MOTHER SMITH, OF ELLIS. Excerpted from "Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1911-1912", Edited by Geo. W. Martin, Secretary. Vol XII., State Printing Office, Topeka, Kansas 1912, pages 347-352. submitted by Teresa Lindquist (merope@radix.net); (copyright) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist ----------------------------------------------------------------------- KSGENWEB INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In keeping with the KSGenWeb policy of providing free information on the Internet, this data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other gain. Copying of the files within by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- MOTHER SMITH, OF ELLIS. Written for the Kansas State Historical Society by JAMES H. BEACH,(1) professor American history and geography, at the Western State Normal School, Hays, Kansas. THE HISTORY of pioneer days has never been fully told. It has recounted the deeds and exploits of the men who blazed the way. The stories of hunters and trappers, soldiers and scouts, traders and missionaries never lose their fascination. The places of these men in the history of the country is [sic] as secure as those of the reformer or the statesman. The service they performed can not be rated too highly. They gave up comfort and ease for the probability of death and the certainty of privation and suffering. They conquered the savage and subdued the wilderness. Such men made possible the story of American achievement. The story of the women who accompanied these men has never half been told. For the man the frontier is a place of suffering and want. For the woman it means all that the man endures, and, in addition, utter loneliness, torturing anxiety, and the dread of nameless calamity. Their lives are full of physical pain. They minister to the wants of their men with rudest means. They bear their children amidst unfeminine surroundings, and they spend their old age in barren obscurity. For the man there is always the relief of action and the fierce joy of conflict. For the woman there are long days of solitude while the men are away; there are agonies of suspense while husbands, sons or brothers are on dangerous service, and there is an utter barrenness and poverty that deprives a woman of all that makes life worth living. She simply effaces herself and finds her satisfaction in the lives of her men. In spite of all this, no man ever went into the wilderness where it was too dangerous for a woman to accompany him. These women took their places in frontier communities. They raised up strong sons and daughters who became an honor to later times, and in modest self-effacement they gave all the credit to their men. This is the short story of one heroic pioneer woman. Mother Smith was born in Logan county, Kentucky, May 11, 1824. She came of a Revolutionary family, and was marked, even in her youth, as a woman of striking personality. She grew to womanhood with no advantages for education, and was married, when only eighteen years of age, to W. M. Smith. In about 1846 they joined a colony that went to Cherokee county, Texas. This was the year after the annexation, and their home was in the wilds of a new country. In 1858 the husband died and left Mrs. Smith with seven small children. Four others had died in infancy. Their life in Texas was the common lot of pioneers. It meant hard work, lack of opportunity, much suffering, and no promise for the future. At the outbreak of the Civil War Mrs. Smith decided it would be unwise for her to remain in Texas. She thought it likely that the country would be devastated by armies, and was unwilling to subject her small children to dangers that would be inevitable. An aunt in Litchfield, Ill., offered to find work for her there; so in 1861, with her flock of children, she journeyed north. In later years she gave vivid descriptions of the trip through a country seething with the excitement of war. She went up the river to St. Louis on a boat on which she was the only woman. She always said that on the whole journey no one offered her the slightest insult, and that she was the recipient of kind acts without number. During the next nine years she supported her growing brood by hard work, managing to hold them together and maintaining unbroken their family life. In this way was developed that feeling for each other which was always so strong a trait of the family. By this time the older children were grown up and were eager to go where wages were better. Great stories came to them of the wages paid in the New West, and they decided to emigrate. Here again was shown that invincible spirit of the American pioneer in search of opportunity. It mattered not that the life of the plains was one to test the endurance of a strong man. The fresh history of the Indian wars counted for nothing. The widow and her flock decided to be a part of the beginnings of things in the Great West. In 1870 a division point of the old Kansas Pacific road was Ellsworth, and Col. P. A. Maginnis, of Illinois, was master mechanic of the shop there. He was a relative by marriage of Mrs. Smith and promised to find employment for