In the Quadrangle:
Elk

That many pioneers came into the American West with a pair of horses’ asses directly before them is not a consideration of either historian or ordinary citizen but, so a fellow from Topeka told me one evening in the Strong City café, for a person taking one of the Flint Hills covered-wagon trips occasionally sold to tourists, farting and manuring horse rumps sweating a few feet away will be a significant part of the view from the wagon seat. I struck up a conversation when I saw him underline with purple ink and a pocket ruler a sentence in Kansas History, the journal of the state historical society. He was a civil engineer, squarish and short, a friendly man of pronounced opinions: after he put a good squirt from the plastic lemon into his iced tea and took a sip, he said, I’ll be damned if I couldn’t eat three lemons and pee out a better juice than this. He loved double acrostics and western history, and I think he’d read everything written on the Union Pacific Railroad. I was familiar with his arguments, but I liked his passion for them, especially his vexations about textbooks and professors.

He said, For six generations we’ve given our kids a picture of the American West that’s no better than the dime novels of the 1880s—nationalistic, imperialistic, romantic, and distorted till hell won’t have it. Indians are either ruthless, conniving savages or noble stiffs. Pioneer men are two-fisted and upright, their women prairie madonnas. The railroads are quaint pufferbellies with lovely little whistles, tooty-toot. And what is probably the most recognizable scene of western history—two armed men facing off on a dusty street—if that ever happened, there isn’t one single reliable record of it. The past we believe in is fabrication. We’re informed idiots about it. The truth is, white settlers were motivated to come out here not for noble endsbut self-serving, economic ones. At their worst, pioneers were genocidal and environmental exploiters encouraged by a grasping and moronic and inhumane government. And the inheritance continues.

He had got himself exercised, and I’m afraid I abetted it when I asked whether I might jot down a few of his words. He waved his hand in what seemed to be assent and said, The white conquest was inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we have to perpetrate lies on our children. They’ll understand themselves, and the threats they live under, if they can see their ancestors honestly. We harm their futures by throwing bull chips in their eyes.

When his steak dinner arrived he kept talking, seeing the ready audience I was, although he choked once and had to pause. Projectiles of food now and then rocketed from his mouth onto me as he continued more to lecture than to swallow. He didn’t blame movies, television, or popular novels for the distortions so much as a couple of generations of American historians who let the public get by with myths. Look, these historians—they were almost all white males—they were more interested in theories than in how the butt of a horse changes the way you see things or why a certain carbine would jam and change the outcome of a battle. They were nothing more than medieval theologians deductively proving their ideas. What they gave us belongs in a Buffalo Bill Wild West show.

He stopped to ask what I was writing down, and I complimented him on his insight and he continued, but not before snorting a particle of pickled beet onto my sleeve. When I took that covered-wagon tour a couple of years ago, one passenger was a history prof back east, a nice guy in Hush Puppies, lots of information, but he couldn’t tell a sycamore from a cottonwood, hadn’t the least idea of what kind of tree to cut a wagon axle out of. He wasn’t exactly sure what an ox is. He didn’t know how to make hominy, hadn’t ever skinned a squirrel or milked a cow—and he got paid fifty thousand a year to tell college kids about the West. A woman, an outspoken gal, asked him what the wagon-train pioneers used for toilet paper and sanitary napkins. Now I’d call that basic knowledge. He didn’t know. If you’d put him in a homesteader’s cabin alone, he’d die in a month. But he told us every theory of the American frontier ever concocted.

After the waitress took away his plate, I asked him how his steak was; and he said, I had meatloaf, and went off again, pausing only once to pick something from a tooth (I thought, if he orders the coconut cream pie I’m moving to the next stool). He said he was glad to see a younger generation of historians working to break down nationalistic and racist and sexist myths of the West by looking at ordinary details of life and then trying to interpret them inductively. Then, But I still haven’t read anything about the realities of riding in a covered wagon for days, where you’ve got a pair of crapping butt ends in your face the whole way.

