History of Atchison County, Kansas. Sheffield Ingalls

of the Stringfellow family. While they were belligerent pro-slavery advocates, they were always high class men with decent instincts and therefore it would not be unusual for them to open their home to so violent an opponent of theirs as Lane was. The eastern papers, in giving an account of Lane’s entertainment at the Stringfellow home, stated that the dinner was a very elaborate one, including oysters, plum pudding, terrapin and champagne. Mrs. Stringfellow told E. W. Howe in 1894 that Lane came to the house about 11 o’clock in the morning attended by a body-guard of four men and inquired for Dr. Stringfellow. The Doctor was away at the time, but was expected about noon. The men said that they would wait, whereupon Mrs. Stringfellow knew that she would probably have them for dinner. Her girl was just getting ready to go somewhere on an errand and was asked to remain at the house. Dr. Stringfellow came in about noon and when the two men met in the yard Stringfellow asked Lane if he was not afraid to call at his house. “I am not afraid,” Lane replied, “to call on a gentleman anywhere.” This gallantry captured Mrs. Stringfellow’s admiration and she invited Lane and his body-guard to dinner, which, contrary to the report in the eastern papers, was a very simple one. Mrs. Stringfellow, in her interview with Mr. Howe, said that it was as follows: Coffee, hot biscuits and butter, cold pie, preserves and milk; no terrapin, no oysters, no champagne, no plum pudding. Lane called at the house on a matter of business and Mrs. Stringfellow said that Lane and his body-guard were very kindly genteel men. Two or three weeks later, when Mrs. Stringfellow was alone in the house, she saw a wagon pass in the road with three or four men lying down in it. Presently another wagon, similarly loaded, attracted her attention. Then came four men and a woman on horseback and several men on foot. The people came from down town, or from southwest of town. The circumstances were peculiar, and Mrs. Stringfellow climbed on top of a table and watched the men through the upper sash of a window. They stopped in a little glade northeast of the house, when the woman dismounted from the horse, took off the skirt and turned out to be Jim Lane. He stood beside the horse and talked possibly half an hour. Mrs. Stringfellow is certain the speaker was Lane, because she had seen him only a few weeks before, and he rode the white horse he had ridden when he stopped at her house, and the same four men composed the body-guard. Lane had threatened to make a speech in the town but had been warned not to, as he had been warned two years earlier. He made his speech in spite of the warning, but his audience was composed of his friends only. A half hour after Lane disappeared over the hill toward the farm then owned by John Taylor, some distance south of the Orphans’ Home, forty mounted southerners appeared looking for him. Mrs. Stringfellow knew John Scott, the leader, and told him of the incident. The men laughed and then gave three rousing cheers for Jim Lane, who had outwitted them.

      Forest Park, Atchison, Kansas

      While there was a tremendous traffic across the plains from Atchison in 1857, 1858 and 1859, and for a number of years later the “town was alive with business,” it is only fair to record that the town itself was not a thing of beauty and a joy forever, in spite of the efforts of Mayor Pomeroy and the city fathers who put the city in debt to the extent of $9,000, September 5, 1859, for public improvements.

      Frank A. Root in his admirable book, “The Overland Stage to California,” published in 1901, has this to say in part upon his arrival here in November, 1858:

