Butler County Genealogy Trails KansasHenry Morris Logan Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

HENRY MORRIS LOGAN

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

Fifty-four years ago, Henry M. Logan as a lad of twenty-one rode into El Dorado on a stage from Humboldt. His first view of El Dorado thrilled him. In a booklet of his reminiscences he expressed this emotion in beautiful language:

“When the sun was low in the west we came in sight of, and I got my first look at, the little city of El Dorado, and the beautiful, picturesque Walnut Valley, which was just then in its autumn glory, for the creeping vines on its gray stone bluffs were all aflame with frosts, rich scarlet tinting and all one shimmering sea of gold, flecked with emerald and purple, stretching far away in potential silence; while above all curved the wide, magnificent sky, unclouded, fathomless and tenderly blue—all of which made a scene long to be remembered.”

It was remembered, for that first glance of a marvelous country remained in the mind of this pioneer lad all his life and fifty years rolled by on their stately courses before he set it down in words. During the half-century and more that he was a citizen of this town that germ of admiration flamed into an abiding love for El Dorado and for Kansas in the soul of him. In the same booklet, he said, “Over a half century of my life has been parallel with the story of Kansas, during which time I have seen its vast, bleak prairies changed from the home of the Indian and the cowboy and his ‘chaps,’ flaming red ‘comecia’ and wide sombrero to the brightest gem in the phalanx of states. Kansas is the only state that ever harvested 180 million bushels of wheat in one year and now has thousands of girls and boys of school age who have never seen a saloon.”

These brief excerpts from Henry Logan’s own voluminous writings serve as an index to his character. He was a strange mixture of the practical and the idealist. He was a merchant with the soul of a poet. He sold goods for a living—and he was a conservative merchant—but he gained his real riches and comforts in the beauties about him. All the years of his busy life, while the country about him was changing miraculously from a wilderness to the most vigorous civilization of all history, he was laying up treasures where moth and rust could not corrupt. His state of mind was a wholesome, stately and beautiful dwelling place. It was no monastical retreat he withdrew for his own selfish contemplation, for he gladly welcomed others into communion with his precious delights. An abiding faith and pride in the land about him teeming with its richness of soil and of character elements, painstaking loyalty to his business and faith and devotion to his family and church—these were the treasures of Henry Logan. In laying them up, he attained riches far beyond the worth of gold or silver and property.

Henry Logan personified the pioneer—whose glory it is to Kansas to honor. It was granted him to round out a long and useful span of years. His worthy life, along with those of the countless host which has gone ahead and has left to us who remain a land flowing with milk and honey, has been poured into the civilization that is Kansas. Some day—as the years pass on into eternity—we shall forget these pioneers. Their individual faces will face into the past; the memory of their individual deeds will disappear. But the fragrance of their glorious lives will ever hover over, and the work of their hands will endure, in the structure they have so sturdily and so nobly built.

Said Henry Logan in his book: “Alas, only a few of the ’71-ers are here now. Many, many, old-time, early-day, never-to-be-forgotten friends have taken their last ride to that Silent City, there to sleep where all down through the coming years Kansas breezes will ripple the grass on their graves, the summer sunshine caress it lovingly and the winter snows cover them softly.”

Today, alas, Henry Logan took that ride. For eons he shall sleep in the soil he loved so passionately, while the “Kansas breeze ripples the grass on his grave, the summer sunshine caresses it lovingly and the winter snows cover him softly,” but his spirit—the spirit of the Kansas pioneer—shall continue to glorify his beloved land like the benediction of the redeemed.—August 19, 1925.