He spoke about writing an account of his trip, how it changed his perception of our history and the kind of people he descended from; the title was, so he claimed, “Fair History and Farting Horses: Fundaments and Fundamentals of Our Western Passage.” When I wrote that down he said, just so you’ll know, I’ve copyrighted it. I asked to read his essay when he finished it, but I’ve never heard from him. He continued over coffee, now taking on Kansas railroad barons, but his commentary was less heated and interesting, although it later helped me see something in the Elk quadrangle I otherwise might have overlooked.

At forty square miles—the smallest of the twelve quads—Elk has a single westward-running road that follows Middle Creek before splitting off north and south to follow two polar-trending small tributaries, Stribby and Wildcat creeks. The entire northern half, but for a single section, is without roads, and this isolated corner is a lovely reach of hollows and narrow vales dissecting the knobby land. It is a place mostly of pasturage, a good quad for getting the feel of tall prairie even if it is a bit chewed over. Because of its isolation and negligible population, much of its history has never been passed along and recorded in the Falls, the county hearth for storytelling. If you had a handful of half-dollars, you would today have enough to give one to every resident of the Elk quad. But, for about fifty years there was a village here, or at least the seeds of one, directly atop the county line so that on one side of the main street Henry Collett’s general merchandise and post office sat in Chase but his blacksmith shop across the road was in Marion. Such bifurcation rarely benefits a community, and this split, dividing affairs as it did, was not good for Elk. There were never more than a dozen buildings, and nearly all of them, one by one, went down in flames (the last two, as if to close an era neatly, burned on New Year’s Eve of 1930); all that you’ll see today is a strip of big Osage-orange hedge along a dirt lane. When Whitt Laughridge first pointed out the site to me and said, That’s Elk, I asked, looking right at it, Where? and I walked through the brush and still couldn’t find it; later he showed me a couple of photographs of the village.

Two miles east stand the only aboveground remnants: Balch school, a fine one-room stone building (now a hay barn, the standard use here for old schoolhouses), and little Elk Cemetery, one of the prettiest in the county.

Born in London, Henry Collett, whose ancestors followed William the Conqueror into England, came into the county exactly 799 years later and walked around to find a good piece of untaken land; nine years afterward he opened a store next to his house and received a postal commission, which established the necessity for people to come into his shop. He named the settlement not for any long-gone animal but to be brief: the government required rural postmasters to cancel letters by writing the name of the post office across them; not for him the endless scrawling out some fifteen-letter town name. Collett was an astute businessman, and he made a profit from Elk, and the enterprises he set up gave a hub—a heart—to the American and German immigrants homesteading along upper Middle Creek: Collett’s Gen. Mdse, and P. O. became the nexus of their lives, the single spot they all visited, the one center everyone shared. To this forum of economic and social exchange women carried barnyard and garden surplus (eggs, butter, turnips), and men brought field surplus (wheat, oats, com). In cash-poor Elk, almost everything ran on barter. The store gave a focus of allegiance to settlers from seventeen states and seven nations and helped form them into a community where cooperation could mediate differences in language and culture.

(Digression, this from an old countian: just after World War One, when the area began declining, there was a closed-up church Elktonians used only for yuletide programs and Memorial Day services. At Christmas, a skinny Santa Claus would laugh into the small room and give six-year-old boys twenty-cent penknives and twelve-year-olds West Bend pocket watches that the boys were almost afraid to accept because of the cost: a dollar and a half, nearly two days’ wages. The big cedar Christmas tree would always be left standing until practices for the Memorial Day service, when the farm children would slip behind it to pick off and eat the dusty, strung ornaments—popcorn, animal crackers—but leave the shriveled cranberries. Even after parents scolded them and threw the tree over the back fence, the children would sneak out, scare sparrows off the cedar, and again eat the decorations.)

