It was eight wilderness miles to Powhattan, the post-office; five miles to Granada, the trading post; and one mile to the nearest neighbors—Rube and Anne Wolfley.
The mill that made our sorghum molasses—nearly every farmer grew a patch of cane for making molasses to go with corn-bread, the staple diet—one mile off from Powhattan, was owned by Charley Smith, the same Charley Smith who had in earlier days, been keeper of a station (his home ) on the old John Brown “underground railroad,” where runaway Negro slaves, being transported to Canada, were in hiding through the day. I know it was the Charley Smith place, for Ben Summers, our hired man, said it still smelled of “niggers.” But of course it didn’t. That was Ben ’ s way of opening a sizeable tale about Mr. Brown and his underground railroad.
And I wouldn’t know how far it was to the mill that ground our corn-meal, but I do know there was one—for we had no bread other than cornbread for months on end. Only on rare occasions would we have “lightbread”—made of wheat flower, of course. The cornbread my mother usually made was not the cornpone customary in the South. Cracklin ’ bread and seasoned cornbread was much better—that is, for most palates. I wish I could have some of it now. But there was one traveling salesman, Hugh Graham, who preferred the cornpone. He would wire the hotel here of his expected arrival, which meant that for breakfast, dinner, or supper, he wanted cornpone. I think the cornpone was made of cornmeal, salt, and water.
I recall that Ben Summers had gone “acourtin” Betsy Porter that evening, when my parents were shelling corn, by candle-light, on a sheet spread upon the kitchen floor, to take to the mill—probably the Reiderer mill east of Holton — when a big bullsnake which had crept in through a displaced chink in the log house, slithered across the sheet, gliding over the corn, and out an open door. The matter was debated, seriously—then it was decided the hogs should have that corn.
My father and mother, with their three small children, came to Kansas from Nashville, Tennessee, in 1865. They came by steamboat on the Cumberland, the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to Atchison. The family was met there by my uncle Nick, father’s only brother, with an ox-team, taking most of two days to drive us to his home on Wolfley creek. That farm is now owned by William Mast.
On the way out from Atchison, as we were nearing home, we ran into one of those fierce prairie fires that so often menaced life and property of the early settlers. I was very young then and cannot say positively that what I am about to relate here is from actual memory, although I have always believed that I retained a mental picture of that prairie fire. Details are now a bit hazy—and, you know, with the very young there is always a borderland not any too well defined between what you may have actually seen and what you may have heard others recount.
Anyway, there was a prairie fire. And its sinister red flames—a long snake-like line of crackling, blazing hell — overhung with an ominous pall of thick black smoke, sent a spasm of fear surging through my uncle and my parents.
That prairie fire was on one of the big creek bottoms — probably on the old Overland Trail — somewhere between Granada and Wetmore, only there was no Wetmore then. We had just forded a stream and were well out in a big bottom where the slough grass was as tall as the oxen, when the fire was sighted coming over the hills towards us, and fanned by a brisk wind it was traveling at terrific speed.
My uncle, who was driving, ran up along side his oxen and yelled, “Whoa-haw-Buck! Jerry!” The oxen seemed to sense danger and the wagon was turned around in no time. Just then a man on horseback came running up. Without stopping to say a word the man jumped off his horse and touched a lighted match to the tall dead grass in front of the outfit. An effort was made by the man to beat out the fire on the windward side. The man then excitedly commanded my uncle to drive across the thin line of back-fire into the newly burned space. It looked like the rider had come out of that blazing inferno especially to warn us. And as the wagon moved away he yelled loudly so as to be heard above the roar of the encroaching flames from behind, “For God’s sake, man, follow it up as fast as you can.”
That young man was Fred Liebig.