H.sapiens are a curious lot. We’re obsessed with stories about ourselves, novels and plays and movies and TV shows and now probably podcasts, but even though many of these are based on events from the past and some of them unabashedly tout history as a feature, this mostly gets downplayed when it comes to travel, with some obvious exceptions, like the Pyramids or Machu Picchu or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Or our local home town of Boston MA, that is well known to utilize history as an enticing bit of tourist bait. Hey! We’re the Cradle of Liberty! Come walk the Freedom Trail! Come see the original USS Constitution with Paul Revere’s house nearby, visit the Old North Church where it was “one if by land and two if by sea” and if that sounds unfamiliar to you, come to beantown and get the lowdown! So much history! And while you’re at it, you can buzz down to Plymouth and see how it all started with those Pilgrims!
Yes, this is the quintessential American origin story, or a good part of it. Of course, it’s the one told by the winners and every American kid in public school learns about it, at least the ones paying attention, which can be difficult in a history class. This is not always the fault of the student. Lies My Teacher Told Me, a bestselling lament by a U.S. history professor, eloquently outlines how history might be the most poorly taught of all public school subjects in America, subject to questionable carefully curated “facts” that leave out a whole lot of what else was going on. In the case of these United States, there’s the small matter of the fates of the native tribes and the commonplace practice of “owning” slaves, to name two of the obvious, and even worse, it’s all too often presented in such a way that it’s all a huge bore and it’s no wonder Johnny falls asleep in class or gets caught texting on his cell.
Still, the American Revolution is a great story, and visiting the sites of all the famous events just might make it come alive for any visitor with enough imagination. What taints the experience is that the looming presence of a major modern city with all its distractions can make it a bit difficult to imagine how it all once looked and what it must have been like. This was much less an issue when it came to our experience in Kansas, though it should be pointed out (if it hasn’t been already) that this was a Naturalist’s Journeys trip, a travel agency whose schtick and appeal leads it to downplay history for the most part. NJ’s trips are “for the birds” for the most part, and more often than not history gets left out completely as an itinerary item, and its customers could not be happier, which includes us. Except for this trip to Kansas, as far as we know, and it should be mentioned that it has often quickly sold out in the past. Hmmmmm.
Oh wait there was also that trip to S Carolina where we did the downtown carriage tour in Charleston (we saw the spot where slaver John Calhoun, one-time Senator as well as VP of the United States, took opponents for duels!) and went out to Fort Sumter which had not only some great history but some good birds. The leader on that trip also took us to a plantation for a tour, where she’d scheduled us not to see the lavish “big house” of the plantation owners but the slave quarters, which had been inhabited into the 1940s. Her name is Pat, from Missouri, and she’s also great with birds. We’ve become groupies, of a sort, done several trips led by her, and will do another this coming spring in Cape May NJ.
Tell people you’re going to Boston on vacation and most in the know might assume the Freedom Trail and all that will be part of your itinerary, especially if you’re taking the kids. Tell people you’re going to Kansas and besides “why?” it seems safe to assume they won’t say “oh, for the history?” and frankly to that we might have answered “yes but only sort of” or something to that effect. It has already been mentioned that the impetus for this trip arose from mostly vague yearnings to “experience” the American Midwest, the great plains and the last tall grass prairie, and all that lived there and what it looked like and how it felt to behold it, with history kind of an afterthought. Our historical knowledge of Kansas was pretty sketchy: okay there were once natives and buffalo, and after that settlers and farmers and ranchers, and then there was something about “bloody Kansas” that was mentioned in a paragraph somewhere in one of those questionable high school history textbooks. Didn’t the professor guy tell us that history is a loser when it comes to public education in America? Does that not make this writer one victim among many?
Of course local history is often fascinating for anyplace you care to name, if one is at all curious about the world. Many small towns have a historical society with a venue full of artifacts somewhere that is often just a storefront, though most of these tend to be open on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to three, so the avid local history buff must plan carefully. But the state of Kansas is hardly a small town, and American history classes in public school always devote at least one hour in the school year to what went on there, especially in the mid-19th century, or at least they once did. A few old memories of a history-once-taught got tickled while we were in the Sunflower state, and as you’ve read, sometimes it came alive, like meeting all those buffalo.
