Book Reviews from the Jackson County Historical Society Bookstore
While you will encounter the occasional beach in Jackson County, Kansas City area readers don’t need beaches to enjoy a good read during warm weather. That’s why we thought September would be a good time to remind Jackson County Historical Society members of the great reads available through the Society’s online bookstore.
At jchs.org/books, online visitors will find a curated selection of books, as well as DVDs, that detail some of the more fascinating events and individuals that have helped shape Jackson County history.
Many of the titles listed likely will not be stocked by your favorite big book retailer. For example, we have copies of “Jackson County Pioneers” and “Independence and 20th Century Pioneers”, both by Pearl Wilcox, an early chronicler of Jackson County history. But we also carry newer books, such as “Kansas City Houses: 1885-1938”, a handsome volume by Michael C. Kathrens that includes photographs of homes designed and lived in by many Jackson County architects and residents.
Also in stock: “Mount Washington Cemetery: In Search of Lost Time”, recently published by authors Judith King and Bruce Mathews, who describe the final resting places of many Jackson County residents.
We recently acquired more copies of “Deaths on Pleasant Street: The Ghastly Enigma of Colonel Swope and Doctor Hyde.” A popular book, difficult to find of late, by former Kansas City Star journalist Giles Fowler, it details the infamous early 20th century deaths among members of the family of Jackson County philanthropist Thomas Swope, and the subsequent murder trial.
For the Society’s September E-Journal, members have reviewed several of the books you can find in the JCHS bookstore. For online orders, Society members receive a 10 percent discount on the listed price (plus shipping).
Some of these books also are available in the gift shop of the 1859 Jail, Marshal’s Home &Museum, at 217 N. Main St., just northeast of the Historic Truman Courthouse.
Paul Kirkman First published 2018, History Press, Charleston, SC $22.00
Missouri Outlaws: Bandits, Rebels & Rogues
Reviewed by J. Bradley Pace. Brad is past president of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors and current E-Journal editor.
Author Paul Kirkman’s 2018 book, “Missouri Outlaws: Bandits, Rebels & Rogues”, is much more than a collection of biographies. It begins with the territory we know today as Missouri being passed back and forth between French and Spanish empires. Kirkman describes early Missouri as a powder keg which would eventually produce larger-than-life men and women of action.
The land grew up wild, with hardy settlers and Native Americans vying for possession. Opportunity for trading with Indians out west, and with Mexico to the south, kickstarted river traffic and the making of trails. The big Conestoga wagons made an attractive target for bandits and Indians. Many rural towns, especially in the Ozarks, remained isolated. They would be great places for an outlaw to hide.
The lawlessness and violence in pre-statehood Missouri was but a warmup for the bloodshed to come. Kirkman explains how “in Missouri the Civil War came early and stayed late.” Pro and anti-slavery forces opposed each other on the Missouri/Kansas border. Though Missouri was not a secessionist state, a large part of its population had ties to the South, and many of its communities relied on the slave economy. Fighting spread throughout the state during the war.
The year 1860 found Ohio native William Quantrill teaching school in Lawrence, Kansas. But by the following year he was leading a band of guerrillas ambushing Union patrols, robbing the mail, and causing general mischief. Quantrill and his group, which ranged in size from a dozen to a few hundred men, were constantly pursued by much larger forces. Only the wildest riders and the best shots were fit for Quantrill’s service. He attracted the likes of “Bloody” Bill Anderson, George Todd, Cole Younger and Frank James. Anderson in turn would merit his own followers, including Frank’s younger brother Jesse.
When the war ended in 1865, ex-combatants returned home to find a Missouri badly scarred, both physically and socially. The weight of Reconstruction drove a deep wedge between those who supported different sides during the war. With so many disillusioned former guerrillas and Confederates scattered around the state, the stage was set for the emergence of that brand of outlaw some called criminal, and others called folk hero. Men like Frank and Jesse James would embark on new careers robbing banks. This crime spree soon spread to the stagecoach lines and railroads. Missouri had become the “outlaw state.”
These desperados were hotly pursued by federal forces, possies, and lynch mobs. Despite their hopeless plight, the outlaw could count on finding sympathy and recruits from families who held power and respect before the war but were now marginalized.
We can’t know today what their true motives were, but the Reconstruction era outlaws were admired by many who saw them as still fighting against the enemy. Most of the banks, stagecoach lines and railroads were owned by Eastern and/or pro-Union businessmen. As time went on most of the old guerrillas were either dead, in jail, or had kicked the habit in favor of less dangerous pursuits. Among the last to be killed was Jesse James himself, who was gunned down in 1882, by another gang member for a $10,000 reward. Jesse was only 32.
Author Paul Kirkman paints a vivid picture of the life and times of Missouri’s most infamous outlaws. From dime novels to the Wild West Shows, generations of Americans grew up with the frontier mythos. The public’s fascination with the outlaw’s life of excitement and adventure will likely endure as long as America itself.
Ruth Henning Published 2017, Woodneath Press $19.99
The First Beverly Hillbilly: The Untold Story of the Creator of Rural TV Comedy
Reviewed by Brian Burnes. Brian is the current President of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors.
“The First Beverly Hillbilly: The Untold Story of the Creator of Rural TV Comedy,” By Ruth Henning, 2017,Woodneath Press, $19.99 (JCHS bookstore price) For those of a certain age, “The Beverly Hillbillies” was a television situation comedy featuring members of a supposedly unsophisticated country family which debuted to a vast audience in 1962.
The show proved to be television’s top-rated program that year. It inspired two similar shows, “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres,” which also featured gentle send-ups of rural residents. Paul Henning, a Jackson County native who grew up in Independence, created “Hillbillies” but never boasted about it or wrote a book about it. His family’s California home included a bookshelf stacked floor-to-ceiling with biographies of successful show business personalities - none of them about Paul Henning. That bothered his wife Ruth Henning enough that she decided to write that book herself. She completed the manuscript in about 1994, but did not find a publisher. Before her death in 2002, however, she sent a copy to her friend Sue Gentry, longtime columnist and editor with The Examiner of Independence. Gentry died in 2004, leaving no heirs.
Jackson County Historical Society staff members several years ago recovered Ruth Henning’s manuscript from one of the approximately two dozen boxes of papers Gentry had donated to the society. The society, in turn, brought the manuscript to the Mid-Continent Public Library which in 2013 had opened its Woodneath branch, today home of The Story Center, the library district’s community publishing initiative. It published Henning’s book, with the support of Henning’s three children, in 2017. “Hillbillies” depicted the adventures of the Clampett clan, which moved to southern California after patriarch Jed’s stray rifle shot uncorked a subsurface oil field on his hardscrabble property.
It was a huge hit and Paul Henning, a 1929 graduate of William Chrisman High School in Independence, today can be considered among the inventors of television situation comedy. But how did he come up with that particular “Hillbillies” scenario? That’s what Ruth explains.
Then known as Ruth Barth, she had graduated in 1930 from Kansas City’s Central High School. She and Paul soon encountered one another at the downtown Kansas City studios of radio station KMBC. “Creative young people swarmed the studios at KMBC,” Ruth wrote. “As far as I was concerned, it was the answer to everything.” Soon Paul and Ruth were among those who helped write and act in daily rural-themed serials. One revelation in her book is how, without Ruth, Paul may never have left Kansas City. Ruth, ambitious and confident, decided to move to Chicago. There she became part of the team that produced “Fibber McGee and Molly,” one of the most popular radio shows of its time When Ruth notified Paul that the show’s producers needed scripts, Paul sent one. The producers hired him. Paul soon joined Ruth in Chicago. Eventually they married and moved to California.
Over the ensuing 20 years Paul Henning rose in the Hollywood radio – and then television – industries. Perhaps the only frustration with “The First Beverly Hillbilly” is that Ruth Henning never really details how her husband developed his skill at scripting episodic comedy. But the “Hillbillies” origin story is just weird, specific and random enough to have the ring of truth.
First, Ruth writes, Paul consistently had enjoyed comedy that referenced rural life. She remembers him laughing often while seeing a production of “Tobacco Road” at Kansas City’s Orpheum Theater, reacting to the challenges – played for laughs – faced by impoverished Georgia tenant farmers. He also enjoyed Bob Burns, a radio comedian who, billed as the “Arkansas Traveler,” told stories involving his eccentric relations such as Uncle Fud and Aunt Peachy. Fast-forward some 25 years to 1959 when Henning’s most recent television program had ended, and he was taking a driving vacation.
While marveling at the highway network then being built across the country, he pondered what some 19th century historical figures might think of modern America. He also began remembering his Boy Scout camping trips to southwest Missouri during the 1920s, when he encountered rural Missouri residents whose knowledge of life beyond the Ozarks was minimal. He also had been reading recent newspaper stories about isolated hill people –“hillbillies” – who knew little of modern conveniences, but somehow seemed unbothered by that.
