Official details regarding the death of Ernest Ackerly, the man who, along with his wife Mary, had given Cheyenne raiders the slip along White Rock Creek in 1869, turned up on findagrave.com a few days ago. I’m glad I was able to set the record straight this week after letting the former Excelsior Colonist languish on these pages as a hapless suicide for over a decade.
The unvarnished story of his passing may have been confined to his hometown paper in White Plains, while the rumor mill ran riot in the penny press, particularly the Sun (“It shines for all.”) This was the Gilded Age, and readers seemed to be drawn to tales of members of the upper crust getting taken down a peg. Not only was the deceased said to have ended his own life, but he had been accused of operating under the delusion that he was President of the United States.
Despite speculation that fumes from two gas jets and a pair of kerosene heaters being used to thaw frozen pipes in his bathroom had contributed to Ackerly’s death, blame was attributed chiefly either to heart disease or stroke, although he was only fifty years old. After all, in 1896 fifty was right on the brink of being old.
Mary Ackerly, who been forced to shed her soggy petticoats in the waters of White Rock Creek as the Excelsior refugees found their way to the shelter of a frontier cabin by moonlight, would die of pneumonia fifteen years after the death of her husband, at the advanced age of sixty-three.
Excelsior Colonist Harry Wallin, who wrote a long account of the multiple miseries that assailed the group, which was printed in the New York Sun in June of 1869, penned a final memoir about his adventures along the frontier for the Belleville Telescope. In 1898 Wallin was getting on in years and realized that he had never given a full account of his wife’s heroic efforts both inside the Excelsior barricade and the Colony House at Scandia. I remembered reading years ago that with that final chore out of the way, Harry Wallin died the following year. I did not notice at the time that he was only sixty-one.
A number of people associated with what came to be called The Bloody Saga of White Rock seemed to cash in their chips somewhat prematurely. Robert Watson, the young farmhand who was about to be surrounded by marauders when Mrs. Frazier opened up with both barrels of her shotgun, was spared that day in 1869 but was claimed by an unknown illness two decades later at the age of forty-six. He managed to work in one last visit to the Frazier farm to drink a bucket of water before he died.
Perhaps most surprisingly, James Scarbrough, half of the team of Winsor and Scarbrough who produced the first history of Jewell County, including the tale of the long, bitter struggle for control of the White Rock Valley, died at the age of fifty in 1880, only two years after their joint venture was published.
Winsor and Scarbrough’s history book, as the surviving author disclosed to the editor of the Smith County Pioneer, was a financial failure. The editor mused that “it deserved a better fate. In future days the curious collector will doubtless pay more for a single copy, obtained after long and careful search, than was realized by its first publishers.”
I noticed a few hours ago that a fine hardcover reprint of the 40-page booklet is available on Amazon for $24.90. While the books listed on Amazon are no doubt printed on demand, a 1961 facsimile of the 1878 original, published to coincide with the Kansas Centennial, is being offered for $69.00 on eBay. If an original edition has somehow survived in someone’s musty attic, how much might it fetch today?
I have a feeling the editor of the Smith County Pioneer was probably right. Of course any amount would be more than Winsor or Scarbrough cleared on the deal.
(For more on Winsor & Scarbrough see Pampleteers of the Plains)