Kansas Boy

The Memoir of A. J. Bolinger

A. J. Bolinger, Jeffrey H. Barker, Melissa Walker, Jeffrey H. Barker, Melissa Walker

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700630639
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Kansas Boy: The Memoir of A.J. Bolinger offers the twenty-first-century reader delightful and revealing insights on life during an era of dramatic change in American history. Bolinger describes those years as "bursting with energy, wild with ambition." The Kansas of his childhood and young adulthood was a place where life was lived at a rapid pace: investors pursued fortunes as town developers, settlers sought to establish prosperous farms and ranches, and reformers tried to create an ideal society. A. J. opens his account with a vividly detailed description of the prairie itself, including how the frontier settlements of Kansas were in the process of becoming established communities. Born and raised in Elk County, Kansas, he tells stories of ranching and cattle drives. Retelling some of the legends of early Kansas, he debunks more than a few frontier myths. As he moves toward adulthood his accounts of farming and small-town life grow increasingly aware of the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and 1890s faced by farmers and small-town businesses as they struggled with the growing power of corporations, in particular the railroads. In doing so he offers ground-level insights into the appeal of the Populist movement and the rise of the People's Party. The challenges result in the Bolinger family's move to the city of Topeka where A. J. attends Washburn College. As a college student he helps temperance activist Carrie Nation wage her antisaloon campaign and goes to Washburn's new law school. His first step in pursuing what would be a lifelong career in the law is to replicate his family's and his era's pattern of moving to where new opportunities lay: the Oklahoma territory.

A. J. Bolinger (1881–1977) offers today's reader a deeply felt memoir with keen insights and thoughtful commentary that is by turns startlingly progressive and deeply conservative. He offers us a richer understanding of life on the prairies and plains of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

Background in General

At last the spirit moves me.

For a long time my children and grandchildren have been urging me to commit to paper the tales of the olden days with which I amused their childhood. Now I yield to their urging, or more perhaps to indulge an old man’s vanity; in recounting the days of my youth.

I was born on February 2nd, 1881 in the little town of Longton, in Elk County Kansas.1 Not that this date is one of world shaking importance; but we have to commence somewhere and perhaps that is as good as any.

To understand a people, I have always said; you must know something about their environment. In this, as far as the Midwest is concerned, America, east of Indiana, is as profoundly ignorant as they are of the tribal customs and ethics of an inhabitant of Mars.

In the first place one speaks of the Great Plains, and the easterner at once visualizes a vast area of flat, barren and uninteresting desert as far as the eye can reach. That is not really true of any part of the plains, but least of all the Eastern part of Kansas. There the scene is not much different from that of the Missouri Ozarks, though the hills have been smoothed out a bit, and timber is found only along the streams. The hills themselves were in that day, and to some extent still are clothed in blue stem grass; a tall strong grass; so tall that a rider going through it on horseback, was hidden until only his body from the waist up, and his horse’s head, was visible. This grass was so rich in sugar that it was possible to produce cattle ready for market just by a summer’s grazing. One of the finest sights, was and still is, the cattle upon a thousand hills. Now only white face or Angus, then the many hued longhorn, red, white, roan, spotted, lank, rangy, and fleet of foot.

My home was only about 15 miles off the first Chisholm Trail but since the coming of partly sufficient rail transportations the herds were no longer driven overland, but were shipped in train load after train load, from Texas to Kansas for the summer’s graze.2

These wild herds were always interesting. And their unloading and handling was always full of excitement. From the trains they were unloaded into pens; and to restrain them required a sturdy construction. The fences about these pens were made of two inch lumber, braced and cross braced and from eight to ten feet high, usually with a footboard so that an observer could stand and see clearly the work in the pens. It was nothing to see a wild Texas steer attempt to jump out; and in a few occasions, impossible as it might seem, I have seen them succeed. And small wonder.

From the pen into which they were unloaded from the car, they had to pass one at a time through a narrow chute one side of which was moveable, so that it could be pressed against the animal; then men swarmed about him. The long vicious horns were sawed off, one man to each horn, another man applied the ranch man’s brand, and bulls were castrated. The whole operation took about two minutes.

