Kansas- From "Bleeding Kansas" to Oz- Saturday, July 27, 2019

     Today, we went to sights that covered the two things that we think of most when we think of Kansas- its bloody pre-Civil War history and its home for a new American fairy tale and mythology.

     "Bleeding Kansas" is a topic that Scott has to cover every time he teaches about the coming of the Civil War.  Ever since the Missouri compromise, which admitted Missouri to the US as a slave state in 1820, the portion of the Louisiana Purchase that contained Kansas was supposed to be free territory, where slavery would never be allowed.  In the 1850s, however, Senator Stephen Douglas got Congress to pass the "Kansas-Nebraska Act," which said that settlers in those territories would vote on whether slavery would be allowed there.  This opened the territory of Kansas to the possibility of slavery, and neither side wanted to let the other one gain an advantage.  Abolitionists, including John Brown* came rushing into the territory from New York and New England, but the pro-slavery "ruffians" from the nearby state of Missouri came across the border to intimidate the abolitionists and influence the votes with threats, cheating, and violence.  Two rival governments- one supporting slavery and one against it- were each claiming to run the territory where in truth, there was no law or order to be had.   The violence that occurred was dubbed, "Bleeding Kansas."

     In Kansas, the abolitionist named John Brown first gained notoriety at a place called Pottawatomie Creek.  On the night of May 24-25, 1854, in response to attacks on abolitionists, Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery settlers, hacking them to death with broadswords, at what is called the "Pottawatomie Massacre."  Though we didn't know exactly where the attack took place, Scott found an historical marker in the hamlet of Lane, Kansas, noting that the location was a little ways north of the town, which was the direction we had come from.   We stopped for a photo, and continued on to the town of Osawatomie, which bills itself as "The Cradle of the Civil War," with some justification.  The fighting here was a bitter civil war that was being fought a full five years before the rest of the nation joined in.  John Brown and his family have deep connections to this place.  Our first stop was a large historical sign that read "John Brown Country. "  It sat next to the small red land office that had been built in 1854.  It was a stone's through away from a stone church built by the Reverend Samuel Adair who had married the half-sister of John Brown, and was thus his brother-in-law.

      Also in Osawatomie is the John Brown Museum State Historical Site.  It sits in the middle of John Brown Memorial Park, and includes Reverend Adair's cabin.  The cabin itself was originally built over a mile away from its current location, but was moved to this park to preserve it.  A second stone building has been built around the log cabin to further protect it for the future.  (Scott suspected that the stone building was built to resemble the building in Harpers Ferry, WV, where John Brown was ultimately captured, and the man working their confirmed that was true.)  The cabin itself contains many relics from the Adair/Brown family and tells how Brown and his sons came there and used it as a sort of headquarters.  After a brief introduction from the state employee, it is possible to stroll through the cabin.  It has many signs and a few push-button recordings to tell the story of its occupation.

    Outside, there was a statue of John Brown, and by it is the first of a series of signs that describe the "Battle of Osawatomie."  This memorial park is on the land where it occurred, and the signs offer a short walk through the rolling, shady park grounds.  30 anti-slavery men, led by Brown, fought against 250 pro-slavery men in August of 1856.  Brown and his men were ultimately overrun here, but their defeat helped inspire other anti-slavery forces to rally.

