The California Road

Franklin County, Kansas

By Diana Staresinic-Deane

On a rise above Ottawa Creek in Franklin County, Kansas, a shallow depression roughly six feet wide hugs the southern boundary of a battered cemetery before it veers north and vanishes into a fence line. Today it is barely visible, a valley of grass and weeds a slightly different shade of green than the field surrounding it. During the years leading up to Kansas’s statehood, this strip of green was a road that saw hundreds of wagons and thousands of cattle heading west to California and Oregon.

“California emigrants are passing in great numbers,” Reverend Jotham Meeker wrote in his journal from the Ottawa Baptist Mission on April 27, 1852. “Four companies encamped near us last night with 1,300 cattle. On this evening three more companies encamp with 700 cattle. These are exclusive of probably 5 or 600 oxen with 60 or 80 wagons.”

The Ottawa of Blanchard’s Fork and Roche de Boeuf and Oquanoxy’s Village were among several bands of Native Americans forced into present-day Franklin County after losing lands in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio in the 1830s. More than half of the Ottawa had died by 1837, when Jotham and Elenor Meeker arrived to establish a Baptist mission among them.

Born in 1804, Jotham Meeker trained as a printer before becoming a missionary among the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi in Michigan. He became fluent in multiple Indigenous languages, and he developed a phonetic method using Roman type to print in several of them.

When the Indian Removal Act pushed tribes into the Plains, the Meekers were sent there, too. In 1833, at the Shawnee Mission, Meeker set up what is thought to be the first printing press in what would become Kansas Territory. He would print thousands of books and other materials in the Native languages of the various tribes moving to Indian Territory.

In October 1836, Meeker received orders to set up a mission among the Ottawa as soon as a printer could be sent to take his place. By the spring of 1837, construction had begun on the first five-acre mission site, which was situated along the Marais des Cygnes River and the Fort Scott Road. This site was partially destroyed in the flood of 1844 — a flood whose high-water mark was thought to be nearly seven feet higher than the flood that drowned much of Eastern Kansas in 1951.

The Meekers rebuilt on higher ground, situating the mission church, cemetery, house, well, and farm on a rise above Ottawa Creek. Although missionaries were undeniably part of the larger colonial machine that devastated Indigenous populations to make way for white settlement, Meeker’s journals and the memories of the Ottawa themselves suggest that the Ottawa and Jotham Meeker had a relatively respectful relationship. Meeker’s journals narrate days filled with visiting families, caring for the sick, and comforting the grieving.

Meeker also documented those traveling along the California Road that passed by the south side of the new mission site. He first mentions the “California emigrants” and a cholera outbreak in 1849. Beginning in 1850, springtime meant hundreds of emigrants passing the mission.

Wagon trails are integral to the history of the American West, and Kansas was often seen as the liminal space that travelers passed through to reach their true destination. Two of those major trails — the Oregon-California Trail and the Santa Fe Trail — passed through Kansas, each traveler on their own journey to somewhere else.

But those trails did not exist in a vacuum; thousands of miles of lesser roads connected the major trails to military forts, Indian agencies, missions, homesteads, water sources, and hunting grounds, and still more roads connected many of those places to each other. Any Kansas road that ultimately linked to the Oregon-California Trail might be called a “California Road,” and one such road carried travelers through present-day Miami County before turning due west into Franklin County and passing through the Ottawa Reserve and Meeker’s Baptist Mission.

“It has now been four weeks since California emigrants commenced passing and we think to this time about 800 wagons and 10,000 cattle have gone along this road,” Meeker wrote in his journal on May 15, 1852. “About 30 wagons and 300 cattle pass to-day.”

Emigrants purchased oats, corn, and potatoes at the mission, but they were less interested in religion, and Meeker wrote that few observed the Sabbath. Emigrants also brought cholera, and on June 15, 1852, Meeker wrote, “California emigrants are returning, fleeing from the cholera. They report that great numbers are dying with it on the Plains. They have two cholera cases with them.” At least one emigrant never left the mission site; the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Smith is buried in the cemetery.

The road also brought news and change. On June 1, 1854, Meeker noted that, “Nebraska and Kansas Territories are organized,” referring to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed just two days earlier. He also wrote of emigrants who “are squatting around us in great numbers,” signaling the beginning of white settlement in Kansas Territory and what would soon be the end of Indian Reserves in Franklin County.

Jotham Meeker died January 12, 1855, leaving behind hundreds of pages of journals documenting life with the Ottawa in Kansas before it was Kansas. His wife Elenor died in 1856 and is buried in the mission cemetery next to Jotham. The mission fell into ruin, though the cemetery would continue to be used by both the Ottawa and white settlers. Shortly after the Civil War, the Ottawa were forced to sell their lands in Kansas and move to Oklahoma.