      “It was in November, 1858, that I first set foot on the levee in Atchison. I stepped from the steamer, ‘Omaha,’ which boat was discharging its cargo of freight at the foot of Commercial street. At that time the place was a very small town. I took up my residence in Atchison the following spring, having this time come up the river on a steamboat from Weston where I had been employed as a compositor in the office of the Platte Argus. On landing at Atchison I had a solitary dime in my pocket, and, after using that to pay for my lunch, I started out in search of a job. A sign over the office which read: ‘Freedom’s Champion, John A. Martin, Editor and Publisher,’ attracted my attention. It hung above the door of the only newspaper office in the city at that time, but preparations were then being made by Gideon O. Chase, of Waverly, N. Y., to start the Atchison Union, which was to be a Democratic paper. I secured a place in the Champion office, beginning work the following morning. As I walked about the town I remember of having seen but four brick buildings on Commercial street. A part of the second story of one of them, about half a square west of the river, was occupied by the Champion. The Massasoit House was the leading hotel. The Planters, a two-story frame house, was a good hotel in those early days, but it was too far out to be convenient, located as it was, on the corner of Commercial and Sixth streets. West of Sixth there were but few scattering dwellings and perhaps a dozen business houses and shops. The road along Commercial street, west of Sixth, was crooked, for it had not been graded and the streets were full of stumps and remnants of a thick growth of underbrush that had previously been cut. A narrow, rickety bridge was spanning White Clay creek where that stream crosses Commercial street at Seventh street. Between Sixth and Seventh streets, north of Commercial street there was a frog pond occupying most of the block, where the boys pulled dog-grass in highwater, and where both boys and girls skated in winter. The Exchange hotel on Atchison street, between Second and the Levee, built of logs—subsequently changed to the National—was the principal hotel of Atchison, and for more than a quarter of a century stood as an old familiar landmark, built in early territorial days.

      “Atchison was the first Kansas town visited by Horace Greeley. It was Sunday morning, May 15, 1859, a few days before beginning his overland journey across the continent by stage. He came through Missouri by the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, thence down the Missouri river from St. Joseph on the ‘Platte Valley,’ a steamer then running to Kansas City in connection with trains on the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. It was in the old Massasoit House that Greeley wrote on Kansas soil, his first letter to the Tribune. During the latter part of the afternoon he was driven over the city in a carriage, John A. Martin being one of the party. The city was a favorite place of Albert D. Richardson, the noted correspondent of five eastern newspapers.

      “It was at Atchison that Abraham Lincoln, on his first visit to Kansas, spoke to a crowded house on ‘The Issues of the Day,’ December 2, 1859, the date that old John Brown was executed in Virginia. Lincoln spoke in the Methodist church, which then stood on the hill at the corner of Fifth and Parallel streets. The little church was a frame building, dedicated in May, 1859, and overlooked a considerable portion of the city. The house afterwards became quite historic, for during the early part of the Civil war, the patriotic Rev. Milton Mahin, a stanch Union man, from Indiana, in a patriotic speech, soon after the Civil war broke out, had the nerve, and was the first minister of the Gospel in Atchison, to raise the Stars and Stripes over his house of worship.” D. W. Wilder, in his “Annals of Kansas,” one of the most wonderful books of its kind ever published, says that Abraham Lincoln arrived in Elwood, which is just across from St. Joseph, December 1, 1859, and made his speech there that evening. He was met at St. Joseph by M. W. Delahay and D. W. Wilder. The speech that Lincoln delivered at Elwood and at Atchison was the same speech that he subsequently delivered at the Cooper Institute, New York City, and was considered as one of the ablest and clearest ever delivered by an American statesman.

      Atchison county was making forward strides at a rapid pace and the future held out every promise of prosperity, but in 1859 “a great famine fell upon the land.” It did more to depopulate Kansas than all the troubles of preceding years. The settlers in the Territory were able to fight border ruffians with more courage than they could endure starvation, and during all of their earlier troubles they confidently looked forward to the time when all of their political difficulties would be settled and prosperity, peace and contentment would be their share in life. During the years of 1855, 1856 and 1857 the citizens of the Territory were unable to take advantage of the then favorable seasons to do more than raise just sufficient for their immediate needs. During the next year immigration to Kansas was large and the new settlers had but little time, in addition to building their homes, to raise barely enough for home consumption, so in 1859 Kansas had only enough grain on hand to last until the following harvest. The drought commenced in June, and from the nineteenth of that month until November, 1860, not a shower of rain fell of any consequence. By fall the ground was parched and the hot winds that blew from the south destroyed vegetation and the wells and springs went dry. There were a few localities on bottom