In the Quadrangle:
Gladstone

Now, three miles south of Saffordville: I’m walking in the Gladstone quadrangle, some seventy square miles of grassland, draws, and hollows devoid of roadways but for those at its perimeter and the Bloody Creek Road, which follows the wooded stream to a dead end in the heart of the rectangle (even before the first settlers here saw their children finish school, seven men had been murdered on Bloody Creek). The South Fork bounds the western side of the quadrangle, and Jacobs’ Creek nicks the northeastern comer, and along this fluvial notching, and in a smaller strip farther south on the Verdigris River, lie the most ancient things of substance in Chase County—260-million-year-old shales and limestones, strata formed when the seven continents lay as one.

The Gladstone area today is nearly all rangeland, a place where I sometimes must stop my car on the rock roads to let pass approaching Hereford and Angus and crossbreeds moved by mounted pasturemen, the animals pressing against the car, their flanks rubbing doors and fenders clean, gently rocking me inside as they bellow at who knows what. Nearly all things in the quadrangle lie within sight of the most distinctive natural feature in the county, Jacobs’ Mound; even though it is several feet lower than knobs a few miles south, its abrupt rise from a rolling plain and its isolation and symmetry have made it the best landmark around. The first settlers and wagon freighters sighted on it as a coastal pilot would a sea stack, but no one other than a cowboy or hunter has navigated by it for years, and the travelers on Interstate 35, that open-air tunnel from Lake Superior to the Rio Grande, ignore it, if they even see it, preferring to rely on green signs and concrete strips.

I’m walking along Jacobs’ Creek—clear water and mellow riffles over a stone-broken bed that bends every twenty yards like a small and maddened viper and cuts a course under redbud, burr oak, walnut, hickory. It is quiet and alluring today, a New England brook, but like other things here, its nature is most mutable; it has several faces, and it can turn a new one on you suddenly. Gabriel Jacobs, born in Pennsylvania, came to the Hills in 1856 from Indiana. His biographer, with only slight exaggeration, wrote in the Chase County Historical Sketches: As far as is known, no white man had ever set foot on this rock- and grass-bound place before the Jacobs family settled here. Gabriel, drawn west by his son, was an old man when he arrived, but he lived long enough to build a log house in the rich land by the creek, and he fielded a couple of good harvests before the great “drouth” (the local pronunciation) of 1859 and 1860, when the Cottonwood River ran dry, did him in. He was a Dunkard preacher, and the creek vale became a settlement of followers named for their full-immersion baptisms but better known for their practice of mutual foot washing. The Dunkers eventually lost the county to the less damp but more practical Methodists. An old resident wrote: They just preached themselves out. We could not stand it. Some of their sermons were three hours long. The Methodists here also watched disappear the Soul Sleepers, a sect believing that the spirit was a mortal substance slumbering within the body, like a woodchuck in winter, until the noise of the resurrection would awaken it. The log schoolhouse and its stone and frame successors that these sects shared with the Baptists and Presbyterians have fallen or been scavenged for later bams, while the old chimneys and foundations lie hidden in rock fences. The Jacobs’ Creek community, known today as Grandview, shows itself only in a county-line cemetery and a few incidents in the Historical Sketches, where a later resident of Gabriel’s cabin tells of the partition between rooms that her mother brightened up with pages of the Emporia News: from that wall young Josephine Makemson learned to read.

And, in the Sketches, Helen Austin writes this about an 1885 cloudburst: By ten o’clock it was raining hard. The sound filled our little house. Water poured off the roof and ran over the yard like oil. By eleven o’clock the muddy water from the creek was spread ing over the fields. It made a roaring noise as it ate away the furrows. Ben Jacobs, Gabriel’s grandson, living along the creek near the ford, got his brother, Will, and loaded his wife and two children into the mule wagon and started fast for higher ground across the creek, usually no wider than a half-dozen tall men lying head to toe. At the crossing Ben looked up the creek and saw what he’d never seen before, a wall of violent, muddy water, waves rolling over and over, higher than the ears of his mules. The uproar hit the wagon and capsized it and flushed the little family toward the Cottonwood River. Ben caught hold of a limb, and Will snatched up the boy and held him above the brown swirl and suck until he could climb into a tree, but the creek pulled Mattie and her baby on north. By three o’clock the sky blew clear, the stream fell back to size, and Ben went down along the creek and climbed the slick banks to hunt his wife and child. Just before dusk, in a field he found a small, lumpen shape, and under a coverlet of soft mud lay his daughter, her nose and eyes stoppered with earth. She was drowned. Hoping for a miracle, he kept searching for Mattie. Three days later, on the bottom of the creek carrying his family name, he found her, the flesh already defiled, her torn and beslimed dress snagged on a sunken limb. From then on, they say, Ben was here and there, mostly living away from the county. His end was the reverse of what he’d found along his stream: in 1901, he died in a prairie fire.

