Volume 37, Number 4 | Winter 2014–2015

A collaboration of the Kansas Historical Foundation and the Department of History at Kansas State University

Kansas HistoryA Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 4 | Winter 2014–2015

WPA Display of Arts and Crafts Projects in Kansas

Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

The Works Project Administration provided jobs to millions of Americans during the Depression years, operating from 1935 to 1943 as a centerpiece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansive New Deal relief program. The WPA offered a multitude of employment opportunities for both men and women, always emphasizing the distinction between relief work and public assistance at a time when unemployment was high but accepting charity was considered shameful. In this unidentified photograph, a Kansas woman poses at a loom in a public exhibit that shows the training and occupations available to women in the WPA. A poster in the background underscores the message that the WPA was about work above all else. Exhibits like these served both to advertise the WPA as a work relief program and to normalize the employment of women by showing them engaged in domestic tasks. The popularity and visibility of federal work relief programs encouraged states and local governments to adopt similar

initiatives, like the County Cotton Mattress Program of 1940–1941. Devised as a means of surplus disposal—world events disrupted the global textile trade, leaving U.S. farmers, especially in the South, in dire straits—the cotton mattress program also provided instruction and an essential household item to the “deserving poor.” Kansans, however, preferred to believe it was “not a relief program in any way.” Indeed, as historians Virgil Dean and Ramon Powers explain, Leavenworth County was poised to reject the program due to the stigma attached to public assistance until the county’s persuasive home demonstration agent stepped in to prevent it. The county later reported that reluctant residents became “much happier when they understood it to be an educational and self-help project.” In all, more than twelve thousand families across Kansas participated in the Cotton Mattress Program, the subject of one of this issue’s feature articles.

Kansas HistoryA Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 4 | Winter 2014–2015

Suzanne E. OrrInterim Managing Editor

Virgil W. DeanConsulting Editor

Derek S. Hoff Book Review Editor

Katherine Goerl Editorial Assistant

Editorial Advisory BoardThomas Fox AverillDonald L. FixicoKenneth M. HamiltonDavid A. HauryM.H. HoeflichThomas D. Isern James N. LeikerBonnie Lynn-SherowPatricia A. MichaelisJay M. PricePamela Riney-KehrbergKim Carey Warren

Cover: “Crossing the Kansas,” Watercolor by Alfred Jacob Miller. Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Back cover: “Occupations Related to Household Arts,” Created by Peter Radin, WPA, 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

p. 210

p. 226

p. 242

Copyright ©2015Kansas State Historical Society, Inc.ISSN 0149-9114

Printed by Allen Press,Lawrence, Kansas.

Uniontown and Plowboy— 210 Potawatomi Ghost Towns: Enigmas of the Oregon–California Trail by Tom Ellis

“Out of the Ashes”: The Rebuilding 226 of Lawrence and the Quest for QuantrillRaid Claims by Katie H. Armitage

“In No Way a Relief Set Up”: The 242 County Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas, 1940–1941 by Virgil W. Dean and Ramon Powers

In Memoriam 256

Editors’ Note 257

Reviews 258

Book Notes 261

Index 262

210 Kansas History

Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 37 (Winter 2014–2015): 210–225

Potawatomi Indian Mission, St. Marys, Kansas, ca. 1865–1869.

Potawatomi Ghost Towns 211

Uniontown is a ghost town on the Oregon–California Trail with a short, complex history. The establishment of Uniontown near a historic location known as Plowboy was a government-encouraged attempt at both commercial expansion and social engineering. Government Indian agents attempted to unify semi-autonomous bands of the Potawatomi—now known as the Prairie Band and the Citizen Band—under one

administration as the tribe endured relocation and treaty manipulation. It was an experiment that ultimately failed. Uniontown did not stand the test of time either as the tribal center for the unified Potawatomi or as a commercial center and growing town on the Oregon–California Trail. Plowboy continued, as it had before the establishment of Uniontown, as a locus of community activity until the 1880s, when it officially ceased to exist.

Located in the Indian territory that subsequently became Kansas, Uniontown and Plowboy are both gone now—ghost towns with little to show but their names in the chronicles of Kansas and western history. This article illuminates the origins and demise of these two places linked by location, trading history, government Indian policies, and westward migration on the Oregon–California Trail. Uniontown is the name that appears most often in references by Oregon–California Trail travelers. Plowboy’s origins and existence are less well chronicled but significant to the history of Uniontown. Because Uniontown is the more recognized trading center, it is appropriate to begin our narrative with a sketch of Uniontown before discussing its neighboring community, Plowboy.

In 1849, excluding military posts in the West, Uniontown was the last major civilian center of commercial activity and supply on the Oregon–California Trail and a significant settlement along the trail between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast. It was near important crossings on the Kansas River. Today, a small frontier cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places located across the road from the Green Wildlife area points to its location.1 It was

Uniontown and Plowboy–Potawatomi Ghost Towns:

Enigmas of the Oregon-California Trailby Tom Ellis

Tom Ellis is a retired Washburn University administrator living in Topeka. He also writes historical fiction and has completed his second novel, Twisted Cross, which also includes Uniontown history.

1. The Green Wildlife area is north of the West Union Road exit from I-70 in Shawnee County. There is another Uniontown in Kansas which still exists. It was first established in 1858 as Turkey Creek in Bourbon County. The name changed to Uniontown in 1871. In 1851–1852 a post office for a place called Uniontown existed in Wyandotte County. Neither is related to Uniontown in Shawnee County. “Kansas Post Offices, 1828–1961,” Kansas Historical Society, kshs.org/geog/geog_postoffices/search/placename:Uniontown.

once a place important to tens of thousands of emigrants and gold seekers, missionaries, and Potawatomi Indians. How could it evaporate so suddenly?

During its short existence, Uniontown was at the heart of the busiest crossing of the Kansas River. Travelers on the Oregon–California Trail left comments in their diaries about stores, bakeries, and beer shops they found. On May 18, 1849, George Miffling Harker wrote, “To-day we journeyed through a beautiful country—arrived at this place, sometimes called Uniontown, a trading post for the American Fur Company, and several individual fur companies, among the Pottawatomie Indians.”2

Uniontown was established in 1848 as an Indian Pay Station and trading post on the Oregon–California Trail. Tragically, cholera ravaged the region and was particularly bad along the Oregon–California Trail.3

Disease killed or drove away most of the population in 1849 and 1850. The Potawatomi were particularly savaged by cholera.4 Uniontown was almost deserted with only the physician and three traders remaining. But traffic on the trail remained robust, and Uniontown soon bloomed again as a trading center. At its peak it had sixty buildings and nearly three hundred residents including a physician, two blacksmiths, a wagon maker, gunsmiths, and a saw mill operator. By December 1852, its light had faded again, as another cholera outbreak ravaged the area. Although Uniontown was created suddenly, its demise followed several fits and starts, and by 1858 it disappeared when the Potawatomi Pay Station closed.5 There is little question that the closing of the pay station

2. Emphasis added. “Diary of George Miffling Harker,” in Daniel Fitzgerald, Ghost Towns of Kansas (Holton, Kans.: The Gossip Printery, 1979), 2:3.

3. Ramon Powers and Gene Younger, “Cholera on the Overland Trails, 1832–1869,” Kansas Quarterly 5 (Spring 1973): 37.

The Uniontown Cemetery in Shawnee County, shown here, houses the remains of many who died during the cholera epidemic of 1849–1850, including white settlers and a mass grave of twenty-two Potawatomi. The population of Uniontown declined dramatically but soon rebounded due to traffic on the Oregon–California Trail.

4. William G. Cutler and Alfred T. Andreas, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1883), available online at http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/shawnee/shawnee-co-p2.html. Although many historians use the plural Potawatomis, the current leadership of the Citizen Band Potawatomi prefer the plural and singular spelling to be the same.

5. “Uniontown,” Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/uniontown/12228.

212 Kansas History

was the final blow. In its heyday, 1848–1852, Uniontown could be thought of, in today’s vernacular, as a truck stop on the Oregon–California Trail, but there is little physical trace of its past glory.6

Plowboy is a much less recognized community, yet it was a mile and a half away from Uniontown, where roads to the river ferry on the Kansas River and the road to the west along the south

side of the river diverged. Although never incorporated as a town, Plowboy was a place of commerce and settlement near Uniontown, and in fact it was “sometimes called Uniontown.” If Uniontown can be compared to a twenty-first-century truck stop, Plowboy can be compared to the small town near the exit ramp. It was a historic crossroads where every road—the California–Oregon Trail, the Military Trails from Fort Leavenworth and eventually Fort Riley, and the Mormon routes to Salt Lake City—converged.7

For a half-century, Plowboy was a locus of commerce on the south side of the Kansas River between Topeka and where the Oregon–California Trail crossed the river. In his diary entry in the spring of 1849, William Kelly described a place near Uniontown as “a little straggling suburb of wigwams.” That same spring, Kimball Webster also noted in his diary that he passed several small nearby settlements of Indians before reaching Uniontown.8 These would have been Potawatomi and many of the traders were mixed-race Potawatomi or white traders married to Indian women.

Although Plowboy was the crossroads, Uniontown was where the government created an official trading center. Once that happened, Plowboy became a straggling suburb with historical links to transportation and commercial activity. There were at various times three or more ferries

operating on either side of Plowboy within a couple of miles, not including the rocky fords, one of which was between Uniontown and the Darling Ferry on the Oregon–California Trail. All of these spots are close to the trading post, originally founded by the American Fur Company as Chouteau’s trading post, almost twenty years before Uniontown was established. Likely, Plowboy was first settled by those with close association with the American Fur Company—among them, Métis Potawatomi traders and entrepreneurs.

Plowboy existed as a settlement and a center of commerce for more than a decade before Uniontown became officially designated and remained important to area citizens long after Uniontown faded. Both places are prominent in the history of the Potawatomi people, but during Uniontown’s existence, it overshadowed Plowboy. Uniontown was where government agents located white traders, and Plowboy was where Potawatomi made their homes and farms and where mixed Potawatomi and French entrepreneurs lived.

Geography and location are fundamental to the history of Uniontown and Plowboy. A government survey of Shawnee County in which Uniontown and Plowboy were located after its organization in 1854 described the land as “‘bottom land, 31 per cent; upland, 69 per cent; forest 8 per cent; prairie, 92 per cent.’ The timber . . . consists of elm, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, sycamore, box elder, hickory and ash . . . [and] is confined to bottoms of the Kansas River and the numerous creeks and streams tributary to it.”9 Perhaps the reader can imagine tall prairie grass washing over the hills to the west, south and east of Uniontown. In the spring tall, golden grass tickles the belly of horses except in those stretches where fire has scalped the land left emerald with new growth in its wake. The hills are gentle with good, deep soil. Between the hills are wooded valleys with hardwood trees woven through with intermittent streams and spring-fed pools. The streams have steep mud banks with big trees, where prairie fires have spared them. Trees grow only in the fire-sheltered parts of the stream bed. Those streams are short—only two or three miles in length before they empty into the Kansas River to the north. On the south side of the Kansas River the banks are steep and rocky except where the streams enter and access to the river is easiest. Those high banks and prominent hills are covered with thick

6. In 2010 a field survey by Washburn University archeologist Margaret Wood and her students found scant evidence on the parcels of private land to which they had access. Margaret C. Wood, “In Search of Uniontown: Pedestrian and Metal Detector Survey of Fields that May be the Location of the Early Settlement of Uniontown, Kansas,” (unpublished paper, Washburn University, Topeka, Kans. August 2010).

7. The 1846 Latter Day Saints party that crossed Kansas was “known as the ‘Mississippi Saints’ under the leadership of William Crosby. This group consisted of 19 wagons and 43 persons, mostly from Southern states. They followed the original Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, and at first traveled in company with non-Mormons.” Morris W. Werner, “Highway to Zion: The Kansas Connection,” Kansas Heritage Group, www.kansasheritage.org/werner/highzion.html.

8. Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West 1540–1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972), 795, 796.

9. Cutler and Andreas, History of the State of Kansas, 531, available online at http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/shawnee/shawnee-co-p1.html.


stands of hardwood timber protected from grass fire by the streams coursing around them. From the high bank, the Kansas River is a shining ribbon up to one hundred yards wide along the south side of a broad, flat valley of rich ground for farming.

Uniontown sat on a hill near Post Creek. The creek here is in a steep valley a few hundred yards wide, and water during dry periods is intermittent. The Oregon–California Trail dove steeply into the ravine at Uniontown. Nearby, Plowboy occupied Vassar Creek over the next hill to the east. It is a gentle valley with rich bottom land suitable for farming nearly a mile wide with wooded banks and generous water even during periods of drought. Vassar Creek empties into the Kansas River immediately downriver of the Point of Trees prominent on the early maps of the 1800s. The Oregon–California Trail traverses the creek where the mud bank gently descends to a rocky crossing. Geography made transportation routes along the trail possible, turning them into profitable locations for trade and giving rise to both Uniontown and Plowboy.10

Uniontown and its straggling suburb, Plowboy, are remembered primarily as ghost towns of the Oregon–California Trail. The description as ghost towns misses their importance in Kansas history. While they were prominent on the trail as trading centers, they are really

histories of the Indian, particularly Potawatomi, experi-ence in Kansas. Thinking of Uniontown and Plowboy as simply ghost towns or trail waypoints ignores what these places represented. The details of Uniontown—which hilltop it might have been on and what years it might have thrived—draw us away from the larger picture of an active community that existed before and after Union-town in the area. Like many towns, transportation sup-porting commerce is the reason for settlement.

Kansas was not the vast empty land often described by famous explorers. Buffalo, Plains Indians, and later fur traders used pathways through Kansas decades before explorer John C. Fremont made his trip of discovery along the Kansas River in 1842. Frederick Chouteau, brother of Pierre Chouteau, who ran and later owned the Western Department of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, controlled trade west of the Mississippi River. Fur trappers and traders had coursed the greater region around Uniontown and Plowboy for more than 150 years and specifically traded in the area of Uniontown for almost thirty years before it was established. Before the Oregon–California Trail and before the Potawatomi relocation along the Kansas River, Plowboy was a trading site for the Kansa Indians.

214 Kansas History

10. The author surveyed both Post and Vassar Creeks in March 2014 during a period of drought to confirm water flow. Public access to these sites is welcomed. The State of Kansas owns land at both the Uniontown and Plowboy sites. The Green Wildlife Refuge adjacent to

Wagons on the Oregon–California Trail crossed the Kansas River at a point that closely resembled the view in this ca. 1960s photograph, which shows a site on the river near the location of Uniontown. This area was reputed at one time to be the last civilian location west of the Mississippi where travelers could purchase supplies on their way to Oregon.

the Uniontown Cemetery National Historic Site has walking trails and Oregon–California Trail ruts. The Fitzgerald Wildlife Area is located at Plowboy—wagon ruts are prominent where the trail splits to the northwest toward Uniontown and the Darling Ferry.

In 1829 the Kansa Indians, who had villages near present-day Manhattan, Kansas, relocated eastward from the Kansas River and Big Blue junction. In September 1829, Reverend Isaac McCoy, Indian agent and Baptist missionary, along with Kansa principal chief White Plume led a group on a “tour of exploration” of the Kansas region. Where they went and what they discovered was never reported. White Plume’s son-in-law, Louis Gonville, a Frenchman, served as the interpreter and spoke little English. McCoy kept secret the geographical clues of their tour. Nevertheless, Kansa villages and a Baptist mission were soon located near a Chouteau trading post not far from where Plowboy would develop and where Uniontown would sprout in 1848.11 This moved them forty miles closer to Missouri, downstream from three villages west and north of present-day Topeka along the Kansas River. It is likely McCoy was attempting to influence the location of a trading center because in December 1829, Kansa sub-agent M. G. Clark, who controlled his license to trade, advised Frederick Chouteau to abandon his trading post at Horseshoe Lake (near present-day Lawrence) because it was unprofitable.

Around 1830, Frederick Chouteau established a trading post on a tributary of the Kansas River upriver from current-day Topeka. The Kansa Indians had villages a couple of miles either side of their trading post on American Chief Creek (later renamed Mission Creek). Hard Chief located his village of five hundred to six hundred people at the place we later identify as Plowboy. For blankets, guns, tobacco, and whiskey, Chouteau traded pelts and cash the Kansa Indians received from annuity payments from the government.12 In April 1838, the American Fur Company launched a caravan headed west from Westport, Missouri, that traveled the Santa Fe Trail until it split away to follow the Kansas River to “a point of timber” (west of Topeka) where they awaited a pirogue supply boat before crossing the river. Chouteau’s company transferred goods from the pirogue and the overland caravan to the company’s flat bottom

boat (presumably in place when they arrived) across the river. This site became a stronger crossroads location as Frederick Chouteau claimed to own the only keelboats on the Kansas River, which were used to haul pelts to St. Louis. Chouteau’s operation was on the south side of the Kansas River near the mouth of Mission Creek, where timber would have been more plentiful. Timber, scarce on the wildfire-scorched plains, would have been as important to missionaries and Chouteau as it was to the Kansa Indians and Uniontown’s founder, Indian sub-agent Richard W. Cummins, two decades later. Chouteau and his company operated along and upon the Kansas River likely no more than five miles from the site where, decades later, Cummins and A. J. Vaughan planted their flag for Uniontown.13

Early trappers and fur traders in the region were French and had a long association with the American Fur Company and its rivals. The French connection is part of the Uniontown and

Plowboy story. The only constant in the area is commercial activity, which Chouteau controlled. Chouteau’s operations were intertwined with the activities of Indian agents representing the government. Increasingly, the road crossing the Kansas River became more important than the river itself, and business with emigrants overshadowed business with Kansa Indians. Through the 1830s and early 1840s the Kansa Indians had a reputation for being a terror with respect to their neighboring tribes, which may have hastened their declining value as business partners.14 They earned that reputation by both violence and alcohol—no doubt interrelated. At Plowboy, the Indian trade was the reason for Chouteau’s trading center. Eventually, however, the Kansa Indians were pushed out, as government policy moved the Potawatomi in, and they became the successor to the Kansa Indians as a trading partner at Uniontown and Plowboy.

Laissez-faire economic beliefs and commercial exploita-tion of the rich resources of the central plains combined with a country hungry for land, and the riches of opportunity, placed both Uniontown and Plowboy at the


11. Isaac McCoy, “History of Baptist Indian Missions,” in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 164.

12. Louise Barry, compiler, “Kansas Before 1854: A Revised Annals, Part Nine, 1836–1837,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 29 (Spring 1963): 43, available online at http://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-kansas-before-1854-a-revised-annals-part-nine/17907; “Senate Document 110,” 21st Cong., 1st Sess., in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 167; “Cool Things––Keelboat Steering Oar,” Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/cool-things-keelboat-steering-oar/10384.

13. Barry, The Beginning of the West, 345; 21st Cong., 1st Sess., in Barry, Beginning of the West, 167; the map provided by Barry clearly shows the Point of Trees on the first survey map at the location where the roads split. “Shawnee County map of 1874,” in Barry, Beginning of the West, 167.

14. William E. Unrau, Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 33.

crossroads of history. Indians were moved from place to place as others coveted their lands. The Potawatomi were pressured into agreements with the government as they were being forcibly relocated. As the Kansa Indians were moving their villages in the 1830s, the Potawatomi were being forced to move from the upper Midwest and Great Lakes.

Several small bands of Indiana Potawatomi, hereinafter called Citizen Band, signed a treaty on February 11, 1837, in Washington for land along the Marais de Cygnes, a tributary of the Osage River near Osawatomie, Kansas.15

They left the upper Midwest on an arduous relocation known now as the Trail of Death. While a few of the Prairie Band relocated to the Marais de Cygnes, the majority stopped at Council Bluffs, remaining recalcitrant about moving.16 The Potawatomi were accustomed to dealing with white settlers and the government. John and Abram Burnett were among the interpreters. Abram Burnett later became a chief of the Potawatomi in the Topeka area. By the time of the tragic Trail of Death in 1838, the Potawatomi had lived with the French for more than two hundred years. There developed a subculture of French and Potawatomi of mixed ancestry known as Métis, but often negatively thought of as “half-breed” by both Indians and whites in the 1800s.17 They traded and

worshiped with each other, intermarried and worked for the American Fur Trading Company, which had already set up business in the western region before the Potawatomi relocation to Kansas. Both Catholic clergy and American Fur Trading agents followed or led the Citizen Potawatomi to the Marais des Cygnes area. Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Company established a new post in 1839 for the newly arrived Potawatomi trade at a place to this day called Trading Post about three miles west of the Missouri line in Linn County. The establishment of the Marais de Cygnes Potawatomi and the Kansa trading post mentioned earlier had important parallels. Most certainly, Pierre Chouteau’s trading company was a connecting influence upon the Potawatomi, as was the employment by the Indian department of Métis leader Joseph N. Bourassa, a lawyer, as interpreter, and Jude W. Bourassa, as miller, both of whom would eventually settle at Uniontown.18

Baptist, Methodist, and Jesuit Catholic religious denominations had influence among the Potawatomi. The Jesuits seemed to have the most influence with the Citizen Band, although the Methodists opened a new station on what became known as Potawatomi Creek. Father Christian Hoecken, a Jesuit priest, joined the Potawatomi in October 1838 and reported a few months later that his mission was thriving and that six hundred Catholics could be counted among the Potawatomi in Kansas. Nevertheless, he urged them to move fifteen miles to Sugar Creek to give separation from the Protestants.19 Religiosity was not the only function of missionaries. Both groups operated schools before the forced relocation to Kansas and after it. In 1845 Indian sub-agent Alfred Vaughan reported that the Citizen Band “are communicants, to the number of about eleven hundred, of the Roman Catholic Church — and too much praise cannot be awarded to the zealous fathers of the persuasion for the good they have wrought among the people. Two schools are in operation. The female one, under direction

216 Kansas History

15. There are two bands of Potawatomi, and in the historical record each was given multiple names according to the preference of the correspondent. The Citizen Band were called Indiana, and Dayton, Osage Potawatomi and Mission, because they had become Christianized by missionaries. The Prairie Band were called Chicago, Des Moines, and Council Bluffs. These names reflect relocations over time and other names can be found to refer to each band beyond those referenced here. The names “Prairie” and “Citizen” were not formalized until 1861 but are used here for the sake of continuity. “Timeline History of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,” pamphlet (Shawnee, Okla.: Citizen Band Potawatomi Nation), 2012.

16. The Potawatomi had their first contact with Europeans in 1615 with French explorer Samuel de Champlain. By 1670, the Potawatomi had contact with Christianity when they met with Father Claude Allouez, a Jesuit priest. From 1742–1748 during King George’s War, the Potawatomi fought with the French against the British in New England and a few years later in 1754 with the French again in the French and Indian War. The Trail of Death cost the lives of 40 of the 875 who started the trip. This was one of a pattern of tribal relocations for the Potawatomi from their original lands in New Brunswick west through the Great Lakes. It was not to be their last relocation. “Timeline History of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,” and Joseph Murphy, Potawatomi of the West: Origins of the Citizen Band (Shawnee, Okla: Citizen Band Potawatomi Tribe, 1988), 131.

17. Commissioner C. A. Harris, letter, July 21, 1837, in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 319; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture 1665–1965 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 134.

18. Joseph N. Bourassa became a full instructor at the Jesuit School in 1840 and taught English. He was noted to be active and influential in the affairs of the tribe. Hoecken, “Narrative and Diary, 1837–1848: Annual Report of Sugar Creek Schools 1842,” trans. James O’Meara (St. Mary’s, Kans.: St Mary’s College Archives), 14, in Murphy, Potawatomi of the West, 110; Joshua Pilcher, superintendent of Indian Affairs, “Abstract of Licenses Granted, St. Louis, for the Year 1839,” in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 376; Report by Agent Richard W. Cummins, recorded by 29th Cong., 1st Sess., in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 569.

19. Barry, The Beginning of the West 315; Hoecken, “Diary,” in Barry, Beginning of the West, 356.

of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, deserving particular commendations.”20 Competition between the religious orders to receive funding for education from the government became a source of tension among the Potawatomi. There were socio-economic divisions among the Potawatomi as well. The Citizen Band was generally more successful at trading and agriculture, and included among their numbers multiple generations of educated members. It was American Fur Company agent Alexis Coquillard who in 1840 first secured acceptance of the idea to unite the bands of Potawatomi. He proposed that they could be brought together at Sugar Creek with those under the religious stewardship of Father Hoecken. Métis leaders Luther Rice and Joseph Napoleon Bourassa were sent to Council Bluffs to meet with the Prairie Band but were rebuffed. Coquillard was wrong about how many of the Potawatomi were Catholic and their willingness to be together as a Christian community.21 Educated members of the Potawatomi including Rice and Bourassa are important to the story of why the Potawatomi were relocated to the Kansas River basin around Uniontown and Plowboy. While the Potawatomi Métis leaders had less sway with government officials in Washington than did the Prairie Band leaders, their cooperation with agents and traders was influential through the 1830s and 1840s with respect to the commercial ramifications of their relationship with the government. Trade with Indians was important economic activity.

Meanwhile, the certainty of Iowa statehood (December 28, 1846) became the driving force to once again relocate and unify the Potawatomi Nation. The press of white

settlement pushed the Prairie Band out of Iowa, but they objected to relocation with the Citizen Band along the Missouri border at Marais de Cygnes. The Prairie Band argued the land was unhealthy and unproductive, and they were not interested in being unified with the Citizen Band.22 The U.S. government subjected each tribe to a “carrot-and-stick” administrative philosophy.

The government wanted Indian land, and it offered cash for land and annuity payments or the threat of forced removal.23 The Kansa Indians were restricted to a new reservation around Council Grove on the Santa Fe Trail at the headwaters of the Neosho River. It was an area of small rivers and streams that were not navigable or part of the transportation system of the time like the Kansas River was, and, like all Indians relocated to reservations, the Kansa Indians retained only a small part of their original range.

20. Murphy, Potawatomi of the West, 96.21. Clifton, The Prairie People, 330.22. By this time, the Prairie Band were being invaded by thousands


This ca. 1860 portrait shows Joseph Napoleon Bourassa (1810–1877), a leader within the Métis (mixed French and Potawatomi) subculture. The Métis were negatively seen as “half-breeds” by both whites and Indians but served as important liaisons with traders and Indian agents.

of Mormons who stopped along the Missouri River on their migration to Salt Lake, many of whom abandoned polygamy, dropped out of the emigration to Salt Lake, and settled in western Iowa. Clifton, The Prairie People, 315–46.

23. On December 2, 1845, the Potawatomi reached a deal to pay $850,000 and receive a new reservation on the Kansas River in exchange for vacating their lands in Iowa and around Marais de Cygnes. Elliott was to receive $3,000 in silver from the Potawatomi for his services as middleman in the deal. The deal later fell apart. Clifton, The Prairie People, 339–42.

