On this farm, Harry used some of the cooking skills his mother taught him to feed farmhands who worked the 600 acres that bordered the railroad tracks, tracks that snaked from nearby Grandview all the way to Kansas City, 17 miles away. This was Harry’s second tour of duty on the farm. First time around as a young child, his mother taught him to be curious about the world around him.
This time around, his mother credits the farm as the place “where he got all his common sense.” He became Grandview’s postmaster, he established Grandview’s Masonic Lodge, and he held Saturday evening jam sessions on the front porch.
Locals didn’t think he’d survive as a farmer. And his culinary skills never transformed his slight frame into anything near a lumberjack’s build, but that didn’t stop him from hard labor. He couldn’t see very well, either, but that didn’t stop him from voracious reading. There’s a pattern here.
During his farming years Harry overcame his deep shyness to pursue a young lady from Independence, so he’d often hop the Frisco and ride the rails to Kansas City’s Union Station, where he’d switch to the Independence train.
Bess Wallace liked Harry, but her folks didn’t think much of the relationship. After all, she was a Wallace, born to wealth and class. And he was a farmer. That didn’t deter Harry. There’s a pattern here.
***
Down the road, Belton shows off its collection of old railroad cars, right downtown. And an excursion train offers a short round trip for nostalgia buffs. I bought a ticket to ride the train, just like Harry Truman did, except his fare was a dime to ride the Frisco High Line all the way to Kansas City. My excursion was two miles each way, and cost about $2.25 per mile. What would Harry think? I suspect he’d bring the railroad to its knees. Still, it’s nice to see somebody maintain a part of this old short line, and offer children a taste of transportation their great grandparents knew as a way of life.
I don’t know whether Dale Carnegey ever rode the short line, but I bet he did. Riding a train is a great way to win friends and influence people. Another way to win friends and influence people is to change the spelling of your name to the predominant Carnegie, the one for which the concert hall is named, thanks to the millions of influential greenbacks behind Andrew Carnegie.
Dale called Belton his hometown, even though he was born up the road in Maryville. Early in his life, his parents moved the family to a farmhouse outside Belton, and it still stands. Dale is buried in the Belton Cemetery, where everybody is equally friendly and influential, except for the size of their monuments. His grave and the neighboring plots of his parents and daughter are simple markers atop door-sized slabs of granite. The granite slabs may be insurance against grave robbers. Early in my travels I began to notice a pattern of heavy cover over the graves of many of Missouri’s rich and infamous.
She may not have been rich, but the lady buried in a nearby grave sure was infamous. This is the final resting place of the most fearsome woman ever to smash things with a hatchet. No, not Hatchet Molly. Not Lizzy Borden, either.
This six-foot battle ax waged all-out war against liquor. She first married an alcoholic, and that bad marriage steeled her resolve to destroy the tools that supplied liquor to men. Later she married a preacher and editor of the neighboring Johnson County Democrat newspaper. His last name and a slight change to her first name—oh, and her propensity for violence—would propel her to the forefront of the temperance movement.
She crusaded as Carry Nation, and she smashed whiskey barrels with sledgehammers, threw pool balls at barroom mirrors, and later employed a hatchet to smash up barrooms, to “carry a nation for Prohibition.” Her intemperate temperance crusade lasted a decade, during which time she was beaten, bloodied, battered and arrested nearly three dozen times. Carry’s crusade preceded American Prohibition by several years, but her efforts wrung the booze out of Missouri’s public places in all but the most robust river towns.
She was sought by circus promoters and sideshows, but she traveled as a one-act revival, driving the demons out of married men, a few of whom came willingly to her crusades. While she did most of her damage in Kansas, a dry state at the time, with only a few establishments that served liquor “for medicinal purposes,” her influence spilled over to Missouri, too. In 1906, less than a third of Missouri counties were dry. Three years after her death, 80 percent of the state was dry. Imbibers could buy a drink in only 23 of 114 counties. Almost all of those 23 holdout counties clung to rivers, those arteries that delivered the sternwheeling swift boats, too quick for Carry’s hatchet. The boats delivered the demon rum and witches’ brew and kept the old river ports steeped in a lifestyle that put the wild in the west.
I left the headstones of Carry and Carnegie, polar opposites in their approach to public relations, and headed for the wide open spaces. The back roads delivered a succession of towns whose very names hold the promise of good stories: Cleveland, Freeman, West Line. Oh, and Peculiar, a place with the motto, “The odds are with you.” A sign downtown proudly proclaims the town’s Civil War history: “In 1861-1864 while bloody battles raged throughout the southern states, nothing happened here.” Nobody wanted to die for a Peculiar cause.
But a hundred years later, the town almost became famous. The owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, an eccentric named Charley O. Finley, brought more innovation to stadium sports than any other person since Caligula: Colored jerseys. DayGlo orange baseballs. He installed a mechanical bunny rabbit under home plate that would pop up like a Jack in the Box to give the umpire fresh baseballs. And he threatened with regularity to move his team away from Kansas City. In one spat with the city, he vowed to move the team to Peculiar. The Peculiar A’s. The name might’ve become a synonym for arsehole, but the move never materialized. Eventually, Charley huffed off to Oakland with his team, whose players cultivated handlebar mustaches and won pennants.
***
Within spitting distance of the Kansas state line, I stumbled onto a real find. I almost passed by an unimpressive metal building, except for the modest sign at the gravel drive entrance: Frontier Military Museum. The building resembles a small aircraft hangar. Avoiding the urge to judge this tin book by its cover, I pulled into the parking lot. Inside that simple metal building sits perhaps the greatest collection of military saddles in America.
Since Mark and Virginia Alley retired more than a decade ago from the aircraft industry in Wichita, they’ve focused on presenting their collection to the world. It’s not where you think it would be. Not on the Smithsonian Mall. Not Texas or Tucson or anyplace known for riding tall in the saddle. It’s not in Kansas City—or any city. It sits on the eastern edge of tiny Drexel, Missouri. Mark admits that the museum is out of the way. “But we love the area,” he said. And after all, this was the frontier when many of his fifty saddles were enlisted.
Each saddle reflects the status of its rider, from the plebeian soldier’s ride to the elaborate officer’s saddle. I’d never thought about it much, really, that an officer sat on a leather Lexus, while a regular soldier perched on a stripped-down chassis. Rank be damned, the museum’s caretakers ensure that every saddle tells a story, thanks to its supporting cast of characters including tack, boots, headgear, canteens, uniforms and firearms. A replica of the Drexel Mercantile Company displays frontier-style dry goods. Relics add perspective from several local Native American tribes: The Osage, Sac and Fox. Mark relishes in showing the displays and talking about the collection. It’s nice to see somebody spend a big part of his retirement time and money showing people their past.
Thanking the Alleys for their pioneer spirit, I jumped back in my saddle, and spurred the horses under my hood ornament to take me down the trail. Minutes south of Merwin, I met up with a cowboy in a field. More precisely, Merwin Mike is a scarecrow-like dummy of a cowboy, riding up and down on the rocker arm of an oil well pump. Curious, I later Googled, “cowboy riding the rocker arm of an oil well pump,” and I can say with some confidence that this sculpture is one of a kind. The visual conjures memories of rodeos, or the Wyoming