Late last year I ran across a brief summary of Thomas Lovewell’s early career in Kansas on the website “Legends of Kansas,” which made the understandable mistake of connecting two points on a map with a straight line.
Knowing that Lovewell had settled for a time in Marshall County, Kansas, a few years before filing a Homestead claim in Republic County, the writers chose to characterize this relocation as a move from one county in Kansas to another, a distance of about seventy miles.
If only life and history were so simple.
In fact Mr. Lovewell first returned from Marshall County to resettle his family in Iowa in 1859, then drove a wagon to Pikes Peak to check out rumors of a rich gold strike. After hanging about for a few weeks at the burgeoning new city of Denver he headed for northern California to meet up with his younger brothers, before meandering into Nevada to establish several mining claims.
After war broke out in 1861 Thomas headed for Stockton to enlist in the Army, spending the next few years patrolling forests near Round Valley, California, and guarding the overland trail at Fort Churchill, Nevada. Released early with a lung ailment he visited his brother Solomon near Fort Vancouver, Washington, before starting his return trip to Iowa.
At the end of 1865 he departed Iowa for the final time to establish a Homestead on a plot of land he had spotted on one of his previous journeys through north-central Kansas. Although now estranged from his first wife, he was accompanied on this trip by her relatives, Daniel and Duranda Davis, and Daniel’s younger sister Orel Jane, who would soon become the second Mrs. Thomas Lovewell. The group spent the winter near Kansas City before resuming their trek into the unsettled Kansas frontier in the spring of 1866.
So, when “Legends of Kansas” states that Thomas Lovewell came to the White Rock area from Marshall County in 1865, the date of his arrival is off by a year and the journey itself, which actually encompassed six years, is greatly simplified.
The site is still worth a look, by the way, for its trio of subtly colorized views of early-day Lovewell. Another entry on the same platform, the one for White Rock, is somewhat longer, more detailed, and basically accurate.
If I had a bone to pick with their version of the White Rock story it would be their repetition of the old canard that White Rock residents doomed their town to a premature demise by voting down Kansas Pacific Railway bonds in 1878.
The website notes that only 2 citizens of White Rock voted in favor of the bond issue, while 95 opposed. However, even if all 95 had changed their votes, the county-wide proposal still would not have passed, though it would have lost by a narrower margin. Most accounts of this election fail to note that even if the measure had been adopted, there was no guarantee that the railroad would have ventured all the way to White Rock, promising only to build their tracks “as near as practicable.”
The Kansas Pacific declared bankruptcy fifteen years later.