged, being out about three miles from the 
 city, fell back half a mile to the corner of a large cornfield and 
 barricaded the road and built rail pens, working nearly all 
 night. In the morning everything was clear before us, and 
 we were called in. There was great commotion in the city, 
 and rumors that the city was to be attacked by the Rebels 
 within twenty-four hours; that Fremont had refused to re- 
 inforce the line; that Springfield was to be abandoned, and 
 that we were to march to Rolla to defend the terminus of the 
 railroad, where fortifications had just begun. Shortly before 
 sundown the bugle was blown at our regimental headquarters 
 south of town, and the companies fell immediately in line 
 separately. There were no tents or regimental quarters, be- 
 cause we had no tents and were doing our sleeping out in the 
 open air; and the companies' positions were marked by the 
 fires where the companies' kettles were standing. Each com- 
 pany fell in under arms. After standing there a few min- 
 utes, General Lyon was seen approaching, riding his large 
 dapple-gray horse. The companies were formed separately, 
 there being quite an interval in some places between them. 
 Lyon rode past the companies and made a little speech to 
 each. We couldn't hear what he said to the companies on 
 either side of us, owing to the distance apart. When he came 
 to our company his words were: 'Men, we are going to have 
 a fight. We will march out in a short time. Don't shoot un- 
 til you get orders. Fire low don't aim higher than their 
 knees; wait until they get close; don't get scared; it's no
 
 60 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 part of a soldier's duty to get scared.' This was all he said, 
 and I believe it is a verbatim report; for we often afterwards 
 talked it over and compared notes, practically committing it 
 to memory. The absurdity of the last expression struck 
 everybody that it 'was no part of a soldier's duty to get 
 scared.' His tone of voice was so low that it appeared as if 
 he were talking under exhaustion. He was dressed in full 
 uniform buttoned up to the chin. There was no enthusiasm 
 in it, and in fact the boys thought it was a poor effort. None 
 of us liked him, and if the great majority had not had sweet- 
 hearts back in Iowa we would have left him long before. He 
 always wore a solemn, hard-working expression. He worked 
 very hard, regardless of hours, and expected all of his men to 
 do the same. He had no compliment or kind words for any- 
 body, and talked to his soldiers the same as he did to a mule. 
 " Among the men he had bitter enemies for his occasional 
 severity and want of consideration. The boys thought as 
 they had agreed to stay with him voluntarily that he ought to 
 do better. He seemed to go upon the theory that he did not 
 want his men to think kindly of him; that what he wanted of 
 them was to have them understand that he -was not to be 
 fooled with, and that as they were in the employ of the Gov- 
 ernment it was his duty to see that the Government got every- 
 thing out of them that could be got for the time being. On 
 the other hand, the boys felt that strange confidence which 
 soldiers always feel in an officer whom they believe under- 
 stands his business. So that the speech that General Lyon 
 made produced no particular effect one way or another, and 
 had he not been killed, would have been forgotten. In fact,
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 61 
 
 the boys did not like Lyon. They wanted a fight so that they 
 could go home creditably, to themselves and their sweethearts, 
 and they knew just exactly how to fire a musket, and they 
 did not intend to be scared, whether it was part of their duty 
 or not. 
 
 " Soon after this time, when Lyon had gone, ammunition 
 was distributed in large quantities and a large covered army- 
 wagon drove up with a sergeant, who asked how many men 
 there were for duty in our company, and on being answered, 
 threw out into the bushes and grass an equal number of 
 loaves of bread. These loaves of bread were about the size 
 of an ordinary wooden bucket, perhaps not so high, but fully 
 as large through, and had a crust brown and solid of about an 
 inch thick all around. My action regarding my loaf was per- 
 haps descriptive of many others ; I plugged it like a water- 
 melon and ate my supper out of the center. I then fried up a 
 lot of beef, crammed the center of the loaf with it, poured in 
 all the gravy, took off my gun-sling, ran it through the lip of 
 the loaf, filled my canteen, filled my cartridge-box and pockets 
 with cartridges, and was ready to march. My clothing, while 
 somewhat different from the rest, was of the same general 
 description. We had no uniforms ; I had on shoes without 
 stockings. While marching through Dade county I ran out 
 of clothes and secured a pair of winter breeches with heavy, 
 coarse, cotton 'nigger-cloth' lining. On the outer seam 
 there was a slight fringe, which gave it the appearance of 
 Indian leggings. The boys said that I was the 'Belle of the 
 Mohawk Vale' a song then new and quite popular. The 
 hat I wore was a white wool one, quite advanced in years, that
 
 62 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 had belonged to one of the enemy in a former skirmish, and 
 of the broad-brim type so much affected by horse-thieves in 
 Kansas at the present day. The balance of my clothing was 
 a heavy wool mule-colored shirt with breast pockets, each of 
 which would hold twenty rounds. My musket bore the stamp 
 date of '1829,' was long in the barrel, of vast bore, vigorous 
 recoil, and substantial construction. It had been a flint-lock; 
 but on the side of the breech where the priming went a brass 
 plug had been fused in, and a percussion-lock attached. 
 There were officers in our regiment who had scaled Chapul- 
 tepec, the palace-home of the Aztecs, and who told us stories 
 of Buena Vista and Molina del Key. One of our buglers had 
 sounded the charge at Palo Alto, and one of our fifers told us 
 stories of the wars with the Seminoles, in the everglades of 
 Florida. 
 
 " After sundown, as soon as the men could get their lunches 
 and fill their pockets with ammunition, we marched into the 
 city of Springfield, not knowing where we were going. We 
 soon found that we were to go southwest. The city was in 
 frightful disorder. Every available means of transportation 
 was being used by the merchants on the square to load up 
 and haul off their goods. We had brought nothing along 
 with us but fighting material, and had left behind, where 
 we had camped, our blankets and cooking utensils. Store- 
 keepers brought us out, during our very brief stop of a few 
 minutes, tobacco, sugar, and things of that kind. Starting 
 west, it was nightfall. When we got out of town and marched 
 along the cornfields, the boys that didn't have any sweet- 
 hearts, slipped into the cornfields and through the fences to
 
 BATTLE GOENEES. 63 
 
 get roasting-ears, and never succeeded in catching up with 
 the company until after the battle was over. But there were 
 not many of these, and the other boys made life a burden for 
 them, not only during the balance of their service, but for 
 years afterward, until they moved somewhere where they were 
 unknown. Without doubt they rank among the loudest howl- 
 ers, and the most accurate and regular pension-drawers that 
 exist. 
 
 " I shall not attempt to describe what part Gen. Sigel 
 took in the Wilson Creek fight. The day had been fearfully 
 hot, and as the night began to grow cool, life became more 
 desirable, and the marching was anything but a funeral pro- 
 cession. The boys gave each other elaborate instructions 
 as to the material out of which they wanted their coffins 
 made, and how they wanted them decorated. Bill Huestis 
 said that he wanted his coffin made out of sycamore boards, 
 with his last words put on with brass tacks, which were: 'I 
 am a-going to be a great big he-angel.' ( Bill still lives.) Af- 
 ter going several miles in the night, our road that we were 
 following was found to be leading tortuously around among 
 the rocks and trees and brush among the hills, and we were 
 ordered to keep still and to make no noise. About that time 
 a cavalryman passed us from the front, and we noticed that 
 he was going slowly, and that his horses' feet had cloths tied 
 around them, banded at the fetlock. During the stoppage there 
 was a passing to and fro along the line, and some one said that 
 blankets had been tied around the artillery wheels. We moved 
 short distances from twenty to a hundred yards at a time, 
 and kept halting and closing up, and making very slow prog-
 
 64 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 ress. Finally we were practically involved in the timber and 
 among the side-hills of a water-course. There were some 
 little light clouds and it was light enough to see a short dis- 
 tance around us, by starlight. Finally word was passed along 
 the line that we were inside the enemy's pickets, but were two 
 or three miles from their camp, and rumor magnified the 
 number of the enemy to twenty-five thousand. We could see 
 the sheen in the sky of vast camp-fires beyond the hills, but 
 could not see the lights. We also heard at times choruses of 
 braying mules. 
 
 "About this time, while we were moving along we passed 
 around the brow of a low, rocky hill, and the line stopped at 
 a place where our company stood on a broad ledge of rock. 
 It must have been about 11 o'clock. I never did know the 
 hour, but I laid down on this rock to get rested. The cool, 
 dewy night air made me feel chilly in the ' linings ' which I 
 was wearing, and the radiating heat, which the rock during 
 the day had absorbed, was peculiarly comfortable. I went to 
 sleep in from five to ten seconds and slept deliciously. I had 
 made up my mind that if we were going to have a battle I 
 certainly would not get killed, but might need all my strength 
 and ability in getting away from the enemy's cavalry. The 
 anxiety which novelists describe, and the wakefulness on the 
 eve of battle, are creatures I presume of the imagination of 
 the novelists respectively. I do not know what took place, 
 until, early in the morning, just as there was a slight flush of 
 dawn in the east, somebody came along and woke us all up, 
 and told us to keep still and fall into line. We marched a 
 short distance and struck an open piece of ground where we
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 65 
 
 could see all who were marching, those in our front and those 
 in our rear. The cavalry, artillery and infantry were march- 
 ing in companies, abreast, and in close order. In a short 
 time as it began to grow a little light we heard a gun fire. In 
 a short time two or three more. Then some regular troops 
 were detailed as skirmishers and circled around to our left. 
 In a short time we found that the enemy were alive 'and 
 active. Our regiment was ordered to go in a direction to the 
 left, and to take a position on a ridge ; the enemy in strag- 
 gling numbers were shooting at us from the ridge. The 
 skirmishers fell back. As we marched up the hill, it came in 
 my way to step over one of the skirmishers who was shot 
 right in front of me. He was a blue-eyed, blonde, fine-look- 
 ing young man, with a light moustache, who writhed around 
 upon the ground in agony. I asked him where he was shot 
 while I was walking past, but he seemed unable to compre- 
 hend or answer, and perhaps in the noise heard nothing. As 
 we started up the ridge a yell broke from our lines that 
 was kept up with more or less accent for six hours. We took 
 a position on the ridge and the country seemed alive on both 
 our right and left. Wilson's creek was in our front, with a de- 
 scending hill and a broad meadow before us, in which about 
 five acres of wagons were packed axle to axle. The hills had 
 some scattering oaks, and an occasional bush, but we could 
 see clearly, because the fires had kept the undergrowth eaten 
 out, and the soil was flinty and poor. Since that time a large 
 portion of the country has been covered with an impenetrable 
 thicket of small oaks. But in those days the trees were rather 
 large ; were scrawling and straggling, and everything could
 
 66 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 be distinctly seen under them all around. Across the creek, 
 which was not very far, a battery of artillery made a specialty 
 of our ranks, and we all lay down on the ground and for some 
 time the shells, round shot and canister were continually play- 
 ing over our heads. Some of the canister fell into our ranks. 
 They were coarse cast-iron balls, about an inch to an inch and 
 a half in diameter. Where they struck in the ground the boys 
 hunted for them with their hands. The shells were shrapnels, 
 being tilled with lead balls run together with sulphur. Our 
 company did not have much to do for awhile in the way of 
 shooting, and we simply laid on the ridge and watched the bat- 
 tery in front of us, or sat up or kneeled down, and when we 
 saw the puff of the artillery we dodged and went down flat, 
 and in the course of fifteen minutes gained so much confi- 
 dence that the boys felt no hesitation in walking around and 
 seeing what they could see, knowing that they could dodge 
 the artillery ammunition. 
 
 " In a little while two pieces of artillery were run up on the 
 ridge between our company and the company on the right. 
 One was a six-pound gun, and the other was a twelve. They 
 started in to silence the enemy's artillery, and a concentration 
 of fire began in our neighborhood near the cannon. The duel 
 was very interesting, and our boys stayed close to the earth. 
 Considerable damage was done to the guns, but they were not 
 silenced. One of the large roan horses that pulled the gun 
 was standing back of the gun and over the crest of the hill. 
 A shell from in front of us struck this horse somehow and tore 
 off its left shoulder. Then began the most horrible screams 
 and neighing I ever heard. I have since that time seen
 
 BATTLE COENER8. 67 
 
 wounded horses, and heard their frantic shrieks, and so have 
 all other soldiers, but the voice of this roan horse was so abso- 
 lutely blood-curdling that it had to be put to an end immedi- 
 ately. One of the soldiers shot the horse through the heart. 
 
 "In a little while, in front of us, appeared, advancing in 
 the meadow, a body of men that we estimated at about one 
 thousand. They seemed to be going to attack somebody on 
 our left. Our artillery stopped shooting over their heads at 
 the enemy's battery, but turned upon the meadow, and in a 
 short time the enemy were in perfect confusion. 
 
 "On the edge of the meadow toward us, and between us, was 
 a fence. The enemy rallied under the shelter of that fence, 
 and, as if by some inspiration or some immediate change of 
 tactics, or orders, they started for our guns. As they got 
 nearer to us, their own artillery ceased to tire, because it en- 
 dangered them. Then we rose, and when they got close the 
 firing began on both sides. How long it lasted I do not know. 
 It might have been ten minutes, it might have been an hour; 
 it seemed like a week. Every man was shooting as fast as he 
 could load, and yelling as loud as his breath would go. We 
 had paper cartridges, and in loading we had to bite off the. 
 end, and every man had a big quid of paper in his mouth, from 
 which down his chin ran the dissolved gunpowder. The other 
 side were yelling, and if any orders were given nobody heard 
 them. Every man stood up and assumed the responsibility 
 of doing as much shooting as he could. 
 
 "Finally, the field was so covered with smoke that not 
 much could be known as to what was going on. The day was 
 clear and hot. As the smoke grew denser, we kept inching
 
 68 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 forward, as we fired, and probably went forward in this way 
 twenty-five yards. We noticed less noise in front of us, and 
 only heard the occasional boom of a great big shot-gun, with 
 which some of the Rebel companies were armed. 
 
 "Onr firing lulled, and as the smoke cleared away, sitting 
 on the fence in front of us, on the edge of the meadow, was a 
 standard-bearer, waving a hostile flag. I do not know its de- 
 scription, but it was not a Union flag. The firing having 
 ceased, we were ordered back and told to lie down, but the 
 boys would not do it until the Rebel artillery opened on us 
 again. Several wanted to shoot at the man on the fence, but 
 the officers went along the line threatening to kill the first 
 man that raised a musket, which was all right, that being the 
 way certain things were done. The boys understood the 
 threat, however, and knew that if they disobeyed they would 
 at some future time get into the guard-house, and they sim- 
 ply observed, that if their officers did anything out of the way 
 they would get 'licked' just as soon as all got mustered out 
 it being generally understood that the privates in the ranks 
 had a higher, or at least equal social footing at home with 
 their officers, they all being volunteers. 
 
 "In the meantime, however, a little Irish sergeant, who 
 appeared to stand about five feet high, and sported a large, 
 fiery moustache, turned the twelve-pound gun on the man 
 who was waving the flag on the fence in such a foolhardy way. 
 The gun went off, the Rebel flag pitched up in the air, and the 
 man fell to pieces gradually over the fence; and at least a 
 thousand men on our side, who saw it, cheered in such loud 
 unison that it could have been heard as far as the report of
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 69 
 
 the twelve-pounder. I am not able to give, in any moderate 
 limits, the history of the charges and counter-charges on the 
 slope of that hill. In one of them the Rebel infantry, in its 
 charge, worn down to a point, with its apex touched the 
 twelve-pounder, and one man with his bayonet tried to get 
 the Irish sergeant, who, fencing with his non-commissioned 
 officer's sword, parried the thrusts of the bayonet. Others 
 were around the guns, but none of them got away. The bal- 
 ance were started back down the hill ; the twelve-pounder 
 was loaded, and assisted their flight. 
 
 "At one time we were charged by a large detachment of 
 Louisiana troops. They made the most stubborn fight of the 
 day. They had nice, bright, new rifled muskets from the 
 armory at Baton Rouge, which armory had by the secession 
 leaders been judiciously filled, before the war, from a Northern 
 arsenal. 
 
 "I had a musket made in '1829,' a clumsy smooth-bore; the 
 troops in front were armed with the finest weapons of that age. 
 We were borne back by the charge of the Louisiana regiment, 
 slowly in the course of the firing, as much as fifty yards. Squads 
 of Rebel cavalry had been seen in our right rear, and while the 
 enemy were safe in running, we were not. No man deserted 
 the ranks. During that fight, our color sergeant, the athlete 
 of the regiment, a large and powerful young man, and a great 
 favorite, received a minie ball on the crest of the forehead. 
 The ball went over his head, tearing the scalp, sinking the skull 
 at the point of impact about the eighth of an inch. He bled 
 with a sickening profusion all over his face, neck and clothing; 
 and as if half-conscious, crazed, he wandered down the line,
 
 70 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 asking for me: he was my bunk-mate. I handed him my can- 
 teen, and sat him down by the side of a tree that stood beside 
 our line, but he got up and wandered around with that canteen, 
 perfectly oblivious; going now in one direction, and then in 
 another. From that depression in the skull, a wasted skeleton, 
 he, the athlete, died shortly after his muster-out, with consump- 
 tion. 
 
 "We succeeded in repulsing the Louisiana troops, although 
 we were not numerically superior. Our former victory had 
 given us great confidence, and no man broke ranks or ran. 
 As the Louisiana troops were going we followed them some 
 little distance down the slope, and we put in about fifteen or 
 twenty minutes gathering up fine shot-guns and fine rifled mus- 
 kets, and looking over the fellows that were laid out. I still 
 have two bullets left that I took from a Louisiana cartridge 
 box. 
 
 "About this time we heard yelling in the rear, and we saw a 
 crowd of cavalry coming, with their apex pointing steadily at 
 our pieces of artillery. We were ordered to step forward and 
 meet them. We advanced down the hill about forty yards to 
 where our view was better, and rallying in round squads of fif- 
 teen or twenty men as we had been drilled to do, to repel a 
 cavalry charge, we kept firing and awaiting their approach. 
 Our firing was very deadly, and the killing of horses and riders 
 in the front rank, piled the horses and men together, as they 
 tumbled over each other from the advancing rear; so that the 
 charge, so far as its force was concerned, was checked before 
 it got within fifty yards of us. 
 
 "In the meantime over our heads, the artillery took up the
 
 BATTLE CORNERS. 71 
 
 fight, and the cavalry scattered through the woods, leaving the 
 wounded horses and men strewn around. We captured several 
 dismounted men by ordering them in under cover of a gun. 
 A flag was seen lying on the ground about 150 yards in front 
 of us, but no one was ordered or cared to undertake to go and 
 bring it in. In a few minutes a solitary horseman was seen 
 coming towards us, as if to surrender, and the cry therefore 
 rose from us, 'Don't shoot!' When within about twenty yards 
 of that flag, the horseman spurred his horse, and leaning from 
 his saddle, picked the flag from the grass, and off he went 
 with it a-flying. The flag bore the 'Lone Star' of Texas, and 
 we did not shoot at the horseman, because we liked his dis- 
 play of nerve. 
 
 "In a few minutes a riderless horse came dashing over the 
 ground, and as he passed a bush, a man with a white shirt, 
 covered with blood, stopped the horse, slowly and painfully 
 mounted, and rode off. The cry passed, 'Don't shoot!' and 
 the man escaped. 
 
 "In the meantime, artillery fire concentrated on us, and the 
 Irish sergeant yelled, 'They are shooting Sigel's ammunition 
 at us!' Sigel had been whipped, because his men, elated by 
 victory, had stopped to plunder the lower camp. We had driven 
 the Rebels from the upper camp into the lower camp. Our 
 artillery had set on fire and destroyed the acres of wagons 
 parked in the meadow. 
 
 "Some few spasmodic efforts were made to dislodge us, all 
 of which we repulsed. Finally the hostile artillery in our 
 front ceased firing, and there came a lull; finally the last 
 charge of the day was made, which we repulsed, and the field
 
 72 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 was ours. Word had been passed along the line that Lyon was 
 killed. A big regular army cavalry soldier on a magnificent 
 horse rode down alongside of the rear of our company, and 
 along the line, and appeared to have been sent for the pur- 
 pose of bracing us up. He shouted and swore in a manner 
 that was attractive even on a battle-field, and wound up with 
 a great big oath and the expression, 'Life ain't long enough 
 for them to lick us in.' After this last repulse the field was 
 ours, and we sat down on the ground and began to tell the 
 funny incidents that had happened. We looked after boys 
 who were shot, sent details off to fill the canteens, and we ate 
 our dinners, saving what we did not eat in a big crust and 
 hanging it over our shoulders on our gun-slings. We regretted 
 very much the death of General Lyon, but we felt sanguine 
 over our success, and thought the war was about ended. 
 
 " In a little while, there being nothing visible in front of us, 
 an orderly came and told us to move forward, and the artillery 
 to go to the rear. The artillery had to be helped off; we moved 
 forward about one hundred yards, then wheeled to the right, 
 marched some little distance down the line of battle, and sup- 
 posed that we were going to chase the enemy down Wilson 
 creek, but instead of this an order came for us to wheel to the 
 right, and take up a position in the rear. We marched to the 
 rear, perhaps a half mile or more, and on a ridge found the 
 artillery and some of the infantry drawn up in a line of battle. 
 We were fronted about, but nobody pursued us, and several of 
 the boys who had brought packs of cards along sat down in 
 groups and played. In the meantime our ambulances, am-
 
 BATTLE COBNEBS. 73 
 
 munition wagons and other transportation had moved to 
 Springfield, eight or nine miles distant. 
 
 "The boys were highly pleased that they had got through 
 with the day alive, and there was no idea on their part that the 
 day had gone against them. So much was this so, that myself 
 and two corporals went off to a distant farmhouse to buy 
 some peaches, the lieutenant consenting, providing we would 
 bring a lot back to the boys, and return when we heard a gun 
 fire. While at the house we bought some buttermilk, and 
 stopped with an old man to tell him the story of the fight, 
 when in a little while we saw the dust rising, and saw that the 
 whole detachment was going through to Springfield by the 
 road. This was about two o'clock in the afternoon, as near as 
 I can judge. A boy came in shortly afterward, and said that 
 everybody had gone to Springfield. 
 
 " In a little while we got rested, and we started on after the 
 army. There was nobody following ; stragglers came along 
 occasionally, and we sat down and rested from time to time. 
 We were so hoarse from yelling that we could hardly talk. The 
 reiterated kick of ' 1829 ' made my shoulder feel as if I had 
 the rheumatism. We did not get into Springfield until after 
 sundown. 
 
 "There was absolutely no pursuit whatever. When we got 
 into Springfield we heard that about noon the report of the 
 death of Lyon had come in, and that all the army supplies and 
 stores had been sent northeast to Holla, and that every mer- 
 chant that could move anything had moved it. As we three 
 came into town, grocery merchants hailed us to come in and 
 get what we wanted. One man took a ham, another found
 
 74 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 something to put some sugar in; some took one thing, some 
 another. One merchant pounded in a sugar-hogshead head on 
 the street and told the boys to take it all if they could. It was 
 so with tobacco, and nearly everything else. Union men did 
 not wish to furnish the Rebel army with supplies. We hunted 
 for our company, and found that an order had been received 
 to burn everything that we could not move, and go to Rolla. 
 The boys were all angry and swearing at the officers. The offi- 
 cers seemed all to be swearing at each other. Having eaten 
 the balance of my loaf and toasted some beef on a ramrod, I 
 found out that all of our blankets and camp-kettles had been 
 sent off on the wagon train. My two companions and I laid 
 down on the ground, carefully folded the blue sky around us, 
 and slept refreshingly all night, until early in the morning. 
 We must have started about four o'clock, for it had grown 
 light as we passed the suburbs of Springfield, which was then 
 a small town. There were two roads from Springfield to 
 Rolla. One was the ' Mountain ' road, the other the ' Valley ' 
 road. 
 
 "On the llth of August, the day after the battle, we marched 
 thirty-two miles. In the meantime Rebel sympathizers on 
 horseback had spread the word that we were retreating. The 
 'Valley' road was the best road for troops to travel, and the 
 one over which the military trains and supplies came. In 
 order to head off and ruin us the people on the 'Valley' road 
 turned out, felled the trees, tore up bridges, and sealed up the 
 road. We took the other one, and consequently the cavalry 
 of the Confederacy were prevented from heading us off and 
 beating us into Rolla. When they were in full flight towards
 
 BATTLE COENEES. 75 
 
 Arkansas, they heard of our abandoning Springfield, and they 
 turned back to pursue us. We could have held Springfield 
 with our army and invaded Arkansas with it if Lyon had lived 
 or had been properly succeeded. 
 
 "The second day from Springfield we only marched three 
 miles. Our Generals had to stop and quarrel over who should 
 assume command. Sigel, who had been so severely handled 
 at Wilson's Creek, wanted to command the army, and the reg- 
 ular officers would not stand it. He and Sturgis quarreled it 
 out. The result of the Wilson Creek battle was lost by the dis- 
 cordant animosities of the leading officers. If some one had 
 taken Lyon's place who had any capability, Springfield would 
 never have been abandoned. I do not allude to the casualties 
 of the battle; they were very severe. We were better drilled, 
 more hardy, tough and experienced, than our opponents. 
 They were a heterogenous mass of good, bad and indifferent. 
 They were three or four to one in numbers ; but in actual, 
 effective discipline and fighting strength, and capacity for 
 hard work, they were not much more than our equals. 
 
 Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel first, 
 And four times he who gets his work in first. 
 
 "Few of the First Iowa infantry remain. It is their pride 
 that Gen. Lyon was killed while leading them. The fact 
 that the regiment stayed and fought after their term of 
 service was out, raised the First regiment so high in the 
 estimation of the State of Iowa, and made the State so 
 proud of them, that nearly every member was commissioned 
 in new regiments, and very many of them fell in battles of the 
 Union, as officers, from General down. At the last reunion
 
 76 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 only about fifty were present all fine-looking, gray-haired 
 gentlemen. Their triennial anniversary of meeting is August 
 10th, the date of the battle." 
 
