Born in London, Henry Collett, whose ancestors followed William the Conqueror into England, came into the county exactly 799 years later and walked around to find a good piece of untaken land; nine years afterward he opened a store next to his house and received a postal commission, which established the necessity for people to come into his shop. He named the settlement not for any long-gone animal but to be brief: the government required rural postmasters to cancel letters by writing the name of the post office across them; not for him the endless scrawling out some fifteen-letter town name. Collett was an astute businessman, and he made a profit from Elk, and the enterprises he set up gave a hub—a heart—to the American and German immigrants homesteading along upper Middle Creek: Collett’s Gen. Mdse, and P. O. became the nexus of their lives, the single spot they all visited, the one center everyone shared. To this forum of economic and social exchange women carried barnyard and garden surplus (eggs, butter, turnips), and men brought field surplus (wheat, oats, com). In cash-poor Elk, almost everything ran on barter. The store gave a focus of allegiance to settlers from seventeen states and seven nations and helped form them into a community where cooperation could mediate differences in language and culture.
(Digression, this from an old countian: just after World War One, when the area began declining, there was a closed-up church Elktonians used only for yuletide programs and Memorial Day services. At Christmas, a skinny Santa Claus would laugh into the small room and give six-year-old boys twenty-cent penknives and twelve-year-olds West Bend pocket watches that the boys were almost afraid to accept because of the cost: a dollar and a half, nearly two days’ wages. The big cedar Christmas tree would always be left standing until practices for the Memorial Day service, when the farm children would slip behind it to pick off and eat the dusty, strung ornaments—popcorn, animal crackers—but leave the shriveled cranberries. Even after parents scolded them and threw the tree over the back fence, the children would sneak out, scare sparrows off the cedar, and again eat the decorations.)
On the north bank of Middle Creek, Collett built an icehouse, and anyone who helped cut out blocks in winter could draw a free ration in summer. His blacksmith shop would shoe an animal or fix an implement in the same day a farmer brought it in, this speed often the difference between getting a crop planted or harvested in time. Elk was the invention and expression of Henry Collett, and as his success went so did the community’s progress, but, even had he lived a second life, his shrewdness could not have kept the village from dying, situated as it was in a pinfold of federal land policies, legislation that created a kind of serfdom that to this day still binds many countians. What the Cottonwood in flood did to valley towns, federal land policy did to this upland village.
Whites who entered Chase in its first half-dozen years of settlement were largely free to take whatever acreage they chose, deferring only to someone’s earlier claim, but the people who arrived after the Homestead Act of 1862 were limited to a quarter-section—160 acres—of free land they could gain patent to by building a permanent residence of specified minimal size and living in it for five continuous years (Horace Greeley wrote of one land speculator who tried to qualify by putting up a purple-martin birdhouse and reporting its dimensions as eighteen-by-twenty but leaving the agent to presume the feet.)
Most county bottomland had been claimed by 1870 through preemption or homesteading, and, to this day, valley farms are rarely more than quarter-sections. Settlers of the 1870s not only had to take their farming to the more precarious uplands but also to contend with land grants given the Santa Fe and the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas (the Katy) railroads as a kind of federal subsidy for building lines into the West. (A benefit of this program—for the county—is that it got a railroad without being long encumbered by rail bonds.) The two companies received title to thirty-eight percent of Chase, more than any other county in the Flint Hills, most of it uplands: the railroads received the odd-numbered sections, each a mile square, thereby leaving homesteaders the even-numbered pieces; around Elk the settlement pattern became a checkerboard of unconnected plots, railroads taking the black squares, homesteaders the red. Even for the rare settler who had money enough, land was hard to buy because railroad realty agents preferred selling here to big land speculators or ranching syndicates that would buy thousands of acres at a time. The people of Elk were largely locked into forty- and eighty-acre plots adequate only for subsistence farming. Young men, other than eldest sons, found it nearly impossible either to stay on the homeplace or buy neighboring land, and the consequent social disruption was serious: suddenly, the constricted rural Germany or New England that so many immigrants had come here to escape was again upon them and their generations.
