A Little House on the Prairie
Montgomery County was organized in 1869 on tallgrass prairie ground that had been Osage territory until the treaties cleared it, and the families who came were the same ones who had been moving west for two generations — following the same current from the Carolinas through Tennessee and Missouri, each stop a generation's answer to the question of where to try next
On the Kansas prairie near Coffeyville, the Foster family came to rest a spell — and Jarrett and Dorcas, son and daughter of South Carolina, came to the end of their journey
What Drew People Here: The Prairie Opens Up
Montgomery County was organized in 1869 — the year the Kansas prairies were beginning to fill in earnest, after the Civil War had settled the question of whether Kansas would be free, after the railroads were pushing south and west faster than the population could follow them, after the government had surveyed the land into tidy quarter-sections and was offering them for almost nothing to anyone willing to show up and work one. The county sits in the southeastern corner of the state, where the Verdigris River and the Caney River run southwest through rolling tallgrass prairie country, the land opening up from the wooded river bottoms into the kind of gently rolling grassland that Kansas made famous and then repeatedly tested with drought, grasshoppers, and the particular cruelty of the continental climate.
The settlers who came were following the same current that had moved the Foster family and families like them from one edge of the frontier to the next — from the Carolinas to Tennessee to Missouri to Kansas, each move a calculation between what was available and what was possible, each stop a generation's answer to the question of where to try next. By February 1870, Charles Ingalls had brought his family to the county, living in a one-room log cabin near Independence. His daughter Laura, who was three years old that year and would spend much of the rest of her long life rearranging her childhood memories into the most beloved American homesteading narrative ever written, called this place The Little House on the Prairie. The museum that stands on the approximate site of the Ingalls cabin near Independence is perhaps the county's most visited landmark, which tells you something about how thoroughly the story Laura told has become the story the county tells about itself.
What Laura's books do not quite convey, though her adult accounts sometimes did, is how provisional the whole thing was. The Ingalls family left Montgomery County within a year of arriving, moving back north when the land titles proved complicated by the presence of Osage allotments that had not yet been fully resolved. The prairie that looked available was sometimes not fully available, and the optimism of the pamphlets and the promises was always in tension with the actual legal and agricultural situation on the ground.
Coffeyville: The Town That Endured When Others Failed
Coffeyville sits on the Verdigris River in the south of Montgomery County, and it got its start the way so many Kansas border towns did: from a trading post, in this case one established by Colonel James A. Coffey around 1869, that became a supply point for the surrounding farms and the cattle drives coming up from Texas. The town incorporated in 1872 and grew steadily through the 1870s and 1880s, accumulating the infrastructure that distinguished the survivors from the vanished — a railroad connection, a proper main street, manufacturing, the critical mass of population that generates more population.
The county was full, in those years, of towns that looked like Coffeyville for a season and then faded. Westralia was one of them — a townsite that platted itself in the boom years with the same confident geometry as every other new Kansas town, attracted a population for a moment, and then found that the railroad went elsewhere and the farms around it weren't quite enough to sustain a commercial centre. The Kansas plains are littered with the ghosts of Westralias, places where the stakes are still in the ground and the street plan still exists in the county plat books and nothing else remains. What Coffeyville had that Westralia didn't was, in the end, the railroad. The Kansas City, Lawrence and Southern Kansas Railway came through Coffeyville in 1875, and with it came the grain elevators and the cattle pens and the commercial future that the town's founders had always claimed to see coming.
By the 1880s Coffeyville was a prosperous small city, the largest in the county, with a zinc smelter and a brick industry and the varied economy that a county seat needed. It was, by almost any measure, a success story — the kind of town the frontier was supposed to produce if you did everything right.
The Dalton Gang and October 5, 1892
There is a particular kind of Kansas civic pride that attaches to disaster when the town survives it intact, and Coffeyville carries that pride to this day. On the morning of October 5th, 1892, the Dalton Gang — Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton, with three accomplices — rode into Coffeyville to rob not one but two banks simultaneously, a bold escalation of their criminal career that went catastrophically wrong. The townspeople recognized them — the Daltons had grown up in the county — and armed themselves from a nearby hardware store before the gang emerged. In the gunfight that followed in an alley now called Death Alley, four Coffeyville citizens and four of the six outlaws were killed. Emmett Dalton was hit nineteen times and survived. Bob and Grat Dalton did not.
The town has not been shy about its moment. The Dalton Museum on Union Street commemorates the raid with the kind of local enthusiasm that suggests the citizens regard it, despite its cost, as the day their town proved itself. The graves of the Dalton gang members are a tourist attraction. The story is part of the county's identity in a way that the Laura Ingalls Wilder story is at the other end — one an emblem of the innocent pioneer enterprise, the other of the violence that enterprise always contained.
Farming in the 1870s: What the Country Required
The farmers who broke the Montgomery County prairie in the 1870s were working land that had been, within living memory, the range of the Osage Nation — a people who had used the Verdigris and Caney valleys for generations and had been successively compressed by treaties until the final removal in 1870 cleared the last of their Kansas territory for settlement. The tallgrass prairie was not easy farming. The sod was thick and matted, requiring the steel-beam plows that John Deere had made practical, and the roots went down deeper than anything a farmer from the eastern woodlands had encountered. Breaking a quarter-section of Kansas prairie was a season's work for a man and a team.
What the land offered, once broken, was exceptional fertility — soil built up over millennia of grass and bison and fire, dark and rich in the bottomlands along the rivers. The farmers who worked it in the 1870s grew corn and wheat and sorghum, kept hogs and cattle and horses, and sold what surplus they could manage through the commission merchants and grain dealers who had set up shop in Independence and Coffeyville as the towns consolidated. It was not a wealthy life in those early years. The market was too far and the prices too low and the weather too variable for that. But it was a viable life, and the county filled up steadily through the decade, the population rising from a few hundred at organization in 1869 to several thousand by 1880.
The families who were already in Kansas — who had come to Bourbon County during the border war years and weathered the violence and survived — drifted south and west into Montgomery County as the Osage lands cleared. The Fosters appear in the county's records by 1870, when Jared and Dorcas — old now, in their seventies, farming one last time on the Kansas plains — are enumerated in Westralia township, with their sons nearby. It was the last place the old couple stopped. Dorcas died sometime after that July census, on ground that the plains have since absorbed. Her grave is not marked. The land she farmed is still there.
The 1875 Kansas State Census fills in the household at the end of Jarrett's life with unusual specificity. He is seventy-nine years old, living in Cherokee Township near Coffeyville alongside his sons, close enough to call across a fence. Francis Marion, now twenty-nine, is farming with his wife Emily Jane Coffelt Foster — her family known to the Fosters since their Jasper County Missouri days — and their son James Newton, seven years old and Missouri-born, with young Lillian already a Kansas child. Andrew, thirty-three, is farming next door with his wife Hannah Catherine Morgan Foster. On the same census page: the family of Silas Morgan — Hannah Catherine's people — still neighbours, still close. The frontier arranging itself, as it always had, into the kinship networks that made isolated farm life survivable.
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