PrairyErth
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I’m walking along Jacobs’ Creek—clear water and mellow riffles over a stone-broken bed that bends every twenty yards like a small and maddened viper and cuts a course under redbud, burr oak, walnut, hickory. It is quiet and alluring today, a New England brook, but like other things here, its nature is most mutable; it has several faces, and it can turn a new one on you suddenly. Gabriel Jacobs, born in Pennsylvania, came to the Hills in 1856 from Indiana. His biographer, with only slight exaggeration, wrote in the Chase County Historical Sketches: As far as is known, no white man had ever set foot on this rock- and grass-bound place before the Jacobs family settled here. Gabriel, drawn west by his son, was an old man when he arrived, but he lived long enough to build a log house in the rich land by the creek, and he fielded a couple of good harvests before the great “drouth” (the local pronunciation) of 1859 and 1860, when the Cottonwood River ran dry, did him in. He was a Dunkard preacher, and the creek vale became a settlement of followers named for their full-immersion baptisms but better known for their practice of mutual foot washing. The Dunkers eventually lost the county to the less damp but more practical Methodists. An old resident wrote: They just preached themselves out. We could not stand it. Some of their sermons were three hours long. The Methodists here also watched disappear the Soul Sleepers, a sect believing that the spirit was a mortal substance slumbering within the body, like a woodchuck in winter, until the noise of the resurrection would awaken it. The log schoolhouse and its stone and frame successors that these sects shared with the Baptists and Presbyterians have fallen or been scavenged for later bams, while the old chimneys and foundations lie hidden in rock fences. The Jacobs’ Creek community, known today as Grandview, shows itself only in a county-line cemetery and a few incidents in the Historical Sketches, where a later resident of Gabriel’s cabin tells of the partition between rooms that her mother brightened up with pages of the Emporia News: from that wall young Josephine Makemson learned to read.
And, in the Sketches, Helen Austin writes this about an 1885 cloudburst: By ten o’clock it was raining hard. The sound filled our little house. Water poured off the roof and ran over the yard like oil. By eleven o’clock the muddy water from the creek was spread ing over the fields. It made a roaring noise as it ate away the furrows. Ben Jacobs, Gabriel’s grandson, living along the creek near the ford, got his brother, Will, and loaded his wife and two children into the mule wagon and started fast for higher ground across the creek, usually no wider than a half-dozen tall men lying head to toe. At the crossing Ben looked up the creek and saw what he’d never seen before, a wall of violent, muddy water, waves rolling over and over, higher than the ears of his mules. The uproar hit the wagon and capsized it and flushed the little family toward the Cottonwood River. Ben caught hold of a limb, and Will snatched up the boy and held him above the brown swirl and suck until he could climb into a tree, but the creek pulled Mattie and her baby on north. By three o’clock the sky blew clear, the stream fell back to size, and Ben went down along the creek and climbed the slick banks to hunt his wife and child. Just before dusk, in a field he found a small, lumpen shape, and under a coverlet of soft mud lay his daughter, her nose and eyes stoppered with earth. She was drowned. Hoping for a miracle, he kept searching for Mattie. Three days later, on the bottom of the creek carrying his family name, he found her, the flesh already defiled, her torn and beslimed dress snagged on a sunken limb. From then on, they say, Ben was here and there, mostly living away from the county. His end was the reverse of what he’d found along his stream: in 1901, he died in a prairie fire.
And it was on Jacobs’ Creek where Josephine Makemson, four years after she learned her letters from a papered wall, received something rare in the hard land: a new dress, white and trimmed in lace, to wear to Sunday school and church and to other happy places. She was nine, and in the next few months she watched die her cousin of diphtheria, her eldest brother from blood poisoning after he cut himself recovering his hatchet from the creek, and an uncle from a spinal injury. When she was seventy-five, Josephine wrote: The little white dress after being worn to three funerals no longer was a joy to me. It was just a sad little dress, and I could not be happy in it again.
