He was a man who was quite determined when he had his mind made up.
—Minnie Wallace Walkup (1885)
At age forty-eight, James Reeves Walkup, a large man with large appetites, had already worn out two wives. He stood six feet, two inches tall, weighed well over two hundred pounds, and was what one might call “rough around the edges.” Walkup ate, drank, smoked, and fornicated to excess, frequently visiting both black and white houses of prostitution and also indulging in sexual liaisons with women he encountered in his neighborhood and on his many business trips. His friend Eben Baldwin euphemistically called him “vigorous.”1
If two separate physicians in Emporia can be believed (and they divulged this information only reluctantly and under oath), Walkup not only had a sexually transmitted disease himself (gonorrhea), once in 1883 and again in May 1885, but had twice employed these doctors to treat prostitutes for STDs as well.2 And it was no secret that he was a frequent visitor at the home of Mrs. Lina Burnett, a divorcée fifteen years his junior with three children, who once lived on the same street as the Walkups (Merchants Street). Now that she had moved to Topeka, he was visiting her there, too.3
Despite his sexual proclivities, the more salacious of which were hidden from his fellow Emporians, Walkup was well-respected and enormously successful. A Civil War veteran, he had made money in West Virginia coal mines before moving with his family to Kansas in 1867. There, he took up farming and later moved into the city of Emporia, where he became a contractor for the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe and the Missouri & Pacific Railroad companies, engaged primarily in figuring out the taxes along the routes that touched public highways. Walkup was not the only railroad contractor in the state of Kansas, but he was definitely at the top of the list. He also owned a 160-acre farm outside Emporia, had recently entered into a partnership for the sale of wood and coal, and was active in buying and selling grocery stores.4
Benevolent fraternities were popular in the nineteenth century, and Walkup belonged to two of them: the Knights of Honor and the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW). And he was politically involved in the government of Emporia as well, holding office as city councilman from the First Ward and being elected president of that council. As president, he was also acting mayor whenever Mayor Nelson Whittlesey was away. Later, he would be appointed by Governor Martin to be a delegate at the River Improvement convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Vigorous” sums up his working and public lives as well. The man never seemed to slow down.
Walkup had first married back in West Virginia, and when his wife Annie died a few short months after giving birth to their first child, William, in 1857, he waited exactly one year and then married Welsh-born Hannah Maddock. Their daughter Martha (called “Mattie”) came along in 1861, followed by Elizabeth Ann (“Libbie” or “Lizzie”) in 1866. In Kansas, Walkup had Hannah and the girls working hard for his various enterprises, primarily cooking for the men who worked for him on the railroad and keeping the books. When Hannah died in May 1884 at age forty-three, probably from cancer, there were many in Emporia who felt she had been worked to death.5
Now, a mere seven months after Hannah’s death, James Walkup was on his way to New Orleans, ostensibly to see the World’s Fair, but also to indulge himself in the city’s legendary brothels.6 Consciously or unconsciously, he chose as his traveling companion the very man who would do his best to keep him out of trouble: Eben Baldwin, a forty-three-year-old farmer who had a large spread near Lawrence, Kansas. The two had been friends for almost ten years.
On December 16, 1884—the day the Cotton Exposition opened in New Orleans—Walkup and Baldwin boarded an Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe train for Kansas City, then took a Missouri & Pacific train to St. Louis (Walkup’s passage was probably free because of his employment with both companies). There, they would take the Anchor Line boat Baton Rouge into New Orleans, by way of Memphis. The Baton Rouge was scheduled to leave St. Louis at 5:00 A.M. but did not depart until noon. The two men strolled around St. Louis, and Walkup took advantage of the delay to get a prescription filled. Although Baldwin was with him in the drugstore, he wasn’t close enough to see exactly what the medicine was. He would later wish that he had been.7
It would take them nearly two weeks to reach New Orleans, and somewhere between Cairo, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee—about a week into the trip—Walkup became quite ill with vomiting and stomach pains that came and went. Baldwin could do nothing for him but bring water and help him change his position in the bed. There was a doctor on board the boat, but Walkup refused to let Baldwin send for him, saying he had experienced this illness before, knew what it was, and was confident it would soon abate. During this time, he was taking the medicine he had purchased in St. Louis, which Baldwin blamed for the terrible smell of his urine in that very close space. (“It was so bad it would nearly drive you out of the room,” he said later.)
