The Gray County Seat War; 3; Election Mess

The Grey County Seat War was written and produced by Brendan Merrick Lynch. Principal funding for this program was provided by the Kansas Humanities Council, a nonprofit cultural organization encouraging the appreciation of history, heritage, and values. This program was produced in conjunction with High Plains Public Radio with support from listeners like you. Last time on the Grey County Seat War, millionaire Aces Sewell has spent big money in Grey County to influence residents to vote for the city of Ingalls as the permanent county seat. But citizens of Simmaron have vowed not to give up the county seat without a fight. Here's Brendan Lynch. Craig Miner describes the money making possibilities. Sewell and Big 19th Century financiers like him may have seen in Western Kansas. Fundamentally, these people were developers, and his railroad, and just as the case in his ditch, would make money if he could develop the region. And if he could develop the region by providing it with water and making it a different kind of place, then the land that he owned in the region, and I'm sure he did.

I don't know this, but I'm sure that was the way they usually. If they're going to invest in the railroad in the ditch, then they want to get in the ground floor, and buy the land for a dollar and acre when there's no canal in no railroad. Then build the canal in the railroad, and then wait five years, and wait for all these people to come in, and have good businesses, and then sell the land for $100 an acre or something. And then the railroad, of course, would have business, and the canal would have business. So both of those would be money-making enterprises, plus the general development of the area would make him money on land speculation. The town of Ingalls, Kansas, earned Ace of Soule money, too, which was incentive enough for him to spend freely for its rapid construction. When stung by charges that Ingalls was prefabricated, Soule complained to an Ingalls town officer about the lack of any real community. A town is not a town unless it has a church and a minister. I want a church built here within 60 days, and a minister hired.

Select a representative to hire one, and my people will take care of the details. Ace of Soule. To counter Soule's pro Ingalls spending, Simuron's leadership developed anti-Soule and anti- Ingalls themes for the county seat election in the Simuron newspapers, especially the Jacksonian. The Jacksonian charge that Soule was a shyster, a profiteer out to create a personal empire and thwart democratic rule in western Kansas. As evidence, they pointed to the ill-gotten gains of his patent medicine empire. As for Ingalls. It is merely a question of time when Ingalls will be knocked out and the friends that knew her once will know her no more. The town was started for no other purpose upon Earth and to drown Simuron and feather the nest of a lot of the biggest shysters ever born. A.T. Soule is merely work in the dear people for suckers. The Jacksonian and Simuron made high sport of attacking and ridiculing Soule. The paper referred to Soule as the Alsabub, and when they did print his proper name, they refused to capitalize it. In fact, they labeled Soule worse things than can be repeated over the airwaves a century later.

Marshall Allen Bailey has read through these old Simuron newspapers. Their idea was to put out as much anti-Soule propaganda as possible, because even though Soule was supposedly doing a big favor for the citizens of southern Great County, Simuron wanted to downplay that and let them know that they were being ripped off. It was not in their favor. As soon as the voting was done and everything, they would find out that they were getting ripped off. Professor Jim Schellenberg explains the involvement of the local press in these wars. Oh, that's a beautiful one. In those days, the newspaper was a representative of the interests of the town. In these young towns, it was very closely tied to the future of growth of that town. And those little newspaper men were intemperate to say the least. Beautiful examples in the Great County, the Jacksonian of Simuron, particularly I found.

And in many other county seat wars, the newspapers of the fludging towns did their best to fan the flames. We are on to the Lop Eard, Lantern John, half bread, and half-born whiskey soaked, pox eaten, pup, or pretenced to edit that worthless water of subdued, outhouse, a bug fodder known as a single messenger. He just started out to climb the journalistic banister and wants us to knock the hayseed from his hair. Pull the splinters out of his stern and push him on and up. We'll fool him. No free advertising from us. Craig Miner has researched these 19th century newspapers and says they were often used to drum up support both financial and emotional for their hometown. Clearly the newspaper and the newspaper editor represented mostly that town. And the means of communication and the means of faction forming, it kind of came through that daily dose of wild rhetoric in the newspaper.

