Recollections and Experiences

of a Kansas Pioneer.

by S. T. Kelsey, Las Crucus, N.M.

My recollections run back to a time seventy-three years ago, when I played by a beautiful brook that ran through my father's farm. The location was in southwestern New York near the Allegheny river, where it makes its great north bend to get around the foothills of the southern Appalachian mountains. The farm then consisted of a small clearing, perhaps fifteen acres, surrounded by a dense forest, and no other clearing or settlement in sight. With much hard labor the clearing was enlarged in course of time into quite a respectable farm, but for nearly twenty years after my father's settlement the forest, up the stream from our place to the water divide, remained unbroken. The brook during all those years was never dry; floods were not excessive; the water was. never muddy, and only after heavy rains or melting snows was it more or less colored by the forest leaves. And the charm of that crystal water as it went laughing, skipping, dancing merrily along over the clean rocks and pebbled bottom can never be told. I was cowboy for the ranch and must necessarily employ much of my time tramping in the woods. I well remember when I first went into the wilds alone how I was awed and frightened; how dark and desolate and how dismal the sighing of the wind in the tall pine trees, while every rustle of the leaves suggested a panther or bear ready to spring upon me at any moment. But the wild woods became tame and homelike and I learned to love them, and found something interesting and instructive each day as the season advanced, from the first blooming of the trailing arbutus and hepatica. on the sunniest hillside to the fading of the last aster and goldenrod in some protected nook, and the rattling of the acorns and chestnuts through the deadened autumn leaves. I observed that the forest ground was always moist; the clear, cool springs and crystal brooklets that rippled down the hillsides seldom if ever were dry, and never carried mud or silt to the valley below. In course of time the lumbermen came, stripped the woods of the best trees, and were followed by the settlers, who cleared up the valley and hillsides, and conditions changed. The quickly melting snows and heavy rains caused unprecedented floods that brought down " And heaped upon the cumbered land Its wreck of gravel, rock and sand," and clogged the channel of the lower streams with mud and silt; but the water was soon gone, the springs and smaller streams became dry, and our beautiful perennial brook became a muddy, uncertain, wet-weather branch. On examination and inquiry, I found that other streams were
behaving in like manner, the mill ponds and larger streams filling rapidly with silt and the water powers becoming too unreliable for profitable use, and so I became interested in forestry and believed that the growing of forests, and intelligent use of the water that fell upon the earth and came down the mountains, could so reform conditions that a large part of the "Great American Desert" might become productive and capable of providing pleasant homes and profitable employment for a dense population. So strong was my faith in the practicability and ultimate success of forestry as an occupation that I left a good position as foreman of the Bloomington (Illinois) Nurseries and made an engagement with the Ottawa ( Kansas) University to manage the laying out of their grounds-about 15,000 acres-planting of forests, hedges, orchards and ornamental trees, to show the practicability of forest growing of the upland prairie and to make model farms for occupation. It was in June, 1865, that I made my first trip to Kansas. I bought a ticket in St. Louis over the Missouri Pacific, which was built only to Holden, Mo., but the agent told us that hacks would meet the train to take passengers to Independence. We reached Holden just at night in a heavy downpour of rain. The Independence hack, owing to bad conditions of the road, would not be in till morning and we must spend the night in Holden. There was no station house, and of the dozen or more passengers turned out into the mud and rain, only the three or four ladies could find any accommodations for the night, not even dry standing room with decent protection from the pelting rain. Some words were said that night that seemed suitable to the occasion but won't bear repeating. But the morning came, and an old dilapidated stage coach drawn by four poor, tired horses, and after some two hours waiting for repairs on the coach, which could take only a part of the passengers, we, the lucky ones, started out. It still rained ; the coach leaked and the roads were terribly bad, but we finally reached Independence at night and had to layover a day for the train to Kansas City.

At Kansas City I found the Kaw was up, washouts in the road, and no trains running to Lawrence. I waited three or four days for the water to subside and then hired a private conveyance by way of Olathe. It had cleared off at last and we started out in early morning for Ottawa. The sun shone bright-just one of those lovely June days that follows and almost pays for the long dreary spell of rain and slush and wind. But the roads were most fearfully and wonderfully unmade; the unbridged streams were still high and crossings difficult. We were all day and all night, not on, but in, the way; but our good horses pulled us through and next morning at daylight we arrived at the crossing of the flooded and unbridged Marais des Cygnes river. A call brought the ferryman and I was soon landed in the future city of Ottawa.

