July Gleanings from Coffeyville: Threshing, the Ponca Long March, and Railroad Strikes
If you read any of the other “ Gleanings,” posts, you might recall that these “seen-around-town” sort of items were a regular column in the Coffeyville, Kansas newspapers, and many newspapers, in the 1870s and 1880s. I am compiling samples for each month. One change is that if I have commentary on an item, I highlighted it.
22 July 1875
Ten days without rain.
The “blue-tailed fly.”
Cutting hay is in order.
Wheat threshing everywhere.
The mosquito is an impudent cuss.
One hundred two degrees in the shade Thursday.
Thomas Jesson harvested a fine crop of barley.
Complaints are being made that town cows are destroying neighboring corn. Either enforce the law or repeal it.
Can’t this shooting at night be stopped? Why are people permitted to continue violating city ordinances and frightening women and children with impunity?
An entertainment will be given the evening of August 2nd. A variety of excellent vocal and instrumental music, select readings, tableaux, etc. will be rendered, and ice cream, lemonade and other luxuries will be prepared and sold….
The tableaux was a fad that arrived in the U.S. in the 1840s. Actors on stage – or the family in the parlor - would create a “living picture,” a scene such as “Washington crossing the Delaware,” or those taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” A narrator would announce the scene and give some background. Then a sheet would be removed, revealing the tableaux. Costumed participants would “freeze” in silent position as the audience admired the scene.
In the 1870s, scantily clad women performing tableaux scenes on stage inspired Anthony Comstock’s purity crusade. For a church performance, Biblical scenes and themes such as “Faith” and “Peace, or perhaps the “Eight Stages of Drunkenness” would have been suitable. The tableaux required costumes and precise lighting, and were performed with music.
28 July 1877
Buckwheat in bloom.
Freight business embargoed.
Peaches, $2 a bushel, Monday last.
The strike has not reached Coffeyville.
An order came last Tuesday to our depot men to receive no freight till further orders, because of the strike preventing the movement of loaded freight cars.
Indians have been selling blackberries in town.
Seventy barrels of salt were piled up about Wells Bro’s. store a few days ago.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was a series of violent strikes precipitated by repeated wage cuts in the fourth year of a severe economic depression that began as the Panic of 1873. In the spring of 1877 several major railroad companies simultaneously agreed to cut wages ten percent. That represented a 35 percent pay cut over wages from three years earlier. Previously, the prevailing belief of most Americans, according to a historian, was that employees needed to accept the labor conditions and pay offered. But now, Americans felt sympathetic. There was also a lot of national anger about railroad rates and tactics. Farmers in particular resented high freight rates, and the public was angry about rail company corruption.
More than 100,000 men would participate in these strikes over a two-week period in July. Half the nation’s freight ground to a halt. It was the first national strike. It was said that no one in the country was left unaffected. Police and the national guard were called in to various cities to suppress the strikers, with violent clashes, 100 killed and millions in property damages. The strike was crushed.
However, it was costly and the rail companies did not want a repeat. Some appeased workers by providing coverage for sickness, injury and death. One rail company president said an increase in pay might be less expensive than a reduction. The Great Railroad Strike itself may have failed, but it led to a chain of events that created great change in American labor.
27 July 1878
Learn to swim.
Kite fever is raging.
Water-melons in market.
Glorious rain Wednesday night. It made a million bushels of corn.
Boat riding on the Verdigris furnishes amusement for some of the young folks.
Another detachment of the Poncas, in charge of their agent, Col. [William H.] Whiteman, assisted by Mr. Willard, passed through this place Monday going to their reservation, west of the Pawnees. This is the last of them. They were traveling in government wagons and ambulances. Men, women, dogs, bacon all together. One wagon had a man, a boy, woman, a baby, a dog and half a fresh beef, all exposed to the sun.
The Ponca people lived in South Dakota and Nebraska, and signed their first treaty with the United States government in 1817. A small tribe, in 1858 and 1865 they signed land cessation treaties in exchange for military protection and economic aid. In the 1860s and ‘70s, droughts, a dearth of buffalo, and threats from the Sioux brought them to the point of starvation. Instead of honoring their treaty, the U.S. government gave Ponca land to the Sioux in 1868 and in 1877, and removed the Ponca to Indian Territory.
Sources:
Piper, Jessica.”The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: A Catalyst for the American Labor Movement,” The History Teacher, Vol. 47 No. 1 (November 2013), pp. 93-110.
Robert M. “Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theater in Victorian America,” Les Lieux de la Vie Américaine, No. 36 (April 1988), pp. 280-291.
“Ponca,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=PO007
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