Kansas: The Priceless Prairie
KANSAS WITH ALL ITS EXCITING, TURBULENT YEARS
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SOLDIERS * INDIANS * FORTS
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Mary Einsel
At left: Cover artwork from the slip cover of Kansas: The Priceless Prairie by Mary Einsel of Comanche County, Kansas.
First issued as Stagecoach West to Kansas, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-114005. Copyright 1976 by Mary Einsel.
Jacket photograph: "Trail in Comanche Pool Territory", courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas.
Few states have experienced the turmoil and stripe that has accompanied the growth and development at Kansas. Border wars, Indian depredations, the raw violence of trail towns and the hardships imposed by a harsh and uncompromising land have given Kansas a unique historical background.
Kansas: The Priceless Prairie captures and brings to life the excitment, the drama, the adventure and coor which have characterized Kansas since Coronado and his conquistadores crossed Kansas plains in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola.
Here are true stories of the Kansas plains meticulously researched and compiled from personal correspondence, diaries, newspaper accounts and historical archives from many sources.
Mary Einsel has with unerring perspective traced an affectionate, often humorous, always entertaining account of the rich heritage of her native state.
Without this record, few except scholarly historians would know that Daniel Webster roared his disapproval in the Senate concerning the Kansas Territory, calling it a "vast and worthless area of savages with wild beasts, shifting sands, cactus and prairie dogs and great deserts." Or that in 1856 the Planters House bar room in Leavenworth, patronized by both Northern and Southern sympathizers kept one proslavery and one abolitionist bartender on duty at all times. Or that Claude Charles Du Tisne, the French explorer, yanked off his wig, threw it on the ground and told the Osage Chief if he wanted his scalp he could have it!
Here is Kansas with all the sweep of its vast prairies, the violence and tragedy of a civil war border state. Here are true stories of cattle drives and trail towns, Indians and soldiers and the lonesomeness and heartbreak of the men and women who carved a magnificent state out of the "vast and worthless area of savages and shiftless sands.
The above description of the book is from the inside front portion of the book's cover jacket.Mary Einsel gave me an autographed copy of this book in the late 1970's. This page was originally made on August 3rd, 2002, as a way of thanking Mary for her gift by featuring a mention of this book on the Comanche County web site. Last week, Bobbi Huck told me that she'd written to Mary to tell her about this web site and the page about her book, and asked if extensive quotations from the book could be used on the site. Mary wrote back giving permission for "any and all" of her book to be published here! Thank you, Mary, for your generosity in allowing this history to be shared with the world via RootsWeb! As webmaster of this site, there's a word for my delight:
Yeehaa!
The first part of the book I'll add is about The Comanche Pool. Remember, as you're reading about this group of stockmen who ranched cooperatively, Cap Pepperd had been running cattle on 8,000 of free range from his ranch house on Mule Creek just north of where present-day Wilmore, Kansas stands today and had been doing it for 5 years before the Comanche Pool existed.
The Comanche Pool
Each western state has its early history a famous cattle spread that overshadowed all others. Kansas had the Comanche Pool, which was located near Medicine Lodge, the largest cattle ranch in the state's history.
The ranch was started by four men: Jess Evans, Wylie Payne, Richard Phillips, and Major Andrew Drumm, after an Army order, issued from the Indian Territory, stated that no more Texas cattle drives were to cross the Oklahoma Strip.
The best source for facts about the Comanche Pool is an old newspaper published in Medicine Lodge, the town closest to ranch headquarters and the only town of any size in south-central Kansas at the time of the pools organization.
Evans, Payne, Phillips, and Drumm talked to the handful of ranchers who were already in south-central Kansas, then they moved in large herds of their own, starting the ranch with some 26,000 head. The idea was for "members" (the four mentioned above were by far the largest holders) to range their cattle as one great common herd. A Board of Directors was formed, with Wylie Payne as treaurer. All expenses incurred and profits received were in direct proportion to the number of cattle a particular rancher owned compaired to the total number of the whole herd.
The ranch house and main headquarters, called Evansville were built among the rolling hills 28 miles southwest of Medicine Lodge. Warehouses were maintained in different parts of the ranch territory, to hold supplies sent out from Kansas City by Major Drumm to outfit the three principal horse camps.
Mrs. Frank King, coldwater, whose husband worked for the pool and had been in Evansville many times, remembered how Major Drumm usually arrived at Evansville in a fine black surrey driven by his personal valet. She also recalled that a barrel of currants was included in the freight one day. "A little cub bear came out of the trees and got into the currants. He came back tot he barrel so many times that he got real friendly and had the run of the place."
To cover the territory, the pool kept a sizable herd of horses. According to the paper, "of their 400 saddle horses, they came through the winter (1882) with a loss of only eight head. Most of the horses were wintered on the Cimmaron in Oklahoma. It was described this way: "They fenced in a strip one- half mile wide up and down the river all winter, and when spring came those horses were generally fat. Other wild animals wintered in the trees too. There were antelope, deer, bears and lots of wild turkeys."
At roundup time, as one early-day resident recalled, it looked like an army camped out on the prairie. The pool always put notices in the paper so other outfits could come along too. The territory was divided into sections with each having a boss. A man took seven good horses. One for every day in the week.