     Last night at dinner, Scott and Richard were discussing John Brown. Scott said Brown was "problematic" and Richard knew exactly what he was talking about.  As an abolitionist, John Brown was on the right side of history, working to end the evil scourge of slavery.  But as an extremist, Brown went to measures that brought violence and terror to Kansas and, later, to Virginia.  Brown would be caught at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now WV), and hanged for his plot to try to spread weapons to slaves to start an insurrection.  Is that a bad thing?  Southerners would have called him a terrorist for what he was planning if they had coined that word then, but at least some Northerners were singing his praise as a savior whose "soul goes marching on."  If nothing else, Brown made people on both sides look at each other with far more fear and confusion than they had before.  Still, there was recently a Facebook meme that used words sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson- "When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty," and the creator of the meme though it was cute to put these words around a Confederate battle flag.  Surely, the words apply more to the four million enslaved Southerners who were being kept as chattel and whom Brown was trying to help.  Today, when the state employee was giving us the introduction to the log cabin, he noted how many people want to say that in Bleeding Kansas, one side was good and the other side was bad but that the truth is that both sides were pretty brutal.  That's true.  So, is John Brown a hero here?  Well, it's his memorial park, and his museum, and his statue outside, so it would seem so.  Relics of villains are sometimes kept, but this does not seem to be a museum to an outlaw, but rather to a founding father of the community.  Furthermore, as violent as Brown was, the crucible of Kansas shows the pro-slavery side with their true motivation, and without the banner of "States' Rights" to hide behind.  That would come later.  John Brown himself explained his actions by writing, "I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

     We continued on to Lawrence, Kansas, and while we were eating lunch there we had some discussions about the plans for the rest of the vacation and what we really wanted to do.  Our plans changed, but we'll write more about that at the end.  Meanwhile, we searched Lawrence for its pre-Civil War history.   It was the seat of the antislavery government, which met at the Free State Hotel.  The town became a target of the pro-slavery forces, and was "sacked" by the ruffians on May 21, 1856, and the burning of the town escalated the violence.  There is a plaque on the Hotel Eldridge today which marks it as the site of the Free State Hotel.  Lawrence is a busy little place, being the home of the University of Kansas and its Jayhawks.  We could have gone to the location of the rival pro-slavery government at Lecompton, but we had enough of Bleeding Kansas at this point and wanted a change.

     We drove a little over an hour through Topeka to Wamego, Kansas, which is the location of the OZ museum.  The character of Dorothy Gale is famously from Kansas.  "Kansas, she says, is the name of the star!"  There are at least two places in Kansas that make a claim for Oz tourists- this museum in the northeast part of the state and "Dorothy's House" in the far corner of the southwest of the state.  Neither has any real claim to a connection to the Oz stories other than just being in Kansas.  But the books and movies are not more specific than that.  As with Clark Kent's Smallville, all we know is that Kansas was her home, so why not Wamego?

     Many of the buildings on Wamego's main street are made out of a light-colored stone, but the front of the OZ museum is unmistakable with its emerald green.  Visitors enter in the gift shop and find themselves on Aunt Em's front porch.  Once you enter the museum proper, you follow the yellow brick road through the familiar story.  The exhibits are centered around figures of each of the characters and tell the story of the story.  They begin with the books, of course, written first by L. Frank Baum and continued later by other others.  Baum wished to write an American fairy tale, and found that the story he had been telling his niece was popular with others as well.  His book was illustrated by W.W. Denslow and published in 1900 to great success.  The first few display cases are filled with early editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it's many sequels, versions of the stories in many other languages, and portraits and autographs of Baum.  We asked Emma if she would dance in front of the Scarecrow the way she did when she was little, but she quickly said "No!"

     From almost the very beginning, Baum tried to dramatize the story of Oz, and the many versions that were produced all have a place in the museum.  The majority of the story told here seems to be of the 1939 MGM movie that is a beloved classic.  Videos play to tell the story of how this production came to be, and the exhibits show items and photos associated with the cast.  There are lots of new pieces of trivia that visitors can learn here.  The movie was one of the first to be produced in Technicolor, and because of that, the silver shoes that play a key role in the book were changed to be ruby slippers so that they will show up better against the yellow brick road.   There were several pairs of ruby shoes made for the movie production, and one pair is famously in the Smithsonian.  One pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 2005, just weeks before they were supposed to come to the OZ Museum here.  There are also lots and lots of display cases full of merchandise, toys, books and games related to the story.  There were hundreds of pieces on display, and it seemed odd that we didn't spot Mego dolls like the ones that Julie has from when she was young.

