Soon after the Manley hanging a branch of the Kansas Peoples Detective Association was organized here. Unlike the vigilantes, its purpose was not to override the law, but to assist it in capturing and convicting horse-thieves. W. D. Frazey was president and E. J. Woodman was secretary.
Now a line about the Old Overland Trail. Besides carrying a faint flavor of Manley handiwork, it was the avenue by which I myself came into this country. But I did not ride the old Concord coach drawn by its four spirited horses. I came by the slower mode of the ox-team.
The Old Overland Trail, or military road, as it was sometimes called, was vastly different from the good roads of the present time—very, very much different from the elaborate specifications for Number Nine, now building through Wetmore. It was little more than a wide rut worn deep by the constant movement of horse-drawn vehicles, including, of course, mules and oxen. There were stage-lines, pony-express riders, and heavy freighting outfits. The commerce of the West was handled over the Old Trail.
Starting at Atchison, the Old Trail came into the Pow~ hattan ridge settlement at the southwest corner of the Kickapoo Indian reservation, and, keeping to the high ridges as much as practical, it passed through Granada, Log Chain and Seneca, and on westward to Oroville and Sacramento, in California. The stage company maintained a change station on the old Collingwood C. Grubb farm—called Powhattan. Noble H. Rising was in charge of the station after it had been moved three miles north, and the name changed to Kickapoo. His son, Don C. Rising, was a pony-express rider. W. W. Letson was express messenger. Bill Evans, Lon Huff, and Bob Sewell, oldtimers here, were stage drivers.
The road made a sharp turn to the north before reaching Granada. Peter Shuemaker lived on the farm now owned and occupied by Charley Zabel, west of the turn. Shuemaker wanted the road to pass by his farm, and, at his own expense, built a cut-off in the hope that traffic would be diverted that way.
Roads in those days were built, mostly, by the simple process of going out with a plow and running a couple of parallel furrows, with the proper spacing to accommodate all anticipated traffic. Peter Shuemaker’s cut-off veered off to the northwest, across the prairies just anywhere the going seemed to be good, until it intersected the Old Trail again. And though as simple as that, road building in those days was not without difficulties. Some would want the road and some wouldn’t want it.
“Uncle” Peter’s road bumped into a circumstance when his engineer projected the cut-off across the farm of a certain female importation from the Emerald Isle. And right there Irish wit and Missouri temper mixed. William Porter, not so very long removed from the Rushville hills, was chief engineer and contractor for the prairie division of “Uncle” Peter’s cut-off. Mrs. Flannigan met the Missourian head-on, with an old horse-pistol wrapped in her apron. “Off with you, I’ll not have the place torn up,” she commanded.
Entirely unaware of the ominous clouds rolling up in the sky of his destiny, the wily William squared himself in an attitude of defiance, squinted his eyes in the peculiar manner of his people, spat out his tobacco, and said, “I carkilate I’m running this road.” Whereupon Mrs. Flannigan unbound her pistol, and replied, “It’s a fine young man you are, but I’m sorry to tell you that you’ll never see your old mother again.”
Contractor Porter decided to take fate in his own hands and change the plans of destiny as decreed by Mrs. Flannigan. He took another chew of tobacco and then meekly backtracked for a mile over the perfectly good road he had just built—and ran some more furrows. You couldn’t block a road project with a horse-pistol, or even with injunctions, in those days. There was too much open land.
The generous spacings and fine appointments of Peter Shuemaker’s cut-off—it had a corduroy bridge, over Muddy Creek, with nigger-head trimmings—were out of all proportion to the scanty travel that passed his way. And when “Uncle” Peter found that he couldn’t bring the traffic to him, he, like Mahomet, went to it. Shuemaker built a hotel in Granada.