NOTES
1. "Escape from the past is scarcely more possible for a community than for an individual. New growth is ever occurring but generally as an outgrowth of vital traditions or latent capacities.... If the community’s tradition (its own story, its history) is then part of its character, the history of its historiography is an important chapter in the story of its cultural development". – Blake McKelvey, "A History of Historical Writing in the Rochester Area," Rochester History 6 (1944): 1.
2. See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1951). To Smith’s chapter on Gilpin may be added Gilpin’s own basic contribution to the debate over the nature of the West: The Central Gold Region (Philadelphia, 1860). Gilpin’s map of his projected "Centropolis" is reproduced in the Kansas City Star, May 26, 1901.
3. Meigs County (Ohio) Telegraph, June 27, April 25, 1850; the volumes of this paper edited by Van Horn are in the Kansas City Public Library. Where not otherwise indicated, biographical data on Van Horn comes from the sketch in Theodore S. Case, History of Kansas City, Missouri (Syracuse, NY, 1888), 432-40. There is a small but valuable collection of Van Horn papers in the Archives of the Native Sons of Kansas City.
4. Pomeroy, Ohio, February 27, 1854, Van Horn papers, Native Sons Archives.
5. Address at merchants’ Christmas dinner, 1857, "Railroads and the Press – Twin Brothers in American Progress and Development," quoted in William H. Miller, The History of Kansas City (Kansas City, 1881), 79.
6. To I. Cartwright, Kansas City, February 27, 1858, Van Horn papers, Native Sons Archives.
7. Western Journal of Commerce, May 24, 1860.
8. Ibid., June 25, 1860.
9. Kansas City Enterprise, December 22, 1855. On the effort of the Kansas City leadership to remain "neutral" during the Kansas conflict, see James C. Malin, Grassland Historical Studies, (Lawrence, KS, 1950), vol. I, 102-18.
10. See the interesting sketch of Van Horn (who is not named) in [Albert D.] Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford, CT, 1867), 27-29.
11. Case, 434-35.
12. Manuscript of memorial address on Milton J. Payne (n.d., 1890?), Van Horn papers, Native Sons Archives.
13. Westport was then four miles from Kansas City; it has since been absorbed into the metropolis. Biographical data on Charles C. Spalding comes from an obituary in the Boston Daily Advertiser, January 20, 1877, kindly supplied by the Boston Public Library, and also from a valuable sketch by James Anderson, appended to the facsimile reprint of Annals of the City of Kansas published by Frank Glenn (Kansas City, 1950).
14. Charles C. Spalding, Annals of the City of Kansas, fifth and sixth unnumbered pages after the frontispiece; about a dozen copies of the original, printed by Van Horn and Abeel in 1858, are known to have survived. We have used the Glenn facsimile edition cited above.
15. Spalding, 10-14, 16, 70.
16. The only known biographical sketch of William H. Miller is in The History of Jackson County, Missouri (Kansas City, 1881), 816, 817. Miller’s History of Kansas City, in addition to the separate publication cited in these notes, appears in this volume, pp. 373-632.
17. Miller, 15-16; Elizabeth Butler Gentry contributed a lively sketch of the early Westport social life (a subject that Miller ignored) in Carrie Westlake Whitney, Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People, (Chicago, 1908), vol. I, 641-63.
18. Spalding, 9-10.
19. Miller, 72.
20. Miller’s concluding chapter is captioned: "Kansas City – Why She Is and What She Is"; in it, he reviews the factors that seemed decisive in the city’s growth, noting the apparently unlimited resources of the "new West". In spite of its youth, Kansas City’s supremacy in its region was clearly secure. "Since, therefore," Miller continues, "Kansas City already so largely controls the trade of this vast area, and since its intense and speedy concentration here is assured … it manifests that her growth will be measured by that of the country. It remains only for us to review the resources of the country and compare them with those of districts commercially tributary to the great cities of the world, to arrive at some idea of what Kansas City must become" (p. 249). History and prophecy were as inseparable as two sides of the same coin.
21. Ibid., 6, 7.
22. Ibid., 110.
23. Ibid., 111. See Roy Robert’s prefatory note to the most recent (and best) history of Kansas City, Henry C. Haskell and Richard B. Fowler, City of the Future (Kansas City, [1950]), 5: "but for the daring, the vision, and the faith of a handful of men, the capital of this great empire might just as well have been St. Joseph, Leavenworth, or even Independence. All three had a head start over the scrawny little village that sprang up at the mouth of the Kaw".
