Pictures on My Wall a Lifetime in Kansas FLORENCE L
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Pictures On My Wall A Lifetime in Kansas FLORENCE L. SNOW From a Portrait by Helen Hodge Pictures On My Wall A Lifetime in Kansas By FLORENCE L. SNOW UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PRESS LAWRENCE *945 COPYRIGHT, 1945, BY THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PRESS All rights reserved. No part of this book may be repro• duced in any form, except by reviewers of the public press, without written permission from the publishers. TO THE MEMORY OF MY SISTER EMILY SNOW PREFACE Kansas has often been called the perfect flowering of the New England conscience. Sometimes this is meant to be a com• pliment and at others it is plainly an insult. Either way I doubt if it is a fact. What we did get from New England, particularly in the days of ''bleeding Kansas/' was the habit of talking, writing and philosophizing about conscience. This gave the impression that we had a very active and painful conscience, though it was frequently only an excuse for talking about ourselves, like an operation. Even after our convalescence from the Civil War we never stopped talking and. writing, despite the fact that when we wanted to point out the scar we could no longer find it. In this way Kansas became the most articulate state in the Union. Whether New England should receive credit (or blame) for the habit is beside the point; the conscience and the language are pure Kansas. However, this is only one explanation. Another is that only in Kansas and New England is the climate so warm, cold, windy, calm, unpredictable and preposterous that it is always a fresh topic of conversation. In other sections when gossip is used up a gloomy silence falls, but in Kansas and New England we prac• tice on the weather. In Kansas, it is true, we sometimes fall back on politics, which is even stranger than the weather and requires a stronger vocabulary. On this subject a New England conscience would be a distinct liability, which is another proof that we are no longer tongue-tied to our mother's apron strings. No, the extraordinary record that Kansans have compiled about themselves and the state is their own. From the earliest days, in prose and verse, what they saw, what they felt and what they did was expressed in writing. It was set down in letters and diaries without thought of publication and it overflowed into newspapers, books and magazines. A great deal of this record has been preserved, much even of what was most personal. In the archives of the Historical Society at Topeka there are hundreds of thousands of unpublished letters and diaries. Almost every newspaper, book and magazine ever printed in the state is there on file. This collection makes Kansas the most completely and minutely documented commonwealth in history. It is a collection of several million clinical slides whereby the microscope of history can be leveled at any county in the state and focused on any day in nearly a hundred years. Florence Lydia Snow's book is an interesting addition to this record. It is a personal story and it is also good regional history. The descriptions of early-day Neosho Falls—the Neosho Valley District Fair, the visit of President Hayes, incidents with the Indians, building the church, the early growth of the town—all these are factual without sacrificing any of their life and move• ment. The chapter on Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a notable English poet who was entertained in Miss Snow's home, is especially delightful. Florence Snow is a Kansan not by the accident of birth but by choice; she moved here from Indiana in the spring of 1862 at the age of one year. The state at that time was also one year old and the two have grown together for eighty-three years. She has lived at Baldwin, Neosho Falls and Lawrence. She has been a bank cashier, a good neighbor and an author. Her two volumes of verse The Lamp of Gold and Sincerely Yours are charming reflections of her personality. These are the reminiscences of her long life, one that has been lived gracefully and observantly, and they are also among the brighter pages of the story of her distinguished contemporary, the State of Kansas, KlRKE MECHEM. January 27, 1945 CONTENTS PREFACE, BY KIRKE MECHEM - vii I. "TOPSY"TIME i II. THE YEAR THE PRESIDENT CAME - 21 III. BAKER DAYS 39 IV. MAGNIFICENT DISTANCES 59 V. THE KANSAS ACADEMY OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE 81 VI. IN REGARD TO EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON - - 105 VII. DAILY DUE 123 VIII. STUDENT-AT-LARGE 143 I 1 opsy 1 ime To my Only Brother, Cyrus Cushion Snow, Eatonville, Washington Ever West and Westward, Good Luck in His Two Hands. I DEAR BROTHER: That is glorious news, that you will be able to walk again. Praise be for the blessed hospital treatment and Agnes' incom• parable care! So wonderful a wife is not often given a man, and you have been especially fortunate in your second adventure in marriage. The family thought that perhaps a helpmate only half your age might not be the part of wisdom. You might so probably in the ordinary lease of life leave her with a number of children on her hands, or there might be many years when she wrould be sadly hampered with your possible invalidism. But time and tide have diminished the difference between you in many gracious ways. Your four splendid children and one grandchild rise up to honor and delight you. That you named the first marvelous baby for me has always been a great satisfac• tion, because of all her gifts and aspirations, her union with so suit• able a young man, and the perfections of little Paul the second. She is such a good letter-writer, withal, when, in this rushing time, she can get letters written. She may thus carry on my life• long love of this type of communication, though it does require a certain sense of leisure in one's days, as well as the desire for interchange of thought and feeling. Letters possess a definite spiritual quality, one soul flitting to another, in-so-far freed from the body though still belonging to this very material earth. And how conscious I am that I have always written you too infrequently, though I have sent many letters to your one, and now this is an extra-special letter which you can take on the installment plan when you feel like harking back through the years to relieve the inevitable tedium of the hours until you are strong and well again. So many things come to me in the measureless desire to give you all that I may of every good re• generating thing. I am still the Baby Sister of a big hero-of-a- 2 PICTURES ON MY WALL brother, carrying the flowers you have made to bloom along my way in my hands, and cherishing things I have told you before in our brief visits, or through my pen or faithful machine. Some of the blossoms must be left out—they would make such an immense bouquet—as big in its way as that wreath of wagon- wheel size some friends made for the beloved old trapper who spent his last days in one of your little cottages and who died that summer Emily and I spent with you twenty years ago, after mother had been called home. We had such endless need of help and healing, and how I recall all that you and Agnes did for us there among your multi• tudes of matchless roses—roses giving forth in the sunlight their beauty and perfume against the "Mountain that was God," and exerting such enchantment in the mist and the rain. Changing the name of that unique "Tacoma" to the flat prosaic "Rainier" was an everlasting sacrilege. The Indians had the vision and the dream. Though we did not reach in actual fact any higher than Paradise Valley that heavenly day we climbed toward the eternal snows, there was a revelation of God at every turn, a benison of beauty that nothing can deflect. We prairie people constantly dream of the sea, but the mountains enthrall us too. Your tremendous Northwest did many things to me. I wish it could do many more. Dear only Brother, getting acquainted with you so richly again made me realize how very true it is that one gets from the mountain what he takes to it. Yet a better expression would be "Much more than he takes to it." The mountain brought us the crown and glory of the grandeur we had seen on the way to the coast. And when you announced that the next month we should have a personally-conducted trip to Alaska, I simply soared into the realms of farthest anticipation, Emily declaring that "just everything is coming true." It was from Alaska that you had once sent us a handful of tiny pure gold nuggets together with a number of native garnets, "more precious than rubies." A LIFETIME IN KANSAS 3 It was Alaska of which our distinguished Uncle Harlan had said, "See Norway and Sweden, if you can; if you cannot, see Alaska and covet no wonders of foreign lands/' How happily we set forth in mid-July, avoiding at that especial time the possibility of forest fires clouding the atmosphere. And how fortunate it was that on reaching Seattle, our sister, Dr. Ann Snow Turner, a successful osteopathic physician in that city of seven hills, could join us as we boarded the boat for the scenic splendors of the Inland Passage.