In the Quadrangle:
Fox Creek

If you’ve ever put an ax to a black-walnut log, you know how the wood splits suddenly, seems to leap apart as if looking for release, and you know how the cleaving follows a gentle and slight humping away from the perfectly straight so that there’s only a decurving regularity. Fox Creek divides this quadrangle into east and west rather evenly, with only the easy deviations that you find in split walnut, a tree common in these vales. State route 177, paralleling here the old Kaw Trail, follows the stream from the north county line, near where the Indian agency once stood, to where the highway crosses U.S. 50 at Strong City a mile and a half from the bottom of the quadrangle, which the Cottonwood River demarks. Other than 177, the roads lie along the river valley and leave the hills above Fox Creek a place of a few ranch trails and lone slopes of prairie chickens and coyotes: you can walk farther in a cardinal direction without encountering a road here than any other place in the county. And north of the Cottonwood, even on a stormy Tuesday night, you’d likely find more people along the quiet highway than in the few Fox Creek homes, all of them solitary ranches. On the fifty-some square miles above the river, only a couple of dozen people live, yet several of the most notable ranches lie along the creek and its tributaries, and chief among them is the Z Bar, now the center of another land-use fight. North a half mile, on a hill above the highway and in splendid isolation, as if it were some old aerial cargo that had slipped its restraints and fallen onto the blankness, is Fox Creek School, a one-room, cut-limestone building of 1882, the bell tower set so cleanly against the sky and the silhouette so archetypically native that it has become an emblem of prairie America. Its quintessential shape and location have even made travelers think it a reproduction: you’ve seen it in your imagination.

The first white man to build a dwelling in the county—Seth Hays, trader to Indians and outfitter to the Santa Fe Trail—sent a Kaw down from Council Grove along Diamond Creek in 1854 to find some good winter pasture for his trail oxen; the Kaw found it just below the junction of the creek with the Cottonwood near a ford long used by Indians. This first improvement (so the citizens call farm structures) was the cabin of Hays’ overseer; today, what remains is but a nearly imperceptible hump in a bottom bean field just southeast of where the Superior branch of the Santa Fe line intersects highway 50, a junction called Neva Crossing. In 1937, George Washington Starkey, the farmer and antiquarian of whom I’ve spoken, numbered the worn logs, dismantled and hauled them to the park in the Falls, and reassembled the sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cabin. In time it fell into disrepair, and some citizens took it down and piled it by the rail line to await money for restoration; but a track fire got it first (I’ve heard that members of the city council, finding the thing more an eyesore than the oldest building in the county, set the blaze, but I don’t believe it).

When Seth Hays, great-grandson of Daniel Boone, ran his cattle station here, Chase was part of a now nonexistent county named after Henry Alexander Wise, the dueling, cursing, slaveholding governor of Virginia who closed his term in 1859 by hanging John Brown at the very time Lincoln was campaigning in Kansas. As sectional unrest moved across the eastern part of the state, counties named by the pro-slavery “Bogus Legislature” (its statutes were later fired out of a cannon into the Missouri River) began shedding place names associated with the southern cause. Although Brown was at his fanatical bloodiest in Kansas, where he supervised the hacking to death of five pro-slavery settlers seventy-five miles east of here, he was, and to some extent still is, an honored figure in the state for his unyielding attempts to provoke emancipation. To local abolitionists like Samuel Newitt Wood, a settler and lawyer from Ohio who printed the first newspaper here in 1859 under a cottonwood tree near the falls, the Virginia governor’s action constituted defamation of a grand cause; that year, through the work of Wood, the southern half of Wise County joined with a northern piece of Butler County to become Chase County.

A distant relation by marriage of Wood, Salmon Portland Chase, Lincoln’s frequent rival as well as his secretary of the treasury (and, later, chief justice), began his career in Cincinnati. He was an ardent supporter of Kansas Free Soilers, a lawyer who defended so many fugitive slaves that opponents called him the attorney-general for runaway negroes. He was counsel to John Van Zandt, the original of Kentuckian John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the whilom slaveholder who frees his blacks, buys land for them in Ohio and then turns his farm into a stop on the underground railroad, sits back on his porch, and enjoys his conscience. In a confrontation made coincidentally peculiar by the county names, it was Governor Salmon Chase who responded to Henry Wise when the Virginian threatened to invade Ohio to thwart purported attempts to break John Brown out of jail after his raid on Harpers Ferry. And it was Chase, despite his belief that the Emancipation Proclamation was too weak, who wrote the last paragraph of it, the one calling for men to judge the action. He was such a vigorous and eminent opponent of slavery (later a proponent of Negro suffrage) that anti-Lincoln groups put him forward for president. As chief justice presiding over the court of impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Chase probably saved the president by insisting on proper judicial procedure. He helped preserve the Union through his intelligent work as secretary of the treasury, and he originated the national banking system, organized what is now the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to help finance the Civil War, and it was he who modified a phrase from the fourth stanza of Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” and put it on American coins: “In God We Trust.” A friend named the Chase National Bank, now the Chase Manhattan and the second largest in the country, after him. Yet the legacy of Salmon Chase has no more popular currency here today—not even in the historical society—than the ten thousand dollar bill bearing his portrait. In a county he never saw, that ignorance is sad, since it’s the only one in the nation named for him.

