On the Town:
From the Life and Opinions of Sam Wood, with Commentary (II)
Fourth Commentary In May of 1856, the truce at Lawrence collapsed, and the pro-slavers, led by the raving Bogus Jones, attacked the town and burned the Woods’ house and, next to it, the new, three-story Free-State Hotel on Massachusetts Street, and much of Lawrence. John Gihon, the Kansas governor’s secretary, said: Jones himself was in ecstasies. He sat upon his horse, contemplating the horror he was making, and rubbing his hands with wild delight, exclaimed: “This is the happiest day of my life. I determined to make the fanatics bow before me in the dust and kiss the territorial laws: and I have done it, by God, I have done it.” He had, of course, done nothing of the sort, but one company of his raiders did march out of town each with a book from the Herald of Freedom office speared on his bayonet. This pillaging would be repeated, with far more citizens killed, when the Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill struck seven years later; given its beginnings, it is fitting that the first mayor of Lawrence was Colonel James Blood.
In the chaos I lose Sam, and I feel like the paleontologist who discovers a few fossil footprints and has only them to reconstruct the man who left them. The Woods’ first daughter was born in Lawrence, and, in the autumn of 1858, Sam went alone to the falls of the Cottonwood River, where there were only two cabins, and took up a claim. He built a small log house, apparently with the help of two slaves he hired from an acquaintance, and in May of 1859 he brought Margaret and the three children to this new verge of the frontier. While the many accounts of the border troubles give good documentation of the Woods’ days in Lawrence, their seventeen years in Chase are now only scattered—if abundant—fragments rather than whole stories, and no biographer has yet tried to assemble the shards into the entire bowl of his time in the Cottonwood Valley; I can show you only some of the pieces and footprints to let you imagine something more complete than is actually present. (If you will follow me in this fragmentary middle of the Sam Wood triptych, I will get you to the story of the bizarre yet apposite way he died.)
I cannot tell you why Margaret, in her long biography of her husband, skips over their years in the valley where they lived longer than any other place and where they lie buried, and this is odd: if anyone could be said to be the father of Chase County, it is Sam Wood, who named it and Cottonwood Falls, who helped organize and lay out both of them, who so set his hand on the very shape and early character and tenor of the place. I cannot even tell you in certainty why he moved to the Cottonwood River other than to guess that he was looking for a greater opportunity to speculate with his own town-lot company.
Sam went into new country because he liked the essence of pioneering—being first—as he liked founding things: he was in on the creation of half a dozen new towns, seven railroads, five newspapers, a couple of mining companies, and one telegraph line, most of which had about the longevity of, say, a row of carrots. Whenever he left the two or three high causes that molded his life, he became an all too common American character, a fellow seemingly in pursuit of influence and money, and some of his later eccentricities and battles look like the mere posturings of a realty opportunist. What he was able to achieve in helping others he could never do quite so well just for himself, and I like to imagine that the effort he put into land promotion schemes and some small and selfserving litigations was without his fullest passion because the consequences weren’t national, the arena not large enough.
One of the first whites to perceive the agricultural potential of the Flint Hills, Sam Wood helped to cut Chase out of Wise (later Morris) and Butler counties and, soon after, to enlarge it twice, once by taking a strip from Lyon County and another from Marion: the mile-long jog in the western side of Chase is Sam Wood’s work (he got residents there to vote to leave Marion because it had a herd law). Taking pieces from four of the five bordering counties, Sam assembled Chase like a Dagwood sandwich: a slice of this, a cut of that.
I’ve already spoken of his naming it after his Ohio friend Salmon Portland Chase, an abolitionist and opponent of the Kansas Nebraska Act and a man Wood advocated for the presidency; in 1870, when Chase was chief justice of the Supreme Court, he wrote Wood: I am glad to read such favorable accounts of the county with which you have done me the honor to associate my name, but beyond that sentence he apparently had no interest in it. I’ve also spoken of the Indian notion of names coming to shape their possessor, and so, in that way too, Sam Wood’s influence yet lies over the county, although, in many instances now, I find it more ironic than apt. But then, the movement from liberalism to conservatism, from a more open society to a narrower one, is the history of all Kansas.