And it was on Jacobs’ Creek where Josephine Makemson, four years after she learned her letters from a papered wall, received something rare in the hard land: a new dress, white and trimmed in lace, to wear to Sunday school and church and to other happy places. She was nine, and in the next few months she watched die her cousin of diphtheria, her eldest brother from blood poisoning after he cut himself recovering his hatchet from the creek, and an uncle from a spinal injury. When she was seventy-five, Josephine wrote: The little white dress after being worn to three funerals no longer was a joy to me. It was just a sad little dress, and I could not be happy in it again.

It was north of where the creek makes its east turn out of the county, close to where I’m walking, that the wife of Gabriel’s grandson often allowed their six-month-old boy to go in the arms of an admiring Kansa woman across the Cottonwood to the Indian camp where she would care for him half the day. One afternoon Mrs. Jacobs learned that her son would not be returning until the Indians received in exchange a particularly fine rooster. It was purely business.

The creek-bottom community, even in its isolation, was a stop on the underground railroad. One escaped slave, Charlie, last name unknown, arrived and made a reputation as a wizard of the fiddle, and he played so exuberantly for all the dances around that a free black man warned him, They’ll get you sure if you don’t stay at home. You better keep quiet beins you got no free papers if you don’t want to go back to slavery. One day Moses Jacobs, Gabriel’s son, brought word that a Missouri slave owner named, of all things, Freeman, was on the creek and hunting Charlie. The fiddleman hid in that old frontier-prairie refuge, a cornfield, and a woman delayed Freeman and asked him whether he wasn’t ashamed to be chasing a poor colored boy, and the Missourian admitted, yes, but couldn’t help himself. That night, the Haworths, a white family, rigged Charlie up in a dress, shawl, and veiled sunbonnet, and Moses Jacobs took him by buggy to the next fugitive station, and that was the last they heard from the wizard of the fiddle.

Once in a while I hear Kansans congratulate themselves on the part the state played in ending American slavery, and it’s true that Bleeding Kansas earned its epithet over that issue, and it’s also fact that a century later one of the most important pieces of litigation in the civil rights movement began sixty miles northeast of here: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. But the full truth is more convoluted. Countians, at the time Gabriel Jacobs’ sons were helping escaped slaves, voted against a statewide amendment to extend suffrage to blacks—in Chase it lost by three votes and women’s suffrage by seven—and both amendments lost across the state. At that time, the county Republicans, supporters of Lincoln, passed several resolutions; this is one:

 

We urge upon Congress the propriety of purchasing Sonora [Mexico] or some other suitable Territory for the purpose of settling the negroes of this country with a view to the entire separation of the races.

 

Sam Wood, who named the county, an abolitionist of whom I’ll tell you more, believed in this idea: wishing to see a people free is not the same thing as wanting to see them equal.

When Charlie disappeared in Mrs. Haworth’s dress and sunbonnet, when Kansas was bleeding and the house dividing, there arrived in Lawrence, seventy-five miles northeast, Thomas Gladstone, an English journalist and a kinsman of Queen Victoria’s four-time prime minister, Sir William. Thomas reached Lawrence in 1856, the day after the first sack of the town by pro-slavery ruffians (a euphemism) and the day before John Brown and his sons retaliated by slashing to death five men on Pottawatomie Creek, the two signal events in the Border War. Young Gladstone traveled the northeast corner of the state for several weeks and then returned east to write his powerful reports that were quickly published as a book called The Englishman in Kansas, or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare. One historian claimed that Gladstone’s pen helped make Kansas free. I can’t say nobody in Chase County has ever read the book—if a copy exists here today—but I do say I’ve not found anyone who’s heard of it, and I’ve found nobody who knows that Gladstone, Kansas, once a collection of a few homes and a school seven miles from Jacobs’ Creek, was probably named for Thomas.

The settlement never had a post office or any official recognition beyond the sign that the Santa Fe Railroad put up by the stockpens, and today it’s nothing more than two widely separated houses along perpendicular roads that join at the tracks, where the old marker still says GLADSTONE, a place the trainmen call Happy Rock. Now the history of the quadrangle is hardly more than pentimento, little more than the earthen circles near where Jacobs’ Creek meets the Cottonwood—the circles that seasonally reappear when the new grass comes up to reveal where the Kansa camped—and the old stories of the hollow and its creek that seemed to take people one way or another (a stream that gave life and exacted it) have not much more presence than the fairy rings that crop up overnight on the lawns of the countians.