It was north of where the creek makes its east turn out of the county, close to where I’m walking, that the wife of Gabriel’s grandson often allowed their six-month-old boy to go in the arms of an admiring Kansa woman across the Cottonwood to the Indian camp where she would care for him half the day. One afternoon Mrs. Jacobs learned that her son would not be returning until the Indians received in exchange a particularly fine rooster. It was purely business.
The creek-bottom community, even in its isolation, was a stop on the underground railroad. One escaped slave, Charlie, last name unknown, arrived and made a reputation as a wizard of the fiddle, and he played so exuberantly for all the dances around that a free black man warned him, They’ll get you sure if you don’t stay at home. You better keep quiet beins you got no free papers if you don’t want to go back to slavery. One day Moses Jacobs, Gabriel’s son, brought word that a Missouri slave owner named, of all things, Freeman, was on the creek and hunting Charlie. The fiddleman hid in that old frontier-prairie refuge, a cornfield, and a woman delayed Freeman and asked him whether he wasn’t ashamed to be chasing a poor colored boy, and the Missourian admitted, yes, but couldn’t help himself. That night, the Haworths, a white family, rigged Charlie up in a dress, shawl, and veiled sunbonnet, and Moses Jacobs took him by buggy to the next fugitive station, and that was the last they heard from the wizard of the fiddle.
Once in a while I hear Kansans congratulate themselves on the part the state played in ending American slavery, and it’s true that Bleeding Kansas earned its epithet over that issue, and it’s also fact that a century later one of the most important pieces of litigation in the civil rights movement began sixty miles northeast of here: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. But the full truth is more convoluted. Countians, at the time Gabriel Jacobs’ sons were helping escaped slaves, voted against a statewide amendment to extend suffrage to blacks—in Chase it lost by three votes and women’s suffrage by seven—and both amendments lost across the state. At that time, the county Republicans, supporters of Lincoln, passed several resolutions; this is one:
We urge upon Congress the propriety of purchasing Sonora [Mexico] or some other suitable Territory for the purpose of settling the negroes of this country with a view to the entire separation of the races.
Sam Wood, who named the county, an abolitionist of whom I’ll tell you more, believed in this idea: wishing to see a people free is not the same thing as wanting to see them equal.
When Charlie disappeared in Mrs. Haworth’s dress and sunbonnet, when Kansas was bleeding and the house dividing, there arrived in Lawrence, seventy-five miles northeast, Thomas Gladstone, an English journalist and a kinsman of Queen Victoria’s four-time prime minister, Sir William. Thomas reached Lawrence in 1856, the day after the first sack of the town by pro-slavery ruffians (a euphemism) and the day before John Brown and his sons retaliated by slashing to death five men on Pottawatomie Creek, the two signal events in the Border War. Young Gladstone traveled the northeast corner of the state for several weeks and then returned east to write his powerful reports that were quickly published as a book called The Englishman in Kansas, or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare. One historian claimed that Gladstone’s pen helped make Kansas free. I can’t say nobody in Chase County has ever read the book—if a copy exists here today—but I do say I’ve not found anyone who’s heard of it, and I’ve found nobody who knows that Gladstone, Kansas, once a collection of a few homes and a school seven miles from Jacobs’ Creek, was probably named for Thomas.
The settlement never had a post office or any official recognition beyond the sign that the Santa Fe Railroad put up by the stockpens, and today it’s nothing more than two widely separated houses along perpendicular roads that join at the tracks, where the old marker still says GLADSTONE, a place the
trainmen call Happy Rock. Now the history of the quadrangle is hardly more than pentimento, little more than the earthen circles near where Jacobs’ Creek meets the Cottonwood—the circles that seasonally reappear when the new grass comes up to reveal where the Kansa camped—and the old stories of the hollow and its creek that seemed to take people one way or another (a stream that gave life and exacted it) have not much more presence than the fairy rings that crop up overnight on the lawns of the countians.