     At the half-way point in the museum is a theater where the MGM movie plays continuously.  Julie and Emma settled in to watch it, but Scott excused himself to go back over the museum displays we had just looked at.  There were two videos playing there that were going in depth into the story and the movie, and Scott was much more interested in seeing them.  When Julie and Emma had enough, they weren't sure where Scott had gone, and they went forward through the museum instead of back through it like he had.  It took us a while to reconnect with each other and when we did, we all had ended up going through the museum several times, but we can honestly say that we noticed new things each time.  After the theater came the Haunted Forest hallway, with its warning sign, "I'd turn back if I were you," and the Wicked Witch of the West herself lurking at the end.  After that were exhibits on more recent movies and productions like Disney's Return to Oz, Michael Jackson's The Wiz, the book and Broadway musical Wicked, the 2013 movie Oz the Great and Powerful with James Franco, and others.

     After the OZ Museum in Wamego, we decided that we were going to go east instead of west.  The original plan was to go to Dodge City, which is practically in the opposite corner of the state.  We all decided that we didn't want to do that.  Emma hasn't been sleeping great and has missed a few of our stops because she needed to nap in the car (with the air conditioner running, of course, but even that is a problem).  Julie has been getting beaten down quickly by the heat.  It's hot for all of us, but she's particularly susceptible to it now and needs to be careful to protect "the little strawberry."  Taking Dodge City out of the itinerary saves us from a total of 8 to 10 hours driving, a day in what was going to probably be either dusty or muggy heat (or both), and two nights in a cheap hotel.  Instead, we're going back into Kansas City tomorrow, and then we'll head south to Oklahoma.  We'll fill you in as we go.  We've got a big hotel room here because we seem to have gotten a room built for wheelchair access.  We've been in touch with Anna and Julie's parents.  Anna went camping with Noah and his family, and Julie's folks were helping her by agreeing to watch the three dogs.  Julie and Scott went out to eat while Emma got some more "alone time" in the hotel room.  We all called it an early day after that because we all needed it.  For now we'll paraphrase Loretta Lynn- "But here in Topeka... one's on the way."

*Not Julie's dad's friend--- the other John Brown. 😉  

Hannibal and Marceline- Friday, July 26, 2019

We took a little more time to get up this morning.  On our way into Hannibal, we stopped at the Missouri Welcome Center.  Remember, Hannibal sits along the Mississippi River and so it is right on the border with Illinois.  We stopped at the welcome center to get the mandatory "Welcome to Missouri" pic.  Even though we've been here for a few days, we hadn't done that yet.

When we talked about what to include in this trip, Hannibal was a given.  It's one of those places where myth and story seem to be interwoven with the historical past and the tourist sites of the present.  We've been to Walnut Grove and Walton's Mountain, Sherwood Forest and 221B Baker Street.  It seemed natural for us to want to come to the boyhood home of Mark Twain, where the experiences of his youth were later made into the literature of a growing nation.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum is a complex of several buildings, many of which are in their original locations.  It begins in a museum that introduces the early life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and the community of Hannibal.  His family moved here when he was four.  His early life and the social fabric of the community are covered in the exhibits in this first building.  Then, after you exit, the first stop is the home of Tom Blankenship, who was the recognized as the model for the character of Huckleberry Finn.  Twain himself said, "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was.  He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had."  Both had fathers who were the town drunks.  The small home here is furnished sparsely to show their poverty.

     The next building that the route takes you through is the home that was owned by the Clemens family.  While Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer are not exactly the same people, it's clear that Twain was drawing on many aspects of this house when he created the setting of the story.  It's not hard to picture young Tom climbing out the window of young Sam's room, to go off to mischief.  None of the furniture is original to the house, but each room is set up to show how it might have looked when he was a boy here.  The most interesting thing in each room is a life size statue of Mark Twain as an adult.  Each statue has a contemplative look about it, as if the adult Sam Clemens has come back wax nostalgic with us, and each is accompanied by a quote that is appropriate to that mood.  "Nothing remains the same," he says in one.  "When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for."  Visitors tour both floors of this narrow house.   Unusually, you enter this building from the back and exit out the front.  Once in the street you can see the infamous fence in need of whitewashing, which Tom conned his friends into doing for him, in what might be the most famous episode of any of Twain's books.