In June 1846, a treaty was held with the two divisions of the tribe. It was concluded on June 5 at the Potawatomie Agency, near Council Bluffs, with the Iowa or Prairie Band; and on June 17 with the Kansas [Citizen] Band on Potawatomie Creek. “In this treaty,” wrote Kansas historian William E. Connelley, “there was an attempt to bring together the tribes formed by the ancient division of the Potawatomies. It provided that the various bands of the Potawatomie Indians, known as the Chippewas, Ottawas and Potawatomies, the Potawatomies of the Prairie, the Potawatomies of the Wabash, and the Pottawatomies of Indiana, being the same people by kindred, by feeling, and by language, should unite and be consolidated into one people to be known as the Potawatomie Nation.” While the Prairie Band did not want to go south to Marais de Cygnes, many among the Citizen Band did not want to go north and west to the Kansas River valley.24 Nevertheless, Potawatomi leaders, led by Chief Wabansi, the principal chief of the Potawatomi Nation and most closely associated with the Prairie Band, negotiated vigorously with Washington to make the best financial deal for the inevitable relocation.25 Those chiefs of the Prairie Band who preferred to deal directly with Washington led the negotiation. Citizen Band leaders were largely left out of these talks and tended to work through missionary and business leaders who curried influence. Chief Wabansi died from injuries sustained in a stagecoach accident returning from Washington, and in the wake of corrupt behavior of Indian sub-agent Richard Smith Elliott, new sub-agents were assigned to the task of moving the Potawatomi to the Kansas River reservation. Deals agreed to in Washington unraveled. Some among the Citizen Band complained that the Kansas River area contained too little timber for houses and fences, but considerable influence by Father Felix Verreydt convinced them the move was advantageous. Agent Cummins, out of frustration at the slowness of progress toward the relocation, made his own tour of the Kansas River area and declared that the Potawatomi were very much mistaken about the lack of timber. He likely had commercial development of the Kansas River area of the Oregon–California Trail very much in mind, and locating the trading post that would become Uniontown on the south side of the river was certainly an appeasement of the Citizen Potawatomi.26

Development meant money, and financial success was, understandably, a consideration. Missionaries to the Indians needed financing as well. The Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, and others all competed for influence (and government payments) among the Potawatomi and had their own evangelical and financial interests at heart. Reverend Isaac McCoy, by this time a well-known Baptist leader, argued that relocating the Indians would allow the territory to become first a colony of the United States for Indians and eventually a state for Indians. It was a concept abandoned by others who wanted the land for white settlement.27 Cummins issued the trading licenses and thus had abundant contact with the American Fur Company and with Methodist missionary Reverend William Johnson and those who would conduct trade with the Kansa Indians at their new Council Grove area reservation. Perhaps the Methodists had their greatest influence with the tribes on the Santa Fe Trail—the Shawnee at Shawnee Mission and the Kansa Indians at Council Grove. While the Kansa Indians were being pushed out of the Kansas River valley, Methodist missionaries were trying to make Kansa Indian life at their new reservation better. But why replace one tribe of Indians with another?

It is likely that the Potawatomi, with considerable influence of the Métis subculture, were a better business partner. They were better educated and their commercial experience with the American Fur Company was valuable. The Oregon–California Trail was a road of growing commercial importance, and the Potawatomi were the best partner for the task. Also, some Indians among virtually every tribe in what would become Kansas had members who embraced white culture. They prospered from it using their leadership positions within the tribe to influence decisions that would benefit them personally and financially, even at the expense of the other tribal members. Many were of mixed European and American Indian ancestry with French surnames. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau in The End of Indian Kansas (1978) suggested that such Indians might be derogatively labeled “Uncle Tomahawks.”28 Government policy, transportation, commercial activity, and unenlightened self-interest created Uniontown from an area previously known as Plowboy.

218 Kansas History

24. William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1918), 1:260.

25. Wabansi has various spellings including Wa-Ban-Si. The town and county in Kansas that carry his name are Wabaunsee.

26. Murphy, Potawatomi of the West, 136, 142–43, 149.

27. H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 5.

28. Ibid., 6–7.

The movement of first the Kansa Indians and later the Potawatomi Indians to and from the Plowboy commercial area is as much a part of Uniontown’s history as the Oregon–California Trail. The existence of the Chouteau trading post that had serviced the Kansa Indians on the Kansas River fostered the settlement of traders, trappers, and others in an area where trails diverged and water was sufficient. That place would eventually be called Plowboy. When Plowboy received that designation is unrecorded in the historical record—the name first appears on local maps in 1861, but subsequent accounts imply that the Plowboy settlement emerged in the early 1840s. The origin of the name, like the date of its beginnings, appears to be a mystery. However, the distinct French influence among the traders of the region suggests that Plowboy was the anglicizing of the French words plus bois, meaning literally “more wood,” but no doubt here translated as “many trees.”

The portion of the Oregon–California Trail near Plowboy that diverts to the northwest is identified on local maps in 1861 as the “road to the Darling Ferry.” The Darling Ferry operated on the Oregon–California Trail crossing the Kansas River on a deep hole just downstream a few yards from where Cross Creek enters from the north. The ferry, which commenced operation in 1840 under proprietor Lucius Darling, was funded by the federal government from treaty funds and officially called the Pottawatomi National Ferry. It was operated by Lewis Ogee, a Potawatomi. Plowboy was the junction of those two roads and straddled the Oregon–California Trail about a mile southeast of the Uniontown cemetery on Vassar Creek.29

It was not until 1848, when agents R. W. Cummins and A. J. Vaughan declared it so, that Uniontown became an officially designated location. On March 7, 1845, Vaughan reported in a letter, “I have accordingly stuck my stake and christened it union town,” and five days later Cummins wrote: “The point selected by us is on the south side of the Kansas [“on high ground, near the river”] … & very nearly in the center of their [the Potawatomies’] country, east & west & as nearly so north and south as good timber…

could be had. . . .” Their purpose was to locate “the [black] smith & traders for the Potawatomies.”30 Good timber was as essential to Uniontown’s location as it had been to Plowboy’s. Perhaps there is another hint to the mystery of Uniontown in Cummins’s words “for the Potawatomies.” In one sense it can have a paternalistic meaning that the Potawatomi needed to be cared and provided for by whites. Another, perhaps more illuminating reading of his words, would have Cummins’s acting on behalf of or


Missionaries like Reverend Isaac McCoy, who explored the area near the future site of Uniontown in 1829 and established a Baptist mission soon after, and Father Christian Hoecken, a Jesuit who claimed to have converted six hundred Potawatomi to Catholicism in 1838, used religious literature like this to communicate with and “civilize” American Indians, whose religious and spiritual beliefs they thought barbaric.

29. In 1867 Frank Darling, son of Lucius, was given patent to land adjacent to the location of the family owned trading post at Plowboy. Fitzgerald, Ghost Towns of Kansas, 2:3; George A. Root, “Ferries in Kansas: Part II, Kansas River, Concluded,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 3 (February 1934): 15–42, available online at http://www.kshs.org/p//jabsas-historical-quarterly-ferries-in-kansas-part-ii-kansas-river-concluded/17899.

30. A. J. Vaughan, letter, March 7, 1848, and R. W. Cummins, letter, March 12, 1848, in Barry, The Beginning of the West, 737–38.

even at the insistence of Potawatomi leaders to mollify factions within the Potawatomi and stabilize the trading relationships already in existence. Certainly the choice of the town’s name by Indian agents was symbolic of the government’s desire that the Potawatomi unify.

Although the Citizen Band was reluctant to move to the Kansas River, they did so cooperatively and settled in villages south of the river. While cholera was devastating and many left, others did not. The Pappan brothers—Joseph, Louis, Achan, and Pelegie—were operating a ferry before 1846 across the Kansas River at what would become Topeka.31 Joseph and Lewis Ogee operated a ferry close to that location as well. Near Uniontown was Lucius Darling’s Ferry. Jude Bourassa, brother of Joseph

Bourassa, was the government authorized miller and operated a mill a few miles west on Mill Creek. All were Potawatomi. Crossing the Kansas River on the north, a wagon first came to the sawmill and toll bridge operated by Frank Bourbonnaise, also a Potawatomi. Ten miles farther west another sawmill and toll bridge were operated by Louis Vieux, a Potawatomi who by all accounts and photographs appeared to be quite prosperous, dressed in the finest suit and top hat of the time. During the height of the season, those ferries could handle sixty wagons a day at two to five dollars each in 1850. These men were serious entrepreneurs and among the merchant class of the Kansas River valley.32 Several lived in Plowboy and the

220 Kansas History

The above map shows the approximate locations of Uniontown and Plowboy, short-lived communities established near the Oregon–California Trail. In 1838 the federal government forced many Potawatomi from Indiana to relocate to the area, which had once been settled by Kansa Indians. The Potawatomi joined local communities in commerce, agriculture, and religion, forming an integral part of the trade that flourished along the Oregon–California Trail. Created by Katherine Goerl based on the research and drawing of Tom Ellis.

31. The Pappan (or Papin) brothers are generally identified as Frenchmen (see, for example, Barry, The Beginning of the West, 480, 584). There are clear family relationships with the Kansa Tribe, but Pappan descendants are also founding members of the Citizen Band, indicating close ties with both Indian nations. R. Blake Norton, Curator/Archivist of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Shawnee, Oklahoma, interview by author, September 30, 2014.

32. Some of their graves are at Uniontown, but other graves with primitive stones are found at Plowboy, including the grave of Dotti Darling who died at age sixteen in 1870. At Plowboy there are still “many trees,” some of considerable age, which James Fitzgerald, whose family has owned the Plowboy site since the 1870s, has dated to the time of the Oregon–California Trail. Near those trees, Fitzgerald has found evidence of the old dwellings, including artifacts that pre-date 1850. The Oregon–California Trail went through Fitzgerald’s property, and he has

vicinity, and there is considerable evidence of permanent settlement as structures remain of what is thought to be Darling’s trading house.

Following the demise of Uniontown, Plowboy continued to be a center of community activity through the 1860s. On March 12, 1866, the Pottawatomie Bridge and Ferry Company was organized in Topeka by many of Topeka’s founding fathers, including Dr. D. W. Stormont: “but a few rods from the mouth of what is now known as Vesper [Vassar] creek, was the location of the Pottawatomie Bridge and Ferry Company. A stone approach led up from the river at this point. . . . This was just one and one-half miles below the site of old Uniontown.”33 That bridge road intersected from Plowboy. This location is directly north of Plowboy one mile on the river, and the current land owner in January 2014, confirmed the existence of the rock road just under the surface. The road is discernible from aerial photos taken in 2012 and visible on the Shawnee County website. While commercial activity thrived in the Uniontown area, it was government payments to the Potawatomi which kept them tied to the town.

Uniontown was intended to unify the Potawatomi. In theory they would all come together in one place several times a year for allotment payments and by doing so become

united. According to historian Daniel Fitzgerald, “Annuity gatherings usually lasted 10 to 15 days, during which time gambling, horse racing, and drinking were present for the Indians to enjoy along with their tribal dancing and funerals that enlivened the ceremonies. The Indians were paid separately their sums of money with $6.00 to $10.00 the largest share received by any of the Indians. Most of this money was spent on liquor before they left town.”34 Not unlike shopping centers today, certainly the traders wanted the Potawatomi people to be in one place with money in their hands. As the local newspaper recorded twenty-five years after Uniontown’s demise:

There were quite a large number of houses and a brisk trade was carried on with the Indians; the principal commodities of course being calico and whisky. Union Town had its share of excitement in the shape of railroad and political mass-meetings and

speculation in town lots ran as wild and reckless as in the average of early Kansas towns. But every other interest subsided at once on the event of the regular visit of the Indian agent with ‘payment.’ Everybody then claimed a perfect right to all the money he could trade, cheat or steal from the Indian. They all went in for ‘a long pull, a strong pull and a pull altogether,’ as long as the money lasted, and the poor deluded wretches [Potawatomi] couldn’t hold on to it long under such a strain.35

It was up to the army, which was the only civil authority, to keep the swindlers, whiskey sellers, and blacklegs away.36 General John C. Fremont visited on October 25, 1853, and reported in his diary, “Went to Uniontown and nooned. This is a street of log cabins. Nothing to be had here . . . lots of John Barleycorn [whiskey] which the men about were consuming.”37 At the time there was a government regulation against providing alcohol to Indians to which the army turned a blind eye. Also, land speculation on town lots was over ground that belonged to the Potawatomi in trust as part of their reservation. Speculators could not rightfully trade land that was legally owned by the Potawatomi. Prior to Kansas

Although Uniontown had faded away as an official settlement by the late 1850s, it is identified on this 1873 Shawnee County Atlas map in pencil, northwest of “Ploughboy.”

done extensive research at the site and in the vicinity since the 1950s.James Fitzgerald, interview by author, February 2, 2014.

33. Root, “Ferries in Kansas: Part II,” 18.34. Fitzgerald, Ghost Towns of Kansas, 2:2.


35. St. Marys (Kans.) Times, May 11, 1877.36. Blackleg is a name given to a general category of cheating

gamblers and swindlers.37. John Charles Fremont, Memoirs of My Life (Chicago: Belford,

Clarke and Company, 1886), 27.

becoming a territory in 1854, permanent settlement by non-Indians west of the Missouri border was, ostensibly, illegal according to the U.S. government, but ignored with government complicity. Even opening of Kansas Territory was not done because of the need for white settlers to escape overcrowding in the east. Iowa, for example, had only averaged three persons per square mile. Miner and Unrau noted, “Virgin soil, railroad rights of way, and lucrative town sites were more important than stuffy statistics and a permanent Indian policy conceived by a previous generation.”38 Uniontown and Plowboy were in decline after only a few short years.

As noted previously, the Citizen Band Potawatomi had a relationship with the American Fur Company and Chouteau for decades, and that business center had been near Plowboy. The decline of the fur trade caused Chouteau to scale down his operations in the West. Even in the decline of Chouteau’s enterprise we do know the Citizen Band appealed to Chouteau a decade later to intervene on their behalf in conflicts with the government.39 They thought of Chouteau as a partner. Chouteau’s successor trading company, Boon and Hamilton, was complicit in the illegal trade of alcohol as most traders before them had been. The destructive powers of alcohol were as devastating as cholera, smallpox, and typhoid on Indian populations. While the decline of the Chouteau trading enterprise had a withering effect, so did the growth of Topeka and other towns east along the Kansas River. Uniontown was founded by government agents; Topeka was founded by visionary business leaders bolstered by the righteousness of their fervor that Kansas would join the United States slave free. The energy and fervor that founded Topeka was missing upriver at Uniontown.

Uniontown was founded on a logic that was destined to fail. The deal that Chief Wabansi had negotiated for payments before his death was diminished by later actions of the government to subtract large amounts from the payments. The government simply heaped expenses from years earlier into the settlement, subtracting them from the agreed upon $850,000 cash settlement. And although the treaty was signed, it was done so by leaders of factions within both the Prairie and Citizen Bands and lacked universal support within the tribe.40

Even though Uniontown boomed to fifty buildings and three hundred residents, its time was short. At the

spring annuity payment in 1849, there were recorded 3,235 Potawatomi on the Kansas River.41 While the Potawatomi were scattered near Uniontown and their farms and homes included the Plowboy vicinity, among other communities, there seems never to have been a unified appreciation for Uniontown to be the center of Potawatomi life.

It was not only stress from relocation, social upheaval, and cultural pressure that made life hard for the Potawatomi at Uniontown and Plowboy. Through the late 1840s and early 1850s, cholera came in waves along the Oregon–California Trail.42 The Potawatomi were hit hard by cholera as they gathered to receive annuity payments. Twenty-two or more (accounts vary) Potawatomi are buried in a mass grave. The government appointed physician was stricken and died, and the residents fled. The town was abandoned out of the fear of the cholera scourge and was burned. Plowboy and Uniontown were adjoining areas, and Plowboy was where many of the Potawatomi homes were located. Those folks from Plowboy suffered as well, and their tales of woe are interwoven and inseparable with Uniontown.

Yet disease was not the only problem. The experiment with unified services for the Prairie Band and Citizen Band was never fully accepted, largely because the Potawatomi were never unified. It was a time of stress for the Potawatomi. Not only had they been moved—a stressful exercise in and of itself—but there were new stressors at their Kansas River reservation. In the summer of 1848, the Potawatomi, allied with the Sac and Fox, Kansa, and Kickapoo Indians, participated in a battle against the Pawnees over hunting grounds. Skirmishes with the Pawnee Indians continued until 1852, and fear of reprisal weighed on the Potawatomi. Tensions with other tribes over hunting grounds caused a major disruption for those Indians who relied on hunting more than commercial trade.43

The Kansas River created its own stresses. The Potawatomi north of the river, including the Prairie Band, complained about crossing the river to receive their annuity payments and petitioned for their own pay station, blacksmiths, and traders. Conflict also developed

38. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 5.39. Murphy, Potawatomi of the West, 234.40. Clifton, The Prairie People, 341.

41. United States, Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1848, Ex. Doc. No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1849), 447, available online at http://images.library.wisc.edu/History/EFacs/CommRep/AnnRep4650/reference/history.annrep4650.i0003.pdf.

42. Powers and Younger, “Cholera on the Overland Trails,” 32–39.43. Murphy, Potawatomi of the West, 157–59.

222 Kansas History

over the concept of “national debts,” a decades-old practice of allowing traders to incur debt on behalf of the tribe and be directly reimbursed by the Indian agent. This put considerable power in the hands of traders and the chiefs the traders favored. The government began giving annuities directly to individual Indians, thus diluting their impact on any one trader and further dividing the centralized power within the tribe both by chiefs and the traders they favored. Citizen and Prairie Bands favored different traders, so the concept of concentrating them at Uniontown fell apart.44

From the beginning there were complaints about being forced together. The Prairie Potawatomi sought more isolation and autonomy and rejected the influence of Christian missionaries.

The Prairie Band may have disagreed with the Citizen Potawatomi who curried the favor of missionaries for the resources and influence that different denominations afforded. There was an effort to keep Uniontown and its philosophy of unification together. Uniontown was

reestablished in 1851 but had faded by late 1852. By then the Jesuits had firmly established their mission on the north side of the river at St. Marys, which became the center of religious life for the Catholic Potawatomi, who were largely Citizen Band. The Prairie Band did not embrace Christian religion and there developed an anti-Prairie Band sentiment among the Jesuits.45 Nevertheless, an additional payment center eventually was established at St. Marys. Commerce was spread up and down the Kansas River on both sides.

Perhaps Uniontown was never rebuilt because it was a failed experiment in social engineering to push the Potawatomi bands together in a place festering with corruption and predatory actions toward the Indians. Ownership of land eventually trumped both commerce on the Oregon–California Trail and Potawatomi unification as the overarching influence on Uniontown and Plowboy. From the time Kansas became a territory in May 1854, there was a concerted effort to pry away the land entrusted to the Potawatomi along the Kansas River in

44. Clifton, The Prairie People, 377–78.

Alexander Gardner created this stereograph showing a group of Potawatomi at St. Mary’s Mission in Potawattomie County, Kansas, in 1867 on his journey to the West along the Union Pacific Railway. The Catholic mission included a school and, following nineteenth-century philosophy, encouraged members of the Potawatomi to give up traditional Indian culture and assimilate to western ways of life. Accordingly, the Potawatomi pictured here all wore conventional western styles of clothing.


45. Ibid., 344–45, 365, 380; “Uniontown Cemetery,” Registration Form, National Register of Historic Places, available online at http://www.kshs.org/resource/national_register/nominationsNRDB/Shawnee_UniontownCemeteryNR.pdf.

1848. Even before 1854, while the land officially belonged to the Indians, competition by squatters, town developers, speculators, and railroads for control of acreage was fierce and government enforcement against white settlement was generally ignored. Most of the land in eastern and southern Kansas never became part of the public domain, so government policies allowing for preemption and homestead were not followed. The Potawatomi lands were allotted directly to individual Indians to break up the trust lands on the reservation. Those lands owned by individual Indians then became available to be ceded by their owners directly to individuals or companies. Alternatively, if they were ceded to the United States, it was done under trust for the benefit of the Indians and the government was then free to sell the land or allot those lands to individual Indians. After Kansas became

46. Paul Wallace Gates, “A Fragment of Kansas Land History: The Disposal of the Christian Indian Tract,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 6 (August 1937): 227–40, available online at http://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-a-fragment-of-kansas-land-history/12721; Cutler and Andreas, History of Kansas, 533.

a territory, other burgeoning towns in the Kansas River valley emerged as real or potential commercial centers.46

Many of those towns had political leanings for or against slavery and were active in attempts to tilt the balance one way or the other, supplying commercial energy and settlers for growth.

The Civil War caused more upheaval. The Citizen Band Nation records indicate that at least ten Citizen Band men volunteered for military service with Kansas volunteer units on the Union side. Perhaps tension caused by the notion that those soldiers favored the duty of citizenship was the final straw that shattered the unification of the Potawatomi on the Kansas River. In 1861 the Treaty of the Kansas River Agency caused the Mission (Citizen)Potawatomi to sell portions of their land and have it allotted to individual members. The treaty required that they distinguish themselves from the Prairie Potawatomi who decided to stay on their reservation and hold their land in common. The treaty also formally made the Mission Potawatomi citizens of the United States, and that was when they officially became known as Citizen Band Potawatomi. The government’s orchestrated attempt at unification had transformed into an official effort to separate and divide the Potawatomi, making their land holdings easier to acquire. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad became the beneficiary of several hundred thousand acres of “Potawatomi Reserve” and marketed the sale of the land to settlers with a vigorous advertising campaign. The sale of Potawatomi land became the way to make money by companies and speculators. Uniontown and Plowboy, once important to the Oregon–California Trail, were left in the shadows as the railroad became the new transportation link to commerce and western expansion.

Plowboy continued as a “straggling suburb” under siege by land ownership policies of the day. Homes and businesses continued. Many of the same Métis Potawatomi leaders who influenced the move to the Kansas River stayed or returned when the Citizen Band relocated to Oklahoma. Those same Potawatomi men created a Business Committee for all Potawatomi, and in 1867 it evolved to be the first Citizen Potawatomi Business Committee. Those businessmen remained and

From a January 8, 1879, issue of Kansas Farmer, this advertisement announces the sale of 150,000 acres of the “Great Pottawatomie Reserve.” An 1861 treaty with the Kansas River Agency had divided Potawatomi land between the Prairie Band and individual members of the Citizen Band, making it easier for outsiders to acquire their land holdings.

224 Kansas History

thrived in Shawnee County. By the early 1870s, most of the Citizen Potawatomi had resettled to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma), leaving behind a prosperous cadre of merchants. Even though Plowboy had been a geographic locale, it became an official location when a post office was established in 1871. It continued until 1882 when the post office name was changed to Redpath. It is not clear why the named changed, but in Potawatomi ceremonies today, members are encouraged to follow the “red road,” meaning to follow the Potawatomi way. It is not hard to imagine that the residents of Plowboy, in defiance of land grabs to take their property, would fight back with a symbolic name change. The Plowboy post office served the crews working to build the railroad along the south side of the river and survived until the railroad towns of Valencia and Williard became established. The Redpath post office continued operation until 1886 before closing. By the 1880s most of the land around Uniontown and Plowboy had already transferred from Indian ownership.

This closer look at Uniontown and Plowboy only shines a penlight on the panoramic mural that is the history of the Oregon–California Trail in Kansas and its development in relationship

to western expansion and the predatory treatment, relocation, and removal of Indians. The villages are gone. A prescient view of the Potawatomi future can be found in the work of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, a noted Swiss artist and traveler. His drawings illustrate the dignity of the Potawatomi from when he interacted with them in 1848. He questioned “how long they would have the benefit of that retreat [on the Kansas River].”47

Plowboy was important to the fur trade, the Oregon–California Trail, and the Potawatomi. Even after statehood, settlers counted on services at Plowboy while the Kansas River was an important transportation link—either to use or cross—on the Oregon, California, and Military Trails. When the railroad was built, the river’s importance declined, and Plowboy ceased to be a place except in Kansas history. The prominent names among the Potawatomi who served the commercial needs of Oregon–California Trail travelers for flour, ferries,

A Potawatomi farmer named Pisehedwin poses here in 1877 in front of his home in Kansas, which was likely within a few miles of Uniontown. Many Potawatomi settled near communities along the Kansas River in what is now eastern Pottawatomie and western Shawnee Counties. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

bridges, lumber, and trade goods continued to live and prosper in the area. Assimilation, as a government policy, was adopted by many Potawatomi families who found life along the Kansas River valley suitable. Many of those families remain today. Other Potawatomi saw their land holdings disaggregated and snatched from them. The remaining homesteads became scattered from the center of tribal life. The Dawes Act of 1887 finalized the allotment process, and the Citizen Band officially moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma. The Prairie Band refused to have their communal lands divided, even though they had been allotted, and retreated to an eleven mile square of original reservation, isolating themselves from the others.

The ghosts of Uniontown and Plowboy remain. In many ways, Uniontown was like initials carved in the tree trunk of Plowboy, a place of many trees scarred and faded by time. Arguments are made that Uniontown never had big aspirants to propel the town to a stable future. But unlike most frontier towns that thrived, it was not built on a dream. Rather it was cobbled together on an artificially constructed notion that the Potawatomi, pushed from place to place by the government, could unify conflicted tribal bands in a commercial enterprise plagued by corrupt officials in a town focused on taking the Indians’ land and treaty payments. 47. Randolph Friedrich Kurz, “Sketch of Prairie Potawatomi Family

on the Trail, 1848,” in Clifton, The Prairie People, 345.


226 Kansas History


Portrait of F. W. Read originally published in Richard Cordley, A History of Lawrence, Kansas (1895).

