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
Given space, I could make of this in itself a very interesting story.
Green Campbell’s second wife was Eleanor Young, a reporter on a Salt
Lake newspaper, and daughter-in-law of the famous old Brigham himself,
who hated all peoples not of the Mormon faith. It is not recorded that
the lady said to her man, like Ruth of old, “Thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God.” But the inference is, she did. Campbell did
not go Mormon. Indeed, he was poison to the saints after he contested
the election of his Mormon opponent, Bishop Cannon, and took unto
himself the Canadian’s seat in Congress after it had been occupied by
the alien for nearly two years.
Several of the old stage drivers, after closing days, married and
settled down in Wetmore. Robert Sewell married Cicily Locknane; Lon
Huff married Clara Rising; Bill Evans married Kate Porter. Through
their activities on the stage line, and breathing the free atmosphere
of frontier life, these men were all moulded pretty much into a like
pattern. Good story-tellers all, they lent themselves to the occupation
without stint. Jovial and courteous at all times, they shunned
work—unless it be with horses. Lon Huff drove the hearse for the local
undertaker. He had a black team for adults, and a team of white horses
for children.
Robert Sewell, the outstanding character, known on the plains as “Bob
Ridley,” owned a livery stable here. Shall I tell the auto-minded young
sprouts that the livery stable, now in the discard, was an enterprise of
the horse-and-buggy days—a place where rigs were kept for hire?
Sewell’s wife, Cicily, ran a hotel. Her mother, Mrs. D. M. Locknane,
had conducted a famous eating house just west of Granada during overland
days. Those two early-day enterprises of the Sewells were known as the
“Overland Livery Stable,” and the “Overland Hotel.” Bob Sewell had a
record of killing three Indians and wounding a dozen more in a running
fight near Cottonwood Springs. Ben Holladay gave him a gold watch for
saving the stage and four mules.
About the Old Trail, I have heard my uncle say that in the flush times
of 1865 and 1866, when traffic was at its peak, there was hardly an hour
of the day when one could not see the road lined for miles—one seeming
endless procession moving westward. No other road ever had such a
promiscuous, persevering throng—a weary plodding throng, whose way was
fraught with many hardships, whose dead were left all along the Old
Trail from the Missouri river to the Golden Gate. Other stage lines
threaded the West and the Southwest—but the Overland has gone down in
history as the greatest of them all.