My father was Dr. Allen White, a pioneer doctor, who came to Kansas in fifty-nine. My earliest recollection of my father must go back to a time when I was two or three years old and he was keeping a country store in a little wooden building which we were using as a home. It was located where the new postoffice building site is, facing Central avenue. It was a rambling, one-story, unpainted house, with a chimney rising from every room in it—a rusty, sheet iron chimney. These chimneys sprouted all over the gray roof of the house and it was known in the vernacular of the town as the "foundry." My father kept the country store and sold everything that the pioneers would buy. Later he bought a drug store and moved over on to Main street, and I recollect him even more vividly than I recollect him in the little store. In the drug store I remember him chiefly as wearing nankeen trousers six or seven months in the year, a white pleated shirt (which my mother ironed with great care, and a rather broad brimmed panama hat.

He was a jovial, good natured, rather easy-going man, but I think he must have been very effective, for I can recollect that they hanged him in effegy in Augusta in the county seat election, and that he chuckled and laughed at home and that my mother was very angry and not a little afraid that they might do violence to him. I believe they said he helped in stuffing the ballot box which carried the election. Of course, I was too little, then to know the facts, but I should not be surprised to learn that he know something about it. He played life according to the rules of the game at that time in vogue, and it was his chief joy in life to get results. He was a Democrat, I remember, and many and many a day I have ridden with him as he drove over the county making the first organization of the Democratic party in Butler county. The Democrats put up a county ticket and I remember this strategy—that they thought if they would concentrate their entire efforts on one man on the ticket they could elect him and so get a foothold in the courthouse. Thus Vincent

Brown was elected, to the surprise and consternation of the Republicans. My father sold his drug store and bought a farm seven miles north of El Dorado, where he tried to realize a lifetime dream. He had been born and reared on a farm near Norwalk, in Huron county, Ohio. His father had cleared the wilderness and my father wanted to go back to the pioneer living that he enjoyed as a child. So he built on this farm north of El Dorado, a log cabin with a great fire place and rafters whereon hung dried pumpkins and sage and onions and all sorts of festoons that held dried food during the winter. I can see him, winter nights, sitting by the fire, smoking with supreme satisfaction. He had rail fences built all around the farm, and cleared out some woodland patches, and did all he could to duplicate the farm of his childhood. But the day had changed. The farm which he laid out required hired men to work it, and a lot of hired men; for my father was fat and clumsy and could not do very much. And the hired help that crowded around the table made the farm work so hard that my mother could not do it. She broke under the strain and we had to give up the farm and move back to town—back into the old foundry.

My mother was of Irish extraction. Her father was Thomas Hatton, an Irish weaver near Longford, Ireland, and her mother was Anne Kelly of Dublin, the daughter of a contracting carpenter on the docks. They were married in the Catholic Church at Longford, where presumably Anne Kelly's father was working on a contract. I have seen the marriage register signed by Anne Kelly in the church at Longford. They came to America and my mother grew up at Oswego, New York. She was left an orphan at sixteen with a small brother and sister, and she went west with some friends—drifted away from the Catholic church, was converted at a great revival, joined the Congregational church—worked her way through Knox College, doing sewing and house work, learning the millinery trade. The truth is that she did anything she could to keep herself in school, and finally having got what education she could at Knox College, set forth as a school teacher. She came west, taught school in Council Grove and Cottonwood Falls—met my father at a dance and they were married in 1867.

After our farm experience, we moved back to town, and my father, who was an expansive sort of a person and liked to have a house full of company, tore down the old foundry and built what was then a commodious residence. He had so much company that my father and mother talked it over and decided to open a hotel; hence the White House, which my father and mother ran for three or four years. My mother did not like it, but my father was never happier in his life. The nankeen pants, the pleated white shirt, shinily starched, and the panama hat and the white suspenders gleam through the gloom of that day in my memory as a joyous apparition.

I think he lost money every day he kept the hotel open and I think that was his chief pride in life that he wasn't making any money out of his guests. He was something of an amateur cook and loved a good

table. I used to go to market with him in those days when he had the run of the butcher shops in El Dorado, and he would pick out fine, thick sirloins and porterhouse steaks, and tall, fat rib roasts and bring them home to his guests, whom he fed and roomed at $2 a day. Prairie chickens were common in those days and we only used the breasts, and a little boy and I had to pick them. We also served quail and bass, and buckwheat cakes and homemade sausage for breakfast. It was early in 1882 that m mother, seeing the family fortune failing, rebelled and the hotel closed.