Some of the other affairs at the pens were less bloody. Our saddle stock came mostly from the wild herds in Wyoming and Montana. When a load of ponies arrived we really did have sport. You could buy a pony for five dollars, and then give a wrangler five dollars more to ride him. Vastly different from our present day rodeos, which are its illegitimate offspring, the purpose was not to madden and ruin a horse; but to train him and make him a useful companion. He was ridden to a standstill and was then turned over to his new owner. Of course for quite a while he had to be rebroken every morning, but eventually he settled down into his work and liked it. The old time cow pony really loved working cattle. My own favorite mount in my teens was a little “flea bitten” pony, about 14 hands high3 and with the letter “T” almost as big as she was branded on her right shoulder. Used as a cutting horse, that is to separate some particular animal and bring it out of the herd, and she was in her glory. Put her at some particular beast, guiding her until she had seen the one you wanted, then you need only guide her by swaying your body. Teeth snapping, she was after that poor steer, and squirm and twist as he might, there was no avoiding her guidance. My complaint of the modern rodeo, is that it is inhumanely cruel and useless. In place of training as his friend, the horse is tortured until frantic with pain and then goaded by some prize grabbing acrobat is steered about the ring, Spanish spurs gouging and cutting him at every jump, and a flank strap of narrow cutting leather drawn tight around his flanks until he is in agony. The object not, as I said, to train, but to torture and make a noble and naturally gentle animal into a furious demon.

Usually my home was in towns; but even when not living on a ranch, as we sometimes did, my playmates and school mates were largely ranch children. We learned to ride early and well, and often accompanied drives not as paid drovers, but just for the sport of it and were usually assigned to the duty post of drag.4 Even when robbed of their horns, a means of lessening fight damage in the herds, these long horns were mean and ornery, and woe be to the foolish man who got into a bunch of them on foot without ready means of escape. I well recollect one summer day when my older brother went hunting and did not return as expected, to the great alarm of my parents. He came dragging in about nine o’clock reporting that he had been chased by the cattle, and had to take refuge in a tree, and stay there long after sun down, waiting for them to go to their usual bedding ground, so it would be safe for him to come down from his perch.

I have mentioned how high the blue stem grew. It was burned off early each spring to give the new grass a chance to emerge and one of the most spectacular sights was to watch long lines of flames, sometimes ten miles in length, marching across the hills. At that time roads were not laid out. You went on a beeline wherever you wished. And every traveler, whether he smoked or not, carried with him a little bundle of matches. These to be able to start a fire in case one was suddenly caught in the path of an approaching prairie fire; which might well be fatal to both horse and rider as the flames sweeping through the tangle of long grass would reach as high as twenty feet from the ground. The safety measure was to take a match and start a fire downwind and so burn off a patch into which you could ride in safety before the main fire reached you. And these matches! Our modern kitchen match had not yet been introduced. What we carried was a sulfur match, about the same length as our present match, but tipped on the end with a little patch of phosphorous, followed up the stem for about a quarter of its length with sulfur. You lit the match by striking the phosphorous tip until it blazed and ignited the sulfur, then you waited until the fire had quit burning blue and turned red and it was ready for use. In all this time the sulfur had been sending up stinking fumes, like the atmosphere of tophet.5

These were days of great change. The last two decades of the nineteenth century, and the first decade of the twentieth, was a transition period. The old wild west, which was never as wild as the dime novels, the horse operas and the TV writers would have us believe; had calmed down. In my boyhood I personally knew many of the old time pioneer characters, but in my day, they had become respected and quiet citizens. And to me, they appeared no different than a grown man would be to a boy today. In fact most of the tales told of those frontier days are ridiculous to one who was a part of them. I have often said that if a woman had gone on the streets dressed as pictured on the TV she would have been arrested and run out of town. Of all the women in the westerns, I have found only one woman who always dressed as a woman of that era dressed. That is Miss Kitty in “Gunsmoke.”6 She has always been above reproach. Stretch pants such as some of the screen pretties wear, mannish attire in general would have stamped the wearer, if she was to wear them at all, as a person of ill repute. In fact it was at this time that a lady doctor in New York assumed men’s attire to make it easier in her work, and was given a jail term as a recompense.7 In fact at one time the state of Kansas handled this flair officially. There was solemn and duly enacted a statute, passed by house and senate and duly signed by the governor, which required all skirts to extend at least three inches below the patella (knee cap).8