If Sam’s reason for coming to the valley was to make more money, then I believe he wanted some of that income to underwrite his causes: within ten days of bringing his family to the Chase claim, he set up a printing press under a cottonwood tree not far from the river and gave the valley its first newspaper, the Kansas Press, a polemical Free State organ of four pages that also promoted the new town and county (he later also brought out the second paper, the Banner). In his small house nearby, local Republicans met in 1859 to draw up a resolution calling for the federal government to buy a portion of the Sonoran Desert from Mexico to provide a homeland for black people; this man, who had risked his life transporting fugitive slaves on the underground railroad, had decided (as Lincoln would later) the solution to racial problems was colonization.
Sam also farmed, sold town lots, and practiced law: his defense of four settlers accused of murdering William Hugh (the first of eight men to die violently along Bloody Creek) may have brought vengeance on him when, a month later, fifty tons of his prairie hay were burned, and, soon after that, his house was robbed and torched. Whatever the cause, this is clear: Sam Wood drew fire, figuratively and literally, everywhere he went (appropriately, his Chase home had the first lightning rod in the county). A year later, during an interlude when he lived in Council Grove, his house there was set afire (he must hold the state record for houses deliberately burned from under him).
Sam, so he said, moved twenty miles north to the Grove because the battle over whose plat constituted Cottonwood Falls—his south one or Isaac Alexander’s to the north—was hindering the growth of the village, but I suspect he really believed the Santa Fe Railroad would build through Council Grove rather than down the Cottonwood Valley. The town company also plied him with new opportunities to speculate in real estate and it bought many subscriptions to his Press, but profits were disappointing there also, and Sam ended up accepting payments in cast-off clothing, coyote pelts, and buffalo chips. He began calling for the opening to white settlers of the Kaw reservation lying just outside the village, and he published sarcastically racist editorials about Indians, yet he hoped to be appointed as the government agent to the tribe. After three years in Morris County, he saw the railroad would not follow the Santa Fe Trail but rather the Cottonwood River, and he moved back to the Falls.
He served in both the territorial and state legislatures before joining the army in 1861 and forming a cavalry company (he wanted a battalion) with himself as captain. He fought at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, in Missouri, and in other, smaller engagements across the northern Ozarks, and his eleven-year-old boy joined him in the field (David was one of the youngest combatants in the war; there is a photograph of him seated on Sam’s knee, father and son crossing pistols). With unproven charges of malfeasance dogging him—as they did everywhere—Sam’s fourteen-month military career was as unconventional and mercurial as all his other endeavors: the army investigated one incident where he took into custody slaves owned by an English trader and, to their bewildered joy, set them free. After trying to resign his commission four times, he finally succeeded and left the army as a lieutenant colonel; he was later appointed brigadier general of the Kansas militia, but after 1862 he preferred to be Colonel Sam Wood.
He continued off and on in the Kansas house and senate, but he co
uld never make the jump to Congress, despite his proficiency as an anecdotal speaker and his comprehension of the law and parliamentary procedure, which allowed him so to control the legislature that people called it Sam Wood’s Circus. Opponents fought him with legal action (he once said that he had no reason to fear Kansas laws since he had helped make most of them) and twice with weapons: in the capitol, a representative, angered over Wood’s advocacy of female suffrage, attacked him with a bowie knife but Sam threw him down as if he were a Westport ruffian. The Little Quaker, as opponents sneeringly called Wood, several times took his fists to adversaries.
Colonel Sam built a new house—of fireproof rock—a mile due east of the courthouse (his virtual second home), a small and unpretentious place, enlarged by a later owner, it sits on a barely perceptible rise at the edge of the river, a location so shrewdly chosen that the Cottonwood has never been inside it: of the dozen places in Kansas that Sam lived, this is the only one remaining. Although on the National Register, this oldest stone dwelling in Chase is in private hands and its survival is tenuous. Behind the house he put in a ferry, a thirty-six-by-fourteen-foot boat, the first in the county: the tolls were a dollar for a loaded wagon, half that for an empty one, fifteen cents for a pedestrian, two cents for a hog.