A calf was branded according to its mother, and tally sheets were kept by the range boss. During branding, the range boss hired extra hands at $40 a month.
After the cattle were gathered (according to Jeff Long, Medicine Lodge) "there'd be so many they'd have to string 'em out before they could work 'em. The different outfits brought their own chuckwagons - they'd feed about 12 men each. Some outfits had several wagons. Night was the worst time. You didn't want any cattle running."
Mr. Sampson, the bookkeeper from St. Louis, drew up balance sheets and presented them to members every six months. He found it cost 9 cents a month to keep each head of stock. Other expenses noted were for 5,000 bushels of corn and two carloads of horses arriving on the train from Harper, Kansas.
Stories about the pool cowboys were related by people who had had some relatives work for the pool or who had lived in the vicinity of their range. Ben Harbaugh, a rancher living in the area who did not belong to the pool, said "They always treated me right. They told me to let my few cows drift; that they would look after them and see that I got them back after roundup. They did, too."
After pay day, pool cowboys preferred to do their celebrating in Kiowa, because it was considered a more wide-open town. "But if they didn't drink too much," Mrs. Frank Gordon reminisced, "they were not a bad lot. They just liked to cut up and dance a lot. There was the time they bought all the paper flowers the store had and gave one to every lady that passed by on the street."
One of the pool cowboys was described by Frank Lockert, Coats, as "the best horse-breaker I ever knew. His name was Bill Hill, a Negro, who came up with some long-horned Mexican cattle from the San Antonio country. He could do anything with a horse. He always wore high-topped boots, a ring on each little finger and a horsehair watch guard on a fancy vest. One day he got drunk in Medicine Lodge and someone doped his liquor and he went crazy. They had to take him away to an institution. But I heard later that he got over it and went back to breaking horses."
Once, when a five-year-old girl wandered away from her home on the prairie, word was sent to the pool and the men fanned out across the plains. Jeff Mills, one of their hands, found her at daybreak.
Two years after the pool began operating the newspaper in Medicine Lodge began to show evidence of the size of the pool's holdings. In April 1882, "it is estimated that 20,000 beeves will be shipped from the Comanche Pool this year." And, "Evans and Hunter during the past week gathered from the Comanche Pool beef pastures two herd of beeves, of 2,000 each, and started them north to fill beef contracts in Wyoming and Dakota. They will be issued to the Indians at the Pine Ridge, Standing Rock and Cheyenne agencies. The contract price is $4.10 per hundred. It will require 60 days at 10 miles per day to complete the trip."
Then, in the summer of 1883: "The pool has about 10,000 beeves in their pasture and they are reported to be doing first class. These beeves will be shipped from Dodge City as will all the beeves in the section. Shipments will probably commence around the first of August.
One of the biggest undertakings of the pool was the fencing of their range. Fence did not mean one continuous unbroken line. The southern and western ranges were marked by the natural barrier of the sandy bars along the Cimarron, and to the north and west drift fences were built along the high ridges. Their fence building project had a slight interruption, according to the paper: "P.J. Larkins, boss of the Comanche Pool and J.C. Boston, who is holding cattle in the same county, had a big discussion - with fists.
"Larkins and his men were cutting cedar posts when Boston ordered them to quit. They continued to chop and Larkins and Boston came to blows. The former is a small man and the latter a big six-footer, and those who witnessed the affair said it appeared very much like a scrappy bantam and a big rooster fighting. After several rounds, Boston got the drop on Larkins and he went down. They boys admire their boss' stand but not his discretion."
Part of the pool's barbed wire is still in use today (1970). It can be found on ranches located in the vicinity and is easily identified by its course thickness and many-sided prongs.
Within four years after the pool's beginning, the steady influx of homesteaders began to tell. Pool cowboys were ordered to "prove up" along many of the good streams, but the changing times were making free open range in Kansas a thing of the past. News items such as this appeared in the paper: "The Comanche Pool still objects to giving in their property for taxation. The commissioners, on the other hand, have ordered that the levy be made. The matter, of course, can only be settled in court."
One night in 1884, irate farmers who came to the home of Ben Harbaugh, the same man who had had the pool look after his small bunch of cattle. The farmers said they were fed up with the cattlemen and were going to burn off the prairie. "I told them I wanted no part of it." Mr. Harbaugh recalled, "to leave me alone, that I had a Winchester that could reach all over my section and that I'd have nothing to do with them. They only suceeded in burning off about 100 acres. But before that, I took the oxen and plowed five or six furrows completely around my place."
Taxes, homesteaders, enactment of the herd law (cattle had to be fenced), the harsh winter of 1885 and the even harder one of 1886 brought the end of the Comanche Pool. Frank King, the last foreman for the Pool, took the remaining cattle to leased Indian lands in the Cherokee Strip.
Related history:Cap Pepperd: Open Range Rancher, Comanche County, Kansas.
Thomas Jackson "Tommy" Wilmore & Some of His Descendants
Note: according to The obituary of Colonel Dick Phillips, the famed Comanche County Pool was formed in 1879. Cap Pepperd had been ranching in the area for years by that time.
This web page was added to this site by Jerry Ferrin, 03 August 2002.