Sue, going to be a mixed presence on the one hand, you don't want to reject his money, but on the other hand, people are jealous and bitter about outsiders coming in with a lot of money and trying to exercise what they think is illegitimate political control. So certainly there's that and who feels sorry for stool? Well, it's really easy to build up this resentment. Also newspapers thrived on some sort of factionalism. Every newspaper had to represent some group. And there was a tendency to really exaggerate the situation in order to play to that group. So there would be a tendency to polarize in that way and to become the champion of some group that was bitter and to make somebody else the Satan of the situation. And probably Gray County was ready made. There are lots of stereotypes already in place that allow that to happen fairly readily. The 1880s were the height of the gilded age. When critics charged, the capitalism had run a mock

creating a small elite class of the super rich who prayed on the American masses. The power of their money could skew and taint democracy itself it was charged. Simmeron's editorialists skillfully painted stool with this brush as a menace to democracy, Craig Miner. So this can really rouse passions and people feel that democracy itself is threatened by their enemies, by whoever it is in the other town or county seat candidate. And of course, probably they're all cheating in some way. But usually each side has a feeling that it is the righteous and the other side is evil. This election is to decide whether the pioneer town of Gray County centrally located, built up by the old inhabitants of the county, and now populated by an industrious, intelligent, and influential class of people shall campaign over a corrupt set of scheming, shysters who have mapped out a town upon the broad prairies to further their own interests.

It is simply a question of right against wrong honesty and law against brutal and bulldozing. It is the mass of the people against a favored few. Inkeeper Kathleen Holt explains that Sewell's irrigation canal was seen as an engineering failure by local farmers and was plagued by accidents, a fact that Simmeron supporters were quick to turn into classic war propaganda. In addition to vote buying and fraud, Simmeron's journalist charged Sewell with atrocities against children. The ground over near Ingalls is very, very sandy. And what happened is before the water flowed, it was reabsorbed into the sand. Now there are people who would say that the irrigation canal never held water. But we know that's not true. It did hold at least standing water. And I've read newspaper accounts of a child falling into the canal and drowning. And of course, Asa Sewell was a fairly controversial figure and he evidently had been sued in the past by someone that had taken his hot bitters and had miscarried a baby.

So the newspapers and their very flamboyant language of the time called Sewell now not only a baby killer but also the killer of innocent children because they were drowning left and right in his canal at any rate so we know there was water in the canal at one time. Despite these engineering and publicity problems, Sewell assumed rightly that his irrigation canal, town, railroad, college and other projects had bought him enough support to win the election for Ingalls canzes. By late 1888, most great county residents had been lured to Sewell's way of thinking. Why stand in the way of a tycoon who wanted to pour millions into the county for the sake of one town? For victory, Sewell would simply need a clean, uncorrupted county election to confirm this majority view. Unfortunately for Sewell and Ingalls, Simmaron partisans were in charge of the election return tabulations and they planned to cheat. Election day for permanent county seat fell on Halloween 1887.

Simmaron resembled an armed camp. Simmaronites, rendishing Winchester rifles, milled about the polling places. Ingalls, as promised, sent in Bat Masterson, Bill Tillman, the Gilbert Brothers and other well-known Dodge City gunmen as its designated election observers. But their access to Simmaron polling places was denied by armed townspeople. And in at least one case, Sewell's men were poisoned with laxatives by Simmaron citizenry. Kathleen Holt runs the old Simmaron hotel. That was also in Simmaron and Ingalls poll watchers just refused to leave their poll. I mean, their spots. They were going to stay there. Finally, when they would not leave, the Simmaron people sent two kids who were there up to the drug store and told them to get coffee for the poll watchers. Only they had them lace the coffee with laxatives. So the kids took the coffee back. The poll watchers drank the coffee and pretty soon they were forced to leave their posts. And so the Simmaron people could stuff the ballot box. This is the election. This is the decision that the people have made.

And then we're going to have to implement that and leave the records in Simmaron. Avezah Sewell's gunslingers, the Simmaron Jacksonian complained, the hired henchmen of Sewell who boldly infest our town and interest of Ingalls, are no better than cup throats and thieves. These curves are on our streets like anarchists. We look upon and treat them all as deadly vipers. All of Sewell's Dodge City gunmen couldn't prevent Simmaron from committing election fraud. Marshall Allen Bailey explained it this way. Simmaron stuffed the ballot boxes, according to the folks from Ingalls. And while Simmaron had its own society of ballot box stuffers. And these guys, their, their sole purpose is the way I understand it was by hook and crook and ballot box stuffing and whatever it took to, to get Simmaron as, to get Simmaron as the county seat. They grew up hearing the story from my grandmother's family about the dozen odd businessmen from Simmaron who promised money to a secretive society of 72 remote farmers from foot and Logan townships.