her. The family arrived in Ellsworth only to find that the division had been moved to the new town of Ellis. There was nothing to do but to go on. Mrs. Smith was not one of the number of those who, having put their hands to the plow, turn back. On August 10, 1870, she landed from the cars on the bare prairie that was to be her home for forty years. There was no place to shelter her--not even a dugout. The railroad men were sleeping on the bare ground. A few who had wives lived in rude huts. A storm was coming up. She was offered the shelter of a box car by John H. Edwards,(2) proprietor of the Railroad Hotel, and this was her home until a better place could be provided. Mrs. Smith had expected to be given charge of the Railroad Hotel, but her patron failed in his efforts in this direction and she was thrown on her own resources. She and her children took whatever honorable work offered, and soon all had places. Her two sons, William and John, went into the shops, and two of the girls were soon employed in the Railroad Hotel. The expectation of high wages was justified, and no member of her family was ever long out of a job. Here, as in Illinois, they kept unbroken their family life. The railroad company soon put up a large wooden rooming house for the men in their employ. This was known as the "bunk house," and Mrs. Smith was placed in charge of it. Here it was that she earned her title of "Mother" Smith, and by this she was known to the end of her life. She became in truth a mother to all the homeless men of the frontier settlement. When they were sick she nursed them; when they were in trouble she gave them advice. She was one of the strong, capable women, like Mother Bickerdyke, who go amid any surroundings, who never hesitate in the face of any duty, and who hold the solid respect of all. With rough-and-ready generosity the men responded to her kindness, and to this day the survivors reverence her memory. Railroad men belong to the homeless class. They come and go with their work and are shifted at the command of their superiors. They are merely privates in the great industrial army. Forty years is a long time in the history of a Kansas town, yet a number of the original railroad boys are still in Ellis. S. J. Holman was one of the first engineers. He is now in the grocery business. A. B. Keagy was a machinist in the first shops, and is still at his place by his lathe. C. J. Bascom was foreman of the water service. He is living in retirement. Michael Ryan, another engineer, is also in retirement. Thomas Chapman, who came out from London a ruddy young Englishman, worked as an engineer until recently, when he retired upon a pension honorably earned by his long service. He is now the "lord mayor" of Ellis. The other boys of the early group are dead or are scattered to the four corners of the earth. It is safe to say, though, that no matter where they are, every man of them treasures in his heart the memory of the old days at Ellis, and no finer memory remains than that of the ministrations of Mother Smith. Some time later the railroad boys aided Mother Smith to own a cottage. They contributed to a fund to help buy the lumber and worked in their hours off duty to build it. When it was finished Mother Smith moved into it and began to serve meals to the men. From this time on she had an established business. The lots on which the cottage was built were the gift of Colonel Maginnis, who had taken as a homestead the quarter section on which the greater part of the town site was situated. He sold the quarter to the railroad company, but reserved Mother Smith's lots, and they were her home until the time of her death. The country then was in its state of native wildness. No efforts had been made to farm any of it. The prairie stretched away in an unbroken expanse of buffalo sod. The buffalo themselves came down to the opposite bank of the creek to drink. Practically the only meat eaten in the town for several years was furnished by them. It was served to the crowds of eastern excursionists who were fed at the Railroad Hotel. The only milk served was the canned article, which was new to the greater number of the easterners. It is recalled with much amusement by the old timers that many of them asked Mother Smith's daughter Josie, who was a dining-room girl, about this milk, and that she invariably told them it was buffalo's milk. The answer was usually received without suspicion. Mother Smith's years were always serious years and filled with much sorrow, but in 1872 occurred the great tragedy of her life. Her daughter Mary had married Richard Jordan, and was living at Trego, now Wa Keeney. About the first of August in that year Mr. Jordan, with his brother George and a Swede boy named Fred Nelson, started for a buffalo hunt, and Mrs. Jordan accompanied them. They had a wagon well equipped for a camping trip and a good team of mules. It was the intention of the party to go from Trego leisurely southward and to take their buffalo hides to Dodge. They warned Mother Smith not to be alarmed if she heard nothing for some time. About two weeks after the departure of the party Jordan's dog returned. Even this did not