



Produced by Linda M. Everhart, Blairstown, Missouri




Tales and Trails
of Wakarusa

By
A. M. HARVEY
of the Topeka Bar

Crane & Company, Printers
Topeka, Kansas
1917

Copyright 1917
By Crane and Company



A Forethought and a Dedication

"A Paradoxical philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that
aphorism of Montesquieu's, 'Happy the people whose annals are
tiresome,' has said; 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant.' In
which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found some
grain of reason? For truly, as it has been written, 'Silence is
divine,' and of Heaven; so in all earthly things, too, there is a
silence which is better than any speech. Consider it well, the Event,
the thing which can be spoken of and recorded; is it not in all cases
some disruption, some solution of continuity? Were it even a glad
Event, it involves change, involves loss (of active force); and so
far, either in the past or in the present, is an irregularity, a
disease. Stillest perseverance were our blessedness--not dislocation
and alteration--could they be avoided.

"The oak grows silently in the forest a thousand years; only in the
thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his ax, is there heard
an echoing through the solitudes; and the oak announces itself when,
with far-sounding crash, it falls. How silent, too, was the planting
of the acorn, scattered from the lap of some wandering wind! Nay,
when our oak flowered, or put on its leaves (its glad Events), what
shout of proclamation could there be? Hardly from the most observant
a word of recognition. These things befell not, they were slowly
done; not in an hour, but through the flight of days: what was to be
said of it? This hour seemed altogether as the last was, as the next
would be.

"It is thus everywhere that foolish Rumor babbles not of what
was done, but of what was misdone or undone; and foolish History
(ever, more or less, the written epitomized synopsis of Rumor)
knows so little that were not as well unknown. Attila Invasions,
Walter-the-Penniless Crusades, Sicilian Vespers, Thirty-Years' Wars:
mere sin and misery; not work, but hindrance of work! For the Earth
all this while was yearly green and yellow with her kind harvests;
the hand of the craftsman, the mind of the thinker, rested not; and
so, after all and in spite of all, we have this so glorious high-domed
blossoming World; concerning which poor History may well ask with
wonder, Whence it came? She knows so little of it, knows so much of
what obstructed it, what would have rendered it impossible. Such,
nevertheless, by necessity or foolish choice, is her rule and
practice; whereby that paradox, 'Happy the people whose annals are
vacant,' is not without its true side."--Carlyle.

This book of tales and trails of people whose annals are vacant,
because they were peaceful and happy, is dedicated to the
nineteen-year-old soldier boys of 1917 and to their comrades; and
especially to that nineteen-year-old soldier, Randal Cone Harvey,
whose image and whose service is with us by day and by night. May
their service help bring to a war-cursed world such peace that the
annals of all men will be stories of love, companionship and
association one with another.

A. M. Harvey.



Contents

  Title
  Forethought and Dedication
  The Trail of the Sac and Fox
  The Stone Bridge
  The Newcomers
  An Old-Timer
  Mother Newcomer
  John MacDonald
  Jake Self
  The Yankee and His Hog--and Other Troubles
  The Trail That Never Was Traveled
  The Conversion of Cartmill
  A Fourth of July Speech
  The Phantom Fisherman, and Other Ghosts
  An Indian Christmas



The Trail of the Sac and Fox

It was during the '40's that the Sac and Fox Indians started on their
long journey to take up their home in the land provided for them in
Kansas, being a portion of the present counties of Lyon, Osage, and
Franklin. In the year 1846 a large number of them had camped in the
Kansas River Valley near the present site of Topeka, and because of
their friendship with the Shaw