24. Miller, 247.
25. The best biographical sketch is in H.L. Conrad, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri, (New York, 1901), vol. I, 517-19. It is difficult to say how much of his history Case actually wrote; his preface credits the assistance of compilers and remarks that he has subjected their work to strict inspection (p. 4).
26. Case, 3.
27. Ibid., 28.
28. Ibid., 60-61.
29. Ibid., 55, 58.
30. William Griffith, History of Kansas City (Kansas City, 1900). The Kansas City directory for 1900 identifies Griffith as associated with the firm that published his book; the same firm published other local history material and may have commissioned Griffith’s book as one for which a substantial local sale was expected.
31. Griffith, 49.
32. Ibid., 106-107.
33. Whitney, Kansas City Missouri, 641-63; Charles P. Deatherage, Early History of Greater Kansas City (Kansas City, 1928); Roy Ellis, A Civic History of Kansas City (Springfield, MO, 1930); Darrell Garwood, Crossroads of America (New York, 1948); Haskell and Fowler, City of the Future. To these may be added an unpublished M.A. thesis: Alice Lanterman, "The Industrial Development of Kansas City" (Northwestern University, 1939). For examples of plagiarism referred to above, see Miller, 236, passage beginning: "The school year of 1868-9…"; Case, 115, same words; Griffith, 75, same words; and Whitney, vol. I, 306: "Of the school year of 1868-1869…". See also Miller, 45, passage beginning: "There was no municipal government…"; Case, 198-99, beginning: "A circumstance occurred…"; Whitney, vol.I, 125, beginning: "A circumstance occurred…"; and Deatherage, 375: "There was no municipal government…". Again, see Miller on the Panic of 1873, 147: "the effect of this panic…"; Case gives the same passage without acknowledgment, 92-93 and again with acknowledgment, 284-85.
34. Haskell and Fowler, 61.
35. William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York, 1946), 212.
36. Griffith, 102.
37. Whitney, vol. I, 9.
38. Miller, 21-26; Case, 33-36; Whitney, vol. I, 149-79; Deatherage, 293-323.
39. Garwood, 11; Haskell and Fowler, 15.
40. Ellis, 36; on page 148, Ellis remarks that "the strategic location of Kansas City" funneled into it a fine assortment of riffraff, "quite as much of the flotsam and jetsam of society as will any street in America [present]…". Thus does geographical advantage return to plague the local historian!
41. Lanterman, 2, 54, 130.
42. Garwood, 321.
43. The most complete biographical sketch of McCoy was itself "oral", a memorial address delivered before the Jackson County Historical Society, "John C. McCoy, Pioneer, and the Early History of Jackson County", by W.C. Scarritt. It was printed in the Kansas City Times; an updated clipping is in the John C. McCoy Scrapbook in the Archives of the Native Sons of Kansas City. In addition to this sketch, the present account generalizes from newspaper items, 1855-1860, and letters in the Isaac McCoy Letterbooks, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.
44. Mrs. Nellie McCoy Harris, "Memories of Old Westport," in The Annals of Kansas City, (Kansas City, MO: Missouri Valley Historical Society, 1924), vol. I, 466. Christiana McCoy to Isaac McCoy, April 20, 1840, Isaac McCoy Letterbooks; John C. McCoy, "Survey of Kansas Indian Lands," Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, vol. 4 (1890), 300-302, lists twenty-two surveying trips between 1830 and 1855.
45. To P.S. Brown, November 11, 1863, in Native Sons Archives.
46. An extensive collection of his "letters to the editor" and addresses are preserved in the McCoy Scrapbook [cited above in note 43].
47. McCoy Scrapbook, 2 (Kansas City Daily Journal, February 15, 1871).
48. Kansas City Daily Journal, February 22, 1888; McCoy confessed that he had no interest in economic history: "we will not waste time or space now to tell what everybody knows of the ... dozen or more great iron bridges – the speeding cable trains, the screams and crash of a thousand trains…".
49. Kansas City Daily Journal, March 19, 1882.
50. Ibid., January 1, 1881.
51. Undated Journal clipping, McCoy Scrapbook, 7.
52. Kansas City Daily Journal, November 18, 1883.
53. Garwood, 23; it has been noted above that Garwood cannot be considered an authentic bearer of the written tradition; he devotes more of his text to Frank and Jesse James than to the coming of the railroads to Kansas City.
54. Geary to W.L. Campbell, January 12, 1915, in "Pioneer Recollections" folder, Native Sons Archives.