cause immediate alarm, because the dog had returned in a similar manner from a hunt once before. Still, the friends of the men were beginning to plan a relief party, when a hunter came in with the startling news that he had found Jordan's two wagons on the prairie deserted. He had identified them by an empty grain sack having the name R. Jordan, Park's Fort, on it. He was alone and had been afraid to make any search in the immediate vicinity. A relief party was immediately made up, under the leadership of Mr. T. K. Hamilton, another son-in-law of Mother Smith. He was a man of courage and determination. He afterwards was sheriff of Ellis county and a most successful officer. Mr. Hamilton secured a detachment of twenty-five soldiers from Fort Hays and went as rapidly as possible to the scene of the supposed murder. At this time the Indians of the plains were still in hostile mood, although the campaigns of 1868 and 1869 had taught them the futility of resistance on a large scale. The scene of the murder was reached on the bank of the south fork of Walnut creek, about fifty miles south of Trego. It was found that the party had camped in a sheltered place in a bend of the creek and had evidently been cooking a meal. It was supposed that they had been surprised in the daytime, because Jordan was experienced in the ways of the plains and was too careful a man to camp at night in a place where he could be ambushed. Richard Jordan and Nelson had been killed by rifle shots and had not fired a shot in their defense. It was evident that the surprise had been complete. George Jordan was found some distance away, where he had taken refuge behind a buffalo carcass. Possibly he was not with the party when they had been attacked. A number of empty shells around him told the story of his defense. His body was full of arrows. No trace of Mrs. Jordan was seen in the vicinity. Her fate could only be conjectured from that of other unfortunate women who had been carried away in the various raids of the plains. Expert army scouts took the trail of the Indians and followed it north to the Nebraska line, where it finally disappeared. It was believed that the deed was done by a small party of northern Cheyennes who were returning from a feast with their kinsmen in the Indian Territory. At the time of the hunting trip Mrs. Jordan was wearing a new balmoral underskirt, which had been given her by her mother and which could be easily identified. She had torn strips from this and had dropped them at intervals. These were picked up by the trailers as far north as the Nebraska line. It was believed that the Indians finally separated into two or more small parties, and perhaps one of them returned to the Indian Territory. All efforts were unavailing, and no further trace of the missing woman was ever found.(3) When Jordan went out he had a gun of a pattern new to the country. It carried a shell so different from those in common use that it served as a means of trailing the Indians. Later the gun was found in the possession of an Indian. Correspondence with the manufacturers established the fact that the gun was undoubtedly Jordan's. The Indian declared that Mrs. Jordan had been taken about ten miles from the scene of the surprise and had been killed. He asserted that the killing was in revenge for the killing of a member of their party by a detachment of soldiers only a few days before. Mother Smith gave up all expectation of recovering her daughter, but clung to the hope that evidence of her death might be discovered. Later she went with an army escort on a tour of all the principal reservations in search of some assurance that would bring peace to her mind. She followed up every story that reached her ears of women taken by Indians, and, with the infinite longing of a mother for a lost child, hoped to the last to obtain some proof of her daughter's death. In every direction she failed, and to the last day of her life she was tortured by the most cruel anxiety as to her child's fate. As the family became more prosperous Mother Smith was gradually relieved of the long strain of caring for them. In 1886 her daughter Jennie married Mr. Sumner Martin, an engineer on the Union Pacific road, and they made their home with Mother Smith. A comfortable house in time came to take the place of the little cottage that had so long been their home. From that time her life was one of ease and quiet. An ordinary woman would have settled into her place in an easy chair and would have devoted her time to knitting, reading her Bible, and caring for her grandchildren. Mother Smith was not an ordinary woman, and it was then that a new and surprising side of her character developed. She became a reader of unusual breadth and with surprising power of assimilating and remembering what she read. Her means for buying books were limited, but her powers of persuasion were good, and she usually found some way of gratifying her desire to have books. She either persuaded friends to buy the new books or had them bought for the library. She read everything--fiction, poetry, history, biography--and all added to her permanent store of information. All the different magazines