That spring afternoon when I was making my way along Old Og’s back and was still entangled in the redbuds, I heard water running below me, and I stumbled down the steep grade to its source. I stood there in surprise: in front of me was the Perkins springhouse, that dismal thing, and I saw the hill the water issued from was no hill at all—it was the Orient grade itself. Stilwell’s crew had buried the original spring and built that dark and evil-looking conduit. I climbed the grade again and followed its slow ascent onto the treeless upland toward the oil town of El Dorado, “the golden place” that would have let Arthur Stilwell finish his dream had the Spirit Corps mentioned what lay below his tracks—the biggest oil field in Kansas, one discovered only three years after he lost the Orient line.
As I hoofed along I wasn’t thinking about black gold so much as water: I had refused again to fill my canteen. What could it be that disturbed the peace of that copious spring? It wasn’t, really, a legend about tavern guests getting waylaid for their money; and it wasn’t, really, the presence of Jesse James; and it wasn’t just some spiritual-list’s mumblings about silver mines and golden rules, a speculator possessed of the old European lust for the riches of the Indies, that avarice at the heart of the stealing and corrupting of the American land; and it wasn’t just night-dancing hobs down in that darkness. Something else, stronger and more ancient than any of those, was in there. When I was a couple of miles down Old Og, I thought I knew: what also loomed in that dismal and aggrieved wood was my memory of a native people who found the greatest gift in the grasslands to be clean water in perpetual flow. With that spring, Mr. Stilwell and his dreams played hob.
On the Town:
Versus Harry B. (I)
THE ROMANCE
This is what we know about a certain dark event in 1898 near Matfield Green, where there have recently been three unsolved murders: a man on horseback rides down the dirt-packed lane just south of town. His name is Frank Rinard, and he is a hired hand on the Captain Henry Brandley place. It is Sunday, July the twenty-fourth, dusk. Neighbors see him pass on his way to the Brandley farm on the western terrace of the South Fork, a favored piece of ground. Rinard (pronounced Rine-erd) is about twenty-one, unmarried, a local man, and he is on his horse, Bender.
The captain, a Union army veteran whose left hand crippled by a Ute arrow is a kind of always evident campaign ribbon, has retired from the Kansas senate and now develops his realty investments. In less than thirty years he has become one of the wealthiest and most influential countians. He and his second wife, Elizabeth, have eight children. (His first spouse died several months after they had married and taken up housekeeping in his log cabin.) Lizzie is a pretty woman with thick, glossy hair, her Teutonic eyes of such transparent blue they could almost be window glass. She is shrewd and determined and a member of the school board, and she is disappointed that their eldest son, the third child, Harry, has shown no interest in his education. When he was two years old, he fell into a well and would have drowned had a young woman not climbed down in after him. Now he is twenty-four and unmarried.
What is about to happen will concern him and his strikingly comely seventeen-year-old sister, Pearl, and the man riding the horse. It is common knowledge that Miss Pearl pays more than passing attention to Frank Rinard, and he to her, but as a farmhand his prospects are ordinary. Several times the two have been seen walking toward the Brandley quarry, where men are cutting stone for the foundation of the big house the captain is building to replace the log home he put up after staking a claim here. Miss Pearl was also observed in the hired hands’ bunkhouse above the bam, when she and Rinard sat on his bed as he showed her pictures. One of her five sisters is married to Edward Crocker and another is seeing his younger brother, Arthur; the history and achievements of the Crockers match the Brandleys’. Power and influence have been building on the upper South Fork since the end of the war.
Young Brandley has ridden in from the ranch house at Jack Spring, four miles west, where he lives and works. He has brought in his laundry, and as he talks with his mother in the kitchen, hired hand Cecil Richards comes in with the fresh milk and interrupts the conversation—seemingly at an inopportune moment—and leaves. Some time later, hour not certain, Harry heads back to the ranch while his fifteen-year-old brother, Bob, arrives from Matfield, fixes himself something to eat, and then goes to the south porch to sit alone. Daisy Brandley, a couple of years older than Pearl, sits talking with Arthur Crocker on the unfinished foundation of the new house. She will marry him, and he will become a state legislator. The eastern sky darkens, and the crickets and bullfrogs start up. It is about nine o’clock.
Frank Rinard rides onto the place, heads to the barn and unsaddles Bender, but does not unbridle him. Then: from near the granary and hog lot comes the loud report of a large-caliber gun. The night goes still for some moments, then the gentle sounds of the vale resume. Gunshots are not especially unusual. Again the dark is staggered, this time by a woman screaming and moaning. It is Lizzie, and she is saying, Someone’s been shot! Is it Bob? Is it Bob? Her son runs to her and says he isn’t hurt. He doesn’t know who fired the gun.