Between Pommel and Cantle
This is Slim, and he isn’t, his circumference nearly his height, five feet four inches. Now that all the ranch hands from the first half of the century are gone, Slim Pinkston is the most famous cowboy in the county. It’s Saturday morning and sunny, cold, November. Slim has parted and oiled his hair flat in the style of another time, and he just opened the door to me and the prairie wind that pushes me into the room but doesn’t disturb his hair, and still he gives the wind a round of cussing and shuts the door to the dim little frame house where he has lived as a bachelor for some years since he and his wife split up. The home is orderly in the way I’ve come to expect from lone ranch hands, the order deriving from objects arranged tightly against walls as if there were but one way to set out a room, and things, like the prairie itself, a little weathered and dusty but not cluttered. The furniture seems set down in some permanence like an outcropping of pasture rock: here a grayed doily and there a plastic flower gone off its color—the presence of a woman not yet disappeared entirely, and it’s these remnants that make a bachelor cowboy’s house lonely. I’ve never heard a Chase County pasture-man so express it, but I think they are drawn to things that never seem to move far from the permanent, from the eternality of birth, death, cattle coming and going, from storm, fire, injury, heat, cold.
Slim offers the living room sofa, but I ask to go to the kitchen, where chairs are closer, coffee near, and memory of good times is. We sit down to the small, bare table, oilcloth-covered, Slim with cigarettes and ashtray, and, for most of the time that we talk he keeps fixed on the ashtray as if it held what was left of his past, the ashes of his hours spent between pommel and cantle.
Of the family names in the county from the days of early white settlement, most are gone, but Pinkston isn’t, and countians know the name and the moniker Slim, but not many know his christened name: Dudley. The Pinkstons pick up sobriquets like sticker weed (Windy, Brownie, Chub, Bud, Mutt), but his brother Phill has never caught anything more than an extra consonant. Slim says of himself (only) that he is over seventy. I know that he and his son and Phill run ten thousand cattle on forty thousand acres, much of it on the east side of the county where he has ridden the pastures from Jacobs’ Mound to Matfield Green since he went to work for the Norton brothers in the thirties. Although never the largest nor the grandest here, the Norton Ranch has become a touchstone of the old ways, a classic not like the Duesenberg places around Matfield but more like a Model T truck.
Will Norton was the boss, a good man but a poor-riding cowboy, and Slim says: He had a lot of knowledge. He could talk to you about religion on down. He could weld in fire—blacksmithing—could make you anything out of metal. When he was a boy he made a gun to shoot his teacher with. Never did a course. I still have a fence stretcher he made. Him and his brother Ed could lay up rock wall too. Full-blooded Irish, and they told Irish stories all day. Always bachelors, till Ed up and married late in life.
Slim stares at the ashtray, in some sadness I think, and answers more out of duty than desire; he’s not going to lose himself in the past as others do because he’s somehow beyond it, as if watching it from a distant ridge: he’s here and it’s there. He’d be happier if I stood up and disappeared with what’s left of the morning so that he could get on to Emporia, but he sits doggedly, decently, and awaits my questions as one does the second page of an exam to be passed along.
His voice is granular, a gullet full of creek-worn flint, and deep, the sort you used to hear from some villainous gunslinger in a 1930s B western, yet his face is open, the kind you’d ask to see your child to school. In my first days in the county, I often heard about Slim, and almost always after his name came an appositive, a real cowboy, carrying respect and distinction from the western-store, all-hat-no-horse cowboys who only dress the part as they understand it played by country singers. But if your notion of a cowhand is a sotto voce Gary Cooper, tall and slender, in a buttless walk down a dusty street, then you’ll likely take Dudley Pinkston for a washer-dryer repairman. Yet Slim is a cowboy in the manner here: laconic, of some gentleness, almost introverted, a character shaped by the bovine nature of the animals he spends his days with. A cowboy may love his horse but his essence comes from the slow beasts he cusses.