At first the population around Collett’s general merchandise grew and prospered—four one-room schools, a creamery, an annual neighborhood fair—and then things began to decline, partly because of irresponsible management of the shallow upland soils. There was something else: the Santa Fe and Katy finally sold two big parcels, up till then freely used as pasturage by farmers: one went to the Eastern Land and Loan Company, speculators who profiteered off railroad grants during the recession of the 1890s, commonly through lending farmers money and then foreclosing or through buying up mortgages on the cheap at sheriff’s auctions. The other large parcel went to a British ranching syndicate, the Western Land and Cattle Company, headed by three men (one was the travel writer Sir William Tyrone Power, son of the Irish actor, and another Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days). The English sent their sons into the county as part of the young men’s practical education. A newspaperman and former countian, Jay House, in the thirties wrote (with some exaggeration, I suspect): Younger sons of British aristocracy were as thick around Cottonwood Falls as bass in South Fork. The county actually boasted of two or three British titles [and the] invasion had a distinct influence on the speech, intonation, and nomenclature of the county.
People near Elk found themselves increasingly boxed in by absentee landlords whose main interest was to turn big profits, somethmg that encouraged their buying up farmsteads. People north of Elk ended up being completely encircled by the syndicates and having to get permission to cross into the village. The British acreage, eventually comprising about twenty percent of Chase, evolved into the Diamond Ranch, named after the major creek watering it, the outflow of the renowned spring a few miles north on the old Santa Fe Trail. The ranch grew to thirty-five thousand acres before the famous 101 Ranch of Oklahoma bought it in 1900. Later, outcounty Kansans purchased it and broke it into three pieces, and, to this day, nearly all of the land in the Elk quadrangle belongs to people living in cities. The largest landowner here—and in Chase—is a Texas widow whose holdings derive through her husband directly from one of the speculators of the Eastern Land and Loan Company; she owns twenty-eight square miles, nearly four percent of the county, but her ties to Chase are merely those of her local lawyer in Cottonwood. (Enclosing a letter of introduction from her Falls banker, I wrote her to ask for an interview but she returned my request with one typed sentence telling me she would not be available and did not wish to discuss her family or properties.)
Realty agent Whitt Laughridge believes nearly three quarters of the county now belongs to nonresidents, a percentage still increasing, and he says much of Chase has not for even a single day been owned by a resident. Although some of these absentees care for nothing more than the rental income, while others oversee the land with better husbandry than some natives, virtually all of the absentees take their profits out of Chase to invest elsewhere. Owners who hire local hands and buy materials in the county do, of course, make a small contribution, but the range-cattle business is neither labor- nor material-intensive: a few cowhands and salt blocks can never support Chase.
These alien landlords have little interest in the survival of county towns, condition of its roads, quality of its schools, or the acumen and honesty of its officials. Absentee dominance in this agricultural
place makes it almost certain that many citizens will never be anything more than manual laborers who will live and die as hired hands, with chances for economic improvement hardly better than those of southern sharecroppers of another time. For this reason, it seems to me, making big money here is the one sin countians are slow to forgive. The nature of this landownership ulcerates the lives of many hard-working people with an insidious jealousy often turning into a meanness of spirit, an infection that gnaws at hospitality, friendship, and their sense of community; and, unquestionably, nineteenth-century federal land policies still drive out their children, especially ones with energy and imagination.
To the homesteaders who came here looking for relief from the economic and social restrictions of Europe or eastern America, such a crimping of expectations and possibilities would be depressing and bitterly ironic in this grandly open land. Surely they would curse the great Jeffersonian grid—so cage-like when seen from above or on a county plat—that has helped bring about the effectual vassalage of several hundred of their descendants in a result quite the opposite from what Jefferson had in mind when he wrote (for example): Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people. . . . Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue.
When I was in my last months of walking around Chase County, the federal government threatened to work another permutation on landownership around Elk, a turning of the wheel to bring it full circle. On the fifth of April, 1990, countians were stunned to read this headline in the Leader-News:
ARMY EYES CHASE FOR FT. RILEY EXPANSION.