There is confusion. Bob and Daisy and Arthur Crocker go toward the barn. Near it lies a body. Arthur raises the head and sees it is Frank. He’s been shot in the face. He lies weltering in his blood. He is unarmed, and no one sees any gun near him. In the turmoil, the men take Rinard up to the porch, where they can see bad powder burns on his face, and within minutes he dies. Lizzie sends John Knowles, a farmhand, for the doctor. An hour or so later the captain arrives, apparently from his real estate office in Matfield. Around midnight, the Brandleys hear a horse gallop through the gate, but the captain tells Knowles not to follow—by the time he gets a horse up, the rider will be gone. About daybreak Lizzie sends Knowles, a cousin of Rinard, to tell Frank’s father of his son’s death.
THE GUN
On Monday, the twenty-fifth of July, an inquest is held in Matfield and Harry Brandley summoned. The coroner has extracted a single forty-four-caliber slug from Rinard, and the county attorney asks Brandley to show his pistol. He rides off to get it, returning shortly. In his forty-four are six live rounds, five tarnished and one brightly new. Harry says he shot at a coyote on Thursday, but the gun seems to have been fired more recently. He says he often carries the pistol to protect range cattle. The attorney asks whether he objects to Rinard’s attention to Miss Pearl, and he says no, he and Frank are on good terms, but someone challenges his assertion (in a small community, the one thing neighbors know about is bad blood). There are no other suspects. Circumstantial evidence is strong enough for the justice of the peace to call for Harry’s arrest and have him taken to the jail in Cottonwood.
The community is tense: people remember the hooded men who, four years earlier, pulled the confessed murderer George Rose from the courthouse jail and hanged him under a Santa Fe trestle because they doubted justice would be done, and those men, the belief is, were not hoodlums but eminent citizens. Reporting a few days later the preliminary hearing on the Rinard murder, the Leader writes that emotions are unlike anything seen here before and crowds composed of an unusual number of women throng the courtroom.
Over the next nine months, the witnesses are many and the evidence voluminous but the trial of The State v. Brandley ends in a hung jury, one man holding for acquittal, and the attempt to impanel a second fails altogether. Believing Chase countians prejudiced against them, the Brandleys want a change of venue to Emporia, where the captain has several influential friends, but the Leader claims:
If the attorneys for the defense are responsible for the statement that “Chase County is against Brandley,” they utter what is not true for the purpose of excusing their own failures. The attorneys for the defense at no time seemed to appreciate the status of their client. They attempted to belittle the prosecution from the start and when they could not ridicule witnesses for the state they resorted to abuse and badgering, and one of the defendant’s attorneys appear
ed to be more interested in making the audience laugh than in proving the innocence of his client. Brandley’s case was undoubtedly badly managed. A change in management of his case and not a change of venue is what the defense needs.
Finally, in March of 1900, the motion is granted, and on the fourteenth of May a second and decisive trial begins in Lyon County. The crowds, still marked by a large number of women, continue in Emporia, and the reasons are evident: the son of a wealthy landowner and real estate investor, a senator and war hero, accused of shooting down a poor farmhand sparking his sister: privilege versus the people, Romeo dying for Juliet in a family feud.
VII
HYMER
From the Commonplace Book:
Hymer
Life was not only a process of rediscovering backwards.
—D. H. Lawrence,
Sea and Sardinia (1923)
Did you guess any thing lived only its moment?
—Walt Whitman,
“Song of Prudence” (1881)
If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many miles remain to travel—and the more the better—reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing. If it did the same service to all, it might well be a matter of public rejoicing.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1856)
I found that when the moment was right, by concentrating on some external object, an arrowhead found on Scratch Flat, for example, or the running walls or foundations of the area, I was able to perceive something more than a simple mental picture of what some past event was like. I not only could see the event or the place in my mind’s eye, but would also hear it, smell the woodfires; and sometimes, for just a flash, a microsecond if you care to measure things, I would actually be there, or so it seemed. This is nothing like the experience with the madeleine in Remembrance of Things Past; what I would sense is the reality of an event that I could never have witnessed. Nor is it anything mystical; I don’t claim to have experienced these things in some previous existence. It was simply a heightened awareness or perception of the way things must have been.
