From the collections at the Leavenworth County Historical Society and Museum. Reprinted with permission from The Leavenworth County Historical Society and Museum and the Leavenworth Times. Donated by Debra Graden.

Widow of Anthony Dies

Link With Early Day Leavenworth Is Broken

Going to Kansas in 1864, She Spent Exciting Life as Wife of Stormy Figure of the Town.

Kansas City Star, October 21, 1930. Leavenworth, Kas., Oct. 21.

A woman whose life was coincident with the turbulent and dramatic history of early day Leavenworth, a period in which her husband was the fiery central character, died today in California. She was Mrs. Anna E. Anthony, widow of the late Col. Daniel Read Anthony. She died, at the age of 86, at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Maud Koehler, widow of the late Col. L. M. Koehler of the regular army, in Los Angeles.

Mrs. Anthony had survived her husband nearly twenty-six years and since his death had spent most of her time in California. She was one of the trustees under the will of Colonel Anthony, which left the estate to the children of D. R. Anthony, jr.

To Leavenworth in 1864.

Like her husband, Mrs. Anthony was a native of Massachusetts, having been born at Edgartown, the daughter of a ship owner. She was married to Colonel Anthony amid the exciting days of the Civil War, in 1864, and came to Leavenworth to make her home. She found herself projected into scenes far more turbulent than any she had witnessed in her girlhood in the quiet little New England town where she was born.

Her husband of the 7th Kansas cavalry, in the first part of the Civil War, was back in Leavenworth, serving as mayor of the city. He had come to Kansas as one of those patriotic abolitionists sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, with the firm purpose of preventing Kansas from becoming a slave state. A short time later he returned to Rochester, N. Y., the family home at that time, but was so inoculated with the Kansas fever that he set out again to settle in the territory and chose Leavenworth as the place.

Wife of a Stormy Figure.

From that time until his death in November, 1904, "Old Dan" Anthony was a stormy figure in Leavenworth and Kansas affairs. His enemies shot at him, they tried to mob him, he fought bitter political battles; he was violent in his hatreds and impetuous in his acts. Through all the years of his life, the colonel was respected--and feared. At first the young wife of the doughty colonel must have lived in fear that she would not see her husband alive again when he had left their home each day for work. But as time went by she undoubtedly became accustomed to the excitement of being the wife of a newspaper editor who was always prepared to defend his vitriolic editorials with a pistol. However, he had some narrow escapes. One time he was shot by W. W. Embry after a political quarrel. The bullet passed through an artery in the chest, and he would have bled to death in a short time; but, according to the story as related by some of those associated with the colonel at that time, a Leavenworth doctor stopped the flow of blood by holding a finger against the broken artery until Anthony reached the hospital. Relays of nurses continued this unique treatment until the artery healed and Anthony was on the road to recovery. The doctor is said to have received a suite of rooms in the Leavenworth Times building free of rent for the remainder of his life.

Foes Suffer a Fright.

One incident came even closer to Mrs. Anthony, but had a humorous ending. The colonel was engaged at the time in particularly savage political argument wit the editor of a rival newspaper, the Chronicle, and neither minced words in references to each other. One day Mrs. Anthony and her daughter, Maud, were out riding in the family carriage when the horses ran away. Word reached the colonel and he dashed out of the Times office, down the street on a dead run in the direction of the Chronicle office. The editor of that paper, some of his employees and friends were standing in front of the building. When they saw Anthony running toward them, they thought he was coming to shoot hem all. There was a mad scramble back through the Chronicle office to get out a rear door.

Hoped To Be Governor.

It is said of Colonel Anthony that his greatest political ambition was to become governor of Kansas. But he was defeated in that aim and never was elected to an office higher than that of mayor of Lawrence. Mrs. Anthony lived to see her son, Daniel Reed Anthony, jr., elected to congress and advance to what is perhaps the most powerful individual position in the house of representatives, that of chairman of the ways and means committee, from which he was forced to resign after only a few months' service, at the height of his career, by illness.

Mrs. Anthony is survived, besides the son and daughter, by two grandchildren, D. R. Anthony III and Mrs. Donald Sawtelle, wife of a lieutenant in the army. There is a greatgrandchild, D. R. Anthony the fourth. One daughter died while very young, and another, Miss Susan B. Anthony, jr., so named for her famous aunt, pioneer woman's suffrage leader, met death in a tragic manner while on a skating party, drowning under the ice after it had broken. Funeral services for Mrs. Anthony will be held here Saturday afternoon.