The California Road, which was drawn into the official government land survey maps created between 1856 and 1864, was no longer an official road by the time Leonard F. Shaw and G.D. Stinebaugh published their map of Franklin County in 1878. Later travelers followed section line roads, and later still, Kansas Highway 68 and Interstate 35. Although these roads allow for faster and safer travel, they can’t offer the intimate knowledge of a road that hugs the curves of the land, climbing hills, splashing into creeks, and passing through thousands of acres of wildflowers at the pace of a wagon train.

I am fascinated by old trails, and I am forever searching for remnants of paths that once connected us to other people and places. Where we are is shaped by our ability to get there, and I have spent many hours standing in the depressions that still remain, thinking about the people and goods and animals who once followed that path in their journey.

Today at the old mission site and cemetery, a steady Kansas wind carries the sounds of faraway travelers: the drone of high-speed traffic on I-35 and K-68, the buzz of a small plane, the horn from a distant train, chatty bluebirds and nuthatches hopping from perch to perch in the trees. The only stillness is in the old California Road itself. Yet, as I stand in the swale of this former road, I can imagine a time when the Meekers and the Ottawa could hear lowing cattle and creaking wagons hours before they reached the mission on their way to somewhere else.

Diana Staresinic-Deane grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and currently calls Ottawa, Kansas, home. She is the executive director of the Franklin County Historical Society in Ottawa and a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau. She is the author of the book, Shadow on the Hill: The True Story of a 1925 Kansas Murder. Diana can often be found exploring old cemeteries and searching for remnants of historic trails.

Read Jotham Meeker’s journals at the Kansas Historical Society, or visit their archive for a more complete Meeker collection.

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1112 Gillespie Place

Garden City, Kansas

By Rosemary Hope

This is the story of my house and the foursome who gathered for dinner Christmas Day 1959: Truman Capote, Nelle Harper Lee, and my parents, Dolores and Clifford Hope Jr.

It was at the beginning of Truman’s seven or so years of entanglement with Kansas for In Cold Blood, his 1966 nonfiction novel chronicling the murders of the Herbert Clutter family and the prosecution of their killers. Herb, his wife Bonnie, and teenaged children Nancy and Kenyon had been killed by gunshot in the early hours of November 15, 1959.

Truman and his childhood friend Nelle came by train from New York a few weeks later: Truman to cover the murders for The New Yorker and Nelle to help with reporting.

My father was Herb Clutter’s lawyer. Shortly after Truman and Nelle’s arrival, Daddy and the estate’s administrator opened the doors to the crime scene, a tidy farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas, five miles west of Garden City. Truman sniffed about while Nelle took notes.

Otherwise, the pair did not get much help from the community throughout December. Truman, a flamboyant, pushy, gay man, was puzzling to townsfolk and stymied by local press and law enforcement.

He and Nelle faced Christmas alone at the Warren Hotel in Garden City. Until my mother issued an invitation.

“Come at one,” my mother said.

“Make it two,” Truman replied.

Mom always looked out for those new in town, young reporters at The Garden City Telegram, neighbors, teachers, singletons — all would all be invited for dinner. She knew who Truman was; she subscribed to The New Yorker. And for a woman who claimed she spent the 1950s with her “head in the diaper pail,” an adults-only dinner was welcome.

She fed the four little Hopes in the kitchen ahead of time. When Truman and Nelle arrived around 2:00, Christine, 10, Nancy, 8, Quentin, 5, and Holly, 3, were introduced and then whisked upstairs to play with their new toys.

Years later, I learned that Chris and Nancy had discussed their meeting with Nelle and Truman in detail. They marveled at their voices — Truman’s high, Nelle’s low — and their appearances: he was “small and pinkish,” she “dark and tall.”

Our house sits on a two-block-long, tree-lined street flanked at either end by brick pillars with bronze plaques announcing

Gillespie Place

Private Drive

Truth: the street was not private and our house, a 1908 bungalow, was among the most ordinary on it. But the trees were special. Despite the name, “Garden City” was not a grower’s paradise. The vicissitudes of a semi-arid climate and near constant wind — “hard blue skies and desert-clear air” as Truman said on page one of In Cold Blood — made growing pretty things pretty hard. My grandfather, Clifford Sr., planted and irrigated the heck the out of the elms after he purchased the house in 1920.

Nelle volunteered to help Mom in the kitchen and shared her trick for getting the air out of baking batter. “You whomp it on the counter,” she instructed while smashing the bottom of the pan on the Formica. This method has now served three generations of Hopes baking hundreds of batches of cakes, rolls, and brownies.