I began to talk about our western bias concerning the structure of time. I said that [we] think of time as linear, flowing from past, to present, to future like a river, whereas the [Pawtucket-Micmac Indian] Nompenekit thinks of it as a lake or pool in which all events are contained.
—John Hanson Mitchell,
Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand
Years on One Square Mile (1984)
Human beings inherit little History but many histories. The past bequeaths a small nest egg of stable, undisputed facts and a thick portfolio of speculative issues—divergent, ever changing interpretations—because presents and futures alter pasts. . . . No one can predict the future of the past.
—“Notes and Comment,”
The New Yorker (1989)
We are inclined in America to think that the value of monuments is simply to remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles. As such even the least sightly of monuments gives a landscape beauty and dignity and keeps the collective memory alive.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)
[Landmarks] stand for continuity, community, identity, for links with the past and the future. In the contemporary American community these roles are what counteract our mobility and fragmentation and forgetfulness of history.
Stone was a way of establishing the passage of time in terms comprehensible to rational men.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Stone and Its Substitutes” (1984)
Limestone is among the chief blessings of Kansas.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
The true-born rockman (for they are born, not made) has always been one of the finest characters in England, with a farmer’s patience, a woodman’s imagination, and the constructive vision and balanced mind of a mathematician. Of old, without infringing the boundaries of his legitimate craft and often unable to read or write, the rockman could do wonderful things. Even today they do not easily put pen to paper, and probably there are few people more inarticulate, few people whose mental processes are less formulated. They have always used an instinct as completely unconscious as that of an Eskimo at a seal hole. Looking at rock and its position, they will arrive at an equation demanding mathematical formulae far beyond their conscious calculation. They will say, putting a finger on the spot, “The shot will shift it here,” but remain quite incapable of telling you how they arrive at that perfectly accurate judgment.
—Dorothy Hartley,
Made in England (1939)
A landscape is where we speed up or retard or divert the cosmic program and impose our own.
It is here in the United States that we see the largest and most impressive example of neo-classic spatial organization Our national grid system, devised by the Founding Fathers, represents the last attempt to produce a Classical political landscape, one based on the notion that certain spaces—notably the square and the rectangle—were inherently beautiful and therefore suited to the creation of a just society.
Instead of being a blueprint for the ideal Classical democratic social order, the grid system became simply an easy and effective way of dividing up the land.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)
Perhaps only the stone wall of New England equalled the hedge of the Middle Western prairie as an essential man-made part of a distinctive historical regional landscape. The Kansas part of that landscape rivaled that of New England in durability [until] make-work activity in the 1930s stript the area of most of its hedges.
—Leslie Hewes,
“Early Fencing on the Western Margin
of the Prairie” (1981)
The Indians give an extravigant account of the exquisite odour of this fruit [of the Osage orange] when it has obtained maturity, which takes place the latter end of summer, or the beginning of Autumn. They state, that at this season they can always tell by the scent of the fruit when they arrive in the neighbourhood of the tree, and usually take advantage of this season to obtain the wood; as it appears not [to] be a very abundant growth, even in the country where it is to be found. An opinion prevails among the Osages, that the fruit is poisonous, tho’ they acknowledge that they have never tasted it.
—Meriwether Lewis,
Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1804)
Much had been expected [by Lewis and Clark] of the Osage orange, called by them the Osage apple, for fabulous tales had been spread about it in the East. After they saw it, however, the explorers lost all interest in it; it did not in any way fulfill their expectations, being useless for timber and producing no valuable fruit.
—E. J. Criswell,
Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers (1940)
You cannot civilize men if they have an indefinite extent of territory over which to spread. . . . Civilization can best be effected when the country is hedged in by narrow boundaries.
—George McDuffie,
Speech before the U.S. Senate (1843)
I was led to see the utter impossibility of a proper social organization of society, so long as the want of fencing material compelled the people to form broken and scattered settlements on the margins of groves and streams, while all within was left a solitary waste. . . . I then thought that the greatest moral, intellectual, social, and pecuniary benefactor would be the man who should first devise some feasible mode of fencing. Accordingly . . . I commenced a series of experiments with hedge plants.
—Jonathan B. Turner,
The Prairie Farmer (1847)
There is a curious logical connection between civilization and rain. All along the frontier, Indians declare that the white man brings rain with him. Thirty years ago, Missourians living on the opposite bank of the river thou
ght the soil of Kansas good for nothing on account of its rainless climate. Since the young state was settled, it has suffered only twice from dry seasons, and of late good crops and increasing rains have dispelled all apprehensions.