Kansas Territorial
Sesquicentennial Commission

Week of June 6 - 12, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On June 7th, the St. Joseph Gazette mentioned cholera, a subject newspapers were loathe to discuss. Nine Clay Countians had died. The same week, troops just out of Fort Leavenworth were "brought to a halt by the cholera, which raged rather fiercely for some days." On the trail in Nebraska Territory near the Platte, Anna Goodell recorded the number of graves she passed each day, four on the 6th.

Cholera, a cyclical plague, had been epidemic in the United States since 1848. Often called Asiatic cholera, the bacterial disease of the small intestine creates toxins that cause an overwhelming imbalance between natural functions of absorption and secretion. Proteins stimulating secretion cause cells to draw fluid from the blood, which thickens. Symptoms include acute abdominal and muscle pain, blood pressure drop, blue extremities, skin that loses its elasticity, vomiting, excruciating diarrhea and sudden death. Victims who appear well at breakfast are dead by dinnertime.

Cholera has a high mortality rate, killing up to 70 percent of those infected. Fortunately, cholera has a low morbidity rate. Many who are exposed are resistant, possibly due to high gastric acid levels. Cholera is generally spread through contaminated water, although the bacteria can live in food. The disease thrived among travelers living close together with their improvised latrines. Riverboats, wagon trains and boomtowns were as dangerous as city slums. Cholera still claims many lives around the world. Today's mortality rate is about 11%, with rehydration using glucose and saline solutions effective treatment.

In the 1850s, cholera's cause and cure were unknown. Kansan Sara Robinson, opined on the source. "Drinking stagnant water in the river's bed" and a "sad want of personal cleanliness" were close to the truth. But she also believed spicy foods and general overindulgence stimulated the system, decrying the Missouri diet ---"meats with rich gravies, pastries, cakes, jellies, ices..Can any stomach bear a mingling together of all these?...One man went on to one of the boats with a large bunch of radishes in his hand. The captain warned him, it being the cholera season." We can imagine his sad end. The radishes may have killed him, but rather than the spicy taste, the bacteria in their bath water did the deed.

At cholera's first appearance in Europe, people abandoned cities in panic, a reason governments often denied an outbreak. By 1854, however, Americans calmly accepted its annual reappearance. Anna Goodell's June trail diary is full of descriptions of death. "We have come up to the Ebey camp. They are stopping on account of a sick man. He was taken this morning cramping..That man is dead, he died about 5 o'clock..There is another man just taken cramping but I guess he will get over it."

A correspondent to the New York Times, writing on the 10th from Salt Creek Trading House, a few miles west of Leavenworth, reported that Mormon emigrants camped nearby had a few cases. The same day, settlers meeting at the trading post formed a self-regulatory organization, a people's court to register land claims. Immigration was proceeding faster than the federal bureaucracy in Salt Creek Valley where Isaac Cody squatted during the spring. Cody was one of a "Vigilance Committee" of 13 men appointed to decide inevitable land disputes. Over the next few weeks, 50 settlers a day registered claims in the organization's ledger. Among their resolutions was one stating "slavery already exist[s] in the territory." The organization recommended slaveholders "introduce their property as fast as possible." Free-soilers who might want to settle in the area were warned abolitionists would be afforded no protection. (600)

The attachment this week is a 20th century cartoon depicting cholera's devastating effects.

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Louise Barry, "Kansas Before 1854: A Revised Annals," Kansas Historical Quarterly VXXX, 1964, Pg. 207.

Anna Maria Goodell, "Vermillion Wagon Train Diaries, 1854." Kenneth L. Holmes, editor. Covered Wagon Women, Volume 7, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) June 20th, 1854. Pg. 105.
Sara T.D. Robinson, Kansas; Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: 1856) Pp. 118-119.

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Week of June 13 - 19, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

Mid-June, the Excel steamed up the Kaw for its seventh trip of the season. Aboard was George S. Park, editor of the Parkville Industrial Luminary. Park invested heavily in the Missouri River town of Parkville, where he'd purchased the land, surveyed the lots and boosted the city as a gateway to the new territory. Platte County was Missouri's second largest county and the heart of Senator David Atchison's proslavery support, but Park's politics lay with the free-soilers. He further allied himself with New England when the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society published his description of the Kansas River journey later in the year.