Mom debuted twice-baked potatoes and roast duck. Truman, who “noticed everything” according to Mom, zeroed in on the potatoes. “They lack something,” he observed. Perhaps it was sour cream and caviar (“the freshest, the grayest Beluga”), which he described in 1972 as the only way he could “bear to eat a potato.” This “most delicious ever potato lunch” was to be accompanied by chilled Russian vodka, which “must be 80 proof.”

On this day, Truman brought J&B scotch. Conversation flowed, with Truman holding court. “Most of the talk was about himself, but it was interesting,” Daddy later recalled. “He loved to gossip, especially about his rich and famous friends.” (These were likely Truman’s Swans, ladies at the top of New York society.) At some point in the meal, Daddy rose from the table and recited the kings and queens of England in order.

Back in New York in January, Nelle wrote my mother that Christmas Day with the Hopes, Daddy’s tour of the town, and other shared meals were the “high spots” of the stay.

By all accounts, Christmas lunch launched Truman into Garden City society. Once word got around town that the Hopes had hosted Truman, he was honored with dinners and cocktail parties from Garden City high society. He even collected his own Garden City Swans, who were special guests at his Black and White Ball in 1966 after the publication of In Cold Blood.

People frequently ask why my parents were not at the ball. They weren’t invited, and Daddy knew why. Although he was a Kansas state senator and son of retired U.S. Congressman Clifford Hope Sr., and although Mom wrote a daily column, “The Distaff Side,” for The Telegram, my parents were not in the country club set, not the “in” crowd. Mom did not pick up smoking and bridge as she’d been advised to do when she was society editor for the Telegram. Daddy didn’t golf. They didn’t have a modern house with a conversation pit and intercom system like those who lived on “the Hill.”

But Truman knew what he had with my parents. He retained Daddy as his Kansas lawyer throughout the writing of the book and filming of the 1967 movie. He relied on Daddy’s insider view of Kansas politics, particularly the 1960 gubernatorial race, which could have threatened the death penalty in the state. Daddy is one of five mentioned in the book’s acknowledgments.

Truman genuinely liked my mother. He insisted on writing a guest column for her, and it was a charming recount of his luncheon with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the home of royal photographer Cecil Beaton.

I liked to tease my parents that I was Truman Capote’s love child. I mean, there are similarities between my baby pictures and his “fat years” photos. And he sent Mom a bottle of Chanel No. 5 when I, her fifth child, was born in June 1961. My fantasy stems from the story I was told over and over: Truman showed up at the house midday in early 1962 wanting my mother to join him at the Warren Hotel coffee shop for a gab session. She answered the door, baby me on her hip, making dinner, phone ringing. She plopped me in his lap, noticing his look of horror and confusion as she ran to answer the phone. Like any other Garden City housewife, Mom had no nanny for the baby, no cook for lunch. Truman left alone for the coffee shop, perhaps a bit sticky from our encounter.

The four from Christmas dinner 1959 are gone now. My parents lost touch with Truman after the filming of the movie. Nelle and my parents remained friends, with sporadic correspondence through the years. The house on Gillespie Place, with some replacement trees on the driveway side, remains in the family.

Rosemary Hope resides in verdant eastern Kansas, with twice the rainfall and half the wind of her beloved western Kansas. She lives on a tree-lined street with her husband, cat, dog, and rabbit, and an easy-to-grow organic garden. She is a medical writer and editor.

Photo at top: Hope family home, winter 1960. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 because of its association with Clifford R. Hope Sr., who represented the southwest Congressional District in Kansas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1927 to 1957.

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Lazy T Ranch

Manhattan, Kansas

By Traci Brimhall

Gravel crunches beneath my tires as I approach Lazy T Ranch, home of the Kansas Poet Lariat Ron Wilson. It’s an unseasonably warm February day, and birds punctuate the silence with their twitters and trills. The deep cerulean sky is cloudless and seems even brighter against the beige of the Flint Hills in winter. Quilt square designs decorate the outbuildings of Lazy T Ranch. The house is tucked in a horseshoe curve of hills.

Ron pulls up and greets me with a white cowboy hat and a kindness as bright as the day. We survey the land and buildings in front of us and make a plan for our afternoon. The winter mud had been nearly constant for weeks, but today is warm and dry, so we get in Ron’s work truck and head out to take in the best views.

As we drive past each pasture and hill, Ron names the peaks and points out where weddings have taken place. We talk about our favorite seasons in the Flint Hills, from the great sledding of his childhood to the gorgeous greens of new grass after a controlled burn takes out last year’s big bluestem. It’s astonishing that they can storm back so quickly after a fire. Nature performs such a hopeful metaphor for us if we choose to see it that way. A hawk wheels above and wind rustles last year’s grasses, and we agree spring’s renewal is one of our favorite times to love this place.

