The History of the Early Settlement of Norton County, Kansas

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received an average of 38 votes of a total of 108: Representative, Thomas Beaumont; county treasurer, Ben Butler; county clerk, Charles Stowell; clerk district court, Chas Bender; register of deeds, G. W. Cole; sheriff. Jim Kenyon; coroner, Vic Clark; commissioner second district, Sol Marsh.

A great many of the streams in this county were named by the early settlers from incidents that transpired upon them.  Wild Cat Creek, a tributary to Prairie Dog on the south side and on the east line of the county, was named by Ame Cole from the following incident: One cold day in the winter of 1873 Cole was up on this creek hunting buffalo; he killed a wild cat and just as he finished skinning it, his team came along and he got in the wagon to ride home.  His feet were very cold so he took off his moccasins and wrapped his feet up in the wild cat skin which was covered with lice.  They instinctively crawled off of the skin and up onto Ame's person.  From this incident the creek took it name although it ought to have been named Louse creek.

Buffalo creek which puts into Prairie Dog from the south, about one mile east Almena, was named by John Skeels of Republican City.  He was up at Cole's on a buffalo hunt on January 1, 1872; they spied a bunch of buffalo up on that creek.

Cole got to the windward side of them and killed them all, twenty-five in number, and in honor of that event Skeels suggested the name.  Fancy creek which puts into Prairie Dog from the north near the east line of the county was named by Fred Hyde.  Sand creek which flows into Prairie Dog about two miles below Almena was named by George Cole, probably on account of its wide sandy bottom.  Horse creek, which flows into the Prairie Dog at Almena, was named by Ame Cole for the reason that a man by the name of Comstock who was the first county surveyor of Jewell county, was camped there at the time of the big snow storm that occurred (sic) November 17, 1871.  Comstock's horses froze to death and they all had to walk back to Jewell county after the storm had subsided.  Comstock's wife was one of the party camped there.

The North and South forks were probably named by the government surveyors while Wild Cat and Turkey creeks which come in on south side in Emmet township was named before any settlements were made in the county, was also probably named by the government surveyors.

Battle creek which comes in on the north side near Calvert was named by John Diefenbach in 1876, in honor of a fistic encounter which occurred (sic) between Jesse Wright and John Nelson.  That stream had previously been known as Curry creek.

kuney.JPG (42343 bytes) D. B. Kuney was born in the state of Pennsylvania May 12, 1820; received as good an education as it was possible to get from attending school in a log house with slab seats placed around the wall and a rough board in front of you for a desk, a teacher at least fifty years old well qualified, for he had ciphered clear through Daboll's arithmetic, by skipping a few of the hardest "sums," occupying one end of the room and the corner well filled with hickory switches without the use of which no scholar ever advanced far enough to be able to spell words of four syllables.  He boasts that he was very fortunate in escaping the whipping and of course missed the spelling.  So much or rather so little for his early education and his latter education was of but a little higher order.  He spent about six months in a high school and got along so far in Kirham's grammar that he could conjugate a verb and sometimes tell what relation it sustained to other words; He was raised on a farm

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