 There is, in this narrative, a melancholy confession fre- 
 quently made in the confidence of their few friendships by 
 men of General Lyon's stamp, that they are not able to at- 
 tract their fellow-beings, and must be left in solitude to com- 
 mand them. Gen. Lyon came of an iron race. He was the 
 grand-nephew of that Col. Knowlton who commanded the 
 American right wing at Bunker Hill. He had passed his life 
 in the regular army of the United States, and he was not a 
 popular man among his fellows, as his political convictions 
 widely differed from those of the great mass of officers in the 
 "old army.'' He was one of the few men who believed the 
 Civil War was coming, and who wished it to come. He hated 
 the doctrine of disunion; he hated, personally, the men who 
 preached it. He despised the men who lagged or hesitated in 
 the defense of the country. As a soldier, he had no mercy on 
 himself ; he extended none to others. His life and death were 
 a tragedy. He lived and worked alone; and, at last, weary, 
 wounded, fearing, yet daring the worst his face, his hair 
 dabbled in blood he called, like Richard, for another horse, 
 and placing himself at the head of men as brave as he, rode 
 to instant death. 
 
 Singularly, the most satisfactory and appreciative notice I 
 have ever seen of Gen. Lyon and so I commend it to others 
 has been written by an enemy, and one, too, who knew Gen. 
 Lyon, and knew the full measure of his hatred of the Confed-
 
 BATTLE COENEBS. 77 
 
 eracy and all its works. I speak of Colonel Thomas L. Snead, 
 for a long time chief-of-staff to General Sterling Price, and 
 his little book, "The Fight for Missouri." In this work will 
 be found a study by a man as different from Gen. Lyon in 
 lineage, education, tastes, and convictions, as one man can 
 be different from another of this born-soldier, whom he 
 thus describes as at first sight: "He was now in the forty- 
 third year of his age; of less than medium height; slender 
 and angular; with abundant hair of a sandy color, and a 
 coarse, reddish-brown beard. He had deep-set blue eyes; 
 features that were rough and homely; and the weather-beaten 
 aspect of a man who had seen much hard service on the fron- 
 tier." And this appreciative foe says of the life and death 
 work of Lyon: "By wisely planning, by boldly doing, and by 
 bravely dying, he had won the fight for Missouri." 
 
 It was but a look that we took at Wilson's Creek battle-field 
 one glance of the eye covers that ground; but there was time 
 to think of Deitzler and Mitchell and those who have passed 
 over the river, and the brave men and true, our friends and 
 neighbors who did bravely there, and who are yet with us, as 
 we trust they may be for many days to come. The hearts of 
 these beat more proudly when the 10th of August comes 
 around. It was to them a day of triumph, and they get to- 
 gether, some of them, every year, at Atchison or Leavenworth, 
 and celebrate it. It makes no difference to them that Sam 
 Sturgis marched off the field: they still believe that Wilson's 
 Creek was the Union's victory and their own. 
 
 The field is not forgotten. It has many visitors. It has 
 been the scene of reunions, and let us hope that some day on
 
 78 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 that bare ridge smitten by the sun and the winds, there will 
 rise a monument, not with that desolate word "Unknown," but 
 bearing the names of those who, daring for duty's sake, made 
 themselves known forever. 
 
 The end of the war found Battle Corners desolate. All 
 there was to lose had been lost. Nearly every county town 
 had been laid in ashes ; the country was a waste. Like one 
 recovering from a swoon, first consciousness, then real life 
 and movement, was slow in coming. But the bounty of Na- 
 ture proved a restorative. Certain lead mines had been 
 worked in a rude, slow way for many years the Confederate 
 Army, of Missouri, mined for their bullets at Granby. These 
 mines spread, grew richer, and were found to extend into the 
 "bloody angle" of Kansas. Then coal began to be sought, 
 found, developed. No prospector ever starts for reported 
 washings or diggings quicker than the railroad-builder starts 
 for a mining or lumber country. Railroads were driven 
 through the "Corners" in every direction, the "Gulf" and 
 the "Frisco" systems leading. At first it seemed as if the 
 Kansas "corner" was to have one system of railroads and the 
 Missouri "corner" another, but this idea was abandoned and 
 the State line is now crossed at all points. During the war 
 there was scarcely a mile square that did not hear at some 
 time the sound of hostile guns. Now there is scarcely that 
 area in southwest Missouri and southeastern Kansas that does 
 not hear the railroad whistle. The old towns, Fort Scott and 
 Springfield, commenced to grow and have never ceased grow- 
 ing, and have become centers of capital which has aided the
 
 BATTLE COKNEBS. 79 
 
 development of all the "Corners." The ruined hamlets of the 
 war-time grew as if fertilized by their own ashes, and towns 
 with new names filled the before uninhabited intervals. Last 
 to feel the impulse last to waken when Peace said, "I say 
 unto thee arise ! " was Arkansas. Here, too, Nature gave the 
 helping hand ; the healing waters of Eureka, made accessible, 
 were sought from afar, and furnished "bold advertisement." 
 The country is yet, however, regarded more as a curiosity than 
 an investment. But the road is open. It is idle to say that 
 the world does not move when the mail is carried every day 
 from Fayetteville to Prairie Grove and Cane Hill. We all 
 know what they formerly raised in Arkansas : they raise 
 apples now. At Prairie Grove they gave us " Shannon " apples ; 
 at the Elkhorn Tavern they brought forth an apple, red and 
 green, and said it was a native of the battle-field, an "Elkhorn 
 Pippin." These are the fruits of peace, more beautiful than 
 any that grew in the Gardens of the Hesperides. 
 
 All this may be seen. It is but a few hours' travel now 
 from Kansas to any of these historic fields. Now may the 
 veteran once more and in perfect peace go where "war's wild 
 deadly blast was blown," and muse in quiet on "all that he 
 saw, and part of which he was."
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS MEN OF '57.* 
 
 \7~ ANSAS had newspapers as soon as she had anything. 
 -L^- There was, to start with, a race between the two po- 
 litical parties which contended from the first for the mastery 
 of the Territory, to establish a press in Kansas. The Pro- 
 Slavery, more melodiously called the Southern party, having 
 the less distance to travel, won the first heat, and the Leaven- 
 worth Herald, devoted to the establishment of slavery, was 
 the first newspaper issued in Kansas. The primeval type- 
 sticker had a magnificent composing-room. Its boundaries 
 were the Missouri river, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, and the British Possessions. No smoke-dimmed ceiling 
 stretched above him, but he listened as he worked, to the 
 September breeze as it rustled and rattled the leaves of a 
 great elm tree, which, extended its sheltering branches over 
 the laborers of the " art preservative." The Herald was 
 moved into the first house erected on the town-site, so a 
 printing-office was literally the beginning of the first city of 
 Kansas. 
 
 The pioneer newspaper man of a great State, one would 
 naturally suppose, would figure in history as a marked and in- 
 teresting character, but the dull, plain truth is that our news- 
 
 * American Journalist, December, 1880^ 
 (80)
 
 KANSAS JOUBNALISTS. 81 
 
 paper Daniel Boone has been pretty much lost in the mists 
 of time. Mr. William H. Adams was a mild-mannered Ken- 
 tuckian, a printer rather than an editor; one of those who 
 cares not who edits the papers of a country, provided he 
 may attend to the advertisements and job-work. Mr. Adams 
 soon handed over the gray goose quill to Colonel Lucian J. 
 Eastin, born in Nicholasville, Kentucky, who came to Kansas, 
 however, from Missouri, and who, in the course of human 
 events, returned to that State to edit a Missouri newspaper 
 for years, and finally died old and greatly respected. Very 
 early in the history of the Herald Col. Eastin was reinforced 
 by a fiery young Virginian, Mr. H. Rives Pollard, who was 
 destined to exercise his pyrotechnical appetite on a wider if 
 not hotter field. 
 
 While the Southern party gained a slight advantage in 
 point of time, Northern ingenuity was equal to the emer- 
 gency, and very shortly after the appearance of the Leaven- 
 worth Herald two Free-State papers made their appearance 
 in Lawrence, both, to save time and trouble, printed in the 
 East one at Medina, Ohio, and the other in Pennsylvania. 
 The Leavenworth Herald was printed before it had an office,, 
 but the Herald of Freedom was printed before it had a town, 
 and was dated in an uncertain fashion at "Wakarusa, Kan- 
 sas," the Wakarusa being a creek, on the banks of which the 
 prophetic soul of the editor believed a town would arise 
 sometime. The town failed to materialize, and the second 
 issue of the Herald of Freedom was printed and dated at 
 Lawrence. 
 
 The writer of this chronicle has no disposition to draw 
 
 6
 
 82 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 from their "dread abode" the "frailties" of the early Pro- 
 Slavery leaders and politicians of Kansas, but the faithful his- 
 torian is forced to say that they utterly failed to grasp the 
 idea of the value of the press. The Free-State party fully 
 comprehended it, and the Pro-Slavery press, such as it was, 
 was speedily overmatched in the matter of numbers, ability, 
 and circulation. The Southern party established the Leaven- 
 worth Herald, the Squatter Sovereign at Atchison, and later, 
 the Union at Lecompton, which was intended to be to the 
 Territory of Kansas what the old National Intelligencer was 
 to the country. With the exception of a few little papers, 
 the names of which are mercifully forgotten, the papers 
 named above made up the sum total of the Southern side of 
 journalism in Kansas. The patronage of the Federal and 
 Territorial governments went to the Pro-Slavery papers, but 
 these never attained any noticeable circulation or influence. 
 Probably the most imposing in appearance was the Lecomp- 
 ton Union, to which Territorial Governors, Secretaries, and 
 such official personages, contributed; the editor-in-chief bear- 
 ing the bovine name of General Brindle. Brindle now finds 
 his green pastures and still waters somewhere back in Penn- 
 sylvania. 
 
 The Free-State papers sprang up everywhere, and were 
 everywhere bold and alert, possessing what the Pro-Slavery 
 papers had not a backing outside of the Territory. 
 
 The most prominent of the Free-State papers for a time 
 was the Herald of Freedom; and, by the way, the word "free- 
 dom" and its derivatives was a favorite for title-lines. Be- 
 sides the Herald of Freedom, there was Prouty's Freemen's
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS. 83 
 
 Champion, at Prairie City, and so on all around the board. 
 The Herald of Freedom was fortunate in its location. Law- 
 rence was the capital of the Free-State party and the center 
 of stirring events, and the Herald waxed fat. At one period 
 it attained a circulation of eight thousand copies, which were 
 spread all over the North ; and in 1857 Mr. George W. Brown, 
 the publisher, brought the first power-press to Kansas. 
 
 The irrepressible conflict in Kansas brought to the Terri- 
 tory correspondents of the great Eastern dailies, notably the 
 New York Tribune, which was always ably represented. The 
 best known member of the Tribune staff in Kansas was Wil- 
 liam A. Phillips, who fixed his residence in the Territory dur- 
 ing the "troubles," has lived in Kansas ever since, and has 
 represented the State in Congress. Mr. Phillips wrote num- 
 berless letters, and collected the fruits of his observations and 
 experience in a volume, "The Conquest of Kansas"; a mar- 
 vel of rapid book-making, written for a Boston publishing 
 house in six weeks. Another busy man of the pen in those 
 days was Richard J. Hinton, a young Englishman who had 
 written for many Eastern papers prior to coming to Kansas, 
 and whose journalistic range still extends from New York 
 to San Francisco. To the names of Phillips and Hinton 
 should be added that of Albert D. Richardson, who became a 
 bona fide resident of the Territory. These men were not mere 
 observers, but took an active part in every stirring scene, and 
 always turned up as secretaries of the Free-State conventions, 
 which were held somewhere nearly every day in the week. 
 
 The year 1857 settled the political, and so the journalistic, 
 future of Kansas. In the spring of that year it was estimated
 
 84 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 that one hundred thousand Northern emigrants came to Kan- 
 sas, and virtually ended the controversy. Free-State towns 
 sprang up everywhere, and each had its paper or papers, con- 
 tending not for " the old flag and an appropriation," but for 
 free Kansas and the town-site. The " year of grace" for Kan- 
 sas was 1857.. Besides the young men who came to perma- 
 nently identify themselves with the Kansas press was an 
 army of bright young fellows, prompt for a " scrimmage," be 
 it with Sharps' rifle, or sharp steel pen. 
 
 These edited papers here and there betimes, and were 
 always ready with their contributions. A gayer, brighter lot 
 of godfathers never attended the christening of the journal- 
 ism of a State. Phillips, Hinton and Richardson wrote, not 
 only for Eastern papers, but lent a helping hand to the local 
 press also. 
 
 Then there was Richard Realf, about whom there was a 
 romantic story, to the effect that he was connected with the 
 family of Lord Byron ; there was John Swinton, then a " jour " 
 printer, but who sat down at the editor's pine table occa- 
 sionally ; there was James Redpath, whose Irish letters have 
 created such a stir of late years he started a paper at Doni- 
 phan called the Crusader of Freedom ; there was J. H. Kagi, 
 a companion of old John Brown, and a vigorous writer. Since 
 the name of old John Brown has been mentioned, it may be 
 said that he was not a contributor to newspapers. He came 
 and went, like the Jibbenainosay in the old story of "Nick of 
 the Woods," taking no part in conventions or political con- 
 troversies. The only article believed to have been contributed 
 by him to a Kansas newspaper was "John Brown's Parallels," 
 which was brought to the Lawrence Republican office by Kagi.
 
 KAN 8 AS JOURNALISTS. 85 
 
 To go on with the 1857 arrivals: There came a young 
 man from Union College, New York, Mr. T. Dwight Thacher; 
 another young man not long out of Harvard College, Mr. D. 
 Webster Wilder ; still another young man, with a lively gait 
 and a freckled face, from Xenia, Ohio, Preston B. Plumb by 
 name. The old town of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, sent a 
 hearty youth, not yet of age, named John A. Martin. Then 
 there were the Murdocks and Jacob Stotler, and yet another 
 Ohioan, as good a printer as ever walked the sod, Sol. Miller. 
 Then there was a stirring young man from Rochester, New 
 York, who had visited Kansas in 1854, and now came back for 
 good. Though not to engage in the newspaper business just 
 then, he was destined to fill a large place farther on. This was 
 Daniel R. Anthony. A red-headed boy, George W. Martin, 
 also went to work in the Lecompton Union office about this 
 time. 
 
 This was the famous "1857 crowd," who came to stay, and 
 are here yet. They were all young, as everybody in Kansas 
 was then. Not a man we have mentioned was over thirty 
 years of age. They were all ambitious, and the possibilities 
 were wonderful. The stories of the printers, saying nothing 
 of the editors of that day, make one think of Napoleon's say- 
 ing about every French soldier carrying a marshal's baton in 
 his knapsack. 
 
 In one issue of the Herald of Freedom, Editor Brown ac- 
 knowledges the good management of the office during his 
 absence by his foreman, Mr. T. A. Osborn ; ex-Foreman 
 Osborn is now United States Minister Plenipotentiary to 
 Brazil.
 
 86 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 A history of the "men of 1857" is the history of the foun- 
 dation and the erection of, say the first story of the Kansas 
 journalistic house; and so, if the "gentle reader will go with 
 us for a moment," we will tell briefly, what became of these 
 young fellows. 
 
 It is difficult to say which of the set first began to spoil 
 white paper in the newspaper line, neither is the matter of 
 precedence vital, but T. Dwight Thacher was heard from early 
 in the action. His whole name, Timothy Dwight Thacher, tells 
 the story of his ancestry, and to some extent his own story. 
 Carefully educated in Alfred Academy and Union College, 
 New York, he had taken his degree of A. B., and had gone 
 back to Union to get his A.M., when he received a "call" to 
 Kansas. Old George W. Brown's Herald of Freedom had be- 
 come somewhat " withered " by custom, and an opposition 
 organ was to be started. A couple of Mr. Thacher's former 
 townsmen sent for him to engage in the enterprise, and the 
 young man came and went to work on the Lawrence Republi- 
 can. He was not Saul among the prophets exactly, but rather 
 a prophet in a crowd of Sauls. Those were "parlous times." 
 There was intense excitement all the time and everywhere, 
 and it is feared that a great deal of Eastern-made religion 
 was lost overboard in crossing the Missouri; but young Mr. 
 Thacher continued to steer clear of the soul-and-body-destroy- 
 ing whisky of the period, avoided sinful games of every kind, 
 and yet bore his part manfully in the stern conflicts then 
 raging. He stayed by his Republican office, saw its ashes after 
 Quantrill's cruel raiders rode away from stricken Lawrence, 
 went to Kansas City, labored amid the shocks of war with a
 
 KANSAS JOUBNALISTS. 87 
 
 promising infant which has grown to the present Kansas City 
 Journal, went thence to Philadelphia, worked on the staid news- 
 papers of that city, and then, as many a wanderer has done 
 since, came to Kansas again, and after various changes found 
 himself in the Lawrence Republican- Journal office with two 
 partners, the Rev. Isaac S. Kalloch and Milton W. Reynolds. 
 This was not "three of a kind" by any means, and the queer 
 combination broke up, and left Mr. Thacher in charge of the 
 paper, which still lives in the hands of Mr. Thacher's eldest 
 son, the oldest daily in Lawrence, Mr. Thacher sr. reposing on 
 his laurels in the comfortable berth of the State printership, 
 which we are sure no man ought to begrudge him. To Mr. 
 Thacher belongs the honor of having in a rude time, and 
 amidst all sorts of trials, terrors, privations and difficulties, 
 preserved the language, the tastes, the manners and feelings 
 of a scholar and a gentleman. 
 
 The word "scholar" brings up the name of another Kansas 
 editor who came early, and is still with us. There is a tradi- 
 tion in Kansas that old Dr. Nott said once that Thacher was 
 the most promising student that had graduated from Union 
 College; and D. W. Wilder took the Franklin medal at the 
 Boston Latin School, and the first prize- the Bowdoin gold 
 medal at Harvard. Then he read law and was admitted to 
 the Boston bar, and, being ready for a comfortable Massa- 
 chusetts existence, gave it up to live in a little cottonwood 
 Kansas town, since drowned in the Missouri river, and felt 
 rewarded for the change, in the society of the boys. We be- 
 lieve there was once a law office in Elwood, but common grati- 
 tude toHBen Franklin, who had kindly left a medal for him,
 
 88 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 demanded that Wilder should go into the newspaper business, 
 and he did. It was the Elwood Free Press, and Lee & Wilder 
 ran it. Fortune shuffled the cards; Lee went into the army, 
 grew to be a very erect brigadier general, and then made a 
 large amount of money as State Printer of Louisiana, and 
 now divides his time between American and European luxury. 
 Wilder went to St. Joseph, started a freedom paper about 
 twenty-five years too early, and was rewarded for his exertions 
 with an indictment. D. R. Anthony, of Leavenworth, thought 
 this a burning shame, and started for Wilder's benefit a news- 
 paper which as a grim joke was called the Conservative. Then 
 it was the Times- Conservative, then the Times. After years of 
 work in Leavenworth there followed a vacation spent at Fort 
 Scott editing the Monitor. Then divers years passed as Auditor 
 of State, when some new ideas were introduced in the way of 
 combining the editorial and official styles of composition in 
 the annual reports, greatly to the delight of the public, who 
 had never read the reports before and have never read them 
 since. Then the old field at St. Joseph was harrowed over 
 with the Herald, and now all the old editorial qualities are 
 displayed in the Hiawatha World. There is no neater workman 
 than Web. Wilder; there is an absolute absence of slovenliness. 
 In all his notes there are none counterfeit and none ragged. 
 Probably the work done in gaining the gold medals has some- 
 thing to do with it; but more than that, the impress of the 
 powerful mind of Theodore Parker, Wilder's first and last 
 pastor. In the matter of what has been written in books, Mr. 
 Wilder is the State oracle. All the other newspaper men ask
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS. 89 
 
 him to kindly find the page and verse, and no son of Kansas 
 has loved his State with a more chivalrous devotion. 
 
 As Leavenworth was the starting-point of the first weekly 
 paper in Kansas, so it -was the birthplace of the first perma- 
 nent daily, the Leavenworth Times. The limits allotted to an 
 article like this might be exceeded in recounting the vicissi- 
 tudes of morning journalism in Leavenworth ; there have 
 been papers and papers, but the ever-present newspaper fact 
 has been the Leavenworth Times, and for many a year the 
 Times has been Col. D. R. Anthony and Col. D. R. Anthony has 
 been the Times. Unlike Thacher, Wilder, and others, Col. An- 
 thony was not educated for nor bred to the profession, but 
 started his first newspaper, the Leavenworth Conservative, as 
 has been said, with the chivalrous intention of making a place 
 for Web. Wilder, who he thought had received hard measure 
 and unjust treatment at St. Joseph. Col. Anthony assumed 
 the ownership, publishership and editorship of the Leaven- 
 worth Times in 1871, the paper resuming, after years, the 
 name it started with in 1858. Col. D. R. Anthony has been the 
 Caesar of Leavenworth morning journalism, and his motto has 
 been Times aut nullus. He has captured and taken into camp 
 any given number of opposition morning papers, and now 
 not only " rules the roost," but occupies it alone. Col. Anthony 
 is no "slave of the lamp" ; he has never written a regularly 
 organized "leader" in his life. He is an intensely active cit- 
 izen of Leavenworth, who literally runs not walks a news- 
 paper. He writes when he has something to say, and for the 
 rest employs assistants ; but these so perfectly reflect his ideas 
 and modes of expression, that the Times is one of the few
 
 90 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Kansas papers that know no difference in their general tone, 
 whether the "head" is at home or abroad. And here it may 
 be said, that in Kansas newspaper offices, as a rule, the dis- 
 tinctions of editor-in-chief, managing editor, city editor, dra- 
 matic editor, and so on, have not come into vogue ; all hands 
 may be classified as " general utility." It is not many years 
 since daily papers of considerable circulation and influence 
 were run by two men, and an evening paper has been known 
 to get along for months with one. The exact subdivision of 
 labor known further east has yet to be introduced. To return 
 to Col. Anthony, he pervades all the pages, and every line of 
 his paper. It is Anthony all over. It is needless to say, that 
 energy such as his has met its reward. The Times is a valuable 
 newspaper property, and its voice is potent. Like the war- 
 horse in Job, the Times hears the sound of the battle afar off, 
 and usually meets the battle itself half-way, yet it seems to 
 grow a little stronger with each fight. It stands by itself 
 among Kansas newspapers in its singular personal character. 
 It is the voice of one man, and that man of rare force, cour- 
 age, pertinacity, and enterprise. 
 
 Probably no two editors in Kansas present a more marked 
 contrast in personal appearance and in character than D. R. 
 Anthony and John A. Martin, of the Atchison Champion. 
 Both men cast in their lot in Kansas at the same time, both 
 ardently espoused the Free-State cause, both entered the army 
 and rose to be field officers, both have adhered without " vari- 
 ableness or shadow of turning" to the same political doc- 
 trines; both have given themselves to Kansas with that ultra 
 devotion which used to be characteristic of South Carolinians
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS. 91 
 
 in regard to their State, and yet have arrived at similar ends 
 by entirely different processes of thought and action. Singu- 
 larly, too, the fiery Anthony is descended from a family of 
 Quakers, while the quiet and conservative Martin has in his 
 veins the unmixed blood of the pugnacious and hard-headed 
 Scotch-Irish, who were the pioneers of western Pennsylvania. 
 Col. Martin was one of the company of young men hereto- 
 fore spoken of, who began to make their mark in Kansas 
 affairs in 1857. He came, a boy, from the staid old town 
 of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, a practical printer, and during 
 its brief existence he labored on Redpath's Crusader; then 
 he came into possession of the Squatter Sovereign, a pro- 
 slavery gun which had been captured and turned on its 
 former supports, and which, after a few changes of name, be- 
 came the Champion, and claims to be the Kansas paper which 
 has existed longest under the same name and management. 
 In all the years since 1858 the Atchison Champion has re- 
 ceived the daily attention of its present editor, save during 
 his four years of service in the army, and has been character- 
 ized by the great quality of steadfastness. It has steered by 
 three stars: the prosperity of the city of Atchison, the glori- 
 fication of the State of Kansas, and the maintenance absolute 
 of the organization and discipline of the Republican party. 
 Atchison, Kansas, Republicanism these form the Champion's 
 trinity. For twenty-five years this Apostles' Creed has been 
 repeated. The utterance has been calm, steady, uniform, even 
 solemn. The Champion has never recognized a personal 
 enemy; the existence of such a person has been ignored. 
 Every shot in the locker has been used to bombard in a
 
 92 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 steady and uninterrupted fire, those who presumed to vilify, 
 not the Champion, but Atchison; to call Kansas "too dry," or 
 propose "foreign levy or domestic quarrel" to the injury of 
 the Republican party. The Champion has justly acquired a 
 reputation for absolute sincerity and solidity. It has made 
 no "wild breaks," but has kept on its steady way, and its edi- 
 tor has grown with the growth of the three objects nearest 
 his heart his city, his State, and his party. He has been 
 honored by all three, but those who know the fiber of the 
 man's nature do not doubt but he would have stood firmly in 
 the ranks had he never been called to the front for promotion 
 or preferment. 
 
 The veteran of the Kansas weekly press is Sol. Miller, of 
 the Troy Chief, started in 1857, in the same county as the 
 White Cloud Chief. Mr. Miller came to the flourishing Mis- 
 souri river port of White Cloud, a young man from Ohio, 
 bringing his printing-office with him. While his name is 
 known to every Kansan, few men have taken the Kansas pub- 
 lic less into their confidence as regards matters of personal 
 history. None of the numerous works devoted to Kansas 
 biography have contained even a roughly-drawn sketch of 
 Sol. Miller. This much may be inferred: That he went to 
 school when spelling was taught in the thoroughly old- 
 fashioned manner, and that he spelled everybody down; that 
 he " served his time " in the days when an apprenticeship to 
 the printing business meant three to five years without an 
 idle moment; and further, that he was brought up in a coun- 
 try entirely American, where traditions of the war of 1812 
 and tales of the atrocities of the allied British and Indians
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS. . 93 
 
 were still told by the evening fire. Sol. Miller is an Ameri- 
 can in every fiber and every bone. He fills his first page with 
 stories of American valor in ancient and modern days. His 
 selections of poetry are all from the good old American au- 
 thors, and he excels Allibone himself in his knowledge of all 
 the American writers of prose and poetry. He is a recognized 
 authority. Given any old song, and Sol. Miller can recall the 
 name of the singer, no matter how long ago he ceased to sing. 
 He observes all the revolutionary anniversaries, and furnishes, 
 as the day returns, a great store of appropriate " reprint." 
 He is full of country lore; knows all the signs of an approach- 
 ing hard winter, including the "goose bone," and never fails 
 to note the coming of "ground-hog day." The teachings of 
 the old-time printer who first "taught him the boxes," still 
 remain. The Troy Chief, with its wide columns, its clean 
 face, and its marvelous correctness, is a newspaper among a 
 thousand. Very savage, yet funny withal, are the columns of 
 the Chief. The victim swears, yet the unfeeling public is 
 prone to laugh at the sudden and overwhelming nature of the 
 catastrophe. Few men are so seldom seen abroad. Editorial 
 conventions and excursions and merry-makings delight him 
 not. The object of his existence is to get the Chief out on 
 time. In his office at Troy, with his sleeves rolled up, and 
 surrounded by such stacks and piles of newspapers and such 
 boxes, drawers and barrels of clippings as grace no other 
 printing-office in this Western country, may be found old Sol. 
 Miller; queer, bright, quaint, original, a man of old-world vir- 
 tues, yet keeping his eyes on the moving hands of Time's dial. 
 Mention was made earlier in this sketch of an emigrant of
 
 94 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 1857 from Xenia, Ohio Preston B. Plumb. This gentleman 
 was one of the pioneers of what may be called interior jour- 
 nalism in Kansas. Newspaper men till this time had not 
 wandered far from the border, but he "marched into the 
 bowels of the land" to the new town of Emporia, and started 
 a newspaper whereof he was editor-in-chief, with the accom- 
 plished Richard J. Hinton as associate, and an Ohio youth, 
 Jacob Stotler, as foreman. Mr. Plumb, however, found other 
 paths leading more directly to fortune than journalism. He 
 took to law, land trades, banking, with an occasional dash 
 into politics, and is at present the junior United States Sen- 
 ator from Kansas. 
 