The town consisted of twenty or thirty, mostly temporary houses. The "only original and genuine" state capitol, as I was informed, a large two-story frame building, had been moved down from Minneola or Centropolis, and served as town hall, church, schoolhouse, etc. Three or four railroads had been projected, all to become great through lines, and of necessity Ottawa must become one of the leading commercial, industrial and educational centers of the country. With such prospects ahead, I quickly paid out most of the little money I had saved in the nursery work for a share, a one-twentieth interest-in the town site and some good pieces of land near by, and entered upon the work of improving the university grounds. My real estate investments were profitable, but my forestry and improvement work was so sidetracked and hindered that little could be accomplished. The university was disappointed in not securing expected funds and must use all available means for completion of a building; and so the improvement work was of necessity delayed, and I started a commercial nursery to meet expenses, hoping that conditions would improve so that I could take up the forestry and improvement work later. But through some unfortunate manipulations in the Interior Department most of the college land was returned to the Indians who had donated it, the originators of the enterprise were retired, new directors decided to limit my work simply to the management of a commercial nursery , and after four  years of seemingly wasted time, I quit the job. Meantime the range question was coming up for readjustment on the plains of Kansas. The stockmen and most of the earlier settlers claimed that the upland prairies could not be successfully utilized for cultivation; that their permanent and profitable use must depend upon grazing, and law and custom gave to stock the free and unrestricted range of all outdoor lands, while cultivated or uncultivated grounds must depend upon a "legal fence" for protection. It was an old custom started at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and universally adopted by the early settlers as they moved westward, and as universally abolished as civilization advanced and fencing material became scarce. The timber belts and bottomlands along the streams of eastern Kansas had been taken up by the early settlers and the stockmen. They had the only available fencing materials, the bottomlands, and practically the free use, by whomsoever owned, of all the land besides. The United States gave the homesteader a quarter section, but the state practically deprived him of its use. I believed, with many others, and particularly the newcomers, that the upland prairies generally were capable of successful and profitable improvement and home making, and that the future development and prosperity of the state depended upon their settlement. So I took up the then unpopular fight for a stock law that should oblige the owners of all stock to keep it off other people's grounds, regardless of fences. The principal financial interests of the state were arrayed against us. The stockmen warned the public that it was an unrighteous scheme of the landowners to deprive the people of their long established right to the free use of unoccupied land; that such a law would ruin the stock business and greatly damage the country. The stock law people claimed that the fence laws unjustly obliged every farmer to protect his crop, that always stayed at home, from all the roving herds and flocks that might be turned out to range the country In daily and nightly search of something more enticing than the prairie grass.

Few of the settlers' fences furnished adequate protection. A large part of the farmers crops were destroyed every year, and the owners seldom obtained redress. Under the stock law, stock could be herded by day and corralled by night on the owners' lands, the open range or on cheaply rented grounds.

The stock owner and the landowner would alike be protected in his right to the use of his own, and the homesteader could plant and reap his harvests, start his orchards, hedges, groves, windbreaks and ornamentals and soon make a home worth more to the owner and the state than many times the amount of unoccupied and unimproved prairie land but the long established custom of using unenclosed lands for free range had come to be considered, even as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, an inalienable right, that the stockmen proposed to maintain so long as there remained any land, public or private, not securely enclosed and protected, at the owner's expense, against the flocks and herds of unguarded stock that might be turned loose, under protection of law, to feed upon a free range.

The stockmen and stock interests practically owned the state and controlled the legislature. The Kansas Farmer and most of the state papers favored the free range. Under such adverse conditions, the stock law movement, for a time, made slow progress and seemed destined to failure, but a persistent campaign of education and the settlement of the upland prairies won converts to the cause, and after three or four years we were able to secure the passage of local option laws under which the people by vote began to adopt the stock law in various sections. It was a stubborn and persistent fight and, as in the slavery contention, each party accused the other of trying to impose a great wrong upon the people. However, as population became more dense the stock law, as it appears now, was of necessity accepted, and I think that most of us, even the old-time scrappers, will agree that it was the changing of conditions rather than contending theories and arguments that has driven the free range westward until it is probably making its last obstinate stand on the plains of Colorado and the wilds of the Rocky Mountains.

I meant to tell something of my later efforts in the interest of forestry, the work that took me to Kansas, but I have already exceeded the limit proposed for this paper.