His speech, like many others’ here, is a relic from the Appalachians. Slim says: My dad was a cowboy—I guess you’d call him that—until he got crippled. His horse hubbed him, ran him along a bob-wahr fence and tore up his leg, and then he cut up the other leg on a corn-sled knife, then he fell off a horse and broke his hip. When I can remember, he was purta near all crippled up and couldn’t ride. I learned cowboyin from the Nortons. They ran mostly Texas cattle brought up to Bazaar on the train in April. Steers wasn’t these yearlins of nowdays people want because they’re tender—then they was three or four years old and still not any wider than from my wrist to elbow—skeletons with tails—but they’d put on four hundred pounds in a season. Them Texans shipped us the horns and we put the body under them. We’d drive them up toward the Jacobs’ Mound pasture, ten, twelve miles. The train these days don’t even stop at Bazaar—don’t stop in the county. The cattle get trucked right into the pastures, and most of the boys are bringin their horses in by trailer. Nowdays we just drive them from section to section and later on down to the pens to be hauled away. Ain’t as much horse work here anymore. Hell, these cattle comin up to us now ain’t never seen a horse before, and they get crazy. Then, we used to send them straight to the packin house, but now they go to a feedlot for finishin. We never had much of this cow-calf business.
A cow-calf operation keeps cattle year-round in the same pastures where they are bred, born, and raised. The rule of thumb is five acres for every animal, but that works only if the cattle stay in the pasture just from April to late summer. To keep them twelve months a year requires eight acres per beast to prevent overgrazing, diminished grass, and eventual erosion. And now there’s another potential danger called double-stocking, where twice the usual number of cattle graze for half the usual time, but many owners leave them longer, to the detriment of the land. Slim says: We don’t double-stock. It’s too much for the grass. They ain’t supposed to be that many animals out there. A lot of pastures now are in bad shape because of abuse like that.
(Now I’m remembering a rancher once lecturing me how the herds of buffalo ate and trampled the hills, but he didn’t mention that bison came only seasonally and some years not at all, so that their migrations let the vegetation restore itself in a cycle that sustained plant and herbivore. And, later, a prominent countian told me: Leave it to us, and we’ll eat the hell out of these pastures. Because of the extent of rangeland in the county, to eat the hell out of the prairie is to eat the hell out of the future, out of what has made and sustained life here since the tallgrass first arose.)
Good cowboys like the Pinkstons know the cycle must be served before the dollar, and nothing benefits the old turning so well as what might seem its great enemy. Every March, Slim and the boys go out with their firesticks or firepipes and light the forty thousand acres they oversee. We used to just ride along on horseback and break a wooden match so it don’t get hung up on top of the grass and strike it and throw it down. These days we use them farsticks that somebody around here come up with. Light the end and drag it along behind a pickup. A course, you better hadn’t ought to get that truck mard in, or else with that far behind you, you’re not in very good shape.
The firestick: six to seven feet of inch-and-a-half steel pip
e, the lower dozen inches commonly bent to an obtuse angle like a hockey stick and stoppered by a threaded plug with a slit filed through, and the upper end capped. The cowboy fills the pipe with gasoline, lights the grass and ignites the pipe from it, and sets off trailing fire. Raise the pipe high, and the small flame goes out. The firesticks are homemade and more efficient than matches or weedburners.
When the Pinkstons burn, they leave neatly uncharred—if there are no vagaries of wind—cemeteries, right-of-ways, fences, outbuildings, and any adjoining land a neighbor wants left in old grass. But they don’t like that new problem, the Kansas Turnpike. If smoke blows across the interstate, these city boys’ll drive right on into it. They can’t see ahead, and then somebody slows way down, and there’s your wreck, and the insurance companies want to sue us. That highway used to be our pasture—now it’s a lawsuit out there. Slim stares at the ashtray as if it were smoky pasture, and he says, Back-burn all you want, get all the sprayer trucks and wet gunnysacks you want, and if that wind comes up sudden and changes, everything else don’t make much difference, and you’re just not in very good shape.