“Out of the Ashes” 227

Fred Read, a Lawrence dry goods merchant, was drinking heavily during the weeks after Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence in August 1863. Read had lost his store and goods valued at $10,000 in the raid. His wife Amelia, who had heroically saved their home from a group of Quantrill’s raiders who had repeatedly fired it, became so desperate that she had her drunken husband jailed. Amelia Read’s brother-in-law, merchant Lathrop Bullene,

who had also lost heavily in the raid, wrote, “Poor Fred how I pity him and poor Amelia if any woman needs sympathy she does. . . . He will probably be sent to some asylum before long, If he is not taken to the great disposer to the final one.” In a follow-up letter to his wife, Susan Read Bullene, who had left Lawrence for a time after the raid, Bullene related that Fred Read’s property “has been placed beyond his control—of which I approve. Had I known of any place a suitable asylum for inebriates I should have made an effort to take him to it.”1 How much the trauma of the raid contributed to Read’s drinking is unclear, but the four hours of chaos, the death of friends and associates, and the feeling of being personally violated in his home and store likely contributed to Read’s torment, as it did to that of many other survivors. The raiders had even stripped Amelia’s arm of the bracelet that had belonged to the child the Reads had lost and mocked Amelia’s plea for this keepsake of the dead girl. In a sketch of his life, Read recalled, “[I] was entirely burned out in Quantrell Raid & lost Every Dollar I had.” For the Reads and others the raid was a traumatic experience that would affect them for the rest of their lives.2

“Out of the Ashes”: The Rebuilding of Lawrence and the Quest

for Quantrill Raid Claimsby Katie H. Armitage

Katie H. Armitage, author of Lawrence: Survivors of Quantrill’s Raid (2010), has concentrated on the history of nineteenth-century Lawrence, Kansas, and the surrounding region. This article is her fifth for Kansas History. She gives historic tours, teaches Osher Lifelong Learning Institute classes on Lawrence history, and is a regular volunteer at the Watkins Museum of History.

The author would like to express her appreciation to Dr. David Katzman, Dr. Barbara Watkins, and John Jewell for help with the manuscript.

1. Lathrop Bullene to his wife [Susan Read Bullene], October 6 and 7, 1863, Bullene Letters, transcription folder, Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas.

2. “Sketch of the Life of Fred W. Read,” F. W. Read Papers, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas (hereafter cited as Read Papers).

228 Kansas History

Read’s papers are among the approximately 150 accounts of Missouri guerilla leader William Clark Quantrill’s August 21, 1863, raid on Lawrence, Kansas. This attack on almost entirely unarmed men and boys led by the Ohio-born Quantrill was the horrific culmination of tensions and strife that had begun shortly after Kansas Territory was opened to settlement in 1854. Settlers along the western Missouri border with Kansas Territory had looked askance as antislavery organizations in New England aided settlers with their travel arrangements to

the newly opened land. Missouri farmers, who grew tobacco and hemp on the western border, were often small slave owners who feared for their economic well-being and way of life. Voters in Kansas were to decide the slavery question for Kansas under the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act’s popular sovereignty provision. As leaders of the free-state cause established homes in Lawrence, the confrontational rhetoric of leaders of proslavery Missourians and the heated antislavery pronouncements of Kansans soon escalated into skirmishes and attacks in the period of Bleeding Kansas. After the Civil War began in April 1861, Kansas men joined Union army units, and many battled Confederate forces in Missouri, where torn and conflicting loyalties also gave rise to guerilla bands. The raid on Lawrence in the middle of the Civil War was the peak of hostile acts that had begun nine years earlier. Numerous legal and personal records about this raid, especially the saga of the raid claims, provide a wealth of historical resources for this article to explore the resilience and recovery of a disrupted nineteenth-century community and the long pursuit for restitution of losses from this Civil War–era attack on this young town.3

Historian Albert Castel declared, “The Lawrence massacre was the most atrocious act of the Civil War.” This raid virtually wiped out the Lawrence downtown, killed as many as two hundred men and boys, and left Lawrence with a high proportion of widows and “orphans,” as the fatherless children were called. The recovery of this devastated town in the western theater of the war and its “arising out of the ashes” has been less documented than the often-told story of Quantrill’s August 1863 raid. A number of books and articles have recounted the events of the raid on Lawrence from the early work of raid survivor and pastor Richard C. Cordley to more recent

histories of the attack. Several of these books mention

3. Richard Cordley, A History of Lawrence, Kansas: From the First Settlement to the Close of the Rebellion (Lawrence: E. F. Caldwell, 1895); Albert Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958). Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), masterfully placed the raid on Lawrence in the context of the broader Kansas-Missouri conflict and the Civil War, especially Chapter 10, “I Am Here for Revenge, The National Civil War,” 219–45.

Amelia Rockwell Read arrived in Lawrence in the 1850s after her marriage to Fred Read in New York. She became a local heroine by saving her home from raiders attempting to set it ablaze. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society/Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas.


the quick recovery of Lawrence but offer few details and no account of raid claims. Cordley wrote that even in the midst of alarms in 1864, “The business street was built up again almost solid, and many houses were restored.” He cited the opening of the bridge across the Kansas River and the arrival of the railroad for the rapid recovery of Lawrence. Albert Castel’s history of wartime Kansas noted that money and supplies from other Kansas towns and “from the East” aided the reconstruction of Lawrence.4 In the face of the enormity of the human and material loss in the young town, Fred Read and a number of his fellow merchants managed with great fortitude and outside help to rebuild in short order. Born in Bedford, Westchester County, New York, December 25, 1831, Read had arrived in Lawrence in 1856, and returned to New York to marry Amelia Rockwell. He had begun business in Lawrence with his brother, J. F. Read, and brother-in-law Lathrop Bullene. The partnership soon separated, each man opening his own store. In the two years before the raid Fred and Amelia had lost two young children, daughter Addie aged one year and eleven months in 1860, and baby Freddie on August 30, 1862. The time that Read spent in jail in September 1863 apparently stopped his drinking and enabled his return to business. On October 9, 1863, his brother-in-law Bullene wrote, “Fred is quite well. They will be selling goods in a day or two.” Read may have taken heart from the activity all around him in Lawrence. Merchants, such as Bullene, began to repair partially destroyed buildings and reopen their stores, but for Read and many survivors the psychological scars of the raid persisted.5

Editor John Speer confirmed renewed business activity when he reprinted the Troy Patriot’s tribute in his recently revived Kansas Daily Tribune of December 10, 1863:

Hurrah for Lawrence.—Talk about a Phoenix arising out of the ashes of its predecessor! Lawrence has done it, and, we expect, not half tried. One hundred and forty new houses already gone up, and business flourishing like a green bay tree. Bridges, railroads, and other little matters attended to, and now a daily paper, The Tribune, in full blast.6

But cheerful commentary could not mask the need for survivors of the raid to make difficult, painful adjustments. Editor John Speer lost two sons in the raid; they had largely put out his paper, so he advertised, “Boy Wanted,” in the December 10 issue: “We want a boy 17 or 18 years old, to roll, turn a job press, sweep out, and do miscellaneous little chores. No objection to take a ‘colored American of African descent.’” While existing records do not reveal whom Speer chose, his advertisement demonstrated not only his need for an employee to take over his sons’ work but also his willingness to hire a young male from among the recently arrived formerly enslaved families that had poured into Lawrence from Missouri and Arkansas.7

The steadfastness of Speer and Cordley, who continued to carry out their duties in the face of personal loss, provided a model for other survivors. As spokesmen for survivors through the press and from the pulpit in the critical time after the raid, these men gave voice to the Lawrence community’s suffering but also to its strength. Their belief in the justice of the antislavery cause that Lawrence leaders had championed contributed to the determination that Lawrence would not “wink out,” as John Speer expressed this resolve.8

4. Cordley, History of Lawrence, 236; Castel, A Frontier State at War, 207. David Dary argued that because Lawrence was favored by the railroad before most other Kansas towns, the community took the lead in industry and trade. Dary also mentioned the benefit of new roads. David Dary, Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas: An Informal History (Lawrence: Allen Press, 1984), 135. Thomas Goodrich’s Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991) presents a highly dramatized, detailed account of the raid. In the last chapter, “When Paths Join,” a few paragraphs address the recovery. The author states that for Union soldiers returning to Lawrence and newcomers arriving, “vestiges of the famous raid were fast disappearing.” Edward Leslie’s The Devil Knows How to Ride (New York: Random House, 1996) credits the railroad as giving new impulse to trade; Duane Schultz, Quantrill’s War: The Life and Times of William Clarke Quantrill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 238-39, quotes the Missouri Democrat on the rapid rebuilding of Lawrence.

5. Bullene to his wife [Susan Read Bullene], October 9, 1863, Bullene Letters; Karl L. Gridley, A Survey of Nineteenth-Century Gravestones in Pioneer Cemetery, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (Lawrence: Historic Mount Oread Fund of the Kansas University Endowment Association, 1997), x; “The End Has Come: Fred Read Died at His Home Saturday Evening,” Lawrence Daily World, June 10, 1901.

6. “Hurrah for Lawrence,” Kansas Daily Tribune, December 10, 1863. The presses of the Kansas Tribune were destroyed in Quantrill’s raid and two sons, John M. Speer, age nineteen, and Robert, age seventeen, were killed in the raid; William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1883), 343, or online at http://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/douglas/douglas-co-p25.html.

7. “Boy Wanted,” Kansas Daily Tribune, December 10, 1863; Kansas Weekly Tribune, August 27, 1863.

8. Speer went to Topeka and on borrowed presses published his newspaper with a detailed account of the raid and news of businessman Ridenour clearing away rubbish and others planning to rebuild, Kansas Weekly Tribune, August 27, 1863; Cordley, who lost his home and library, conducted a mass funeral as well as regular church service. He wrote an account of the raid for the Congregational Record. [Reverend Richard Cordley], “The Lawrence Massacre,” The Congregational Record

230 Kansas History

to subscribe to the stock to be paid when the line was completed south to Franklin County.10

Leavenworth, the oldest and largest city in Kansas, sent immediate relief to survivors in the stricken town, as did area farmers who brought in wagonloads of food. The day after the raid the

Daily Times (Leavenworth, Kans.) called on “our citizens to display their liberality. The loss and suffering in Lawrence must be great. Let immediate steps be taken towards raising a munificent fund to relieve their necessities.” Residents of Leavenworth also reached out to help friends in Lawrence. Barbette Brechtelsbauer, a thirty-five-year-old German-born raid widow whose home was destroyed, recalled, “After the raid a friend from Leavenworth came down in a wagon and took myself and children with him where I stayed some 4 weeks.”11

By September 1, the people of Leavenworth had raised $20,000 as a Lawrence fund and the Leavenworth ladies of the Lawrence Aid Society had met to sew a sizable array of clothing which included: “26 aprons; 26 boys’ pants; 5 boys’ shirts; 6 boys’ waists; 5 boys’ aprons; 22 ladies’ chemise; 12 child’s dresses; 19 child’s waists; 10 child’s flannel skirts; 26 crash towels; 13 pairs drawers; 29 ladies dresses; 13 ladies handkerchiefs; 14 pairs hose; 13 infants’ flannel skirts; 150 infants’ napkins; 5 infants’ dresses; 21 infants’ flannel shirts; 3 night dresses; 37 sheets; 8 white skirts; 1 flannel skirt; 3 gents’ shirts; 3 gents’ collars.”12

Grocer Peter Ridenour, age thirty-four, appreciated the food sent from area farmers, and “the good people of Leavenworth were prompt in sending several wagons-loads.” Moving quickly to assess the future of his ruined store, Ridenour located some cash in an unharmed safe, pocketed ten dollars, and determined to pay his creditors with the rest. In his autobiography he recalled that he set out to rebuild the firm even as his wounded business partner, Harlow Baker, fought for his life:

Leading businessmen lost no time in clearing the rubble and making plans to restock. A key to this quick business recovery was available credit. Buoyed by aid and credit from Leavenworth, Kansas; St. Louis, Missouri; and Boston, Massachusetts, surviving businessmen marshaled their resources, optimism, and youthful energy to reconstruct and expand the nine-year-old town. Vermont native and twenty-nine-year-old lawyer Oscar E. Learnard expressed the determined spirit of survivors. Only three weeks after the raid, on September 15, 1863, he wrote from Lawrence about the future:

And yet we here—even those who have suffered most in loss of property and friends are beginning to buoy up their griefs and nerve themselves for the great Future which awaits their coming. Most are cheerful, and all hopeful.

Many have, of course, left, some never to return, but their places and the places of the Dead will be filled by others and Lawrence will continue her onward march.9 Rebuilding shattered lives was a more difficult and

longer process than the material rebound, given that the raid left the town with a score of wounded men, nearly a hundred widows, and 250 fatherless children. But outside support encouraged Lawrence residents. Town namesake and benefactor Amos A. Lawrence, a Boston industrialist, sent money to alleviate suffering from the raid. Charles Robinson, the first governor of the state of Kansas, who was in Lawrence at the time of the raid, had written Amos Lawrence regarding a fund for the proposed university and of the business revival: “Lawrence is rising rapidly from its ashes. Everybody is busy rebuilding. Property is enhanced in value rather than depreciated. This is owing to the prospect of two railroads in process of construction in this direction.” No doubt this vision of Lawrence as a railroad center added confidence to those rebuilding. The Kansas Pacific Railroad reached North Lawrence in December 1864, and in 1865, after Senator James H. Lane assumed the presidency of the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad, Douglas County voted $250,000

5 (September & October 1863): 98–115, in Quantrill and the Lawrence Massacre: A Reader, ed. Richard B. Sheridan (Lawrence: the author, 1994), 144–64.

9. O. E. Learnard to “My Dear Mary,” September 15, 1863, Oscar Eugene Learnard Papers, 1850–1911, Volume 4, 1861–1864, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence.

10. Charles Robinson to [A. A. Lawrence], October 5, 1863, box 1, folder 1, University of Kansas Collection, Collection 651, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society; Harold J. Henderson, “The Building of the First Kansas Railroad South of the Kaw River,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 15 (August 1947): 225–26.

11. Daily Times (Leavenworth, Kans.), August 22, 1863; “Statement of Mrs. Bettie Brechtlenauer,” typescript, Recollections of Quantrill Raid for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Lawrence Massacre, Box 1, A–R, Collection 159, State Archives Division, Kansas State Historical Society. An attached biographical sketch spells the last name “Brechtelsbauer.”

12. “Report of the ‘Ladies Lawrence Aid Society of Leavenworth,’” Daily Times (Leavenworth, Kans.), September 1, 1863.

and James B. Laing, gave out loans of between $100 and $500 at 6 percent interest for three to five years to Lawrence business survivors. One recipient, merchant G. W. E. Griffith, had paid $30 interest on his loan by June 1865. Griffith also recalled going to Leavenworth, where he found a merchant from St. Louis who would sell iron and steel “on four months' time.”15


Mr. Baker’s life was still hanging in the balance. I studied the situation over for an hour or two, and came to the conclusion that we must start again, and did not know of any place more favorable to start than right where we were. . . .

I nerved myself for the responsibilities of the hour. I felt that I was strong and that I had the best part of my life before me, and that I could and would succeed. . . . I went to work that afternoon and cleaned out the old corn-crib, got some lumber and built a “lean-to,” and hoisted the Stars and Stripes on top of the corn-crib to attract attention to the fact that we had a store back there on the alley; I rolled into it two or three wagon-loads of salt and some other articles not paid for, which we had in transit from the Missouri River and which had not arrived at the time of the fire.13

Before the raid Ridenour and Baker had established a thriving wholesale and retail business in Lawrence, and after the raid Ridenour resupplied the burned-out Lawrence store with goods the firm had in a warehouse in Leavenworth. By January 1, 1864, the Ridenour and Baker advertisement boasted their “New Store” offering “Staple and Fancy Groceries.”

Only weeks after Phillip Albach’s brother George was shot dead at the family home south of Lawrence, Phillip and his pregnant wife, Wilhelmina, set out on foot for Leavenworth to resupply their ravaged store. They stopped by Big Stranger Creek near Tonganoxie, where their son Henry Albach was born September 8, 1863. Phillip continued his quest and obtained $600 worth of stock from a Leavenworth merchant named Ditmer. After returning to Lawrence, he reopened his grocery store at 149 Massachusetts Street. When this stock was sold, Albach ordered more goods.14

The Union Merchants Exchange of St. Louis sent $10,000 after the raid as a relief fund, which was an important source of loans for rebuilding businesses and dwellings. The local fund administrators, Lawrence merchant Wesley H. Duncan, Reverend B. L. Baldridge,

13. Peter Darcuss Ridenour, The Autobiography of Peter D. Ridenour with Genealogies of the Ridenour and Beatty Families (Kansas City, Mo.: Hudson Press, 1908), 177–79.

14. Kansas Daily Tribune, June 25, 1864; Stacy A. Jeffress, “1701 Tennessee: The Albach House,” research paper prepared for Professor Paul Wilson’s Historic Preservation Law Class, Fall 1984, University of Kansas, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence.

Amelia Read’s brother-in-law, Lathrop Bullene, had come to Kansas to open a business with the Reads, but their partnership broke apart. Bullene, who was in New York during the raid, estimated his business losses at $20,000. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society/Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas.

15. “St. Louis Relief Fund,” Kansas Daily Tribune, June 10, 1865; G. W. E. Griffith, My 96 Years in the Great West: Indiana, Kansas and California (Los Angeles, Calif.: Geo. W. E. Griffith, 1929), 169.

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Two businessmen who were out of Lawrence at the time of the raid rushed back to the stricken town. On his honeymoon in August 1863, Alexander Lewis, age thirty-three, left his bride with a sister in Ohio and returned to Lawrence to reopen his dry goods store. With Lawrence rapidly rebuilding, Lewis switched to the lumber business. Reuben W. Ludington, age thirty-six, was visiting his home state of Massachusetts at the time of the raid during which he lost heavily. He returned to Lawrence, purchased the Methodist church building in the small nearby settlement of Franklin, moved it to Lawrence, and reopened his wholesale business. The next year he built a two-story building on Massachusetts Street and advertised “Liquor, Cigar and Tobacco Jobbing House.” In 1864 he also was elected mayor of Lawrence.16

Two storeowners, one born in Pennsylvania, the other in Germany, took pride in their rapid return to business.

16. Kansas Daily Tribune, April 13, 1865; “Death of R. W. Ludington,” Lawrence Daily Journal, October 7, 1905.

James G. Sands of Pennsylvania and his wife, Susie, had operated a saddle and harness shop on Massachusetts Street before raiders left it in ruins. By January 1864, Sands, whose brother-in-law George Sargeant had died in the raid, was back in business with his “Great Western Harness & Saddle Manufacturer.” In his advertisements, Sands turned disaster into a defiant boast: “Established in 1855. Sacked in 1856. Stood the Famine in 1860. Totally Destroyed in 1863. Defies all Competition in 1864.” Across the street from Sands’s shop on the west side of Massachusetts, merchant Jacob House, born in Leipnik, Austria, in 1833, had been in Lawrence only a year when his store was damaged in the raid. By December 2, 1863, he advertised:

J. House Has Resumed Command! And Is Now In The Field! He Can be Found at His Old Fort Known As Miller’s Block . . . Latest Styles of Clothing and Furnishing Goods, Hats, Caps, Boots and Shoes . . . ENTIRE NEW STOCK.

During the late 1850s, merchants on Massachusetts Street like Fred Read and Lathrop Bullene (whose store is near the middle of this image), owned bustling grocery businesses. Easy access to credit enabled Bullene to rebuild. He sold his business when he became ill in 1885 to his son-in-law, Arthur D. Weaver, who later opened Weaver’s Department Store.

17. James G. Sands lived at 603 Tennessee; his saddlery was located at 722 Massachusetts. Sands’s advertisement, Kansas Daily Tribune, April 12, 1864; J. House, “Experiences and Facts About Survivors,” Lawrence—Today and Yesterday: Published as a Magazine and Souvenir Edition Commemorating the Semi-Centennial of the Lawrence Massacre (Lawrence: Lawrence Daily Journal-World, 1913), 123–24; Green and Foley’s Lawrence City Directory, 1888 (Lawrence: P.T. Foley, Printer, 1887), 132.

18. Martha Caldwell, “The Eldridge House,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 (November 1940): 364.

19. Ibid. Eldridge in the Kansas State Census lists assets of $40,000 and $20,000 in real and personal properties. See Kansas State Census, 1865, Douglas County, Lawrence; “Sale of the Eldridge House,” Kansas Daily Tribune, May 22, 1866. Eldridge built hotels in other towns, made money, but also lost wealth. Shalor Winchell Eldridge, Publications of


House long remembered the generosity of Leavenworth and how his partner and their families had gone there to restock their goods after the raid and stopped at the Planter’s hotel. When time came to pay the bill House recalled, “The hotel clerk refused to take our money, saying the good people of Leavenworth had paid our bills.” No doubt people’s kindness lifted the spirits of House and other raid survivors.17

In addition to attracting outside credit and support as Lawrence had from its founding, survivors were willing to take on town debt for local financing of the Eldridge hotel. Rebuilding the already iconic Eldridge House, as the hotel was called, involved both a concerted group initiative and public bonds. Only ten days after the raid, on September 1, 1863, a group of business men and bankers, who had lost their buildings but survived the raid, petitioned Colonel S. W. Eldridge, “We, your neighbors and friends appeal to you not to be discouraged but arouse yourself to action & rebuild the noble structure as near as possible as it was. We will aid you to the utmost of our ability and firmly believe the friends of freedom throughout the land will aid you.”18 But Eldridge, who had lost $60,000 when the hotel burned down in the raid, needed financial help. A committee visited the city council to ask for submission of a bond issue to the voters, and on March 3, 1865, a $15,000 bond issue passed on a 162–47 vote, a vote of confidence in the future of the town from raid survivors. Eldridge hired men, began construction, and the rebuilding reached the third floor before work stopped. Out of money, on May 21, 1866, Eldridge sold the hotel to raid survivor George W. Deitzler, who moved immediately to have the building finished. By September 1866, the hotel was ready to receive guests. Although the name “Eldridge” was retained for the hotel, Shalor W. Eldridge, then in middle age, would never be quite as influential a figure in Lawrence as he had been before the raid.19

Brinton W. Woodward had survived the raid when his raider assailants became distracted by the escape of a prize pony from a nearby livery stable. Woodward reopened his drugstore a month after the raid, because his building near the Kansas River was damaged but not destroyed. By January 31, 1865, he had constructed a new and larger building on the corner of Henry (Eighth Street) and Massachusetts Streets. Fred Read had made a remarkable recovery from his status as a “Habitual Drunk,” as the Probate Court had labeled him. A jury of his peers, chaired by raid survivor L. Guild, in 1864, found him competent to regain control of his property, which had been placed under his wife’s guardianship. In 1865 Read announced that he would make crockery his specialty and that he had arranged with a New York importing firm to supply him with “celebrated potteries.” He would also keep selling other dry goods.20

Prior to its destruction in the raid, the Eldridge House was one of Lawrence’s most recognizable buildings. Within days of the raid, survivors encouraged its owner, Colonel S. W. Eldridge, to rebuild and offered him financial support. After running out of funds, Eldridge sold the partially completed structure to George W. Deitzler, who opened the new building in 1866. Alexander Gardner took this photograph of the hotel a year later. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

the Kansas State Historical Society Embracing Recollections of Early Days in Kansas (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1920), 2:206.

20. “New Edition for B. W. Woodward” advertisement, Kansas Daily Tribune, January 31, 1865; Lawrence City Directory and Business Guide for 1866 (Lawrence: Boughton and McAllaster, [1866]), 70, 88; “F. W. Read,” Kansas Daily Tribune, June 27, 1865; Douglas County, Probate Court Records, Record C, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries.

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While Massachusetts Street businessmen sought to quickly reopen their stores, many of the raid widows had to find a way to earn a living. Many widows and wounded

men received $150 from the Lawrence Relief Fund in the immediate raid aftermath but had to improvise their own longer-term support.21 Three years after the raid thirteen raid widows had remarried, and German-born widow Mary Anna Oehrle had sent her two sons to an orphanage in Ohio. Two raid widows opened boardinghouses. Thirty-eight-year-old Annie Bell, widow of Douglas County clerk George W. Bell, advertised “Boarding” for “a few day and week boarders” in her home in August 1864. Left without extended family members in Lawrence and at a time when she could expect neither a government pension nor public support, Annie Bell, with five children to provide for, in 1865 advertised her “Home Restaurant” in rooms she had “fitted up” over Leis’s Drug Store. In 1866 her “New Restaurant” on Henry Street, just east of Massachusetts, opened up in rooms she had once again “fitted up” for her business. She announced she was “prepared to accommodate a few day boarders and furnish good meals at any time.” For her entrepreneurial pursuits in April 1865, Mrs. Bell received two infusions of $50 each in cash from the $5,000 fund that Amos A. Lawrence had sent to aid sufferers in the stricken city. In 1866 Annie Bell received another cash award that included $19 for a washing machine wringer and funds to help pay taxes on her home. Jetta Dix, the young Irish-born widow of raid victim Ralph C. Dix, whose wagon and blacksmith shop were destroyed, rebuilt a home on the Dix property and opened a boardinghouse to support her three young children. She was not listed as receiving further relief funds but may have been extended credit on the basis of Ralph Dix’s entrepreneurial reputation and property. However, she had to apply to the Douglas County Probate Court for money from her husband’s estate for her children’s needs. Ralph Dix, like most victims, had not made a will. In these circumstances widows with underage children had to apply to the probate judge, raid survivor James Hendry, for funds from the estates of their husbands that were held in trust for the children.22

21. “Report,” Kansas State Journal, November 12, 1863.22. Douglas County Marriages, 1854–1884, vol. 1 (Lawrence: Douglas

County Genealogical Society, 1989). Oehrle’s sons Gottlieb and Charles spent several years in the German Methodist Orphanage in Berea, Ohio. Widow Mary Anna Oehrle married John Damm of Stull, Kansas, on January 18, 1865; John S. Brown, who administered the funds, reported to A. A. Lawrence in Boston in letters and a listing of 115 dispersals of

The Amos A. Lawrence and Union Merchants Bank of St. Louis relief funds not only aided the raid survivors but also played a critical role in supplying money for Lawrence to secure designation as the site of the proposed state university. After much maneuvering in the Kansas legislature in 1863, Lawrence delegates secured the location of the university contingent on the town raising $15,000 in a nine-year-old settlement that had almost been destroyed in the raid. Portions of both the St. Louis Fund and the Amos A. Lawrence fund were used to underwrite the first university building. By summer 1865, Lawrence city fathers decided an orphanage was no longer needed and applied money from these resources to the building that became known at North College. As a concession to the original intent of the funds, they agreed that raid orphans could attend the university tuition free.23

Expansion followed recovery. By 1866 Lawrence had grown rapidly from about 2,500 people at the time of the raid to a population of 5,960, of which 1,113 were “colored,” according to the Kansas Daily Tribune on January 11, 1866. Among the new businesses and institutions were Lathrop Bullene’s “New Store,” a rebuilt Eldridge Hotel, and the University of Kansas, set to open with fifty-four students in September. With a toll bridge spanning the Kansas River, the city of Lawrence was ready to incorporate North Lawrence, the settlement that had been the Delaware Indian Reserve on the north side of the Kansas River, into the city. The city council, led by men who survived the raid, approved this measure after the Delaware Indians were moved to a reservation in Indian Territory, later the state of Oklahoma.24

Some smaller preraid businesses never reopened. Those with fewer resources or access to credit than Fred Read, Lathrop Bullene, G. W. E. Griffith, R. W. Ludington,

the “Lawrence Fund” to persons in need, accounts 1865 to 1867. John S. Brown to A. A. Lawrence, July 8, 1867, folder 1, box 1, Collection 651, State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society. “Hon A. A. Lawrence I hereby transmit to you an account up to the present date of my stewardship—This nearly closes up Dr. & cr. with the Funds I have recd from you. There have been a good many annoyances connected with the distribution of these funds. The pleasure of relieving want has more than balanced the trouble.” Pat Kehde, High Hopes and Great Loss: The Story of Ralph and Jetta Dix, Lawrence, Kansas—1858–1871 (Lawrence: the author, 2013); “Funeral of Judge Hendry,” Lawrence Daily Journal and Evening Tribune, February 7, 1895.

