I was not twenty years old, without a scar or scratch, but brought from cypress and alligator swamps of the south a case of malarial fever that tenaciously stayed in my system for four months. I believe I could make a safe two-to-one bet that no mortal on earth ever drank as much boneset tea during that time as I did. My mother, backed by every old lady in the neighborhood, insisted that it was the only remedy to get the bile off my stomach and the ague out of my system.
CHAPTER II.
Early Settlements of Southeast Kansas.—Texas Cattle Fever Trouble.—The Osage Indians and Firewater.—Poor Mrs. Bennett.—How Terwilliger's Cattle Stampeded.—Why the Curtises Moved On.—The Odens Murder Parker.—Parker Was Avenged.—Jane Heaton and Her Smith & Wesson Revolver.—What Became of the Benders.
In 1867 I went to Labette county, and located on 160 acres of land three miles from where the notorious Bender family committed their horrible murders in 1873. Shortly after locating, together with all of the settlers on Timber Hill creek, I got mixed up in the Texas cattle fever trouble that broke out along the Indian Territory border.
At the time the trouble was on an old man and his son who was about 35 years old had taken up a claim on Big Hill creek down near the Montgomery county line, and had established a trading-post and were selling whisky to the Osage Indians, who had recently ceded their lands and were preparing to move south and west to their present reserve.
Milt Adams, James Bennett and myself were delegated to wait on the old man Curtis and son to tell them to quit selling liquor to the Osage Indians. They both denied ever selling them any at all. But we had the indisputable evidence from the best of sources that they had. I said: "Look here, you see that cabin down there on the prairie? That is the extreme frontier cabin that a white man lives in the border. That's John Bennett's home. And that was his wife, who, day before yesterday, was compelled to stand over a hot cook stove, in a little cluttered up room, and cook meat and bake nearly half a sack of flour into biscuits for a party of drunken Osage Indians that got their whisky here and went straight from here to Bennett's. You both know that in point of personal valor when sober the Osage is a coward, and cowards have to get drunk to be dangerous. Of course the worst injury Mrs. Bennett received was fright, and now that poor woman is prostrate and the Timber and Big Hill settlements will hold you fellows responsible for it."
A man by the name of Terwilliger had a large corral on Cherry creek near its junction with the Nipawalla, or Drum creek, and on the western border of our settlement. He was grazing about 600 head of long-horned Texas cattle. He had repeatedly been requested to move his cattle farther west, beyond the danger-line, but paid no heed to the wish of the settlers. The day that Mr. Curtis and son were advised "to seek other parts," which they did, that same night, some one rode along the east side of Terwilliger's corral, where 600 steers were lying down chewing their cuds, and threw a big cat over the fence plump on a steer.
Ugh-ee! Woof! and the ground fairly trembled. The stampede was on. The eight-rail staked and double-ridered fence was no barrier. Some of the rails were carried 200 feet from the fence. And most of the cattle were twenty-five miles southwest by noon the next day when their herders caught up with them.