On the north bank of Middle Creek, Collett built an icehouse, and anyone who helped cut out blocks in winter could draw a free ration in summer. His blacksmith shop would shoe an animal or fix an implement in the same day a farmer brought it in, this speed often the difference between getting a crop planted or harvested in time. Elk was the invention and expression of Henry Collett, and as his success went so did the community’s progress, but, even had he lived a second life, his shrewdness could not have kept the village from dying, situated as it was in a pinfold of federal land policies, legislation that created a kind of serfdom that to this day still binds many countians. What the Cottonwood in flood did to valley towns, federal land policy did to this upland village.

Whites who entered Chase in its first half-dozen years of settlement were largely free to take whatever acreage they chose, deferring only to someone’s earlier claim, but the people who arrived after the Homestead Act of 1862 were limited to a quarter-section—160 acres—of free land they could gain patent to by building a permanent residence of specified minimal size and living in it for five continuous years (Horace Greeley wrote of one land speculator who tried to qualify by putting up a purple-martin birdhouse and reporting its dimensions as eighteen-by-twenty but leaving the agent to presume the feet.)

Most county bottomland had been claimed by 1870 through preemption or homesteading, and, to this day, valley farms are rarely more than quarter-sections. Settlers of the 1870s not only had to take their farming to the more precarious uplands but also to contend with land grants given the Santa Fe and the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas (the Katy) railroads as a kind of federal subsidy for building lines into the West. (A benefit of this program—for the county—is that it got a railroad without being long encumbered by rail bonds.) The two companies received title to thirty-eight percent of Chase, more than any other county in the Flint Hills, most of it uplands: the railroads received the odd-numbered sections, each a mile square, thereby leaving homesteaders the even-numbered pieces; around Elk the settlement pattern became a checkerboard of unconnected plots, railroads taking the black squares, homesteaders the red. Even for the rare settler who had money enough, land was hard to buy because railroad realty agents preferred selling here to big land speculators or ranching syndicates that would buy thousands of acres at a time. The people of Elk were largely locked into forty- and eighty-acre plots adequate only for subsistence farming. Young men, other than eldest sons, found it nearly impossible either to stay on the homeplace or buy neighboring land, and the consequent social disruption was serious: suddenly, the constricted rural Germany or New England that so many immigrants had come here to escape was again upon them and their generations.

At first the population around Collett’s general merchandise grew and prospered—four one-room schools, a creamery, an annual neighborhood fair—and then things began to decline, partly because of irresponsible management of the shallow upland soils. There was something else: the Santa Fe and Katy finally sold two big parcels, up till then freely used as pasturage by farmers: one went to the Eastern Land and Loan Company, speculators who profiteered off railroad grants during the recession of the 1890s, commonly through lending farmers money and then foreclosing or through buying up mortgages on the cheap at sheriff’s auctions. The other large parcel went to a British ranching syndicate, the Western Land and Cattle Company, headed by three men (one was the travel writer Sir William Tyrone Power, son of the Irish actor, and another Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days). The English sent their sons into the county as part of the young men’s practical education. A newspaperman and former countian, Jay House, in the thirties wrote (with some exaggeration, I suspect): Younger sons of British aristocracy were as thick around Cottonwood Falls as bass in South Fork. The county actually boasted of two or three British titles [and the] invasion had a distinct influence on the speech, intonation, and nomenclature of the county.

People near Elk found themselves increasingly boxed in by absentee landlords whose main interest was to turn big profits, somethmg that encouraged their buying up farmsteads. People north of Elk ended up being completely encircled by the syndicates and having to get permission to cross into the village. The British acreage, eventually comprising about twenty percent of Chase, evolved into the Diamond Ranch, named after the major creek watering it, the outflow of the renowned spring a few miles north on the old Santa Fe Trail. The ranch grew to thirty-five thousand acres before the famous 101 Ranch of Oklahoma bought it in 1900. Later, outcounty Kansans purchased it and broke it into three pieces, and, to this day, nearly all of the land in the Elk quadrangle belongs to people living in cities. The largest landowner here—and in Chase—is a Texas widow whose holdings derive through her husband directly from one of the speculators of the Eastern Land and Loan Company; she owns twenty-eight square miles, nearly four percent of the county, but her ties to Chase are merely those of her local lawyer in Cottonwood. (Enclosing a letter of introduction from her Falls banker, I wrote her to ask for an interview but she returned my request with one typed sentence telling me she would not be available and did not wish to discuss her family or properties.)