In exchange, these farmers were to give their block vote for Simmaron. However, there was a Simmaron scam in the works. Kathy Holt elaborates. They were on promised people if they would vote for Simmaron, they would give them a $10,000 bond. And so the people said, yes, we'll take the $10,000 bond for our vote. And then the people offering the bond signed this official document stating that this was the agreement. Only each man signed the name of the man to his left. So after the vote was taken, then it was revealed that that agreement was also void because it was fraudulent. People hadn't signed their own names. There was yet more evidence of such conspicuous vote fraud. To crown this elaborate hoax of an election, the pro Simmaron commissioners counting the ballots came up with a vote total that far exceeded Simmaron's population of voters. When asked later by courts to produce registration, tally sheets and poll books, Simmaron claimed these records had been conveniently lost or maybe stolen.

I mean, a lot of those ballot boxes and stuff that I understand, the names showed up and stuff were people that had gone on and moved off somewhere else and, you know, things like that. I mean, it was very hook and crook. And Simmaron claimed victory by a scant 43 votes and Sools Legion of lawyers working for Ingalls contested and took the mess into the Kansas courts. Through much of 1888, tensions ratcheted upwards. Lawyers for both townships submitted more than 3,000 pages of briefs containing substantial evidence of vote rigging and bribery on all sides. Again, Dodge City, Marshall Allen Bailey, the county seat fight itself is so complicated that anybody with even good understanding can read how the court orders, how the records were removed to Simmaron, how they removed Ingalls, how they removed Simmaron and why and all this and it's confusing. It's really confusing. It was a big fat political mess and it's just even to this day. It's not clear. I mean, it's just not.

The county seat case progressed up the court system as the townships taunted each other in their newspapers. Eventually, the case went to the Kansas Supreme Court. By the end of 1888, George Boulds, a seat war participant on the Ingalls side recalled that, quote, if an Ingalls man wrote into Simmaron, he was a marked man. He was in for a beating or he would be cornered until he was forced to draw. But we had desparados like you wouldn't believe. That just didn't go where the two turt and shit shit is. I asked locals about the violent reputation of Old West Kansas. There were some angolites that aren't here because of that, had lead poisoning. It's not who shoots first, that matters, but who hits first, aim for the Billy. And what did it gain? Nothing. A lot of deaths, a lot of hard feelings. And God didn't put us on this earth for that.

There shouldn't have been a lot of regret. If standing in Dodd City, Kansas where you can still carry exposed loaded weapon legally, it's not against the law here, of course. If any one occurrence triggered the multiple instances of violence over county seats at the close of the 1880s, it was the bursting of the Kansas land and town lot bubble. The cresting wave of settlement that inspired the building craze on the high plains crashed in 1888. Suddenly, the real estate business died. Drought came. Prices fell, credit tightened, railroad companies disappeared. And the collective dream of multiple metropolises on the high plains withered and blew away like a tumbleweed. Professor Craig Miner of Wichita State University talks about the bust. It starts to lose the confidence it goes very rapidly. It just disappears very rapidly. And it's hard to imagine that if you don't have some historical perspective and have watched it happen before, it's hard to imagine that it can.

Because how can this place with all this cash flow for a while and all these fancy offices and all these loans and all this staff and everything? How can it really disappear? Or how can Enron and WorldCom be actually cooking their books? You know, how can all these people actually be dishonest in pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of a company and leaving it for rent? Well, it's happened a lot of times. And when it does happen, of course, people, it's a terrible thing and they, for a while, become fairly cynical about it. And that's where you get a depression. Due to these dashed investment prospects, county seats all over western Kansas now, paradoxically, seemed more valuable than ever. Losing a seat war in the new shrinking economy could mean the outright death of a town. And today, there's a graveyard of ghost towns on the high plains to prove it. How will the courts decide the voting fraud in Gray County?

And if the courts can resolve the county seat conflict, will the citizens of Ingalls and Simuron resort to violence? Tune in tomorrow for part three of the Gray County Seat War here on High Plains Public Radio. Meanwhile, photography, documentary transcripts, audio, research links, and an essay by Brendan Merrick Lynch are all available on the Gray County Seat War website. You can reach the site through the High Plains Public Radio website at www.hppr.org. Principal funding for this program was provided by the Kansas Humanities Council, a nonprofit cultural organization encouraging the appreciation of history, heritage, and values.