in Ellis passed through her hands, and she knew the principles for which each stood and the policy by which it was governed. She had a wide correspondence that included many persons of note. In her collection were autograph letters from five presidents. The history of one of these letters is worth telling. After the loss of her daughter Mother Smith placed a claim against the government for damages. She owned the teams and outfit which Jordan had on the hunting expedition and he was carrying a government message to Fort Dodge. The case dragged along for years, but the claim was never allowed. When President Roosevelt came through Ellis on one of his western tours Mother Smith succeeded in having a few words with him and in placing a written statement of her claim in his hands. He spoke kindly to her, and as soon as the train started wrote her a long autograph letter, telling her the proper mode of procedure and expressing his interest in the case. This letter was mailed from Sharon Springs. Her passion for collecting amounted almost to a mania. No traveler came to Ellis without meeting Mother Smith. Whether he was a missionary, a tourist, a lecturer or a celebrity of any sort, he was interviewed and asked to send her something from the parts of the world he visited. Many of them complied, and her collections grew. Finally they contained souvenirs from nearly every foreign land. Her collections of postcards and stamps were large. Her various diversions by no means took away her interest in the poor and the afflicted. In times of crop failure and financial panic she knew every family that needed help, and she saw to it that they had relief. She took from them that had for the help of them that had not. She was not of the sort to go about in a begging manner for the aid of her poor She asked as one having the right to demand, and her demands were honored. Whether the poor were her immediate neighbors or whether they lived far out on the prairie, it mattered not. In all the country tributary to Ellis the needy were in her parish. So long as she was able to be out there was never a death that did not bring from her a call upon the bereaved family. Her life had been such a series of tragedies that she was able to feel the woes of others and to bring the sympathy that they needed. In her youth Mother Smith united with the Baptist church, and she considered herself a member of the church as long as she lived, although there was no organization of her faith in Ellis. She said frequently that her entire creed was summed up in the words of the Apostle James: "Pure religion and undefi led before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world." It can not be denied that her whole life was spent in exemplifying her creed. During the latter part of her life she became feeble and recognized that her end was near, but her only anxiety was that her mind might be clear. Her wish was gratified, and she retained her interest in worldly affairs to the end. Her death came at the close of a short, acute illness, and was a surprise to nearly everybody. It was in keeping with her career. She continued the battle to the end and gave up the struggle without a murmur. Mother Smith was not of the passive, saintly order. Life to her meant a conflict, and she never shirked her part in it. She was likely to call things by their harsh names and to give people their proper places according to their deeds. Perhaps she was not always right, but she was honest in her convictions, and her convictions grew out of the experiences of a long and varied career with many sorts of people. Sometimes she gave offense. But when the harsh and the grotesque of tbe great character has been forgotten, then the deeds of kindness, the acts of nobility and the greatness of soul stand out in relief. It will be so with Mother Smith. When her body was laid at rest on July 28, 1910, her work was ended, but her influence was only beginning. It will live in the lives of men whom she aided with kindly ministrations and good advice; in the lives of pioneer women who felt the strong and sympathetic touch of a sister woman; in the lives of little children to whom she was a universal grandmother, and in the life of a community in which she was a force for forty years. When it is remembered that this woman was reared in Kentucky before the days of common schools, was married at eighteen, went to Texas in frontier days, became the mother of eleven children in sixteen years, worked like a slave at the hardest kind of labor until she was sixty years old, her intellectual development appears marvelous. Good women are not scarce, but women who have the force to be leaders in all good works in a community are always needed. In force of character, in practical goodness, in intellectual power despite adverse conditions, Mother Smith well deserves to be called a remarkable woman. --- NOTE 1.--For sketch of James Harvey Beach see Kansas Historical Collections, vol. 11, p. 571. NOTE 2.--[biography of John H. Edwards] NOTE 3.--The Topeka Weekly Commonwealth of October 17, 1872, contains an account, written by John H. Edwards, of the murder of the Jordans by the Indians.