Likewise with beholding that pioneer dugout, or ascending Coronado Heights, or marveling at the beginnings of flight in Wichita and of course, a taste of what Kansas was like a long long long time ago, as in under water, or maybe even before that, at the Museum of World Treasures, where we’d skipped the rooms telling more recent Kansas stories. We may never know what we missed.
So much history, so little time! And not just that of H.sapiens but also that of the other animals, and plants and geology and ecology and whatever else comprises the story of this earth since the beginning. For a trip just over one week long, ya gotta narrow it down somewhere. This writer/traveler feels it important to quibble over at least one aspect of the human-story part as it got told on this trip, namely the general paucity of coverage for the pre-white cultures. He will also admit that there seem to be any number of tribal museums and historical sites spread across the state of Kansas – the Mid-America All Indian Museum in Wichita and the Pawnee Indian Museum in Republic and the El Cuartelejo Pueblo Ruins in Scott City, site of an earlier Apache village, to name just a few – all of them worthy of a whole trip in itself. But maybe that’s what it takes to overcome the overwhelming presence of history getting told by the winners. So does the world need a new tourism outfit focusing on all this, and would it make enough money to stay in business? Might it already exist?
As for this flora & fauna “naturalist’s” trip, its unusual attention to human history gave a nod almost exclusively to the usual winner’s story, starting with that dugout and that hill named after a Spaniard near the town of Lindsborg. The souvenir t-shirt says it all most eloquently, or almost all. Lindsborg was a community founded by Swedish immigrants in 1869, a year to remember since it happened eight years after KS statehood and more importantly after the American Civil War, when the turmoil that had prevailed starting in the 1850s had greatly subsided. Great timing, Swedes!
Our group did a few overnights in the town, which was charming and very quiet and appeared quite prosperous. Tourism is clearly a factor here, as the downtown seemed to have a lot of gift shops and a few art galleries and the old blacksmith’s shop is now a quality coffee shop. On the other hand, the car repair place on the corner looked quite defunct while the “we’re really Swedish here!” message was stated loud and clear, with all these painted horses like the one featured on the tee. In case you didn’t know already, they are called Dalas, and represent strength, faithfulness, wisdom, and dignity, while also providing a great logo for Swedish brand identity.
Some of the evident prosperity might also result from Bethany College, founded locally by the Rev. Karl Aaron Swensson and a group of Swedish members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) back in 1881, making it one of the oldest colleges in Kansas. To gain admittance to the school may no longer require that one be a Lutheran or even a Christian, but it probably helps. Lindsborg showed no signs of being the lively college town that Wichita was, where there were many bars and liquor stores and music venues. Go Shockers! Bethany does, in fact, participate in 22 different intercollegiate varsity sports, and their teams are surprisingly known as the Swedes, or Terrible Swedes. Go Swedes! There has been an annual performance of Handel’s Messiah at the college every year since 1882, making it one of the longest-running annual performances of anything in America, which just might compensate a bit for the lack of a party scene downtown.
Ed had mentioned a few times that one of his acquaintances in Lindsborg was a photographer who had a gallery there. He might even have mentioned that the guy had worked for National Geographic, but even if that’s the case it didn’t resonate much. This snobby east-coast-elitist writer admits to the prejudice that anybody with an art gallery showing their work in Lindsborg was no doubt pretty good and no doubt talented but probably not stupendous. Turns out the photog, whose name is Jim Richardson, worked for National Geographic for 35 years, traveling all over the world on assignment under the mandate that he always produce great and memorable images. Always. If you grew up looking at the magazine and cutting out gorgeous photographs for your own art or school projects or whatever, some of those might’ve been Jim’s, if you are of the right age.
Jim also worked for Life magazine and has done books focusing on water issues in the West as well as a lot of work in Scotland and other parts of the Celtic world. He’s lived in the Linsborg area for decades and was the logical photographer for the Geographic piece on the Flint Hills (Ed and Sil gifted everybody on the trip with a copy of that issue) and is known for a 30 year chronicle of life in the nearby town of Cuba (pop. 220). He did a photo essay in 1979, High School USA, that is considered a classic in that genre, and he produced the class for The Great Courses on landscape photography. He was voted Kansan of the Year in 2007, and received an honorary doctorate from KSU in 2017 for his work in cultural and environmental communications. It all adds up to stupendous.
