Kansas History - Forthcoming issue
Summer 2024
(Volume 47, Number 2)
“Entrepreneur, Editor, Provocateur: Nick Chiles and the Topeka Plaindealer”
by Sonja Czarnecki
Before the Chicago Defender, the widest-circulating Black-owned newspaper west of the Mississippi was The Topeka Plaindealer, run by the indomitable Nick Chiles from 1899 to 1929. While the Plaindealer has long been recognized by historians as a vital primary source, there has been little research about Nick Chiles as a businessman, political leader, and activist for racial justice, or about how the Plaindealer promoted African American economic, civil, and political rights. Chiles was a master of self-promotion who could be combative in pursuit of his personal interests and flagrantly provocative in pursuing political aims. He sought national recognition and collaboration with key leaders like Booker T. Washington, and formed improbable alliances, for example with teetotaler Carry A. Nation. He also picked some high-profile fights, like with Senator Charles Curtis and newspaperman William Allen White. Chiles routinely used the Plaindealer to call out racial violence, the hypocrisy of white liberals, and the sexual abuse of Black women, which often made him the target of racist abuse within Kansas and threats of violence in Southern states where the Plaindealer circulated. This article describes Chiles’s rise from his beginnings as a hotel and saloon owner through his role as a political machine boss to his emergence as a radical voice for racial justice.
“This Ambivalent Masterpiece”: Kirke Mechem and the Story of “Home on the Range”
by Kirke Mechem, with a foreword by Thomas D. Isern
In this reprint of Kirke Mechem’s Kansas Historical Quarterly article “Home on the Range,” originally published in 1949, Tom Isern offers a foreword detailing Mechem’s incredible life and the context surrounding what this song symbolized to Mechem, and to many Kansans. Mechem’s article traces the origins of “Home on the Range” by following Samuel Moanfeldt’s journey West. Moanfeldt was a New York lawyer investigating the song after a copyright lawsuit was filed in 1934. His research became instrumental in the song’s adoption as the Kansas state song in 1947. Detailing the song’s history, Mechem reveals how popular the song was in America and its place in American song lore. His real message is that this song is a Kansas song. It finishes with an exposition of the lyrics, comparing several versions to recreate the original meaning. An appendix follows with Moanfeldt’s original report.
“Íⁿ, Moⁿyóⁿ, ShokhÍ (Rock, Theft, Returning Home): Rematriating Iⁿ ‘zhúje‘waxóbe”
by Curtis Kekahbah and Hayden L. Nelson, with C. Huffman and Tai S. Edwards
This collaborative article examines the rematriation and return of a thirty-ton glacial erratic Sioux quartzite grandfather rock, Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe (Sacred Red Rock), to the Kaw Nation. Its long history allowed humans to give it various meanings which are explored in this article as context for this rematriation process. First, an oral history from Kanza elder Curtis Kekahbah describes the “importance of the stone,” which traveled from what is now Minnesota and South Dakota to the mouth of Shunganunga Creek near Topeka more than 600,000 years ago during the pre-Illinoian glaciation. Then historian Hayden L. Nelson examines how settler rhetoric in the twentieth century transformed this grandfather rock into a monument to the founders of Lawrence, Kansas. Finally, Kaw citizen, poet, and theologian C. Huffman and historian Tai S. Edwards explain rematriation and the process by which Lawrence is working to return Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe to the Kaw Nation.
Book Reviews
Book Notes
