Between the Lines: Family History and Quirky Stories From Our Forgotten Past

       A young Myron Cassius Barbour One set of my great-great-grandparents, Enos and Avarilla Patchett, homesteaded in Kansas in 1869. But another pair, Myron C. and Agnes Barbour, moved there in the summer of 1887. The difference in years meant they had totally different experiences. Enos and Avarilla traveled by wagon. Myron and Agnes came on the train. Enos and Avarilla arrived at a place where the town of Coffeyville didn’t yet exist. It was only a trading post, selling buffalo meat amid survival essentials. The prairie sod was unbroken, and the Osage were still living on their lands.       Myron and Agnes came to a growing little town of about 1,000 with a hotel, fraternal organizations, churches, schools with a total of 520 kids in attendance, stores and a photography studio. Fourteen freight and passenger trains steamed into the city each day. The Osage had long ago be...

“Kansas City drummers numerous,” Coffeyville Courier, 6 May 1875. “A mob of “drummers” came in last night,” Coffeyville Courier , 24 June 1875  “Drummers plenty.” Coffeyville Weekly Journal , 17 March 1877.      Were there a bunch of drummers coming into Coffeyville, Kansas to put on a performance? I was puzzled by this reference. I didn’t really think it meant men with a drum, but with one-line references there was no context. Then I came across a story about drummers and it all made sense. Drummers - drumming up business. They were traveling salesmen, wholesale, selling to retail merchants. This was something new. These weren’t the door-to-door peddlers or the self-proclaimed “doctors” in the traveling medicine shows. They were also called “commercial travelers” and “knights of the grip-sack and sample case,” a grip-sack, or grip, being a suitcase. After a minister called them “Angels of Commerce” in a speech at a large venue in Chicago in 1886, th...