(Click one of these links for The Excelsior Story - Part One or The Excelsior Story - Part Two)
Although Captain Walker had arrived with reinforcements and a load of Spencer rifles, Excelsior Colonists quickly voted to abandon the site in Jewell County and sent for enough wagons to haul away their tools and other belongings. After waiting impatiently for assistance they decided to dig a pit large enough to hide their valuables from Indian marauders.
A MOURNFUL BURIAL SCENE.
Sadly we began to bury our property in ground, so that there might be a chance of its escaping the claws of the redskins. It was night as we began the work. The moon shone brilliantly, casting our lengthened shadows over the ground, and flooding the burial mound - as we might call it - with its pale light. No sound was heard but the blows of the spade as it was struck in the ground, and Heaven knows that sound fell sadly enough on our ears. What we were burying there might be little, but it was all we had, and we could not tell if we would ever see it again.
Morning came at last after a feverish night, and we were to start, but happily were delayed by a slight accident, for as we were about to leave, the wagons and the men we had sent for then came into sight. In an instant all was bustle and confusion again. We at once began the resurrecting of our baggage, and had it out again, I can assure you, in half the time it took us to bury it. We then started in earnest. Our Eden, as we first thought it, was soon left far behind us, and many a lingering glance did we cast toward it as it lessened in the distance, despite all that had taken place there.
ANOTHER ENCOUNTER WITH THE REDSKINS.
We tramped steadily onward until we reached a settlement on the Republican river called Scandinavia, by its Swedish inhabitants. There we passed the night, but the sun had barely risen before we were attacked once more. Mrs. Wallin, who had borne herself so nobly at White Rock Creek, came near to losing her life here. We was taking breakfast with her husband, when a bullet (the first sign of the presence of the redskins) passed close to her head. At the sound, we sprang to grasp our arms, but alas! our arms were gone. The Spencer carbines that Capt. Walker had brought us were merely a load to us, and had been given up by us some time before. As for our other arms, the Indians had cut us off from them. We were done for now, without a doubt, we thought.
There some fifty Swedish men in the place, but worse cowards I never saw. They crept into the nearest holes they could find, and would have hidden their heads in the sand, like ostriches, had they not been able to find more convenient places. Fortunately for us, the redskins thought us stronger than we were, and made off, content with the killing of a boy and the capture of five horses. We remained in this place two days longer, when we met Capt. Peak, the Sheriff of Salt Creek, who advised us to accompany him, promising to show us a place fully as good as White Rock Creek, but not nearly as exposed to the raids of the Indians.
SETTLED AGAIN AT LAST.
We were rather too broken down not to accept his advice, and following it, are at the present moment settled in Salt creek, Republic county, were we are in a prosperous condition. We are frightened once in a while, it is true, by an alarm of Indians, but have little to fear from them, the country being rather thickly settled for this frontier neighborhood. We have, moreover, a guard of United States soldiers stationed here, and each of the settlers has a carbine and fifty rounds of ammunition.
The claims on West and Salt creeks are being taken very rapidly. There is a good deal of limestone in the country. The soil is exceedingly rich, the fertile surface soil being as much as thirty feet deep. The wheat crop promises to be an enormous one. Mr. Walker and a few others have left the colony, and gone, no one knows where, and what makes it rather disagreeable, he has taken the funds of the colony with him. We suppose, however, he will return before long. Mr. McClimont is to take charge of our affairs now, and under his management there is no doubt of our succeeding. We have a physician, blacksmiths, carpenters, and, in short, representatives of every trade. Those of our former fellow citizens of New York who are turning their thoughts to the West and its fertile plains, cannot do better than join us. A hearty welcome they will certainly receive from us.
HARRY WALLIN, GEORGE PUNOUF, WILLIAM STOKES, PATRICK O’BRIEN.
The 1869 account of the Excelsior Colony’s adventure in Jewell County by Henry G. “Harry” Wallin and three of his fellow colonists might leave readers pondering a few unanswered questions. How large was the Excelsior Colony and exactly where was their fort located?
The Atchison Champion put the number of colonists passing through their city at 100, yet when Wallin takes a head-count in the second installment of his memoir, he finds thirty-four men, three women and four children. Since this seemed to be about sixty persons short of the expected total, I was tempted to read the numeral “3” as a battered and eroded “8” in order to reach a total of eighty-four men.
However, in the 1898 version of his story in the Belleville Telescope, Wallin estimates the size of the company setting off for Kansas as “50 or 60 souls.” Some members of the larger group passing through Atchison may have been bound for another destination. We also need to subtract a few men who were apparently left behind at various stages along the nine-day march from Waterville to White Rock Creek. By the time the final tally of available men was made at the White Rock encampment, the Ackerly family (known as “Ackey” in both of Wallin’s memoirs) had departed, along with two or three other men. Thus, it was most likely a colony of no more than fifty migrants from New York who banded together in hopes of making a new start in Jewell County.
The site of the fort was later reported as having been two miles east of Holmwood, a town which once lay due north of present-day Mankato. The colony’s defenses must have been located near the southern bank of the White Rock between Spring Creek and Big Timber Creek, perhaps near the dot signifying Steuben on the accompanying fragment of an 1885 Kansas railroad map, published sixteen years after the Excelsior Colony pulled up stakes and marched eastward.