Kansas was in 1880 embarking upon its dream of prohibition.9 The saloon had disappeared, and the thirsty soul could find his only relief in a trip down an alley, and into the back door of the livery stable or some other secret place. This strictness was gradually eroded until by 1902 at the coming of Carrie Nation the state was almost wide open.10 P.C., that is Post Carrie the state took on another of its sanctimonious eras. It was a criminal offense even to possess liquor of any sort, even purchased in adjoining and wet Missouri. This sanctimonious attitude was specially a product of certain political figures who made fine campaign material out of their dryness. In fact it was the common saying that one certain Sheriff in Shawnee County Kansas was so dry he had to prime his throat if he wanted to spit.

My father was never a man to believe in a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It was his sincere belief that it was at the end of a railroad. As a result his business traveled westward with the traveling of railroad construction and my family got to see most of the towns in southeastern Kansas. One of our stops was at Thayer; of which more at a later time.

I have told you that the true old west was not at all like the modern image. But the men and women of that age were far more heroic, though not as glamorous as the synthetic variety. The cowboy was simply a farm hand on horseback; and not too much different from any other farm laborer. He had to put up with hardships, but then so did everyone. Food was scarce, except for some kinds of game, and hard to come by. Most people raised, cured and preserved their fruits, meats and vegetables. Running water, electricity, telephones and the like were not only unknown, but undreamed of. Ice was a luxury you sometimes found in the larger towns. But with it all, home life was good. The family gathered about a table of an evening. That table was usually stocked with popcorn, apples, or taffy. One of the group could read aloud to the rest, or there was always Euchre or Pitch or perhaps dominoes or checkers. A boy could meet a lady on the street and recognize her as his mother, and remember her good night the night before. Would we could say the same today.

A. J. Bolinger as an infant, 1881.
(Photograph courtesy of Bruce Bolinger)

Speaking of a boy and his mother, I always remember how I hated to go shopping with my mother, but I always had to go and carry the bundles. Mother needed both hands, one to hold her parasol and the other to hold her long skirts out of the dust. Those skirts were not unusually long, but the general fashion of the time. I remember how a waggish barber whose shop was in a corner building, taught his parrot a nasty trick that caused a lot of local amusement and much embarrassment to visiting ladies. It was considered a shame if a woman in crossing a street pulled up her skirt hem to expose any of her nether limbs above the anklebone. The visiting ladies were enraged, as they crossed the street to hear a raucous voice, screaming “Show your leg! Show your leg,” only to discover when they looked around that the words came from a parrot whose cage hung in the barber shop door.

Well, I have gotten myself safely born, which after all in those days of few doctors and no hospitals was a not inconsiderable feat;11 I have given you a few hints of the times; bursting with energy, wild with ambition; utterly convinced of the manifest destiny of our nation; and not suffering from any of the gloomy premonitions that destiny has imposed upon us at this day.

Now I think I’ll proceed to special instances, which are of course the things I told my children.

CHAPTER 2

The Town of Thayer

The little village of Thayer, in the eighteen seventies, was just a group of three or four hundred people, standing rather barren, just about seventy-­five miles northwest of the southeast corner of the State of Kansas.1 Typically, it consisted of a number of small frame houses, three or four rooms, and on some the paint already almost sanded off by the dusts of the Kansas winds. The business district, if it could be called such, was a group of four or five false front, one-story frame buildings. Boardwalks ran along the storefronts and in some places were also in front of the better homes. Other places the walkway was a path, fairly good in good weather, otherwise deep in dust or slippery in wet.

It was to this village that my father brought my mother after their marriage. Here he had a general store, and they rented a four-room house. They were a bit better than average in their home, for since screens had not yet been inv...