 There remains of the group of young men of 1857 I started 
 out to notice, but General Brindle's whilom red-headed ap- 
 prentice, George W. Martin. He came later to the front 
 than the others, in his own proper person, as editor of the 
 Junction City Union. In this gentleman the fighting and 
 Presbyterian blood of imported Ulster runs with quicker flow 
 than in the veins of the other Western-Pennsylvania Martin. 
 The reflection of the editor's head casts its radiance all over 
 the columns of the Union. Like Miller, an elegant printer, as 
 publisher of the Union Martin has always kept his paper in 
 the group of half a dozen very handsome weeklies in Kansas, 
 which may be styled the belles of the newspaper ball. The 
 same cultivated taste for the typography characterized Mar- 
 tin's unprecedentedly long service as State Printer. The 
 dingy old "pub. docs." of the Eastern States were as tat- 
 tered rags beside a silk gown, when compared with the books 
 which came from the State printing-house in Martin's time.
 
 ' KANSAS JOURNALISTS. 95 
 
 He it was who (outside of these) published Wilder's "Annals 
 of Kansas," the handsomest, most useful and worst-paying 
 book ever printed in this Western country. The Junction 
 City Union has the same identity with its editor possessed by 
 the Leavenworth Times. Anybody picking it up and reading 
 an article on some one of the prevalent frauds for which 
 Martin has invented the name of "hoodoos" can hear the 
 sharp, jerky voice of the writer directly behind him as he 
 reads. The editor of the Union is always outspoken to the 
 verge of audacity, yet, perhaps because the people admire 
 the fortiler in re rather than the suaviter in modo, or because 
 the stars have said that old Blair county is bound to win, few 
 men in Kansas have been more successful in their ambitions 
 than George W. Martin. 
 
 Some years ago, some low-spirited Kansas editor uttered 
 a lament over the insufficient rewards of journalistic labor 
 in this State ; but taking this little group of toilers at the 
 newspaper oar, they seem to have labored to some purpose 
 in the way of attaining honors, if not fortune. Taking them 
 in their order, Thacher is at present State Printer ; Wilder 
 has been Surveyor-General of Kansas and Nebraska, and two 
 terms Auditor of State ; Anthony has filled high positions, 
 civil and military ; John A. Martin commanded a fine regiment 
 during the war, has been Mayor and Postmaster of his town, 
 member from Kansas of every National Republican conven- 
 tion, and is at present Secretary of the National Republican 
 Committee ; Plumb, the founder of the Emporia News, is in 
 the United States Senate ; Stotler has filled various official 
 positions, State and Federal ; George Martin served as State
 
 96 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Printer four terms, and has held office almost continuously 
 since he came to man's estate. Sol. Miller alone has been 
 distinguished from the others in the matter of this sort of 
 recognition, although he has reluctantly left the Chief office 
 several times to represent his county in one branch or other 
 of the Legislature. 
 
 Some of the old-timers have not been so fortunate John 
 Speer, who brought printed sheets from Medina, Ohio, to start 
 the first newspaper at Lawrence, and Prouty, big in heart 
 and waistband, whose Freemen's Champion was among the 
 first. Both have had various vicissitudes, but have never en- 
 tirely given up the newspaper ship, and are always considered 
 shipmates. 
 
 In most new States, dominant journalism usually begins 
 and continues at the State capital, but Topeka lagged some- 
 what in this respect, regularly issued daily newspapers at the 
 capital not dating farther back than 1868. Prior to this a 
 respectable, though not especially brilliant weekly press had 
 been maintained, the pioneers in the business being the 
 brothers Ross, from Wisconsin. One of the brothers later 
 became a United States Senator. 
 
 With the beginning of daily journalism in Topeka came to 
 Kansas one of the second generation of Kansas journalists, 
 taking the men. of 1857 as the first Henry King, now of the 
 St. Louis Globe- Democrat. The other editors whose names 
 have been mentioned in this sketch came into the profession 
 from college, or from business life, or from the composing- 
 room, but Henry King belongs to a new school who are news- 
 paper writers from the beginning. If he did not "lisp in num-
 
 KANSAS JOUENALISTS. 97 
 
 bers," he editorialized in petticoats. His first essays in writing 
 were like those of Benjamin West in painting. Though not 
 classically educated like Wilder, Thacher, and others, he has 
 carried the art or science of word-handling to a higher pitch 
 than any other Kansas writer in any field. No word-mason 
 among us has polished and fitted each stone in his structure 
 as he. 
 
 To write with some is recreation, with many a business, 
 with others the effect of occasional inspiration, but with him 
 it is an art, like music, or painting, or acting. His thought- 
 ful devotion to form does not run into pedantry or finical 
 work-picking, but is the result of the man's constitutional 
 nicety and daintiness of mind, which betrays itself even in the 
 clear, legible and peculiar handwriting in manuscript which 
 knows no "outs," "doublets," blots, or interlineations. He 
 alone, singular as it may seem, of all the bright company of 
 writers in active service in Kansas, has developed the patience 
 and polish of a magazinist, and has gained for the State a 
 hearing in the Century and other leading monthlies. His work 
 in this line has been pictures of Kansas life and scenery, small 
 as to canvas, but careful in drawing and striking in coloring. 
 The fault of these, if a gentle criticism may be allowed, is a 
 certain sombreness, which comes from the writer's rather re- 
 served and solitary ways of life, and an aversion to the hustle 
 and hurly-burly of the crowd. But, for his own work and for 
 his example, which has taught young writers that what is worth 
 doing at all is worth doing well, he has deserved well of Kan- 
 sas. His newspaper work in Kansas has been done on the old 
 Kansas State-Record, now dead ; on the Commonwealth, and last
 
 98 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 on the Capital. He was also the editor during the first bril- 
 liant year of its existence, of the Kansas Magazine, now a 
 bright memory in Kansas. 
 
 A notice of journalism in Topeka would be incomplete 
 without a few words concerning F. P. Baker, of the Common- 
 wealth, the "Father Baker," of the Kansas newspapers ; the best 
 abused and most sought after of all the fraternity ; the of ten- 
 est aggravated and most uniformly cheerful of Kansas news- 
 paper men. Every young cub, just starting in the "withering" 
 line of business, shies his brickbat at "Old Baker," and as 
 soon as said cub goes to Topeka for the first time he hastens 
 to see the placid and white-haired object of his assault, to be 
 furnished with theater tickets and other luxuries of the season. 
 Malice is not in the old man's heart, and when, as president of 
 the State Editorial Association, he starts his quill-driving 
 flock on an excursion, he treats with equal parental kindness 
 the good, bad and indifferent, the grateful and responsive, the 
 evil and the unthankful. A great store of shrewdness is con- 
 cealed in that queer white head and kindness in that often 
 misunderstood heart. Without making any pretensions as 
 a writer, he expresses his views only on subjects in which he 
 feels an interest, being incapable of the so-many-columns-a- 
 day business ; and when it is done the effect reminds one of 
 a log "jam ;" it may look rough, but it is strong and cannot 
 be altered, revised, or made over. Like several other Kan- 
 sans, he has tried his hand at writing letters from Europe, 
 and while no publisher will ever bring out these " Tales of a 
 Traveler " in blue backs and gilt edges, it is safe to say that 
 they contain more facts than forty of the average tourists
 
 KANSAS JOUBNALISTS. 99 
 
 get hold of. Mr. Baker has made the Commonwealth a valuable 
 newspaper property; and has been aided in this work by his 
 sons, Mr. N. R. Baker, as business manager, and Clifford C. 
 Baker, as associate editor, more especially in charge of the 
 city department. 
 
 Probably none of the publishers who have tried to build 
 up newspapers at Topeka have yet attained to their ideal of 
 a "State paper," though heaven knows that money enough has 
 been sunk in the experiment; yet it is probable that the Com- 
 monwealth and Capital foreshadow what is to be for many 
 years to come. The morning papers of Topeka have always 
 kept ahead of their city in the matter of growth, and fully kept 
 pace with the State. 
 
 The evening press of Kansas just now is getting firmly on 
 its feet, and is beginning to be seen, heard, and felt. Of the 
 evening journalists of Kansas, the file-leaders at present are 
 Edward W. Howe, of the Atchison Globe, and Alex. Butts, of 
 the Emporia News. Mr. Howe for a long time, while not ex- 
 actly hiding his light under a bushel, limited his illumination 
 to the personal and local affairs of a little city, thus dwarfing 
 for a time his really great powers. But of late he has given 
 the world a "touch of his quality" in his "Story of a Country 
 Town;" full of rather sad philosophy, yet keen and powerful 
 in its description and analysis of human character, and per- 
 fectly novel in its scene. This book is acknowledged to be 
 the first produced in JKansas which possesses more than a 
 local or provincial interest, and which can be read with equal 
 pleasure and profit on the banks of the Missouri and the 
 Ganges.
 
 100 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 The Salt Lake Tribune, the leading Gentile paper in Utah, 
 was started by Prescott, Lockley and others Leavenworth 
 men. New-Mexican journalism was sired by imported Kansas ? 
 and on the Coast, the good Hugh Burke, Somers, Creighton 
 and others, who drew their first newspaper breath in Kansas, 
 have labored long and well. Of course Missouri has often 
 borrowed from her next-door neighbor ; Hume, of Leaven- 
 worth, went years ago to St. Louis, and Henry King and John 
 Coulter migrated thitherward of late ; and so they go, both 
 east and west, but as the descendants of the Aztecs look for 
 the return of Montezuma, so we who remain look for the re- 
 turning of all who have gone away. No Kansan, such is the 
 Kansan's belief, ever forswears his allegiance to his State. All 
 things considered, what may be called the newspaper popula- 
 tion has been permanent this has been shown in the brief 
 sketch here given of the men of '57; and so we believe that 
 some day, as the State grows strong and rich, and more 
 mindful of the deserts of her literary sons, "Kicking Bird" 
 will permanently perch in some Kansas tree, and the Burkes, 
 and Skiff, and King, and Coulter, and Barlingame, and more, 
 who though not forgotten cannot be named here, will put their 
 hands to the plow again in once familiar fields. 
 
 THE foregoing was all true when it was written, but in the 
 time that has elapsed since it appeared short as it seems 
 there have been many changes. 
 
 In a general way it may be said that the sun has continued 
 to shine on the "men of '57."
 
 KANSAS JOURNALISTS. 101 
 
 To call the roll: T. Dwight Thacher has served his time as 
 State Printer and crossed the divide that separates youth from 
 age, and is working down the slope in peace and comfort, like 
 the whilom "Thane of Cawdor," a "prosperous gentleman." 
 He no longer writes or prints for others to read, but reads 
 not now harried or worried the best that others have writ- 
 ten or are writing. 
 
 Web. Wilder it sounds better that way is now State 
 Superintendent of Insurance; and his official themes are great 
 ones, being "Home" and "Life." He issues reports which 
 retain their juices; he does not believe in desiccated literature 
 in any department. Those who know him best of course en- 
 joy the reports the most. They read him in his works and are 
 not surprised when they find traces of some good story in the 
 midst of grave official statements and admonitions. He re- 
 tains his interest in the Hiawatha World, and writes edito- 
 rials, usually in the guise of letters" from Topeka, characterized 
 by all the old qualities precision, English undefiled, humor, 
 and above all, what may be called "interestingness." 
 
 The most startling change of circumstances has been made 
 in the case of Col. D. R. Anthony, whose name no longer ap- 
 pears at the head of the Leavenworth Times. He is reported 
 as a "gentle shepherd," looking after his flocks and herds at 
 Huron and elsewhere. Absolutely the last newspaper item 
 concerning him was something about a carp pond he was to 
 start at Huron. Nobody thinks that any bushel ever con- 
 structed will permanently hide Colonel Anthony's light. He 
 will return again. 
 
 Col. John A. Martin, since his name was set down in our
 
 102 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 "brief chronicle and abstract," has served two terms as Gov- 
 ernor of Kansas. He took into the executive office his old 
 editorial habits, and it has been well said of him that while 
 he held the office the governorship was well edited. He prob- 
 ably left in the records of the office, in the shape of every 
 form of written composition, more than any four of his pred- 
 ecessors put together. It was "good copy" too, such as re- 
 joices the printer's heart. His name all the while remained 
 at the head of the Champion, and to the Champion he has 
 returned. 
 
 "Father Baker" is still "Father Baker," only more so. 
 The Commonwealth has been merged with the Capital, and 
 "Father Baker" is out of the newspaper business and where 
 the wicked cease from troubling in fact, they had ceased, 
 pretty much, before he made the change. He looks after his 
 " patents," of which he furnishes a great store, and visits 
 every day the Senate and House he is now the oldest legis- 
 lative reporter in Kansas and sits at the reporters' table 
 and talks to the boys, and tells them how it is done; and if 
 anything particular is to be done, he gives them "a pointer." 
 
 George W. Martin has made a great change. After twenty- 
 seven years of residence at Junction City, he has "pulled up" 
 and gone to Wyandotte, which he has driven everybody in the 
 State into calling Kansas City, Kansas. They said they would 
 not do it, but a red-headed man must have his way. The 
 Kansas City, Kansas, Gazette is the transplanted Junction 
 City Union. He did not succeed in making a great me- 
 ropolis of Junction City, but, as Napoleon said, somewhere,
 
 KANSAS JOUENALISTS. 103 
 
 "We have lost one battle, but there is time enough to gain 
 another." 
 
 Changeless amid change has remained Sol. Miller. It is 
 still the Troy Chief, and still "old Sol." He wrote a long arti- 
 cle, lately, with the preface that it would describe the meanest 
 thing made up to date, viz.: Man. But it is very doubtful if 
 he believes this; if it is his rule, he allows many exceptions. 
 
 Of the others mentioned, Henry King is still with the Globe- 
 Democrat; Clifford C. Baker, aforetime mentioned as "local" 
 of the Commonwealth, is State Printer for the second time; 
 Ed. Howe writes more stories, and edits the Atchison Globe; 
 Alex. Butts does the "paragraphed Kansas" in the shining 
 Kansas City Star; Stotler has changed his base of operations 
 from Emporia to Wellington. 
 
 The record, considering what a world of change this is, is 
 fairly satisfactory, save that those who went away have not 
 come back to us Reynolds, who has settled at Geuda 
 Springs, being the only exception. 
 
 As we write these last words comes the. sad news that 
 Salmon S. Prouty is dead ; the first of the " men of '57 " men- 
 tioned in this sketch to pass away. He was among the first to 
 come ; the first to go where all must follow, for one sound is 
 always heard somewhere in the world it is the tolling bell.
 
 JIM LANE. 
 
 THE announcement may affect old Kansans like hearing 
 an American say that he never heard of George Wash- 
 ington, bat the writer hereof never saw Jim Lane. He was 
 dead and buried long years before the undersigned ever saw 
 Kansas as a resident. 
 
 While in the confession business, the "author" must still 
 further humiliate himself by saying that until he came to 
 Kansas he had never heard much of Jim Lane, although he 
 took a burning interest as a boy in all that related to the 
 Kansas struggle, or, more properly, the Missouri-Kansas 
 struggle, for it takes two to make a struggle. 
 
 This fact is significant as showing how utterly "Kansan" 
 Lane was. He went about much ; he died a Senator of the 
 United States. He had achieved some fame, or notoriety, call 
 it what you will, before he came to Kansas, but after all he 
 was "Jim Lane of Kansas." He was, in the phrase invented 
 by Web. Wilder, and which comes in mighty handy, "One of 
 our things." 
 
 All knowledge, then, of the "subject of our sketch" is de- 
 rived at "second hand," and is made up from the impressions 
 of other people. These impressions have, it is but just to 
 say, been diligently sought for. Lane, whatever else he may 
 have been, was the most original, and so the most interesting 
 
 (104)
 
 JIM LANE. 105 
 
 human being who has figured in Kansas affairs; and he would 
 be a dull Kansas news-gatherer who did not listen with in- 
 terest to any reminiscences concerning him. 
 
 The main thing, however, to be observed in giving the re- 
 sult of these impressions to the public, is to maintain, without 
 absolutely going to sleep, a severe impartiality. To go any- 
 where near the old Lane-Robinson fight, is like smoking a 
 cigar in a powder magazine. A mild-mannered professor in 
 the State University tried it not long ago, and was blown clear 
 out of the State by the explosion. To change the simile, no 
 flowers bloomed for that Spring. To disarm such criticism 
 in advance, the writer may repeat that he never saw Lane, 
 and that he has been the personal friend of Governor Robin- 
 son for eighteen years, and still regards him across the deep 
 ditch of politics with sadness but affection. 
 
 Cords of printed matter have in the last quarter of a cen- 
 tury been piled up about Lane, but it is for the most part dry 
 reading. Stories about Lane, like the doubtful class of narra- 
 tives known as "man stories," lose their point in print. He 
 who would resurrect the "Grim Chieftain" from the books, 
 newspapers and manuscripts of the State Historical Society, 
 will fail. He will obtain nothing more satisfactory there than 
 a dry and eyeless mummy. The only really graphic, moving 
 sketch the writer has ever read of Jim Lane appeared in one of 
 the minor magazines Lippincott's, perhaps over the signa- 
 ture of "Jacob Stringfellow." It was given Kansas circulation 
 in the Topeka Daily State Record, then under the accomplished 
 editorship of Capt. Henry King, but which years ago ascended 
 the tin tube around which the woodbine twines its graceful
 
 106 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 tendrils. Upon this sketch Hon. Sidney Clarke, a strong par- 
 tisan of Lane's, drew extensively in the preparation of a 
 lecture on Lane and his times, and yet it was not all com- 
 plimentary to Lane, so it must have been substantially fair; 
 at any rate it was bright. The authorship of this one brilliant 
 piece of Lane literature has been variously attributed to John 
 James Ingalls and Verres Nicholas Smith divided, so to 
 speak, between the most brilliant and the most beautiful of 
 Kansaiis. 
 
 In bringing up before the mind's eye this certainly re- 
 markable man, it is necessary to talk with those who in his 
 day talked with him ; who " hoorayed " for him, or against 
 him. In a group of old Kansans the mention of Lane's name 
 will always rouse the conversation, as a punch at the back-log 
 starts an old-fashioned open fire. From scores of such talks 
 the writer has derived his impressions. One of the first 
 hearty laughs he remembers to have indulged in in Kansas, 
 was at some of Col. Tom Moonlight's wonderful imitations 
 of his former civil and military chief after a fashion. He 
 was also made a debtor in the same way to Mr. James C. Hor- 
 ton, once the "poor Yorick" who was wont to set Lawrence 
 in a roar, but who instead of dying to have his head-piece 
 knocked about by some unmannerly sexton, and moralized 
 over by some Hamlet, still lives, a sedate and prosperous busi- 
 ness man of Kansas City. 
 
 Of Lane, biographically, there is no need to speak at 
 length. The earlier story is summed up on page 440 of 
 Wilder's Annals : 
 
 "James Henry Lane was the son of Amos Lane, and was 
 born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, June 22, 1814. In 1846 he be-
 
 JIM LANE. 107 
 
 came colonel of a regiment raised to engage in the Mexican 
 war; in 1847 he became colonel of another Indiana regiment; 
 in 1849 he was elected Lieutenant-Governor; in 1852 he was a 
 Democratic Presidential Elector, and was elected to Congress; 
 in April, 1855, he came to Kansas. In this State, in politics, 
 he was King." 
 
 In 1854 he voted for the Kansas-Nebraska bill ; in 1855 he 
 came to be King of Abolition Kansas. There is a good deal 
 of politics in that little paragraph. 
 
 The Lanes seem to have been a family of politicians. His 
 father, Amos Lane, was a member of Congress in 1837, and 
 before that had been a member of the Indiana Legislature, 
 and Speaker. In the matter-of-fact pages of Lanman he is 
 spoken of as a first-class lawyer, and as "filling a conspicuous 
 place in the history of Indiana." Gen. Lane was accustomed 
 to speak in public of his "good old Methodist mother." Pos- 
 sibly he may have derived the religion, which he possessed 
 in an intermittent form, from her ; it is probable that he re- 
 ceived his political training from his father, who survived 
 until 1850; but there is a tradition that politics in the Lane 
 family did not end here. 
 
 Some years ago the writer met in Atchison a venerable lady 
 with a memory of iron and a voice like a steamboat bell 
 most sonorous and melodious of bells who gave him the 
 story of the hard-cider campaign of 1840 in Indiana, of which 
 she was a witness, from a Democratic standpoint. "In 1840," 
 observed the old lady, with an air of conviction and in her 
 most bell-like tones, "-the Whigs nominated Gen. Harrison 
 for President, and he was an old imbecile." She went on to 
 say that the Whig managers endeavored to keep the old Gen- 
 eral in the background, for fear he would do something
 
 108 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 foolish, but that it was necessary that he should appear in 
 public at a banquet. Here it was hoped he would keep quiet; 
 but the "Lane girls" sisters of James H., got around the 
 old man, filled him up with champagne, and got him to sing- 
 ing songs of love and war in the most ridiculous manner. 
 
 This was told for truth. If true, it shows that "blood 
 tells." If not true, it is interesting as a specimen of the cam- 
 paign lie of forty-eight years ago. 
 
 However the political faculty may have got into Lane, it 
 got there. 
 
 What induced a man who had voted for the Nebraska bill 
 to come to Kansas, of all the places in the world, to seek 
 political preferment, has not been clearly explained. It is 
 probable that no other man would have thought of it. 
 
 General Lane, as he seems to have been called at once, 
 came to the Territory a Democrat, and his first figuring was 
 done in a "National Democratic" movement which was de- 
 signed to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. A month 
 later he was in the councils of the extremest of extreme Free- 
 State men. He spoke with Charles Robinson at the funeral 
 of Barber, commemorated in pathetic verse by Whittier, and 
 thenceforward was General Lane of Kansas. 
 
 It is of course possible to conceive of an Indiana Democrat 
 becoming a Free-State man and a Republican in Kansas, but 
 the wonderful thing is that a Southern Indianian should have 
 become a leader of the Kansas Free-State movement at all. 
 
 Southern Indiana in those days was very far south. One 
 had only to look across the river to see slavery. In fact, 
 there was a story that Lane was actually born on slave tern-
 
 JIM LANE. 109 
 
 tory, in Kentucky. The natural supposition, looking at the 
 situation from this distance, would be that the New-Englanders 
 would have entirely controlled the Free-State organization. 
 Yet, there was this born-pro-slavery Hoosier running what 
 was naturally a Yankee party. He had no single feature that 
 could endear him to the Massachusetts heart, and he had no 
 "idees" in common with Hosea Biglow's countrymen; but 
 here he was, between spring and summer, working in the 
 lead. He had no New England habits or reverences. In busi- 
 ness habits he was "shiftless," in language coarse and un- 
 couth, and he had no culture. It is the boast of Manhattan 
 that one of the first parties to locate on the town-site was 
 composed of five graduates of five different colleges. Jim 
 Lane could never have located had only alumni been eligible. 
 It is considered one of his best jokes that he succeeded in 
 getting a school named in his honor, "Lane University." 
 "Jacob Stringfellow," whose sketch I have cited, says Lane 
 came to Kansas with the purpose of becoming a United States 
 Senator. He "made it," and he did it all with his jaw, for 
 silver and gold he had none. Not a day or an hour was he 
 idle. From 1855 to 1861 he was everywhere. It was an era 
 of conventions. No other country had ever held so many 
 conventions or passed so many resolutions as did Kansas dur- 
 ing her Territorial period. It was a cold day when Jim Lane 
 did not address a convention and report a platform. 
 
 It is very easy to get lost in attempting to follow him 
 through all this maze. The speeches are preserved in the old 
 newspaper files, with the resolutions. But they tell very little 
 of the man. What about him?
 
 110 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 He looked like nobody else. His picture in the State His- 
 torical Society's collection does not look like any of the others 
 there. His hair stands out in every direction, like the " scare 
 wigs" that the nigger minstrels use. The mouth suggests im- 
 precations and nicotine, the eyes anything you like. There 
 is a suggestion of recklessness about the visage. Compare 
 it with the trim bust of Eli Thayer, of Massachusetts, if you 
 want to see something startling- in the way of a contrast. 
 
 He talked like none of the rest. None of the others had 
 that husky, rasping, blood-curdling whisper, or that menacing 
 forefinger, or could shriek "Great God" on the same day with 
 him. Nobody save him purposely mispronounced well-known 
 names and talked about the "Topeko constitution" and the 
 "Lavingsworth constitution." 
 
 Those who have read Dr. Bird's old Indian story of "Nick 
 of the Woods" will remember the " Jibbenainosay " and Roar- 
 ing Ralph Stackpole. Jim Lane seemed a combination of the 
 two. Like the "Jibbenainosay," he was always on the move. 
 His calfskin vest was liable to appear in any part of the 
 wilderness. He was as active and tireless as the wind. In the 
 course of five years every man, woman and child in the Ter- 
 ritory saw and heard him. The "Jibbenainosay," the Quaker 
 turned avenger, did not pursue the Shawnees more remorse- 
 lessly than did Lane his political foes. Let some village law- 
 yer set up the standard of opposition or revolt, and in an hour 
 he thought not, a box was set up in front of his office and 
 thereon stood "Old Jim" pouring out upon him to the delec- 
 tation of a crowd of Kansas sovereigns a flood of gall, describ- 
 ing him as a compound of fool and malefactor, coward and
 
 JIM LANE. Ill 
 
 slave, and inventing biography by the yard. And the crowning 
 misery was that at the end of half an hour everybody seemed 
 to believe it. The crowd was always there. The bare an- 
 nouncement that he was to speak called the aged from the 
 chimney-corner and the children from their play. 
 
 His reign was not undisputed. The opposition broke out 
 here one day and there the next. It looked easy to "down 
 him," but the "old settlers" laugh to this day at the discom- 
 fiture of the plots. A gentleman high in the councils of 
 the State in his retrospective moments is accustomed to tell 
 of a missionary of sedition who labored for an hour with the 
 ugliest man in the Border Tier, and a fearful stammerer be- 
 side, unfolding a dark chapter of Lane's infidelities and im- 
 moralities, at the end of which the ugly man, with a grin that 
 intensified the horrors of his countenance, announced that he 
 should vote for Lane, because he was himself, locally, the chief 
 of sinners in the same direction. 
 
 Was he an orator? Was it eloquence tha"t made him, as 
 Wilder says, "King" ? There is on record an opinion written 
 by a young man named Ingalls, who in the year 1862 wrote 
 letters from Topeka to the Leavenworth Conservative. This 
 young man, it may be remarked, has since had considerable 
 experience in public speaking himself ; and in one of his let- 
 ters he thus described Lane: 
 
 "His voice is a series of transitions from the broken scream 
 of a maniac to the hoarse, rasping gutterals of a Dutch butcher 
 in the last gasp of inebriation; the construction of his sen- 
 tences is loose and disjointed; his diction is a pudding of slang, 
 profanity and solecism; and yet the electric shock of his ex- 
 traordinary eloquence thrills like the blast of a trumpet; the 
 magnetism of his manner, the fire of his glance, the studied
 
 112 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 earnestness of his utterances, finds a sudden response in the 
 will of his audience, and he sways them like a field of reeds 
 shaken by the wind." 
 
 One sunny day, some years ago, Judge Samuel A. Kingman, 
 sitting on a broken-backed chair in a Topeka grocery store 
 smoking his faithful pipe, indulged in some remarks on the 
 subject of oratory and orators. He gave Kentucky traditions 
 of the wonderful Tom Marshall; his own recollection of Henry 
 Clay, as well as the never-printed remembrances of Henry 
 Clay's neighbors ; his own first and last hearing, in a little 
 Kentucky town, of Sergeant S. Prentiss, and he did not hesi- 
 tate to class Lane with these as "a great natural orator." "By 
 a great natural orator," remarked the Judge, by way of defini- 
 tion, "I mean a man who can stand up before a crowd of five 
 hundred men, two hundred and fifty of whom are ready to 
 hang him to the next tree, and at the end of half an hour 
 have them all cheering for him." 
 
 This, it will be remembered, was said of a man who really 
 did not know who Pericles was. 
 
 How was it done? A word in Ingalls's sketch here quoted 
 seems to furnish the key. It was " magnetism." 
 
 The late Col. Stephen A. Cobb was wont to relate an inci- 
 dent which came under his own observation. After Lane had 
 killed, in a claim fight, his Free-State neighbor, Gaius Jenkins, 
 the sky grew black for a time. In the worst of it, Lane went 
 to Wyandotte to make a speech. Jenkins had once lived 
 there, and the town was filled with his friends. It was with 
 difficulty that Lane could find a man to preside at his meet- 
 ing. Col. Cobb himself consented to act as secretary. The
 
 JIM LANE. 113 
 
 hour came and the room was crowded. The scene was some- 
 thing frightful. Lane rose to speak, and the crowd yelled, 
 "Murderer !" Not a syllable could be heard. Lane stood and 
 waved his hand for ten minutes, fifteen nobody knew how 
 long, and the crowd grew still, and was kept still nobody 
 knew how. He held them. In the midst of the uproar a Wy- 
 andotte Indian named Greyeyes had gone out of the hall, 
 presumably to get a drink. He returned after the uproar 
 had ceased, but his muddled mind did not take in the situa- 
 tion. He staggered up the hall and muttered some opprobri- 
 ous epithet. Lane looked about, pointed his long finger at 
 the offender, and said in a voice of command : "Put that In- 
 dian out !" And out he went. That was magnetism if there 
 is any such force. 
 
 It was about this time that Lane also visited Topeka. 
 According to local tradition the town was in high state of 
 virtuous indignation. There was a lofty resolve not to coun- 
 tenance the supposed-to-be fallen chief. He might speak, but 
 they would not listen. Yet when the "speaking" began the 
 entire population was present, as usual. And this, according 
 to a living witness and'listener, is what he said : 
 
 "I have heard these charges against me, and I am here to 
 answer them. I will take them up one by one. They say that 
 Jim Lane is a murderer ! What are the facts ? When the 
 noble women of Lawrence were endeavoring to establish a 
 public library, what did Jim Lane do ? He took his old clay- 
 bank horse out of the field, where he was plowing to raise a 
 little corn for his family, and sold that horse for $37.50 and 
 gave the money to those noble women to help them establish 
 that library; and yet, great God, they say Jim Lane is a mur- 
 derer!!!" 
 
 In this report, Archie Williams is probably as correct as
 
 114 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 was Dr. Johnson in his report of William Pitt's remarks 
 concerning "the atrocious crime of being a young man." 
 At any rate, whatever Lane said was no more to the purpose, 
 and yet the effect was electrical. 
 
 On the 4th day of April, 1861, Lane was chosen, after 
 what may be called an agonizing campaign, and a ballot which 
 consumed two hours, a Senator of the United States from the 
 State of Kansas, receiving fifty-five votes. Then came the 
 war, and Lane left his place in the Senate and announced 
 that he had been commissioned a brigadier general. And 
 the Kansas brigade marched and "countermarched," and forti- 
 fied, and fought, and burned for months, and then Brigadier 
 General Lane was announced as Major General Lane, about 
 to take command of an army to march to the Gulf of Mexico, 
 and then there was a conflict with old Gen. Hunter, and 
 Gen. Lane announced that it was his "sad and simple duty" 
 those were his words to return to the United States 
 Senate, to which the Governor had appointed a successor, who, 
 however, did not succeed. Lane had commanded an army, 
 and was announced as a commander of another, yet his name 
 is not borne on the rolls among the officers commissioned 
 from Kansas by the President of the United States. Nothing 
 like that ever happened before. 
 
 After all this, after revolt following revolt against him, he 
 was chosen in January, 1865, United States Senator, receiving 
 82 votes, with seven votes for his leading competitor. He was 
 still "King." 
 
 This last victory was in 1865. One year later he came 
 from Washington to Lawrence to make a speech in favor of
 
 JIM LANE. 115 
 
 Andrew Johnson. He spoke at Leavenworth and at Topeka, 
 and there was a sort of indorsement. It was but a wave. In 
 the spring the overwhelming opposing tide came in. Town 
 after town, the old strongholds, shut their gates against him. 
 Meetings called to indorse him broke away and condemned 
 him. He still held out, and in April spoke for Johnson in the 
 Senate; but "Birnam Wood" kept marching on and the 
 "Thanes" fled from him. In June he procured leave of ab- 
 sence and came back to Kansas. He appeared in Lawrence to 
 be received in silence and coldness. A few days later he was 
 in Leavenworth on his way east. On the 25th of June he was 
 reported in St. Louis seriously ill ; on the 28th he was back in 
 Kansas City ; the next day he was back in Leavenworth, and 
 stopping with his brother-in-law, Mr. McCall, at the Govern- 
 ment farm. On the 1st of July, it being Sunday evening, he 
 was riding out with Mr. McCall. He left the carriage several 
 times. On arriving at a gate Mr. McCall got out to open it. 
 Lane sprang from the carriage, said "Good-bye, Mac," placed 
 the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth and fired. He sprang into 
 the air and fell back insensible. The ball had passed directly 
 through his brain. 
 
 Why did he do it ? Some said there was a suicidal mania 
 in his brain that he had a brother who, literally, in the Old- 
 Testament language, "fell upon his sword and so died"; 
 others said that he feared disgrace growing out of certain 
 transactions, but such as never killed any other public man 
 of his day. Is it possible his iron heart was broken ? 
 
 With this wound, which would have been instantly fatal to
 
 116 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 any other man, he lived on; five days after, he recognized 
 those about him and spoke to them. 
 
 On the eleventh of July, at the hour of noon, ten days hav- 
 ing passed, the scheming brain worked and suffered no more; 
 there was an end of plots and plans; a last farewell to all that 
 men strive for to find ruin in the gaining. 
 
 The "King" was dead.
 
 THE HOUSE OF BOURBON.* 
 
 HENRY IV, the Bearnese, first of kingly Bourbons, rid- 
 ing in peace into the camp of the Catholics, hitherto 
 his enemies, was hailed, "King of the brave," and so to the 
 end of his days, as far as any bodily peril, in camp or field, in 
 charge or siege, by spear or battle-axe, or cross-bow, he re- 
 mained. On his moral side most weak, slave of his passions, 
 crying even in graying age for the possession of some female 
 favorite, like a baby for a toy, he yet loved France and French- 
 men, and was a king among kings, and a man among men. 
 Born amid mountains and reared in rude simplicity, rocked 
 in the cradle of war, he grew hardy but not hardened. He re- 
 tained in his mouth to the last the taste of the garlic and 
 mountain wine that his grandfather forced into it when he 
 was not an hour old, in order that the boy might grow up bold 
 and gay. Born Huguenot, he changed openly and in the face 
 of day his religion, beseeching his new spiritual guides to 
 make the new faith fit as loosely as possibly. This he did for 
 the peace of France, and in doing so drew on himself the 
 anger and grief of the Huguenots of the old rock, and, be- 
 cause he would not change into a savage bigot, the wrath of 
 fanatics of the old religion, who sharpened the knife of 
 
 *An address delivered before the literary societies of the Kansas State 
 University, June 6, 1887. 
 
 (117)
 
 118 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Kiivillac. Henry IV believed in a God who took intimate 
 and personal cognizance of the political affairs of France and 
 Navarre, and to Him he addressed himself before the battle of 
 Ivry, saying: "If it be for the people's good that I keep the 
 crown, favor Thou my cause." For the rest, he believed God 
 would be lenient with the faults of men, especially of royal 
 men, and so he was of earth earthy, and lived for this world; 
 so that his friend, Bassompierre, hearing him one day speak 
 of dying, said in the impatience of his soul: "My God, will 
 you never cease vexing us by telling us that you will soon die; 
 you who are loved and adored by your subjects, with fine 
 houses, fine women, and fine children who are growing upi" 
 Yet, die he did. Last of the merry-hearted and brave and 
 affectionate of his race, a great sinner, too, yet because he left 
 one wish behind him, his memory has been saved in honor. 
 "I wish every poor man in France," said he, "had a chicken 
 in his pot." For that his statue stands much respected on the 
 Pont Neuf, unharmed by all the revolutions that have crossed 
 that bridge. First of Bourbons, but without a Bourbon face 
 or soul, why were you not the last ? 
 
 Louis XIII, son, not of his father, but of his mother, save 
 that he would fight on occasion, melancholy bat stubborn, 
 resolute but yielding, hated his mother and disbelieved his 
 wife, and fell into the hands of John Armand dn Plessis, 
 Cardinal Richelieu, who walked, when a young lion, softly in 
 the sands of policy and seeming meekness, but when older 
 grown crushed with his iron paw noble and simple, Catholic 
 and Huguenot, " irreverent ribald " and true believer. In the 
 craft and force of this man, who was no Bourbon, the second
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 119 
 
 prince of the house of Bourbon lived, moved, and had his being, 
 and when the cardinal died the king died; when the sheltering 
 hand of Richelieu was removed the life of Louis XIII went out 
 like a candle. 
 
 Louis XIV, sometimes called the Great, fell in childhood 
 into the hands of another priest, Cardinal Mazarin, not so 
 great as the other, but one of the sort who wait and watch and 
 gather in. "Time is an able fellow," said the Cardinal. He, 
 waiting and watching, and gathering and circumventing, kept 
 the round world together till Louis XIV was ready to take it. 
 The cardinal, in that distant age, had arrived at a conclusion 
 recently reached by Col. Ochiltree, the bon homme Thomas, of 
 Texas: "The more I get acquainted with men the more I think 
 of dogs." Cardinal Mazarin was a believer in the historical 
 theory so wordily maintained by Mr. Froude and Mr. Carlyle, 
 that what men need is a vigorous, all-round tyrant. Being 
 about to depart on a journey full of uncertainty, Cardinal 
 Mazarin sought to secure this boon for France, and so told 
 his young charge to trust no man and be his own Prime Min- 
 ister. And Louis XIV then began a career that spread like a 
 fog before and behind him. He was the first and the last; the 
 beginning, the middle, and the end; the argument and sum- 
 mary and conclusion of Bourbonism, that is of the French 
 Bourbons. His actual length in his coffin was five feet eight; 
 his statue looks six feet; in life he was ten. He was a regu- 
 larly installed god. Herod was eaten of worms for less preten- 
 sions. Men lived in his smile and perished in his frown; the 
 sun was eclipsed when he turned his back, and it was heaven 
 to hand him his nightgown, and a boon like eternal life to
 
 120 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 hold the candle when he got into bed. He said: "I am the 
 State," and nobody in France ventured to dispute it. He 
 frowned, sulked, uplifted and degraded, and was king all 
 around regardless of expense; made war on everybody and 
 oppressed everybody, forced the legitimation of his wretched 
 natural children, and dismissed his faithful wife from this 
 world with the observation that her death was the first of her 
 acts to cause him trouble; and at forty years of age he sur- 
 rendered his imperial nose to the cold grasp of the thumb 
 and finger of Madame de Maintenon, who led him the rest of 
 the way. He impoverished France, built palaces for harlots, 
 starved a million of his subjects, and drove at the least cal- 
 culation 250,000 into exile by the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes. Having outlived his old generals, he saw his younger 
 ones beaten on all sides, and coming to die was deserted by 
 the half-devotee, half -hypocrite, and wholly selfish and implac- 
 able woman he had made his wife, and heard with his old dy- 
 ing ears the retreating footsteps of those who were rushing 
 out to take a look at the rising sun. Thus perished the first 
 and last Bourbon opposite whose name even the basest flat- 
 terer has dared to write "Great." 
 
 With Louis XV, the house ceased to be counted respecta- 
 ble. Bad became worse. More ecclesiastics came, but not 
 Richelieu, not Mazarin, but Fleury and Dubois. St. Simon 
 said of the latter : "All vices struggle within him for the mas- 
 tery. Avarice, debauchery, ambition were his gods ; perfidy, 
 flattery, slavishness his instruments," and, here is the finish- 
 ing touch, "unbelief his comfort." The time of Louis XV 
 was with most -civilized nations a period of awakening and
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 121 
 
 growth. It was the period when the British colonies, destined 
 to become the United States of America, were rising into no- 
 tice. With France it was an age of loss and disgrace. Fouler 
 grew the court, lower sank the king, till one day a strange 
 sight was seen. Quite different was it from those resplendent 
 royal progresses which his late majesty Louis XIV was ac- 
 customed to make. This was the last progress of his later 
 majesty, King Louis XV, in a hearse, driven at full speed and 
 followed by two carriages. The progress, though unpreten- 
 tious, was not unnoticed ; the people stopped in their ways to 
 curse the cavalcade as it passed. The dark-browed Fate had 
 cut the brittle, rotten thread of another Bourbon life. 
 
 Then came the poor source of a long controversy, yet in 
 progress; the dull subject of a brilliant argument; the amia- 
 ble excuse for frightful cruelties, King Louis XVI, who, be- 
 cause he had neither the courage to fight nor the wit to fly, 
 was devoured by red-capped devils. 
 
 It all came about, this catastrophe, from the old affair of 
 the chicken and the pot, meditated upon by his majesty 
 Henry IV, and overlooked by his Bourbon inheritors. It was 
 the failure of the fowl, the receptacle and the poor man to con- 
 nect that precipitated the revolution. True, the philosophers 
 had discussed in salons and in summer arbors the natural 
 rights of man, and had quoted some emphatic declarations on 
 the subject written by Mr. Thomas Jefferson, at one time 
 minister of the United States at the court of Louis XVI; but 
 the hungry people hustled the philosopher aside in a rush, not 
 merely for natural rights, but for "bread" for which they 
 called out in connection with " blood. " A fine lady suggested
 
 122 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 if the people were starving they might eat plain roast chicken. 
 The chicken suggestion came up again. Alas! Madame, that 
 was the trouble. Bourbonism has never met the chicken or 
 any other question, either boiled or roasted, or stewed, or 
 fried, or in any other shape or manner whatsoever. 
 
 Well, after poor Louis, there came others, like the shifting 
 shadows of a magic lantern. There was a doll Louis XVIII, 
 of whom little is remembered personally, although Europe 
 was trodden into a mire of blood that a crown might be placed 
 on his fat thick head; and there was Charles X, who was over- 
 thrown by a revolution that lasted three days; and there was 
 Louis Phillippe, a sort of side-track Bourbon, who got up a 
 little excursion to England within our recollection; and there 
 died not long ago an elderly gentleman, who never exercised 
 even as much actual authority as Sancho Panza on his island 
 of Barrataria, but who kept a white flag up garret, and whom 
 a few deaf and semi-paralytic old gentlemen were accustomed 
 to call on once a year and salute as Henry V; but now he is 
 dead, and the House of Bourbon has gone out of business and 
 nailed up the windows, and the family jewels were put up at 
 auction by the Republic of France only last week. The House 
 of Bourbon began with Henry IV, a man and king; it ended 
 with Henry V, the shadow of a shade. 
 
 French people, with many accomplishments, have one of 
 saying a great deal in a few words. All the history of the 
 Russian monarchy from Peter the Great to Alexander III, is 
 summed up in Talleyrand's description, "An absolute mon- 
 archy limited by assassination," and the limitation is still in 
 force, and all of the history of the House of Bourbon has been
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 123 
 
 covered by the saying, "Learning nothing and forgetting 
 nothing." There was, too, a prophecy uttered once which has 
 been accepted as a general and special explanation of Bour- 
 bon ill-luck. In the most splendid and wicked period of Louis 
 XVth's reign, France was really ruled by a lady known as 
 Madame the Countess of Pompadour, whose name is preserved 
 to us in a fashion of dressing the hair. She was not born a 
 Bourbon, but of a middle-class French family, her maiden 
 name translated being Miss Fish. She, not being a Bourbon, 
 was blessed with common-sense, and noting the waste, includ- 
 ing the millions wasted on herself, said one day, "Apres nous 
 le deluge," "After us the deluge." She went out of this world 
 early, dying of heart disease, but she left behind this prophecy 
 and key to Bourbonism, and it is but just to say for her, poor 
 sinner, that she also left, as created to satisfy her artistic taste, 
 the great porcelain manufacture at Sevres, which goes on like 
 Tennyson's 'Brook,' forever, without regard to the changes of 
 government in France, and has furnished employment to a 
 great many honest men and women. 
 
 " Learning nothing," referring to good things, and forget- 
 ting nothing," referring to evil things, and when forced to the 
 wall, and standing on the verge of the last ditch, and meeting 
 the demand of justice, when she stands with her uplifted 
 sword, with the everlasting "Apres Nous" -"After Us," and 
 you have the Old and New Testament, and the family record 
 between, of Bourbonism. The history of the French House 
 of Bourbon shows that it never advanced, but retrograded. 
 Henry IV proclaimed the edict of Nantes ; his grandson, 
 Louis XIV, revoked it. Before Henry IV was the massacre of
 
 124 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 St. Bartholomew, but in Louis XVth's time, eight years before 
 the birth of George Washington, the new law concerning 
 Protestants said: "Preachers shall be condemned to the pen- 
 alty of death ; their accomplices to the galleys ; women to be 
 shaved and imprisoned. Persons who exhort the sick shall 
 be sent to the galleys or imprisoned for life, according to sex, 
 and to confiscation of goods." " I am the State," said Louis 
 XIV, but in 1792 King Louis XVI was advised that "all legisla- 
 tive power is in the hands of the king." From Noah's flood to 
 the verge of the deluge predicted by Madame Pompadour, 
 nothing had been learned. 
 
 The House of Bourbon is no more, but there remains, not 
 in France only, Bourbonism. The House of Bourbon exer- 
 cised even in its decay and ruin, a strange spell. The great 
 British nation, when that virtuous indignation which it always 
 keeps in stock, was roused by the extraordinary liberties 
 taken by Napoleon Bonaparte with the map of Europe, could 
 think of no remedy except turning Europe into a slaughter- 
 -house that the Bourbons might be restored to a people who 
 had driven them off, and the powerful and original mind of 
 Napoleon himself was overcome with the Bourbon idea. He, 
 the son of a Corsican lawyer, starting in active life a sub- 
 lieutenant of artillery, must needs try to be a monarch after 
 the fashion of Louis le Grand, and call around him to teach 
 him how to do it a lot of withered dames of the old regime 
 who improved the proximity to fly-blow his reputation. 
 
 Bourbonism, the system, exercises the same spell as did 
 the old dynasty. As in the old time, not the parting waters 
 of the Red Sea, nor the admonition of the pillar of fire by
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 125 
 
 night, nor the instruction of the cloud by day, nor myriad 
 miracles, nor the quaking of Sinai itself, prevented Israel 
 from groveling at the feet of a brass calf whose worship they 
 had left Egypt to escape ; so men have time and again re- 
 turned to the worship of the House of Bourbon. 
 
 The pretensions on the part of Bourbonism which have led 
 men to hold by that system, or even to return to it when well 
 rid of it, are that it is necessary to the preservation of public 
 order and of stable government. Fixedness is the perpetual 
 trait of mountains and the occasional characteristic of mules; 
 and there are people who do not seem to be able to perceive 
 the difference. If a strong government is needed, Bourbonism 
 in its purity is what is wanted. The government of Louis 
 XIV was a strong one. A government that could at once and 
 by the issue of a single order drive 250,000 faithful subjects 
 into exile, was undoubtedly strong; it would be hard to con- 
 ceive of a stronger, unless it would be a government that could 
 for twenty-one years prevent a single immigrant from land- 
 ing on its shores. But it has been noticed that the strength 
 which is always equal to the demands of persecution and pros- 
 ecution and repression, is never equal to the task of elevation. 
 Under the strong government of Louis XIV the fate of com- 
 mon Frenchmen was to perish in useless battle, eat grass by 
 the roadside, die in the ditch, or be banished from home. 
 The strength of Bourbonism is always the strength of an al- 
 ligator that drags everything under. The romance of Bour- 
 bonism, too, has its charms. The great and good Mr. Burke, 
 at the period of the French Revolution, could see nothing 
 through his tears but the decline of chivalry; but the chivalry
 
 126 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 which Mr. Burke mourned was of the sort that branded the 
 white shoulders of women with a red-hot iron fleur de Us on 
 account of their religion, and made the peasant-women of 
 France wooden-shod beasts of burden. Chivalry and Bour- 
 bonism both frauds, how often, early and late, they have 
 been associated. Then too, we are pointed to Bourbonism as 
 the supporter of religion; and it is true that a great amount 
 of anointing oil has run down its narrow and retreating fore- 
 head. But on inspection it will be found that it was the relig- 
 ion of Balaam -determined to go the wrong way regardless 
 of the protest of the angel that stood in the path, or of the 
 beast of burden it bestrode. The religion of Bourbonism 
 was, and always is, a Bourbon religion, that renders unto 
 Caesar all that is Caesar's, and a great deal more, and to God 
 what happens to be left. That was the religion of the cour- 
 tier who remarked when the wickedest of Bourbons died that 
 God would think twice before he would damn a man of his 
 quality; it was the religion of the bishop, who walking in a 
 garden with a lady had a servant walk behind with a rake to 
 obliterate their tracks one rake thus following another; it 
 was the religion that filled France with sleek abbe's, who were 
 practically atheists. Better than this, any religion. Better 
 than these ordained mockers of God, and high priests in the 
 temple of corruption, and servers of an infamous altar, the 
 wildest manifestations of what is called religious enthusiasm; 
 better even the Salvation Army, everywhere spoken against for 
 frightening horses. The crimes of Bourbonism have been 
 laid at the door of the Roman Catholic Church by its ene- 
 mies, and the authority of that church has been invoked by
 
 HOUSE OF BOUEBON. 127 
 
 its friends. But that was the church of Fenelon and Massil- 
 lon, saints of God; the church of Pascal and the good people 
 of Port Royal, the church of millions who went to heaven 
 and found there the greatest possible contrast with France. 
 Others have accused Christianity as the essential principle of 
 Bourbonism. That was the prevailing view in 1793, and is 
 still of many Frenchmen. Such do not appear to remember 
 that one form of faith, undoubtedly Christian, was at one time 
 the great barrier in the way of the flood of Bourbon rotten- 
 ness. I speak of Calvinism, which made God so great that 
 even Louis XIV looked small. The slightest review of the 
 facts should convince that the religion which ministers to 
 Bourbonism is no form of the Christian system. It is merely 
 the Bourbon religion. There is no strength except that 
 which oppresses ; no stability except that of the infernal 
 powers ; no true chivalry, if there ever was such a thing ; no 
 faith embodying peace on earth and good-will toward man, in 
 Bourbonism. 
 
 Probably the most clearly visible of the evil effects of the 
 once universal reign of the House of Bourbon, is its influence 
 in literature, especially in the department of history, where the 
 doctrine is upheld that communities have, in days past, and 
 even do now, need tyranny, and individual and " higher class " 
 rule as a school. This is upheld in face of the fact that a 
 school of this kind once maintained in Egypt, resulted in the 
 children of Israel, to the number of a million or so, " playing 
 hookey." 
 
 To many minds the declaration of Abraham Lincoln at 
 Gettysburg in favor of a government of, by and for the peo-
 
 128 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 pie, seems a new and strange saying. That government, be it 
 understood, is the direct opposite, and the farthest possible 
 remove from Bourbonism. No tyrant, or advocate of tyr- 
 anny, from Pharoah who would not let the children of Israel 
 go, to the latest judge, who, in the miserable inconsistent days 
 of our own country, found in the constitution new reasons for 
 keeping man a slave, was ever of the least practical use, ex- 
 cept as an example to be avoided and detested. 
 
 The Bourbon notion is that the government makes the peo- 
 ple. But the people have always, until absolutely imbruted 
 by Bourbon rule, been better than their government. When 
 Louis XV once seemed inclined to behave like a soldier and a 
 gentleman, when he went to the army and camped with the 
 troops, all France rose in a transport of affection, and when 
 he fell sick waited in anxiety the issue, and fairly kissed the 
 horse of the messenger that brought the tidings of his recov- 
 ery. The people were kinder, braver, better than the king, 
 and so they always are. The people have always been more 
 fit to rule themselves than any Bourbon has been fit to rule 
 them. The poorest and rudest commune in France left to 
 regulate its village affairs, was better governed than any Bour- 
 bon ever governed France. Even during the reign of terror 
 administrative reforms were introduced in France which the 
 Bourbons, left to themselves, would not have compassed in a 
 thousand years. 
 
 The history of the House of Bourbon in France as we have 
 given it is the history of a failure. It is the hope of man- 
 kind that Bourbonism will everywhere fail. One of the causes 
 that brings about its fall, is that it arrays against itself the in-
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 129 
 
 telligence, the wit, the humor, the poetry of the country. All 
 the wit of France was arrayed in its burnished armor against 
 the House of Bourbon, before its bloody fall. Voltaire said 
 that he at one time intended to write a book which should be 
 a summary of human depravity, and that he wrote, " Once 
 there was a tax-gatherer," and quit, and all bright France 
 laughed at and applauded the sentiment. The satirist is sel- 
 dom, the wit still more seldom, and the humorist never on the 
 side of absolutism, of Bourbonism. Poets have been hired be- 
 fore now to sing its praises, but let the court minstrel clad in 
 silken doublet sing ever so wisely, and some poet of the field, 
 some cottage singer, taught by free bird and unfettered 
 stream, warbles. " A man's a man for a' that," and draws the 
 world away. 
 
 Bourbonism thus assailed, because it is an outrage and an 
 insult and an impertinence, being the self-constituted rule of 
 the few for the benefit of the few over the many, always resorts 
 as its first impulse to violence. A government based on force, 
 and pursuing force as its first instinct, is a Bourbon govern- 
 ment. In Bourbon regions it is a soldier at this corner, a 
 gensdarme at the next, and the space between filled with police 
 and spies. It makes no difference whether the Bourbon wears 
 a diadem or whether his hair "reads the answer in the stars" 
 through the top of his hat, whether the emblem of his power 
 is a lettre de cachet consigning the Protestant to the darkness 
 of the Bastile, or whether it is a tar-bucket and a fence rail 
 the Bourbon idea is force, always force. The midnight mes- 
 senger of the king, of the masked riders of the Ku-Klux, are 
 alike the representatives of Bourbonism. A gentleman is he
 
 130 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 who rides a horse, a cavalier with a sword with which he may 
 cut down a peasant for a look. He who has no horse, no sword, 
 who may not on occasion use force to support a rule of force, 
 is not a gentleman, and has no part in the government. Yet 
 strange as it may seem, this idea is maintained occasionally in 
 a civilized country by civilized men. The contest in this world 
 is between this brutal idea and the movement to make the 
 cavalier come down from his high horse, lay aside his ever- 
 ready sword and take part with his fellow-citizens in a govern- 
 ment of reason. When Bourbonism is not in a condition to 
 use open it uses secret violence, for where it may have no 
 army it may have assassins. And where this is too dangerous, 
 Bourbonism attempts a war of words and indulges in peculiarly 
 venomous abuse and poisonous slander. The real wit in the 
 contest, the fun of the thing, is on the other side; the real in- 
 telligence finally drifts there, and Bourbonism gets the worst 
 of it. Read history and you will see this. Note how it was in 
 England before the passage of the first reform bill, and of 
 Catholic emancipation. Where were Tom Moore and the poets ? 
 Where were Sidney Smith and the wits and essayists? 
 
 The last resort of Bourbonism is cant. The ruffian and the 
 lampooner turns the solicitous guardian of public order and 
 the established framework of society. Bourbonism mourns 
 over the temporal and spiritual dangers of the emancipated 
 slave, turned loose in a world full of temptation without the 
 restraining influence of a godly overseer and the evangelizing 
 ministry of a cowhide. Bourbons, by-the-way, always believe 
 freedom for other people a failure. The Bourbon countenance 
 grows sad as it contemplates the high wassail which grand-
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 131 
 
 father and grandmother and the family will hold around the 
 hearthstone because one of the boys has been deprived by law 
 of the facilities for public intoxication. And it is the sleep 
 of Bourbonism that is murdered by frightful visions of chil- 
 dren being drowned in the cistern, or blown up with kerosene, 
 and shapes hot from Tartarus coming in to crouch by the 
 desolated hearthstone while mother runs across the street to 
 vote. 
 
 So the contest goes on between reason and beneficence as 
 against worn and rusty tyrannies, lumbering precedent and 
 the effort of intrenched evils to get themselves regarded as 
 vested rights. The sound you hear is the advancing steps of 
 Freedom, preceded by her heralds calling "Clear the way." 
 As between those who maintain that all men are created equal, 
 and are everywhere equal to the duties of self-government, and 
 are everywhere improved by the exercise of that privilege; and 
 those who maintain that to bear rule is the right and duty of 
 the few, and who everywhere resist any extension of the gov- 
 erning powers; who believe that only certain classes of men 
 are fit to take care of themselves, and who hold that the gov- 
 ernment should be conducted on the principle of a church 
 which nobody was allowed to join unless there was a vacancy; 
 a rule which long prevailed in China, and has been lately sug- 
 gested for the United States; between these two classes, a 
 decision must be arrived at by the test of experience. 
 
 In a matter of this kind it is allowable to bring in individ- 
 ual experience. That is always evidence, and I trust I shall 
 not lay myself open to any charge of vanity in citing what 
 may be called the experience of a family, even though that
 
 132 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 family be my own; and especially as the story is told, not be- 
 cause it is remarkable, but because it is not; because it is the 
 history of thousands of American families; an average his- 
 tory. 
 
 The first of my name in America was an English immigrant 
 who landed on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in 1631. He 
 was no "lord or belted knight," that is certain; no learned 
 doctor was he from any school; the "annals" of the poor man 
 are "short and simple;" five lines from the old record comprise 
 it all. He "came to this land," says the chronicler, and "en- 
 dured much bodily affliction," and died and left behind him "a 
 good savor of godliness;" and this one thing more, "He was 
 made a Freeman." He had undergone no special education, 
 nor resided in the country for a long time, nor did he possess 
 an extensive property qualification which, if required, would 
 have been fatal to his political advancement, as well as that of 
 most of his descendants since, but he was "made a Freman." 
 He had no precedents to guide him. It was not an a^e of 
 freedom. Louis XIII was king of France; Charles I, a Bour- 
 bon in every drop of his blood, was king of England; the dark 
 and bloody Wallenstein was ravaging the fields and cities of 
 Germany; but still this poor invalid, who, in a government 
 based on force would probably have not been counted in, was 
 "made a Freeman," the equal partner of other "Freemen" in 
 the structure of the state. Thus before Hampden, before 
 Cromwell, this humble man and his associates, taking upon 
 themselves the title of Freemen, established a free government, 
 made war and peace, preserved order, repressed crime, and 
 laid the eternal foundations of a commonwealth. The son of
 
 HOUSE OF BOUBBON. 133 
 
 this first Freeman, a blacksmith, went with others, farmers, 
 sailors, and mechanics, through the wilderness, and his forge- 
 fire first lit the woods and rocks and waters of New London; 
 and the blacksmith, as he shaped the glowing iron, shaped in 
 his free and equal brain the laws, the ordinances, the codes and 
 policies of the infant state of Connecticut. This Freeman's 
 son sailed away with the other seafaring men of that coast, 
 and humbled the house of Bourbon in its strong fortress of 
 Lonisburg. Later, when came the bloody issue between the 
 colonies and crown English Bourbonism with its sword, and 
 American Freedom with her sword two lineal descendants of 
 that first Freeman died in the ranks: one in the bloody redoubt 
 at Bunker Hill, and another on the victorious field of Saratoga. 
 No glittering rewards were held out to these, no seignorial 
 grant of lands attracted the first emigrant; no dukedoms, or 
 stars, or garters, or largesses of any sort were held out to them 
 later: it was enough to live and die Freemen. So for two hun- 
 dred and fifty-six years the structure reared as I have told you 
 without a model, has endured, and the gates of hell have not 
 prevailed against it. That plain, strong house shelters me and 
 my children as it sheltered seven generations of my name and 
 race before me. In that two hundred and fifty years the floods 
 have risen and the winds have come, and the rain has beaten 
 on the house of Bourbon and it has fallen, for it was based on 
 the shifting sands of human arrogance and pretense. 
 
 The government of American freemen, adopted by the first 
 handful of exiles gathered on the narrow shore between the 
 devouring wilderness and the hungry sea, has proved its adapt- 
 ability to the wants and needs and aspirations of common
 
 134 KANSAS-MISCELLANIES. 
 
 men by over two centuries and a half of trial. It has enlisted, 
 as I have shown yon, the affection not of those whose " trade 
 is royalty," but the bone and sinew; the farmer in his furrow, 
 the blacksmith at his anvil, the sailor whistling as he climbs. 
 For that free government, and that it might be kept free, 
 these have shed their freely-given and unpurchased blood. It 
 has grown stronger as it has grown more free, and as its priv- 
 ileges have been extended. The first Freeman in the family 
 story which I have given you was required to be a member of 
 the church; the community being, by express understanding, 
 a religions as well as a civil society. In a short time the 
 religious test was removed, and we have gone on making 
 "Freemen" and removing restrictions ever since -religious 
 restrictions, property restrictions, race restrictions, and now 
 the restriction of sex, and the country is stronger and better 
 for it. We have not torn down the old house we have only 
 made it roomier and more comfortable. 
 
 In the over two hundred and fifty-six years but one serious 
 danger has ever menaced our government, and that came in 
 the shape of a revolt in favor of the House of Bourbon. In 
 the mid'dle of the Nineteenth century there came an attempt 
 to set up over against this free government an aristocracy, 
 based, like every aristocracy, on slavery. It came on with all 
 the oW cries; the old assumptions of chivalry and snperiority 
 of blood and lineage ; its banners were blessed by the old 
 priests with the ancient benedictions, and it failed. And 
 amid the crash of its fall was heard the voice of the humbly- 
 born, raised to the summit of the State, proclaiming a gov- 
 ernment of the people, by the people, forever and forever.
 
 HOUSE OF BOUBBON. 135 
 
 For myself, as one American citizen, I have no fears of 
 freedom. I fear nothing except Pharisaism, exclusivism, re- 
 actionism, Bourbonism. I fear the ballot nowhere. I am not 
 afraid of it in a black hand, I am not afraid of it even in my 
 wife's hand. I do not fear, either, that too many will come to 
 this blessed land to enjoy its sun or its soil or its freedom. It 
 is not for me to shut out from this land, where the poor Eng- 
 lish emigrant of the Seventeenth century brought his broken 
 body but undaunted soul, to find a grave for one and free- 
 dom for the other, it is not for me in the Nineteenth century 
 to shut out from this land a single human being who^ seeks, 
 as he did, to be "made a Freeman." There is in my opinion, 
 no more danger of this country being conquered or its liber- 
 ties overthrown by the advent of the foreign-born, than of its 
 invasion by the armies of Gog and Magog; and as to the An- 
 archists, this great, strong, powerful country is in the same 
 danger from them that it is from a sudden concerted outbreak 
 of all the maniacs in the United States from the walls of their 
 respective asylums. Anarchism is the ague that arises from 
 the swamps of Bourbonism, and the just and reasonable en- 
 forcement of law is the quinine that will "break" it. 
 
 Bonrbonism bears in itself the seeds of death. Freedom 
 drinks at the waters of Eternal Life. Bourbonism goes, 
 Freedom comes. How beautiful upon the mountains, Lib- 
 erty, are thy advancing feet !
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN.* 
 
 IT has just been the fortune of the writer for once, at least, 
 to obey the commandment and make the Sabbath a day of 
 rest, in a town above all others in Kansas best adapted to com- 
 posure of body and soul, though once the noisiest, the fiercest 
 and most generally torn up little burg west of the Missouri. 
 It is hardly necessary to go further with the description to 
 enable an old Kansan to guess the truth that the town re- 
 ferred to is Lecompton. 
 
 The "guide, philosopher and friend" of the day and the 
 place was "Joe Fluff er," who, though a young man, may be 
 styled the "Old Mortality" of Lecompton, who has lived 
 within hearing of Lecompton for the better part of his days, 
 and who, for twelve years last past, has gathered there the 
 "sum of his possessions and fortunes;' 1 whose children are 
 natives of the place, and who, though adding to his other points 
 of resemblance to St. Paul, the fact that his life is spent in 
 "journeyings oft," returns from each pilgrimage to his Le- 
 compton home with the multitudinous little cedars, and the 
 three big coffee bean trees, which nature, in a sudden fit of 
 order, set out one day in a straight row, and exactly the same 
 distance apart. Here our friend sits on his " front stoop " 
 and gazes betimes at the hills and hollows and houses of the 
 
 * From the Atchison Champion, September 26, 1882. 
 (136)
 
 A KANSAS H AS-BEEN. 137 
 
 town. And more, he can shut his eyes and see Lecompton 
 just as it has looked on any day in the last twenty years. He 
 can go in the darkest night to any designated spot in the old 
 mile square that formed the original limits of the town; can 
 point out the else unseen loose lines of stones overgrown with 
 brush, that mark the foundations of houses that disappeared 
 utterly and forever years ago; and can stand on some high hill 
 and point to any historic spot, from old Gen. Brindle's print- 
 ing-office to the grave of Sherrard, who died in one of the polit- 
 ical brawls that marked the early days of Lecompton and 
 there are no days at Lecompton except early days. Every 
 visitor links it with the past, and of those who made the " Sab- 
 bath day's journey" here recorded, one was a lady who saw 
 the place first and last as a stage-sick little girl taking her 
 first journey in Kansas, from Leavenworth to Topeka, twenty- 
 three years ago. 
 
 The railroad has wound along the rocky bluffs that wash 
 their feet in the river at Lecompton for a good many years as 
 time is counted in Kansas, but for a long time the railroad 
 company refused to recognize the place as alive, and nothing 
 but a platform greeted the traveler, but at last a station-house 
 has been built, where two active and courteous young men 
 keep watch and ward over the slowly-developing freight and 
 passenger business of the neighborhood, but no hotel runners, 
 no hacks, no clamor of any sort meets you at the station. The 
 flowing river is not more still than the surroundings. A wagon- 
 road exists, but the traveler is liable to overlook it and clam- 
 ber up the sides of a rock quarry and so across bare commons 
 and through hazel patches up to the straggling town, with its
 
 138 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 maze of weed-grown lanes, and rail fences, and old houses, and 
 some new ones, and cabbage gardens, and little vineyards, all 
 piled in like furniture in an express wagon on moving-day. 
 
 The story is not yet forgotten about the man who became 
 possessed with the street-car rhyme about "Punch with care," 
 and so, going along, the line from the " Deserted Village " en- 
 tered our mind and there remained : 
 
 "With blossoming furze unprofitably gay." 
 
 Of course there is no furze in Lecompton, nor in the United 
 States, as far as known ; there was nothing but sand-burs, 
 and jimsons in a state of dry and rattling raggedness, and the 
 coarse and nameless yellow flowers that betoken the coming 
 on of autumn ; but still the words came, " With blossoming 
 furze," and then a break made by a question or some sudden 
 turn in the conversation, and then with silence came, with a 
 following echo, "unprofitably gay, unprofitably gay." 
 
 There was no living thing passed on the walk up from the 
 depot, save the most emaciated and listless of young colts, 
 which somebody, with a fine sense of humor, had decorated 
 with a halter, as if there was the slightest danger that he would 
 ever break, or pull, or run, or even walk away. He came in 
 naturally with the rest of the landscape, the sun-burned grass, 
 and the "blossoming furze, unprofitably gay." 
 
 When we had reached the porch of Senator Greene, for 
 " Fluff er" also wears the toga and sits in the curule chair, 
 and has the fasces borne before him and all that, as a Sena- 
 tor from Douglas county, we had a chance to observe how ad- 
 mirable for situation was Lecompton. The plan of nature is 
 an amphitheater of wooded hills they were once covered
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN. 139 
 
 with great oaks, growing free and shady, without incumber- 
 ing underbrush and in the center of the amphitheater rises 
 a hill as high as those surrounding it, and sloping to the river, 
 and on the crest of this was to stand the capitol of Kansas. 
 On this spot the edifice was actually begun, and $30,000 of the 
 money of the United States was here expended. Here, too, 
 the greatest change had been made in the latter-day ap- 
 pearance of Lecompton. On the old foundation, though cov- 
 ering but half of it, rises a new and spacious stone building, 
 glaring with fresh lime and a bright roof, the newest thing in 
 Lecompton. It is the new building of "Lane University." 
 This school was founded years ago by the United Brethren in 
 Christ, a small Church, inheriting the saintly traditions of the 
 Moravians, an outgrowth of that holy society which carried 
 its doctrines to the frozen mountains of Greenland and the 
 burning plains of India; which made Wesley a religious re- 
 former and organizer; which penetrated the forests of Amer- 
 ica and turned the fierce Indian to an unresisting gentleness 
 which was rewarded by the massacre of Gnadenhutten, the 
 most frightful chapter in American history, the most brutal 
 deed ever done by men professing to be civilized Christians. 
 The United Brethren started at Lecompton and have main- 
 tained for years their school. For a long time the school was 
 gathered in an old Lecompton hotel, famous once as the Row- 
 ena House, but now the academicians dwell in this structure, 
 erected as we have said, on the foundation laid in the old days 
 when the Government of the United States was a fraud, back- 
 ing violence in support of slavery. The school lives; I do not 
 know that it exactly flourishes, but it lives. A small Church
 
 140 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 like the United Brethren is more closely banded together and 
 more willing to make sacrifices for its own than a more nu- 
 merous and wealthy body. So it will not be surprising if this 
 school lives many, many years to kindle the torch of learning 
 to be carried far and wide by many hands. 
 
 Certainly a more beautiful site could not be found. From 
 the high windows the young men and maidens look over the 
 fairest of Kansas landscapes and there are no fairer. 
 
 The afternoon wore on amid talk and laughter, which, how- 
 ever, it is hoped did not disturb the appropriate stillness of 
 the place or shock any pious heart, since the subdued hilarity 
 gladdened the hearts of a little company of human beings 
 ranging in years from three to eighty-three years. 
 
 All the hills around Lecompton are covered with forest, to 
 which the drouth has given the somber hues of autumn, with- 
 out the gorgeous tints which are worked by the frost. The 
 brown and russet and grayish green of the trees conveyed an 
 impression of sadness, and framed in these fading woods rose 
 a ruin, as it seemed to be, a roofless church of stone. The ruin, 
 however, is not that of a house once completed and so convey- 
 ing a sense of something lost. It marks the hour when the 
 palsy struck Lecompton. On this now wild and overgrown 
 hillside the Catholic Church, which rarely makes mistakes of 
 business, essayed to rear one of its altars. The end came, and 
 the walls of the church, raised for the roof, were abandoned by 
 the workmen forever. It will never know the thread of priestly 
 feet, the smoke of censer, the light of candle, or the sound of 
 bell. Near by is a house built for the priest, but for years left 
 to the care of first one poor tenant then another. We walked
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN. 141 
 
 over to the "ruined fane." Where it was hoped and fondly be- 
 lieved would be a paved and crowded street, there wound only 
 a yellow country road. At one place a wide culvert was 
 crossed. We should not have noticed it had not our faithful 
 guide called attention. That culvert cost the United States 
 $1,000 in gold. It was in the "earlier and purer days of the 
 republic," that that robbery was committed; twenty-odd years 
 nearer Jackson than we are now. Passing over the ancient 
 fraud, we left the road entirely, and tramped through thickets 
 and great growth of weeds, and stood within the walls of the 
 old unfinished church. One wall had fallen in, and gaps had 
 opened in places, but, as conscious of protection, birds had 
 built their nests in the crevices of the wall, and raised their 
 young in the abandoned sanctuary. But framed in the open- 
 ings for the windows looking to the westward were such 
 clouds, such hills, such evening shadows as painters cross the 
 sea to find. Here was the village spire rising among the 
 trees; here a shining glimpse of the winding river; here the 
 white road winding adown the steep; and above all such a sky 
 as never Italy knew. That same view, 3,000 or 4,000 miles 
 away, with perhaps some slight accessories a castled tower; 
 the sharp pinnacle of some old chateau would wake the en- 
 thusiasm of the American artist, or poet; but it was only at 
 poor old Lecompton, in and for the county of Douglas and 
 State of Kansas. 
 
 Led by the indefatigable Albert, we went to the top of the 
 hill and through a newly-cleared field cut out of the woods, 
 and saw, in the near distance, a large, hip-roofed house. It 
 was built by Frederick P. Stanton, when Secretary of the Ter-
 
 142 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 ritory of Kansas. In his mind, Mr. Stanton saw Lecompton 
 an opulent metropolis, and built this great house where he 
 thought to be convenient to the forum and the mart, and yet 
 out of the noise and whirl of business. The house, for the 
 time, was strongly and massively built; it was esteemed a sort 
 of baronial residence, but the fashion of politics passeth away; 
 Mr. Stanton long since left Kansas, the stage on which he was 
 for a time so conspicuous a figure, and the house was left to 
 itself; its occupants are shifting and inconstant, and it even 
 has the reputation of being haunted. 
 
 Pointing to the northwest across the river, the "delineator" 
 explained .that there existed a Mormon graveyard. According 
 to tradition, a party of these unfortunate and misguided peo- 
 ple, bound westward, were overtaken at this place by some 
 officious Missonrians who claimed that they were endeavoring 
 to escape military duty in the Mexican war. Of the men, 
 many were apparently frightened or cajoled into enlisting ; 
 the women were left almost alone to pursue their long jour- 
 ney ; with the other troubles came sickness, and many went 
 away, not to Utah, but to the " silent land." This was the 
 story as it was told whether it be true or no under the 
 gentle and pitying sky of evening. 
 
 Poining to the northeast, the line of cottonwoods was 
 dimly discerned that mark Stonehouse creek, where it is 
 claimed the first white settlement of Kansas was made. It 
 was a trading-post. One of the traders was a Boone, a son or 
 grandson of Daniel Boone, and there exists, or did exist, 
 some years ago, a well walled up with cut stone, the work be-
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN. 143 
 
 ing done at the expense of the nursing mother of Territories, 
 the United States treasury. 
 
 , Next we went down through the woods along what was a 
 mere trace, a narrow grass-grown path, abruptly crossed at 
 one place by a barbed wire of the newest and sharpest kind. 
 This was once the main road from Lawrence to Lecompton, 
 and coming in on this road with a couple of six-pounders, 
 Gen. Lane, and that better and braver man, Col. Sam. Walker, 
 bluffed the authorities at Lecompton into compliance with 
 their wishes. 
 
 On these hills, on the down-river side of the town, live a 
 good many colored people of the rural order. It is a singular 
 circumstance, but these primitive black folks are always found 
 haunting the vicinage of all the old pro-slavery towns of Kan- 
 sas. Why they do this, nobody ever has satisfactorily ex- 
 plained. One would suppose that they would have hunted the 
 the "citadels of freedom" at Lawrence. But no, here th^ey 
 are, where dwelt those who fondly hoped to be called "master," 
 and have their drinks brought to them on a waiter by "my 
 yeller boy." These dark reminders of the "patriarchal sys- 
 tem " have their little farms and garden patches around Le- 
 compton, sending their children to school like other Kansans, 
 and on Sunday they pray and preach and sing at the public 
 school-house. 
 
 Thus did we go round about Lecompton and so back like 
 a surveyor's line, "to the place of beginning," just as the 
 lights were shining in the windows of the town. Then, like 
 good people, we all went to church. The spacious hall of the 
 University was quite splendid with chandeliers, and a fine
 
 144 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 congregation of solid-looking people, with several old men 
 with German names, who set one to thinking about Count 
 Zinzendorf ; and their singing of the modern sort, harmoni- 
 ous, though without musical accompaniment, and a sermon 
 by a thoughtful young man who was an observer of nature 
 because he used as an illustration a lizard he had discovered 
 under a Lecompton rock and with poetry in his soul, be- 
 cause he quoted "Evangeline"; and it was well, for a man 
 who has no eyes for the world around him, and no imagina- 
 tion, withal, has no "call" to preach. 
 
 That night, at the bright supper-table, the talk was of 
 apples, brought on by the presence of some fine specimens of 
 Kansas growth, and the host, taking up one, said that there 
 was once a man down South, during the war, who hated every- 
 thing Yankee so much that he did not like to hear the North 
 Star mentioned, who yet bowed in reverence to the "Rhode 
 Island Greening," the apple exhibited to the company, and 
 raised in Lecompton. And this led to what may be called the 
 resurrection of Lecompton. The "metropolis" idea being 
 abandoned, the people who might otherwise have lived in 
 town went on their farms and into their orchards, and so has 
 grown up around some of the finest orchards and vineyards. 
 The lamentations of the Douglas County Horticultural So- 
 ciety have not prevented Douglas from being a fruit county, 
 or one orchardist not far from Lecompton shipping in one 
 season 25,000 bushels of apples to Colorado. The railroad 
 has made the discovery that Lecompton is a good shipping 
 point, and so the country grows apace and reacts on the town, 
 and new houses are not infrequent, and the waste places shall
 
 A KANSAS HAS-BEEN. 145 
 
 be made glad in time, and there will not be quite so much un- 
 profitable vegetable gayety in the neighborhood. 
 
 At midnight, under a moon that shone like an electric 
 light, we wended our way along the silent street of the town, 
 and it chanced that we lifted up our eyes and beheld a 
 weather-beaten, two-story frame building, which even the 
 "fairy moonlight" could not brighten or soften, and this was 
 "Constitutional Hall." 
 
 Oh, the constitutional conventionists of Lecompton ; how 
 statesmanlike they thought themselves, as they gathered in 
 this frame house. How shrewd they thought that dodge of 
 submitting the "Constitution with slavery" and the "Consti- 
 tution without slavery." How they were going to "calm the 
 agitation " and save the Union, and suppress the fanatical 
 abolitionists and soothe the throes of the approaching earth- 
 quake, and quiet the thunder and saddle and bridle the storm. 
 How they made this old shell echo, and how they wiped the 
 perspiration from their Websterian foreheads, and thought 
 they had completely and everlastingly "done it," and how it all 
 ended in a bad smell, and the story of a candle-box hid in a 
 woodpile. Such is the "unprofitable gayety" of statesmen, 
 which considerably discounts the "blossoming furze." 
 
 The railroad curves and winds and hugs the bluff to pass 
 Lecompton, and so we stood on the platform, and listened to 
 the rumble, which seemed near, but was really miles away ; 
 then a light flashed, disappeared and flashed again, and then 
 was lost once more. The first flash was seen three miles away, 
 and then the intermittent rumble grew into a low, steady roar, 
 and grew louder and louder, and then the flash was near at 
 10
 
 146 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 hand, making the rails for a long way ahead shine like molten 
 silver, and then there was a scream and a pause, and a clang- 
 ing bell and another rush, and Lecompton was left to silence 
 and to sleep.
 
 THE MENNONITES AT HOME.* 
 
 TALKING the other day with Mr. C. B. Schmidt, the for- 
 eign missionary of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe", 
 we asked him concerning the present whereabouts and pros- 
 pects of the last detachment of Mennonite immigrants from 
 Russia, whose arrival was recently chronicled in the Common- 
 wealth, whereupon Mr. S. suggested that the questioner visit 
 the Mennoriites and enable himself to answer his own ques- 
 tion. The suggestion was unanimously adopted. 
 
 The features of the country between Topeka and Newton 
 are tolerably familiar, and do not need description. Going 
 down, however, the writer noticed a remarkable illustration of 
 the heavenly influence of music. A stout, middle-aged woman 
 on board had with her two and a half seats filled with chil- 
 dren. One of them, a girl, kept up a steady succession of the 
 most ear-piercing yells that ever made an old bachelor wish he 
 were dead. This young lady led the rest of the family in a 
 continual chorus of shrieks, save one, a youth of about three 
 years, who was provided with a "mouth-organ," or harmonica, 
 which he played all the time, with an occasional vacation of 
 about a minute and a half for breathing purposes. While his 
 brethren and sisters were bathed in tears, and almost silenc- 
 ing the rumbling of the train with their outcries, he sat, as 
 
 * From the Topeka Commonwealth, August 20, 1875. 
 (147)
 
 148 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 happy as he could be in a vain world like this, and played and 
 played and played, illustrating the great truth that "music 
 hath charms to soothe the savage breast." 
 
 From melody to sweetness is a natural transition, which 
 recalls the fact that Mr. A. F. Homer was a fellow-passenger, 
 and informed us that he had just shipped sixty-two barrels 
 and the requisite cane-crushing machinery down the road, 
 and proposed to make sorghum on a scale of unprecedented 
 magnitude. In view of this, the destruction of the levees in 
 Louisiana is not such a serious calamity to us. 
 
 The original objective point of the trip was Halstead, 
 where Mr. B. Warkentin, a Mennonite, has a fine flouring mill; 
 but circumstances changed cases, so that our railroad jour- 
 ney ended at Newton. Mr. Warkentin, by-the-way, was met 
 on the train going down, with his bride, a young lady from 
 Summerfield, St. Glair county, Illinois. The bridegroom, 
 bride, two brothers-in-law and a sister of the bride, made up 
 a gay party. 
 
 In the morning bright and early the "outfit" started from 
 Newton. Like Mr. G. A. Sala's trip to Russia, ours was "A 
 Journey Due North," over the prairie and over a road now 
 used almost exclusively by the Mennonite settlers; in fact the 
 first team we met was that of a Mennonite who was going to 
 Newton with a wagon-load of watermelons. He very politely 
 handed over a melon, selecting one which he said was of Rus- 
 sian origin. It was a very fine one, and we anticipate great 
 pleasure on our next visit to St. Petersburg in sitting on a 
 store-box in front of the Imperial palace and eating such a 
 melon with the Grand Duke Alexis. And this brings up the
 
 THE MENNONITES AT HOME. 149 
 
 great subject of watermelons, as connected with the Mennon- 
 ite immigration. 
 
 The Mennonites have a decided preference for watermelons 
 over every other "fruit." They call the melon "arboosen," 
 though we would not be willing to certify that this is the cor- 
 rect spelling. The last detachment happened to arrive at 
 Atchison on Saturday market-day, and among the first ob- 
 jects they saw were the big Kansas watermelons. They "went 
 for them then and thar," and felt that they had reached the 
 "happy land of Canaan." Unless some other State can raise 
 larger watermelons than Kansas which some other State 
 can't the future Mennonite immigration will be directed 
 hitherward. This fondness for watermelons and a watermelon 
 country are an indication of the peaceable and sensible char- 
 acter of the Mennonite people. The American prefers to 
 migrate to a country where he has a chance to be eaten up by 
 grizzlies and chased by wolves, and can exercise his bowie- 
 knife on the active red man, while the Mennonite sees no fun 
 in danger, abhors war, and so seeks out a fertile, peaceable 
 country, where he buries his glittering steel, not in the hearts 
 of his enemies, but in the bowels of the luscious watermelon. 
 
 The first Mennonite residence reached was that of "Bishop" 
 Buller, who is not a bishop at all, as the Mennonites recognize 
 but one order in their ministry, that of " elder," who is elected 
 by the congregation, and is usually a farmer like the rest. At 
 Mr. Buller's we saw an evidence of progress. One of the stone 
 rollers which were procured to thresh grain was lying in the 
 yard, while a short distance away was an American threshing- 
 machine in full blast.
 
 150 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Mr. Buller accompanied us to the residence of Abraham 
 Reimer, where a council was being held relating to some busi- 
 ness with the railroad company. 
 
 The establishment of Mr. Reimer, who is a leading man 
 among his people and who left a fine property in Russia, af- 
 forded a good idea of what Mennonite thrift has already ac- 
 complished in Kansas. Mr. Reimer's house was a substantial 
 frame structure with two large barns, and at the rear of it 
 numerous stacks of grain arranged in a semi-circle. A stout 
 boy and girl were engaged near by in stacking hay, the young 
 lady officiating on top of the stack. That the Mennonite, the 
 female Mennonite, is not destitute of an eye for the beautiful, 
 was shown by a well-kept flower garden at the end of the 
 house. It is true that the flowers were arranged in straight 
 rows and were such floral old-timers as pinks, marigolds and 
 the like, but, after all, Solomon in all his glory was not ar- 
 rayed as one of these. 
 
 Out in the dooryard there was that queer blending of races 
 often seen in Kansas. There were Mennonites, and in the 
 midst was a horse-trader of the usual American type, and 
 with him a young colored man who spoke German and acted as 
 interpreter. An object of interest to all except the Mennon- 
 ites, was a Russian farm -wagon, noticeable for its short 
 coupling, narrow "track," flaring bed painted green, and a 
 profusion of blacksmith's work all over. The horse-trader 
 intimated that the American eagle would not condescend to 
 ride in such a wagon. 
 
 The interior of the house, as we have said, consisted of two 
 rooms, as yet unplastered, looking like the apartments of any
 
 THE MENNONITES AT HOME. 151 
 
 thrifty settler who has not yet had time to plaster his walls. 
 The only "foreign contrivance" to attract a stranger's notice 
 was the bedstead and bedding, the latter piled up in a high 
 stack when not in use, and covered over with a calico "spread." 
 The top of the high, narrow pile resembled in shape a coffin, 
 and conveyed the unpleasant impression to the visitor that he 
 had arrived just in time for a funeral. In the "best room" 
 the meeting was in progress. The room was quite full, and 
 the visages of all present were as immovable as the green-and- 
 gold face of a Russian clock that ticked on the wall. These 
 clocks are seen everywhere. They sport a long pendulum 
 with a disk as big as a buckwheat cake, and long, heavy hang- 
 ing weights of brass. There was not a newspaper or periodi- 
 cal in sight, and no books save a black-covered German Bible, 
 according to the version of Dr. Martin Luther, and several 
 Mennonite hymn-books; these last were bound in leather and 
 printed in Odessa. There were few relics of Russia to be 
 seen, especially* no pictures of any sort. In every kitchen, 
 however, there is a Russian teakettle a large affair of cop- 
 per, lined with tin; and at "Bishop" Buller's we saw some 
 wooden bowls, curiously painted and gilded. They are very 
 common in Russia, and the smaller sizes sell for three cents 
 each. The Mennonite in Russia beats the Yankee in the 
 wooden-ware line. 
 
 After the council had broken up, dinner followed, being 
 neat and clean. The leading features were fried cakes, the 
 English name of which appeared to be "roll-cake;" then there 
 was black rye bread very good and excellent butter. We 
 should not omit to add that there was also watermelon.
 
 152 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Everything indicated that the Mennonite is "fixed;" he is a 
 good liver, and hospitable in any event. 
 
 We finally took leave of Abraham Reimer, who shook hands 
 cordially, though he did not kiss Mr. Schmidt as he did the 
 Mennonite brethren when they left. The luxury of men kiss- 
 ing each other appears to be exclusively confined to the Men- 
 nonite Church, 
 
 We left the Reimer settlement for Gnadenau by way of 
 Hoffnungsthal. The Reimer settlement is called New Alex- 
 anderwohl, or New Alexander's health. Healthy Alexander is 
 synonymous with smart Alexander. Hence, New Alexander- 
 wohl may easily and beautifully be translated into New Smart- 
 aleckville. A few miles further east along the south branch of 
 the Cottonwood is a row of grass-thatched shanties called 
 Hoffnungsthal. The settlers here are poor, and the name of 
 the town signifies "The Valley of Hope." The settlers live in 
 hope. Next in order comes the admirably-located town of 
 Gnadenau. Mr. Schmidt seemed "mixed" as to the meaning 
 of this word, and we are not positive whether it signifies 
 "Valley of Grace," or "The place from which a fine prospect 
 can be seen." 
 
 We drove across an immensity of newly-broken prairie be- 
 fore we arrived at the acres of sod corn and watermelons which 
 mark the corporation line of Gnadenau. The houses of Gnade- 
 nau present every variety of architecture, but each house is 
 determined on one thing, to keep on the north side of the one 
 street of the town and face to the south. Some of the houses 
 are shaped like a "wedge" tent, the inclining sides consisting 
 of a frame of wood, thatched with long prairie grass, the ends
 
 THE MENNONITES AT HOME. 153 
 
 being sometimes of sod, at others of boards, and others of 
 sun-dried brick. Other houses resemble a wall tent, the sides 
 being of sod laid up as regularly as a mason lays brick, and 
 the roof of grass. Some of these sod houses were in course of 
 construction. Finally came substantial frame houses. At the 
 east end of the street, in a red frame house with board window 
 shutters painted green, lives Jacob Weibe, the head man of 
 Gnadenau. We found Mr. Weibe a tall, powerfully-built man, 
 with a more martial appearance than his brethren. This may 
 arise from the circumstance that the Mennonite church is 
 divided on the question of shaving, and Mr. Weibe adheres to 
 the bearded persuasion. Mr. Weibe came to Kansas from the 
 Crimea, where a Mennonite colony was established some thir- 
 teen years ago, and it sounded strangely to hear him use in 
 conversation the once famous names of localities near his 
 home, Sevastopol, Kertch, Eupatoria and others. But Kansas 
 is drawing a population from regions yet farther away than 
 these. On our road to Peabody we met a Mennonite settler 
 who announced the arrival of a daughter from the border of 
 Circassia. Mr. Weibe has built a house more nearly on the 
 Russian model. He took us over the structure, a maze of 
 small rooms and passages, the stable being under the same 
 roof with the people, and the granaries over all, the great 
 wheat-stacks being located at the back door. 
 
 An immense pile of straw was intended, Mr. Weibe said, 
 for fuel this winter. The Mennonites are economists in the 
 way of fuel, and at the houses are large piles of chopped straw 
 mixed with barnyard manure stacked up for "firewood." This 
 kind of fuel destroys one's ideas of the "cheerful fireside" and
 
 154 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 "blazing hearth." There is not much "yule-log" poetry about 
 it. Straw sounds and smells better. In order to use it, how- 
 ever, the Mennonites discard stoves, and use a Russian oven 
 built in the wall of the house, which, once thoroughly heated 
 with light straw, will retain its warmth longer than young love 
 itself. 
 
 Of course we visited the watermelon fields, which in the 
 aggregate seemed about a quarter-section, and Mr. Weibe in- 
 sisted on donating a hundred pounds or so of the fruit or is 
 it vegetable ? fearing we might get hungry on the road. 
 
 As we have mentioned three Mennonite villages, we may 
 say that the Mennonite, system contemplates that the land- 
 holder shall live in the town and in the country at the same 
 time. The villagers of Gnadenau and Hoffnungsthal own 
 fourteen sections of land, yet all the farmers live in the two 
 towns, each of a single street. Near are the gardens, and all 
 around are the wide fields. Near each house were immense 
 stacks of grain raised on ground rented from men who were 
 driven out last year by the grasshoppers. 
 
 When we left the manly and hospitable Weibe's, the even- 
 ing was well advanced. At the top of the ridge we looked 
 back into the wide sunlit valley with the cornfields and the 
 long row of grass-thatched houses, and thought of the coming 
 day when solid farm-houses and great barns and waving or- 
 chards would line the long village street, even to Hoffnungs- 
 thal; and so we slashed open a watermelon, and drank to the 
 health of Gnadenau.
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITE8.* 
 
 r I ^HERE has always been something very interesting to me 
 -L in the coming of different peoples to Kansas, and the 
 blending of all of them into a community of interest and 
 language. In my newspaper travels I have interviewed a half- 
 dozen varieties of "colonists," among them the Hungarians, 
 of Rawlins county, and the colored folks of Nicodemus, who 
 came to Kansas from the distant and foreign shores of Ken- 
 tucky. 
 
 By far the most extensive and notable immigration in the 
 history of Kansas was that of the so-called " Russians," which 
 began substantially in 1874, and which has resulted in the set- 
 tlement of fifteen thousand Mennonites in the counties of 
 Marion, Harvey, McPherson, Butler, Reno and Barton, besides 
 the Catholic German-Russians, who have some settlements in 
 Ellis county, on the line of the Kansas Pacific, and whose mud 
 village of Herzog I visited in 1878. 
 
 The rallying-point of the Russian immigrants in 1874 and 
 1875 was Topeka, and that town abounded with sheepskin 
 coats, ample breeches, bulbous petticoats, iron teakettles, and 
 other objects supposed to be distinctively Russian, for many 
 months. There was considerable competition between the 
 two great land-grant roads the Kansas Pacific and the 
 
 * From the Atchison Champion, May 8, 1882. 
 (155)
 
 156 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Atchison, Topeka <fe Santa Fe" to secure these people as set- 
 tlers. With its usual good luck, the Santa Fe 1 captured both 
 the larger and the better class, the Mennonites. 
 
 The Catholic Russians were from a remote part of Russia, 
 the government of Saratov, and were the most foreign in 
 their appearance. The men and boys had a custom of gather- 
 ing on the street at night, near their quarters, and singing in 
 concert. The music was of a peculiarly plaintive character, 
 suggesting the wide, lonely steppes from whence they came. 
 As I have said, they went out on the Kansas Pacific, where 
 they seem to have pretty much disappeared from public view. 
 In 1878, at Herzog, they had made very little progress. 
 
 The Mennonites seemed more at home in the country; and 
 securing excellent lands from the Santa Fe company, soon 
 disappeared from Topeka. In the summer of 1875, in com- 
 pany with Mr. C. B. Schmidt, then, as now, the Emigration 
 Agent of the A. T. <fe S. F., who had been largely instrumental 
 in settling them in Kansas, I visited a portion of the colo- 
 nists, living in the villages of New Alexanderwohl, Hoffnungs- 
 thal and Gnadenau, in Harvey and Marion counties. The, 
 observations made on the occasion of that visit were em- 
 bodied in an article in the Topeka Commonwealth, entitled 
 "The Mennonites at Home." From that visit until yesterday, 
 I had never seen the Mennonites, though I had often felt a 
 great curiosity to observe for myself how they had succeeded. 
 
 In 1875 the Mennonites were still a strange people. They 
 retained the little green flaring wagons they had brought from 
 Russia, and were attempting to live here under the same rule 
 they followed in Russia. ^The village of Gnadenau was the
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 157 
 
 most pretentious of their villages. It was a long row of 
 houses, mostly built of sod and thatched with long prairie 
 grass. A few of the wealthier citizens had built frame houses, 
 furnished with the brick ovens of Russian origin which warm 
 the family and cook its food for all day with two armfuls of 
 loose straw. 
 
 The land belonging in severalty to the villagers, lay around 
 the settlement, some of it at a considerable distance, while 
 near at hand was a large common field, or rather garden, 
 which was principally devoted to watermelons, which seemed 
 the principal article on the Mennonite bill of fare. 
 
 The site of the villages seemed selected with care, each 
 standing on such slight ridges and elevations as the prairie 
 afforded. It was summer in Kansas, and of course the scene 
 was naturally beautiful ; but the scattered or collected Men- 
 nonite houses, with their bare walls of sods or boards, amid 
 patches of broken prairie, did not at all add to the charm of 
 the scene. The people were like their houses, useful but ugly. 
 They had not yet got over the effect of their long ocean voyage 
 or their life in the huddled emigrant quarters at Topeka, where 
 they acquired a reputation for uncleanliness which they were 
 far from deserving. Still there was an appearance of resolution 
 and patience about them, taken with the fact that all, men, 
 women and children, were at work, that argued well for the 
 future. It was easy, if possessed of the slightest amount of 
 imagination, to see these rude habitations transformed in 
 time to the substantial brick houses surrounded by orchards, 
 such as the people had owned when they lived on the banks of 
 the Molotchna in far Russia. Of course, it was reasoned, they
 
 158 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 would remain villagers; they would cling to the customs they 
 .brought from Russia, and remain for generations a peculiar 
 people. They would be industrious ; they would acquire 
 wealth ; but they would remain destitute of any sense of 
 beauty, rather sordid, unsocial, and to that extent undesirable 
 settlers. 
 
 Hardly seven years have passed, and on Friday last, for the 
 first time, the writer was enabled to carry into effect a long- 
 cherished purpose to return and take another look at the 
 Mennonites. It was intended to start from Newton in the 
 morning, but a day fair as ever dawned in Eden was followed 
 by a night of thunder, lightning, and rain, the rain continu- 
 ing to fall all the following forenoon, with a chill wind from 
 the north; but at noon one of those "transformation scenes" 
 common in Kansas occurred. The sky began to clear, with a 
 great band of blue in the north and west; the wind blew free, 
 and by 2 o'clock we drove out over roads that you could 
 almost walk in barefooted without soiling your feet. We were 
 fortunate in our guide, Mr. Muntefering, of Newton, who had 
 hunted all over the country, and had traversed it often trans- 
 acting business on behalf of the railroad company with the 
 Mennonites. The wheat waved a varying shade of green, 
 shifting in its lines like sea-water; the prairie-chickens rose 
 on whirring wing before the old hunting-dog who ran before 
 the carriage; flocks of long-billed plover looked out of the 
 grass ; and the meadow-lark rehearsed a few notes of his 
 never-finished song. 
 
 A great change had taken place in the country generally 
 since my last visit. The then raw prairie was now, barring
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 159 
 
 the fences, very like Illinois. At last, after driving about ten 
 miles, Mr. Muntefering announced the first Mennonite habita- 
 tion, in what seemed the edge of a young forest, and I then 
 learned what I had never before heard, or else had forgotten, 
 that the Mennonites had abandoned the village system, and 
 now lived "each man to himself." They tried the villages 
 three years, but some confusion arose in regard to paying 
 taxes, and beside, it is in the air, this desire for absolute per- 
 sonal and family independence; and so they went on their 
 lands, keeping, however, as close together as the lay of the 
 country would admit. Sometimes there are four houses to 
 the quarter-section ; sometimes four to the section. The 
 grand divisions of New Alexanderwohl, Hoffnungsthal and 
 Gnadenau still exist, but each group of farms has a name of 
 its own, revealing a poetical tendency somewhere, as Green- 
 field, Flower Field, Field of Grace, Emma Vale, Vale of Hope, 
 and so on. These are the German names freely translated. 
 The old sod-houses (we believe the Mennonites never resorted 
 to the dug-out) had given way to frame houses, sometimes 
 painted white, with wooden window-shutters. The houses had 
 no porches or other architectural adornments, and were uni- 
 form in appearance. I learned afterward, that the houses 
 were built by contract, one builder at Halstead erecting sixty- 
 five houses in one neighborhood. 
 
 The most surprising thing about these places is the growth 
 of the trees. I left bare prairie; I returned to find a score of 
 miniature forests in sight from any point of view. The wheat 
 and corn fields were unfenced, of course, but several acres 
 around every house were set in hedges, orchards, lanes and
 
 160 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 alleys of trees trees in lines, trees in groups, and trees all 
 alone. In many cases the houses were hardly visible from the 
 road, and in a few years will be entirely hidden in the cool 
 shade. Where the houses were only a few hundred yards apart, 
 as was frequently the case, a path ran from one to the other, 
 between two lines of poplars or cottonwoods. A very com- 
 mon shrub was imported from Russia and called the wild olive, 
 the flowers being very fragrant; but the all-prevailing growth 
 was the mulberry, another Russian idea, which is used as a 
 hedge, a fruit tree, for fuel, and as food for the silk-worm. 
 
 We wished to see a few specimen Mennonites and their 
 homes, and called first on Jacob Schmidt, who showed us the 
 silk-worms feeding in his best room. On tables and platforms 
 a layer of mulberry twigs had been laid, and these were covered 
 with thousands of worms, resembling the maple-worm. As 
 fast as the leaves are eaten fresh twigs are added. As the 
 worms grow, more room i? provided for them, and they finally 
 eat mulberry brush by the wagon-load. Mr. Schmidt said the 
 floor of his garret would soon be covered. It seemed strange 
 that the gorgeous robes of beauty should begin with this blind, 
 crawling green worm, gnawing ravenously at a leaf. 
 
 We went next to the house of Peter Schmidt. Had I been 
 an artist I should have sketched Peter Schmidt, of Emmathal. 
 as the typical prosperous Mennonite. He was a big man, on 
 the shady side of forty. His face, round as the moon, was sun- 
 burned to a walnut brown. He was very wide fore and aft; he 
 wore a vest that buttoned to his throat, a sort of brown 
 blouse, and a pair of very roomy and very short breeches, 
 while his bare feet were thrust into a sort of sandals very
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 161 
 
 popular with the Mennonites. The notable feature of Peter's 
 face was a very small mouth, which was slightly spread at 
 times with a little smile, showing his white teeth, and quite out 
 of proportion to his immense countenance. Peter knew 
 scarcely any English, but conversed readily through Mr. 
 Muntefering. He showed with pride his mulberry hedges. 
 The plants are set out in three rows, which are cut down al- 
 ternately. Peter had already cut down one row, and had a 
 great pile of brush for firewood. The Mennonites relied at 
 first on straw, and a mixture of straw and barnyard manure, 
 which was dried and used for fuel, but now the wood is in- 
 creasing on their lands. They have seldom or never indulged 
 in the extravagance of coal. Another source of pride was the 
 apricots. The seed was brought from Russia, and the trees 
 bore plentifully last year, and the Mennonites, taking them to 
 Newton as a lunch, were agreeably surprised by an offer of $3 
 a bushel for them. Peter Schmidt showed all his arboral 
 treasures apples, cherries, peaches, apricots, pears, all in 
 bearing, where seven years ago the wind in passing found only 
 the waving prairie grass. No wonder Peter Schmidt, of Em- 
 mathal, waxed fat and smiled. He started on the prairie with 
 $800 ; he now has a farm worth f 4,000. We went into the 
 house, of course; the door of every Mennonite is open, and 
 the proprietor showed us his silk-worms and his possessions 
 generally. He exhibited his Russian oven, built in the parti- 
 tion walls so as to warm two or three rooms, and to which is 
 attached also a sort of brick range for cooking purposes. 
 This device cannot be explained without a diagram. It is 
 perfectly efficient, and the smoke at last goes into a wide chim-
 
 162 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 ney" which is used as the family smoke-house. A happy man 
 was Peter Schmidt, and well satisfied with his adopted country, 
 for when I managed to mix enough German and English to- 
 gether to ask him how he liked America as compared with Rus- 
 sia, he answered in a deep voice, and with his little smile: 
 "Besser." With a hearty good-bye to Peter Schmidt of Em- 
 mathal, we pursued our journey, passing many houses, hedges 
 and orchards, and finally came to the home of Heinrich 
 Richert of Blumenfeld, or Flower Field. 
 
 This place was of the more modern type. The house was 
 a plain frame, of the American pattern, but the stable had a 
 roof of thatch, on which the doves clung and cooed, as you 
 see them in pictures. Not far away on either hand were two 
 other houses, to which shaded alleys led. In one of them lived 
 the oldest married daughter of the family. Leading up to 
 the front door the path was lined with hedges of mulberry, 
 trimmed very low, and flat on top, as box hedges are trimmed ; 
 and there was also a large flower-bed of intricate pattern, the 
 property of the Misses Richert. 
 
 When Mr. Richert came in from the fields, his bright eye, 
 his square jaw, and the way he stood on his legs, showed that 
 he was accustomed to authority. He had, in fact, been a 
 schoolmaster in Russia, and in America occasionally exercises 
 his gifts as a preacher. In the sitting-room, which had no 
 carpet, but a pine floor which fairly shone, was a bookcase 
 set in the wall and filled with books, which usually are not 
 very common in Mennonite houses. They were all sober-col- 
 ored volumes, commentaries on the Scriptures, and works on 
 horse-doctoring. Madame Richert, a very pleasant woman,
 
 A DAT WITH THE MENNONITES. 163 
 
 with, it may be remarked, a very pretty and small hand, gave 
 the history of the older books, which were brought from 
 Prussia, where her husband was born, but she herself was born 
 in southern Russia, as were the thirteen young Richerts. 
 
