“‘To the most minute observer his age was a question of the gravest doubt. He might have been thirty; he might have been a century, with no violation of the probabilities. His hair was a sandy sorrel, something like a Rembrandt interior, and strayed around his freckled scalp like the top layer of a hayrick in a tornado. His eyes were two ulcers, half filled with pale blue starch. A thin, sharp nose projected above a lipless mouth that seemed always upon the point of breaking into the most grievous lamentations, and never opened save to take whiskey and tobacco in and let oaths and saliva out. A long, slender neck, yellow and wrinkled after the manner of a lizard’s belly, bore this dome of thought upon its summit, itself projecting from a miscellaneous assortment of gent’s furnishing goods, which covered a frame of unearthly longitude and unspeakable emaciation. Thorns and thongs supplied the place of buttons upon the costume of this Brummel of the bottom, coarsely patched beyond recognition of the original fabric. The coat had been constructed for a giant, the pants for a pigmy. They were too long in the waist and too short in the leg, and flapped loosely around his shrunk shanks high above the point where his fearful feet were partially concealed by mismated shoes that permitted his great toes to peer from their gaping integuments, like the heads of two snakes of a novel species and uncommon fetor. This princely phenomenon was topped with a hat which had neither band nor brim nor crown:
“‘If that could shape be called which shape has none.
“‘His voice was high, shrill and querulous, and his manner an odd mixture of fawning servility and apprehensive effrontery at the sight of a “damned Yankee abolitionist,” whom he hated and feared next to a negro who was not a slave.’
“The only error in the senator’s description of ‘Shang’ is that ‘Shang’ was ‘abolitionist’ himself, and ‘fit to free the nigger.’
‘Shang’ continued to live in Sumner until every house, save his miserable hut, had vanished like the baseless fabric of a vision. He claimed and was proud of the title, ‘the last mayor of Sumner.’ He died a few years ago, and a little later lightning struck his cabin and it was devoured by flames. And thus passed away the last relic of Sumner.
“In the flood tide of Sumner’s prosperity, 1856 to 1859—for before that it was nothing, after that nothing—it had ambition to become the county seat of the newly organized county of Atchison. J. P. Wheeler, president of the Sumner Town Company, was a member of the lower house of the Territorial legislature, and he ‘logrolled’ a bill through that body conferring upon Sumner the title of county seat, but the Atchison ‘gang’ finally succeeded in getting the bill killed in the senate. Subsequently, October, 1858, there was an election to settle the vexed question of a county seat. Atchison won; Sumner lost.
“About this time Atchison secured its first railroad. The smoke from the locomotive engines drifted to Sumner and enveloped it like a pall. The decadence was at hand, and Sumner’s race to extinction and oblivion was rapid. One day there was an exodus of citizens; the houses were torn down and the timbers thereof carted away, and foundation stones were dug up and carried hence. Successive summers’ rains and winters’ snows furrowed streets and alleys beyond recognition and filled foundation excavations to the level, and ere long a tangled mass of briers and brambles hid away the last vestige of the once busy, ambitious city. The forest, again unvexed by ax or saw, asserted his dominion once more, and today, beneath the shadow cast by mighty oaks and sighing cottonwoods, Sumner lies dead and forgotten.”
In the above article, reference is made by Mr. Park to Jonathan Lang, and it is important in this connection to print herewith an excerpt from the Atchison Daily Globe, December, 1915, relating to this interesting character, which follows:
“The reunion of the Thirteenth Kansas infantry at Hiawatha Tuesday recalls that the late Jonathan G. Lang, self-styled ‘Mayor of Old Sumner,’ and hero of John J. Ingalls’ ‘Catfish Aristocracy,’ was a soldier in this regiment, and was the butt of many jokes on the part of his comrades in camp as he was in the days of civil life at old Sumner. Thomas J. Payne, a sergeant in the Thirteenth, now living in California, relates an amusing story of ‘Old Shang,’ as Lang was generally called by his comrades: When the regiment was mustered into service on September 28, 1862, and the newly assigned officers were reviewing their troops at Camp Stanton, in Atchison, the tall, gaunt form of Lang (for he was nearly seven feet tall and very angular) towered above the rest of the men like the stately cottonwood above the hazel-brush. Riding up and down the lines, and scanning the troops with critical eye to see that there was no breech of ranks or decorum, the gaze of Colonel Bowen could not help but fall upon the lofty and lanky form of Lang, rising several heads above any of his comrades. The colonel paused, and pointing his finger at the grenadier form in the ranks, shouted in thunderous tones, ‘Get down off that stump.’ A ripple of suppressed laughter immediately passed along the lines, and when Colonel Bowen saw his mistake he promptly revoked his order with a hearty chuckle and rode on towards the end of the column. And not until twenty years later, when all that was mortal of old Lang—his nearly seven feet of skin and bones—was laid way to moulder with the ruins of old Sumner, did he finally ‘get down off of that stump.’ He rests at the entrance of the Sumner cemetery and his grave is marked with one of those small, regulation slabs such as are furnished by the Government for the graves of dead soldiers and bears this simple inscription: ‘J. G. Lang, Co. K. 13th Kansas Infantry.’ There are two other members of the Thirteenth Kansas buried at Sumner. They are, John Scott, of Company D, and Albred Brown, of Company F.”
Another article relating to Old Sumner, which is entertaining and instructive, was written by E. W. Howe, and is taken from the Historical Edition of the Atchison Daily Globe, issued July 16, 1894: