Soon after Greene visited, a twenty-four-year-old man—who had inspired himself to join the First Dragoons, an Indian-fighting cavalry regiment, by reading Ivanhoe, Mr. Midshipman Easy, the Leather stocking Tales, and John Frémont’s reports of his western explorations—camped nearby. Sergeant Percival Lowe reached the spring with his unit as it was moving toward Fort Leavenworth. Some years later he wrote:
Nothing of special interest occurred until we reached Diamond Springs, now in Morris county. The weather had been frosty at night and days sunny—a continuous Indian summer all the way—grass dry as powder. We had barely a quart of corn per day for each horse, and they were poor. All day we had seen little bands of Indians a mile or two off the road traveling the same direction that we were and apparently watching us. This was the Kaw country and probably no other Indians were there, and we could hardly understand why they kept aloof and watched our progress. Of course the Kaws knew our troop by the horses, and we knew they had no love for it, but were slow to believe they would attempt to do us any harm. We camped on high ground a little east of Diamond Springs, on the south side of the road. We had been very careful of fire all the way in, and here we were especially careful on account of the dense growth of grass and consequent danger of burning the camp. We had finished dinner, about two hours before sunset when, as if by one act, fire broke out in a circle all around us not more than a mile from camp. A stiff gale was blowing from the south, and when we noticed it the fire in the tall grass was roaring furiously and the flames leaping twenty feet high. Quickly we commenced firing outside of our camp, whipping out the fire next to it, thereby burning a circle around it. Every man used a gunnysack or saddle blanket and worked with desperate energy. The utter destruction of our camp was imminent, and we faced the fire like men who had everything at stake. Success was ours, but the battle left its scars on nearly all. I have never seen fifteen minutes of such desperate work followed by such exhaustion—scarcely a man could speak. Blinded by smoke, heat, and ashes, intuitively we found our way to [Diamond] creek, bathed our burned hands and faces, many of us terribly blistered. My hands and face were blistered in several places; my mustache and whiskers, the first I had ever raised, were utterly ruined; even my eyebrows were badly scorched. I could not wash on account of the blisters, and dipped my face and head deep down into the lovely spring water and held my hands under to relieve the pain. My experience was that of most of the troop. We had quite a quantity of antelope tallow, which was warmed and gently applied to our sores. Undoubtedly the Kaws had set the fire to burn us out, and while they did not quite succeed, if they had seen us they should have been fairly well satisfied. I think that Major Chilton and Lieutenant Hastings were better satisfied with the troop than they had ever been before. Men who could stand together in such a fight and win could stand against desperate odds anywhere. I was instructed to notify the troop at retreat roll call that we would start at daylight. The guards were doubled, and we rested as best we could.
Some time before 1855, a freighting and mail company built on the low ridge above the spring a stage station consisting of three two-story buildings (hostelry, store, wagon shop) and a big rock-fence corral; George Morehouse, an early-day Kansan who lived nearby, said the buildings were the most pretentious of their kind between Council Grove and Santa Fe. The structures, even the corral, are gone now, and no one has done archaeological work to discover their precise locations and sizes.
In the fall of 1856 when the station was new, an eleven-year-old girl, Marian Sloan, came through with her mother in a caravan heading east. It was the second of ten trips up or down the trail she would make. In the thirties, Marian (by then Mrs. Russell) finished dictating her memoirs not long before being run over by an automobile; the old trail traveler was ninety-one:
The wagons were all ox-drawn and oxen do not walk as fast as mules or horses; however, they did walk more evenly and we were able to sew or even read as they ambled slowly eastward. . . . We read and reread Pilgrim’s Progress and a travel book written by some missionary. . . .
[Brother] Will walked all day by the wagon. Mother busied herself sewing ball after ball of rags to be woven when reaching home into a fine rag carpet. I think that the walking and carpet rag sewing helped them to kill the time as the slow oxen bore us onward. I had nothing to do but help with the carpet rag sewing, a task that I loathed. . . . I can see the hot August sun shining on the polished horns of the red and white oxen. . . .
There came at last an evening when our tired oxen stumbled to a halt at little Diamond Springs. Water bubbled from the earth as clear and sparkling as a diamond. It came in such quantity that a little stream had its source there. A great stone house stood near by, its windows boarded up, its massive door barred and bolted.
Our wagon master went into a huddle with the drivers and it was decided that on account of the Border Ruffians and the danger from Indians that we should go into camp at Diamond Springs and stay there until such time as a larger caravan might join us or the Government be induced to send a detachment of soldiers to protect us. Some of the drivers argued against the delay. Many of them were anxious to get to Fort Leavenworth. However, we were guided by the decision of the wagon master.
Mother tried to say that she could not see where we could be in much more danger on the road than in camp; but being a woman no one listened to her. The man said that if we were to be attacked by Ruffians or Indians we would have the old stone house in which to seek shelter. One argument led to another and finally it was decided to break the great lock and to enter.
We used that grand, old parlor as a community hall while we camped there. It had a fireplace at one end and a pathetic old spindle-legged piano at the other. Several ladies in our party played well and one old man had a fiddle. In the evening while flames leaped on the hearth, lilting tunes would go echoing through the empty rooms. The old man would take his fiddle out of its red-lined cradle. He would nestle it under his chin for a moment and then suddenly the Irish Washer Woman would begin ducking in and out among the smoke-blackened rafters. The old man teased the Washer Woman. The old rafters shook with the music. The fiddle would wail like a banshee, the old piano kept on a thrumming. The piano throbbed with love and longing. The fiddle filled the hearts of the children with strange mystery. Flames leapt on the hearth. Shadows danced on the stairs. Some folks danced, their shoes a clump, clumping. This is my only memory of a strange fire-lit evening when the Santa Fe trail wound like a serpent through the New World’s dream vineyards.
All of us were called upon to furnish entertainment. Two drivers agreed to furnish sheet music. They appeared at the pianoend of the long room with a bed sheet in their hands. They lay down on the floor, covered themselves with the sheet and “snored.” There were charades, jokes, dialogues, recitations, and songs. . . .
After two weeks at Diamond Springs our food supply began running low, but still the men refused to press onward. Perhaps there is such a thing as mass panic for one evening when the advisability of breaking camp was discussed around the fireplace and a vote was taken; most of the men voted to stay where we were. That was the evening mother arose to her small height and announced firmly that she was much more afraid of Old Man Famine than a host of Border Ruffians. She said she was very anxious to get back to Kansas City and would walk if she could go no other way. The men laughed indulgently at her fearless words, but I knew my mother meant what she said, and, when another and another day passed and still no mention had been made of breaking camp, I was not surprised when she awoke me early one morning and told me to dress quickly, as she and I were going to walk to Council Grove.
Marian and her mother reached Council Grove the next evening and found a big feathery bed in the home of a grocer. The following morning they accepted a ride with a westbound wagon train and met their caravan coming toward them: they rejoined their group and Mrs. Sloan told the wagon master that she had broken the trail as far as Council Grove and had encountered no ruffians to hurt him.
After the discovery of gold in Colorado in 1859, gold seekers began passing through. Their notations tend toward the cursory, typically commenting on the amount of water pouring forth, things, perhaps, to be expected from men in quest of bullion. The Civil War came on, and, in 1863, a dark turbulence moved down the trail, Dirty Dick Yeager, a Confederate guerrilla from Missouri. He and his bushwhackers, intent on burning Council Grove, thundered into town one evening, the residents cowering in half paralysis. Suffering from a severe toothache, Yeager sought out the dentist and promised to cause no trouble if Dr. Bradford would pull the bad molar and provide an analgesic: he extracted and Yeager took his raiders outside town. Several citizens visited the bushwhacker camp and persuaded him, mellowed perhaps by laudanum, to move on. The next night the guerrillas rode up to the stage station at Diamond Spring and attacked it, shooting, setting fire to the buildings; hit in the arm, the storekeeper, Augustus Howell, ran up Diamond hollow and tried to use his necktie as a tourniquet, but his strength gave out before he could bind himself up and he bled to death. His wife, Adeline, was shot trying to defend her husband and their two little girls, but she recovered and later moved with her daughters to Chase and remarried; now she lies next to Augustus in a cemetery near Hymer. That August, Dick Yeager joined William Quantrill in burning Lawrence.
