Abroad At Home Part 30

While he was standing there Bob Ford shot him in the back.

"Well, Bob died a violent death a while after that. He was shot by a man named Kelly in a saloon in Creede, Colo. And Charlie Ford brooded over the killing of Jesse and committed suicide about a year later. The three Younger boys, who were members of the gang, too, were captured a while after, near Northfield, Minn., where they had tried to rob a bank.

They were all sent up for life. Bob Younger died in the penitentiary at Stillwater, but Cole and Jim were paroled and not allowed to leave the State. Jim fell in love with a woman, but being an ex-convict, he couldn't get a license to marry her. That broke his heart and he committed suicide. Cole finally got a full pardon and is now living in Jackson County, Missouri. He and Frank are the only two members of the Gang who are left and the only two that didn't die either in the penitentiary or by violence. Frank was in hiding for years with a big price on his head. At last he gave himself up, stood trial, and was acquitted."

Adherents of Bob Ford told a different story of the motives back of the killing of Jesse James. They contend that Jesse James thought Ford had been "telling things" and ought to be put out of the way, and that in killing Jesse, Ford practically saved his own life.

Whatever may be the truth, it is generally agreed that the action of Jesse James in taking off his guns and turning his back on the Ford boys was unprecedented. He had never before been known to remove his weapons.

Some people think he did it as a piece of bravado. Others say he did it to show the Ford boys that he trusted them. But whatever the occasion for the action it gave Bob Ford his chance--a chance which, it is thought, he would not have dared take when Jesse James was armed.

During the course of our visit Frank James "lectured," more or less constantly, touching on a variety of subjects, including the Mexican situation and woman suffrage.

"The women ought to have the vote," he affirmed. "Look what we owe to the women. A man gets 75 per cent. of what goodness there is in him from his mother, and he owes at least 40 per cent. of all he makes to his wife. Yes, some men owe more than that. Some of 'em owe 100 per cent. to their wives."

Ethics and morality seem to be favorite topics with the old man, and he makes free with quotations from the Bible and from Shakespeare in substantiation of his opinions.

"City people," I heard him say to some other visitors who came while we were there, "think that we folks who live on farms haven't got no sense.

Well, we may not know much, but what we do know we know darn well. We farmers _feed_ all these smart folks in the cities, so they ought to give us credit for knowing _some_thing."

He can be dry and waggish as he shows himself off to those who come and pay their fifty cents. It was amusing to watch him and listen to him.

Sometimes he sounded like an old parson, but his air of piety sat upon him grotesquely as one reflected on his earlier career. A prelate with his hat c.o.c.ked rakishly over one ear could have seemed hardly more incongruous.

[Ill.u.s.tration: It was Frank James.... He looks more like a prosperous farmer or the president of a rural bank than like a bandit. In his manner there is a strong note of the showman]

At some of his virtuous plat.i.tudes it was hard not to smile. All the time I was there I kept thinking how like he was to some character of Gilbert's. All that is needed to make Frank James complete is some lyrics and some music by Sir Arthur Sullivan.

There are almost as many stories of the James Boys and their gang to be heard in Excelsior Springs as there are houses in the town. But as Frank James will not commit himself, it is next to impossible to verify them.

However, I shall give a sample.

I was told that Frank and Jesse James were riding along a country road with another member of the gang, and that, coming to a farmhouse shortly after noon, they stopped and asked the woman living there if she could give them "dinner"--as the midday meal is called in Kansas and Missouri.

The woman said she could. They dismounted and entered. Then, as they sat in the kitchen watching her making the meal ready, Jesse noticed that tears kept coming to her eyes. Finally he asked her if anything was wrong. At that she broke down completely, informing him that she was a widow, that her farm was mortgaged for several hundred dollars, and that the man who held the mortgage was coming out that afternoon to collect.

She had not the money to pay him and expected to lose her property.

"That's nothing to cry about," said Jesse. "Here's the money."

To the woman, who had not the least idea who the men were, their visit must have seemed like one from angels. She took the money, thanking them profusely, and, after having fed them well, saw them ride away.