This went on for two full days, until Walkup had a bowel movement at the end of the second day. From that point on, he was completely fine. He told Baldwin that these bouts were caused by excessive smoking, but the more likely cause of the problem, one that would account for the intermittent pain in the lower stomach, the vomiting, and the foul-smelling urine, was kidney stones.8
On board the Baton Rouge was a man named Green from Jacksonville, Illinois, whom neither Baldwin nor Walkup knew, but when he found out the two men were also headed for the World’s Fair, he recommended the boardinghouse where he would be staying, run by a Mrs. Elizabeth Wallace. Green had a letter of introduction to her from a former boarder and instructions to the house at 222 Canal Street.
They arrived in New Orleans a few days after Christmas: Sunday, December 28. Instead of going to Mrs. Wallace’s, however, Walkup and Baldwin went first to a lodging house. Given the propensities of both men, what probably really happened here is that Walkup wanted to stay somewhere a little more anonymous and a little less respectable than the Wallace place was represented to be. But when Baldwin saw how seedy the lodging house was, he insisted they go elsewhere. To the Wallaces’ they went, then.9
Until he met Minnie Wallace later that evening, James Walkup was probably secretly cursing Eben Baldwin for making him leave the comfort of the lodging house. The Wallace boardinghouse was very cramped, with six men assigned to the same room and Walkup and Baldwin sharing a bed. But when Baldwin introduced his friend Jim to fifteen-year-old Minnie Wallace that first night (Baldwin had met her first, so would properly do the honors here), Walkup was clearly smitten right from the start. He found himself babbling about nonsense, about birds, about whatever came into his head—as long as this adorable creature would consent to stay and talk with him. He found out she played the piano and got her to play for him, with her sister, Dora, singing in accompaniment.
The very next morning, Walkup approached Mrs. Wallace and told her he was in love with her daughter and wanted to marry her. She just laughed at him. “Minnie has many such admirers,” she told him. But Walkup—who never took “no” for an answer—would not give up. Every time he saw Minnie, he corralled her for a private talk, something no well-brought-up young lady of that era should have tolerated.
Eben Baldwin was becoming alarmed. Although he himself was spending most of his days at the Exposition, he did not think Jim was. His friend was drinking quite a bit, hanging out at the brothels in the neighborhood of the Wallace house, and becoming more and more indiscreet regarding this young girl. For example, because she said she liked birds, Walkup got Willie Willis to go with him to the local bird fancier’s and pick out a canary for Minnie. To make it appear more legitimate, he also bought a parrot for his daughter Libbie (who was three years older than Minnie).
Baldwin resolved to get Walkup away from the Wallace house as soon as he could, before he did something completely rash, such as marry Minnie, a totally unsuitable match, given their ages. It did not appear to Eben that either Minnie or her mother was pressing this match in any way or acting inappropriately, but Minnie’s own version reveals a flirtatious attitude on her part that did more to tease Walkup than discourage him: For example, when he told her he wanted to marry her, instead of turning him down, she kept him dangling by saying she’d never thought of marriage before.
About five or six days into their stay, Walkup encountered Minnie on the stairs. He was quite drunk at this time, although neither Minnie nor her mother ever acknowledged that fact, as it might appear that they were taking advantage of him.
“I was just coming downstairs to look for you,” he told her.
“Were you?” she answered coyly. “What did you want to say?”
“I wanted to ask if I might write to you. I’ll write the first letter. I will not be able to live away from you.”
Again, instead of nipping it in the bud, Minnie mused aloud about never having corresponded with a man before and not knowing the proprieties of it. The two of them went to Elizabeth Wallace, who immediately squelched that scheme. But Walkup insisted and, in order to get her to relent, said he would write to her instead, and she could pass the letters on to Minnie after reading them first. Elizabeth said that would be acceptable, and Walkup was beside himself with joy—although, as it turned out, there were only a few token letters to Mrs. Wallace after that, with the remainder of a somewhat voluminous correspondence (at least on Walkup’s side) being conducted directly between the two parties.
