The streets clanged with the noisy spurs of Texas cow boys and Mexican ranchmen, while the crowds that marched along the resounding sidewalks, were as motley as could be seen at any one spot in America. Texan sombreros and leather leggins; brigandish-looking velvet jackets, with bright buttons, close together, of the Mexicans, buckskin garments of the frontiersmen, and the highly-colored blanket; representatives from a half dozen different tribes of Indians, were familiar sights on the streets.1
—WILLIAM G. CUTLER
CATHERINE MCCARTY, HER two sons, and William Antrim, most likely carrying all they owned in a horse-drawn wagon, arrived in Kansas in the summer of 1870. They settled about two hundred miles southwest of Kansas City in Wichita, an infant prairie village named for an Indian tribe. The federal census recorded in late June of that year showed 607 people living in newly formed Sedgwick County, but the newcomers from Indiana did not surface in time to be counted.2 Wichita clearly was growing, a railroad town through which millions of cattle passed as they were transported north for butchering. Here Billy first saw both the commerce and carnage involved in the cattle business. It was to be the backdrop of his life in the years to come.
Until they could secure permanent quarters, odds are the foursome, like many new settlers, found provisional digs in the two-story frame Empire House, at the time Wichita’s lone hotel.3 As soon as they shook off the trail dust, the family surely realized that they were a long way from Indiana in more ways than distance.
Wichita was a rough-and-tumble place surrounded by an endless sea of grass that had long been the domain of Indians, buffalo hunters, and fur traders. It was not a milieu for the faint of heart. Folks in Wichita enjoyed pointing out to greenhorns that back in the bygone times of 1860, a mere ten or so years before, Osage tribesmen on a hunting expedition had murdered one of the first white residents in the area. A search party of twenty resolute horsemen scoured the prairie, but all they ever found of the missing man was a booted human leg and a severed head for his widow to bury.4
During the Civil War a trading post was established near the future site of Wichita. A few years later Jesse Chisholm, a half-breed Cherokee and an adopted member of the Wichita tribe, settled in the area for a time and marked a path that turned into a choice route for cattle drivers bringing up great herds of longhorns from Texas to the Kansas beef markets. It soon became known first as Chisholm’s trail and later as the Chisholm Trail.5 In fact, newspapers of the 1870s abounded with tales of the crusty Chisholm, but young Henry McCarty did not get a chance to meet him. The pioneer trailblazer had died on the North Fork of the Canadian River in Indian Territory in 1868 after eating bear grease contaminated by a melted brass kettle.6
Still, there were plenty of other colorful characters and nomads congregated in Wichita. A boy could take his pick from an assortment of soldiers, bullwhackers, sodbusters, renegades, Indians, wolf and buffalo hunters, misfits, scouts, and some of the rowdiest drovers ever to mount a pony. Retribution for wrongdoing was swift, brutal, and often dispensed by persons other than law officers. Just a few weeks before Henry and his family arrived in Sedgwick County, a vigilante posse chased down a pair of hapless horse thieves and straightaway lynched them from a cottonwood limb.7
There were few amenities in the settlement. For a dime fee, foot passengers boarded a glorified raft to cross the Arkansas. Indians ferried their families on tub-shaped bullboats, each made from a single buffalo hide.8 Crude boardwalks flanked streets thick with mud or layers of dust depending on the weather. Water for drinking and cooking or the occasional bath was hauled from springs, shallow wells, and cisterns.
William “Dutch Bill” Greiffenstein, a pioneer Indian trader who later served as mayor for a couple of terms, built the town’s first two-story house on South Water Street near the river crossing, while most citizens lived in dugouts or crude wooden cabins.9 Because of the scarcity of wood and the cost of coal, dried buffalo and cattle manure known as chips served as fuel. Cottonwood sprouts pulled from the riverbanks were planted to replace trees destroyed by the many prairie fires. Rattlesnakes and wolves were common. Winters were brutal, and summer temperatures ungodly. Come springtime, tornadoes were a constant threat.