23. Kansas Daily Tribune, June 11, 1865. C. S. Griffin, “The University of Kansas and the Years of Frustration, 1854–1864,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 1966): 1–32.

24. “Population of Lawrence,” Kansas Daily Tribune, January 11, 1866; Lawrence City Directory and Business Guide for 1866; “Amending the City Charter,” Kansas Daily Tribune, February 7, 1866.


25. “Bath House,” Lawrence (Kans.) Republican, July 23, 1862, July 31, 1862; Kansas Census 1865, Elias Bradley, age 48, married, born Arkansas, barber; B. Jean Snedeger et al., Complete Tombstone Census of Douglas County (Douglas County, Kans.: Douglas County Genealogical Society Lawrence, 1987), 209; Directory of the City of Lawrence for 1871 (Lawrence: J.T. Atchison, Publisher, 1871), 42. H. S. Fillmore resided on Kentucky Street between Quincy and Hancock. Listing of property sold to settle Fillmore estate, Douglas County, Probate Court Records, box

A public school teacher with a degree from Mount Holyoke College, Mary Carpenter had been married for less than a year before her husband’s murder. After his death, she served as principal of the high school in Lawrence. Later she briefly taught at Washburn and married John C. Rankin of Quenemo, Kansas. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society/Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas.

9, Kansas Collection; “Death of Jerry C. Willis,” obituary Jeremiah C. Willis, Lawrence (Kans.) Gazette, November 22, 1888; Duncan, Kansas Daily Tribune, May 29, 1867; the Duncan family returned to Lawrence in 1868, when Duncan resumed business; Katie H. Armitage, “‘This Far Off Land’: The Overland Diary, June–October 1867, and California Diary, January–March 1868, of Elizabeth ‘Bettie’ Duncan,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 12 (Spring 1989): 13–27.

B. W. Woodward, J. G. Sands, and Jacob House may not have been able to obtain financing. Owners of small businesses did not have the connections to businessmen in Leavenworth and Kansas City that larger firms had. For example, E. L. Bradley, who had fled Arkansas in 1862, when that state expelled free people of color, did not reopen his bathhouse. He had arrived in Lawrence, widely known for its antislavery stance, with hopes that his Turkish bathhouse would win acceptance. But after the raid he turned to barbering for a living. Whether his first business had attracted general patronage cannot be determined, but the records show that he spent the rest of his life as a barber and was buried in a pauper’s grave when he died in 1896. Credit may not have been made available to this African American businessman. Some business partnerships that had been revived after the raid quickly dissolved. H. S. Fillmore, whose brother and business partner, Lemuel Fillmore, died in the raid, reopened his dry goods store for only a brief time. The Fillmore property was sold to satisfy the estate of the deceased partner. The stable of the Willis brothers burned out in the raid reopened quickly, but the business was sold by 1865. Wesley H. Duncan, whose store had burned and whose partner was killed in the raid, partnered with businessman Robert Morrow to reopen in 1864. However, in June 1867, Duncan sold his share, packed up his wife and two young children, and joined an overland wagon train for California. The Duncan family returned to Lawrence the following year, and Duncan reentered business on Massachusetts with raid survivor G. W. E. Griffith.25

Visitors to Lawrence found the rapid rebuilding remarkable. A man from Marshalltown, Iowa, wrote editor John Speer:

But what excites my admiration more than all things else, is the condition of your own Lawrence. That now on this 21st day

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of August, just four years from the time when by Quantrell’s band all your business edifices were laid in ashes, when so large a portion of your dwellings were destroyed, when eighty-five widows mourned over their slain and one hundred and eighty orphans were left destitute, your city can present such an extent of well-built and substantial structures, both for business purposes and dwellings. Again and again have I inquired in amazement, after such destruction of buildings and property and life, whence came the wealth and enterprise which could accomplish such results, and in four years establish what appears to me to be so extensive and prosperous a business and so pleasant and attractive a city.26

Alexander Gardner, a photographer employed by the railroad, arrived in Lawrence in September 1867. His images of the new university building, views of Massachusetts Street lined with two and three-story brick buildings, scenes of homes scattered down the hill from Mount Oread, as well as the railroad bridge and dwellings across the Kansas River, depicted the quick rebuilding.27

Another indication that just a few years after the raid that citizens had rebuilt, expanded the city, and regained confidence can be found in their willingness to resume political activism, which before the Civil War had centered on the campaign against slavery. The temperance issue was beginning to stir action in Lawrence by the end of the Civil War. Raid widow and public school teacher Mary Carpenter, who was a graduate of Mount Holyoke, read a petition from Lawrence women in mid-October 1865, before the city council that asked for a vote on “licensing for the sale of intoxication liquors.” The petition was received and placed on the record but no action was taken. In 1867 the Kansas legislature placed three suffrage amendments on the November ballot. Lawrence residents actively campaigned for the amendments to confer voting rights to black men and all women. Reformers in Lawrence were greatly disappointed when both amendments failed. A number of prominent women and raid survivors, such as Mrs. Honorable E. G. Ross, Mrs. G. W. E. Griffith, Mrs. J. H. Lane, Mrs. Reverend R. Cordley, and Mrs. ex-Governor Charles Robinson, signed the

“Address by the Women’s Impartial Suffrage Association of Lawrence, Kansas.” No name of any raid widow appeared on this list of twenty-nine women. The growing temperance cause was a moral issue that affected wives and families and therefore deemed more appropriate for public pronouncement by the respected raid widow than the political issue of voting rights.28

Lawrence had rapidly rebuilt with loans from creditors, financing from banks in Kansas and Missouri, and by the initiatives of local businessmen and encouragement of leaders

such as John Speer. Although the railroad boom did not bring as much growth and prosperity as once hoped, it brought new residents and goods to Lawrence stores and to Douglas County farms. The University of Kansas held its first graduation for a class of four in 1873. But after the grasshopper invasion of 1874 and the loss of the railroad roundhouse to Kansas City in 1877, the town entered a period of slow growth.

Fred Read, who stated, “I went through 8 years of war, 4 years of Territorial or border ruffian war & 4 years of war of the Rebellion,” exemplified survivors who were determined to rebuild after the raid. After his seemingly temporary bout with alcoholism, he devoted himself to family, home, business, and the town. By 1888 the Read store had moved two doors south on Massachusetts Street, boasted a stock of $10,000, an annual business of $30,000 to $35,000, and the employment of four to six clerks. Read served on Lawrence’s city council in 1888 and again in 1898. As a councilman for his east Lawrence ward, he supported developing a storm-water system and worked to raise funds for the city to extend a water line to Oak Hill Cemetery, the burial grounds opened by the city in 1865 as an appropriate memorial for raid victims. Read also took pride in his home. On August 14, 1894, the Lawrence World noted, “One of the prettiest places in town is that of Fred W. Read on Rhode Island street.

26. “Impressions of a stranger,” Kansas Daily Tribune, August 21, 1867.27. Alexander Gardner stereographs, Gardner Collections Number 47,

State Archives, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka; David Dary, edited by Steve Jansen, Pictorial History of Lawrence, Douglas County, Kansas (Lawrence: Allen Books, 1992), 79–92.

28. Kansas Daily Tribune, October 19, 1865; “City Council Proceedings,” Kansas Daily Tribune, October 21, 1865. Mary E. Carpenter, 1839–1917, returned to teaching after Louis Carpenter was shot dead in the raid. “Our City Schools,” Kansas Daily Tribune, August 27, 1864; Sarah Wilkinson, Archives Assistant, Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections, e-mail message to author, July 12, 2010; “Suffrage,” Kansas Daily Tribune, February 3, March 2, March 5, March 24, September 24, October 16, November 15, 1867; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, editors, History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells, Publishers, 1882), 933. The third suffrage amendment—the only one of the three that got the approval of the Kansas electorate—disfranchised certain former Confederate soldiers.


During this hot, dusty weather it is a relief to walk by and see Mr. Read watering his lawn, trimming his shrubs and otherwise tending his choice flowers and plants. . . . To keep up such grounds requires a great deal of care and Mr. Read spends five hours each day in watering alone.” In this latter period of his life Read’s dark hair had turned gray, but he cut a dapper figure in his photographs with his trim mustache, bow tie, and a boutonniere in the lapel of his suit.29

Quantrill’s raid continued to motivate Read to action. In the 1880s Read took the lead in championing a bill in the Kansas legislature for payment of raid claims. Read and other Lawrence citizens who had lost so much in the raid felt entitled to compensation for their losses and were frustrated with the lack of action by the government. This cause came to symbolize both their material losses, their struggles in the Bleeding Kansas era, indeed all the wrongs that had been visited on the town. On January 16, 1869, Lawrence’s Kansas Daily Tribune proclaimed, “We understand that a vigorous effort will be made soon to get an appropriation through Congress to pay the losses inflicted on our city by Quantrell’s raid. It is a measure of such justice and humanity, that we do not believe that the representatives of a government which professes to protect the humblest of its citizens, will turn a deaf ear to this petition.”30

As the federal government had paid claims for losses from vigilantism and quasi-military incursions in 1856 in Kansas Territory, raid survivors hoped the United States government would reimburse survivors for raid losses. Raid survivors felt this a matter of justice for those Union loyalists who had suffered so much from Confederate guerrilla bands during the Civil War.31 But the U.S. Congress, consumed with the politics of Reconstruction and the needs of wounded Union soldiers and the widows of these fallen, did not take up the claims of Lawrence civilians. With no action by the federal government on the raid claims, raid survivors turned to their state for action. The Kansas legislature in 1875 appointed a commission to gather testimony from survivors. John N. Murdock,

chair of the commission, asked all persons who desired to present claims to send a postcard to the commission and advised, “Claimants will do well to prepare an itemized statement of their losses, and be prepared to support the same by the evidence of at least one disinterested witness.” By June 1875, the commission had allowed $594,000 worth of claims in Lawrence and was set to return after taking more claims in Paola and Fort Scott. The commission issued paper warrants or certificates that totaled $882,390.11.32

Despite the work of the Raid Commission and the issuing of warrants, the Kansas legislature appropriated no money to redeem these claims. The raids in eastern Kansas had not affected new settlers in western Kansas, who were struggling to establish farms and homes. Their immediate interests did not favor restitution of loss in Civil War Kansas. As the years passed, a number of the raid claimants died and claims passed to descendants. In 1883, twenty years after the raid, Fred W. Read became chair of a state executive committee on raid claims. Ex-

29. “Sketch of the Life of F. W. Read,” Read Papers; Lawrence Daily World, August 14, 1894; William G. Cutler, “Fred W. Read” in History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1883), 343.

30. “Raid Claims,” January 16, 1869, Kansas Daily Tribune. “Quantrell” was often spelled with an “e” instead of an “i” into the early twentieth century, when the spelling was corrected to “Quantrill.”

31. H. J. Strickler, Claims of the Citizens of the Territory of Kansas: Report of H. J. Strickler, Commissioner to Audit, 35th Cong., 2d Sess., Mis. Doc. No. 43 (1858).

32. “Quantrell’s Raid,” Republican and Daily Tribune, April 30, 1875; Frank W. Blackmar, “Claims,” in Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, Embracing Events, Institutions, Industries, Counties, Cities, Towns, Prominent Persons, Etc. (Chicago: Standard Pub. Co., 1912), 1:355; Commission to Audit Quantrill Raid Claims, “A Roster of Kansas for Fifty Years,” Kansas Historical Collections, 1903–1904 8 (1904): 529. The three-member commission included William H. Bear of Burlington, John N. Murdock of Ottawa, and Charles D. French of Lawrence.

Buoyed by the rebuilding he saw around him, Fred Read recovered from the shock of the raid to open his store. His business, located in a different retail space on Massachusetts Street during the 1880s, grossed over $30,000 annually. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society/Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas.

238 Kansas History

Governor Charles Robinson lent his name to the board of this citizen committee. Read visited thirty Kansas counties, where he solicited thousands of petition signatures supporting payment of raid claims to deliver to the Kansas legislature. He mounted a campaign that anticipated a modern public relations effort as he

enlisted prominent supporters, circulated petitions, and issued public statements on the issue. In January 1885, Read submitted a letter to the Lawrence Daily Journal from William Hutchinson, former Lawrence resident and then chairman of the U.S. Pension Commission, endorsing and praising Read’s work and urging the Kansas legislature to pay the raid claims. When the Kansas House of Representatives debated the raid claims bill in 1885, Read was among a group of prominent Lawrence men in Topeka, but no bill passed. In February 1886, Lawrence men were again pressing this cause without success.33

When the Kansas legislature finally passed a raid claims bill in March 1887, twenty-four years after the raid, a

Lawrence newspaper editor welcomed it as the town’s “biggest boom.” The paper and Fred Read praised the work of local state representative J. D. Bowersock for steering the bill that passed with a seven-vote margin. The small margin in favor of the act indicates the reluctance of some legislators to support this funding. The act also covered claims from other guerrilla raids in Kansas from 1861 to 1863, but as the majority of the losses occurred in Lawrence on August 21, 1863, these certificates were generally called the “Quantrell Raid Claims.” The newspaper printed the names and original amounts claimed by 237 Lawrence survivors. But the 1887 act reduced the total value of claims by half. Because allocations for payments of the claims would stretch over a ten-year period, the legislation added $104,720.26 for interest on the claims. In a blow to those with the largest losses, no claims above $1,500 could to be redeemed.

Claims of less than $1,000 were to be paid, then only 25

In the weeks following the raid, Oscar Eugene Learnard, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer from Vermont, professed his faith in Lawrence’s future. Over twenty years later, he purchased the Lawrence Daily Journal, which continued to publish information about raid claims into the 1890s.

33. “The Raid Claims,” letter from William Hutchinson to F. W. Read, Lawrence Daily Journal, January 8, 1885; “The Raid Bill,” Lawrence Daily Journal, February 23, 1886.

34. “Quantrell Raid Claims Bill,” Lawrence Daily Journal, March 5, 1887; Lawrence Evening Tribune, March 5, 1887; Blackmar, “Claims” in Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, 1:352–56; Read Papers, 1864–1901. In addition to a brief autobiography, the documents include dated folders with envelopes of signed contracts and letters relating to the Read’s raid claim efforts.


percent of claims above $1,000 and up to $1,500. The newspaper editor admitted, “It works injustice to the heavy losers, but as a rule they are better able to stand it, and the $1,500 will be something.” Many likely rejoiced in the passage of the bill, but the question of who deserved the most credit for the passage of the act distressed Fred Read, who believed he was responsible. Read had contacted raid claimants, offering them contracts that appointed himself as attorney and agent to procure legislation for collection of claims. Those signing some one hundred of these contracts agreed to pay him 10 percent of the amount assumed by the state of Kansas.34

Twenty years after the raid, new leadership had replaced raid survivors in Lawrence. The population had grown to over 8,500 and the town had gained the United States Haskell Industrial Training School, the present Haskell Indian Nations University. A number of prominent raid survivors had changed careers. In 1883 John Speer, whose newspaper vigorously and continuously promoted the rebuilding of Lawrence, left the newspaper business and moved to Garden City, Kansas. Other prominent Lawrence businessmen who had rebuilt in Lawrence, such as P. D. Ridenour, Harlow Baker, R. W. Ludington, B. W. Woodward, and Lathrop Bullene, moved some or all of their successful enterprises into the growing railroad center of Kansas City, Missouri. By 1880 G. W. E. Griffith had become a banker and was president of Lawrence Gas and Fuel Company before the end of the decade. But soon Griffith left Lawrence to establish branches of that company in the West. Phillip Albach had left the grocery business to become a “fruit grower.” H. S. Fillmore, a former dry goods merchant, had also become a fruit grower. Jacob House’s clothing store was one of the two largest in Lawrence, and he was prosperous enough in 1884, to build a large, Italianate-style home for his family on Ohio Street. Shalor W. Eldridge had invested in mining in Arkansas. Oscar E. Learnard left his position as attorney for the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad in 1884 and became owner of the Lawrence Daily Journal. The Oehrle sons, who had been sent to an Ohio orphanage, returned to Lawrence, and Charles became a fisherman, while Gottlieb edited a German-language newspaper, Die

35. U.S. Census, 1880, Douglas County, Lawrence; “Lawrence, Douglas County Directory” in Southwestern Business Directory (Denver, Colo.: McKinney Publishing Co., 1889); Griffith, My 96 Years in the Great West, 211–15; David M. Katzman, “William Allen White Attends a Lawrence Jewish Wedding,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 34 (Summer 2011): 145; “Col. O. E. Learnard” obituary, Lawrence Daily Journal, November 6, 1911; Honorable R. W. Ludington, Lawrence Daily Journal, March 11, 1885; information on Oehrles from a descendant, Mrs. Frank Scott, in “Many Direct Descendants of Pioneers Living in Area,” Lawrence Journal World, September 16, 1954; Mrs. Arthur H. White, interview with the author, October 18, 1996. Annie Bell had married John R. Hamill in 1872; he soon died. In Green and Foley’s Lawrence City Directory, 1888, she was listed as a widow with a boardinghouse at the end of Tennessee Street. Jetta Dix married W. J. Flintom in 1871, and in 1883 she was listed under “Boarding Houses” in the Lawrence City Directory for 1883 (Lawrence: Lawrence Publishing Co., [1883]), 88, 198.

36. “Sketch of the Life of F. W. Read,” Read Papers.37. “Quantrill Raid Certificate,” Lawrence Daily Journal, July 20, 1887.

Germania. Although raid widows Annie Bell and Jetta Dix remarried, both continued to operate boardinghouses into the 1880s.35

Fred Read remained in the dry goods business on Massachusetts Street and lived nearby in a home on New Hampshire Street and then on the next street east, Rhode Island, for the rest of his life. As he walked to his dry goods store daily, back home for dinner at noon, and returned to the store for the afternoon, he tread the ground where some of the most horrific scenes of the raid had taken place. He had an honorable discharge from service in the Home Guard; was a member of Washington Post, No. 12, Grand Army of the Republic; of Masonic Lodge, No. 6, AF&AM; and Plymouth Congregational Church. He likely discussed the raid with Reverend Richard Cordley, a raid survivor and historian.36

Fred Read had long ruminated on the losses he and so many others had suffered. He had devoted four years of his life to lobbying for the raid-claims bill and displayed his “Certificate of Audited Claims for Raid Losses” in the window of his store in July 1887:

This is to certify that F. W. Read, or his assigns, is entitled to receive from the State of Kansas, on the first day of February 1889, the sum of $156.00 on the claim. . . . This certificate will be received in payment of all taxes except school taxes for the years 1898 and 9, and for all subsequent years, and shall bear interest from July 1, 1887 at the rate of four per cent per annum, payable annually.37

The certificates were not fully funded but could be used to offset taxes. Holders of the newly issued certificates

38. Fred Eggert to F. W. Read, August 22, 1887; Sam Reynolds to F. W. Read, July 27, 1887; Mrs. Sutliff, 309 Waldron Dr., Kansas City, Missouri, to F. W. Read, July 30, 1887, Read Papers; Civil War Claims Register, Quantrill Raid—Claims Paid, and Rejected Quantrill Raid Claims, State Auditor Files (35-05-08-03), State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas.

240 Kansas History

who needed money could sell them immediately but at a discount to speculators and investors. Several Lawrence businessmen and bankers, including Fred Read, offered to purchase the certificates at less than face value expecting them to be redeemed eventually. Read began a letter

campaign, writing those who had signed contracts for him to be their agent. Even though the claims had been drastically reduced, Read expected to be paid ten percent of the $1,500 allowed. Some claimants, such as Fred Eggert, then living in Portland, Oregon, immediately paid up by sending Read a draft for $15 in a letter thanking him for his work. But raid survivor Sam Reynolds of Lawrence wrote to Read in July 1887 to explain that he had not received his new certificate and had yet to decide whether or not to sell. Reynolds, who claimed a loss of $3,226 for his house and barn, sympathized with Read, but added, “I know the world is very ungrateful, but the late legislature is responsible for some things.” Other letter writers asked for more information before considering selling their claims. Mrs. J. B. Sutliff (Augusta) then in Kansas City, Missouri, replied to Read’s letter, “When we get our pay—or scrip [sic]—we would then consider the matter of selling. . . . We shall sell ours as we need the money to close our home here of debt.” She promised to let Read have the first chance at buying her script, “as you say you will give as much as anyone.”38

In 1889 Read publicly de-clared that “Claimants rushed to Topeka and drew their 100, 500, 1000, and 1500 with alac-

After recovering from the financial and psychological damage of Quantrill’s raid, during the 1880s and 1890s Fred Read served as a councilman and worked to secure raid claims from the government for civilian victims.

39. “Quantrill Raid,” Lawrence Journal and Evening Tribune, November 11, 1889.


40. “Claims,” Lawrence Daily Journal, July 3, 1891; “Mrs. F. W. Read Dead,” Lawrence Daily Journal and Evening Tribune, October 1, 1892; A Directory of the City of Lawrence and Douglas County for 1893–1894 (Wichita, Kans.: The Leader Directory Company, [1894]), 132. Fred Read and Lathrop Read lived at 746 New Hampshire Street. At the time of his death, Fred and Louisa Read lived at 635 Rhode Island Street. Chittenden’s 1900–01 Lawrence City Directory (St. Louis, Mo.: Chittenden Directory Company, 1900), 165; “The End Has Come. Fred Read Died at His Home Saturday Evening,” Lawrence Daily World, June 10, 1901.

.

rity” but did not honor their signed obligation to pay their share of the expenses. He had received the money from only “one in ten” of his contracts. When he penned a bitter letter for publication in Learnard’s Lawrence Daily Journal, Read claimed to be “out of pocket more than one thousand dollars” and to be “left holding the bag” by oth-ers in whose names he had worked and sacrificed. Read posted the signed contract of H. S. Fillmore on the door of his store and threatened to post others unless he was paid for his efforts. Fillmore, whose brother Lemuel had died in the raid, did not respond in the newspaper in the following days or month. Fillmore originally filed for $15,965 for the loss of the store and stock. He may have felt that the reduced amount of $1,500, only 10 percent of his loss, did not meet his expectations for Read’s contract to act as agent to the legislature for raid losses.39

So many years after the raid, the practical impact on those who sold their certificates or scripts at less than face value or eventually redeemed their certificates with interest was modest. While

$1,500 or less was welcomed, these amounts were likely not enough to sustain a financially threatened business or a poverty-stricken family for a long period of time. A more timely and generous government reimbursement for losses might have been enough to revive smaller business, such E. L. Bradley’s bathhouse or even H. S. Fillmore’s store. Timely cash surely would have helped raid widows and “orphans.” For Fred Read, the official recognition of loss by the redemption of raid claims

seemed to vindicate his experiences. Amelia Read, who was considered a heroine of the raid when she stood up to the raiders and saved her home, died of cancer in 1892, after a yearlong illness. Before Fred remarried he lived for a short time with his only surviving child, his son Lathrop Read, and family. When Fred Read died in 1901, his obituary in the Lawrence Daily World affirmed, “Mr. Read held many positions of trust but the big work of his life was getting the Quantrell raid claims through the legislature. . . . Year after year he made it the paramount issue of his life to have justice done.” For Fred Read, raid widows and orphans, and many other survivors who rebuilt Lawrence “out of the ashes,” Quantrill’s raid was a defining event of their lives.40

Many towns and cities were burned during the Civil War, but few had sustained the double loss of so many men and buildings that the young town of Lawrence experienced. Despite the terrible loss, Lawrence survivors rallied behind their leaders to reclaim their town. In a few years after the raid, Lawrence businessmen had rebuilt their stores and citizens their homes with loans and support from nearby Leavenworth, Kansas; from St. Louis, Missouri; and Boston, Massachusetts. But the years-long quest for payment of raid losses demonstrated the continuing hold the raid had on survivors. Despite the material rebound and growth of Lawrence, the struggle for redemption of the raid claims speaks to the long shadow that Quantrill’s raid cast on survivors to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.

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Mattress making was a family affair.

“In No Way a Relief Set Up” 243

It was a community project, explained Wilma Ferrick when describing her participation in the Clay County, Kansas, Cotton Mattress Program. She was ten years old at the time, living with her divorced mother and sister on the rented farm of her grandparents, who had lost their own 160-acre Cloud County farm during the Depression. Betty Bowdine Vawter resided on a farm in Osage County. Her future mother-in-law arranged for Betty and her son

Clarence Vawter to make mattresses as part of the Shawnee County program. Thus, the young couple started married life with a new mattress instead of a secondhand one. Thelma Allendorf recalled skipping school to help her family make two mattresses at the fire station in Oskaloosa, Jefferson County; a decade later, while living in north Topeka, they lost the mattresses in the 1951 flood.1

“In No Way a Relief Set Up”: The County Cotton Mattress

Program in Kansas, 1940–1941

by Virgil W. Dean and Ramon Powers

Virgil W. Dean, long-time editor (now consulting editor) of Kansas History, is a fellow of the Agricultural History Society and the author of An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate (2006). Ramon Powers is the executive director emeritus of the Kansas Historical Society and, with James N. Leiker, co-author of The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory (2011), winner of the Center for Great Plains Studies’ Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize for 2012.

The authors owe special thanks to all of the cotton mattress program participants who generously shared their memories with us by letter and telephone, but we are especially grateful for several county extension agents, including Mae Farris True, Anna Scholz Klema, and Ethel Avery Griffing, who provided many of the photographs used in this article. Early on invaluable assistance was received from Marlene Hightower of the Cooperative Extension Service, Kansas State University, who helped us locate material and publicize the project. Of benefit also was a reception for Vera Ellithorpe held at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka on July 21, 1996. Blair Tarr, museum curator, also helped locate and acquire one of the 1941 cotton mattresses for the museum collection.

1. Wilma Ferrick, Tecumseh, Kansas, March 15, 1994; Betty Bowdine Vawter, Carbondale, Kansas, March 16, 1994; and Thelma Allendorf, March 29, 1994, and Allendorf to Ramon Powers, February 28, 2007, telephone interview notes and correspondence, Cotton Mattress Program, in authors’ personal research files, Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas.