     Across the street is the home of "Becky Thatcher," whose real name was Laura Hawkins.  In fact, in the first room of the house, a radio plays an interview with Laura Hawkins where she herself plays the character of Becky Thatcher and describes Tom Sawyer in first person.  It's one of those moments where it's almost hard to tell fact from fiction, or literature and myth from history-- like if Alice Liddell remembered her trip to Wonderland.  The rest of the museum has relatively new exhibits geared to younger visitors that show aspects of daily life from the perspective of children in different societal positions- including slaves.  It's simple, but pretty well done.  There is also an interesting video how printer's apprentices, like young Sam Clemens, would work.  Next door to Becky Thatcher's house is Judge Clemens's law office.  The "Judge Thatcher" of the books is really based on Mark Twain's own father, whose office is represented there.  Certainly, the best quotes about Hannibal come from Twain himself when he became nostalgic on later trips back to his hometown.  "Alas! everything has changed in Hannibal-- but when I reached Third or Fourth Street the tears burst forth, for I recognized the mud.  It at least was the same-- the same old mud."

     At that point, we turned onto Main Street in town.  Julie and Emma wanted to visit the many shops there.  The stores were all filled with quaint things.  The first one we visited sold brilliantly colored quilts and quilting supplies.  Some shops were set up like general stores.  Others were more generic gift shops.   A mandolin player sat busking in the shade on the sidewalk and added to the atmosphere with many tunes that Scott recognized.  We ate an early lunch at Ole Planters Restaurant, which had the atmosphere of an old general store too.  The furniture and shelves were all dark wood, and the place smelt faintly of sauerkraut, which was one of the specials for today.  After lunch, we continued exploring the stores on Main Street, ducking inside often to keep in air-conditioning because the temperature was well over 80 degrees.

     Further down Main Street was the Mark Twain Museum Gallery, which was part of the tour that we had purchased tickets for.  Julie and Emma chose not to go in, but instead they went on and continued their shopping.  Julie said she liked Mark Twain but she had enough of him for now.  Scott really enjoyed the museum though.  It contains many items that belonged to Twain.  Several times we read or heard about the many original Norman Rockwell paintings that are on exhibit here, but we didn't realize that they were all illustrations that Rockwell had done for editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Rockwell actually visited the town of Hannibal to do these paintings and included what he learned in them.  A preliminary sketch of Tom climbing out his window was changed to look like the window we had seen earlier in the Clemens home.  Rockwell chose to make Injun Joe's cave look like the nearby "Mark Twain Caves" rather than the stalactite and stalagmite filled caverns pictured by other illustrators.

     One floor of the building examines six or seven of Twain's most important books in life-sized walk-through dioramas.  Scott was pleased to see that Innocents Abroad was the first one, because that book has always been a favorite of his and he has read it at least three times.  A lighted map traces the route of the "pilgrims" through Europe and the Holy Land, and a large sign highlighted one of Scott's favorite passages- when Clemens and one of his friends torment their tour guide by asking stupid questions and pretending not to know who Christopher Columbus was.  "Is he dead?"  Roughing It is the next book, complete with a stage coach like the one he describes in his trip to the West.  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has a castle for its framework.  Scott remembered the paper he wrote in college where he argued that Twain was using this book to criticize the backwardness of the South with Camelot standing in for the South while the "Connecticut Yankee" brought their world into the 19th Century by introducing "industriousness and change."  Naturally Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are covered as well.    The raft in the Huck Finn exhibit rocks and bounces as you walk across it, and that triggers a video clip of Huck and Jim on Jackson's Island (which we saw last night).  After touring the museum, Scott found Julie and Emma waiting for him in the lobby.  He bought two DVD's in the gift shop (Ken Burns's documentary and Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight.  Scott saw Hal Holbrook perform this show at Shea's back when he was in college.  There are at least two people in town that do similar performances in Hannibal.) In addition to those two, he also bought a CD earlier this morning  (Mark Twain: Words and Music-  a star-studded project that was made to benefit this museum.)  Julie had bought some healthy snacks for the car ride, and a baby elephant puppet book to put away for the little one.