Park noted which areas were still held by tribes. "The balance of the vast regions, drained by the Kansas river and its tributaries are now open for settlement, and will soon arrest the attention of the enterprising settlers." Looking north into the Delaware reserve he saw "high rich bottoms extending for many miles.vast thickets of grape-vines, pea-vines, raspberries, and paw-paws. The timber was principally oak, walnut, ash, hickory, mulberry, hackberry, linden, cottonwood and coffee-bean." Timber grew increasing scarce as the boat chugged west, however. Beyond what is now Lawrence "the prairie undulates gradually back from the river as far as the eye can reach."

The rolling landscape that Park described, the eastern edge of the American prairie, was a novelty, a vista tourists felt compelled to see. Twelve years earlier, novelist Charles Dickens was unimpressed by a minor prairie near the Ohio River. "Now a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing. [but the] prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived ideas.the excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame." Another European, mapmaker Charles Preuss, kept a diary on his trip through what would be called eastern Kansas with John C. Fremont: "Eternal prairie and grass, with occasional groups of trees. Fremont prefers this to every other landscape. To me it is as if some one would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story."

The Excel stopped beyond what is now Topeka at an "Indian wood yard. Fifteen cords of wood were taken on board, for which was paid the sum of $37.50. This is a new employment, as well as a profitable one for the red men; and the owners promised to have fifteen or twenty cords more ready by the time the steamer returned." Steamboats ran on wood, far more than they could carry aboard, so entrepreneurs cleared timber from riverbanks. Such employment could only be short lived on the prairie. Did anyone wonder how long the fuel would last when the Kaw filled with steamboats?

The river never became the commercial waterway boosters hoped. The June excursion was the Excel's last trip, but fuel wasn't the major problem. The river was too shallow except during the short rainy seasons spring and fall. By the end of the decade, newcomer John J. Ingalls explained the Kansas River to his family in the east. "It looks prettily on the map as you will see by referring to the atlas hanging in the front hall at home, but unfortunately that stream is only navigable by catfish, [and] by them only at certain seasons of the year." (532)

The attachment this week is a photo of a reproduction stern wheeler navigating shallow water.

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Organization, Object and Plan of Operations of the Emigrant Aid Company (Boston: 1854) Pp. 9-19.
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Reprint, Vermont: Everyman, 1997) Diary entry, April 16, 1842, Pg. 322-323.
Charles Preuss, Exploring with Fremont (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958) Diary entry, June 12, 1842, Pg 5.
John Ingalls, "The Sumner Years," Kansas Historical Quarterly Letter, March 15, 1859. Pg. 432.

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Week of June 20 - 26, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

By the 20th of June, settlers had given the name Leavenworth to a town platted on Delaware land just south of Fort Leavenworth. Officers from the fort were among the signers of the Leavenworth Association agreement, implying the Army would ignore tribal rights to the land. Another infant town along the Missouri River was begun when, according to The St. Joseph Gazette, "a large and respectable concourse of the citizens of Kansas Territory" met at Million's Ferry about fifteen miles north of Weston. They eventually organized a prospective city named for Missouri Senator David Atchison. Towns sprouting along the eastern border often adopted the Salt Creek Resolutions, aligning themselves with Missouri's slave economy and declaring abolitionists unwelcome.

In Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Northern Division of the Worcester County Anti-Slavery Society held a meeting addressed by Lucy Stone on the afternoon of the 24th. Stone, among the most effective of the lecturers employed by the anti-slavery societies, lectured for abolition during the week, for women's rights on her own time on weekends. A female lecturer was controversial no matter what the topic. A few months earlier the Fitchburg Sentinel had printed an item: "Miss Lucy Stone realize[s] $100 per night above expenses..Who says that strong-mindedness doesn't pay."

Fitchburg was home to a relative of sorts, her brother's brother-in-law, thrice over. Lucy's brother, minister Bowman Stone married three Robinson sisters in succession, wedding a younger woman in the family after each wife's death. Dr. Charles Robinson and Lucy Stone were thus related by marriage as well as by political principle. Robinson, who'd been elected to the California Legislature in his days as a forty-niner, was meeting in the spring with Eli Thayer about Kansas emigration. Thayer's enthusiasm convinced Robinson to emigrate as an agent of the company. Robinson had knowledge of the territory, having spent a few weeks in Westport and ridden across the corner of Kansas on the overland route to the California gold fields. Long interested in reform and abolition, he'd earned a reputation as a man known to act on his principles. His tenure as a California Assemblyman had been short due to the fact that he was elected from a jail cell, awaiting trial for inciting a Sacramento squatters' revolt. Sev eral men died in the violence, including the Mayor. Although California eventually dropped his case, he had not lingered long in the state.

