The Kansas Territorial Experience - The Englishman in Kansas

Tom Kreissler: The first question I was going to ask is what have you learned from this book, but I'll start with this Territorial chronology. I know Kansas history pretty well, including Territorial history, but reading this book helped me with the chronology of the period. I made a rough chronology of the Territorial period up to Gladstone 's arrival. That wasn't very much, just two years, but it will help us orient ourselves with the discussion. This book helped me clarify what happened and when during those years of 1854 to 1856, the pre-Quantrill years. Quantrill's actions later during the Civil War in 1861 and 1863 eclipsed what came before it. But we're going to focus on what happened from 1854 to 1856.

Kansas Territorial Chronology

(up to Gladstone 's arrival in spring 1856)

1854

May Kansas-Nebraska Act passed

Summer Settlement begins

October Andrew Reeder, appointed Governor by President Franklin Pierce, arrives in KT

November J.W. Whitfield elected Territorial Delegate

1855

March Territorial Legislature election

May Second Territorial Legislature election scheduled by Governor Reeder because of irregularities during first election

Summer Legislature, approved by Reeder but still referred to as "Bogus," meets at Pawnee, near Fort Riley , and purges itself of Free-Soilers

Governor Reeder removed by President Pierce, who replaces him with Wilson Shannon, a Southern sympathizer

October Election of pro-Northern State government, including Charles Robinson as Governor

December State government convenes in Topeka

Wakarusa War

1856

Winter President Pierce renounces Topeka government in favor of "Bogus" government, now meeting at Shawnee

May Sack of Lawrence

Arrival of three-person congressional committee investigating election fraud

Arrival of T. H. Gladstone in KT

My question to you is, Whether you knew a lot or a little about the Kansas Territorial time, what did you learn from this book? What was the most interesting thing you learned?

Participant: And more insidious. All the illegalities, the blatant flaunting of the law.

Participant: I was interested in the difference between what I had learned in high school and in college compared to what was in the book. I read about "Bleeding Kansas" in both my high school history book and my college history book. The thing that I was interested in was not included in Gladstone's account: the Pottawatomie Creek massacre that occurred immediately after Lawrence was founded. That was supposedly carried out by John Brown and there were several pro-slavery people killed. Mr. Gladstone doesn't mention that.

Participant: It was when he arrived in Lawrence. And it happened away from here. But certainly during the writing of this book you would think he would've heard about it. It was not included.

Participant: Perhaps he was writing just about what was happening those few days right on the spot? I think he was writing from notes.

Participant: At the end he interjected some things that he didn't actually see.

Participant: He may not have realized, or there may not have been enough communication to know how vital it was.

Participant: He was very forthright about the fact that the free-soilers didn't resist. They didn't fight. They were peaceful. And yet, John Brown was in the Territory. The next day, John Brown, a free-soiler, massacred these people.

Participant: He was not a resident of Lawrence. Maybe that was the dividing line in his thinking. I don't know.

Tom Kreissler: He was a London Times correspondent, and that's as much as I could find out about him. So he is THE Englishman in Kansas. He was in the country and followed the best story that was occurring at the time. He sent these dispatches back to the London Times.

Tom Kreissler: Right. You see how it's sort of circular. You get his first-person account, then there's commentary, and then there's recapitulation of what he's just written. It's helpful for studying because you're getting it a second time.

Participant: You both just mentioned that what he wrote was published as letters.

Tom Kreissler: In dispatches, yes. And then published in book form in which you have his commentary, the analysis that comes afterward.

Participant: He didn't have all those people with him to support his work, to do all the various things they have now for overseas reporters. You can imagine all the groups of people that have to go as a team. Those people have to get the news back as quickly as it happens.

Tom Kreissler: I think it's a very important point that you bring up about what he leaves out because he presents himself as an objective reporter, but, as was mentioned in our previous session on Uncle Tom's Cabin, slavery had been abolished in England in the 1830s. As one person tells him on a ship, "To say that you're an Englishman is as good as saying you're a Yankee abolitionist, so don't mention where you're from." I don't know that he's all that objective.

Participant: I believe he was trying to report back, but he interjected his own point of view quite frequently. And he certainly has one.

Participant: Those people in England were so far-removed from the situation that they needed—or at least the reporter felt they needed—interpretation. You start getting personal feelings in interpretation.