The mattress-making activities that these women remembered were a part of the County Cotton Mattress Program adopted by the state of Kansas in 1940. It was one of the many federal

government programs launched to address the persistent problems of agricultural overproduction, in this case the vast surplus of cotton in the American South, and a need for improving living standards in rural areas by providing mattresses to those Americans still classified as poor. Government programs designed to address agricultural production and commodity prices have been widely acknowledged, studied, and accepted as a permanent feature of the farm economy.2 However, New Deal programs aimed at improving households and homemaking are less understood and little appreciated. This is especially true of the mattress program, enacted when the Depression seemed to be coming to an end.

Well before the onset of the Great Depression, the Kansas Cooperative Extension Service, established under the authority of the Smith–Lever Act of 1914, engaged in programs to enhance people’s lives by educating women on various aspects of better homemaking, including things to look for when purchasing a mattress.3 The disparity between urban and rural life became increasingly apparent during the first three decades of the twentieth century, attracting the attention of Progressive-era reformers, such as those of the Country Life Movement, and national legislators, who focused on loan programs, cooperative marketing solutions, and commodity prices.

2. David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982); Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); R. Douglas Hurt, The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981); Michael W. Schuyler, The Dread of Plenty: Agricultural Relief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle West, 1933–1939 (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1989); Craig Miner, Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 235–89.

3. Earl H. Teagarden and Robert L. Johnson, compilers, The Kansas Cooperative Extension Service: Extending the University to the People, 1914–1989, Part 1 of 4 (Manhattan: Kansas State University, 1991), 32, see online at www.ksre.ksu.edu/historicpublications/Extension_History.htm; Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), especially 143–46; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Dust in Southwest Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 54–58; and Marilyn Irvin Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies & The Modern Farm Woman, 1890–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 76–77, 175, who gave some attention to “home industry programs” championed in the 1920s by home demonstration agents.

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At the same time, extension professionals reached inside the farm home to promote domestic economy and to help those rural people who had, for example, known nothing but “shuck or straw mattresses” all their lives. During the 1930s a myriad of New Deal initiatives, not the least of which was Rural Electrification, enhanced these ongoing Extension Service efforts.4

With the close of the Depression decade in 1940 and the commencement of an unprecedented prewar federal defense buildup, millions of Americans went back to work and saw their standards of living rise accordingly. The national economy was on the upswing, and Kansas participated in the boom. The state received its fair share of government contracts, and in 1940 and 1941 cities hosting defense plants bustled with commercial activity.5 The future even bode well for the state’s major industry—agriculture. Traditionally the first to suffer and the last to recover in times of economic hardship, Kansas farmers endured three especially bad years before the long awaited recovery blossomed in 1941. That year, according to the State Board of Agriculture, “Kansas farm production . . . was about 16 percent above 1940 and well

4. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Jefferson County (Extension Division, Kansas State College), 31, Reel 154 (Kansas Historical Society, MF 7684), Record Group 33, Extension Service Annual Reports, General Services Administration, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter, RG 33). For this project, which began in the spring of 1994, we interviewed or corresponded with some three dozen Kansans or former Kansas residents who had, as adults or children, been involved with the County Cotton Mattress Program. Many related experiences similar to that of a Jefferson County resident who said at the time, “This will be my first mattress to sleep on in my life[;] I have used shuck or straw mattresses all my life.” Flora M. Work Faunce of Denison, Kansas, recalled on March 17, 1994, that her family “slept on a straw mattress during the depression” and they “were thankful” for the one they made in 1941; Anna M. Pierson of Holton, who wrote to us on March 15, 1994, said that her family previously “had Feather beds.” Wilma Ferrick’s family had slept on old feather bed mattresses that they had made many years before. Telephone interview notes and correspondence, Cotton Mattress Program, March–April, 1994, in authors’ personal research files. See also Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies & The Modern Farm Woman, 13–64; Edmund de S. Brunner and E. Hsin Pao Yang, Rural America and the Extension Service: A History and Critique of the Cooperative Agricultural and Home Economics Extension Service (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1949); Roy V. Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Wayne D. Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People: Seventy-five Years of Cooperative Extension (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989).

5. Peter Fearon, Kansas in the Great Depression: Work Relief, the Dole, and Rehabilitation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); R. Douglas Hurt, The Great Plains during World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Craig Miner, Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 303–19.


above the 1930–‘39 average. Cash farm income, including government payments, was . . . the highest since 1929 and about 48 percent above 1940.” The year 1941 ended with the most favorable outlook for agriculture in years.6

Nevertheless, much of the state’s still largely rural population was forced to wait for their own personal and community recovery. While waiting, they remained reliant “on the federal government for the maintenance of their families, homes, and communities,” observed historian Pamela Riney-Kehrberg in her study of southwestern Kansas. It was a reliance with which they felt uncomfortable, at best, and “it was a reliance that showed no sign of diminishing well into 1940.” Thousands of Kansans remained “very poor,” or at least “pretty hard up,” and many were “worse than broke,” as

one old Morris County farmer recalled.7 He and others still needed, and in most cases appreciated, New Deal-type assistance. The County Cotton Mattress Program of 1940–1941, which briefly but memorably touched the lives and improved the standards of living of many thousands of rural Kansans, was one such program. It was, of course, a relief program. But like so many others it emphasized self-help, as well as family and community, and was sold in such a way as to allow many to insist that it was “in no way a relief set up.”8

This particular phase of yet another New Deal relief program, which Kansans insisted was “not a relief program in any way,” originated in Congress during

6. Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Thirty-Third Biennial Report, 1941–1942 (Topeka: State Printer, 1943), 466.

7. Milan Harkness, farm near Delavan, Morris County, telephone interview with author, March 22, 1994; Riney-Kehrberg, Rooted in Dust, 75, 67–88.

8. Hugoton Hermes, July 25, 1941; “Summary of Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas,” Project Number 27, Home Furnishings, 1941,

Interest in the County Cotton Mattress Program was widespread, with 79 of the state’s 105 counties participating. Generally, where the mattress program was implemented in Kansas it exceeded expectations, with the number of eligible participants surpassing all estimates in many localities.

the spring of 1940. Through a letter dated April 27, 1940, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover B. Hill invited Congressman Charles L. South of Texas, and by implication the entire membership of the U.S. House of Representatives, “to attend a mattress-making demonstration . . . in the patio of the Administration Building, Department of Agriculture, commencing

Monday, April 29, and lasting through Tuesday, May 7.” The demonstration, wrote Hill, represented “one feature of the Department’s programs for increasing the domestic consumption of surplus cotton.” The assistant secretary pointed out that the cotton and ticking used in the production of these mattresses were being made available under the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s section 32, which provided funding for “domestic-consumption” programs, and the Department of Agriculture Appropriation Act of 1940. “The mattresses,” Hill explained, “will actually be made in the same manner that they are being made in the States” already participating in the program: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Under these various programs “any farm family whose cash income is $400 or less may qualify for a mattress, which they make themselves with the assistance of various agencies of the Department.”9

Congressman South inserted Assistant Secretary Hill’s letter in the Congressional Record and added that “all of us who have given serious study to the question of surplus farm commodities agree that the problem is one of underconsumption rather than of overproduction.” Because American agriculture was part of the global economy, of course, this “underconsumption” problem had international implications. It was linked to world events: the war in Europe, which disrupted transportation lines and textile production, and developments in Japan, which switched from foreign cotton to the cheaper Japanese-produced rayon. As the global market shrank, government and farm officials in the United States sought alternatives abroad and at home. During the past few years, explained Congressman South in May 1940,

Cooperative Extension Service Historical Files, University Archives, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. The authors found no documentary evidence about African American participation in the mattress program. The number of black farmers in Kansas was in decline by 1940, as it was throughout the region, but a few persevered near Nicodemus in Graham County and elsewhere—the 1940 U.S. Census enumerated 65,000 black Kansans; classified 13,000 of them as rural; and found only 681 African American farmers. One might assume that a few of these folks made mattresses, but whether or not their mattress-making experience was a segregated one is to date unknown. Chester Owens of Kansas City reported in March 2014 that the two elderly African American women he asked had not heard of the program. However, Frederick Meenen, a retired Clifton, Kansas, farmer who lived in both Wyandotte and Barber Counties during the early 1940s, recalled that “a few blacks participated.” Frederick Meenen, March 9, 1994, and Chester Owens, March 18, 2014, phone conversations with Ramon Powers; for census data and an insightful discussion of the rural black experience, see Debra A. Reid, “‘The Whitest of Occupations’? African Americans in the Rural Midwest, 1940–2010,” in J. L. Anderson, editor, The Rural Midwest since World War II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 204–54.

9. 76th Cong., 3rd sess., Congressional Record, Appendix, 86 (May 3, 1940), pt. 15, 2661; “Amendments to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1935,” in Wayne D. Rasmussen, ed., Agriculture in the United States: A Documentary History, 4 volumes (New York: Random House, 1975), 3:2304. Section 32 was attached to the Agricultural Adjustment Act as one of a group of amendments adopted on August 24, 1935. It “appropriated for each fiscal year . . . an amount equal to 30 per centum of the gross receipts from duties collected under the customs laws . . . [for use by the secretary of agriculture] to (1) encourage the exportation of agricultural commodities and products . . . ; (2) encourage the domestic-consumption of such commodities or products . . . ; and (3) finance adjustments in the quantity planted or produced for market of agricultural commodities. The amounts appropriated under this section shall be expended for such of the above-specified purposes, and at such times, in such manner, and in such amounts as the Secretary of Agriculture finds will tend to increase the exportation of agricultural commodities and products thereof, and increase the domestic consumption of agricultural commodities and products thereof.”

246 Kansas History

Ethel Avery (Griffing), Home Demonstration agent, Cherokee County, stitching a mattress tick. Photograph courtesy of the Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.

there had been “many campaigns to encourage the use of various articles” requiring cotton in their production, but the Cotton Mattress Program promised even more benefits because of the substantial amount of cotton needed to manufacture a single mattress. The congressman estimated that it required at least fifty pounds of cotton to make one mattress; thus “ten mattresses . . . dispose of an entire 500-pound bale of cotton, and at the same time a local want is supplied.”10

In 1940, when Congressman South’s remarks appeared in the Record, the cotton producing states of the South

were the main participants in this peculiar dual-purpose relief and surplus disposal program. Indeed, the Texas congressman and others believed “the greatest need for these cotton mattresses is in the sections of the country where a large surplus of cotton is produced.”11 This also may have been true of similar programs administered by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s. These were production programs, however; mattresses and comforters were manufactured by agency

10. 76th Cong., 3rd sess., Congressional Record, Appendix, 86 (May 3, 1940), pt. 15, 2661. For efforts to dispose of surplus, see Edgar H. Omohundro, Nathan B. Salant, Maurice R. Cooper, and L. D. Howell, Domestic Cotton Surplus Disposal Programs, Miscellaneous Publication No. 577 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, U.S. Department of Agriculture, September 1945); Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Irvin M. May, Jr., “Cotton and Cattle: The FSRC and Emergency Work

Relief,” Agricultural History 46 (July 1972): 401–13; see also Edward S. Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007).

11. 76th Cong., 3rd sess., Congressional Record, Appendix, 86 (May 3, 1940), pt. 15, 2661. According to the authors of Century of Service, “The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation had bought raw cotton and arranged for it to be made up into clothing, sheets, and mattresses during the latter half of 1934, the objective being to provide work for the unemployed and supplies for the needy, and to reduce cotton surpluses.” Gladys


Cotton Mattress Program officials believed the family was the ideal work unit. Because the undertaking involved hard, heavy labor, at least two people were required to work on each mattress at the Wabaunsee County program, and it was noted that “as a rule the best made mattresses were those on which at least one man helped.” For this same reason, perhaps, Stevens County planned to require that each family be represented at the “work unit” by a husband and wife, mother and older son, or a father and an older daughter. The Hayhurst family, pictured here fluffing the cotton, constructed their mattress at a site in Bird City, Cheyenne County. Photograph courtesy of the Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.

employees for distribution to the needy: “The mattresses were given to the most destitute of the relief homes, where people were sleeping on the floor, on sacks of moss or straw, or on mattresses so soiled and infected as to be unsanitary.” The FERA program produced some 1,320,000 mattresses and over three million quilts and comforters between April 1, 1934, and July 1, 1935. In Kansas alone WPA workers manufactured 20,197 mattresses during the first four years of its effort, 1935–1939. Thus, the mattress (and comforter) production efforts of the FERA and WPA benefitted the citizens of many states outside the South as well, and the Cotton Mattress Program of 1940–1941 quickly gained in popularity.12 During fiscal year 1942, forty-six states, including Kansas, implemented the program—rural families made nearly 1.25 million, fifty-pound cotton mattresses and over one million, four-pound cotton comforters. Fiscal years 1941 and 1942, according to the chief of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), who considered the program a great success, saw the production of over 5.5 million cotton mattresses and comforters.13

The mattress program of 1940–1941 fit well with the long-standing preference for work relief provided to those “deserving poor” who were willing to help themselves if given the opportunity. In fact, many preferred to view it as a very different kind of program. “It is to be understood that this is not a relief program in any way,” said Pauline Crawford, Stafford County’s home demonstration agent. “It is simply a means of helping the cotton growers use the surplus cotton.” In the same vein, the Hugoton Hermes opined: “The Cotton Mattress Program is in no way a

Relief Set Up because [unlike previous programs that gave bedding to needy families, here] the family carries out the construction of the mattress and thus earns the mattress in the same way as the farmer who is cooperating with the Conservation Program” earns his subsidy.14

In Kansas the implementation of the Cotton Mattress Program also reflected a traditional commitment to local option and control.15 Kansas counties decided individually whether or not to participate in the program that was administered locally by the Extension Service, a well-established agency with a presence in all but two of the state’s 105 counties. Overall, acceptance of the Cotton Mattress Program was impressive and widespread: a total of seventy-nine counties participated, and, one county, Chautauqua, transferred materials to another county because of inadequate work centers for making mattresses. The state Extension Office sent Anna Scholz (Klema) to administer the program in the two counties—Gove and Trego in far western Kansas—that had decided they “really DIDN’T want extension programs, but DID want to make the mattresses available to their people.”16

Home furnishings specialist Mae Farris True, a home demonstration agent in Oklahoma before moving to Kansas in 1939, took charge of the Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas the

following year. She was entrusted with the task of taking the program to the counties in part because she was the only state staff member who had seen and participated in the

L. Baker, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Vivian Wiser, and Jane M. Porter, Century of Service: The First 100 Years of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Centennial Committee, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1963), 185.

12. U.S. Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Work Division, The Emergency Work Relief Program of the FERA, April 1, 1934–July 1, 1935 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 65; Federal Works Agency, U.S. Work Projects Administration, Physical Accomplishments Reported for July 1, 1935 through June 1, 1939 [1939]; see also Martha H. Swain, “The Forgotten Woman: Ellen S. Woodward and Women’s Relief in the New Deal,” Prologue 15 (Winter 1983): 201–13; Nancy E. Rose, “Production-for-Use or Production-for-Profit?: The Contradiction of Consumer Goods Production in 1930s Work Relief,” Review of Radical Political Economics 20 (Spring 1988): 46. As Rose demonstrated, FERA production-for-use projects, such as its early manufacture of cotton mattresses for distribution to relief clients, was often challenged by the private sector, which accused the government of having an unfair advantage in the marketplace. This issue is addressed in somewhat more detail below.

13. U.S. Department of Agriculture, AAA, Report of the Administrator of the Agricultural Conservation and Adjustment Administration, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 17; U.S.

Department of Agriculture, AAA, Report of the Administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), 34. According to Omohundro, Salant, Cooper, and Howell there were a total of five separate mattress programs; they were “in operation during the fiscal years ending in June of 1936, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942.” Omohundro, et al., Domestic Cotton Surplus Disposal Programs, 16

14. Hugoton Hermes, July 25, 1941; Pauline Crawford quoted in the St. John News, St. John, Kansas, March 27, 1941.

15. See Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “Hard Times, Hungry Years: The Failure of Poor Relief in Southwestern Kansas, 1930–1933,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 15 (Autumn 1992): 154–67.

16. Anna Scholz Klema, “Memories of the Cotton Mattress program in Kansas—1940–1941,” unpublished typescript, copy in authors’ personal files; Gove City Republican-Gazette, March 20, 1941; Annual Report of the Home Furnishings Project, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, 43, 118, Reel 147/MF 7677, RG 33. After Gove and Trego Counties, Klema helped finish the program in Bourbon County. See Anna Klema, Russell, Kansas, to Virgil W. Dean, December 28, 1996, and accompanying mimeographed copy of Kansas Annual Report, 1942, Bourbon County, “Cotton Mattress Program,” authors’ personal files. According to the previously cited “Summary of Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas” (1941), the program was sponsored by the Extension, in cooperation with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Surplus Marketing Administration, and the Farm Security Administration.

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production of a mattress. “The program was introduced to the Kansas Extension Service by a representative from the United States Department of Agriculture [USDA],” explained True in 1940. “The Administrative Staff felt it could well serve the low income families of the state. The program was then presented to the state specialist staff . . . [the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Triple-A] by the U.S.D.A. representative and a Home Management Specialist with the Oklahoma Extension Service who had supervised the cotton mattress program in that state.”17

Although a few of the men involved objected, commenting, according to True, that “it would be a

waste of time and effort on the part of the county staff,” the program was approved by a majority of the staff. Implementation of the program required the involvement of various governmental agencies. “The F.H.A. [sic, FSA] and county welfare staffs assisted in notifying their clients of the program and encouraged them to take part,” True recalled. “The A.A.A. [staff members] were responsible for getting the cotton and ticking to the counties. Most of the cotton used was shipped in from the Compress Storages in Oklahoma.”18

One-day, regional workshops were conducted throughout the state in the late fall of 1940 for county extension agents and the representatives of local


17. Mae Farris True, Amarillo, Texas, to Ramon Powers, January 28, 1992; Annual Report of the Home Furnishings Project, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, RG 33. See also Teagarden and Johnson, The Kansas Cooperative Extension Service, Part 2 of 4: 70.

Regional workshops were conducted throughout the state in the late fall of 1940 for county extension agents and the representatives of local governmental agencies who were to be involved in the program. Workers, pictured here fluffing the cotton, learned how to construct a mattress from start to finish so that they could effectively take the program back to their counties. Photograph courtesy of the Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.

18. True to Powers, January 28, 1992. In her 1992 correspondence, True referred to the role of the Farmers Home Administration (FHA), but in 1941 its predecessor, the FSA, was the federal agency involved. The FSA was abolished, and the FHA established to absorb its duties,

250 Kansas History

governmental agencies who were to be involved in the program. At these workshops, participants discussed ways to inform the public of the program and how to proceed in signing up those who were eligible; the local welfare supervisor and the FSA staff were responsible for signing up applicants. The AAA procured the necessary cotton and cover material and, working with the county agent, determined how much cotton was required. Workshop participants also discussed the availability of space and equipment for the actual production of the mattresses.

“Supplies were ordered as each county determined their needs. We were very fortunate in that we had only the best of materials with which to work,” True recalled.

The cotton was Grade A., the best quality and the ticking or cover was made of a hundred percent cotton (10 oz.) stripped fabric. The ticking was stitched into a box size cover 54” X 72” X 10”, a standard double bed size. The depth of ten inches was reduced when the rolled edge was put around the top and bottom edges after the cotton was in the tick. The mattress was tacked every 12–18 inches with heavy waxed cord to hold the cotton in place keeping it from shifting. These mattresses were

very good. To revive a cotton mattress all that was necessary was a day in a good warm sun, four to six hours on one side, turn and repeat on the other.19

According to the Hugoton Hermes, a good mattress was essential to a comfortable bed, and “one of the oldest and most popular types” was the “easily constructed” cotton mattress. When completed, reported the Hermes on July 25, 1941, the family will have “earned a piece of household equipment valued at from $10 to $12.” At a cost of about $1.25 to program participants—a fee that helped defray the expense of paying an extension supervisor and the costs for mattress twine, needles, and incidentals—this was a mighty good deal.20

Reaction to the proposed program varied from county to county. Many agents and potential participants accepted the concept only after they fully understood the nature of the program and had seen that quality mattresses really could be constructed in this manner. At a February 1, 1941, meeting in the office of the Sumner County Farm Bureau, the home demonstration agent explained the Cotton Mattress Program to the twelve people in attendance. Those present apparently were the members of the executive board of the extension service. According to the report submitted by the county agent, “after a few comments by the board members it was voted that the cotton mattress program not be adopted and that it was not suited to this county. The program, therefore, was never undertaken in this [south central Kansas] county.”21 But it was accepted in neighboring Harper County to the west and Cowley County to the east, and far western Wallace County acquired approximately

19. True to Powers, January 28, 1992; the Hugoton Hermes, July 25, 1941, provided a brief description of the process as did the St. John News, May 15, 1941. See also, booklets, “Make A Mattress” and “Care Of The Bed,” Annual Report of the Home Furnishings Project, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, 74, RG 33.

20. Hugoton Hermes, January 10 and July 25, 1941; St. John News, May 15, 1941; Emporia Gazette, April 2, 1941. The Hermes gave the cost to the family as $6.50; this is almost certainly a mistake. Other sources put the figure at about $1.25 per mattress. On March 27, 1941, the News reported that the “total cost of the mattress and comforter will be $1.25,” while the Gazette gave the cost to the family as $1.50. Vivian Beougher of Gove County remembered a $2.00 application fee for each mattress.

21. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Sumner County, 110, Reel 159/MF

The ticking was rolled up wrong-side out and then unrolled over the bed of fluffed cotton.

in 1946. See Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Encyclopedia of American Agricultural History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 115–17.


12,000 pounds of cotton (4,000 pounds of this eventually was transferred to Sherman County) that went into the production of 158 mattresses and 185 comforters. To the state extension service, county officials reported: “The Cotton Mattress Program has benefitted a large number of low income families in the county and is perhaps one of the best methods of using up surplus commodities in Wallace County.” One hundred and two families in the county reportedly benefitted from the program. Stafford County, which called its project the “Better Bedding Program,” anticipated at least 120 applicants; officials ordered enough cotton and ticking for 240 mattress and residents completed 204.22

In Leavenworth County opposition virtually vanished when residents understood the Cotton Mattress Program. “The [county] agent discussed it and got people to understand that it was not a relief program,” reported the county’s home demonstration agent; “so many people who first hesitated about applying on that basis, were much happier when they understood it to be an educational and self-help project.” Once adopted, the need became quite evident: “The agent was surprised at the number

of people who said this was the first new mattress they had ever had in their home.” Some households reportedly had one mattress; the rest of the family slept on “straw or shuck ticks or pads.” As of October 31, 1941, 255 families had made 383 mattresses.23

A Lyon County agent used a regular “With the County Agent” column in the Emporia Daily Gazette to announce,

Earlier New Deal ventures into mattress making had been curtailed because of opposition from some mattress manufacturers, but the 1940–1941 program apparently was not regarded as a threat. Crook Furniture in Hutchinson ran an advertisement in the Hutchinson News Herald, February 11, 1940, for a one-day-only sale on their “50 lb. All-Cotton Mattress.” Their “innerspring mattresses” sold for $19.95. A year later, Lawrence’s Miller Furniture Company offered “The New Beautyrest” for $39.50.

7689, RG 33. Founded in essence as a support organization for county extension agents in the mid-1910s, the farm bureau movement and subsequently the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) enjoyed a quasi-governmental connection with the United States Department of Agriculture and state agricultural colleges for many years, despite the changing nature of the national and state organizations. The symbiotic Extension Service–Farm Bureau relationship became politically untenable during the 1940s. However, as the powerful AFBF clashed with several other farm organizations, most notably the National Farmers Union, over policy issues at the national level, formal “divorce” proceedings were launched in Congress by 1949. See “Divorce of Extension from The FB,” Kansas Union Farmer, February 1949; Charles M. Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture: Soil Conservation and the Struggle for Power in Rural America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952); John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919–1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Christiana McFadyen Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal: A Study of the Making of Nation Farm Policy, 1933–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962).

22. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Wallace County, 89, 156, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33; Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Stafford County, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33; Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Harper County, Reel 153/MF 7683, RG 33; Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Cowley County, Reel 151/MF 7681, RG 33; St. John News, March 27, 1941. On January 23, 1941, the News announced that 120 applicants would be needed before the program could be implemented. Officials ultimately certified 300. See also the Stafford Courier, Stafford, Kansas, January 16, 1941.

In alphabetical order, the leading counties in terms of family participants were Bourbon (364), Butler (625), Gove (308), Jefferson (297), Johnson (229), Leavenworth (255), Logan (261), Osage (289), Smith (664), and Trego (544). Annual Report of the Home Furnishings Project, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, 46–48, RG 33.

23. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Leavenworth County, 121, Reel 155/MF 7685, RG 33.

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promote, and justify the mattress program. On March 12, 1941, the column began: “You’re spending one-third of your life in bed. Eight hours out of every 24 are needed for sleeping. It’s small wonder, then, that most of us are particular about having a comfortable bed.” The interest in “the ‘cotton mattress program,’ as it has been called,” proved this was just as true for Kansans as for other Americans. Creatively, the agent went on to link good bedding to America’s ever-increasing concern for national defense: “We’re hearing a lot about nutrition and national defense. Nutrition and general health in all its aspects—and the need of restful sleep is one of these. These new mattresses that will soon be completed in many sections of Kansas will help promote restful sleep, and provide comfortable sleeping quarters for thousands of persons—thus helping to carry on our national defense program.”24 By implication then, participation in the Cotton Mattress Program was one’s patriotic duty. Whether out of patriotism or simply need, the program was well received in Lyon County, which conducted a second round of mattress making in late October 1941.