In Weston, Missouri, Richard C. S. Brown arrived from Van Buren, Arkansas, to cross into the Kansas Territory and assume his new duties as Indian Agent to the Potawatomi. Brown's charge was to facilitate the tribe's transition to a smaller reserve as the Kansas Territory filled with white settlers. But Brown never made it to Kansas. On the 21st, he died of cholera in his Weston hotel room. Cholera continued to rage along the Missouri River in June with fatalities on the steamers Sam Cloon and Clara, in the Missouri towns of Independence, St. Joseph, Westport, and into the territory at settlements at Bull Creek and Wakarusa. (500)

The attachment is an illustration of speaker Lucy Stone in the reform dress known as Bloomers (named for Amelia Bloomer, another advocate of comfortable and practical dress for women.) Many women traveling west adopted some combination of the short skirt/trousers costume. Hoop skirts dragging through the mud inspired radicalism even in the occasional conservative woman.

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Louise Barry, "Kansas Before 1854: A Revised Annals," Kansas Historical Quarterly VXXX, 1964, Pp. 209-210.
Fitchburg Sentinel, Feb 10, 1854.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin & Co., 1898) Pg. 326.
National Intelligencer, June 22, 1854, Pg. 3.
Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (New York: Harper & Bros., 1892)

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Week of June 27 - July 3, 1854 (2004)

By Barbara Brackman

On June 29th, the Pierce administration commissioned a governor for the new Kansas Territory, lawyer Andrew H. Reeder of Easton, Pennsylvania. Reeder, who'd never held public office; seems to have had three major qualifications. One was strong support for the Democratic Party; two, a belief in Douglas's concept of squatter sovereignty, and three, backing from Pennsylvania Congressman Asa Packer. Reeder's appointment appears to be Packer's payoff for his vote for Douglas's Kansas Nebraska Act.

The following day, the Senate confirmed Reeder's appointment and that of a territorial secretary, plus a Kansas justice system, which included three judges, a U.S. Marshal and a District Attorney. Of the seven appointees, three were Northerners, four Southern. Their annual salaries ranged from $2,000 to $2,500, a substantial sum at a time when, for example, Texan Margaret Houston paid her housemaid $96 a year. Those in the know understood that federal appointments could provide opportunities for other kinds of advancement. Appointees might benefit from land speculation, shipping and building contracts---any transaction involving political power or inside knowledge.

The facts of American political life in the decades before the Civil Service Act of 1883 confounded outsiders such as German Carl Schurz. In the days following the Kansas Nebraska act, he learned about the "spoils system" from a cynical newspaperman who explained the distribution of patronage, "public plunder." Congressmen, Governors, the President were occupied with obtaining "post-offices and government clerkships and consulates and Indian agencies for the party hacks and his personal hangers-on."

The development of two new territories with the potential for patronage jobs must have flooded Washington waiting rooms. Senator Sam Houston was among those who had complained about the constant stream. "I am harassed out of all patience," he wrote wife Margaret, "and pulled so, by applicants for office, that I am afraid to be seen out of my room or in the avenue." Houston also complained to Margaret on June 27th of Franklin Pierce. "The President poor fellow, as a man has sunk below contempt, and does not merit even pity..Every thing which I predicted, on the passage of the Nebraska Bill is daily transpiring."

While Reeder's political career was on the rise due to passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, others tumbled. In Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, Congressman James H. Lane wrote an open letter to his constituents, placing a "card" in the newspapers announcing that ill health caused him to withdraw his name from re-election to a second term in the United States House of Representatives. (400)

The attachment is a picture of Sam Houston wearing his usual broadbrimmed hat. Houston was known for eccentric dress, often wearing a vest of wildcat fur. His personality and his clothing came to define the Texan.

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William E. Connelley, Kansas Territorial Governors (Topeka, Crane & Company) Pg. 18.
Madge Thornall Roberts, The Personal Correspondence of Sam Houston (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2001) Letters dated March 26th, 1853, June 27, 1854, June 5, 1856. pp 60-61, 146, 220-221.
Carl Schurz, The Autobiography of Carl Schurz (New York: Scribner's, 1961) pg 113-114.

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