At the time Catherine McCarty and her boys moved to Kansas, the extermination of the great herds of bison in the surrounding prairies and across the high plains was at its height. Catfish and carp from the rivers, prairie chickens, venison, rabbits, and buffalo hump, at four cents per pound, were customary fare at Wichita supper tables. Buffalo hides were pegged out to dry all over town, penetrating the air with their feral odor. Bits of putrid meat clinging to the shaggy skins and great piles of horse dung attracted enormous swarms of pesky blue-bottle flies.10
The town had more grime than grace although a few attempts were made to tend to practical matters such as education. Wichita’s first school, an abandoned army dugout made of cottonwood logs and sod, opened in the winter of 1869–1870. Indian lodges could be seen in the distance. William Finn, who arrived in Wichita just as the Civil War was ending, was the first schoolmaster hired for a salary of forty-five dollars a month. Finn had to get his pupils’ books from distant Topeka, and he paid for them from his own pocket. At the close of the first term he was in so much debt that he quit teaching and became a surveyor.11
There is no record of the McCarty brothers attending school in Wichita, but it would seem they became streetwise, for better or for worse, during the fourteen months they roamed the town’s dirt avenues.12 In an 1881 column, Colonel Marshall M. Murdock, founding editor of the Wichita Weekly Eagle, briefly recalled the former resident who became the Kid. Murdock wrote that “many of the early settlers remember him as a street gamin in the days of longhorns.”13
While her sons grew accustomed to life on the frontier, Catherine McCarty, with ample help from her friend William Antrim, set out to make a go of it in her adopted hometown. Jobs for women, even for schoolmarms and domestics, were especially scarce in small towns. Unless a woman was wealthy, in which case she did not need to work, or had a working husband, she had few choices. Even respectable women, unable to support themselves and their families through other means, often ended up taking employment at dance halls or brothels. That was not the case, however, with the self-reliant widow McCarty, who had grand plans for her family’s future. “This was, remember, at a time when the women in Wichita came in one of two varieties: either the settlers’ wives and merchants’ ladies who lived east of the river, or the buffalo girls who danced by the light of the moon to the west of it,” writes historian Frederick Nolan. “She [Catherine] clearly intended to be something more than just another farmer’s wife.”14
Catherine, who probably had little formal schooling, promptly made her presence known in town. On July 21, 1870, less than a month after arriving in Wichita, she was one of 124 citizens who signed a petition that was presented to Probate Judge Reuben Riggs calling for the incorporation of the town.15 Catherine was the only woman to sign the document that helped make Wichita an official municipality. She is believed to have attended the first meeting of the city board of trustees in McAdams Hall the following day right along with the menfolks.16
However she had earned a living back East, Catherine’s entrepreneurial bent blossomed in frontier Wichita. She quickly opened a hand laundry service in a two-story building on North Main Street with enough room upstairs to house herself and her two boys comfortably. Mindful of the perceived impropriety of a couple’s living together out of wedlock, Antrim filed on a quarter section of land just six miles northeast of Wichita. On August 1, 1870, he moved into a snug frame house he had built and began cultivation of a five-acre plot.17
As they watched the laundry business take off, both Catherine and Antrim snapped up parcels of real estate. Numerous entries in Sedgwick County records of property purchases made by Catherine include the purchase of a vacant lot on Chisholm (later Market) Street. At the same time, Antrim obtained title to neighboring lots as well as to the property on which the laundry was located, a tract that he later deeded over to Catherine.18 “All of these entries, indicating modestly extensive holdings in what was then the very hub and center of the village’s business district,” observes author Waldo Koop, “give an entirely different view of the legendary picture of an impoverished widow barely able to make ends meet for a family of two growing boys.”19
Located in the heart of Wichita’s up-and-coming business district, Catherine’s City Laundry attracted a steady stream of customers from the start. The laundry did well enough to merit mention in the March 15, 1871, inaugural edition of the Wichita Tribune:
The City laundry is kept by Mrs. McCarty,
To whom we recommend those
Who wish to have their linen made clean20
Only ten days after the plug for her laundry business appeared in the newspaper, Catherine traveled to nearby Augusta, the seat of Butler County. She presented herself at the United States Land Office and filed claim on a quarter section in Sedgwick County adjoining Antrim’s land.21 In support of her claim, Antrim submitted a sworn statement attesting to Catherine’s qualifications. The document reads in part: “I have known Catherine McCarty for 6 years last past; that she is a single woman over the age of twenty-one years, the head of a family consisting of two children, a citizen of the United States, and a bona fide settler upon the foregoing described land, which she seeks to purchase….”22
The deposition also reveals that the McCarty family had moved out of the city and had been living on the claim since March 4, three weeks before the filing date.23 Antrim, with some help from the boys, had built the family a cabin that was “12 by 14 feet, 1 story high, board roof, 1 door and 2 windows.” The sale of the quarter section was approved, and Catherine paid $1.25 per acre or a total of $200 cash for her land.24
She and the boys cultivated seven acres and set out fifty-seven fruit trees. They took comfort knowing they had a decent water well and an outdoor cellar covered with earth and timbers that could be used for storage and for protection from sudden storms and killer twisters. They enclosed the large plot of land with split rails and also put in long rows of bois d’arc trees.25 Better known as osage oranges, the spiny hedges served as a windbreak and were commonly used as fencing before the advent of barbed wire. In late summer Henry and Josie could pick juicy sand plums along the creek and riverbanks while Catherine and Antrim enjoyed sips of sweet wine made from wild elderberries.
By moving her young boys to a rural setting, Catherine no doubt hoped to shield them from the sordidness that proliferated in the more woolly center of the city. Indeed, the settlement was fast becoming a haven for the lawless elements, an unending procession of gamblers, painted prostitutes, con artists, bushwhackers, and man-killers who flocked to Kansas cow towns.
High crimes and misdemeanors had become commonplace in the town. This was particularly true at Main and Douglas, not far from Catherine’s laundry. Lawabiding folks considered Keno Corner, named after the popular game of chance, the wildest spot in Wichita. There large numbers of Texas drovers, taking a break from the rigors of the cattle trail, congregated to gamble, carouse, and swill hard liquor from sunrise to midnight.26 To attract customers to the gambling dens, a brass band on a two-story platform serenaded visitors from morning until far into the night. Chaos and violence inevitably erupted.
“It was a seething humanity that has never been paralleled to the present day,” according to a historical vignette in the Wichita Eagle in 2004. “Day and night this sweltering corner was lined on either side by unbroken rows of cow ponies tethered to the hitching rails. Horse corrals were filled to overflowing. Flimsy hotels were sleeping six and eight cattlemen to the room. Along the old board walks from saloon to gambling house, to dance hall, to stores and back to saloons again, roamed hundreds of Texas men, in sombreros, chap and high-heeled boots, looking for recreation and excitement.”27
It was a setting that caused any mother worthy of the name concern for the welfare of her children. That would have had to include Catherine McCarty, who, after only a year of living on the frontier, might have asked herself if she had made the right decision.