Realty agent Whitt Laughridge believes nearly three quarters of the county now belongs to nonresidents, a percentage still increasing, and he says much of Chase has not for even a single day been owned by a resident. Although some of these absentees care for nothing more than the rental income, while others oversee the land with better husbandry than some natives, virtually all of the absentees take their profits out of Chase to invest elsewhere. Owners who hire local hands and buy materials in the county do, of course, make a small contribution, but the range-cattle business is neither labor- nor material-intensive: a few cowhands and salt blocks can never support Chase.

These alien landlords have little interest in the survival of county towns, condition of its roads, quality of its schools, or the acumen and honesty of its officials. Absentee dominance in this agricultural place makes it almost certain that many citizens will never be anything more than manual laborers who will live and die as hired hands, with chances for economic improvement hardly better than those of southern sharecroppers of another time. For this reason, it seems to me, making big money here is the one sin countians are slow to forgive. The nature of this landownership ulcerates the lives of many hard-working people with an insidious jealousy often turning into a meanness of spirit, an infection that gnaws at hospitality, friendship, and their sense of community; and, unquestionably, nineteenth-century federal land policies still drive out their children, especially ones with energy and imagination.

To the homesteaders who came here looking for relief from the economic and social restrictions of Europe or eastern America, such a crimping of expectations and possibilities would be depressing and bitterly ironic in this grandly open land. Surely they would curse the great Jeffersonian grid—so cage-like when seen from above or on a county plat—that has helped bring about the effectual vassalage of several hundred of their descendants in a result quite the opposite from what Jefferson had in mind when he wrote (for example): Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people. . . . Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue.

When I was in my last months of walking around Chase County, the federal government threatened to work another permutation on landownership around Elk, a turning of the wheel to bring it full circle. On the fifth of April, 1990, countians were stunned to read this headline in the Leader-News:

 

ARMY EYES CHASE FOR FT. RILEY EXPANSION.

 

The fort, forty miles north, is the old cavalry post where George Custer was second in command in 1867, and from it in 1890 rode the Seventh Cavalry on their way to kill two hundred Indians, half of them women and children, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. A monument on the post describes the slaughter as an unfortunate incident.

Today, Fort Riley is primarily an artillery and tank training ground. The current proposal calls for the army, either here or at one of three other sites, to take by eminent domain more than eighty-two thousand acres for maneuvers by tracked vehicles. Thirty-six square miles of northwestern Chase may go under the tread of tanks.

Countians and other Flint Hills people, but not many absentee landlords, organized and wrote letters and editorials (a headline: HOME, HOME ON THE FIRING RANGE), their opposition virtually unanimous—if you exclude the right-wing Kansas Grassroots Association which sees a greater threat in placing a national historic monument at the Spring Hill Ranch. To many residents, the idea of turning food-producing land into a target range was insane; but, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, many came to believe that the real future enemy of mankind was not a hammer-and-sickle soldier but a horseman called famine. The political changes in Eastern Europe in 1990 buoyed them as they saw the death of the Cold War serving to protect their prairie from tracked vehicles. But then George Bush and his industrial colleagues led America into Arabian sands, in part, some people thought, to establish a new need for tanks and weapons.

What land profiteers and railroads and foreign syndicates could not quite accomplish in Elk during the first century and a half of white settlement—the removal of people—the army now proposes to do with panzer divisions. If these Rommels of the tall prairie succeed, citizens believe, you can just about kiss goodbye the good life in Chase County. In only six generations, the history of Elk will have gone from horse fundaments to howitzer muzzles.