Eben Baldwin had heard the conversation on the stairs and knew that his friend Jim was fairly deep in his cups. He had to get him away and did so that afternoon. And so, six days after their arrival in New Orleans, the two men headed back to Emporia, Kansas, one hoping he could convince a fifteen-year-old to be his third wife, and the other hoping that the Midwest air of reality would blow away the spell cast on his friend by the encounter in New Orleans. They got back to Emporia on January 12, two days before Minnie’s sixteenth birthday.
But James Walkup did not forget his little Minnie. He was completely besotted with her and—according to her, anyway—found it difficult to concentrate on his work. (Minnie was given to lavish quotations wherein Walkup tended to gush over her, but it’s hard to imagine this hardheaded businessman doing that, so she was probably embellishing.) He wrote to her frequently, constantly asking her to consent to marry him. He wanted her to meet his daughter Libbie, who still lived at home (Mattie had gotten married in 1882) and arranged to bring her to New Orleans that April, along with a friend of the Walkup family, Mrs. Nettie Fisher. When they showed up at the Wallace doorstep, Walkup said that Libbie and Mrs. Fisher wanted to see the fair.
There followed a week of walks, visits to the fair (all with Dora and Edward Findlay, their five-year-old son Milton, and Mrs. Wallace), and more private conversations all over the house. Walkup offered Mrs. Wallace $4,000 if she would let Minnie marry him. “There is no flesh and blood sold now,” she replied. “If my daughter likes you, she will take you.”
Finally, the desperate man aimed his bribery at Minnie: “Look here,” he told her, “your mother works hard, your brother-in-law doesn’t have very much money, and your cousin Willie hasn’t had a chance to go to school. If you marry me, I’ll buy your mother a house and she will never have to work again. I have five or six enterprises and your brother-in-law can take his pick of them. And I’ll send Willie to school.” Minnie would admit later, “That pleased me very much.”
Walkup returned to Emporia, but on May 16, he was back in New Orleans to press his suit again. Minnie, more kindly disposed toward him because of his promises to take care of her family and his constant representations of how wealthy he was, conditionally agreed to a wedding in New Orleans in October—the condition being that she and her mother were to see the Emporia setup for themselves first. They decided on a July trip. Mrs. Wallace wanted to visit her sick sister in Cincinnati, so they would go first to Emporia and then on to Ohio.
In the end, young Milton Findlay went along, too. Dora was seven months pregnant, and Willie had his job as assistant record clerk at the district court (procured for him by Judge Houston), so they stayed behind, as did Edward Findlay. But before they left, Minnie wrote to James Walkup and teased him with, “When I come [in July], I may stay. How do you like that?” It looked as if she was wangling for an earlier wedding than October.10
A benign interpretation of all this would be that presented by Elizabeth Wallace, that she did not intend to allow her daughter to go off to a strange land with a strange man without assuring herself that Minnie would be well cared for. Discretion would seem to dictate this. An unkind view, however—and there were many of these over the next several months—had the Wallaces, mère et fille, embarking on a scouting party to make sure that James Walkup was as wealthy as he claimed he was.
Despite Walkup’s shortcomings, he seems to have been very generous: he paid for the Wallaces’ travel expenses, met them at the boat in St. Louis and brought them to Emporia, purchased (on spec as a wedding present, to be returned if Minnie refused him) a horse and buggy for Minnie to ride about in, and squired them all around the county. Minnie saw what she had come to see and agreed to marry James Walkup, who was so excited, he sat down and wrote a letter to Edward Findlay: “Minnie has said ‘yes!’”11
Now that James Walkup had what he wanted (and he usually got what he wanted), he pressed his advantage. “I can’t wait until October,” he told his bride-to-be. “Let’s get married now, here, in the Methodist church.” Minnie claimed she told him she wanted to be married in New Orleans, where her friends could attend—but there was that letter, inconveniently kept by Walkup, wherein she hinted she would not be averse to an earlier marriage, and one in Emporia, at that.
Elizabeth Wallace at first refused to agree to the moving up of the wedding, especially since it was not to take place in New Orleans. But Walkup was insistent, so she finally agreed to it, if it could be done in Cincinnati so she could visit her sick sister and at least have some family in attendance. Walkup agreed but imposed his rather formidable will once again, insisting that the marriage be performed by a Methodist minister, even though the Wallaces were Episcopalians.
And so it was settled: Minnie, her mother, and little Milton were to go to Cincinnati, and James Walkup was to follow with Libbie as soon as he took care of some business.