A Kansas Memory Podcast

Searching for "heroic stuff in my mould:" John James Ingalls in Kansas Territory

The documents used in the John Ingalls podcast are available on Earlier Kansas Memory podcasts used documents from Territorial Kansas Online: A Virtual Repository for Territorial Kansas History, 1854-1861.

• Letter, J.J.I.[John James Ingalls] to Dear Father [Elias T. Ingalls]
  October 5, 1858
  On his first full day in Sumner, Ingalls penned a second letter to his father to convey his first impressions of "that Promised Land." The reality Ingalls found and described was quite different than what was depicted in "the lithographic fiction" he had been shown back East. Other than the hotel, the "city" was composed of a "few log huts and miserable cabins . . . None of the premises are fenced," wrote Ingalls, "the whole place being open to the incursions of dogs and pigs which exist in large numbers and seem in fact to constitute the greater amount of the population." Virtually everything about the place distressed Ingalls, who was "quite unable to convey to you any definite idea of the disappointment, not unmingled with anger and mortification with which I contemplate the State of affairs here."
• Letter, J.J.I.[John James Ingalls to Dear Father [Elias T. Ingalls
  October 24, 1858
  After nearly two weeks in the territory, Ingalls was somewhat more optimistic about his prospects, and in this letter to his father, Elias Ingalls, John Ingalls wrote of the gold rush and his legal business, which "opens very well." but he was still weary of "social conditions," as there were no churches in Sumner and "a total disregard of the Sabbath." Atchison, where he had gone in a futile search for an Episcopal Church, was little better in this regard.
• Letter, J.J.I.[John James Ingalls] to to Dear Father
  November 21, 1858
  Much of this interesting letter, dated November 21, 1858, from Sumner, describes the Ingalls law practice and the nature of a "frontier" court proceedings that often attracted "nearly all the population." According to Ingalls, "the chief difficulty arising [in the courts came] from the conflict of the two Codes, adopted by two hostile legislatures, each of which had adherents who call the other 'bogus.'" Ingalls also discussed the business of land sales, as something many successfully combine with the practice of law.