It was along Fox Creek, a decade after the Civil War, that Sam Wood’s daughter-in-law, Zilphia (a descendant of Roger Williams), one morning heard a scratching on her cabin door. She looked through a chink in the logs to see a Kaw warrior called White Eyes, a man she knew the army was offering a reward for. Food, especially meat, was so scarce she had nothing to share. Although she was alone, she was afraid not to open the door. White Eyes asked to “borrow” a knife, and she handed over her biggest one and stepped back. He looked at it, rubbed a finger against the dull edge, looked at her, said nothing, and left. Some weeks later, hearing a thump outside, she frantically figured what to do, but there was no place to hide. She unlatched the door but something heavy lay against it. The small woman leaned into it, the door slowly opening, until she saw blood on the threshold. Cautiously, she peeked out, and there lay a freshly killed deer, and thrust in it was her sharpened butcher knife.

A few mornings ago, not far from where Zilphia Wood lived, I found along the road a slender cottonwood sapling that a highway crew had slashed back and forced into an elbow, and I cut and trimmed it into a walking stick. For months I’d been hunting the right shape and dimension of cottonwood, that tree of life the Plains Indians made into sacred staffs. I stepped off a few paces to test the stick in the hills, and it felt so right in the hand, swung forward so truly, and so pleasingly balanced me like an outrigger that I kept walking until I ended up down along Fox Creek, where much prairie life exists narrowly in the bottoms. Things lay still and silent: had the rocky plates of the earth’s surface shifted a millimeter, I’d have heard the grinding. Then a fulvous shadow moved toward the stream, and I froze and waited expectantly to see my first fox in the county, and I thought how fine it was that even yet the truth of a name could linger on. Then a bronze shape emerged, a coyote slipping from the brush to drink. There was no fox. (A few days afterward, I learned the creek carries not the name of an animal but of an early settler, Edward Fox, who stayed here only two years.) I sat down, disappointed, and whittled on the walking stick, and my thought wandered off and ended up on Flora Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1949:

My father kept his books in two cases flanking the fireplace. Among the volumes on torts and liens, covenants and contracts, was a Harvard Classics edition of Aesop’s Fables, and another book, thick and forest green, full of pictures: American Wild Life Illustrated, a WPA compilation sponsored by Fiorello La Guardia and filled with arcana about, says the introduction, “those forms of life which at some stage in their development possess a notochord,” a thing human beings lose before leaving the womb. My father explained notochords to me in a way that let me see the brotherness in the Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox stories. Once past the preface of American Wild Life, a nine-year-old can follow along, as I often did cross-legged on the floor in front of the shelves, sometimes the fireplace warming me. This book, which I still have, led me toward certain attitudes and away from others. It was almost an Aesop itself—minus the morals but not without an ethic. I read how a fox will shake pursuing hounds by running along a stone wall, or by crossing a freshly fertilized field, or by jumping onto the back of a sheep for a ride that will break the trail of its glandular-scented feet, and how a fox will test thin ice before moving out to the center to lie circled in its insulating tail while the heavy hounds break through into the cold water. And there was this paragraph:

 

The fox shows its true genius in ridding itself of fleas. Taking a stick in its mouth, the fox submerges slowly in a pool of water. As it sinks, the fleas move upward to drier regions. When only the wood remains above the surface, the fleas desert the sinking fox to take refuge on the raft. Thereupon the fox releases the stick, leaving the fleas to their fate.

 

For people who like to dichotomize the world, here’s mine about woods folk: houndsmen or foxmen. The image of Reynard riding smartly away on a ram’s back left me long ago on the side of wildness over domestication in whatever forms.

But the reality of foxness remained for me a thing of words until one morning in 1949 when a friend of my mother came to visit wearing a fox stole, its eyes stuck shut as if in an afternoon doze, and I found myself in one of those childish muddles of repulsion and fascination as if the woman were Medusa herself. While the adults talked, I crept into the bedroom and pulled the skinned fox from the piled coats, and I was surprised by its sad weightlessness and its opened and varnished mouth. In caution, I stroked its glossy back, then curled the stole under the bed and stuffed a dust bunny between its rows of small, fierce teeth. It was this last act that got me into trouble: my mother tolerated the covert protest, but she didn’t let pass an embarrassment to her housekeeping.