     Since we had ridden the riverboat last night, we were ahead of schedule and left even earlier than we had planned this morning.  Julie said that would give us the ability to stop at any interesting places that we might see along the way.  Scott peaked ahead on the map and discovered just the thing- Marceline, Missouri, the boyhood home of Walt Disney.  We had heard people at Disney mention this place before, but we hadn't expected to have it right in our path.  We used the opportunity to stop at the museum there.  It used to be a train station for the Atchison, Topeka and Sante Fe Railroad, but when the building was no longer needed, the town looked for a way to save it.  Meanwhile, Walt's sister Ruth was looking for a place to donate family items to, and the town used this opportunity to open a museum to its most famous son.  The director of the museum was actually the person who gave us the overview of it before we began touring.  She was in several of the videos that play throughout the museum, and she quite obviously loves the job she is doing here.

     Walt had moved to Marceline when he was about four, and this train station would have been the first place that he would have stopped.  "To tell the truth," Walt once said, "More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have ever happened since, or are likely to in the future."   One part of the museum focuses on the trains and the history of Marceline.  One part focuses on the park he was planning in Marceline.  When the Midget Autotopia ride was dismantled at Disneyland, he donated it to Marceline and it ran for a while here.  One of the cars is on display.   He couldn't make the dedication of the new track, though, because he had developed a cough and would die of cancer shortly after.  Part of the museum focuses on his family members.  Julie liked the TV set that is on display.  Walt purchased it for his mother so that she could watch the dedication of Disneyland on TV because she did not like large crowds.   Naturally, the dedication of Disneyland is now shown continuously on it.  There is also a collection of models of many of the buildings at Disneyland, including the Sleeping Beauty Castle and both sides of Main Street U.S.A.  When Walt designed the park, Main Street was inspired by his idealized memory of Marceline, though with a lot more Victorian filigree and ornamentation.

     The heat had gotten to Emma, along with the hard mattresses that we've had the past few nights, so she was asleep when we arrived in Marceline.  We tried to wake her to see the Disney museum, but she said she wanted to continue to sleep.  We let her rest.  After the museum, we drove around Marceline to get a quick tour.  Naturally, we saw Main Street, which has "Main Street U.S.A." on its black mouse-eared street signs.  We also saw the Disney family home, which is still a private residence, but which is marked with a sign.  Nearby is the entrance to where the Disney farm and Walt's "Dreaming Tree" once stood.   Our time here was up though, because we had an appointment in Kansas City.

     Scott originally met his friend Richard when we lived in Petersburg, Virginia, where they worked together in the city's museums.  We haven't seen him since we moved away from Petersburg, though they have been following each other on Facebook for the last few years.  When we realized that we would be passing near Kansas City on this trip, we thought we should use the opportunity to reconnect with him in person.  We suggested that we get together for dinner, maybe for some of Kansas City's famous barbecue.  He ultimately suggested that we meet at a place called Gates Barbecue, which is well known in the area.  We managed to keep to our schedule and arrived there about 6:00 as planned.  He was waiting there, along with his husband Jay, who we met for the first time.   We got a big table and a lot of food and spent a long while chatting and getting caught up with each other.  Emma got to see pictures of their four dogs, which made her miss her own pets even more.  We heard about the Arabia Steamboat Museum, where Richard now works, and other things he has done since Petersburg.  Since he's the only person from the Petersburg museums that we've stayed in touch with, he filled us in on the sad state of the museums themselves, many of which are now closed.  Both Richard and Jay seemed disappointed that we hadn't scheduled more time in Kansas City, and there certainly does seem to be a lot to see here, so we might have to find time to come back soon.

     Meanwhile, our hotel room was in Ottawa, Kansas, and we had about an hour to go before we'd be able to stop.  We crossed into Kansas shortly after getting back on the expressways, but we didn't see a sign to mark the occasion.  It is, however, a new state for Scott and Emma.