The fort, forty miles north, is the old cavalry post where George Custer was second in command in 1867, and from it in 1890 rode the Seventh Cavalry on their way to kill two hundred Indians, half of them women and children, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. A monument on the post describes the slaughter as an unfortunate incident.
Today, Fort Riley is primarily an artillery and tank training ground. The current proposal calls for the army, either here or at one of three other sites, to take by eminent domain more than eighty-two thousand acres for maneuvers by tracked vehicles. Thirty-six square miles of northwestern Chase may go under the tread of tanks.
Countians and other Flint Hills people, but not many absentee landlords, organized and wrote letters and editorials (a headline: HOME, HOME ON THE FIRING RANGE), their opposition virtually unanimous—if you exclude the right-wing Kansas Grassroots Association which sees a greater threat in placing a national historic monument at the Spring Hill Ranch. To many residents, the idea of turning food-producing land into a target range was insane; but, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, many came to believe that the real future enemy of mankind was not a hammer-and-sickle soldier but a horseman called famine. The political changes in Eastern Europe in 1990 buoyed them as they saw the death of the Cold War serving to protect their prairie from tracked vehicles. But then George Bush and his industrial colleagues led America into Arabian sands, in part, some people thought, to establish a new need for tanks and weapons.
What land profiteers and railroads and foreign syndicates could not quite accomplish in Elk during the first century and a half of white settlement—the removal of people—the army now proposes to do with panzer divisions. If these Rommels of the tall prairie succeed, citizens believe, you can just about kiss goodbye the good life in Chase County. In only six generations, the history of Elk will have gone from horse fundaments to howitzer muzzles.
Among the Hic Jacets
Elk Cemetery, in the burr oak valley of upper Middle Creek, lies half encircled by Stribby Creek just above its juncture with the bigger stream a quarter mile to the south near where Wildcat Creek comes in. From time to time this burial ground at such a confluence of waters goes under, its location, considering all the upland surrounding it, revealing something about the settlers’ unease in the grassland. The south side of the cemetery faces the road, set off from it by a low wrought-iron fence of some age, and just inside the gate is a stone carved with RUTHERFORD B. HAYES, a fifteen-year-old who died the same year as the president. A few yards northward stands an eight-foot-high shaft of gray marble commemorating the soldiers and sailors of the Civil War, a monument that went up nearly a half century after the fight ended; for some reason, people around here refer to it as the Unknown Soldier’s Grave. Elsewhere stand or lean or lie fallen a couple of hundred other markers cut with cherubim, urns, fingers pointing aloft, and hie jacet biographies: a name, a pair of dates, sometimes a detail or sentiment (VATER UND MUTTER, BELOVED WIFE, RUHE IN FRIEDEN, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN).
At the back of the ground, in a kind of potter’s field near the soldier and sailor column, lies a flat piece of limestone, a rounded little delta that repeats the shape and orientation of the whole cemetery. The inscription, if one was ever present, is unreadable; perhaps the eroded indentations are nothing more than cuneiforms of wind and rain as if the land itself were trying to speak for whoever lies, easterly-westerly, below. I’ve stopped twice on late afternoons in hopes the low-angled light would pick out letters or numerals, but it hasn’t worked. The nearest grave belongs to Joseph McClure, who died on the Fourth of July, 1883, at twenty-one, and the first burial here, 1871, is also close: Jabez Dart (the Christian name, reflecting his last one, means “he will cause pain”).
I’ve said that I sometimes use cemeteries for lunch stops, where I can eat and walk and imagine the dead again above the turf by taking clues from the stones: a homemade Depression-era marker, its name etched in wet concrete by a finger; a cowhand’s wooden cross hung with a horseshoe; a trainman’s stone carved with a locomotive; the old miller’s with a streamside mill; a grave covered with synthetic turf tacked down with golf tees, a weathered ball centered, teed up, and ready; a stone with an incised Chrysler New Yorker carrying a license plate with the wife’s name: CLETA. These icons can let the dead out of the anonymous ground and set them loose in some stranger’s dreamtime, but on the little limestone delta at the back of the cemetery I’ve found nothing like that, unless the utter poverty of the rock itself is somehow a door. After my first visit, I took to calling it the Grave of the Unknown Citizen.
