November 8, 1984
PRISCILLA CLUB MEETS
Bernice Gwyn entertained ten members of the Priscilla Club at the home of her daughter, Nancy Huth, on Wednesday.
Upon arrival, each member deposited her packet of garden seeds in the president’s basket. Bertha Dawson, the president, gave out seed catalogs, and each member cut out a picture of her favorite flower.
The meeting was called to order with Bertha reading the April prayer from “Guideposts.”
Minutes of the last meeting were read and approved. Roll call was answered by going around the room, and each member showed the picture of her favorite flower and told why it was her favorite.
Bertha mixed up the garden seed packets, and she passed the basket for each one to take one back (if we got our own, we were to take another one). There were lots of flower seeds and some vegetable seeds for us to go home and plant. Bertha closed the meeting by reading a message of “Fifteen Ways to be Miserable.”
April 24, 1986
ANNIVERSARY CLUB
The Anniversary Club celebrated their 20th wedding anniversaries this last weekend by leaving town.
Gordon and Joyce Watts, Tom and Mary Jones, and Paul and Linda Bledsoe enjoyed their taste of city life as they were hosted by Steve and Carla Gibb in their lovely home in Lenexa.
During the Saturday afternoon sightseeing tour of a nearby shopping mall, Linda and Joyce made major purchases, while Mary entertained herself on the escalators. Gordon entertained the neighbors in the early evening and then the four couples went to Tiffany’s Attic for a delicious dinner. “We laughed until we cried,” was the response to the production of “Life Begins at 40.” Everyone in the group had moments when they could relate to the characters portrayed.
Sunday morning was spent visiting and taking a walking tour of the neighborhood. The hosting skills of Steve and Carla were stretched to the limit but they came through with flying colors and in a weak moment invited everyone back.
February 5, 1987
BAZAAR AREA NEWS
Several Bazaar men attended an insecticide dinner meeting for farmers held Tuesday evening at St. Anthony Hall in Strong City.
Jim Schwilling visited Mrs. Charles Schwilling last Wednesday and replaced a storm window blown off during the Valentine Day wind storm.
February 25, 1988
On the Town:
From the Life and Opinions of Sam Wood, with Commentary (III)
THE PATCH ON THE FLOOR
This is happening in southwestern Kansas in 1891, June 21, Sunday: the dust rises from the slow revolution of the buggy wheels, and Sam and Margaret ride in silence, and she says finally, Why don’t you talk to me? and he forces a few sentences, falls quiet again, and she asks, Do you think there’ll be trouble in Hugoton?
She is thinking of the long friction, of the time men burned Sam Wood in effigy, of their crossing pistols in saloons and pledging to kill him; she is remembering the Hay Meadow Massacre of his supporters and the subsequent trial that Sam brought to a brilliant conclusion (lecturing the jury for eight hours) only to see the Supreme Court overturn the decision and set the murderers free; and she is remembering his friends in Topeka four days ago telling him not to go to Hugoton (and later she will learn of one man saying, That’s the last we’ll ever see of Sam Wood;) she is thinking of her sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Ephraim Pinkston, entreating Sam last night to stay in Cedar Point rather than let his respect for law get him killed; she remembers his repeated assurance that he doesn’t think there will be trouble but, if there is, he must go anyway because of his bond; and she is remembering his words of a few days ago as they rode the train to Topeka when he said they should settle things and leave Stevens County and return to Chase and start a newspaper in Elmdale (his words then were slow and uncharacteristic: We’re growing old. We need each other. We have to settle down where we can live quietly and be together more). Margaret thinks of these things and of how little money they have, but she too rides on in silence until she must press him about Hugoton and the trumped-up charge of election bribery. He repeats that he will go into town unarmed, go in without the small pistol he customarily carries but has never used, and he speaks of necessity, and then he says, Don’t talk about it. They roll along in the pleasant day (later she will say that the ride seemed through an enchanted land—a garden of Hesperides).
When they reach Woodsdale, the place Sam calls the Emerald City on the Plains, an area he foresees not as a desert but as wheat country, Margaret is already looking to their return to the Cottonwood Valley. The next day neighbors come to visit, and they tell Sam not to go into the courtroom of Judge Theodosius Botkin, who keeps a brace of pistols next to his gavel, uses armed bodyguards, and has survived impeachment on grounds of drunkenness, partisanship, and fraud. The people know that if Botkin can get Sam in jail, a murder is easy to cover over. Sam repeats that he sees no real danger, yet, when a woman asks whether Margaret will go, he says, Yes. If they kill me, I want her there to close my eyes.