Later in the day, when the holder of the mortgage appeared upon the scene, fully expecting to foreclose, he was surprised at receiving payment in full. He receipted, mounted his horse, and set out on his return to town. But on the way back a strange thing befell him. He was held up and robbed by three mysterious masked men.

CHAPTER XXVII

KANSAS JOURNALISM

Everything I had ever heard of Kansas, every one I had ever met from Kansas, everything I had ever imagined about Kansas, made me anxious to invade that State. With the exception of California, there was no State about which I felt such a consuming curiosity. Kansas is, and always has been, a State of freaks and wonders, of strange contrasts, of individualities strong and sometimes weird, of ideas and ideals, and of apocryphal occurrences.

Just think what Kansas has been, and has had, and is! Think of the border warfare over slavery which began as early as 1855; of settlers, traveling out to "bleeding Kansas" overland, from New England, merely to add their abolition votes; of early struggles with the soil, and of the final triumph. Kansas is to-day the first wheat State, the fourth State in the value of its a.s.sessed property (New York, Pennsylvania, and Ma.s.sachusetts only outranking it), and the only State in the Union which is absolutely free from debt. It has a more American population, greater wealth and fewer mortgages per capita, more women running for office, more religious conservatism, more political radicalism, more students in higher educational inst.i.tutions in proportion to its population, more h.o.m.ogeneity, more individualism, and more nasal voices than any other State. As Colonel Nelson said to me: "All these new ideas they are getting everywhere else are old ideas in Kansas." And why shouldn't that be true, since Kansas is the State of Sockless Jerry Simpson, William Allen White, Ed Howe, Walt Mason, Stubbs, Funston, Henry Allen, Victor Murdock, and Harry Kemp; the State of Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Mary Ellen Lease--the same sweet Mary Ellen who remarked that "Kansas ought to raise less corn and more h.e.l.l!"

Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter. It is a prohibition State in which prohibition actually works; a State like nothing so much as some scriptural kingdom--a land of floods, droughts, cyclones, and enormous crops; of prophets and of plagues. And in the last two items it has sometimes seemed to actually outdo the Bible by combining plague and prophet in a single individual: for instance, Carrie Nation, or again, Harry Kemp, "the tramp poet of Kansas," who is by way of being a kind of Carrie Nation of convention. Only last year Kansas performed one of her biblical feats, when she managed, somehow, to cause the water, in the deep well supplying the town of Girard, to turn hot. But that is nothing to what she has done. Do you remember the plague of gra.s.shoppers? Not in the whole Bible is there to be found a more perfect pestilence than that one, which occurred in Kansas in 1872. One day a cloud appeared before the sun. It came nearer and nearer and grew into a strange, glistening thing. At midday it was dark as night. Then, from the air, the gra.s.shoppers commenced to come, like a heavy rain. They soon covered the ground. Railroad trains were stopped by them. They attacked the crops, which were just ready to be harvested, eating every green thing, and even getting at the roots. Then, on the second day, they all arose, making a great cloud, as before, and turning the day black again. Nor can any man say whence they came or whither they departed.

Among the homely philosophers developed through Kansas journalism several are widely known, most celebrated among them all being Ed Howe of the Atchison "Globe," William Allen White of the Emporia "Gazette,"

and Walt Mason of the same paper.

Howe is sixty years of age. He was owner and editor of the "Globe" for more than thirty years, but four years ago, when his paper gave him a net income of sixty dollars per day, he turned it over to his son and retired to his country place, "Potato Hill," whence he issues occasional manifestos.

Some of Howe's characteristic paragraphs from the "Globe" have been collected and published in book form, under the t.i.tle, "Country Town Sayings." Here are a few examples of his homely humor and philosophy:

So many things go wrong that we are tired of becoming indignant.

Watch the flies on cold mornings; that is the way you will feel and act when you are old.

There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing, but we all do and call it hope.

When half the men become fond of doing a thing, the other half prohibit it by law.

Sometimes I think that I have nothing to be thankful for, but when I remember that I am not a woman I am content. Any one who is compelled to kiss a man and pretend to like it is ent.i.tled to sympathy.