He opened a general store and also served several terms as county attorney: during one election, he published for six weeks a newspaper, The Scalping Knife, to advocate his candidacy, and in it he promised to lower the tax levy, which he did—several times. Wood never ceased arguing for economy in government, and in his later years he began suggesting methods for eliminating the national debt. He went into court to fight the four-and-one-half-mil tax to pay off the sixteen-hundred-dollar difference between the initial cost of the courthouse and some small additions to it, lost the bitter case, but finally won the argument over whose plat legally held the name of Cottonwood Falls. Today, the only obvious manifestation that once there were, technically, two towns, appears in the misaligned streets behind the courthouse: to walk along Union now and see the jogs in eight of the nine north-south avenues, as if Sam had yanked his plat twenty feet west, is to find some of his fossilized footprints.
As a vice president of the Santa Fe Railroad, he tried to bring the line right through Cottonwood and have the depot built on his property, but his opposition to a railroad bond issue that would have burdened taxpayers doomed the Falls from being on the main tracks, and the Santa Fe ended up a mile and a half north; Sam thereby became indirectly responsible for the founding of Strong City, at first called Cottonwood Station, and also the two-mile-long horsecar line that would later connect the depot with the county seat, perhaps the smallest American towns ever to have their own trolley.
He litigated with friends as easily as foes: once, during his term as road-district overseer, his eldest son brought him into court over the placement of a lane; the father fought hard but, said a countian, he showed more pride in the plaintiff’s argument than in the defense. Sam was not only the most powerful man in Chase but also the most progressive (first corn planter, first registered cattle brand], and he was usually the most liberal, especially when the cause was women’s rights, a volatile issue that got him the name of Sally Wood for his advocacy.
He always believed in the power of newspapers to further his causes, but when he left Council Grove he sold his paper, so in 1866 he brought to the Falls an old printing press, the first to come into Kansas Territory, the very one Jotham Meeker hauled up the Missouri River in 1833 to the Baptist Mission near what is today Kansas City, Kansas, to print laws and religious tracts in Indian languages. Before his death, Meeker took the press to Ottawa, Kansas (when he died Indian children sprinkled lead type like wildflowers on his grave); the old machine then went to Lawrence, where the ruffians eventually broke it up and pitched it into the Kaw, but Free State men retrieved and repaired it and put it back into service, and it later survived Quantrill’s raid. Sam moved it on west to print his new paper, the Chase County Banner (the subsequent peregrinations of Meeker’s press are as many and legendary as those of Odysseus).
The Banner pumped Sam’s projects and promoted women’s rights, a cause that drew him into as many ructions as had abolition, even though these quarrels were—the knife attack excepted—of words, many of them libelous charges from editors opposing female franchise. His response was to found the Impartial Suffrage Association and make eastern Kansas a pivot in the women’s movement, and he brought to the state (and to the Falls in 1867, the year an earthquake shook the county) Susan Anthony, Olympia Brown, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He even persuaded Miss Stone to agree to buy his house if woman suffrage won in the county election, but it failed by seven votes and Negro suffrage by three. The election should have shown Sam that his privately professed strategy of achieving the vote initially for women and then pursuing it for blacks was backwards: in 1870 Kansas became the first state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment (Negro suffrage) but it didn’t grant women enfranchisement until 1912, eight years before the Nineteenth Amendment. Although Sam introduced a bill in the Kansas senate in 1867 to extend the franchise to females and blacks, C. H. Langston, grandfather of the poet Langston Hughes, rebuked Wood for complicating, thereby dooming, male Negro suffrage.
