Forthcoming Issue

Volume 32: Winter 2009/2010

Fred E. Woods, "The 1854 Mormon Emigration at the Missouri-Kansas Border."

Nineteenth-century "Mormons emphasized the doctrine of gathering to Zion," explains Fred E. Woods of Brigham Young University, and during the antebellum years church leaders established several different gathering points on the eastern edge of America's westward moving frontier. Thus, in the spring of 1854 thousands of "Saints" congregated in western Missouri near its border with Kansas just weeks before that new territory was organized. Their wagon trains were outfitted at Westport and the City of Kansas (Kansas City) for the long journey to their new American Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. Unlike their previous experience in Jackson County some two decades earlier, which was marred by violence and expulsion, these westbound Mormon emigrants were generally well received and an economic boon to area merchants. "The journey to these points and from them west to Utah was arduous for a number of reasons, most especially the outbreaks of cholera that infected Mormon emigrants at all stages of their pilgrimage," writes Professor Woods. Indeed, "hundreds of emigrants lost their lives along the way," but "the sacrifice for most Latter-day Saints resulted in deep fulfillment. Thousands of converts from Europe and the eastern states crossed over a modern-day Mesopotamia between the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers and reached a desert haven in the West, which they made blossom through their continued hard work and perseverance."

R. Alton Lee, "Joseph R. Burton and the 'Ill-Fated' Senate Seat of Kansas."

Abilene's Joseph Ralph Burton, a dapper attorney and silver-tongued orator of some renown, had a great deal going for him when he first moved into his United States Senate office early in 1901. Burton was a Republican Party leader, who had done well in business and on the stump before capturing the long-sought senate seat. Within five years he had fallen hopelessly out of favor with a popular Republican administration and resigned from office in disgrace, the first U.S. senator to do so after having been tried and convicted of a criminal offense in the federal courts. R. Alton Lee, professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota, tells a fascinating story of the rise and early twentieth-century fall of the tenth man in James H. Lane's "ill-fated" line of succession. Burton blamed his bad fortune on his Republican Party rivals in Kansas and on one of America's most popular presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, and he did all he could to discredit Roosevelt's administration after he left the Senate. Burton's story sheds light on early twentieth-century, Progressive Era politics in the state and nation, and it is worthy of serious consideration in the twenty-first century.

Mark Chapin Scott, editor, "Insured Against Train Robbers: A Kansas Christmas Tale."

Luther Chapin Bailey, a Topeka insurance executive and real estate developer who was also known as something of a man of letters, was used to traveling the rails for business. In "Insured Against Train Robbers: A Kansas Christmas Tale," written by Bailey sometime in the 1930s and originally titled "The Last of the Daltons," the insurance man recalls an eventful overnight train trip he took through central Kansas. According to the hand-written manuscript, which was never published, the events Bailey witnessed took place shortly before Christmas 1904, though subsequent research by the editor-Baileys' great-grandson-proves this date and some other details of the account incorrect. Although Bailey did publish monographs on history, in this instance-and in a move common among writers of historical fiction-he seems to have combined several stories into one to make for a more interesting tale. By doing so, he transformed an account of a train robbery into a Christmas story. Newspaper reports of the incident, one of which offers an interview with Bailey himself, document the historical event and help to establish the facts that stand behind the insurance man's tale.

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