Tom Kreissler: He reflected the English public, I would say, who were removed but interested and favoring the Northern side. England had abolished slavery.

Participant: There are some letters that John Everett wrote. In one of the letters he said they were just two miles away from Pottawatomie, but he knew nothing about the massacre until a day or two later.

Tom Kreissler: That incident was clouded in a lack of details. And as you'll find out when you read the John Brown book, his role in that incident was disputed. I think Gladstone indicated what side he was on.

I wrote down some adjectives he used to describe proslavery figures and then adjectives that he used to describe free-staters. The Missourians or the Southerners were described as "unscrupulous, " "despicable, " "border ruffians, " "remarkably mean" and "contemptible," a "thorough Missourian" (I liked that one, as if that said it all!), and a "lawless rebel. " They were often "inebriated," "clumsy," whereas the free-staters (free-soilers) had "cool self-possession," and were "sound of judgment," and "cautious." They were "full of fire," "daring" and "steadfast." Charles Robinson, among others, was praised for his "moderation," his "specific nature," and "shrewd intelligence."

Gladstone is probably more objective than those newspaper reporters that he quotes from the Missouri papers and from the local free-state papers. But all along I think his bias was evident in what he wrote and how he described Missourians and the pro-slavery sympathizers.

Participant: But his was probably as objective a point of view as was available at that time. The free-soilers weren't the ones to listen to and the Missourians weren't the ones to listen to. So, who on earth can look at it objectively?

Tom Kreissler: Is there anything redeeming about the Missourians? Anyone from Missouri here willing to defend?

Participant: I had a little difficulty reading this book and thinking that I married one!

Participant: But they said it was just those western counties. If he was from somewhere else . . .

Participant: My college history book pointed out that, as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was assumed that Kansas would be a proslavery state and Nebraska would be a free state.

Participant: In the settlement of other territories that became states, usually adjoining states were instrumental in bringing about the legislation determining whether a state would be free or proslavery. It was assumed by Missourians and many others that Missouri would be a slave state and that Kansas would be slave state. If Kansas became became a free state, Missouri would have been surrounded by three free states and that would have been uncomfortable for Missouri. So, the Missourians—and I don't want to defend them, nor do I want to defend slavery—probably thought they were justified to move into Kansas. They settled Atchison and Leavenworth. They had two communities and the free-staters had one community: Lawrence.

Participant: But then we need to define "settled." This book makes "settled" sound like a paper on a tree would be property owned by someone who never planned to live there.

Tom Kreissler: There were exaggerations like that. Atchison and Leavenworth were Southern-leaning towns. Those were settlements on the river.

Participant: I don't know my geography well, but isn't Missouri probably the northern-most outpost of the Mason-Dixon Line? Doesn't it go a little farther north even than Maryland or Virginia?

Tom Kreissler: Right. The Kansas-Nebraska Act went against the Compromise of 1820. According to this compromise, Congress admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. Slavery was to be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36° 30' latitude.

Participant: When Stephen Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they resolved that every state above a certain line was going to be free. Kansas happened to be the southern half of Nebraska at that time. It's next to Missouri but above the line. Congress resolved that by saying that squatters—whoever had the most people in an area at the time—would determine whether it would be slave or nonslave.

Tom Kreissler: In retrospect, squatter's sovereignty was a pretty bad decision—or not?

Participant: All they had to do was put something on a tree or put an axe in the ground.

Participant: What squatter sovereignty did was create a vacuum in power and set up the dynamic for the opposing forces to fight it out. Whoever could get their axe in the tree won out.

Participant: Henry Steele Commanger, the historian, said that Douglas was morally obtuse.

Tom Kreissler: What was Douglas' motivation? Why did he make that decision? What were his reasons for crafting the Kansas-Nebraska Act to bring about popular sovereignty?

Participant: It was inferred it was self-promotion. He was supporting what was going on in Washington because he envisioned greater things for himself, so he was just smoothing the way.

Tom Kreissler: I also read that that decision allowed the transcontinental railroad to take a northern route rather than a southern route.

Tom Kreissler: So his interests were not just political in terms of the Presidency.

Participant: It was a combination. Usually people who want power also would really like a lot of money too.