The center for his political activity was the small rock home with the Cottonwood River in the backyard, a house that gave roof to Anthony, Stone, and Stanton, and, later, to another reformist woman, a young Council Grove teacher whom Sam successfully defended in court when she was charged with integrating her classroom, a case foreshadowing the national one that was to occur eighty-nine years later, the momentous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The teacher, Mary Ann Hatten, left the Grove for Cottonwood to teach for a term, and she boarded with the Woods, where she found the meals tardy and poorly prepared and the beds, used not only by suffragists but also by men just off the cattle trails, infested. Margaret later said that young Miss Hatten was very fussy. The teacher moved on to Emporia, married, and gave birth to William Allen White, but her complaint may have had merit: when the Woods lived in Council Grove, a rival Kansas editor wrote that Sam had two very nice Suffolk pigs, which, judging from his looks, he eats with, drinks with, and sleeps with, and, years later when Sam died, an obituary writer said, They talked about his dirty shirt and his clothes, which were shapeless. But he cared nothing for them, because he cared nothing about clothes. With all the thinking he had to do, he had no time to think of clothes.
For a couple of years Sam ran cattle on the Chisholm Trail, then tried ranching in Texas, then began a Santa Fe Trail freighting business. In 1865 he went west to check on one of his wagon trains: near Raton Pass on a fiercly cold night, an ox kicked him and broke his leg, but he managed to get himself to the house of the legendary fur trader and trail freighter Uncle Dick Wooton, who pulled hard on the ankle while Sam, somehow keeping from passing out, drew back on his knee to set the tibia, but the fracture didn’t knit properly and thereafter he had to wear a built-up shoe.
His businesses gave him enough income that five years after Charles Robinson, famous from the Border War, became the first governor of Kansas he asked Sam for a loan to build a new house, one finer than Woods’ own modest place. Of the many derogatory things said against Sam, I’ve not found any accusing him of wealth or ostentation. In fact, he donated land and money to build a Catholic church in the Falls, even though he was neither a member nor particularly religious. In his lifetime Sam read the Bible through a couple of dozen times, but Margaret said that he believed sharing bread with the hungry was a more holy ordinance than taking communion. He often gave food to struggling countians, contributed hours and dollars toward establishing the library in Cottonwood, borrowed money on his own signature to lend to farmers stricken by droughts and grasshoppers, did some legal work as charity, and several times asked Salmon Chase to assist the county (I’ve found no record that he did).
One morning in Wichita, Sam’s great-grandson, Richard, a r
etired industrial engineer, showed me the colonel’s Civil War uniform buttons and his senate barbershop shaving mug. Richard said: In Cottonwood Sam defended a poor war widow who was about to lose her home in a foreclosure. Her mortgage was on a table in the courtroom. As Sam passed back and forth presenting her case, he quietly tore off a small piece of the mortgage and put it in his mouth. Having no chewing gum, he was known for chewing paper: a soldier at the battle of Wilson’s Creek said that Sam went into the fighting with a paper wad between his teeth. Finally, when time came for a decision in the widow’s case, the judge declared a mistrial and wrote, “Cause dismissed, Sam Wood having eaten the mortgage.” You can find that recorded somewhere in the courthouse. But I haven’t been able to dig it up, although the story sounds like Sam’s unorthodoxy: in Lawrence he once saw an intoxicated man who owed him money stagger past his law office, and Wood ran out, tossed the drunk down, and pulled out of his pocket the money due.
The colonel sold his home and twelve-hundred-acre farm east of the Falls in 1873 to a Washington federal judge, David Cartter (who was taking testimony on the shooting of Abraham Lincoln when the president died in the next room). The judge’s son, William Cartter, moved his family to Cottonwood from Cleveland (a teacher in the Falls once told William’s son, That is not how you spell Carter) and quietly brought some wealth into the county, and he raised cattle and racehorses. For a time Sam and Margaret rented a home in Cottonwood before moving to a farm near Elmdale; there, Mary Elizabeth, the youngest child, called El Dearie, became ill on her fourteenth birthday and six days later died of typhoid. What ruffians and repeating rifles and bowie knives and lawsuits could not do—bring Sam Wood down—the death of Dearie nearly did.