Without dissent, Stevens County officials decided early in January 1941 that the county would sponsor the program. A cotton mattress committee was formed consisting of the welfare director, the supervisor of the local FSA, and the county extension agent, Z. W. Johnson. The committee determined that all WPA and Farm Security clients were automatically considered eligible for participation; the former would apply directly to the welfare director and all FSA clients would apply through Farm Security. The county committee would pass on the eligibility of all other interested people in the county who could apply through the Farm Bureau office or with their extension agent. “Any low income rural family which has had for the latest current year a net income of [not greater than] $500.00 plus $50.00 for each member of the family in excess of four persons, is eligible,” reported the Hermes. A family could acquire one mattress for each two members up to a total of three mattresses.25

Stevens County sent a delegate to Garden City’s two-day cotton mattress school in preparation for conducting its mattress program. In May the county agent and a county road patrolman went to Ulysses to secure tables to be used in the construction process, and in early July a

group of women was invited to the welfare office to assist in making the cotton ticks. All the ticks were completed prior to starting the mattress construction work on July 16. According to the report submitted by Stevens County:

The mattress construction work was carried out in a large broomcorn warehouse where the cotton mattress tables were provided. There were from 9 to 10 construction tables in operation at once. One hundred and twenty mattresses were constructed in 12 days. Here again the mattress applicants were called in, so many each day, to complete their mattresses. On several days, there were more than 50 men and women assisting in the construction of mattresses.26

The program also was well received in Wabaunsee County. In a report to the state extension office, officials concluded that “the people in the county believe the program is a fine opportunity for the low income families which include a large proportion of the people in this county. At first many people thought the program was only for those receiving relief checks or having WPA jobs. Through publicity, letters, and personal contacts this error has largely been corrected.” The report continued, “in general the business people have approved of the program and have been very cooperative, especially in loaning scales for weighing cotton.”27

This sensitivity to the program’s reception by the private sector is telling. Program officials were no doubt conscious of the fact that opposition to such government production programs had in the past and easily might in the future emerge if the project were to be seen as a threat to the interests of private manufacturers and dealers. Contemporary newspapers advertised new, store-bought mattresses for considerably more than a dollar or two: Crook Furniture in Hutchinson ran a one-day-only sale on their “50 lb. All-Cotton Mattress”—a $6.50 value for only $3.88. Their “innerspring mattresses” sold for $19.95. A year later Lawrence’s Miller Furniture Company offered “The New Beautyrest” for $39.50. Even on the low end, however, qualifying mattress program

24. Emporia Daily Gazette, March 12, 1941, item headed “COTTON MATTRESS PROGRAM”; Emporia Daily Gazette, December 26, 1940; Emporia Daily Gazette, March 17, April 2, and October 29, 1941,

25. Hugoton Hermes, January 10, 1941.

26. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Stevens County, 91, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33; Hugoton Hermes, May 30 and July 25, 1941.

27. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Wabaunsee County, 106, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33.


participants found the prices prohibitive. Earlier studies had shown “that low income families do not constitute an effective demand factor,” and thus the program could be conducted “without hurting established commercial production and distribution of these products.” In fact, “it was considered probable that the program . . . might lead to a greater future commercial consumption.”28

In certain counties the supervisors were paid. In Wabaunsee County, “when the program was started the supervisors were offered 75c for each mattress completed. Upon recommendation from the state chairman this rate was changed and the supervisors were offered $4.00 a day.” The supervisors—Mrs. Edith Weeks of Belvue, Mrs.

L. E. Spangler of Harveyville, and Mrs. Alyoe Tomlinson of Eskridge—had full responsibility for supervising the families making the mattresses and securing receipts for the mattresses completed and the names of each individual who worked on a mattress each day. In Stafford County, Mrs. Josie Grubaugh, who had attended the training school in Pratt, was hired as superintendent of the program at fifty cents per mattress.29

The public was made aware of the opportunity afforded by the Cotton Mattress Program in a variety of ways. In Wabaunsee County, for example, all welfare and FSA clients were

informed. News releases were sent to nine newspapers in or near the county, and “Notices were sent to all school teachers to send home with their students.” According

28. Omohundro, et al., Domestic Cotton Surplus Disposal Programs, 16; Rose, “Production-for-Use or Production-for-Profit?,” 48–51. Some earlier government ventures into mattress making had been curtailed because of mattress manufacturers’ opposition, but the 1940–1941 program apparently was not regarded as a threat. For mattress ads, see Lawrence Daily Journal-World, April 15, 1941; Hutchinson News-Herald, February 11, 1940, and March 4, 1940.

Columbus conducted its mattress program at the Cherokee County fairgrounds. Other communities used warehouses, schools, fire stations, and other large open spaces that might accommodated up to a dozen special 57 by 75 inch construction tables.

29. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Wabaunsee County, 105, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33; Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940,

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to the extension report, the “latter method” was quite successful; it “evidently reached many families not contacted by any other methods.”30

Mattress construction required approximately a day and a half, according to the Stafford County report. It took about a half day to make the tick and approximately another full day to complete the mattress. The latter involved hard labor. At least two people were required to work on each mattress at the Wabaunsee County program, and it was noted that “as a rule the best made mattresses were those on which at least one man helped.” For this same reason, perhaps, Stevens County planned to require that each family be represented at the “work unit” by a husband and wife, mother and older son, or a father and an older daughter.31 All of this reflected a traditional gendered attitude toward the division of labor, of course, but also the program’s emphasis on family and community involvement.

In Gove the “work unit” was the basement of the grade school. Vivian Beougher, a long-time county resident, clearly recalled her experience with mattress construction in an essay titled “We Made a Mattress.” First, she was

given instructions and patterns and the blue and white striped ticking material for the mattress. Then, wrote Beougher, “A woman helped me cut the cover out so it would be done properly and sent me home to sew it [the ticking] up.” Sewing machines were provided for those who did not have them. “After sewing it all up except for one end,” Beougher continued,

I and my husband took the cover back to the Grade School where the supervisor weighed out 50 pounds of cotton from the bale and showed us to a large table on which we were to build our mattress. The table was the size of the full-size mattress (54” X 72”) with the outline marked on the top. She showed us how to separate the layers of cotton, gently, so as to fluff it and lay it on the table evenly in the required size to fit the cover.

I have no idea how many tables there were, but you can’t imagine how the lint off that cotton filled the air and got into your eyes and ears and lungs and hair, with all those people tearing and fluffing all that cotton all over the large room. This was all compounded by the formaldehyde used to treat the cotton bales to kill the bugs that eat the cotton. . . .

[T]he cover, which was rolled down, wrong side out, [was] then rolled up over the cotton. Next you sewed the open end with strong thread and a needle. Now you were given a baseball bat to beat the mattress into shape and help to fluff the cotton more. . . . After this was done, you took a large curved needle and strong cord string and sewed the roll around the edges on both sides.32

When the “tufting” was completed, the mattress was ready to take home and, after several days of warm sun and fresh air, the new mattress was ready for use.

Beougher had no desire to relive her mattress making experience, but noted that “we did enjoy the nice warm mattresses for many years. Sure did beat corn shucks or fresh wheat straw

to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Stafford County, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33.

30. Annual Report of the County Agent, November 1, 1940, to October 31, 1941, Kansas Annual Report, 1941, Wabaunsee County, 105, Reel 159/MF 7689, RG 33.

31. Ibid.; Hugoton Hermes, January 10, July 25, 1941; see also the St. John News, May 15, 1941, which included four photos of mattress construction along with a brief description of the process.

32. Vivian Beougher, “We Made a Mattress,” unpublished manuscript. See also the Hugoton Hermes, July 25, 1941, which gave the dimensions of the special construction table as 57 by 75 inches. At St. John in Stafford County, the ticks were sewn in a “local sewing room” under the supervision of Mrs. Margaret Carrier. St. John News, May 15, 1941.

Fluffing the cotton appears to have been a community activity at the work site in Cherokee County.


with a few beards that stuck through the mattress cover that I had experienced at home as a child.” If properly cared for, reported the Hugoton Hermes on July 25, 1941, these mattresses might last ten to fifteen years.33 Although individual circumstance and experiences varied, Beougher’s memories of the Cotton Mattress Program, which she and many others had participated in years before, were typical. All readily admitted the need, as they related their particular story, and took pride in their accomplishment—a quality mattress that was appreciated and used in the home for many years.

Historians have, for the most part, overlooked the County Cotton Mattress Program, but for many mattress makers the memories remained vivid. Although one could not classify it as a major social program in Kansas or elsewhere, it was promoted statewide and conducted in seventy-nine of Kansas’s 105 counties. Generally, where the mattress program was implemented in Kansas it exceeded expectations, with the number of eligible participants surpassing all estimates in many localities. In Ford County, for example, the “County Agent was sure there was not anyone in that county that would qualify for a mattress,” remembered Mae Farris True. “It turned out there were four hundred fifty mattresses made in the county.” In all, nearly 12,000 needy families across the Sunflower State participated; they constructed more than 18,000 mattresses and 10,000 comforters.34

As mentioned above, there was an effort to sell the mattress program as not “a Relief Set Up” in many of the counties where it was adopted and, in others, an apparent reluctance to admit to the need for such assistance. But the need did exist. In 1941, with the nation on the verge of total war and defense industry cities such as Wichita bustling with economic activity, many poor rural farm families, as well as those in small towns and cities across America, had yet to emerge from the Great Depression. This peculiar—one could also say imaginative—project represents an interesting way in which national programs, designed to deal with a special economic problem (a price-depressing surplus of cotton), were targeted to

address a seemingly unrelated social need and bring relief to the lower-income population in many Kansas counties. “The cotton mattress program,” observed department historians in the USDA’s Century of Service, was “initiated to increase the domestic consumption of cotton and to raise the standard of living of low-income farm and city consumers.”35 This county-level program also embodied the self-help approach of certain other New Deal social programs. Materials and know-how were provided by the government, but participants had to pay a nominal enrollment fee and provide the entire labor of making the mattresses. When the wartime shortage of cotton ticking caused the mattress program to be discontinued, virtually everyone considered it an unqualified success story.

Although home demonstration agents such as Pauline Crawford of Stafford County insisted at the time and in retrospect that the Cotton Mattress Program was “not a relief program in any way,” participants were indeed the beneficiaries of government largess. To deny this fact is to engage in a bit of self-deception, but it is a self-deception that Americans have practiced for more than two centuries, as national and state governments subsidize businesses and corporations, farming and ranching operations, and any number of other private and public sector interest groups and activities. Like the myriad of work relief programs that characterized the 1930s, the Cotton Mattress Program offered a government-subsidized benefit—a new mattress and comforter—to qualifying participants who paid a nominal fee and provided the necessary labor to complete the project. The participants’ labor and fee did not, of course, cover the true costs of the cotton and related materials or staff required to organize and conduct the program—by definition, this was a form of relief. But regardless of how participants and organizers sold or perceived the program, the results were positive, at least in the short term, as they were with many of the New Deal’s relief programs. Even critics of the federal government’s “make work” initiatives admitted years later that the County Cotton Mattress Program made life a little better for those Kansans who participated.

33. Beougher, “We Made a Mattress”; Hugoton Hermes, July 25, 1941.34. “Summary of Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas,” 1941.

35. Baker, et al., Century of Service: The First 100 Years of the United States Department of Agriculture, 185.

256 Kansas History

W. Stitt Robinson Jr., a member of the Kansas State Historical Society Board of Directors since 1969, and president in 1997–1998, died in Lawrence, Kansas, on June 20, 2014, at the age of ninety-six. He was born August 28, 1917, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, a place steeped in colonial and Revolutionary War history that would be the subject of his scholarly pursuits. Stitt attended Davidson College in the midst of the Depression, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1939 and was also Phi Beta Kappa. With a DuPont Scholarship, he attended the University of Virginia for his master’s degree, working under Professor Thomas P. Abernathy, a noted scholar of southern colonial frontier history. Stitt wrote his thesis on Indian–white relations in the colonial era. He expanded on the subject in his PhD work under Abernathy after World War II.

Stitt entered military service before Pearl Harbor, attending Officer Training School at Fort Benning, Georgia, as a communications officer. He then trained with a glider unit, which became a part of the airborne invasion of southern France in August 1944. After the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, his unit relieved the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, where half of the unit was lost in one night. Finally, his unit joined General Patton’s airborne crossing of the Rhine in March 1945, landing in German pastures; in this episode Stitt was personally involved in the capture of German diplomat and politician Franz von Papen. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his wartime service.

Stitt married Constance “Connie” Mock in March 1944, when he was stationed briefly at Fort McClellan, Alabama. Like Stitt, Connie was a native of North Carolina, but her father was teaching at a college in Jacksonville, Alabama. After the war, Stitt taught for two years at Northwest Alabama University before returning to the University of Virginia in 1948, on the G.I. Bill, to finish his PhD.

In the fall of 1950, Stitt was hired by the University of Kansas history department to teach American colonial history. In an oral history conducted by Professor Calder Pickett in May 1990, Stitt stated that he had taught at least ten thousand students in his forty years of teaching at KU, prior to his retirement in 1988. In addition to teaching American colonial and Revolutionary War history, the history of the South, and American intellectual history, Stitt introduced the teaching of American Indian history. He directed fifteen PhD and thirty-two masters students. I was one of his PhD students.

Stitt’s research focused on American frontier and Indian history. His The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1608–1763 was part of “The Histories of the American Frontier,” edited by Ray Allen Billington, co-edited by Howard Lamar, and published by the University of

New Mexico Press in 1979. With this volume, ten other books, and numerous scholarly articles, Stitt left a significant scholarly legacy.

In his administrative work with the Department of History, Stitt was associate chair under Professor George Anderson and chair from 1968 to 1973, during which time the department expanded its faculty in the areas of ancient and medieval, modern European, Russian and Eastern European, East Asian, and Latin American

history, and the history of science and medicine. Several generations of KU students who took courses from the extraordinary faculty assembled there are indebted to the efforts of professors Anderson and Robinson.

During his academic career, Stitt was the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, and the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas. He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1983. Stitt also was involved in Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society, at the university, state, national, and international levels.

In the sixty-four years that Stitt resided in Kansas, he left not only this legacy of academic achievement; he was devoted to

expanding and strengthening the role of history and the humanities in the state. As noted, he supported the KSHS throughout his career, particularly in his retirement when he served as president. During my tenure as secretary and executive director of the Kansas State Historical Society, Stitt and Connie were participants in most public activities of the Society. One of his early publications was an essay on “The Role of the Military in Territorial Kansas” published during the 1954 Centennial of Kansas Territory. In addition, he strongly supported the Kansas History Teachers Association (now the Kansas Association of Historians), the Kansas Corral of the Westerners, the Douglas County Historical Society, and the Kansas Humanities Council. Stitt was a founding member and chair of the board of director (1975–1978) of the latter organization.

For W. Stitt Robinson, the consummate gentleman and scholar, history was to inform and enlighten us about our role in society. He valued the preservation and presentation of history at the local, state, and national levels as demonstrated by his involvement in the many history and humanities organizations, including the Kansas State Historical Society.

Ramon PowersFormer Executive Director

Kansas State Historical Society

W. Stitt Robinson Jr. 1917–2014IN MEMORIAM

Editors’ Note 257

The third year of the publishing partnership between the Kansas Historical Foundation and Kansas State University was another of change and transition, but such is life. Three years ago, as our faithful readers will recall, the Kansas State Historical Society, Inc. (a.k.a. the Kansas Historical Foundation), long-time publisher of Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, the successor to the Kansas Historical Quarterly, entered into a publishing partnership with the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University. This partnership emerged in large part because of the financial crisis in state government and rapidly shrinking agency bud-gets. The journal’s edito-rial office moved to Manhattan, but copy edit-ing and production re-mained in Topeka. If the compliments we have received on the mainte-nance of the publication’s high standards are any indication, the transition was a relatively smooth and successful one. But a new set of circumstances presented itself late in 2013, and yet more change seemed neces-sary. As a result, the K-State editorial office officially moved to the Department of History, and as of the spring 2014 issue, all of the editorial and production activities are run out of Manhattan. The Foundation continues as publisher, but the university, now through the Department of History, is respon-sible for everything else, from manuscript selection to printing. The changes in location and staff led to some unavoidable delays and thus explain the reason for the lateness of the last two or three issues. We appreciate your patience, and we are working to correct this situation; through it all, I hope you will agree, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains has not suffered in quality.

The dedicated staff members responsible for the journal’s continued success are credited elsewhere, so we will not extend

E D I T O R S ’ N O T E

Board member Daniel D. Holt presented the Langsdorf Award to Tai Edwards at the Society’s annual meeting, November 7, 2014.

any special thanks here. We would, however, like to acknowledge our ongoing indebtedness to the scholarly community that continues to support and contribute to Kansas History—authors, books reviewers, peer reviewers, editorial board members, and more. In addition, it is always our pleasure to acknowledge and formally announce in the pages of Kansas History this year’s recipient of the Edgar Langsdorf Award for

Excellence in Writing: Tai S. Edwards, “Disrup-tion and Disease: The Osage Struggle to Sur-vive in the Nineteenth-Century Trans-Missouri West,” published in our winter 2013–2014 issue. In her piece, Dr. Ed-wards, an associate professor of history at Johnson County Com-munity College, chal-lenges the common characterization of the western hemisphere’s in-digenous peoples as “virgin” populations that—after the arrival of Europeans—faced im-mediate, inevitable, and massive population de-cline from Old World diseases. In reality, as she demonstrates, it was the disruptions caused

by colonization that determined the timing and impact of disease, especially in terms of facilitating epidemic death rates. The Osage experience in the Trans-Missouri West demonstrates this reality. The Osages had been in contact with French traders since at least the 1680s, but they were not plagued by epidemics until the 1820s, indicating the mere presence of Old World diseases and even their European carriers did not result in Osage depopulation. Instead, it was United States Indian removal policy and settler expansion that provided the neces-sary disruption that enabled epidemic diseases to decimate the Osage people. You can see this fine article, part of Edwards’s forthcoming book-length study of colonization’s impact on Osage gender roles, at http://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-history-winter-2013-2014/18484.

258 Kansas History

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynastyby Daniel Schulman

424 pages, illustrations, notes, index. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014, cloth, $30.00.

In the last fifty years, academics and journalists have written much about the rise to influence of the American conservative movement. Books and articles have considered the evolution of the Old Right into the New, national leaders like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and organizational mobilization across the country and down to the county level. There is a gap, however, in this body of work. Little has appeared on the financial underpinnings of the movement. Daniel Schulman’s Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty helps close this gap. This is a necessary service, especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision, and more recently, the heavy spending of “dark money” during the 2014 midterm congressional elections.

Schulman, a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine, offers a narrative biography of a family that blends the personal, corporate, and political. Founding father Fred Koch built a private company centered on oil refining, engineering, and ranching. As he groomed his sons in business, he also strictly schooled them politically in a far-right agenda of anticommunism, anti-taxes, and small government. Colored by detailed conspiracy theories, Fred Koch’s ideology resonated with the beliefs of Robert Welch’s John Birch Society, and he joined that organization’s National Council. Eldest son Charles even operated a Birch Society bookstore in Wichita not far from the family compound.

With Charles and brother David at the helm, the family-owned business grew spectacularly and expanded into the nation’s second largest private corporation, today enjoying $115 billion in annual revenues and more than one hundred thousand employees in sixty countries. Earnings from their petrochemical, food, and building and agricultural materials operation made the brothers very wealthy, ranking them sixth among the world’s richest men.

The Koch brothers plowed profits back into the company and philanthropic activities. At the same time, they planned a political agenda that would not only advance their corporate interests but also move a nation. The men embraced the libertarian cause in the 1970s and advocated lower taxes and reducing the federal bureaucracy. If a philosophical position, this also reflected their conflicts with the IRS, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Justice Department that spawned criminal prosecutions and civil penalties over the flouting of government regulations.

Koch brothers’ funding created “Kochtopus,” as their critics began referring to their sprawling network and efforts. They provided seed money and operating funds for a libertarian infrastructure of think tanks, advocacy groups, and educational programs to develop theoretical constructs and convert these into policy recommendations for lawmakers. Koch money built such organizations as Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among others. In addition, the Kochs contributed millions of dollars to universities to endow professorships and sponsor conferences and lectures. The result was a professional packaging of a platform that called for free market economics, privatizing Social Security, slashing welfare spending, and debunking climate change.

In mainstreaming libertarianism, they created a base to broker the rightward drift of the Republican Party. Key to this more recently was the mobilization of the grassroots Tea Party movement, with significant funding from Koch-front organizations. The Koch brothers also organized a donor network of like-minded members of the corporate elite in support of Republican Party establishmentarians. Observes Schulman: the Kochs had created an operation that “had evolved over the years into a kind of shadow party, occupying its own center of gravity within the GOP universe” (p. 308).

Daniel Schulman has written an important book that reveals the hidden influence of the wealthiest individuals on American politics. It is a cautionary tale written in a straightforward manner without florid prose or the hyperbole of the exposé. Schulman’s portrayal is well supported with interviews, legal documents, and archival materials forming the bulk of his sources. Sometimes, however, the book tries to do too much and loses its edge. Gossipy details and accounts of internecine legal conflicts are distracting and dull the thrust of this essential, if disturbing story.

Reviewed by Robert A. Goldberg, professor of history, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

R E V I E W S

Reviews 259

The Rural Midwest since World War IIedited by J. L. Anderson

xiii + 323 pages, illustrations, notes, index. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014, paper $28.95.

For many Americans, mention of the rural Midwest evokes images of traditional families working small farms. However, twentieth-century developments such as agricultural consolidation, the rise of a mass consumption culture, and rural depopulation have made this image an anachronism. As Joe L. Anderson points out in the introduction, the popular association of the Midwest with the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal causes many scholars to think of modern midwestern history in terms of decline. Nevertheless, Anderson and the other contributors demonstrate that, for the Midwest, there is life after the family farm.

Anderson has assembled nine mostly native midwestern authors to synthesize the largely neglected history of the rural Midwest since 1945. He contends that scholars deny a midwestern regional identity by using it as “the standard by which other regions’ distinctiveness has been measured” (p. 7). However, he also concedes that capturing the region’s identity is tricky. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates that a “commitment to modernity and progress . . . made the Midwest in general and the rural Midwest in particular the most American region in the nation” (p. 10).

The Rural Midwest scraps the notion of decay and recasts the post–World War II period in the Midwest as a time of “leadership, essentialness, and vitality” (p. 4) while still addressing the significant social, ecological, and economic changes in the region. Each essay describes, from different perspectives, “what happened in and to this place to transform it so significantly” (p. 6). In a brief forward, R. Douglas Hurt muses on the national persistence of the Midwest’s agrarian ideal stereotype. James Pritchard’s essay focuses on environmental history and demonstrates how technology, policy, and market forces led to “simplification and homogenization of the landscape” (p. 12). Three essays focus on the region’s economic dynamism and prosperity—“Ecology, Economy, and Labor,” “Beyond the Rust Belt,” and “Midwestern Rural Communities in the Post–WWII Era to 2000,” by Kendra Smith-Howard, Wilson Warren, and Cornelia and Jan Flora respectively. Howard illustrates the region’s dynamism and prosperity through its “shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive agriculture” (p. 65), Warren through rural industrialization, and the Floras by demonstrating the adaptability of rural communities. Viewing economic prosperity from a different angle, Anderson’s essay, “Uneasy Dependency,” outlines the indispensable role of state and federal policy in rural midwestern resurgence.

The final five essays deal with the region’s social history. In “Farm Women in the Midwest since 1945” and “Childhood in

the Rural Midwest since 1945,” Jenny Barker Devine and Pamela Riney-Kehrberg trace the egalitarian gains of rural women and reveal the increasing convergence of rural and urban childhoods. Debra Reid’s “‘The Whitest of Occupations?’” and Jim Norris’s “Hispanics in the Midwest since World War II” recount the increasing diversity of the rural Midwest. Reid illustrates how African Americans experienced a “tempered” racism even as they “forged mutually dependent relationships [with whites] to survive” (p. 205), and Norris traces Hispanic midwestern presence from primarily migratory workers to permanent residents. Moreover, Steven Reschly reveals how even the extremely conservative Amish, who most closely fit the agrarian ideal, ironically flourish through innovation. Lastly, in a brief conclusion, David Danbom considers the “indistinct distinctiveness” of the Midwest (p. 296).

Kansas History readers will find the Sunflower State fairly well-represented in The Rural Midwest. Indeed, for a work on the broader region, the volume details a surprising number of Kansas places. For instance, Oberlin, Kansas, serves as a case study of a postwar community coping with agricultural job loss; Garden City’s postwar conversion from sugar beet farming to feed lots and meat processing plants demonstrates the shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive agriculture; and Sublette, the tiny hamlet in Haskell County, serves as an illustration of the “positive remaking of [a] rural communit[y]” (p. 120).

The collection provides only a cursory treatment of Native Americans. A paragraph on federal relocation, one on the 1970s American Indian Movement, and one highlighting the poverty of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota—and a few mentions elsewhere—is the extent of Native American coverage in this volume. Yet on the whole, the coverage is impressive, and The Rural Midwest marks a significant contribution to the revival of midwestern regional history. Anderson’s work is sure to spark greater interest in and more research into this region’s recent history.

Reviewed by Daniel T. Gresham, PhD student, Kansas State University, Manhattan.

260 Kansas History

When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territoryby Mary Jane Warde

xi + 404 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013, paper $34.95.

Academic and general interest in the American Civil War appears inexhaustible. Scholars continue to produce volumes on the causes of the war, the political and social repercussions of the Union’s victory, and the sources and meaning of emancipation, to name just a few topics. Mary Jane Warde observes, however, that “Too often, histories of that Civil War either ignore or skim over events and conditions west of the Mississippi River” (p. 3). In part, the omission of the Trans-Mississippi West in traditional Civil War narratives reflects the location of the largest battles and campaigns in the eastern United States. If the events in the West did not determine the course of the war, one might ask, why study this region in relation to the Civil War? Warde points to two dramatic consequences of the conflict to answer this kind of question: the war made it possible for the federal government to force land cessions on tribes that had joined the Confederacy, a development that radically diminished the sovereign authority of many native groups; and second, the federal government then relocated other native groups to this ceded land, opening up millions of acres for white settlement (p. 299).

Warde begins by overviewing the creation of Indian Territory. Focusing largely on the so-called “five civilized tribes,” she describes conditions among the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Muscogee peoples of the southeastern United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; their interactions with European traders; their exposure to and adoption of African slavery; and the crisis of removal, when southeastern Indian nations were relocated to the newly formed Indian Territory by the federal government. By the mid-nineteenth century, members of native groups in Indian Territory paid close attention to statements from federal officials about Indian sovereignty and wondered if Abraham Lincoln and his administration would honor treaty stipulations about native landholdings and property including slaves (pp. 38–39). Native groups had fractured internally over the issue of removal in the 1820s and 1830s, and those “hard feelings were still simmering when the Civil War fanned the coals back into flames” (p. 20).

The four middle chapters provide a detailed and thorough history of the war years in Indian Territory. Through a careful reading of a variety of sources, including the personal papers of native leaders, interviews from the Indian Pioneer History collection, slave narratives, and government correspondence, Warde captures battlefield action; political machinations within tribal groups, between tribal groups, and between tribal groups and federal and Confederate officials; and the war’s impact

on civilians. Warde’s summary of Opothle Yahola’s flight to Kansas demonstrates all of these elements. A wealthy member of Muscogee Nation, Opothle Yahola opposed a Confederate–Muscogee treaty. He and leading chief Oktarharsars Harjo wrote to President Lincoln to ask for protection from Confederate agitators. Other loyalists, including members of other Indian nations, slaves, and former slaves, joined them. As their pro-Union numbers grew, Opothle Yahola’s group drew the attention of Indians fighting for the Confederacy, including Muscogees, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles. Eventually Opothle Yahola and his fugitives, a large number of whom were women and children, fled to Kansas and engaged in the first battle of the Civil War in Indian Territory along the way, as well as several other battles and skirmishes (pp. 64–87). In describing this episode and whenever possible, Warde incorporates the words of the people who experienced these events into her narrative.