As I have said, my father was a tremendous Democrat, but he was a Democrat with a little "d." One of the earliest family traditions that I now recall was a famous blow-up that he had when Kansas gave the suffrage to the colored man—a proposition which he supported—and denied it to the women. He was a woman suffragist and a prohibitionist. We entertained St. John at our house before the days of the hotel, and in September, 1882, when the Democratic convention at Emporia nominated Glick for governor on a platform declaring in effect for the nullification of the prohibitory law, my father came home and went to bed sick. It broke his heart. He took politics that seriously. He believed in Kansas; he believed in prohibition; he believed in the Democratic party and the nomination of Glick was too much for him. He died in October, though I feel sure that if he had lived and had been able to toddle to the polls in his white linen trousers and his white shirt and panama hat (which he wore clear to the last day of the mild weather in the long Kansas autumn) he would have cast a vote against Glick if it had been the last act of his life.

My mother was an Abolition Republican, as one may infer when one recalls that she was educated in Knox College and sat under the altar of Lyman Beecher, but so great was her loyalty to my father after his death that when Cleveland was elected president in 1884, she set a lamp in every window of the big house the night the news came in and rejoiced mightily at the triumph of her husband's party.

As I have said, my father was born in Ohio. His father was born in Raynham, Massachusetts, and his mother was Fear Perry, who, according to family tradition, was some kin of Commodore Perry, and my father's maternal grandfather was a brother, I believe, of William Cullen Bryant's father, and the White family runs back, near the little town of Raynham, Mass., to 1630; so he was pure bred Yankee and my mother was pure bred Irish, and it was a curious mixture that came into my blood. As I look back over my childhood days in El Dorado, I can see more and more plainly the marked traits of the Irish and the Yankee in our family life. It made a thrifty, hard-working, resourceful, cheerful family and I, more than most boys of my time, was blessed with the environment of books, for always my mother was reading to me. Night after night I remember as a child, sitting in the chair, looking up to her while she read Dickens and George Eliot, Trollop, Charles Reed and the

Victorian English novels. My father, I remember, used to growl a good deal at the performance, and claimed that if my mother read to me so much I would never get so I would read for myself. But his prediction was sadly wrong. It was to those nights of reading and to the books that my mother had always about the house that I owe whatever I have of a love for good reading.

They always kept me in school. It was my father's plan to send me to Ann Arbor to be a lawyer and he left $1,000, (which was considered a vast sum in those days), to be devoted to my education, and I remember that my mother's sorrow when I quit the University of Kansas without a college degree, was poignant, and that much of it reflected what my father would think, that I should quit school without a college degree.

Those were golden days for me. I look back upon them all with memories of the keenest joy, from the very first recollection of my parents in the old foundry to the day when I set out from El Dorado to make my fame and fortune in Kansas City. Always, in recalling those days, I have the feeling that I was made the special care for the loving devotion of two middle-aged people to whom I was set apart as the most wonderful child that had ever been born on the earth.

How strange it all seems, and how pathetically ridiculous—as, indeed, everything that is pathetic is at bottom ridiculous, and everything that is absurd is profoundly sad.

In the old days, the women of our little community bore their burdens bravely, and it seems now, looking back to that time, that those burdens were heavy ones. Yet they never complained at the hardships, never murmured at the deprivations, which, in secret, they must have felt. For the women, who came to the town in the later sixties and early seventies, were not used to the rough ways of pioneering. They had left comforts "back yonder," left homes of culture in many cases, left sheltered circles and many of the softening influences of civilization which are dear to women—dearer than to men, perhaps—and had come out to the desolate, windswept prairie town where they were too frequently poorly housed, roughly fed, and more lonesome than anyone will ever know, unless some day he reads between the lines of the hopeful letters that these brave women sent back East—letters wherein they tried so hard to put the best foot forward, to conceal the disagreeable truth.

In other towns, where the rougher element of society came in first, where the cowboy, and the gambler and professional killer broke the sod for graves, the women folks, who came with these creatures suffered very little with mental anguish. But the pioneer women of our town saw their darkest days in the old times. Life was harsh, full of