At four o’clock one morning, weeks after I’d last been in Elk Cemetery, I woke from a dream, a brief thing, small and fragmentary but sharply delineated like an unearthed piece of broken platter painted with a scene: the surrounding landscape gone but the bit of image on the shard remaining bright and clear. I bring up this dream because its strange violence rupturing my sleep eventually led me on to the end of my time in the county. The topic of the dream, as I first understood it, is something I pay no attention to except perhaps to jape literal interpretations of it: the Resurrection (it’s a word I even have trouble spelling, always trying to make it reserection, “things stood up”). I do, of course, believe in biological kinds of resurrecting (flesh to worm to bird to so on, and the more subtle one of genetic inclinations whereby ancestors seem to stalk our blood). If there’s any other kind of journey in the beyond, it’s going to expose me as a poorly packed traveler, planning as I am to go without so much as even a thought for a change of shorts. Now that I think about it, I also believe in another type of resurrection, where the living can carry along not just the legacies of the dead but also an awareness of them as people so that they, in a way, live again: Jefferson—the man—alive in township-and-range, Beethoven in a cadenza, Himmler haunting Auschwitz.
Could I have chosen the dream that night, I’d have taken a conversation with Sam Wood, or a prowl around the Brandley place the evening Frank Rinard went down, or maybe spent an hour on the masons’ scaffold as they set the last course of courthouse stone. Instead I ended up in Elk Cemetery and listening to preaching (you may want to call it a nightmare): a man stood over the flat rock marking the Unknown Citizen and scraped dirt off it with the toe of his old-style countryman’s boot. He was weeping yet still able to deliver a eulogy of twenty-seven words: Lord, these are just or
dinary Kansas boys, common as corn and lard. It don’t seem right to make them and then go off and leave them behind. That was it, that’s when I woke and wrote it down.
Why a eulogy for someone long dead? Why boys? Why not boy or girl or people? With Judgment Day still ostensibly pending, how had they been left behind?
Some little time later, it came to me that maybe the dream wasn’t hooked to Christian eschatology but to American history (after all, the word Lord comes from hlaford, literally, “bread-guardian,” initially a term expressing agricultural and social arrangements). Maybe the dream was really about nourishment, death as the staff of life, perhaps an emblem about forgetfulness of source and cycle, some notion about an old cemetery becoming nothing more than a place to cast off the useless, a spiritual landfill of plastic flowers where the stones should be carved GONE BUT ALSO FORGOTTEN.
In Mexico there is a celebration called El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, deriving from prehistoric Indian rites: during it a family will picnic atop an ancestral grave, children playing with papier-mache skeletons and cradling small gifts called muertos and eating chocolate femurs and tibias, fathers lounging, mothers singing softly, grandparents reminiscing, everyone sharing the repast and the past, living and dead together, the distinctions blurred, the people trying to touch time fore and aft, enter its breadth to live connectedly. To walk in an Indian-Mexican cemetery, at any time, is to see how those people fear a forgotten life, to see their belief that remembrance of the dead gives meaning to the living.
American cemeteries once lay commonly at the heart of a town, to serve as parks for contemplation (hence the abundant variations of Think on me as you pass by) about responsibilities necessary for continuation—about resurrection, if you like. But, by the time citizens laid out Elk Cemetery, ideas were changing, machine-age separations beginning to press in, so that the burial ground lies removed from the village, as if residents were thinking, If I am here, death belongs out there. They do not seem to have considered that the untwisting of death from life is an unraveling of the whole skein. It’s as if they wanted to live without the awareness they would die. They seemed to ignore how the future, from day to day, is mostly remembrance.
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