Warde’s final chapter concerns the war’s aftermath. She details the treaty stipulations that re-established relations between tribal governments and federal authorities and the land cessions made by native groups in the decades after the Civil War. The question of the legal status of the former slaves of Indian masters remained a vexing problem in Indian Territory as some native groups accepted, albeit reluctantly, their former slaves as citizens of their respective nations and others delayed or refused doing so altogether. In the end, Warde asserts that even if Indian Territory did not have a determining impact on the outcome of the Civil War, the war profoundly remade Indian Territory and the peoples living there.

Reviewed by Fay A. Yarbrough, associate professor of history, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

Book Notes 261

B O O K N O T E SSenator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontier. By Ken S. Mueller. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014, xii + 320 pages, cloth $45.00, paper $29.95.)

Thomas Hart Benton, elected one of Missouri’s first United States senators in 1821, served in that capacity for the next thirty years, leaving office at age sixty-nine after being denied election to a sixth term. Benton returned to Washington and Congress as a member of the House of Representatives in 1853, and despite his failure to win a second term in 1854, he remained in the national capital city until his death in 1857. An old Jacksonian who became a force in the national Democratic Party during the tumultuous antebellum era, Benton has received far less historical attention than have his legendary colleagues Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun; according to historian Ken Mueller, however, “No Democratic legislator of the period can compare, in terms of either influence or longevity” (p. 2). That Benton, who fancied himself a champion of “the common man,” was deeply involved with the issues of race, nationalism, and westward expansion as the Kansas Question came to the fore should make this new biography of interest to readers of Kansas History.

A Brave Soldier & Honest Gentleman: Lt. James E. H. Foster in the West, 1873–1881. By Thomas R. Buecker. (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 2013, 210 pages, cloth $29.95.)

Numerous watercolors, diary entries, and photos enhance Thomas R. Buecker’s account of the life of Lt. James E. H. Foster, who was not only a gentleman and a soldier but also a writer, artist, and topographer. Foster had a lifelong passion for army life and enlisted during the Civil War while underage, later returning to the Army as a commissioned officer in the Third U.S. Cavalry. Foster’s service in the West included a posting in Nebraska, where he wrote reports of elk hunting that sometimes read “like a fraternity road trip” (p. 4); the 1875 Newton–Jenney expedition to map the Black Hills at the onset of the Black Hills Gold Rush (covered in a chapter replete with hand-drawn maps); and time in Wyoming Territory fighting Indian tribes that included a nightmarish “Starvation March.” Using Foster’s own words, Buecker has produced a detailed biography that highlights the importance of the frontier army to the history of the American West.

Treasure State Justice: Judge George M. Bourquin, Defender of the Rule of Law. By Arnon Gutfeld. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014, xix + 180 pages, paper $29.95.)

In Treasure State Justice, Arnon Gutfeld offers a “legal biography” of Montana federal judge George M. Bourquin, who used scientific reasoning to justify protecting civil liberties, labor unions, and American Indians in the early twentieth century. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court often privileged contract rights so as to stunt Progressive-era reform, Bourquin promoted the common good against railroad interests. His decisions supporting political radicals during the post–World War I Red Scare sparked controversy but reflected his belief in the importance of guarding First Amendment rights. Yet as Bourquin defended disadvantaged and sometimes unpopular groups, he still promoted the “rule of law” and distrusted the American people—despite his admiration for Thomas Jefferson. Inspired by the U.S. government’s aggressive reaction to September 11, Gutfeld’s examination of Bourquin’s legal career offers a timely look at liberty and security in the history of the American West.

Railroad Empire across the Heartland: Rephotographing Alexander Gardner’s Westward Journey. By James E. Sherow. Photographs by John R. Charlton. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014, x + 214 pages, paper $34.95.)

In 1867 the president of the Union Pacific Railway Company, Eastern Division, commissioned Alexander Gardner, a well-known Civil War photographer, to record the building of a railroad line linking Kansas City to California’s ports. One hundred thirty years later, photographer John R. Charlton rephotographed Gardner’s trip through Kansas, demonstrating the ecological and social change sparked by the railroad. Railroad Empire across the Heartland pairs ninety of the two photographers’ images taken at the same time of day and from similar angles. In explanatory chapters and the text accompanying each set of images, historian James Sherow shows the transformation of Kansas from a landscape shaped by American Indian peoples and dominated by native grassland to a region integrated into a Euro-American capitalist economy. Although the railroad’s promoters could not always predict how the railroad would change Kansas, with the railroad came an American empire, the economic, cultural, and environmental force of which still affect the West.

Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013, xiv + 296 pages, cloth $34.95.)

This illuminating and surprisingly wide-ranging volume traces the rise and fall of American greyhound racing from its origins in the ancient sport of coursing (in which two dogs chase a rabbit), to its spectacular growth in the 1920s and 1930s—the “Halcyon Days” were in Florida in the 1930s—to its long and steady decline after World War II. Today, greyhound racing is a marginalized and much maligned pastime; even the philistine Homer Simpson declared, “I may be a total washout as a father, but I’m not going to take my kid to a sleazy dog track on Christmas Eve” (p. 3). Thayer ably traces the sport’s decline to the rise of the animal rights movement, increasing opportunities for Americans to gamble, a series of animal-mistreatment and corruption scandals that rocked the industry, and, perhaps above all, “a tremendous shift in the role of dogs” from our economic servants to our coddled companions.

Field Guide to the Common Weeds of Kansas. By T. M. Barkley. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983, xii + 164 pages, paper $9.95.)

One need not be a botanist to appreciate Field Guide to the Common Weeds of Kansas, a slim volume designed to guide the layperson through the identification of two hundred unwanted midwestern plants. This volume includes all the hallmarks of a traditional botanical text, featuring line drawings, Latin names, and a glossary, as well as colloquial names and maps; a handy “finding guide” at the front of the book enables readers to identify plants using just a few key terms. Besides a physical description, entries also list the habitat of the plant, related species, and miscellaneous remarks, which usually relate to the weed’s toxicity but are sometimes more colorful; the entry for Astragalus mollissimus, for example, calls it “the locoweed of legend” (p. 57). Although this guide is not comprehensive, it will serve as a handy, inexpensive tool for the general reader.

I N D E X

AAAA. See Agricultural Adjustment AgencyAbilene (Dickinson Co.): cowboy culture, 154–55, 156; male

identity in, article on, 148–63; photo, 150; town marshal, 156Abilene Chronicle, 155Abilene Daily Reflector, 156–57, 162Abilene High School: baseball team, 161; football team, 161–62,

photo, 161; sex ratio of students, 156Abzug, Bella, 46African Americans: businesses, 235; Confederate prisoner, 107,

112; farmers, 246n; in Union Army, 88; voting rights, 236. See also Slaves

Agricultural Adjustment Act, 246Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), 248, 249–50Agriculture: recovery from Depression, 244–45; surplus

production, 246–47Aguirre, Hank, 174Albach, George, 231Albach, Henry, 231Albach, Phillip, 231, 239Albach, Wilhelmina, 231Alexander, Shawn Leigh: book reviewed by, 123Aley, Ginette: book coedited by, reviewed, 50Allendorf, Thelma, 243Ambrose, Stephen, 161–62American Debenture Company, 5, 12American Fur Company, 213, 214–15, 216, 217, 218, 222American Girls, Beer, and Glenn Miller: GI Morale in World War II:

reviewed, 54American Legion baseball teams, 173Anderson, J. L.: book coedited by, reviewed, 50; book edited by,

reviewed, 259Anderson, William “Bloody Bill,” 84Anthony, Daniel R., Jr., 38Anthony, Susan B.: Kansas visit, 36–37; photo, 37Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic

Environmentalism: reviewed, 55Armitage, Katie H.: note on, 227; “‘Out of the Ashes’: The

Rebuilding of Lawrence and the Quest for Quantrill Raid Claims,” article by, 226–41

Arthur, T. S., 152Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, 224Atkinson, Erastus, 28, 33Atkinson, Mary E., 28, 33Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 44Avery, Ethel: photo, 246

BBader, Robert Smith, 35Bailey, Luther C., 67–69; “The Celestial Tryst,” 69; home,

photos, 66, 76; photo, 68

Baker, Harlow, 230–31, 239Baker University: effects of World War I, 136; German Club,

135, 136, photo, 135; German language instruction, 132, 133, 135–38, 139–41, 147; Quayle’s speeches, 132, 136, 138–39; yearbook illustrations, 136–37, reproduced, 136, 137

Baldridge, B. L., 231Baldwin City (Douglas Co.): anti-German sentiment, 141;

naturalization ceremony, 138. See also Baker UniversityBall, Steadman, 39Baptist Indian missions, 215, 216, 218Barker & Summerfield: city directory listing, 10Barnes, Henry: photo, 199Baseball, 161, 171–72, 173, 174–75. See also Major League

Baseball; Torrez, MikeBederman, Gail, 152Bell, Annie, 234, 239Bell, George W., 234Bennett, Lyn Ellen: “Child Custody, Custodial Arrangements

and Financial Support in Late Nineteenth-Century Kansas,” article by, 20–33; note on, 21

Bennett, Robert F., 42, 46Benson, Vernon, 174Benteen, Frederick W., 90, 90n, 92, 93–94, 95Beougher, Vivian, 254Bethel College: effects of World War I, 141–47; German club,

143; German language instruction, 132, 141, 143–45, 146–47; Mennonite identity, 141

Big Blue, Battle of, 88, 101, 104–5, map, 103, Reader watercolor, 192

Bird City (Cheyenne Co.): cotton mattress program, photo, 247Birk, Megan: book reviewed by, 50Blackman, Jon S.: book by, reviewed, 125Blair, C. W., 85, 87, 88Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the

Border: reviewed, 52Blunt, James G.: Big Blue battle, 88; criticism of, 99; at Fort

Scott, 94; Kansas State Militia and, 87; Lexington battle, 86, 87, 185; Newtonia battle, 95, 99; photos, 85, 186; Price’s raid and, 82, 85–86, 89, 182, 186, 190; in western Kansas, 82; Westport battle, 88–89, 191

Bold, Christine: book by, reviewed, 60Book notes, 62, 127, 207, 261Book reviews, 50–61, 122–26, 200–206, 258–60Boothe, Henry: photo, 199Boston Red Sox, 165, 179Bourassa, Joseph Napoleon, 216, 216n, 217, photo, 217Bourassa, Jude W., 216, 220Bourbonnaise, Frank, 220Bowersock, Justin D., 5, 12, 238Bradley, E. L., 235Brandon, John, 25Brandon, Mary Ann, 25Brechtelsbauer, Barbette, 230

262 Kansas History

Brenner, Rachel, 29, 33Brenner, William, 29, 33Brewer, David, 18Brotherton, C. P., 12Brown, E. B., 83, 84, 90Bullene, Lathrop, 227, 229, 234, 239, photo, 231Bullene, Susan Read, 227Burke, Diane Mutti: book coedited by, reviewed, 52Burnett, Abram, 216Burnett, John, 216

CCallister, Marion, 41Campbell, Neil: book by, reviewed, 58Capper, Arthur, 68, 133Carbondale (Osage Co.): railroad, 12; stores, 7Carney, Thomas, 82, 84, 86–87, 89Carpenter, Mary, 236, photo, 235Carr, Charles “Pappy”: article on, 66–77; photo, 66Carson, Benjamin, 32Carson, Mary Ann, 32Castel, Albert, 79, 228, 229Catholic missions, 216–17, 218, 223Chalkley, Marcella, No. 1 inside front coverChamberlain, Mary, 28nCherokee County: cotton mattress program, photos, 253, 254;

county fairgrounds, photo, 253; divorce and child custody cases, 22, 24, 26–27, 30–31, 33, tables, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31; home demonstration agent, photo, 246

Chicano movement, 177–79. See also Mexican AmericansChild custody: article on, 20–33; court decisions, 22–25, 26–33,

tables, 26; divided by children’s gender, 28–29, 33; financial support, 22, 30–33, tables, 31, 33; laws, 24–26, 28, 31; by parent’s gender, 26–28, 33; prevention of interference, 29, 33, table, 29; requests, 26–27, 28, table, 26; visitation orders, 29–30, 33, table, 30

“Child Custody, Custodial Arrangements and Financial Support in Late Nineteenth-Century Kansas”: article by Lyn Ellen Bennett, 20–33

“Children of Abraham and Hannah, The: Grocer, Doctor, Entrepreneur: The Summerfields of Lawrence, Kansas”: article by David M. Katzman, 2–19

Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, The: engraving, 71Chouteau, Frederick, 214, 215, 222Chouteau, Pierre, 216Chudacoff, Howard P., 152Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike: reviewed, 61Civil War. See Confederate Army; Price’s raid; Quantrill’s raid;

Union ArmyClancy, James J., 197Clark, M. G., 215Clay, Laura: photo, 40Clay County: cotton mattress program, 243; divorce and child

custody cases, 22, 24, 26–29, 30–31, 32–33, tables, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31

Clendenon, Donn, 175

Clinton (Douglas Co.): stores, 7Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America,

1945–1960: reviewed, 206Collins, Caspar, 199Columbus (Cherokee Co.): county fairgrounds, photo, 253Confederate Army: in Arkansas, 95–96; in Kansas, 89–94, 97,

107–13, 196–97; Missouri raids, 80; Quantrill and, 84. See also Price’s raid

Confederate sympathizers: in Kansas, 197–98; in Missouri, 81, 82, 182

Connelley, William E., 96, 218Conservatism: Equal Rights Amendment and, article on, 34–49Constitution, state. See Kansas ConstitutionCooke, James J.: book by, reviewed, 54Coquillard, Alexis, 217Cordley, Richard C., 228–29, 239Corrales, Pat, 175Cott, Nancy F., 24Cotton: surplus production, 246–47, 255. See also County

Cotton Mattress ProgramCounty Cotton Mattress Program: article on, 242–55; counties

participating, 248, 250–52, 251n, map, 245; photos, 242, 246, 247, 249, 250, 254

Crawford, Pauline, 248, 255Crawford, Samuel J., 94, 98, photo, 92Crook Furniture, Hutchinson, 252; advertisement, 251“Crossing the Kansas”: watercolor by Alfred Jacob Miller, No.

4 front coverCummins, Richard W., 215, 218, 219–20Curtis, Charles, 38Curtis, Samuel R.: campaign maps, 88, 90; criticism of, 98;

defense of Kansas City, 182; at Fort Scott, 94, 99; Kansas command, 82, 84, 85, 89, 94, 99; photo, 82; Price’s raid and, 82–83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95–96, 98, 186; Westport battle, 191

DDaily Times (Leavenworth, Kans.), 230Danbom, David B.: book reviewed by, 200Darkest Period, The: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland,

1846–1873: reviewed, 204Darling, Lucius, 219, 220Darling Ferry, 213, 219, 220Davis, James P., 39Day, Helen, 30Day, Wade, 30Dean, Virgil W.: book reviewed by, 124; “‘I was a prisoner of

war.’ The Autobiography of SAMUEL J. READER,” article edited by, 100–121; note on, 101, 243; “‘In No Way a Relief Set Up’: The County Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas, 1940–1941,” article co-written by, 242–55

Deitzler, George W., 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 233Delaware Indians: relocations, 234Delgadillo, Charles: book reviewed by, 57Dent, Bucky, 165De Soto (Johnson Co.): grocery store, 5Detroit Tigers, 174

Index 263

Devine, Bing, 177Dickens, Charles: “Pistol-Practice in America,” 19Dickinson County: herding law, 154. See also AbileneDiener, Charles, 141Dierdorff, Arden, 41Divorces: alimony and maintenance, 30–31; cases including

children, table, 24, 25; laws, 24–26; in nineteenth century, article on, 20–33; plaintiff gender, 26–27, 28. See also Child custody

Dix, Jetta, 234, 239Dix, Ralph C., 234Docking, Robert, 39, 42, photo, 45Dole, Robert J.: Equal Rights Amendment and, 42Domestic law. See Child custody; DivorcesDouglas County: anti-German sentiment in World War I, 134;

coroner, 4, 6, 8; divorce and child custody cases, 21–22, 24, 26–27, 28, 29, 30–31, 33, tables, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31; officials, 4, 8. See also Eudora; Lawrence

Douglas County Equal Suffrage League, No. 1 inside front cover

Douglas County Fair: automobile day, No. 1 inside front coverDrake, Samuel A., 89Drew, William J., 184n, 187, 188, 189, 191, 197–98Duncan, Wesley H., 231, 235Dunlavy, James, 93

EEagle Forum, 40–41Earle, Jonathan: book coedited by, reviewed, 52“Early Life and Career of Topeka’s Mike Torrez, The, 1946–

1978: Sport as Means for Studying Latino/a Life in Kansas”: article by Jorge Iber, 164–79

Ebright, Homer Kingsley, 138Eckstein, Henry, 17Eckstein, Monroe, 17Editors’ Note, 257Edmund G. Ross: Soldier, Senator, Abolitionist: reviewed, 124Education. See German language instruction; Schools;

University of KansasEdwards, J. B., 156Edwards, John N., 96Eggert, Fred, 240Eisenhower, David, 153, 157–58, 162, photos, 153, 158Eisenhower, Dwight D.: memoirs, 153, 154, 155–56, 157–59,

162; military career, 158, 162; photos, 148, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163; speeches, 149, 157; sports teams, 161–62; upbringing in Abilene, article on, 148–63

Eisenhower, Earl: photos, 157, 158, 159Eisenhower, Edgar, 157, 159, 160, 162Eisenhower, Ida, 157–58, 162, photos, 153, 158Eisenhower, Milton, 162, photos, 157, 158, 159Eldridge, Shalor W., 233, 233n, 239Eldridge House, Lawrence, 233, photo, 233Eleventh Kansas Cavalry. See Kansas Volunteer Cavalry,

Eleventh RegimentElliott, Richard Smith, 218

Ellis, Tom: note on, 211; “Uniontown and Plowboy—Potawatomi Ghost Towns: Enigmas of the Oregon–California Trail,” article by, 210–25

Ellis County: Volga German population, 145nEmancipation Proclamation, 76, illustration, 74Emporia Daily Gazette, 251–52Entz, Gary R.: book by, reviewed, 57Epps, Kristen K.: book reviewed by, 201Equal Rights Amendment (ERA): article on, 34–49;

congressional passage, 38–39; opposition, 35–36, 39–42, 43–49; state ratifications, 39, 41, 46; supporters, 36, 39, 42–44, 46–48, 49; text, 38–39

“Equal Rights Amendment and the Persistence of Kansas Conservatism, The”: article by Kristi Lowenthal, 34–49

ERA. See Equal Rights AmendmentErb, Jacob, 8, 19Erb, Louis, 11Erb, Newman, 4, 8–9, 11, 12Erby, Kelly: book reviewed by, 51Eudora (Douglas Co.): city council, 6; German speakers, 14;

Jewish cemetery, 6, 13, 14; Jewish community, 6, 7, 13–14; postmasters, 6; Summerfield family in, 4, 5–6, 13–14, 15–16

Everts, W. W., 151Ewert, William, 146Ewing, Thomas, Jr., 82, 83Extension Service. See Kansas Cooperative Extension Service

FFagan, James Fleming: forces in Price’s raid, 80, 81, 84, 90; Mine

Creek battle, 91, 93, 94, 97; Newtonia battle, 95; photo, 83; Pilot Knob battle, 83

Families: traditional, 36, 40, 43, 44, 45–46, 49. See also Child custody; County Cotton Mattress Program; Gender roles

Farm Security Administration (FSA), 249, 252Fatherhood, 31–32, 152. See also Child custodyFederal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 247–48Feminist movement, 38, 40, 43–44, 45–46. See also Women’s

rights campaignsFERA. See Federal Emergency Relief AdministrationFerguson, Mary, 28, 33Ferguson, Reuben, 28, 33Ferrick, Wilma, 243Fillmore, H. S., 235, 239, 241Fillmore, Lemuel, 235, 241Finley, Charlie, 177Finney County: family and sod house, photo, 27Fishback, William H. M., 85, 87Fitzgerald, Daniel, 221“Fleeing Missouri Bloodhounds: Pappy Carr’s Escape to Free

Kansas”: article edited by Mark Chapin Scott, 66–77Ford County: cotton mattress program, 255; divorce and child

custody cases, 22, 24, 26–27, 29–31, 33, tables, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31

Fort Hays Kansas Normal School: German language instruction, 145

Fort Scott (Bourbon Co.): in Civil War, 91, 94, 237

264 Kansas History

Franklin, Benjamin, 151“Free!” from the lithograph, “Journey of a Slave,” No. 2 back

coverFremont, John C., 214, 221Frey, Charley, 174Frisbee, Meg: book reviewed by, 58Frontier Club, The: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–

1924: reviewed, 60FSA. See Farm Security AdministrationFugitive Slave Law, 71, 72, 73n, 75–76nFur trade, 214–15, 219. See also American Fur Company

GGage, G. G., 108Garceau, Dee, 154Gardner, Alexander: Eldridge House, photo, 233; Lawrence

photographs, 236; Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, stereograph, 4; Potawatomi at St. Mary’s Mission, stereograph, 223

Gender roles: in nineteenth century, 22–24, 26–28; traditional, 43, 44, 49, 156, 157–58. See also Child custody; Masculinity; Women

Geography of Resistance, The: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: reviewed, 201

German Americans: anti-German sentiment in World War I, 131–35, 138–39, 141, 144–47; farmers in Marion County, photo, No. 3 inside front cover; pro-German, 142, 143; settlements in Kansas, maps, 134, 140; Volga Germans, 145n. See also Mennonites

German immigrants: Jewish, article on, 2–19; Nativists and, 133German language instruction: article on, 130–47German-language newspapers, 14, 239Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism

from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression: reviewed, 202Goldberg, Michael, 37Goldberg, Robert A.: book reviewed by, 258Gonville, Louis, 215Goossen, Rachel Waltner: book reviewed by, 206Gould, Jay, 10, 11, 12, 13Gove County: cotton mattress program, 248, 254Governorship, Kansas. See Bennett, Robert F.; Capper, Arthur;

Carney, Thomas; Crawford, Samuel J.; Docking, RobertGrant, Ervin, 39Grant, M. S., 88Grant, Ulysses S., 95, 98Gravely, Joseph J., 89–90Great Depression. See County Cotton Mattress ProgramGreer, James E., 187, 187n, 188–90, 189nGregg, Sara M.: book reviewed by, 202Gresham, Daniel T.: book reviewed by, 259Greve, Justine: “Language and Loyalty: The First World War

and German Instruction at Two Kansas Schools,” article by, 130–47; note on, 131

Griffith, G. W. E., 231, 235, 239Griswold, Robert L., 28, 152Grubaugh, Josie, 253

Gruber, Carol S., 147Guild, L., 233

HHalleck, Henry W., 82, 89, 95, 98Hamblin, Jacob Darwin: book by, reviewed, 55Hamm, Lee, 41Hanna, Barbara, 41, 46, 47–48Hansen, Drew, 31–32, 33Hard Chief, 215Harker, George Miffling, 212Harris, Frank: My Life and Loves, 19Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice: reviewed, 123Hart, Harry, 181, 183, 198Hart, Hugh F., 181n, 199, photo, 180Hart, John: “Under Moonlight in Missouri: Private John Benton

Hart’s Account of Price’s Raid, October 1864,” article edited by, 180–99; note on, 181

Hart, John Benton: life of, 181, 199; “My Bunkies,” 183, 190–96, 197–99; photos, 180, 182; Price’s raid account, 180–99; “Sweet Potatoes and Other Stories,” 183–90, 196–97

Hartzell, Bob, 173Harvey County: Mennonite settlements, map, 140Heath, H. H., 87Hendry, James, 234Hentzen, Bob, 178, 179Herington (Dickinson and Morris Co.): St. Paul’s Lutheran

School, 146Hershfield, Reuben N., 17Hershfield, Sarah, 17Hesston College: German language instruction, 145Higher education. See German language instruction; University

of KansasHill, Grover B., 246Hinton, Richard J., 88Hispanics. See Mexican AmericansHobbs, Lottie Beth, 40–41, 43, 46Hoecken, Christian, 216, 217Hoeflich, M. H.: book reviewed by, 203Holt, Marilyn Irvin: book by, reviewed, 206Horton, N. D.: photo, 199House, Jacob, 6, 232–33, 239Howe, Joe, 161Huggins, Harley D., 41Hugoton Hermes, 248, 250, 252, 254–55Hutchins, Harry, 147Hutchins & Summerfield law firm, 12Hutchinson (Reno Co.): Crook Furniture, 251, 252Hutchinson, William, 238Hutterites, 141nHutton, Mrs. M. A., 37

IIber, Jorge: “The Early Life and Career of Topeka’s Mike Torrez,

1946–1978: Sport as Means for Studying Latino/a Life in

Index 265

Kansas,” article by, 164–79; note on, 165Immigrants. See German immigrants; Mexican AmericansIndependence, Missouri: Civil War battle, 86, 190Indianola (Shawnee Co.), 107, 107nIndians. See Kansa Indians; Potawatomi“‘In No Way a Relief Set Up’: The County Cotton Mattress

Program in Kansas, 1940–1941”: article by Virgil W. Dean and Ramon Powers, 242–55

International Women’s Year (IWY), 46–48Israelite, 6, 7–8, 14“It Went Against Us,” watercolor by Samuel J. Reader, No. 2

inside front cover“‘I was a prisoner of war.’ The Autobiography of SAMUEL J.

