"A Paradoxical philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that aphorism of Montesquieu's, 'Happy the people whose annals are tiresome,' has said; 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant.' In which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found some grain of reason? For truly, as it has been written, 'Silence is divine,' and of Heaven; so in all earthly things, too, there is a silence which is better than any speech. Consider it well, the Event, the thing which can be spoken of and re

It was during the '40's that the Sac and Fox Indians started on their long journey to take up their home in the land provided for them in Kansas, being a portion of the present counties of Lyon, Osage, and Franklin. In the year 1846 a large number of them had camped in the Kansas River Valley near the present site of Topeka, and because of their friendship with the Shawnees they were permitted to remain there for some time before moving on. Many of them formed attachments and friendships among t

The Indian trail had given away and had gradually become merged into a public road, here and there forced back to section lines, but in the main sustaining its diagonal course across the country and being known as the Topeka and Ottawa State Road. Jacob Welchans was not only an extraordinarily fine surveyor, whose corner-stones and monuments are now and always will be recognized in Shawnee County as the best evidence of the location of land boundaries, but he also engaged in country school-teach

One November day in 1877 the Newcomers unloaded from a Santa Fe train just then arrived in the city of Topeka, the exact time being about four o'clock in the afternoon. There was Mother Newcomer and five boys, the oldest being less than five years older than the youngest. On the platform they met Father Newcomer, who, together with a country lad, was awaiting the arrival. They gathered their baggage together, and the country boy led the way across the street to where his team, hitched to a farm

During the midsummer of 1854, James Lynn and William Lynn started across the prairies from Westport, Missouri, to find homes in Kansas. With a stalwart pair of oxen yoked to a heavy wagon they proceeded slowly but surely westward, and finally, following up the Wakarusa Valley and out along one of its tributaries, they camped one night after a blistering hot August day near a spring that flowed from among a pile of stones and boulders that had been deposited at that point in great abundance by so

Mother Newcomer certainly enjoyed Kansas, and she soon became as well known as an old-timer. At home she was the cook and the baker and the dressmaker and the tailor, besides doing a part of all other work about the place. She knew where the best greens could be picked in early spring, and the best berries in the summer, and she either made the boys pick them or she took her snake-killing dog with her and picked them herself; and all through the year she was a part of all the activities of the h

A Scotch lad who appeared to be scarcely out of his teens came to the neighborhood one October day and was soon employed as a farm hand. This employment did not last long, because the school ma'am got married, and he made application and was selected as the teacher in the district school. George Franks looked him over and said: "There's one thing certain. He's not liable to get married before the term is over." He was certainly an awkward lad, and his peculiar brogue as well as the unusual phras

On a slab in the Ridgeway graveyard there is this inscription: "Jacob W. Self. Died January 27, 1873." Jake Self was forty-nine years old when he died, and he had been a pioneer and a plainsman since his boyhood. He lived on the old Berry farm near the stone bridge. On the morning of the day of his death he, together with Wash Townsend and S. A. Sprague, went on horseback to Carbondale. Carbondale was then a thriving little village, with a few stores, a blacksmith shop, and about a dozen saloons

Marcus Doyen came straight from the heart of Maine to Wakarusa. His family consisted of himself and wife and an old mother who had made the journey with them. It did not take him long to provide comfortable habitations for himself and one horse and a cow, and he interested everyone by the ingenuity with which he constructed his buildings, so tight that even the Kansas wind could not blow through them, and as though he were calculating on the same kind of temperature during winter time that his h

As you drive from Topeka to the stone bridge, just before you enter the valley, you notice what may appear to be a road extending eastward between two fences set about thirty feet apart. The way is rough and stony, and full of weeds and brush, and if you ask whether it is a laid-out road, you will be informed that it is, and that years ago road viewers went over it and established it as one of the public roads of Shawnee County. If you ask whether it was ever traveled, the answer will be, "no."

The Berry Creek Methodist church was a religious institution. It didn't pretend to have any other purpose nor function than to promote the getting of religion. There was no attempt to provide amusements or recreation, nor to make the church organization a club or a cult of any kind or character. The preachers and the members simply preached the old-time religion and insisted that every human being must get religion or go to hell. They were not so particular as to whether you joined the church, a

A few of the neighbors held a meeting to arrange for a Fourth of July picnic that was to be held in the grove near the big spring that breaks through the rocky banks of the Wakarusa one and a half miles below the stone bridge, and they had quite a dispute over whether they would invite John Martin or Joseph G. Waters to make the speech. An old mossback Democrat insisted that they have Martin. He said that Martin was a real Jeffersonian Democrat, and knew more about what the Fourth of July was ma

The boy treasured up what had been told him about the ghost fisherman, and although he had been taught at home that there were no ghosts, every story of that nature interested him. One night he was at the home of Uncle Bill Matney. It was about ten o'clock, and they were all seated around the big fire that was roaring in the fireplace. Uncle Bill was playing "Natchez Under the Hill" on the fiddle, when suddenly they heard a horse coming on a dead run over the rocky road that led toward the house

The boy was just skeptic enough to have plenty of fun listening to ghost stories by people who believed or half way believed them; and it became a habit of his to bring up the subject in talking with different people, and listen to their ghost stories if any might be provoked. One spring he heard a ghost story that clung to him, and as he grew older and older the ghost in the story seemed more real. It was during the spring roundup of cattle, and he and an old Westerner had been riding and worki