drudgery too often, and disheartening. They came here little more than brides—did the women who used to gather around my mother's quilting frames in those first few years. The faces that were lit up by the candles that sat on the corners of the frame, or upon the quilt, were young faces in those days, only a few of them were touched with the never melting snow, only a few of them were scarred by wrinkles then. The picture comes up so vividly to me as photographed upon a child's brain. Mrs. J. C. Lambdin, perhaps a little older than the average, was always an early comer; then came Mrs. Boswell—Aunty Boswell, the children always called her, and she brought flowers with her. Hers was one of the first canaries brought to the little town. She was young and always had a smile for every one, the same smile she wore through all the troubles that came upon her patient, kind courageous life. Then came Mrs. Louisa V. Shelden down from Chelsea—she often came with her sister, Mrs. Lambdin, and took her place quietly among the others. Mrs. Bronson, plucky, cheerful, full of bright things to make the somber life seem easier, was always there, and Mrs. Edwin Cowles and her sister, Miss Ella McDuffee, came in from their farm below town. Miss McDuffee was one of the first musicians in the little town. She played the first church organ at the old Methodist church, when A. L. Redden was superintendent of the Sunday school, and Frank Hamlin led the singing. The little party around the quilting frames was never complete without Mrs. Dr. J. P. Gordon and good soft voiced Aunt Rachel. The children all loved Aunt Rachel, and she will never know what an event in many a boy's or girl's life, was the coming of Aunt Rachel to a house to "spend the day." Mrs. W. P. Flenner and her little girl came in from their farm down by Conner's. Sometimes she rode in with Mrs. Conner—Warren's mother—who was the youngest of all the party, and perhaps the one most missed when she stayed at home. Mrs. Dr. McKenzie was one of the quiet ones who always helped pick up the dinner things when the quilting was over. Mrs. W. W. Pattison made the jokes for the crowd, and passed upon the moral and financial side of every question that came up. There was no appeal from her decision. Mrs. George A. Hawley came too, sometimes, but not as often as she was asked, for she had cares that kept her close at home, and she was from the further east, Boston, and was shy among the stranger people of the West; she did not realize that they, too, were strangers to one another. One of the quiet, helpful ones who never left the house in the evening until the last dish was wiped and put away; who was always on hand when sickness came; who was gentle- hardworking, patient, and yet found time to make a bright home for her children, a home with books, music and flowers—always flowers the year around—was Mrs. Frank Adams.

There were others who came but these are types. Time had been cruel with some of them; he has been kind to a few of them. They who were young then and in the prime of life, are old now. Most of them are widows and if they are happy it is in the success of their children. It

was the children, we who played under the quilting frame, or scampered at hide-and-seek through the house—that these women worked for and suffered silently in the lonely little settlement, and hoped.

My mother, who is with us here in Emporia, as I write, has lived as they lived, sacrificing, toiling, dreaming as she sang at her work only of one thing. It seems unjust to wait until the carriages file through the woods and over the bleak hill before saying the loving words which these unselfish lives have earned so many fold. They have labored unstintingly and well. Many of them have disappeared from the public, they are not the "four hundred" now. They have sacrificed themselves for a half a century to their children, to their boys who are now men, the bone and sinew of the town; to the girls, who are now young mothers themselves, starting in upon a life of self sacrifice.

We who have reaped the harvest of our mothers' devotion, we who have not understood until the last few years, all the sacrifices that the daily life meant which our mothers lived in the old days, we who are just beginning to realize what Providence has given us—we should be proud of the shy little old women whose names are not seen in the lists of society. We should repay in smiles, the tears and devotion they have given us. It is an old debt, and a just debt, and Gods knows that we and they will be happier if it is even partly paid.

The first time I viewed the Whitewater was in August, 1862. As for settlers at that time they were few and far between. They were located as follows: William Badley, two miles north of my present home, and Joseph Adams. There were several log cabins scattered along the river, but no one living in them down to Gillian creek, where lived Mr. Gillian, who gave his name to the stream. Dan Cupp was the next settler, at Towanda Spring, and then Sam Fulton. Mrs. Kelley and two or three cabins marking the present site of Towanda.

About this time William Badley, George Adams (now deceased) and myself went out to where Wichita now stands and on to Cow-skin grove. We saw there countless numbers of buffalo. How they could have been exterminated in so short a period of time I cannot imagine. On this expedition three of us killed sixteen buffalo. We took the choicest parts of most of them, such as the hump and tongue, and left the rest for the wolves. This, now, we would think a great waste of meat. I built a cabin on my present farm in February, 1806, but did not move here until the following October. I raised a crop in Chase county that summer.

At this time there was not a house east of us until we reached the Walnut and none directly west, so far as I was aware, until we reached the Rocky Mountains. In October, sixty-six, Amos Adams came and settled on his present farm.

There was talk of Indians making a raid upon us but none put in an appearance. However, we left home June, sixty-eight, and went as far as McCabe's on the head of the Walnut and there heard the danger was over and returned to our cabin. Of course we men were not in the least afraid or frightened but were very anxious to get the women and children out of reach of the red men.

In the autumn of 1867, Henry Comstock, H. H. Wilcox and Walter Gilman settled on the creek, north of my farm. Some months before this, T. L. Ferrier and Jake Green came and built log cabins. These were all kind people and good neighbors.

You often hear people pity the early settler because he had so little to eat. I think those who tried, had enough. Game was plentiful, and it wasn't always corn bread and sorghum with us.

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