And you can walk into his gallery in Linsborg and meet him and his wife working there, at least sometimes, which we did. He and Ed chatted as we looked around and I asked him about doing assignments in Scotland and he admitted that the weather there can make it difficult. He talked about running out of time on one job with few good images due to the gloomy weather, and how he saw the almost-perfect shot that he desperately needed which he “improved” by having an assistant shine a floodlight on the heather in the foreground. I told him my favorite Ansel Adams story about getting that iconic shot of El Capitan in Yosemite with the only glass plate he had left, after climbing to the top with his wooden tripod. Jim acknowledged that it was a great story, but also noted that “you have a lot of latitude shooting in black and white” and how Adams knew he could do a lot with that single negative. Jim added that color is tougher in many ways, and that digital is God’s gift to photography, or something like that, and he should know, having been a pro since the ancient days of Kodachrome. It was a remarkable encounter, and his website is glorious and highly recommended.
Many places in the world likely have their share of historical markers – this writer has commented on the vast numbers spread about the Boston area and how he tends to ignore them in most cases. Maybe he’s grown a little tired of the thrilling story of America’s fight for freedom and liberty and the founding fathers’ right to make more money. Maybe it’s something else. At any rate, as for those markers, the winners’ history dates back to the 1600s, starting with those Pilgrims in ’22 and the founding of Harvard University in ’38. We’ve ridden past markers for King Philip’s War of ’75, sites where colonists were “murdered or kidnapped or bravely held off” the tribal people who were fighting to avoid total erasure. That last part never gets mentioned, at least there by the roadside, though this writer is aware of any number of high “lookout” spots around the area which are variously known as “King Philip’s seat” or sometimes “chair” with no story told beyond that. There are some excellent books on the subject, at least, which is real progress.
The Kansas chapter of this particular American story doesn’t really begin until much later, in the 1850s, when the prairies got “settled” in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, which was all the rage at the time. To help the student of this period, as well as the curious tourist, we encountered any number of well-placed and interesting historical markers, and probably for the first time ever, this writer/photog not only paid attention but found some of them worthy of inclusion here, with no apologies.
The first is from a hill outside of Manhattan known as the Mount Mitchell Heritage Prairie, which brought home how“mountain” is a relative term. This is where we met up with Iralee Barnard and shared some great moments in botany, all reported in a previous exciting episode of this series. The parking lot at Mount Mitchell features a prominent kiosk which is not so much about tallgrass prairie plants (which were there in abundance) but the local human story, and the website for the place claims it is yet another location “where history comes alive”, a notion that should be familiar to those who have been reading these posts carefully. Some of them might also recall that bringing life to history often requires imagination and sometimes a bit of work.
As the photo suggests, just walking atop Mt Mitchell, which for a hill has spectacular and inspiring views, might lead one to consider why it was considered a sacred place by tribal people, but the local white peoples’ part of the story, at least one dramatic and significant chapter of it, benefits greatly from a bit of digging if one is not already familiar. What’s on the kiosk is pretty sketchy and just a teaser. Those who were taught well, back in that US history class, or who investigated on their own, might not need any further lessons. Two members of our group were able to stir up vague but useful memories of the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, covered back in that high school class where most had slept. A few more of us had the words “Bleeding Kansas” floating in our historical consciousness, but for all it was somewhat muddled. None of us were Kansans, for one thing, though one wonders how Kansas public schools tell the story, or who pays attention.
But we all knew about America’s original sin of slavery and how it had led to “a great civil war,” as Lincoln described it in his Gettysburg Address. Chances are many of us had seen the lengthy Ken Burns version of the story, which was way too much for most to comprehend or remember for very long, as moving and entertaining as it might have been. Visitors to any of the many Civil War battlefields probably feel history come alive as often as not, which was the case when this writer witnessed the battlefield at Shiloh. That story was one of soldiers and violence and death, of their nobility and heroism on the battlefield and the pain and loss suffered by those who knew them, which is always the case with war stories.