Tom Kreissler: Remember who the President was in 1854. Even though Franklin Pierce is from New Hampshire, he was Southern in many respects.

Participant: The Missourians were hoping that there wouldn't be a vacuum of power. They were proposing to fill what they thought was a vacuum. It was just a transference of power. I think that was the goal in changing the Compromise of 1820.

Tom Kreissler: They brought guns. They brought those Sharps rifles, which, when you read All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, you'll know that they're bringing them to Kansas for the war.

Participant: Didn't they say though that bringing rifles to Kansas was wise? There were Indians and wild animals, and if you had to live in the wild, you had to be armed. Did they bring rifles for war?

Tom Kreissler: I'm not a military historian, but I think these are rifles to shoot other people.

Participant: They weren't envisioning the Civil War, were they? Surely nobody was hoping for that.

Participant: They thought that the more people they have on their side, the better chance of winning.

Participant: They were abolitionists. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1851, and the abolitionists came to Kansas in 1854-1855. And the abolitionists were very strong in those days. Their intent was to not allow slavery to permeate the territories; therefore, they came. One of the things I read said that they wanted to raise a million dollars for the Emigrant Aid Society, and they succeeded in raising about $400,000. They didn't come up with the dollars that they had anticipated in the beginning, but they certainly got a settlement here. They got some people with strong leadership skills.

Participant: It was a moral journey even though they brought rifles. They knew they were going to fight.

Participant: Revisionist historians are now saying that the Emigrant Aid Society's motives weren't just moral but also economic. In order to have return on their investment, slavery would not be advantageous.

Tom Kreissler: Gladstone addresses the pitfalls of slavery on the economy. It's a drain on an economy especially in a climate like Kansas. You can't grow cotton. It's not advantageous to grow cotton here.

Participant: It was interesting that he even described the disadvantages to the South to have slavery. That was a new concept for me. But you could tell a difference in quality of life when he crossed over the line.

Participant: The Southern states had been controlled by plantation owners who planted that ground year after year for 200 years. Therefore, the soil was exhausted in Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi. They were moving their operations into Texas. Many plantation owners moved their slaves, and they started growing cotton in Texas prior to the Civil War.

Participant: Do cotton and tobacco plants deplete the soil more than other crops? Is that part of the problem?

Participant: They planted these crops every year and didn't allow regeneration. The same thing happens if you plant wheat every year and you don't have any fertilizer to rejuvenate the soil. They didn't have the fertilizer that we have now, and their soil was exhausted.

Participant: There's a lot of difference in the soil. Illinois had many inches of black topsoil. What did the South have?

Tom Kreissler: Kansas, as Gladstone points out, was another place to import slaves. That was another reason the Southerners wanted this proliferation of their institution. As he writes, "in Virginia, they were selling off slaves just like Uncle Tom was sold down the river." Slave families would be broken up and sent out west. Not just Missourians, but the whole block of Southern states, wanted to extend slavery.

Note how far Kansas was from everywhere else, from Massachusetts, for example. I've read a handful of narratives about Kansas in the mid-nineteenth century. It's as if they were going to Nepal. The first chapter is "The Journey Out There." Gladstone doesn't emphasize this as much, but you'll see this in Lidie Newton and other narratives. We think of ourselves as being in the middle of the country now, but at that time it was the frontier. It was wild.

Participant: Didn't they come by water from Massachusetts to Kansas, which took about three weeks?

Participant: They went down the Erie Canal to the Ohio River to the Mississippi to the Missouri.

Participant: Do you remember in your literature classes reading about Emily Dickinson, whose father was a member of the governing body in Massachusetts that sent the first group to Lawrence? When she would feel depressed, as she often did, she said, "I have that very bad, gone-to-Kansas feeling."

Participant: Yet some of these people had been to California and come back. I thought that was interesting when you naively think that the country was settled east to west.

Tom Kreissler: Right, 1849 was the Gold Rush in California, five years before.

Participant: The steamship Arabia has been dug up and put in a museum in Kansas City. There is a box of rifles labeled "Addressed to Lawrence, Kansas " that is on display in the museum. That ship went down on the Missouri in 1856.

Participant: Were the rifles going to be taken off-board at Leavenworth and go then from Leavenworth to Lawrence? Why weren't they taken off in Kansas City?