Somehow every one hates to see an unusually pretty girl get married. It is like taking a bite out of a very fine-looking peach.

What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.

A really busy person never knows how much he weighs.

Walt Mason is another Kansas philosopher-humorist. Recently he published in "Collier's Weekly" an article describing life, particularly with regard to prohibition and its effects, in his "hum town," Emporia.

Emporia is probably as well known as any town of its size in the land.

It has, as Mason puts it, "ten thousand people, including William Allen White." Including Walt Mason, then, it must have about eleven thousand.

Mason's article told how Stubbs, on becoming Governor of Kansas, enforced the prohibition laws, and of the fine effect of actual prohibition in Emporia. "No town in the world," he declares, "wears a tighter lid. There is no drunkenness because there is nothing to drink stiffer than pink lemonade. You will see a unicorn as soon as you will see a drunken man in the streets of the town. Emporia has reared a generation of young men who don't know what alcohol tastes like, who have never seen the inside of a saloon. Many of them never saw the outside of one. They go forth into the world to seek their fortunes without the handicap of an acquired thirst. All Emporia's future generations of young men will be similarly clean, for the town knows that a tight lid is the greatest possible blessing and n.o.body will ever dare attempt to pry it loose."

Having spent a year in the prohibition State of Maine, I was skeptical as to the feasibility of a practical prohibition. Prohibition in Maine, when I was there, was simply a joke--and a bad joke at that, for it involved bad liquor. Every man in the State who wanted drink knew where to get it, so long as he was satisfied with poor beer, or whisky of about the quality of spar varnish. Never have I seen more drunkenness than in that State. The slight added difficulty of getting drink only made men want it more, and it seemed to me that, when they got it, they drank more at a sitting than they would have, had liquor been more generally accessible.

In Kansas it is different. There the law is enforced. Blind pigs hardly exist, and bootleggers are rare birds who, if they persist in bootlegging, are rapidly converted into jailbirds. The New York "Tribune" printed, recently, a letter stating that prohibition is a signal failure in Kansas, that there is more drinking there than ever before, and that "under the seats of all the automobiles in Kansas there is a good-sized canteen." Whether there is more drinking in Kansas than ever before, I cannot say. I do know, however, both from personal observation and from reliable testimony, that there is practically no drinking in the portions of the State I visited. As I am not a prohibitionist, this statement is nonpartizan. But I may add, after having seen the results of prohibition in Kansas, I look upon it with more favor. Indeed, I am a partial convert; that is, I believe in it for you. And whatever are your views on prohibition, I think you will admit that it is a pretty temperate State in which a girl can grow to womanhood and say what one Kansas girl said to me: that she never saw a drunken man until she moved away from Kansas.

Three religious manifestations occurred while I was in Kansas. A negro preacher came out with a platform declaring definitely in favor of a "hot h.e.l.l," another preacher affirmed that he had the answer to the "six riddles of the universe," and William Allen White came out with the news that he had "got religion."

Now, if William Allen White of the Emporia "Gazette" really has done that, a number of consequences are likely to occur. For one thing, a good many Americans who follow, with interest, Mr. White's opinions, are likely also to follow him in this; and if they fail to do so voluntarily, they are likely to get religion stuffed right down their throats. If White decides that it is good for them, they'll get it, never fear! For White's the kind of man who gives us what is good for us, even if it kills us. Another probable result of White's coming out in the "Gazette" in favor of religion would be the simultaneous appearance, in the "Gazette," of anti-religious propaganda by Walt Mason. That is the way the "Gazette" is run. White is the proprietor and has his say as editor, but Walt Mason, who is a.s.sociated with him on the "Gazette," also has _his_ say, and his say is far from being dictated by the publisher. White, for instance, favors woman suffrage; Mason does not. White is a progressive; Mason is a standpatter. White believes in the commission form of government, which Emporia has; Mason does not.

Mason believes in White for Governor of Kansas, whereas White, himself, protests pa.s.sionately that the "Gazette" is against "that man White."

Says a "Gazette" editorial, apropos of a movement to nominate White on the Progressive ticket: