- Early Greenwood County History
“E.T. Wickersham of Fall River, Kansas wrote in 1931 of many of his almost seventy years of memories living in southeastern Greenwood County.
A man named Brown was our nearest neighbor and was the leader in the Bledsoe murders which were committed on my place. I helped father make a box to bury them in. It was made out of our old wagon box, as there was no lumber in the neighborhood. They were buried in the Jackson Cemetery, about one mile northwest of New Albany, Kansas. (East of the town of Fall River about six miles.)
I think they were killed in 1864, but I am not certain.
This Brown was the leader of a band that was called a vigilance committee and they killed quite a number of men near Coyville.
Brown was a doctor and preacher.
I remember Greenwood City(south of Quincy) and I was only there one time and that was 1863. I went for our mail as that was the closest post office and it took me two days to make the trip. Some of our neighbors would go for mail every two weeks. There were plenty of wolves and nearly as tame as dogs. It was almost impossible to raise chickens for the wild cats would come to within a few rods of the house and catch them in the daytime. There were parakeets and I will describe them. They are a specie of parrot with a big ugly head and a very sharp, hooked bill. Most of their feathers are of a beautiful bright green that glistens in the sun. They fly in a bunch and are very swift on the wing. There are about fifty in a flock and I was told they roosted in hollow trees. When they start to fly, they begin to scream and keep it up the same as geese. There was a flock of about fifty roosted south east of our house and in the winter, we could hear them every morning coming for their breakfast of softshelled hickory nuts.
Some people call these nuts, pig hickory nuts or pig nuts. They are about as soft as a pecan. There was a great number of those trees near out house and they were full of nuts every year. These birds would light in the trees and crack the nuts and keep up a continual chatter as though talking to each other until they got through. One of the oldest settlers who was here in the 1950s said they roosted in hollow trees and hung by their bills. He said an old friend was visiting them and wanted one to take home with him. Some of the birds roosted in a big sycamore tree and after they went to roost, the men climbed up and stopped up the hole. The next morning, they went back to get a bird and it bit one of the men through the finger. They all disappeared at once and I wonder what became of them. I never have seen them since and one man who claimed to know, said they went to Mexico.
There were a great many badgers, so it was not safe to run a horse over the prairie for the fear of him stepping in a badger hole. There were lots of gray squirrels and some black and flying squirrels and no red or fox squirrels. Now they are all fox squirrels.
There were plenty of racoons and opossum.
There were lots of wood rats and skunks. There were also a great many snipes and when they would light, they would throw their wings together and whistle two long, keen whistles, that could be heard for a quarter of a mile. Then too there were many cocks that were as large and black as crows except for a few white feathers and a red head, with a long sharp bill.
There were thousands of wild turkeys that were almost as tame as our domestic turkeys and there was often as many as thirty in a flock. We had no ammu nition with which to shoot them, but caught them in pens.
The pens were made by digging a ditch about 1 ½ feet deep, about the same width and 8 feet long. Then we would build a pen about two feet high and cover it over with poles. The ditch would reach near the center of the pen. Then we could cover the ditch inside the pen about two feet and leave the center open. We put grain in the ditch and in the pen also. The turkey would follow the ditch and come up in the center of the pen and when they wanted out, they would try to get thru the cracks in the side and never go to the place they came in.
There were thousands of wild geese and ducks and sand hill cranes would pass over both in the spring and fall and occasionally a flock of pelicans. There were plenty of quail. The yellow winged black birds would come every spring by the thousands to take our corn as it was coming up. But the prairie chickens outnumbered them all. They were plentiful all-over eastern Kansas, but in the fall, they would come by the hundreds of thousands to the Port Oak Hills to winter on the corns and we had to get out little bag of corn put where they could not get it or we would be without bread.
Those oak trees were scattered over most of the hills in the southeastern part of Greenwood County and extended into Wilson County.
They average about a foot in diameter and about 8 to 10 feet to the limbs from the ground. The early settlers made rails ( for fences) as they were easy to split.
The entire country was covered with a heavy growth of bluestem grass, and there was also a grass that stayed green all winter.
The Indian ponies wintered on this grass. The streams never got very muddy as there was no loose dirt to wash in the streams. The holes in the rivers were much deeper and wider than they are now as they have filled with mud. There were more than ten times as many fish as now. In the summer time we could walk along the river bank and see dozens of buffalo fish near the surface of the water. I think the muddy water killed them.
The buffalo fish weighed from 20 to 30 pounds. There were many more snakes here in the early days, but very few crows, buzzards, hawks or eagles.
The first settlement in this neighborhood was in the year 1857. A family took out claims west of New Albany. In the year 1859, the Indians drove them all off and burned their homes.
In 1861 Dickey Graves and Mr. Gaffigan came back to their claims. The reason I mentioned these old settlers, is because people spoke of Numpawalla and his band, and I believe Numpawalla( Chief of Little Osage) was the leader in having those settlers driven from their claims.
Little Bear, who was head chief (Little Osage) until his death, was friendly to the whites and was willing for them to settle. Numpawalla opposed to it. Everyone called him Numpawa except Dickey Graves, who called him “Old Fat Ball” because he weighed over 300 pounds and was always hungry.
He would bring about a dozen of his braves and an interpreter with him, when he called, as he could not speak English. He came to our house quite often and would ask mother to get dinner for him and his braves. He said the settlers ought to pay for living on his land and cutting his young timber.
One day while eating dinner he saw two pet pigs as they came near the door, our only pigs and were all we had for winter meat, but father dared not refuse them and when they had finished eating, they took after them with clubs and soon beat them to death.
They did not scald or skin them, but cut them into pieces and each Indian tied his piece to his saddle and off they went.
There would be large bands of them pass our house going and coming from their annual buffalo hunt and if we had any melons, green or ripe, they ate them just the same.
They would eat green muskmelons, seeds and all, as we do cucumbers. They took small poles with them to build platforms to dry their meat on. They placed four corner poles that were about four feet long in the ground and laid poles on them, then placed smaller poles across the top. The meat was cut in long strips and put on the poles, a fire was built underneath with buffalo chips and between the heat and sun, the meat would soon be as dry as powder.
They rendered (melted) the tallow and put it in the buffalo stomach while warm and it would harden when cool. Pack ponies were loaded with meat and tallow and brought home.
I will give you a description of Numpawalla and his braves in the summer time.
They were not as well dressed as our modern ladies for it takes more than a yard to cover them. The Osage brave wore a strip of cloth about six inches wide and about two feet long between his legs, with the ends fastened to a belt around his body. They kept their heads shaves except for a foretop ( lock of hair that grows on the forehead) and a long braid called a scalping lock, hanging down their backs. Their ears were full of large brass rings and they also wore brass bands around their wrists and above their elbows. They carried a scabbard with a butcher knife and a small sack of tobacco, a pipe and a small buckskin bag filled with red paint.
They kept themselves as well painted as our modern belles. They seemed no more timid about coming in among the women than our girls are about showing their painted knees or rolled stockings.
In the winter these braves wore a piece of cloth around their head and a small blanket around the body, held on by a strap or belt around their waist.
The blanket fell below their knees and went over the shoulder and was held together in front with one hand. They also wore leggings and moccasins. When they were ready to start on a buffalo hunt, they would hold a kind of pow-wow or prayer for the Lord to protect them from the Comanches, who inhabited the west part of the state and often killed some members of the Osage tribe when they were on their hunt.
I once sat by an Indian family of three and watched them eat their dinner which consisted of meat and cracked corn that had been boiled in an old powder can.
They had a butcher knife and a spoon made out of a buffalo horn. The large end of the horn made the spoon and held about one-half of a tea cup. The small end made the handle. They all squatted down around the powder can and the old man had the butcher knife.
He took hold of the meat and cut off as much as he could get into his mouth and passed the butcher knife to his son, who did likewise. Then he took the spoon, dipped down in the corn and got it full of cracked corn and broth.
The son passed the knife to the mother, then took the spoon. They kept that knife and spoon going around until the can was empty, so there were no dishes to wash.
They used to take dinner near our house and we would trade them a pint or quart of salt for a pair of moccasins or raw-hide lariat. Sometimes we traded for dried buffalo meat.
It was dry and hard as a bone, but it tasted good and we kids had good teeth and could get away with lots of it.
About the year 1864 William McBrown kept a little store above New Albany and traded with the Indians. He would trade a sack of flour for a good pony. He also traded for moccasins and other things they had to trade, then take them up north and sell them and buy goods with the money.”