 It was decided to accept the hospitality of these good peo- 
 ple, and the mother and daughters got supper and such a 
 supper ! such bread and butter and preserves ; and every- 
 thing, nearly, on the bill of fare was the product of this six- 
 year-old farm. At table the conversation turned on the mode 
 of living in Russia. From Mr. Richert's description the Men- 
 nonites lived much better than most working - people in 
 Europe. They had Brazilian coffee which came by way, of 
 Hamburg, and tea which came overland from China ; then 
 they had fish, both fresh-water fish and fish from the Sea of 
 Azof. He said the mode of serving food had been changed 
 somewhat since the Mennonites had migrated to this country. 
 
 After supper, Mr. Richert, his son, and the visitors, had a 
 long talk about Russia. The treatment accorded the Men- 
 nonites by the Russian Government, up to 1871, was all that 
 could be desired. The agreements made in the days of the 
 Empress Catherine, what Mr. Richert called the "privilegium," 
 were faithfully kept. The Mennonites did not own the lands, 
 but leased them on the condition of cultivating them; the im- 
 provements were their own. The Mennonites had,- in fact, 
 very little to do with the Imperial Government; each of the 
 fifty villages had its burgomaster, and a chief burgomaster 
 was elected by the people. The Government transacted its 
 business with the Mennonites through a council consisting of 
 three Russian officials, and these performed their duty hon-
 
 164 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 estly a rare thing in Russia. The Mennonites were industri- 
 ous, peaceable and loyal; a Mennonite was the richest man in 
 the Crimea, and one of the wealthiest in Russia. Everything 
 went well until the Government, in 1871, announced its inten- 
 tion of enforcing a universal conscription. Against this the 
 Mennonites protested. Ten years was given them to yield or 
 leave. Thousands left. In 1881 the Government revoked the 
 " privilegium," compelled the remaining Mennonites to take 
 lands in severalty, and began to introduce the Russian lan- 
 guage into the Menno'nite schools. Russia's loss is our gain. 
 
 At breakfast the conversation turned on the wonderful suc- 
 cess of the Mennonites with all kinds of trees, quite excelling 
 anything known by Americans, with all their low-spirited hor- 
 ticultural societies. Herr Richert remarked that one thing 
 that helped the trees was "plowing the dew under." This is 
 one of the secrets of Mennonite success they "plow the dew 
 under'' in the morning, and do not stop plowing till the dew 
 falls at evening. 
 
 The history of Herr Richert was that of all the Mennonites 
 we talked with. He had come to this country with $1,000 ; at 
 the end of the second year he was $1,300 in debt, but had 
 lifted the load and was now the possessor of a fine farm. The 
 Mennonites, we may say, bought their lands in alternate sec- 
 tions of the railroad company, and in most cases bought the 
 intervening sections of individual owners. They have been 
 prompt pay. Many of the Mennonites were very poor. To 
 provide these with land, a large sum was borrowed from 
 wealthy Mennonites in the east. The beneficiaries are now 
 prosperous, and the money has been faithfully repaid. Be-
 
 A DAT WITH THE MENNONITES. 165 
 
 sides this, a mission has been maintained in the Indian Terri- 
 tory, and a considerable sum has been recently forwarded to 
 aid destitute brethren in Russia. 
 
 To continue our journey : our next stop was to call on a 
 settler who wore a beard, a Cossack cap, and looked the Rus- 
 sian more than any other man we met. He took us into a 
 room, to show us some Tartar lambskin coats, which was a 
 perfect copy of a room in Russia ; with its sanded floor, its 
 wooden settees painted red and green, its huge carved chest 
 studded with great brass headed bolts, and its brass lock-plate, 
 all scoured to perfect brightness. In a little cupboard was a 
 shining store of brass and silver table-ware. It was like a 
 visit to Molotchna. 
 
 At the humble dwelling of Johann Krause we witnessed the 
 process of reeling raw silk. The work was done by Mrs. Krause, 
 on a rude twister and reel of home construction. The co- 
 coons were placed in a trough of boiling water, and the 
 woman, with great dexterity, caught up the threads of light 
 cocoons, twisting them into two threads and running these on 
 the reel. The work required infinite patience, of which few 
 Americans are possessed. The Mennonites carried on the 
 silk-raising business in Russia with great success, and bid fair 
 to make it a great interest here. 
 
 After leaving Johann Krause, we made few more halts, but 
 drove for miles with many Mennonite houses in sight, and the 
 most promising orchards and immense fields of the greenest 
 wheat. I have never seen elsewhere such a picture of agricul- 
 tural prosperity.
 
 166 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 If anyone has not yet made up his mind as to the possibili- 
 ties of Kansas agriculture, 1 recommend a visit to the Men- 
 nonite settlements. It is not difficult of accomplishment, as 
 the points I visited in Harvey, McPherson and Marion coun- 
 ties can be reached by a few miles drive from Newton or 
 Halstead, on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka <fe Santa 
 Fe, or from Canton, Hillsboro and other stations on the 
 Marion <fc McPherson branch. 
 
 It is a matter, I regret to say, of uncertainty, whether the 
 work begun by these Mennonite settlers will be completed. If 
 the sons and grandsons of Peter Schmidt, of Emmathal, and 
 Heinrich Richert, of Blumenfeld, will walk in the ways of those 
 worthy men, the result will be something like fairyland the 
 fairies being, however, substantial men, weighing about 185 
 pounds each. The orchards will bud and bloom, and amid 
 them will stand the solid brick houses, like those of Russia, 
 and the richest farmers of Kansas will dwell therein. Bat 
 there is a danger that this will not come to pass. Jacob and 
 David will go to work on the railroad, and let the plow take 
 care of itself; and Susanna and Aganetha will go out to ser- 
 vice in the towns, and fall to wearing fine clothes and marrying 
 American Gentiles; and the evil day may come when the de- 
 scendant of the Mennonites of the old stock will be cushion- 
 ing store-boxes, saving the Nation with his mouth, or even 
 going about like a roaring lion, seeking a nomination for 
 Congress. I wish I could believe it otherwise. I wish our at- 
 mosphere did not make us all so smart that we cannot enjoy 
 good health. Were it not for that accursed vanity and rest-
 
 A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 167 
 
 lessneas which is our heritage, I could indulge in a vision of 
 the future of a peaceful, quiet, wealthy people, undisturbed 
 by the throes of speculation or politics, dwelling in great con- 
 tent under the vines and mulberry trees which their fathers 
 planted in the grassy, wind-swept wilderness.
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL.* 
 
 IN a State which had elections before it had legal voters; 
 railroads before it had freight and passengers for them; 
 and newspapers before it had printing offices ; a State which 
 one of its gifted and honored sons described in a magazine 
 (which rose, fell and faded because it was published before it 
 had readers) as the "hottest, coldest, dryest, wettest, thickest, 
 thinnest country in the world," there can be nothing surpris- 
 ing or worthy of apology in the fact that, on an occasion like 
 this, an individual should be selected to speak to classical 
 scholars who does not himself know one Greek letter from 
 another ; and who, so far from knowing anything of the 
 Latin particles, does not know a particle of Latin; that one 
 should be chosen to address, with an implied obligation to 
 instruct gentlemen who are proficient in the mechanic arts, 
 yet who himself could not construct a symmetrical toothpick, 
 even with the plans and specifications before him; nor that 
 there should be delegated as the "guide, philosopher, and 
 friend" of teachers and students of the science of Agriculture, 
 one who, should there arise in future times a contest like that 
 which has raged over the authorship of the "Letters of Jun- 
 ins," might be put forward as the probable writer of that 
 
 * Annual address delivered before the Kansas State Agricultural Col- 
 lege, at Manhattan, May 26, 1875. 
 
 (168)
 
 THE WOULD A SCHOOL. 169 
 
 singular compendium of ignorance, "What I Know About 
 Farming," instead of the late Horace Greeley. 
 
 While thus disclaiming any necessity for an apology, your 
 speaker will not, however, avail himself of ten thousand time- 
 honored precedents, and after first announcing that he is "en- 
 tirely unprepared to make a speech," proceed to demonstrate 
 the truth of that preliminary remark to the absolute conviction 
 of everybody; but, avoiding educational bays and inlets which 
 he has never navigated, will head out to the sea which no man 
 owns; which has no beaten paths; over which the man who 
 sails, though it be for the thousandth time, still sails a dis- 
 coverer, a ten-thousandth edition of Christopher Columbus; 
 and, instead of speaking of this man's books, and of that 
 professor's school, he will speak of a book which no man 
 wrote, and which is not yet completed; he will discourse of a 
 University for which men's schools and colleges and universi- 
 ties are, at the very best, but a slight preparation; and these 
 thoughts and suggestions will be brought together under the 
 general title of "The World a School." 
 
 Possibly some may inquire by what process a speaker, con- 
 fessedly ignorant of many valuable things found in books, 
 and deprived by chance, circumstances, and in early life 
 want of inclination to acquire what is commonly called an 
 education, has obtained the knowledge which he proposes to 
 impart; from what store-house, they may ask, does he pro- 
 pose to draw his facts and inferences ? The reply is, that this 
 qualification and these facts and applications are obtained 
 through what is itself an educational process, although it is 
 never mentioned in the educational journals, or discussed at
 
 170 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the teachers' institutes, or supervised by that oppressive mys- 
 tery the Bureau of Education at Washington; and this 
 sort of education is called in America and by Americans 
 " knocking about." 
 
 The course varies with every scholar, and occupies various 
 periods of time. With most Americans it lasts from early 
 manhood, sometimes from early boyhood, to the end of life. 
 It is the fate of very few to graduate early ; to find some 
 sailor's snug harbor where they may ponder over what they 
 learned, and be knocked about no more. The students of 
 Knock About University cannot locate on the map the seat of 
 that institution; it has no special postomce address. Like 
 love, it is found in the camp, the court, the field and the grove. 
 The student resides at no particular boarding-house ; and, as 
 I have said before, the course varies with each student, though 
 the course is by no means optional, since the student fre- 
 quently pursues branches which he does not fancy ; and, in- 
 deed, instances are of record when the course has suddenly 
 ended at the branch of a tree. In the course of his studies 
 the student may be transported from the banks of the Ohio 
 to those of the Sacramento, and thence to the James. He 
 may be transferred from the society of students of the 
 Septuagint to that of the professors of the seven-shooter. 
 He may become in turn, or be all at once, a preacher, a news- 
 paper correspondent and a soldier. He may be at the same 
 time a member of a presbytery and of a general's staff, and 
 perform at once, and in different ways, the functions of an 
 embassador of Heaven and of the sanitary commission. To- 
 day he may be learning to set type, and to-morrow building a
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. Ill 
 
 church ; to-day he may be fearlessly denouncing sin and wick- 
 edness, and day after to-morrow fighting a narrow-gauge rail- 
 road. In none of these pursuits is he adhering to what I am 
 informed is called a "curriculum;" and in the prosecution of 
 these various labors he may not open a text-book for weeks 
 together. And yet. he is all the time acquiring knowledge 
 which mortal man never yet extracted from between the 
 covers of any book ever written by man. In these years his 
 hands are hardening for the work they have yet to do ; his 
 shoulders are widening for the burden they have yet to bear ; 
 his sinews are strengthening for the race he has yet to run ; 
 his heart is enlarging for those he has yet to embrace in its 
 sympathies ; and his mind is acquiring that breadth and 
 force, vigor and clearness which will at last be required in 
 the instruction of it may be you, young ladies and gentle- 
 men ! 
 
 It is hardly necessary for me to say that the rough sketch I 
 have just drawn is not intended as the outline of an autobiog- 
 raphy. Far less useful and brilliant has been the career of 
 your fellow-student of the evening, and yet it may be, that 
 even in the experience of years spent in the enforced wander- 
 ings of a common soldier ; of other years passed even in the 
 humbler walks of a profession created within a century or 
 two specially to 'record day by day the progress of this busy 
 world; of years filled in with a mass of reading, even though 
 careless and unsystematic; it may be that, in all these years, 
 some knowledge which may be imparted to others has been 
 acquired of that world which Shakspeare says is all a stage, 
 but which for this evening, we will consider is all a school.
 
 172 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 If there is any one thing that there has been a settled en- 
 deavor to impress upon the minds of the students of this 
 Kansas State Agricultural College it is, that neither at this 
 nor any other institution of learning neither at Manhattan, 
 nor at Gottingen, nor Tubingen, nor at any other place that 
 ends in "ingen" can be acquired what some people are 
 pleased to call a finished education. This institution does 
 not, if I correctly understand its purposes, teach the young 
 idea how to shoot; it merely endeavors to furnish him with 
 powder and shot, and expects him to do his own shooting ! 
 All that is learned here is, as I understand it, only intended as 
 a preparation for the student who is going out to become a 
 gownsman, as the English would say, in that great university 
 the World. 
 
 I say "going out into the world," and I use the expression 
 advisedly. The young man or woman who has passed twenty 
 years of life, who has known something of struggle and toil, 
 incurred possibly to avail himself or herself of the advantage 
 of this very institution, may think that he or she is already in 
 the midst of the great world; but this is hardly the case. New 
 York harbor is a part of the ocean; the water is salt and 
 sometimes rough, and the breeze that blows over it is fresh 
 and strong, and the tide rises and falls; but no ships are ever 
 seen under full sail in its waters. They are towed about by 
 steam-tugs, and it is only when you are outside of the Nar- 
 rows, and the tug has cast off and the pilot is gone, that you 
 are at sea; and the difference is, that from that time, on her 
 journey through light and darkness, through sunshine and 
 storm, near the low reef or sunken rock, for thousands of
 
 THE WOULD A SCHOOL. 173 
 
 miles, until the once-familiar stars are gone and even the 
 heavens are strange, the good ship must care for herself 
 alone. For days she sails the lonely deep, nor sees the faint- 
 est glimmering of a friendly sail. When the sky grows black, 
 the waves grow white, and the vessel rolls and groans like a 
 sick man in his sleep, she cannot run into a friendly harbor; 
 her salvation depends on her keeping off-shore. If there are 
 defects in her construction; if she is ill-manned, or if her rig- 
 ging is worn when she leaves port, she cannot return to mend 
 these defects. Courage and skill on the part of the officers 
 must repair damages and provide against calamity. But there 
 is no going back; she is at sea. 
 
 And this it is that makes going out from an institution like 
 this really going out into the world, because it marks the 
 limit between dependence and self-help. The student here 
 obeys rules and regulations prescribed by others; he reads 
 books placed in his hands by others; he receives opinions, to 
 some extent, because they are promulgated by authority; but 
 when he steps out of these bounds all this ceases. He is his 
 own man then. A Frenchman relating an experience in Eng- 
 land, and illustrating the omnipresence of the English officers 
 of the law, said: "I was alone with God and a policeman." 
 And so the newly -graduated is alone in the world with a di- 
 ploma. 
 
 That diploma is a good thing. Your speaker wishes he 
 possessed one; he would prize it, even though it were written 
 in newspaper English. But after all, the parchment only tells 
 what has been done, and it does not always tell the whole truth 
 about that. In a healthy soldier's discharge from the service
 
 174 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 are the words: "No objection to his being reenlisted is known 
 to exist." I imagine that sentence might be written with 
 propriety on an occasional diploma. The graduate might go 
 back and go through the course again without injury. But 
 admitting that the diploma has been well and fairly earned, it 
 is only an evidence of work worthily done so far of a good 
 beginning. It is, at the best, a certificate that John Smith or 
 Jane Smith, as the case may be, has made a good start to- 
 ward acquiring an education, and is prepared, as far as the 
 institution conferring the diploma can furnish a preparation, 
 for entrance in that greater, higher school, the world. 
 
 And right here, over the question what sort of preparation 
 should be furnished, has been fought the battle of the educa- 
 tors. It is over this that the great educational gods have 
 kept "this dreadful pother o'er our heads"; it is over this 
 that it has thundered all around the sky; it is over this that 
 usually mild-mannered men have shot wrathful glances through 
 their gold-bowed spectacles, while every fold of their white 
 neckcloths swelled with indignation. The result of the battle 
 has been the establishment of two varieties of colleges: one 
 teaching the classics, and conferring the information that 
 "Achilles' wrath" was "to Greece the direful spring of woes 
 unnumbered," and also furnishing the truly gratifying infor- 
 mation that Major General Xenophon, with ten thousand men, 
 has fallen back from Richmond to the Chickahominy, and 
 now has the enemy just where he wants him; and the other 
 variety teaching the modern languages, natural sciences, agri- 
 culture, and the trades. Possibly this may not be an exactly 
 accurate statement of the case, but it must be taken as the ac-
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 175 
 
 count given by a passing reporter who took no part in the 
 row himself. 
 
 But seriously, men must take the world as they find it. 
 And what kind of a world does the graduate find when he 
 leaves the halls he has paced so long ? Is it like an old-fash- 
 ioned college? The sinking heart of many a young man as 
 he has stood in the midst of the surging, careless, seemingly 
 selfish, rude, well-nigh merciless crowd for the first time, has 
 told him that the world is no green college campus; that the 
 men he must meet day in and day out, with whom and from 
 whom he must earn his daily bread, are not professors or stu- 
 dents; are not men of culture; that they are not interested in 
 the woes of Greece, but are vastly concerned about their own 
 woes, their own business, and their own dinners. Stand where 
 meet the thronged ways in a great city and notice what men 
 carry in their hands, under their arms, or in their breast 
 pockets, and you will find out something about this world. 
 Here goes a painter with his bucket of white-lead; there goes 
 a carpenter with his square; here passes an Italian with a 
 board on his head, covered with plaster-of-paris figures; here, 
 one after another, pass a dozen clerks with pencils over their 
 ears, and bits of paper in their hands, and papers sticking 
 out of their pockets; shop-boys pass repeatedly with bundles; 
 
 here walks a round-shouldered chap with the end of his right 
 
 
 thumb and finger discolored and worn off a little he is a 
 
 printer, and takes a brass composing-rule out of his pocket 
 and puts it back again; men pass with hods, with mortar- 
 boards, with trowels; there may pass once in a while a young 
 gentleman, a smile irradiating his classical features that is
 
 176 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 a reporter, going to congratulate with the coroner over an ap- 
 proaching inquest. 
 
 This little panorama shows how men live, how you, my 
 friend with the bright and shining diploma, must live. Sup- 
 pose you wish to find out what these men know. Quote, if 
 you please, something from Homer, in the original Greek; 
 something affecting; the best thing there is in the book about 
 Achilles' wrath and the woes of Greece. Try this on the most 
 intelligent-looking man who passes, and if he is a Kansas man 
 as he probably will be if he looks uncommonly intelligent 
 he will look at you in a pitying way, and remark that it is a 
 burning shame that the Insane Asylum at Osawatomie was 
 not enlarged, or a new one built, years ago. It is evident that 
 the gentleman does not know Greek, and if you will look fur- 
 ther you will find before long a man in the crowd who cannot 
 translate the simplest Latin sentence, who nevertheless has a 
 diploma at home written in that language. But the trouble is 
 that shortly after his graduation the exigencies of life obliged 
 him to cease to trouble his head about how long Catiline in- 
 tends to abuse our patience, and abandoning all concern 
 about the woes of Greece, he went into the soap-grease busi- 
 ness. A few moments, then, passed where men can be seen 
 about their ordinary vocations, shows us that the world, which 
 we have said is a school, is likewise an Industrial School. A 
 vast majority of men are engaged in industrial pursuits, and 
 this, too, without regard to the circumstances of their early 
 education. To this complexion men must come at last. 
 
 Admitting this to be true, and it most certainly is true, 
 what sort of preparatory school is the best for a young man
 
 THE WOELD A SCHOOL. 177 
 
 or young woman who must, in time, enter this great industrial 
 school- the World? The question is easily answered. The 
 preparatory school should be the same, in kind, as the ad- 
 vanced department. It should be what the Boston Latin 
 School has so long been -to Harvard. Common sense, to be 
 plain about it, indicates that the transfer should be from the 
 primary industrial school. 
 
 But some people say the office of colleges and universities 
 is not to prepare young men and women for the rugged voca- 
 tions of life, but to impart to them mental culture. Culture 
 is good; but the question arises, What is the best culture ? A 
 man might take a quarter-section of raw prairie, break it, 
 harrow it, and finally seed it down to marigolds ; and that 
 would be culture. The result would be beautiful; a thing of 
 beauty and a joy, till frost came, would be that field of mari- 
 golds. What eye would not kindle when "jocund day stood 
 tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops," pointing with rosy fingers 
 ' to those one hundred and sixty acres of glowing golden mari- 
 golds ? But the man owning the adjoining quarter breaks up 
 the prairie-sod, and puts the entire tract in onions, and that 
 would be culture, too. The onion is not an aristocratic vege- 
 table; it is not admitted into good society. When the opera 
 house is a blaze of light; when the wealth of empires glitters 
 in diamonds on necks of snow; when the echoes of delicious 
 music fill the high hall, and the vast drop-curtain as it falls 
 trembles responsive to the applause that swells from parquet, 
 boxes, and galleries no admirer ever throws at the feet of 
 the child of genius, the embodiment of beauty and melody, a 
 
 dewy bouquet of fresh-culled onions.. And yet, to return to 
 11
 
 178 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the kind of culture on the prairie, public sentiment, leaning 
 over the rail fence and commenting on the two quarter- 
 sections, goes with the raiser of onions; applauds the thor- 
 oughness of his culture; remarks the admirable condition of 
 the ground, and the absence of weeds; and the man of onions 
 goes down to his house justified rather than the other. I con- 
 fess that I am a partisan as between marigolds and onions. 
 I am an ultra onion man, myself. 
 
 But, leaving this discussion, it is to be taken for granted, 
 students of the Kansas State Agricultural College, that you 
 have made up your minds to cast in your lot with an institu- 
 tion which can say to you when you leave it for the last time, 
 "Go, my son, go, my daughter ; I have done all I could for 
 you ; would that it were more. I do not send you forth filled 
 with dreams and visions. The world is a working world, as I 
 have told you often, and I have fitted you as best I could to 
 begin that work. You, my son, may not rise to what the 
 world calls distinction. It may not be yours, the ' applause of 
 listening senates to command,' but you may, please God, live 
 honestly and worthily and eat the bread your own hands have 
 earned. And yon, my daughter, go hence, freed from woman's 
 bane and curse an ignorant helplessness. You go with 
 skillful trained fingers, and an honest heart, into a world that 
 has need of you and such as you. 
 
 Graduated from this school and entered upon that other 
 school, the world who, what, where are the teachers ? They 
 are around above, beneath you ; they are yourself, man and 
 nature. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear in the world, 
 the myriad voices that speak to him. Let him find the
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 179 
 
 " tongues in trees, the books in running brooks, the good in 
 everything," of which the self-taught Shakspeare wrote. But 
 time passes ; we cannot call the roll of the faculty of the 
 University of the World, and so I make a few suggestions, 
 addressed more particularly to the graduating class, and those 
 who are soon to follow them. There is a phrase, I believe it is 
 called a "slang phrase" though whose function it is to say 
 what is slang and what is not, I do not know but the phrase 
 runs this way : " Be good to yourself." It is not an exhorta- 
 tion to selfishness ; men don't need that. It means respect 
 yourself, take care of and do not squander yourself. You will 
 find that if you are not good to yourself no one else will be 
 good to you. You owe no apology to anyone for being here. 
 You have as good a natural right to a front seat as any boy 
 or girl who goes to the World's School. 
 
 This institution, I am informed by the President and mem- 
 bers of the Faculty, is not intended for the exclusive produc- 
 tion of Presidents of the United States, nor does it guarantee 
 to its graduates situations in the United States Senate; but it 
 is well enough for young gentlemen to remember that genuine 
 distinction is to be attained in the line of agriculture and the 
 mechanic arts. As an illustration of the dignity of agricul- 
 tural pursuits, you often hear the quotation that "he who 
 makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before, is a 
 public benefactor." The whole paragraph, which may be 
 found in Gulliver's Travels, is still more striking. It reads: 
 "And he gave it for his opinion that whosoever could make 
 two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of 
 ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of
 
 180 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 mankind, and do more essential service to his country than 
 the whole race of politicians put together." 
 
 You see, then, that the raising of two blades of grass will 
 make you of more value than the whole race of politicians; 
 and in my opinion, if you raise but one blade the result will 
 still be the same. But indeed, in the field of agricultural dis- 
 covery there still seems to be boundless room. The books say 
 that neither Indian corn, potatoes, squashes, carrots nor cab- 
 bages were known in England until after the Sixteenth cen- 
 tury. Who knows how many new vegetables are yet to be 
 invented or improved? Fame may havs something in store 
 for you in that line. Your name may yet be carved on the 
 perfect watermelon of the future. Old men can remember the 
 advent of nearly every improved agricultural implement which 
 we now consider indispensable. It is the happy combination 
 of farmer and mechanic who is yet to achieve triumphs in the 
 field of agricultural invention. Then there is the great voca- 
 tion of teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts in schools 
 established for that purpose. This is new ground. The school 
 established in Switzerland by Fellenburg, counted the first or 
 among the first agricultural schools, was founded in 1806, less 
 than seventy years ago; and most of the work in that line has 
 been done since 1844, and still the surface of the ground has 
 only been scratched. To those who have a genuine literary 
 talent, a readiness in the use of written words, an ability 'to 
 tell things so that people will read them, and combined with 
 this, have a practical knowledge of the subject of agriculture, 
 I can say that in the opinion of those who do not write on 
 agricultural subjects, there is much to be done. A great deal
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 181 
 
 is written on agricultural questions which is regarded by a 
 careless and hard-hearted world as the perfection of balder- 
 dash, the sublimated quintessence of moonshine. But is there 
 not some one to be for this country and this time what Arthur 
 Young was for England at the close of the last century? A 
 bold and bright man was Arthur Young. His account of a 
 tour in France, prior to the outbreak of the French Revolu- 
 tion, is quoted by every historian of that struggle as a most 
 faithful picture of the brutalized and degraded condition of 
 the oppressed French peasantry, which led to the final explo- 
 sion. Said Young in the account of his tour: "The fields are 
 scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery. 
 To see so many millions of hands that would be industrious, 
 all idle and starving. Oh, if I were legislator of France for 
 one day, I would make these great lords skip again." Thus 
 wrote Arthur Young, farmer, reporter of the Morning Post, 
 tourist, political writer, and correspondent of Washington. 
 He wrote many books, among them a work on Ireland and 
 its agricultural condition and resources. The material for a 
 portion of this work was collected in 1776, just one hundred 
 years ago, and is still quoted by the latest writers on Ireland. 
 Young wrote not only what he knew himself, but what others 
 found out. The cattle-breeding experiments of Robert Bake- 
 well, who was not himself a writer, were described and com- 
 mended by Young. Who of the graduates of this institution 
 will be our Arthur Young, to write agricultural books to be 
 read a hundred years hence, and have it said of him, "He will 
 be illustrious in all succeeding days, as long as the profit of
 
 182 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 the earth is for all, and the king himself is served by the 
 field" ? 
 