The year following, George Vanderwalker tried in three states to enlist in the Union army but he was neither old nor tall enough, so, as a panacea (he said) for his disappointment, he joined a freight company in Council Grove to learn how to be a bullwhacker, a whip-cracking oxen handler. Some years later he wrote:
Thus it happened that on an early June day in 1864 there were dumped from a westbound coach at Diamond Springs as odd a collection of the human family as ever escaped the museums. The appearance of the bunch would have tempted the ancient mariner to cut loose from the bank and scuttle his ark had they come aboard during his high water experience. Generally speaking, they were long on everything but money, clothes, and religion.
Soon after our arrival in camp we tenderfeet were being instructed in the art of how to handle a wagon with a live end to it, and the proper manner of carrying an ox yoke and bow in yoking the cattle in preparation for hitching them to the wagons, being instructed by the wagon master and his assistant. A whip was given each driver of the outfit, the last being about sixteen feet in length with a “popper” (whip cracker) added and fastened to a whip stock eighteen inches in length by a buckskin thong. This instrument of torture required an almost constant everyday manipulation by me during my first two hundred miles of the trip before I became proficient enough in handling it to prevent its going about my neck and hanging me.
After the Civil War, the railroads again began pushing west and travelers used the Santa Fe Road less and less. The last trail account of Diamond Spring I’ve found is a sad piece that mentions the water not at all; Samuel Kingman, a law partner of John James Ingalls, the future Kansas senator and author, wrote in October of 1865:
We have today the advantage of an old road to travel on. Six miles farther on we passed Diamond Springs. The remains of 3 buildings of stone 2 stories high tell their own story of violence. A good monument for the builder. A small room used as dramshop is all [that’s] left fit for use save a large stone corral surrounding 5 or 6 acres with a small supply of hay.
Now: the sun is a few minutes from setting, coming down just above a short stretch of still-evident trail ruts a mile west. By the early 1870s when the Santa Fe Railroad came through the region, travelers had abandoned the trail (the ghost town of Diamond Springs five miles south of here belongs only to train-depot days). Sunflowers took to the compacted and furrowed soil, and turn-of-the-century residents said they could get on a hill and yet see the wagon road bending out, a long golden swath.
Dusk is already in the hollow. I’m opening a small pewter pocket flask and pouring an inch of Missouri whiskey into my cup and topping it with Diamond water and (unable to find any of Mr. Webb’s mint) garnishing it with cress and sipping. From the creek timber, five deer file out: in the falling light the place takes on an earlier aspect.
A couple of days ago, I visited Lost Spring, the next usual camping spot west on the trail. (The second owner of the stage station once near there won it in a card game and turned it into a gamblers’ den where at least eleven men were killed and, reputedly, two bodies thrown into the station well.) The spring lies only seventy yards beyond a paved road in a shallow and wooded draw, yet it took me some time in the overgrowth to find the source, a difficulty that accounts for one of several explanations for the name; it also expands gold seeker Charles Post’s comment in 1859 (he misunderstood what people called the spot):
We stopped for dinner about one mile from what is known as the last spring and drank slew water and cold coffee. This spring lays about one-half mile off of the main road. We were not a little vexed when Lemm found the spring so near after dinner and we vented our wrath by drinking immense quantities of the last water.
Lost Spring is small and reclusive, seeming more to leak than flow, and lacks the isolation of Diamond Spring; yet, overgrown and seemingly forgotten and allowing a visitor the pleasurable mystery of hunting something he knows to be in plain view, today its topographical aura is superior to the trampled and troughed pearl of the prairie. But Diamond Spring bears such an accumulation of voices and recorded events that it carries a traveler farther. To look beyond its barbed wire and plastic conduit and the electric pump rammed down its cold throat is to find a splendid American source, a spring as full of incident as its outflow is of watercress. But without its years of encrustings built up slowly like so much travertine, the spring appears a barren place indeed because a traveler now must rely entirely on these depositions to open it to the imagination and reveal its deep time, and it is these layerings that make so shameful Kansans never caring to protect or honor the spring beyond a small 1907 DAR marker. Surely this place belongs not to an absentee-owner businessman but to a whole country. To turn the Diamond of the Plain into a stock tank is the damndest thing I’ve yet seen here.
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