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Butler County, Kansas

FOREWORD

"What is past is prologue." (Wm Shake.)

You are about to enter into a time-machine that will carry you backward entirely past the last millennia into the previous one-into the 1800's; and though almost 140 years have passed, I remember well some of the principal actors in this drama. It was a time and place that has been chronicled again and again by authors and movie scriptwriters (though not always dedicated to accuracy, but without which John Wayne would probably have died a pauper), a place and time in the very geographical and chronological center of what we now know as the great American west.

Names like William F. Cody, George Armstrong Custer, Wyatt Earp, James Butler Hickock, Gordon Lillie, and Ned Buntline are today still very much a part of the American lexicon. All were active in geographical settings quite close to that of this story; although at the outset of this story, Ned Buntline and Wm Cody had not yet invented the character, Buffalo Bill; General Custer had not taken his last stand; the shoot-out at OK corral (thus Wyatt Earp's fame) was still ten years in the future, James Hickock¹ was not yet "Wild Bill;" and Gordon W. Lillie was just a pup of 12 years, not yet even dreaming of becoming the "White Chief of the Pawnees," "the little giant of Oklahoma," and certainly not the legendary icon we know as Pawnee Bill.

Those famous personages, and several others, had not yet been superimposed upon an era of fictional and real heroes of the American west; so you'll find not a single one of them mentioned herein. The story you are about to read is a true story, not of the legends, but of some of the real heroes of the wild west - "wild" in some respects but in others a "tamer but often harsher" west; a story, told without Hollywood flair, of pioneers who lived and composed the history of America as assuredly did Columbus, the pilgrim fathers, or those whose faces adorn Mount Rushmore.

The smoke had scarcely cleared from the most monstrous upheaval this or any nation has perhaps ever conjured for itself. Abraham Lincoln was barely seven years moldering in his grave, as was his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and people were trying to move on. Though by then a state, complete with newborn towns, a few railroads, and the telegraph, Kansas was

¹During the Civil War, William Cody served as a scout with David L. Payne, Hickok, and David Benbow. Hickok subsequently served as sheriff of Hays, Kansas. He was rumored to have appeared in a stage play put on in 1873, in Chicago, by Bill Cody entitled "Scouts of the Plains." Payne was eventually to lead the "Boomer" movement, pressing the opening of Oklahoma territories to white settlement. On Payne's death in 1884 Major Gordon Lillie, by then "Pawnee Bill" assumed that position. In 1889 the mission was accomplished, an event that was to have considerable consequences to Simon Jesse Peter and family.