Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories: Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas — John Locke — John Shaqi
Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories: Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas
John Locke · en
About fifty years ago, a family by the name of Cummings came here and
lived for a short while in the northwest part of town. Mrs. Cummings
said she was the daughter of Andy Maxwell. I did not learn her given
name, but supposed she was May. She called at the Spectator office, and
read the story.
Then, in February, 1939, Mrs. Nettie E. Rachford, Westwood, California,
wrote the Spectator asking for a copy of the story, saying she was the
daughter of Andy Maxwell. I then copied the story from my files, and W.
F. Turrentine printed it again in the Spectator, February 1939.
This reprint of the Maxwell story caused Dr. LeVere Anderson, born and
reared on a farm five miles southwest of Wetmore—now established in
Miles City, Montana—to bring the matter of that Indian fight to the
attention of the Miles City Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber was at
that very time sponsoring a homecoming jubilee—and after an exchange
of letters between Miles City and Wetmore, Andy Maxwell, then living in
Santa Ana, California, was invited to be the Chamber’s honored guest—but
he was unable to make the trip. Andy Maxwell died at Santa Ana in 1941,
at the age of ninety-nine.
Our New Temporary Home Earlier in this writing I mentioned the fact
that our family had three years on the Hazeltine farm. My older brother,
Charley, contracted “quick consumption.” There was a prevailing notion
that the scent of new pine lumber and fresh country air would be helpful
in effecting a cure. So my father made a contract with Charley Hazeltine
for the erection of a new house under the cottonwoods on the hill near
the old log-house which had been the home of father of the Hazeltine
brothers—with a three-year lease on 40 acres of farm land.