So arriving at Mt Mitchell and stopping by the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church the next day presented us directly with a story from Bleeding Kansas, which was all about the Civil War, though this one wasn’t exactly a war story and Ken Burns might’ve given it brief mention but little more. The grand American story about the conflict around slavery, that began with the country’s earliest beginnings, finally came to a head right here in Kansas, years before men in uniform started shooting. Those who slept through the class on the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 can be forgiven as the textbook and lecture were probably less than dynamic. Better the class had been somehow transported, if only by the skills of a great teacher, right here, to this place, to Mt Mitchell and the nearby town of Waubansee, where it all looks much like it did. This is the place, as the website tells us, where history comes alive.
In a country where many passionately hated the institution of chattel slavery for its moral repugnance, there were others totally held in thrall by how it enabled them to become the richest people in the world and was a boon not just to the American economy but several in Europe, as well. History was not on the side of the plantation owners and others benefiting from slavery in the South, or as Martin Luther King put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The Missouri Compromise created a one-for-one tradeoff, “slave” state for “free” state as the American union expanded west and new states were created, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act changed the game plan, allowing the inhabitants of those states-to-be to decide by vote whether to allow “The Peculiar Institution,” as American slavery was known, or not.
This is where Henry Ward Beecher and Captain John Mitchell come into the picture. If a flood of enough abolitionists moved to Kansas, it was reasoned, they could turn the tide against slavery. Nebraska, lying further north, was already expected to vote in this way, while Kansas bordered Missouri, a slave state with a powerful interest in not allowing Kansas to vote in a way that would tip the scales against slavery at the federal level. What you got was Bleeding Kansas, warfare not fought by anybody in uniform but by violent gangs of marauders, or guerrillas, or terrorists, choose your term.
Pro-slavery groups became known as Bushwhackers and Border Ruffians and one famous band was Quantrill’s Raiders, which included the James brothers Jesse and Frank. Their particularly ugly foray into Lawrence in 1863 that became known as the Lawrence Massacre was not exactly a military affair, or if it was it created the model for My Lai 100 years later. Many on the anti-slavery side adopted a term from the Revolutionary War, Jayhawker, which denoted followers of John Jay, one of the US Founding Fathers who was ardently against slavery. In an odd turn of history, “Jayhawker” became a generic term for anybody from Kansas, and after that a term for lawless no-gooders wandering the West, after which it peculiarly morphed into Jayhawk, a mythical bird that is the mascot for the University of Kansas football team. The history of a word can sometimes be strange and fascinating, indeed.
As for Mt Mitchell and that Rifle Church, William Mitchell was one of a group of abolitionists from Connecticut who’d moved to Kansas to found the New Haven Colony, probably seeking a new future in the west but also furthering the antislavery cause by being part of that vote when it happened. Some of them had been inspired by a speech given by Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stow who’d written the runaway best seller of the day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In CT, Beecher’s speechmaking also inspired a movement to provide every emigrant to the Kansas Territory with a brand new Sharp’s Rifle, which happened to be the pride of local industry as the most advanced weapon of its kind, and the New Haven Colony became the Beecher Bible and Rifle Colony. The best part of the story (for some of us) is that “Beecher Bible” does not refer to any holy book, but to that gun, the Sharp’s Rifle, many of which were shipped to Kansas at the bottom of boxes labelled “Books and Bibles” to avoid confiscation by proslavery forces in Missouri. Beecher is known to have said that the gun had “more moral power….than 100 Bibles.” There is something peculiarly American about that statement.
We visited the BB and RChurch on a quiet weekday. It was once a “station” on the underground railroad, there in the town of Waubansee, named after a Potawatomi chief who never set foot in Kansas, having died in Iowa in 1848. The town looked a bit forlorn and down at its heels out there, surrounded by the vast expanse of prairie, but one can never really tell how things are going in a rural place with no downtown to speak of, unless one is a local. Does anybody still live there with roots back in New England? Any Sharp’s rifles in a closet somewhere? One must sometimes temper one’s imagination when getting history to come alive, but having no distractions around like noisy traffic and skyscrapers and crowds of tourists or any people at all – nobody in fact, other than ourselves – it wasn’t that hard to imagine those settlers on the prairie, out there for many purposes besides seeking their futures as sodbusters or whatever, taking some pretty big risks for the sake of their ideals. Heroes, in their way, many of whom never wore a uniform.