Tuesday morning they depart, Sam riding the ten miles in the buggy between Margaret and their housekeeper, Mrs. Carpenter (surely no one will try to shoot between two women), and they arrive in Hugoton (some residents of Woodsdale call it Hogtown) by eleven o’clock. People stare as they pass, and a small boy says, There goes old man Wood. Don’t he know they’re gonna kill him today? and an older girl says, You talk too much. Sam stops at the town windmill to get a cup of cool water and then heads on to the Methodist church being used as a courthouse. Judge Botkin, who holds Sam responsible for his impeachment, hears that Wood has arrived and inexplicably adjourns court until afternoon. Sam enters, looks over the docket. The judge leaves, stepping past James Brennan lounging in the doorway, and Botkin says, Hello, Jimmy, and he walks on toward the buggy and heartily greets Margaret, who has never met him, and heads up the street of little false-front stores. Margaret recognizes Brennan as a deputy from another county and a witness for the Hay Meadow murderers; he wears a black suit, white shirt, and he is in his thirties, dark-complexioned, mustachioed, almost handsome.
Sam comes through the door, passing close to the slouched man whose right hand is concealed to his side, and goes down the wooden stairs and toward his buggy. Brennan waits, then whirls around, draws a pistol, fires once, and hits Wood in the back near the left shoulder. Sam cries out and throws up his arms as if to cover his head and turns from the women and runs as best can a wounded sixty-six-year-old with a built-up shoe and a frame thickened by the years. In the smoke and smell of burned gunpowder, in the calls and screams, Margaret jumps from the buggy and runs, and Brennan is running and firing again, and Sam slows, and the small woman runs to get between them, and the men have half circled the church-courthouse. She once freed her husband from Bogus Jones by jerking the sheriff’s gun from its holster, and she knows it’s up to her now, and the men are around the other side of the church and she hears another shot and she rounds the corner to see Sam against the white wall and Brennan putting the pistol to Sam’s face and firing again. The bullet enters just below his right eye. Then she is there in the acrid smoke between the men, and Sam, gasping blood, falls forward and her thin arms cannot contain him, and his weight bears them both to the ground.
Brennan runs to the street, his second revolver drawn, and a noisy crowd gathers, and in it is Botkin, and Margaret raises one reddened arm to point at the judge whom she knows hired the assassin, and she cries out, He’s the one! But people ignore him and look to Brennan, who shouts, No goddamn man can take me with a gun in his hand and live! and the crowd laughs, and Brennan yells over the noise that he will surrender only to his own sheriff, and Botkin scurries about to arrange for the arrest.
Men carry Sam into the church and lay him on the wooden floor. He has been shot below the heart, in the thigh, and in the face. It is nearly noon. After a lifetime of escapes, Sam, on this morning, will not get away. Margaret closes his eyes but does not get up. She is kneeling in his blood.
/>
Even before the body can be prepared to take to Woodsdale that afternoon, Brennan is again on the street, smirking and talking loud with some men who pay him five hundred dollars for his work. That night in Hugoton, citizens revel, knowing that Sam’s murder is the death of Woodsdale, the Emerald City. Over the next several weeks, the dark stain on the church floor cannot be removed, and as long as it remains there are no services here. Finally, a workman cuts out the blotch and replaces it with a patch. Someone calls it Sam Wood’s marker.
Fifth Commentary Two days later, the funeral cortege, under moonlight, moved twenty miles north toward Ulysses, riding all night long to stop a Santa Fe train to carry Margaret and the casket to Cottonwood Falls. Long obituaries appeared across the country, even in New York and Boston. The next afternoon at the funeral, Sam was there to officiate: Colonel Mackey read a letter from him written five years earlier when Wood thought he would not survive an illness. Sam asked for a quiet funeral without mourning dress or ceremony (none of which he got); among his sentences of a wandering eschatology he said he wished there were a furnace available where his body could be reduced to ashes and dissolve itself into its original elements, and not have to be buried, filling the air with noxious gases, endangering the lives of the living. He wrote of his belief that the dead live on as conscious and distinct entities, and he said, I am with you. I witness your every act. Not missing his last chance to take the stump, he added, I have tried to believe the dogmas of the churches, but the more I have tried and the harder I have investigated, the stronger I am convinced they are not true, but rather a cunningly devised scheme of the priesthood to live on the people. In the conclusion to his long letter, he said, Let ministers and churches quit worrying themselves about the afterlife and go to work and solve the problems of this life. If possible, prepare the people to live here. Sam Wood, albeit by proxy, had taken his final podium and given his last exhortation against public grafters. The choir sang “Shall We Gather at the River?” and then encomium after eulogy after panegyric followed. Finally the procession started for Prairie Grove Cemetery. (A year ago, Sam’s grandson told me: When the casket reached the grave two miles away, the rear of the long procession was still leaving the church.)
Margaret lived on in Chase for nearly thirty years, but all I know of her days after Sam is a small photograph of her sitting in a yard swing with a grandson, her face wistful. Theodosius Botkin and James Brennan never stood trial for the murder, and the judge ended up as a peddler of the Keeley Cure, a fraudulent medical treatment considerably less efficacious than the Botkin Remedy.