Participant: The Missourians had the borders blockaded to Kansas at one point.

Tom Kreissler: Was it news to anybody that Lawrence was so important? That people were coming from Massachusetts. That the London Times correspondent was coming here. This was the theater of war. This was one of the biggest news stories in the world.

Participant: That's right. It amazes me that the English would be interested in that.

Participant: It still surprises me that at ten o'clock every night we have a program on television that is called "World." It's a British crew presenting the news of the world on a PBS station. They've always been adventurers.

Participant: If the English had just outlawed slavery not too many years before, don't you think they'd be particularly interested in this outcome? I think that this would be a subject that would interest their whole country to see what we would do. If this was the new law of the land and I knew there was another country debating it, even possibly going to war over it, I would want to know the outcome. My own people might change their mind.

Participant: Gladstone was also in Washington, D.C., when a committee was appointed to come to Kansas and conduct an investigation. They had two representatives from Congress, one was a free-soiler and one was pro-slavery. There were stories about the elections not being fair, so Congress decided to send a committee to Kansas. Mr. Gladstone said he wanted to go to Kansas Territory when the committee was doing its investigation. They stayed in the same hotel that he did.

Participant: I think it would be interesting to read and compare what was said to the committee members with what Mr. Gladstone tells us. In one of my history books a Washington, D.C., newspaper account about what was going on in Kansas was probably exaggerated. After reading Mr. Gladstone's book, I begin to wonder if his accounts were exaggerated or if they were based in fact.

Tom Kreissler: Dale E. Watts, the historic sites research manager at the Kansas State Historical Society. He says, "The level of killing in Territorial Kansas was much lower than was implied at the time and by subsequent writers" [which would include Gladstone]. "Political killings account for about one third of the total violent deaths." The frontier was a difficult place to live. "They were not common. The streets and byways did not run red with blood as some writers have imagined." "Saul Miller, the irascible and opinionated editor of the White Cloud Kansas Chief (a newspaper at the time), saw some humor in the exaggerated accounts of bloodshed. He wrote early in 1858, 'The late Civil War in Kansas (so they were using that term) did not last but a day and a half. A Kansas correspondent thus sums up the result. Killed 0. Wounded, contusion of the nose, 2. Missing 0. Captured 3. Frightened 5,718. To have read the frightful accounts of the late wars given in the St. Louis Democrat and some of the Kansas papers, one would have supposed that at least as many as I reported above to be frightened were actually killed and had gone the way of all flesh.'"

He says, "In 1854 there were none, 1855 four political killings. In 1856 (which was the year of the sack of Lawrence) 38." This was really the most violent time. There were none until 1860, when there were two. But 13 of those 38 were in Douglas County, five in Franklin County, one in Jefferson County, one in Johnson, eight in Leavenworth. So it's where the people mixed.

Participant: Quantrill's raid didn't happen until 1863. This was well before. It was the first sack by Sheriff Jones.

Tom Kreissler: Yes. Gladstone arrived the day after Sheriff Jones led his posse in May 1856.

Participant: Gladstone says no free-soilers were killed and two proslavery men were killed, one by a brick that blew off a roof and the other in an accident. So he doesn't report a lot of killing. But he does report a lot of killing and intimidation in Leavenworth when he stays in Leavenworth at the hotel, and when he's on the ship.

Tom Kreissler: Here's the quotation. It's on page 69. "Murder and cold-blooded assassination were of almost daily occurrence at the time of my visit." If the perpetrators of that campaign weren't successful with these, not only were they despicable and unscrupulous, but they were pretty incompetent too.

Participant: "As it was, guerrilla parties were organized by some of the less passive spirits on the Free-state side, corresponding with those already existing amongst their opponents. . . Other acts of retaliation occurred. In several instances the opposing parties came into collision, and violence ensued. For some time, therefore, after the attack upon Lawrence, an irregular strife was maintained, and a bitter remembrance filled each man's mind, and impelled to daily acts of hostility and unfrequent bloodshed."

Participant: It also says if you dare to report it, you're a marked man, so maybe they were not reported.

Tom Kreissler: There were no authorities in charge, for example, Colonel Sumner at Fort Leavenworth.