READER”: article edited by Virgil W. Dean, 100–121IWY. See International Women’s Year

JJackman, Sidney D., 94Jackson, Reggie, 177Jacobs, Benjamin (Benny), 5, 11, 16Jacobs, J. H. (Joseph), 5, 6n, 7, 17Jacobs, Minna (Wilhelminna) Summerfield, 5, 6, 6n, 7, 16Jacobs, Solon, 5, 11James, Henry, 152J. B. Watkins Mortgage Company: building, photo, 9; Marcus

Summerfield as counsel for, 4, 8Jefferson County: cotton mattress program, 243Jennison, Charles R., 85, 88, 95, 99, 184nJensen, Billie Barnes, 36Jewish cemeteries: Eudora, 6, 13, 14; Leavenworth, 14Jewish Chautauqua Society, 14Jews: anti-Semitism, 13; community in Eudora, 6, 7, 13–14; in

Kansas, article on, 2–19; merchants, 5, 6, 16, 17; University of Kansas faculty members, 16, 16n

Johns, Laura M.: photo, 38Johnson, William, 218Johnson, Z. W., 252Jones, Mrs. Calvin, 44Juhnke, James, 143

KKansa Indians: Baptist mission, 215; relocations, 215–16, 217,

219; reservation, 217, 218; villages and trading posts, 215Kansas Agricultural College, 16Kansas Citizens against the ERA, 41Kansas City, Lawrence, and Wichita Railroad, 12Kansas City, Missouri. See Westport, Battle ofKansas City, Wyandotte, and Northwestern Railroad, 4, 5,

11–12, 13, 18, pass, No. 1 back coverKansas City Star, 134Kansas Constitution: prohibition amendment, 36, 37; women’s

suffrage, 38Kansas Cooperative Extension Service, 244, 248–49, 250–52. See

also County Cotton Mattress ProgramKansas Daily Tribune, 229, 234, 237

Kansas Equal Suffrage Association: delegates, photo, 42; parades, photo, 40

Kansas legislature: Equal Rights Amendment ratification, 39, 41–42; Quantrill’s raid claims, 237–41; suffrage amendments, 236

Kansas Pacific Railroad, 230Kansas River: ferry crossings, 213, 219, 220, 221; Oregon–

California Trail crossings, 213, 219, photo, 214Kansas State High School Activities Association (KSHSAA),

172Kansas State Militia, 84, 85, 86–87, 88, 89, 121n, 182. See also

Reader, Samuel J.Kansas Supreme Court: child custody cases, 25Kansas Territory: legislature, 26Kansas Volunteer Cavalry: commanders, 182, 186, 190;

Fifteenth Regiment, 184, 184n; officers, 184n, 188–90, 191. See also Price’s raid

Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, Eleventh Regiment: battles, 86, 185–89, 190–96; descriptive roll, 181, 184; on frontier, 182, 199; photo, 199

Kansas Women’s Weekend, 46–48Katzman, David M.: “The Children of Abraham and Hannah:

Grocer, Doctor, Entrepreneur: The Summerfields of Lawrence, Kansas,” article by, 2–19; note on, 3

Kelly, William, 213Kemp, John, 107, 110, 112Klein, Jake, 109, 110Klema, Anna Scholz, 248Kliewer, John, 142, 144–45, 146–47, photo, 144Kohn, Morris, 17Kreneck, Thomas H., 179KSHSAA. See Kansas State High School Activities AssociationKurz, Rudoph Friederich, 225

LLaing, James B., 231Lane, James H., 86, 230Langsdorf, Edgar: note on, 79; “Price’s Raid and the Battle of

Mine Creek,” article by, 78–99“Language and Loyalty: The First World War and German

Instruction at Two Kansas Schools”: article by Justine Greve, 130–47

LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer: book by, reviewed, 201Last Days of the Rainbelt, The: reviewed, 53Latinos/as: in professional sports, 173–79. See also Mexican

AmericansLauck, Jon K.: book by, reviewed, 200Laughlin-Schultz, Bonnie: book by, reviewed, 51Lause, Mark, 183Lawrence (Douglas Co.): Eldridge House, 233, photo, 233;

German community, 14; Jewish community, 6, 13, 14, 14n, 17; Massachusetts Street, photos, 2, 4, 232, 237; mayors, 232; merchants, 5, 6, 16, 229–33, 234–35, 236, 239; Miller Furniture, 252; North Lawrence, 234; Oak Hill Cemetery, 236; population growth, 234, 239; streetcars, 11. See also Quantrill’s raid

266 Kansas History

Lawrence, Amos A., 230, 234Lawrence Daily Journal, 238, 239Lawrence Daily World, 241Lawrence Industrial Corporation, 19Lawrence Waterworks, 5, 7, 12Lawrence World, 236Lazear, Bazel F., 91League of Women Voters, 48Learnard, Oscar Eugene, 230, 239, photo, 238Leavenworth (Leavenworth Co.): aid to Lawrence after

Quantrill’s raid, 230, 233; Jewish community, 14, 17; merchants, 17, 231; streetcars, 11

Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Galveston Railroad, 230Leavenworth County: cotton mattress program, 251Lee, R. Alton: book by, reviewed, 203Leedy, John W., 13Lenker, Sarah L., 26Levy, M. W., 19nLewis, Alexander, 232Lexington, Missouri: Civil War battle, 86, 87, 183–86Lincoln, Abraham: Emancipation Proclamation, 74; presidential

election (1864), 81, 96Little Blue, Battle of, 87, 182, 186–89Llewellyn Castle: A Worker’s Cooperative on the Great Plains:

reviewed, 57Loosbrock, Richard D.: book reviewed by, 59Lost Region, The: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History:

reviewed, 200Lough, Samuel Alexander, 136, 137, 138, photo, 138Lowenthal, Kristi: “The Equal Rights Amendment and the

Persistence of Kansas Conservatism,” article by, 34–49; note on, 35

Loyalty Leagues, 146–47Ludington, Reuben W., 232, 239Luebke, Frederick, 131Lynn-Sherow, Bonnie: book reviewed by, 125Lyon County: cotton mattress program, 251–52

MMajor League Baseball (MLB): scouts, 173; World Series, 179.

See also Torrez, MikeMalin, John, 22, 30Malin, Marcia, 22, 30Maloney, Jim, 171Manhood. See MasculinityMarais des Cygnes, Battle of, 90Marion County: German American farmers, photo, No. 3

inside front cover; Mennonite settlements, map, 140Marks, Alex, 6Marmaduke, John Sappington: drunkenness charges, 96;

forces in Price’s raid, 80, 81, 84, 90; Little Blue battle, 87, 187; Mine Creek battle, 91, 93, 94, 97; Missouri background, 81; photo, 93; Pilot Knob battle, 83; as prisoner, 93, 94; raids in Missouri, 80

Marriages. See Child custody; DivorcesMartin, Michelle M.: book reviewed by, 204

Martinez, Calixto, 167–68, 169, photo, 167Martinez, Concepcion, 167–68, photo, 167Marysville (Marshall Co.): Jewish merchants, 17Masculinity: fatherhood, 31–32, 152; in nineteenth century,

article on, 148–63. See also Gender rolesMather, Cotton, 151Mattresses. See County Cotton Mattress ProgramMayors, John P., 112McCarter, Margaret Hill, 67, 68McClellan, George B., 81McClure, James, 153–54McCoy, Isaac, 215, 218McDonald, Marion, 173McEnaney, Maura: book by, reviewed, 122McNeil, John, 83, 84, 94, 95, 99McPherson College: German language instruction, 145, 145nMcPherson County: anti-German sentiment in World War I,

134, 141; Mennonite settlements, map, 140Melville Mining and Reduction Company, 4–5Men. See MasculinityMennonites: German language instruction in schools, 145;

pacifism during World War I, 141–43, 147; settlements in Kansas, map, 140. See also Bethel College

Methodist Church: Indian missions, 216, 218; World War I and, 138

Mexican Americans: biographies, 179; Chicano movement, 177–79; discrimination against, 169–71; in Kansas, 166–67, 169–71; in sports, 171, 174, 177; in Topeka, 167–74, 178–79. See also Torrez, Mike

“Microcosm of Manhood: Abilene, Eisenhower, and Nineteenth-Century Male Identity”: article by Peter M. Nadeau, 148–63

Military trails, 213Militias. See Kansas State Militia; Missouri State MilitiaMiller, Alfred Jacob: “Crossing the Kansas,” watercolor by, No.

4 front coverMiller, Sol, 86Miller Furniture, Lawrence, 252Mine Creek, Battle of, 91–94, 96–98, 99, 111–12, 113n, 114, 121,

maps, 90, 91, Reader watercolor, No. 2 inside front cover. See also Price’s raid

Miner, Craig, 218, 222Miriani, Ronald: book reviewed by, 60Missouri: Confederate sympathizers, 81, 82, 182; slave owners,

70–71. See also Price’s raidMissouri State Militia, 83, 89–90, 91–92Mitchell, J. J., 18MLB. See Major League BaseballMonnett, Howard, 183Montgomery, James, 87Moonlight, Thomas: background, 182; at Blue River, 87–88, 190;

brigade command, 85; at Lexington, 186; photo, 191; Price’s raid and, 86, 89, 95, 182; Westport battle, 190, 191–92, 193

Mormon trail, 213Morrow, Robert, 235Mossler, Gertrude, 16Mossler, Hettie, 16, 16n, 17

Index 267

Mossler, I. J., 16Mossler, Minna Summerfield, 16Mossler, Sadie, 16Motherhood, 23, 26–27, 28, 33, 36. See also Child custodyMurdock, John N., 237

NNadeau, Peter M.: “Microcosm of Manhood: Abilene,

Eisenhower, and Nineteenth-Century Male Identity,” article by, 148–63; note on, 149

Napier, Rita G., 166National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 37National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 14, 17National Organization for Women (NOW), 38, 41, 43Native Americans. See IndiansNativists, 133NAWSA. See National American Woman Suffrage AssociationNCJW. See National Council of Jewish WomenNebraska Territory: fugitive slaves, 76–77New Deal, 244, 255. See also Works Progress AdministrationNewspapers: during Civil War, 86, 87; German-language, 14,

239; Jewish, 6, 7–8, 14Newton (Harvey Co.): anti-German sentiment, 144–47, 145n;

Loyalty League, 146–47Newtonia, Battle of, 95, 96, 99Newton Weekly Kansan-Republican, 133, 143, 144, 146New York Herald: anti-German illustration, 132New York Yankees, 165, 177Nineteenth Amendment, 38Northwestern Railroad. See Kansas City, Wyandotte, and

Northwestern RailroadNOW. See National Organization for WomenNugent, Walter: book by, reviewed, 205

OOak Hill Cemetery (Lawrence), 236“Occupations Related to Household Arts”: by Peter Radin, No.

4 back coverOehrle, Charles, 239Oehrle, Gottlieb, 239Oehrle, Mary Anna, 234, 234nOgee, Joseph, 220Ogee, Lewis, 219, 220Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal: reviewed, 125Oliva, Leo E.: book reviewed by, 61Oregon–California Trail: cholera outbreaks, 222; Kansas River

crossings, 213, 219; Kansas River crossings, photo, 214. See also Plowboy; Uniontown

Orsi, Jared: book by, reviewed, 61Ortiz, Leonard David, 177Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, Topeka, 168–69, 179Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic School, 168“‘Out of the Ashes’: The Rebuilding of Lawrence and the Quest

for Quantrill Raid Claims”: article by Katie H. Armitage, 226–41

PPacifism, 141–43, 147, 158, 162Palmer, H. E., 183Paola (Miami Co.): Civil War guerrilla raid claims, 237; Union

troops, 89Parents. See Child custodyParish, Arlyn John, 133, 145Parks, Ronald D.: book by, reviewed, 204Passon, Rachel Cohn, 17Paul, Alice, 38Pauline (Shawnee Co.): Mexican Americans, 167Payne, Florence, No. 1 inside front coverPeacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the

American Frontier, 1821–1846: reviewed, 56Pearson, James B., 42Peck, Lydia W., 26Perkins, Clement, No. 1 inside front coverPetrik, Paula, 31Phillips, Christopher: book reviewed by, 126Phillips, John F., 90–92, 95Pickerell (Sergeant), 121Pierce, Abial R., 92Pike, Edward C., 83Pilot Knob, Battle of, 83Pisehedwin: photo, 225Pleasonton, Alfred: artillery, 193–95; photos, 95, 190; Price’s

raid and, 90, 94–95, 98–99, 182; Provisional Cavalry division, 84; Westport battle, 89, 182, 191–92, 193

Plowboy (Shawnee Co.): importance, 214, 225; location, 213–14, 219, 221n; maps, 220, 221; origin of name, 219; residents, 213, 215, 220, 222, 224–25; as trading site, 211, 215

Plumb, Preston B.: photo, 195Pomeroy, Fletcher, 93–94nPost-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West: reviewed, 58Potawatomi: annuity gatherings, 221, 222; cholera outbreaks,

212, 220, 222; Citizen Band, 211, 216–17, 216n, 218, 220, 222–23, 224, 225; farmers, photo, 225; land sales, 224, 225; Métis, 213, 216, 217, 218, 224; missions, 216–17, 223; Prairie Band, 211, 216n, 217–18, 222–23, 224, 225; relocations, 215–16, 216n, 217–18, 217n, 220, 224–25; reservation, 223–24, 225; stresses, 222–23; Trail of Death, 216, 216n; treaties with U.S. government, 218, 222, 224. See also Plowboy; Uniontown

Potawatomi Indian Mission, St. Marys, 223, photo, 210, stereograph, by Gardner, 223

Pottawatomie Bridge and Ferry Company, 221Pottawatomie County: German settlements, 134. See also St.

MarysPotter, George, 29–30Potter, James E.: book by, reviewed, 126Potter, Marnie, 29–30Powers, Ramon: note on, 243; “‘In No Way a Relief Set Up’: The

County Cotton Mattress Program in Kansas, 1940–1941,” article co-written by, 242–55; Robinson memoriam by, 256

Price, Jay: book reviewed by, 122Price, Sterling: criticism of, 96–98; Mine Creek battle, 91–94; in

268 Kansas History

Missouri, 79, 80–89; photo, 78; Reader’s sketch, 107“Price Raid,” watercolor by Samuel J. Reader, No. 2 front coverPrice’s raid: article on, 78–99; Big Blue battle, 88, 101, 104–5,

map, 103, Reader watercolor, 192; Bloody Lane battle, 193–96; campaign maps, 80, 88, 90; casualties, 83, 195–96, 197; court of inquiry, 98; forces, 81; Hart’s account, article on, 180–99; Lexington battle, 86, 87, 183–86; Little Blue battle, 87, 182, 186–89; Marais des Cygnes battle, 90; objectives, 80, 81, 96, 182; order, 80–81; Pilot Knob battle, 83; prisoners of Confederates, 96, 101–15; prisoners of Union Army, 93, 94, 99, 198; Reader’s account, article on, 100–121; results, 96, 183; retreat, 89–91, 94–96, 98–99, 102, 112–14, 196–98. See also Mine Creek, Battle of; Westport, Battle of

“Price’s Raid and the Battle of Mine Creek”: article by Edgar Langsdorf, 78–99

Prohibition amendment, Kansas Constitution, 36, 37Puritans, 151

QQuantrill, William C.: Confederate Army and, 84Quantrill’s raid: businesses lost, 228, 230–33, 234–35; casualties,

228, 230–31; claims, 237–41; recovery, article on, 226–41; survivors, 227, 229–31, 233–35, 236–41

Quayle, William Alfred: anti-German speeches, 132, 136, 138–39; photo, 139

RRafety, James L., 88Rafuse, Ethan S.: book reviewed by, 52Railroads: boom, 10–11; damage by Confederate raiders, 84;

Summerfield family and, 11–13. See also individual railroadsRead, Amelia Rockwell, 227, 229, 241, photo, 228Read, Fred W., 227, 229, 233, 236–38, 239–41, photos, 226, 240Read, J. F., 229Reader, Samuel J.: autobiography, 100–121; “Brush Creek,”

watercolor by, 189; “Chaos,” watercolor by, 192; as Confederate prisoner, 101–15; escape, 114–21; “It Went Against Us,” watercolor by, No. 2 inside front cover; photo, 100; “Price Raid,” watercolor by, No. 2 front cover

Redpath (Shawnee Co.), 225Regalado, Samuel O., 174–75Regester, James, 27Regester, Mary, 27Regier, C. C., 143, 145–46Reilly, Edward F., Jr., 42, 46Reno County: Mennonite settlements, map, 140Reynolds, Sam, 240Reynolds, Thomas C., 81, 96–98Rice, Luther, 217Rickey, Branch, 174Ridenour, Peter, 230–31, 239Rippley, LaVern, 131Robinson, Charles: during Civil War, 86, 87; as governor, 238;

Quantrill’s raid recovery and, 230Robinson, W. Stitt, Jr.: memoriam, 256

Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line: reviewed, 59

Roderick, Tom, 188Root, George A., 101Rosecrans, William S.: at Chattanooga, 80; Curtis and, 98;

photo, 81; Price’s raid and, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94–95Ruddy, Richard A.: book by, reviewed, 124Rural Midwest since World War II, The: reviewed, 259

SSt. Louis Cardinals, 173–74, 175–77St. Marys (Potawattomie and Wabaunsee Co.): Potawatomi

Indian Mission, 223, photo, 210, stereograph, 223St. Paul’s Lutheran School, Herington, 146Salina (Saline Co.): streetcars, 11Samuels, Joseph, 17Sanborn, John B., 83, 84–86, 89–90, 94, 95, 99Sands, James G., 232, 233nSands, Susie, 232Santa Fe Railway: Mexican American workers, 167, 169, 172,

173, 174Santa Fe Trail, 215, 218Santillan, Richard, 171Sargeant, George, 232Saturday Evening Post, 153–54Schlafly, Phyllis, 39–41, 43, 44, 46, photo, 34Schneider, Gregory L.: book by, reviewed, 59Schools: German language instruction, 146; mission, 216–17;

Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic School, 168; Topeka High School, 171, 172. See also Abilene High School

Schrag, John, 141Schulman, Daniel: book by, reviewed, 258Scott, Mark Chapin: “Fleeing Missouri Bloodhounds: Pappy

Carr’s Escape to Free Kansas,” article edited by, 66–77; note on, 67

Segregation: of Mexican Americans, 169–71Sentelle (Lieutenant), 106, 107, 108–10, Reader’s sketch, 110Shaw, Anna Howard, 37, 38Shawnee County: cotton mattress program, 243. See also

Plowboy; Topeka; UniontownShelby, Joseph O. “Jo”: Big Blue battle, 88; forces in Price’s raid,

80, 81, 83, 84; in Kansas, 91, 94; at Lexington, 86; Mine Creek battle, 93, 94, 97–98, 113n; Missouri background, 81, 113n; Newtonia battle, 95; photo, 97; raids in Missouri, 80; reports, 96; Westport battle, 88–89

Sherman Township (Clay Co.): divorce and child custody cases, 22

Shogan, Robert: book by, reviewed, 123Shortridge, James R.: book reviewed by, 53Shouse, Henry, 28–29Shouse, Mary, 28–29Siever, Gertrude, 26Siever, William, 26Silvey, George, 174Slaves: auctions, illustration, 71; former, illustration, 73;

runaway, 71–77. See also Carr, Charles “Pappy”

Index 269

Smith, Andrew J., 82, 182Smith, Edmund Kirby, 79, 80, 83, 85–86, 96, 98–99Smith, Glee, Jr., 39Smith, Michaele: book reviewed by, 54Smith, Thomas J., 156, photo, 155Snoddy, James D., 87Snow, Francis H., 18Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most

Powerful and Private Dynasty: reviewed, 258South, Charles L., 246–47Spahn, Warren, 175Spangler, Mrs. L. E., 253Speer, John, 229, 235–36, 239Sports: high school, 161–62; Mexican American teams, 171, 177.

See also BaseballStafford County: cotton mattress program, 251, 253–54Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War,

1861–1867: reviewed, 126Stanfield, J. S., 110Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 36Steele, Frederick, 83, 98Steinem, Gloria, 44, 47, photo, 47Stevens County: cotton mattress program, 252Stillman, Josephine, 30Stone, Lucy, 36Storey, Pat, 46Stormont, D. W., 221Strong, Mrs. Frank, No. 1 inside front coverStrowig, Calvin, 39Summerfield (Marshall Co.), 12, 18, 19Summerfield, Abraham, 4, 5–6, 7, 13–14, 15–16Summerfield, Elias: career, 4–5, 7, 12, 13, 15–16, 17; Civil War

service, 4; death, 17, 18; marriages, 17; migration to United States, 6; photo, 12; physical appearance, 4; railroad, 4, 5, 11, 13, 18; railway pass, No. 1 back cover

Summerfield, Hannah, 6, 7, 17Summerfield, Jennie Samuels Kohn, 17Summerfield, Marcus: career, 4, 6, 7; death, 18; education, 6,

7–8, 16; law practice, 4, 5, 8–9, 11, 12, 18; marriage, 8, 12; medical practice, 6, 8; migration to United States, 5; photo, 15; physical appearance, 4; political career, 8, 13

Summerfield, Minna. See Jacobs, Minna (Wilhelminna) Summerfield

Summerfield, Sarah Erb, 8, 12, 14, 17, 18Summerfield, Selina Dinkelspiel Eckstein, 17, 18Summerfield, Solon E., 5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18–19Summerfield & Jacobs, 5, 6, 7, 16Sumner County: county extension service, 250Sunflower Justice: A New History of the Kansas Supreme Court:

reviewed, 203Sutliffe, Augusta, 240

TTabor College: fire, 146; German language instruction, 145Teichroew, Allan, 142Temperance movement, 36, 37, 236

Tie that Bound Us, The: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism: reviewed, 51

Tijerina, Felix, 179Tilles, Bertha, 17Tilles, Roy Erb, 17, 19Todd, Andrew G., 183–85Todd, George, 193Tolerant Populists, The: Kansas Populism and Nativism, Second

Edition: reviewed, 205Tolzman, Don, 131Tomlinson, Alyoe, 253Topeka (Shawnee Co.): baseball teams, 171–72; ferries, 221;

Mexican Americans, 167–74, 178–79; Oakland barrio, 168–71, 179, photo, 177; racial segregation, 68; suffrage events, photos, 40, 42

Topeka 7-Ups baseball team, 172Topeka Daily Capital, 179Topeka High School (THS): sports teams, 171, 172Topeka Reds baseball team, 171Torrez, John, 169, 170–73, photo, 170Torrez, Juan P., 167, 168, 169–70, 171–72, 173–74, photos, 168,

169, 170Torrez, Louis, 167, 168, 169, 171Torrez, Mariano, 167Torrez, Mary, 167–68, 169–70, 171, 173–74, photos, 167, 168, 169,

170Torrez, Mike: article on, 164–79; photos, No. 3 front cover, 164,

170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178Torrez, Richard, 169, 171–72, photo, 170Trading Post (Linn Co.): in Civil War, 89–90, 108; establishment,

216Trego County: cotton mattress program, 248Tripp, Abigail, 27–28Tripp, F., 27–28True, Mae Farris, 248–49, 250, 255Turn Verein, Lawrence, 14

U“Under Moonlight in Missouri: Private John Benton Hart’s

Account of Price’s Raid, October 1864”: article edited by John Hart, 180–99

Union Army: African American troops, 88; in Arkansas, 95–96, 198; Army of the Border, 85; artillery, 89, 193–95; criticism of, 98–99; in Kansas, 82, 85, 89–95, 97, 196–98; in Missouri, 81, 82–86, 87–89, 95, 183–96; Potawatomi troops, 224; veterans, 4. See also Kansas Volunteer Cavalry; Price’s raid

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War: reviewed, 50

Union Merchants Exchange of St. Louis, 231, 234Union Pacific Railroad, 11Uniontown (Bourbon Co.), 211nUniontown (Shawnee Co.): annuity gatherings, 221, 222; article

on, 210–25; disappearance, 212–13, 222; establishment, 212, 215, 219–20, 222; importance, 211–12, 214; land speculation, 221–22; location, 211, 213–14, 218, 219; maps, 220, 221; name, 220

270 Kansas History

Uniontown (Wyandotte Co.), 211n“Uniontown and Plowboy—Potawatomi Ghost Towns:

Enigmas of the Oregon–California Trail”: article by Tom Ellis, 210–25

Uniontown Cemetery, 211–12, photo, 212U.S. Bureau of the Census: divorce data, 22Universities. See German language instructionUniversity of Kansas: baseball team, 161; establishment, 234;

faculty members, 16, 16n, photo, 15; first graduates, 236; German language instruction, 133; Law School faculty, 8; North College building, 234; Summerfield Hall, 19

University of Michigan: German language instruction, 133, 147; law school, 162

Unrau, William E., 218, 222Unruh, Albert, 145

VVail, David D.: book reviewed by, 55Vaughan, A. J., 215, 216–17, 219Vawter, Betty Bowdine, 243Veale, George M., 121Vermillion, John F., 41–42Verreydt, Felix, 218Vieux, Louis, 220“View Southward of Seventh and Massachusetts Street

[1890s],” 2Voting rights: of African Americans, 236; of women, 36–38, 236.

See also Women’s suffrage movement

WWabansi, Chief, 218, 222Wabaunsee County: cotton mattress program, 252, 253, 254. See

also St. MarysWarde, Mary Jane: book by, reviewed, 260Watson, Samuel J.: book by, reviewed, 56Webster, Kimball, 213Wedel, Peter, 146Weeks, Edith, 253Weil, Milton, 17Wells, Jeff: book reviewed by, 205Westport, Battle of, 88–89, 99, 103–5, 182, 190–93, maps, 88, 188,

Reader watercolor, 189When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory:

reviewed, 260White, Richard, 10, 11White Plume, 215Wilcox, Clifford, 147Wilcox, Persis Webster, 21–22, 30Wilcox, Robert, 21–22, 30Willard Garvey: An Epic Life: reviewed, 122Williams, E. B., 106, 112Williston, Dorothy, No. 1 inside front coverWinders, Richard Bruce: book reviewed by, 56Winne, Fox: photo, 199Winslow, Edward F., 84, 90

Wise, Isaac M., 7, 8Wishart, David J.: book by, reviewed, 53Wittke, Carl, 131, 133–34Wollman, Jonas, 17Wollman, William J., 12–13, 17, 18Women: business roles, 7; Jewish, 7, 14, 16, 17; journalists, 16;

motherhood, 23, 26–27, 28, 33, 36; professors, 16; public roles, 23–24; roles in families, 22–23; temperance movement, 236; voting rights, 36–38, 236; widows of Quantrill’s raid, 234, 236. See also Child custody; Gender roles

Women for Women, 44Women’s rights campaigns: article on, 34–49Women’s suffrage movement: Douglas County Equal Suffrage

League, No. 1 inside front cover; in Kansas, 36–38, 49; Nineteenth Amendment, 38; in nineteenth century, 36–37; opposition, 36; referendum, 36. See also Kansas Equal Suffrage Association

Woodward, Brinton W., 233, 239Worden (Douglas Co.): anti-German sentiment, 133Works Progress Administration (WPA): exhibits, photo, No. 4

inside front cover; programs, 247–48. See also County Cotton Mattress Program

World War I: anti-German sentiment, article on, 130–47WPA. See Works Progress AdministrationWrobel, David M.: book by, reviewed, 202

YYarbrough, Fay A.: book reviewed by, 260Young, Calvary M., 93

Index 271

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