It was about then when a film and television producer called him and asked if he had ideas for a new project. Henning did. He pitched a scenario that included several members of an isolated rural clan, dropped suddenly into sophisticated surroundings. The twist was that the hill folk had been displaced from their home not by flood or tragedy - but by spectacular good fortune. The show that resulted, “Hillbillies,” every week depicted how the Clampett clan often seemed oblivious to the fabulous wealth their new neighbors so clearly coveted.
Not long after, Ruth accompanied her husband to a New York, where Paul explained his new show, “Petticoat Junction,” to a roomful of entertainment industry reporters. “This show is about a way of life rapidly disappearing from the American scene,” he said, “when people lived simple lives. “They took time to enjoy each other, they helped their neighbors, they weren’t completely dedicated to making money.” Ultimately, that was the kind of script Paul Henning was quite good at writing.
Darryl W. Levings Published 2011, Kansas City Star Books $25.00
Saddle the Pale Horse
Reviewed by William A. “Kip” Esry. William A. “Kip” Esry is a local history enthusiast and a partner with the management consulting firm, HumanRoot LLC.
Darryl W. Levings’ historical novel, “Saddle the Pale Horse”, is the story of the 1864 invasion of Missouri by Confederate Major General Sterling Price. Told using the language of the day from the vantage of those on both sides of the conflict, the novel paints a vivid portrait of the Confederacy’s last gasp in the west.
Well-researched, the novel at times resembles a work of non-fiction providing a much more factual account than often found in historical novels including actual quotes interspersed within the telling of the story. The epilogue includes photographs, illustrations, maps, chapter notes, a bibliography, and a synopsis of what became of the characters.
Price’s army, primarily cavalry, initially outnumbers the Union forces in his path, but his men are poorly mounted and provisioned. Advancing northward, he abandons any attempt to take St. Louis or Jefferson City and instead marches west. His army, dwindling through attrition from illness, desertion, and field casualties, finds stiff resistance at the Battle of Westport from General Samuel Curtis’ troops entrenched on the western banks of the Big Blue River. Meanwhile, another Union force bears down on Price from behind. Out-manned, out-gunned, and out-provisioned, Price retreats south, is doggedly pursued by Union cavalry, and narrowly escapes back into Arkansas.
While Price carried out his campaign and retreat, he urged Missouri guerrillas under George Todd and Bill Anderson to disrupt rail transportation. They terrorized central Missouri, looting towns and killing Union men including 22 unarmed soldiers taken from a train in Centralia. When a detachment of inexperienced Union militia attempts to run the guerrillas down, they are lured into a trap and slaughtered.
There are a good many characters within the fabric of this story. Some are generals and famous men. Most are not. There are both Union and Confederate soldiers, pro-southern guerrillas, girls and women; including a Unionist wife and mother who nurses Confederate wounded in a Kansas City church. There is a Black man held in slavery and another serving as a Union artillery officer, leading other former slaves in the fight for freedom.
Perhaps the most compelling character is a Jackson County youth named Riley Crawford, who was delivered by his mother to guerrilla chieftain William Clarke Quantrill following the murder of his father by Union militia. Now riding with the unhinged Bill Anderson, Riley attempts to navigate the brutality of the most barbaric guerrilla band of the Civil War. Despite having developed friendships such as with a big brotherly Frank James, Riley is reviled by others including Frank’s brutish younger brother, Jesse, and the equally sadistic Arch Clement. As time is running out for the guerrillas, Riley finds himself in a desperate situation, suffering physically, and wanting out. He longs for normalcy, a desire that surely must have been widespread during that fall of 1864 in Missouri.
While there is plenty of heartbreak found within Saddle the Pale Horse, there are also countless acts of courage. Heroism is found on the battlefield as well as by those with everything to lose caught up in the onslaught. With their hopes, fears, and conscience in tow, they find themselves amidst the complete lack of reason that is war. The story concludes with two vignettes; one of tragedy and one of hope. Both bring the reader back to a shared sense of humanity and warn us of its fragility.
By Mary Paxton Keeley Community Press, Inc $20.00
Back in Independence
Reviewed by Gloria Smith. Gloria is a past president of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors and a native of Independence.
Mary Paxton Keeley shares her memories of growing up in the early 1900s in “Back in Independence.”