Participant: How often would one report a murder as political? You would report it as an accident or the other guy infuriated him or he was led to kill him because the other guy did something. Here they talk about the border ruffians trying to get the Massachusetts people to retaliate, and they couldn't provoke them to retaliate. So, how often when a murder from the other side is reported would it be called murder? I don't trust those statistics.

Tom Kreissler: Here's one last piece of data. This gets back to our point about Gladstone's bias, because the data of these political killings indicates that "The two sides (proslavery, free-staters) were nearly equally involved in killing their political opponents. Thirty proslavery people, twenty-four antislavery men were murdered, one officially neutral U.S. soldier, and one man whose political persuasion is obscured by garbled historical record." So antislavery men seem to have been just as hostile and aggressive as their proslavery counterparts as deemed by historians today as opposed to Gladstone who described the free-staters as "cautious," "steadfast," and "pacific." It's the border ruffians who are "cavalier" and often "intoxicated," "violent," and "ignorant." Let's go back to the persona of Gladstone. What are his biases here?

Participant: Where's he getting his statistics? If they're coming from "the government," obviously the government was really messed up at this point. I don't think you can say that what they were reporting was accurate either. I don't know what one should use. I think he's interpreting also.

Tom Kreissler: He's quoting a lot of previous historians, and culling through them, and texts like Andreas's History of Kansas—(it's a wonderful two-volume book)—and the different newspapers at the time and what they were reporting. He notes intruders who were killed and looks at both sides.

Participant: To me, it didn't ring true that people were to remain peaceful while they were being attacked. It's against human nature, particularly the law of the frontier. I mean, we're not talking Gandhi here.

Participant: The free-staters did build an earth barricade. They did have a canon. And they did have guards who were posted to watch for attacks. It would be interesting to know if anyone else reports that the free-staters were as pacifist in nature as is described here.

Participant: Here they talk about Lane being put in charge of the troop or soldiers or free-staters. That was towards the end of the time that they were attacked.

Participant: Lane was a man of action; he'd get right in the middle of it. He was not passive.

Participant: I don't understand the relationship of John Brown to the New England Emigrant Aid Society and to what happened immediately after the siege of Lawrence. Did he know Charles Robinson? Was John Brown a part of this group of settlers here in Lawrence? Or was he out in Douglas County?

Participant: His sons were here first, and he came basically because he was broke and didn't have anything else to do. He's an interesting character. We'll talk more about him next time. He was down on his luck and just wandering around, and so his sons did come out here. They had no connection to the Emigrant Aid Society. They didn't live in Lawrence. He was in and out of Lawrence, but they always lived in Osage County.

Tom Kreissler: The Pottawatomie massacre was provoked not so much by the siege here in Lawrence, but by the actions in Washington, D.C., when one senator beat another senator (Sumner) almost senseless.

You'll find out in reading John Brown: The Legend Revisited, by Merrill Peterson, that Robinson and others separated themselves from Brown for the rest of the nineteenth century. He was not one of their own. Some of them implied that he was insane and argued that his actions in the Pottawatomie massacre proved that.

Participant: He was really a maverick. He was strictly on his own, a fanatic.

Tom Kreissler: Is there anything about the nonpolitical, nonviolent aspects of the narrative about what Leavenworth looked like or what Leavenworth society was like or what Lawrence was like that struck you as significant, interesting, odd, or different from what you have learned in the past about frontier history or Kansas history?

Participant: I didn't realize that Lawrence was the headquarters of the free-soil idea and that the Eldridge Hotel was one of the nicest buildings in the Kansas Territory. I didn't know we were so prominent.

Tom Kreissler: They convened in Topeka for their state assembly, but many of them lived here in Lawrence.

Participant: I read the introduction to The Englishman in Kansas by Frederick Law Olmstead in the University of Nebraska Press edition. It makes the point that slave society dehumanizes the slave as well as the slave master and that corporal punishment is used to subjugate the slaves. This does something to people; they are more ready to shoot or kill. Or is this kind of behavior that goes on as he describes, particularly in Leavenworth, and how abominably people treat each other, just part of the frontier way of life? Certainly it happened in Dodge City. And Dodge City wasn't undergoing the invasion of folks from Missouri or Southern states.

Participant: Mr. Gladstone says that the border ruffians' lawless behavior could be attributed to the fact that they're from a slave state and that people from slave states are more willing to use corporal punishment because it's been a part of their culture to dehumanize people. They become dehumanized themselves in the process.