 To those who propose to follow the mechanic art?, it is un- 
 necessary to say, that it is the skillful mechanic rather than 
 the soldier who now goes where glory waits him. This is the 
 mechanic's age. He is the reigning monarch now, and we all 
 take off our hats to him. He is the Prospero of this our 
 island, and steam is the monster Caliban that does his bid- 
 ding. I doubt if there is a man before me who would not 
 rather wear the laurels of Capt. Eads, the designer of that 
 wonderful bridge at St. Louis, than to be President of the 
 United States. 
 
 You enter the World's School, then, under favorable au- 
 spices, and it remains only that you improve your oppor- 
 tunities ; and let me say that you cannot always tell from 
 appearances who is capable of instructing you. The teachers 
 of the World's School are not always in uniform. For in- 
 stance: your orator undertook one day to air the nautical 
 knowledge he had obtained by a study of Mr. Fennimore 
 Cooper's sailors, who are only equaled in naturalness by his 
 Indians, and in about five seconds had his ignorance set in 
 order before his face by the gentleman he was kindly endeav- 
 oring to instruct. But who would have thought that the quiet 
 gentleman in a frock-coat, writing in an office, with a pencil 
 over his ear, had really followed the sea for years t Such, 
 however, happened to be the exact situation. You will find 
 that rough-looking men illiterate men, in fact are often 
 exceedingly well posted on some one or two things. If yon 
 ignore such yon will lose something. And this you will dis-
 
 THE WOULD A SCHOOL. 183 
 
 cover: that men and women with naturally good minds, but 
 who, from ignorance of writing, are unable to keep a diary, 
 journal, or memoranda of any kind, have frequently a very 
 tenacious memory of matters which have come under their 
 personal observation. The true method of investigation is 
 that pursued by the newspaper reporter, who forms no theory 
 in advance, but, on his arrival at the scene of a fire, or fight, 
 takes the statements of all within reach, without regard to 
 "age, sex, or previous condition of servitude." In the World's 
 School, unless you are willing to accept all available infor- 
 mation, from all possible sources, you will never be a good 
 scholar. 
 
 There is a maxim often quoted in connection with educa- 
 tion, viz., that "half a loaf is better than no bread"; but I 
 may be allowed to remark that one blade of a pair of scissors 
 is precious little better than no scissors at all; and so it is not 
 well in this world to devote a year of precious time to a study 
 which cannot be mastered in twenty years. Take, for in- 
 stance, phonography, one of the many systems of short-hand. 
 A knowledge of this art by which I mean the art of verbatim 
 reporting and nothing less while doubtless a good thing to 
 have, is not a prime necessity to one man or woman in ten 
 thousand. The mass of reporters and writers for the press 
 get along without, and many of the best reporters who have 
 ever lived were unacquainted with it. Yet how many thou- 
 sands of people who really had no occasion to study it have 
 wasted time and money in the attempted acquisition. How 
 many thousands, deceived by the ease with which the theory 
 of phonography is understood, have gone far enough to dis-
 
 184 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 cover that they could not get practice enough in all the leisure 
 hours of Methnsaleh to make them good short-hand reporters. 
 A pile of double-ruled paper as large as this room could be 
 constructed of the note-books of people who after months of 
 practice have found that they could not report even the slow- 
 est sermon, and on trying it found themselves struggling with 
 the pot-hooks which represent "My beloved brethren and sis- 
 ters" when they should have been making a crooked mark for 
 "Amen." These people have simply been trying to make a 
 century-plant bloom at two years old, that's all. Had they 
 been wise they would have devoted their two years to some- 
 thing that can be learned reasonably well well enough to be 
 used, in two years. Newspaper men, who really may be sup- 
 posed to need phonography, as I have said, get along without 
 it. They find it easier, in many instances, to sit comfortably 
 while the entirely original, unpremeditated and impromptu 
 discourse is being delivered, and then, approaching the 
 speaker after he has concluded, and hear him say, "Why, my 
 dear sir, I was not expecting to have my hasty remarks ap- 
 pear in print, but if it would be an accommodation to you I 
 can let you have the heads of my address just a synopsis, 
 you know." Whereupon he proceeds to draw from his right- 
 hand coat-tail pocket the complete manuscript. 
 
 The remarks made on the subject of phonography apply 
 also to ineffectual or insufficient efforts to acquire a knowl- 
 edge of the violin, and especially the flute. In regard to the 
 latter instrument, not only self-interest but humanity to 
 the neighbors demands that yon should not waste your time 
 in abortive tootings. If you feel it your duty to retire for
 
 THE WOULD A SCHOOL. 185 
 
 a season from the haunts of men, and, forsaking everything 
 else, cleave only to the flute until you become its master, it 
 is well ; but do not under any other circumstances touch that 
 instrument. 
 
 Having warned you not to attempt the mastery of really 
 desirable accomplishments unless you are sure that you have 
 the aptitude and the leisure for their perfect acquirement, let 
 me earnestly entreat you not to commit the great error of 
 wasting golden hours in the discussion of matters which are 
 of no vital importance. Beware of societies for the diffusion 
 of useless knowledge ; assemblages of people who know noth- 
 ing, to discuss matters of which nobody knows anything. 
 Remember that the Almighty is the only being who is omnis- 
 cient, the claims of various learned societies to the contrary 
 notwithstanding. There are some things you will never know, 
 and it is a good plan not to rack your brains over those things. 
 The exact age of this world, for instance, can never be ascer- 
 tained. Do not worry your mind by efforts to fix the precise 
 hour in the forenoon at which the process of creation began. 
 In these days when "science" is talked about by gentlemen 
 whose knowledge of the correct spelling of the word is a recent 
 acquirement, I know it is dangerous to disparage what is called 
 "scientific investigation." To speak lightly of such, exposes 
 the speaker to the danger of being called "ignorant," by peo- 
 ple who spell it with two g's ; but still I will risk this frightful 
 calamity by expressing the conviction that years devoted to 
 labor which results at last, not in the discovery of a fact in 
 nature, but merely in the elaboration of a theory, are wasted 
 years. " What shall it profit a man ? " is, after all, the question.
 
 186 , KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 What does it profit a man to handle over a large number of 
 skulls, and shout with rapture when he finds a monkey's skull 
 which resembles his own ? He cannot know, after all, that 
 that particular monkey was his relative. The glow of family 
 pride which comes over him at first, is soon dampened by the 
 dreary reflection that there may be a mistake somewhere ; 
 that the depression in the monkey's forehead which gives it its 
 startling resemblance to his own may be exceptional, may 
 have been the result of accident in youth, a blow from a cocoa- 
 nut in the hands of an irate parent, or something of the kind. 
 
 "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," and the paths 
 of this sort of "scientific investigation" lead us into the 
 mazes of painful uncertainty. Our ancestral gorilla eludes 
 our grasp like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth. And if he 
 did not, what then ? Is there any present or practical good 
 to be attained by dwelling on his merits or demerits, or in 
 tracing, painfully, the line which leads from us to him real- 
 izing, perhaps, that of late years the family has degenerated ? 
 
 But somebody, not a scientist, may ask, "Do you declaim 
 against all investigation of the mysteries of nature?" Cer- 
 tainly not. Consider the grasshopper, how he grows. He is 
 a mystery. Whence he cometh and whither he goeth we can- 
 not tell. Find out, if you can, why a miserable insect which 
 a child can crush beneath its foot, ravages whole states, while 
 man, with all his boasted resources, seems powerless to resist 
 him. Mysteries ! Secrets ! If you would investigate them, 
 the world is full of them. The forces of nature electricity, 
 and the rest have existed from the beginning, but how long 
 has man known of their power ? How much does he know
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 187 
 
 now ? The lightning flashed before the blinded eyes of Adam, 
 but how long since the electric spark became, not the terror, 
 but the friend of man ? Steam curled up from the kettle of 
 Tubal Cain, but how long since man knew how strong were 
 the shoulders of the prisoned vapor which now bears so many 
 burdens f Charcoal lay in the ashes of the first fire kindled 
 by man on the earth;- nitre formed on the walls of the cave, 
 and sulphur lurked in the earth; but how long since man 
 knew that these substances, harmless apart, were, linked to- 
 gether, a black conspirator who, without warning, can tear a 
 city or a mountain to fragments ? No man can say that 
 further investigation on these lines will reveal nothing. How 
 long is it since gunpowder, supposed to be the most powerful 
 of all explosive substances, was found to be to nitro-glycerine 
 what a boy's strength is to a man's ? Investigation ! There 
 is room for enough of that to fill the next thousand years, 
 during which the question of our primitive gorilla-hood can 
 be suffered to rest. 
 
 In the World's School as in the district school, a great hin- 
 drance to study is too much whispering, too much noise, too 
 much talk. The present age demands and admires action, not 
 words. Said an intelligent gentleman, speaking the other 
 evening of the British House of Commons: "A great orator is 
 a great nuisance and a great bore." It will, I think, be so con- 
 sidered in this country some day. It is certainly a consum- 
 mation devoutly to be wished. If any of these young ladies 
 or gentlemen have a habit of keeping still until they have 
 something to say, they can rest easy in the belief that the 
 world is coming round to their fashion. I think even now if
 
 188 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Demosthenes were living and were to repeat his experiment 
 of the pebbles, he would meet with little sympathy. At this 
 time, and I may remark, in this State, where we are so little 
 advanced in the practice of agriculture the oldest of human 
 vocations that the failure of a single crop reduces us to the 
 condition of Indians when the buffalo fails to put in an ap- 
 pearance, and a piteous cry for "aid" goes up from one end 
 of the State to the other in such a State there is little time 
 for speech-making. The world needs, nay, more, will have 
 men of action, not of mere words either spoken or printed. 
 A volume of speeches is not a very enduring monument, gen- 
 erally a fading and perishable one; a fine bridge, a noble 
 aqueduct, a row of tenement houses, built by generosity, not 
 avarice, a beautiful farmhouse such are the monuments men 
 should leave behind them. It is the impatience of the world 
 with talk that leads to Carlyle's "Hero Worship," and such 
 grim books as his Cromwell and Frederick; and who that 
 reads these books does not imbibe a feeling of respect for 
 men of action rather than the men of pamphlets, speeches 
 and proclamations? Who, whatever may be his idea of the 
 career, as a whole, of the first Napoleon, does not, in reading 
 that last chapter save one in Carlyle's "French Revolution," 
 stand an admirer of that young artillery officer, Bonaparte by 
 name, as he stands amid his guns at four o'clock in the after- 
 noon of that October day, waiting the approach of that bloody 
 mob of Paris who succeeded as rulers those "great lords" 
 whom Arthur Young hated? They are moving forty thousand 
 strong; their stray shot rattle on the staircase of the Tuilleries; 
 they are very near. "Whereupon, thou bronze artillery offi-
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 189 
 
 cer? Fire!" say the bronze lips. Roar and roar again go his 
 great guns, and "it was all over by six," said citizen Bona- 
 parte in his report. The mob which had cut off the heads of 
 many speech-makers had met at last a man of action. 
 
 And yet, what is called a "talent for affairs" is not incon- 
 sistent with the possession of a kindly spirit, manifesting 
 itself outwardly and visibly in perfect courtesy. Some of the 
 busiest men I have known always found time to be civil. In 
 the World's School you will find that your progress and happi- 
 ness depend much upon your treatment of your fellow-stu- 
 dents. The Nineteenth is a good century for firm men; it is 
 a bad one for bullies even of the pious variety. Lord Ches- 
 terfield was never wiser than when he exhorted his son always 
 to be the friend, but never the bully of virtue. This you may 
 depend upon: that you may lead your class, but you will never 
 drive it except, perhaps, after the manner of the Irishman's 
 horse, of which his enthusiastic owner exclaimed, "Bedad, he's 
 driving everything before him!" As you cannot safely domi- 
 neer over your fellows, so you may be sure you cannot long 
 deceive them. The stolen composition will be found in your 
 desk; the plagiarized speech will be detected. Blinder than 
 the blindest bat that fluttered in dark Egypt's deepest dark- 
 ness are those who put not their trust in God or man, but in 
 tricks. Little traps, set by little men, are daily knocked to 
 pieces beneath the very noses of their sagacious contrivers, 
 and the world's derisive laughter rings out at "strategy, my 
 boy"! 
 
 This, then, in your intercourse with your fellow-students of 
 this world, is the chief end of life: to be a gentleman; and
 
 190 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 this includes the ladies, for lady is but the feminine of gentle- 
 man. To be a gentleman you have the world's encourage- 
 ment nay more, you have an angelic warrant; for what says 
 Thackeray, in the "End of the Play": 
 
 "A gentleman, or old or young; 
 
 (Bear kindly with njy humble lays,) 
 The sacred chorus first was sung 
 
 Upon the first of Christmas days. 
 The shepherds heard it overhead, 
 
 The joyful angels raised it then; 
 Glory to Heaven on high, it said, 
 
 And peace on earth to gentle men." 
 
 But I must not keep you here listening to words which, 
 after all, may not be worth your remembrance, and which, in 
 the hurly-burly of that world, which soon, very soon will open 
 up before the youngest here, you will scarcely find time to re- 
 member; and yet the blessing and benediction of any human 
 being, even that of the sightless beggar by the wayside, is 
 worth the having. 
 
 Young men, young women, crowding forward from the by- 
 ways into the broad highway of life, may you do well the 
 work that is waiting for your hands, realizing the obligation 
 spoken of by Lord Bacon : " I hold every man a debtor to his 
 profession ; from the which as men of course do seek to re- 
 ceive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to en- 
 deavor themselves by way of amends to be a help and 
 ornament thereunto." 
 
 May your lives resemble not the desert's bitter stream, 
 which mocks the cracked and blistered lips of the fainting, 
 dying traveler; which but adds horror to the fiery desert, and 
 sinks at last into the burning sands, to which it brought no
 
 THE WORLD A SCHOOL. 191 
 
 verdure, no gladness from which it received nothing but 
 poison and a grave. 
 
 May the course of your lives find no counterpart in the 
 sluggish course of the dull bayou, a fungus among streams, 
 which winds and doubles and winds again through miles of 
 rank vegetation, which curtain its dark course, and shut out 
 from its sullen waters the gladsome light of day; a waveless, 
 tideless stream, in which reptiles of hideous shape crawl and 
 glide and swim, and which at night seems to lie still in the 
 darkness and listen to doleful and mysterious voices. May 
 none of you ever live isolated from your kind,- like those lakes 
 which lurk amid dark, once-volcanic mountains, with no visi- 
 ble inlet or outlet; deep, self-contained, solitary, giving back 
 no reflection save the dim images of scorched and barren 
 rocks, and splintered peaks; lakes on which nothing lives or 
 floats, which hide forever in their dark bosoms everything 
 cast into them. 
 
 But may your lives be like the river, which rises amid the 
 pure snows of the bold mountain; which, hurling itself over 
 the cliffs, answers back the wild, free eagle's scream; which 
 forces its way through the rocks that would impede it in its 
 search for the valley; which slakes, as it goes, the thirst of the 
 deer, and washes the roots of the pine tree from which the 
 flag of the far-sailing merchantman is yet to fly; which turns 
 the rude wheel of the mountain mill, and whirls in its eddies 
 the gathering sawdust as it speeds from under the whirring, 
 glittering teeth of steel it has bidden to rend the logs it has 
 brought them. It grows wider and deeper, and more silent 
 and yet stronger, as it flows between smiling farms and thrifty
 
 192 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 villages, which owe their existence to the bounteous river. At 
 night it sends its mist over all the valley and half-way up the 
 hills like sweet Charity, who silently wraps in her sheltering 
 mantle all the sons of men. It carries on its bosom all float- 
 ing craft the light canoe, the slow-drifting raft, the arrow- 
 like steamer. In time, its wavelets give back at night in 
 dancing gleams, the thousand lights of the great cotton mills, 
 and, anon, its waters part before the prow of the new-built 
 ship as she glides down the ways to the element which is 
 henceforth to be her home. Thus goes the shining river, the 
 ever-useful, ever-blessed river ; best friend of toiling man ; 
 fairest thing from the creative hand of God. Thus goes the 
 river, to mingle at last forever with the sun-lit sea.
 
 BOOKS. * 
 
 ~T~ IKE many another who has "offered his services," I find 
 .J * that I have, after all, no particular service to give. 
 Anxious to do something to show my interest in what is to me 
 a most interesting occasion, I readily promised, and thought 
 there would be, when the time came, no lack of ideas and 
 words, (though these are not always associated;) but the time 
 has come, and I find that the cares and labors and thoughts of 
 an existence of drudgery have nearly driven all I thought I 
 should say out of my mind. . 
 
 We are here to establish a memorial to dear and valued 
 friends, and for myself I may say that the memorial could 
 have taken no shape more pleasing than that of a collection 
 of books, small or great. Perhaps from an inability to grasp 
 great things, the vast memorials which men have erected for 
 themselves, or which their heirs or their friends or admirers, or 
 even their countries, have erected for them, have failed to im- 
 press my mind or heart. For myself, my imagination has 
 been the rather warmed and inspired by humbler memorials 
 designed to keep alive in love and honor a name, and to dimin- 
 ish in some degree, though but for a moment, an hour, the 
 sum of human suffering, the weight of human need. While 
 
 *An address delivered at the dedication of the Anderson Memorial Li- 
 brary, of Emporia College, June 5, 1888. 
 12 (193)
 
 194 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 nearly every line of "Marmion," read when a boy, has faded 
 from my mind, I remember the inscription above the wayside 
 spring where they laid the dying chieftain down : 
 
 " Drink, weary pilgrim, drink, and pray 
 For the kind soul of Sybil Grey, 
 Who built this cross and well." 
 
 To me, Sybil Grey, whose memory in the poem is kept 
 alive by the little pool, the trickling stream, flowing for dying 
 knight of high degree or footsore wayside beggar, a comfort 
 for the time, has been all these years as real a person as John 
 Howard. Very dear, too, are those worthies, who, dying cen- 
 turies ago, left not churches, convents, public edifices, lofty 
 halls or cloistered colleges to preserve the recollection of their 
 names or riches, but the rather certain bequests providing 
 that on certain days in the year so many poor people, whether 
 worthy or unworthy the will did not specify, who should apply 
 at a certain place, should receive so many loaves of bread, so 
 that they might eat and be filled and go their possibly idle 
 and worthless and inconsequential way to the end of the 
 world. On the idea of one of these bequests, Dickens wrote 
 his charming stories of "The Seven Poor Travelers," who, 
 driven about by the storms of fortune, found for one night a 
 snug harbor, an inn, where, after supper provided as it were 
 by a vanished hand, they sat by the fire kindled by a long- 
 gone testator, and relating their adventures. This seems, to 
 me at least, real and unworldly charity, done in God's name, 
 without hope of praise, and falling like his rain in the quiet 
 night, unthinking of the just or the unjust. 
 
 Next to a memorial taking the form of an alleviation of 
 physical human suffering, sheltering the houseless, or feeding
 
 BOOKS. 195 
 
 the hungry, there can be no finer or better way of keeping 
 green in life and afterward the name and memory of the 
 good, than by collecting for all time and future generations 
 good books, that he who comes may read; and in this case it 
 is most appropriate, as this library is to bear the name of a 
 family that has known in all its recorded generations the use 
 and value and solace of reading. One of the most widely-read 
 of Kansas scholars and gentlemen once gave me a yellow and 
 time-stained pamphlet it was the printed funeral sermon of 
 his great-grandmother; and in it the clergyman said of this 
 elect lady of a day when books were scarce and women were 
 not taught as they are now, that she never went visiting with- 
 out taking with her a book that she might read in her leisure 
 moments, to herself or her entertainers. And a family which 
 has produced four generations in succession of Presbyterian 
 clergymen men of education, of books could not be better 
 commemorated. Doubtless the brave North Carolina Whig 
 grandmother of Col. Anderson, who hid her little store of 
 corn-meal beneath her hearthstone to keep it from Tarleton's 
 British troopers, read the Mecklenburg Declaration when it 
 was published, and would highly approve this idea of ours of 
 a library bearing the name of her husband, and of her sons. 
 And the mention of families reminds me, that in this and 
 every American library there should be collected books on 
 genealogy, family histories, and family trees even crests 
 and arms, if you please; books sometimes sneered at as un- 
 republican and un-American, and yet having a respectable 
 precedent, since it was Moses himself who recorded the gen- 
 ealogy of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and a great many more.
 
 196 KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 And now that we have come to the library, the actual me- 
 morial library, I should like to say, that first of all let us have 
 old books, both as commemorating an old family with the 
 qualities of the old time, and as in themselves most valuable. 
 All must remember the words of Goldsmith, really much older 
 than he: "I love everything that's old old friends, old times, 
 old manners, old books, old wine." And in old books you 
 have the bright or serious companionship of "old friends," 
 the impress of "old manners," the restoration of all that was 
 best in the "old times," and the cheer, subtle and potent, of 
 " old wine." Said a gentleman whose name if I should mention 
 it would be recognized as that of one endowed with nearly every 
 sort of modern culture: "I try, sometimes, to read a modern 
 novel, but I cannot keep my mind on it; I lay it down, and 
 read ' Waverley ' or ' Ivanhoe ' f or the seventieth or eightieth 
 time." 
 
 This is not saying that there are no good new books in the 
 world; but let us not forget to gather the books, the common 
 books, that the world has pronounced its judgment upon, and 
 set its seal upon. The writer of that somewhat melancholy 
 melody, "I Cannot Sing the Old Songs," gives us as a reason, 
 " for foolish tears would flow." That is the very reason that 
 you should hold to the old books, the books that for centuries, 
 it may be, have caused the eyes to brighten or to fill; that 
 have stirred the heart and quickened the pulses and informed 
 the spirit. Keep them. Let no friend withhold books because 
 they are old; because he or she fancies that everybody has 
 read them. One generation after another rises to call the 
 good old books blessed. They are as inexhaustible as the
 
 BOOKS. 197 
 
 glories of the dawn, the blessings of the rain. Neither is it 
 necessary to stand on the appearance of the covers. The first 
 lesson to be learned about books is, that it is not the outside 
 but the inside that counts. 
 
 Then we should gather, I think, what may be called 
 "home " books ; books about America, about the United States 
 of America, about Kansas, the heart of America ; books writ- 
 ten by Americans about America, about Kansas. Reading, 
 like charity, may well begin at home. This because there is 
 so much to read and because we have need of that sentiment 
 in regard to our country which may be called "loving her very 
 earth," and to that end those books are most valuable, like 
 Thoreau's, which teach us of the ground, the trees, the waters, 
 the winds that blow over what we call our native land, the 
 waves that break upon its shores. Gather such books here 
 that there may grow in young hearts that passionate attach- 
 ment to our home and country, one's own visible and actual 
 country, that wells from the heart of the Ancient Mariner : 
 
 "Oh, dream of joy! Is this indeed 
 
 The lighthouse top I see? 
 Is this the hill, is this the kirk, 
 Is this mine own countree?" 
 
 It is designed, it may be said, to make this library, not 
 only a memorial to friends and benefactors of this institution, 
 but a means of instruction to students who may gather here ; 
 but while this is true, it is to hoped that mere text-books will 
 form the least of the collection. It is not as taskmasters that 
 books are wanted here ; but as a comfort, a solace and a help. 
 It happens to all of us, that experience which forms the open- 
 ing sentence of one of the most famous of books: "As I
 
 198 ' KANSAS MISCELLANIES. 
 
 wandered through the wilderness of this world," says John 
 Bunyan, " I lighted upon a certain place where was a den." 
 We all in journeying through this wilderness, this actual great 
 American desert of a world, come upon Bunyan's "den," and 
 are reminded of what Coleridge said of Edmund Burke: "He 
 lived in a world like Noah's ark, where there were a few men 
 and a great many beasts." The books which stand us in 
 hand, then, are books of gold, but they are great in their vari- 
 ety ; they are books that appeal to the heart, the sensibilities, 
 the spirit, rather than cold reason. What some people call 
 "verses," and "light reading," have, before now, living in the 
 memory, kept the brain from withering and the heart from 
 breaking. May all those books which have, in other ages and 
 our age, from the Meditations of Thomas a Kempis, back- 
 ward and forward, strengthening the soul, be found here ; and 
 may, along with these, every book that has stirred the heart to 
 innocent joy be found here ; and may all the books that have 
 told the story of bravery by land or sea, be found here. 
 
 Of bad books, so much talked of, I do not have much fear. 
 Wicked action is the result of ignorance which cannot write 
 books, or of sudden and distorted impulse that does not take 
 the time. The companionship with oneself, the deliberation, 
 the sober second thought necessary to the composition of a 
 book, refines, so to speak, the coarseness of wickedness. 
 Doubtless many books have been written that did no good; 
 few, I am inclined to think, that have done much harm by 
 their degradation of the mind or blinding of the conscience. 
 Even in this fortress of orthodoxy, there need be no fear that 
 books will pass the guard-line that will do much in themselves
 
 BOOKS. 199 
 
 to shake belief. Most authors are men of such thoughtfulness 
 that, whatever their theories, they yield the main and essen- 
 tial question, as in the well-known case of Lord Herbert of 
 Cherbury, who having finished his great work to the effect 
 that there is no revelation, knelt down in his chamber it be- 
 ing, as he says, a fine day in summer, the sun shining clear 
 and no wind stirring and so, taking his book in his hands, 
 besought a revelation, which he further says, came in the 
 shape of "a loud but gentle noise, forth from the heavens." 
 
 And so, friends, it seems that there can be no better memo- 
 rial gathered of lives spent in goodness and honor; of fifty 
 years of wedded happiness; of an ancient and patriotic Amer- 
 ican family; a memorial to remain such while this school en- 
 dures, than these books not forgetting to place among them 
 some storied copy, like the Bible of Wesley they have been 
 reading at the great conference in New York, of that volume, 
 which, whether from its age, its circulation, its influence, the 
 wealth of learning drawn to its exposition and defense, or the 
 broad and deep mark it has made on the literature of the world, 
 may be called the Book of Books, which in the soldier's knap- 
 sack or beneath the sailor's swaying pillow, goes around and 
 around the world, speaking to men and women and little chil- 
 dren of the "Book of Life."
 
 
 .