Now: the neat and regular road grid of Prairie Grove Cemetery has a single dislocation, a lone jog from perfect straightness; at this disruption is the Sam Wood plot and that jog is another footprint revealing the gait of the man. On his marker in fading letters: With the peace of God around you, sleep old pioneer. Under a big cedar nearby, I occasionally eat lunch and think about Sam’s notion of the other side as a place separated from us only by a thin curtain through which those beyond hear everything, and I remember his Whitmanesque words: I am with you. I witness your every act. Just down the road a half mile is the lake that could not be built in the thirties because some of the laborers would be black, and a few yards away is a nearly markerless section where Chase paupers lie. In the same row as Sam and Margaret and their daughter Dearie (Sam’s inscription on her stone: There is no death. What seems so is transition) lies the boy murdered by George Rose (the only man countians ever lynched), and just west lies Stephen Jones, whose single legacy to Chase is a big ranch, Spring Hill. It is fitting that Sam and Margaret lie in a dark and bloody row between the wealthy and poor.
I’m sitting under the cedar now, sipping something stronger than Sam’s lemonade, and I’m thinking how he seemed to walk faster out of the nineteenth century than his friends and opponents, to walk more directly toward a bigger—if not encompassing—view of humankind that we still cannot quite accept a century later. I’m thinking how life goes these days in Kansas, that staunch outpost of the Republican party Wood helped found (he would deplore its current views). Today, Kansas, born from radical conflict, is a state first to back a war and last to join a revolution, a place once wobbling almost to toppling but now become a land of equipoise, a seeming still point at the center of a revolving nation, a state where movements end rather than begin.
Sam Wood came into Kansas with fire, and from his flames he enkindled light and engendered heat, and when he went out, so did much of that light and heat. He came into the county, marked it indelibly, left it, and returned only to lie in its flinty upland above the Cottonwood. It’s a measure of things today in Kansas that so vital, significant, conspicuous, and peculiar a man has had no published biography other than Margaret’s remarkably literate hagiographie book brought out a few months following his death. Even after a century, despite his being one who builded well a web of meaning to hold the people, he is still suspect in the county: the historical society has not so much as a photograph of him or Margaret on display. Although his life, more than almost anyone else’s, is the story of the state in its first half century—slavery, war, Indian dispossession, white settlement, crusading (and self-serving) journalism, railroads, equal rights, populism—Sam Wood is still too much for Kansas.
XII
WONSEVU
From the Commonplace Book:
Wonsevu
Does landscape enter the blood with the milk?
—Ronald Blythe,
Characters and Their Landscapes (1982)
Made by the same Great Spirit and living in the same land with our brothers, the red men, we consider ourselves as the same family; we wish to live with them as one people, and to cherish their interests as our own.
—Thomas Jefferson,
“To the Miamis, Powtewatamies, and Weeauks” (1802)
[The Indians] will vanish like a vapour from the face of the earth; their very history will be lost in forgetfulness; and “the places that now know them will know them no more forever.” Or if, perchance, some dubious memorial of them should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the poet to people in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns and satyrs and sylvan deities of antiquity. But should he venture upon the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness, should he tell how they were invaded, corrupted, despoiled, driven from their native abodes and the sepulchres of their fathers, hunted like wild beasts about the earth, and sent down with violence and butchery to the grave, posterity will either turn with horror and incredulity from the tale or blush with indignation at the inhumanity of their forefathers
—Washington Irving,
“Traits of Indian Character” (1819)
What the influence of [Indian] contact and intercourse with the European has been, we all know. Where he found them poor, he left them poorer; where one scene of violence and vengeance has been seen, there many have been enacted; where he had found one evil passion, he planted many; where one fell disease had thinned their ranks, he brought those of his blood and land to reap a more abundant harvest. His very gifts were poison: selfish and inconsiderate in his kindness, he was ever bitter in his revenge and anger: he excited the passions of the savage for his own purposes, and when it raged against him, he commenced the work of extermination. He then read that the day of the aboriginal inhabitant of the soil had come and that the white man was destined to take the place of the red, and perhaps he divined well and truly; but he had no right to presume upon it or that he was to be the active instrument in forwarding that mysterious dispensation of God.
The settlement of the various portions of America, with but few exceptions, is equally in the north and the south a foul blot upon Christendom.
—Charles Joseph Latrobe,
The Rambler in North America (1836)
When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when y
our children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. . . . At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love the beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.
—Chief Seattle,
“Address to Governor Isaac Stevens” (1855)
The [Indian-Caucasian] half-breeds, wherever they exist in America, almost universally exhibit a union of the vices of the two races whence they are derived, whilst their corresponding virtues are lost.
As I have looked at the white men with whom the aboriginal tribes have to deal, I have often wondered how any very happy influence upon the Indian character could be anticipated from their companionship and example.
It would be very unfair, however, to charge the United States government with wholesale injustice, or even with neglect, in relation to the native tribes. Equally unfair would it be to bring its agents under a universal censure, as forgetful of the claims of humanity, and grasping only at self-advantage.