Participant: It stands to reason that if you can dehumanize any group, it would be easier to dehumanize whomever you perceive as an enemy. A slave wasn't necessarily an enemy; it was an asset, a thing you own. If you've been cruel to one person, it would be much easier to strike another person if you were angry. Some of these people from Missouri were uneducated. They had very little contact with any people outside of their own circle. They simply knew no other life. And they were easily led. In some countries today, people who are lacking in education or haven't been fed well are angry. Many of these people were. They were led by people for financial reasons. They said, "They're taking your rights away." Many of these people who came here to fight had never owned a slave in their lives. Their only feeling about slaves was "At least I'm better off than they are." They had to have some way of feeling a sense of pride in themselves. When someone told them that they were going to have this taken away from them if they didn't stop these people, it was easy to fight.

Participant: Because they wanted the pride of choice. If they didn't have any money, they didn't have any choice really, but they didn't want anybody in Washington, D.C., getting in their business and telling them what they were to do.

Tom Kreissler: Or New England, because in Washington they said that you could have slavery. Our federal government was allowing this and supporting this.

Participant: I thought it was amazing that the first Territorial governor and assembly incorporated Missouri state law and made it Kansas state law. They made the slave portion of it even more stringent than Missouri, which meant that a free-soiler couldn't actually admit who he was and what he believed or he could be put in chains for five years.

Participant: I don't know what the status of our territories is today. Do our laws apply to our territories today? Or do they have their own laws?

Participant: That was a part of the issue at that time. When did the Constitution actually apply to the territories?

Tom Kreissler: What about the Indians? What did you think about Gladstone's description of the Indians and the Indian village? In our time we'd call them a minority group.

Participant: Gladstone was so positive sometimes. The Indians could be educated if they would just adopt the white man's ways, as they did in Oklahoma.

Participant: They sold land that wasn't even theirs. It had been deeded to the Indians. It makes your skin crawl.

Tom Kreissler: Gladstone does have some awareness of that irony of the civilized white people. He says, "When I returned from my friendly visit to the Sioux, to the riot and savage turmoil of the white settlement, I felt doubtful whether I had not left civilization behind me." (p. 214)

Tom Kreissler: On the boat over, he describes the people on the boat and among them are Charles Robinson, who is under arrest, and the committee. Then he also described—almost parenthetically—servants who were black and the one slave who was in the corner in a very degraded position.

Participant: Just because someone was not proslave doesn't necessarily mean that he was not still prejudiced, racist. A woman in one of our book discussion groups said one of the reasons Kansas wanted to be a free state was to keep black people out.

Participant: Sometimes when we're patting ourselves on the back because our ancestors were righteous, it's interesting to say, "Wait a minute, were all their motives that pure?"

Participant: I think it is important to be careful about generalizing. Lawrence was not like the rest of the state in 1854, or like it is now in many, many ways. At some point it was even made into law or was officially stated that they didn't want black people here at all. But the Underground Railroad remained very active in Douglas County throughout the Civil War. The freed men flocked here after the war. They were welcome. There were free men's schools set up in churches. They were clothed. They were fed. They were taken care of. Housing in Lawrence was never segregated. Social segregation came along later with the rise of Jim Crow in the South. It permeated the whole country top to bottom. I don't think it's a fair assessment that the motivation of the Emigrant Aid Society was to have no blacks in Kansas at all.

Tom Kreissler: As you talk about John Brown more next session, you'll find out that he was radical in so many things, and he was radical in his ideas about race. Stowe had ambivalent, conflicted feelings about race. Abraham Lincoln wanted to send slaves back to Africa. Brown was someone who, on his farm in upstate New York, had black people eat with him and stay with him. He was a person who was ahead of his time in his dealings and thoughts about the relations between the races. One quote I remember is that he was the "blackest white man that the black race knew."

Credits
Charles Robinson photo: used with permission of the Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries

"Day of Our Enslavement" announcement, Kansas Weekly Tribune, Sept. 15, 1855; illustration of Free State Hotel destruction, May 21, 1856, illustration of Kansas River rope ferry: used with permission of the Kansas State Historical Society, copy and reuse restrictions apply