Mary grew up at 614 North Delaware in a family of five children “...in a home filled with books and wise parents to guide my reading”. Her father, John Gallatin Paxton, practiced law in his office on the Square in Independence, and was the attorney for the wealthy Swope family that lived in the Swope Mansion on South Pleasant. Her mother, Mary Gentry Paxton, was a college elocution teacher.
Bess Wallace, Mary’s best friend, lived next door until her father’s tragic death from suicide. That was when Bess moved up to the big white house at 217 North Delaware with her grandparents. Later Mary would be Margaret Truman’s godmother.
Mary attended the University of Missouri and recalls her engagement to Charles Ross, the high school classmate of Harry Truman and later President Truman’s Press Secretary. Charles was her professor in the MU journalism school. In 1910 Mary was the first female to graduate from the “J” School and her portrait now hangs there.
She went on to become one of the first female news reporters in Kansas City; worked overseas in a YMCA canteen during World War I; authored numerous books, magazine articles, essays, poems and plays; and for many years taught journalism at Christian College (now Columbia).
Mary explains that her book is not about Harry Truman but rather “it pictures the social climate in which he grew up.” Truman was a Baptist and the Paxtons were Presbyterians and “in those days the social divisions were by church.” While Mary and her friends enjoyed a full social life, Harry was working at Clinton’s Drug Store to help his family. Because Harry wore glasses, he could not participate in sports and was often called “four-eyes.”
Her colorful description of Independence includes: the south side of the Square was to be avoided because of all the saloons; girls who had the reputation as “spooners” were not invited to nice parties; and visits to the Salisbury Farm where all the Salisbury girls rode horses wearing “divided skirts.”
The book is filled with colorful characters including Jim Peacock, Squeaky Bill, Jim Crow Chiles, Percival, Old Agnes and many others. Mary was fascinated by Arthur Grissom, a poet who was wooing Julia Woods, daughter of a rich banker. Mary recounts the story of their scandalous elopement and short marriage.
The author describes adventures with her siblings including packing a lunch and spending the day in MacCauley Pasture, the shady woodland at the end of Delaware where Willis, their hired man, walked the family cow each day to graze on what is now the lawn of the Truman Library. One of their favorite activities was fishing in a little stream for crawdads using a long stick with a bent pin and a piece of meat.
Playing with Bess Wallace under the catalpa tree in their yard, Mary and her friend would dress hollyhock ladies using bonnet-like catalpa blossoms for heads and swirling pink and red hollyhocks for skirts. When the Paxton and Wallace boys would gather ripe pokeberries, they would open their “red ink factory.” After mixing the juice from the ripe berries with water they proceeded to dye everything red including dolls’ clothes, dolls’ hair and doll’s bed clothes. When they “dyed her brother Eddie’s blond hair, it was a bit too much for Mamma!” With the leftover dye they played drugstore.
On hot summer evenings, the Paxton family would often drive their surrey out River Road to Wayne City to the abandoned steamboat landing. The children would play on the trail while Mary sat with her parents watching the mist rise on the Missouri River.
Other summer evenings on Delaware Street were spent watching humming birds or relaxing in “Papa’s Garden.” Many evenings were spent playing kick-the-wicket or run-sheep-run until their parents would call to them that it was nine o’clock and time to come in. Parental curfew was backed up by the presence of the night policeman who was known to snatch up offenders and deposit them on their parents’ doorsill.
A big event in Mary’s life was each October when her parents took the entire family to Kansas City to see the Priests of Pallas Parade. Mary could only dream of attending the Ball that followed as she was too young. At age 14 Mary attended her first formal dance with her father as her escort. It was at the Fairmount Park Pavilion. As Mary matured she had a procession of beaux including Elmer, Pete, Harold, Lawrence, Egbert and Charlie. When an early suitor, Elmer Twyman, visited her on Sunday afternoons, her little brother Eddie did all he could to terrorize the couple. Elmer’s father was Dr. Twyman, the Swope family doctor at that time.
“Back in Independence” is a delightful personal story of growing up in a big family in the early 20th century. It is filled with entertaining characters and events in Independence that make it a joy to read and re-read.
Mary died in 1986, six months after her 100th birthday. She had asked the book not be published during her lifetime and that her friend and cousin, Sue Gentry, write the introduction. “Back in Independence” was published by the Jackson County Historical Society following her death and is available at the JCHS Bookstore at www.jchs.org.
Also available is “Deaths on Pleasant Street” by Giles Fowler, a fascinating story of the Swope family and the mysterious deaths in the Swope Mansion. It features Dr. Twyman and John Paxton.