Although the ranch is not far from the stoplights and strip malls of Manhattan, KS, it feels a world away. The Flint Hills are often a retreat for me. I love to walk the trails and admire the gentle light of the prairie and insects lounging on the latest blossoms. But I always feel like a transplant to this ecology. I am still learning the names of wildflowers and how to identify bird calls, still tucking the meadowlark and prairie chicken into poems to feel myself more tied to place.

Ron Wilson’s family has been rooted here since 1968. The limestone barn is even older. But the front meadow is the oldest of all. It is still the original prairie sod, never plowed. Even as a boy, Ron’s mother spoke to him about commitment to the land.

As we leave one lookout point for the next, we begin talking about our love of poetry. Ron heard his first cowboy poet when he was in Colorado and got a kick out of it. That sparked something in him and when Kansas cowboy poet, Dr. Jim Hoy, put out a call for cowboy poems, Ron tried penning his first poem. He’s been crafting verses from his life ever since.

Cowboy poetry certainly sings on a page, but it’s originally an oral art form. The performance of the poem is part of its power. As we make our backroad turns and I wait for him to open gates for us to drive through, we talk about the beauty of this immediate connection — to speak your poem and immediately see and hear your listeners respond. For me, poetry has had more of a private sense of audience. I read other people’s poems and feel a connection, but I may never tell them. People often encounter mine on a page or computer screen, and I may never hear from them either, though I still believe an asynchronous intimacy happens.

Ron and I nod as we listen to each other describe our writing process. We find we are opposites in many ways. He was born here, and I still feel like an unrooted stranger after a decade in the same spot. He’s a night owl, and I’m the blackbird, singing even before the dawn gets too purple. I whisper my poems to myself as I revise, and he performs for audiences at bonfires.

Although we find so many differences, our inspirations for our poems almost sound the same. “Sometimes it comes from a moment,” Ron says, “A night thought.”

“Yes!” I agree. “Sometimes there’s a thing in my brain, like itching the grit inside an oyster and that becomes a pearl.”

“Sometimes it’s a twist,” Ron says.

I nod, understanding the strangeness of the world at times. The unexpected ways that what is right next to you is also hidden. I love poetry because a day can hide its details, and poetry helps us pay attention to them.

“When something goes badly on the ranch, we say, ‘Well, if nothing else, at least I can get a poem out of this.’”

I understand this truth, too — how it’s the storms, the accidents, the smoke from a prairie fire, the night’s quiet astonishments that bring us our poems.

We get out of the truck again once we are in the high pasture. Ron points out another popular wedding spot next to a lone tree. Below we can see a small bend in the river reflecting the stunning topaz of the afternoon sky, moving like something alive. It makes me ache with gratitude to be a guest on this land.

As we get into the truck to circle back to where I parked my car, we talk about what keeps us both coming back to poetry, decade after decade, loss after loss, and for me, home after home.

“The best compliment I could ever hear is that something I wrote made someone feel less alone,” I tell Ron.

“Yes,” he agrees. “The best part are those rewarding moments when you connect at the heart level.”

We turn on the gravel road headed back to the barn where we started. The afternoon shadows lengthen and dapple the Lazy T Ranch sign that reads “Happy Trails.” We complete our circle having learned each other a little better, knowing our different relationships with poetry still rhyme.

Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of four other poetry collections, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Parks Service. Brimhall lives in Manhattan, KS, and serves as the current Poet Laureate of Kansas.

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Edwards County Historical Museum and Sod House
Kinsley, Kansas

By Joan Weaver

Starting in Washington, D.C., you can drive U.S. Highway 50 all the way to San Francisco. Along the way is the small Kansas town of Kinsley with a towering sign that announces you are “Midway” across the continent. Contrary to being just the “midway” of a journey, Kinsley has been the desired destination for many people. Some came on the Santa Fe Trail, others on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad, or, more recently, like I did, on a modern highway.

The sign also invites you to visit the Edwards County Historical Society Museum to see how the pioneers lived on the prairie. You can go inside a reproduced sod house built in 1958 by men who still remembered the process. On exhibit are the tools they used and pictures taken during construction. The house contains period furniture and artifacts donated by the descendants of the early settlers. Because the original open-air sod house required continual upkeep, in 2001 the Edwards County Historical Society preserved the house by building a structure to encase it.

Among the early immigrants were the Maxey family from Galesburg, Illinois. On October 1, 1886, George and Clara Maxey gathered their six children into a covered wagon pulled by two horses to begin the 650-mile trip to Kinsley. Penelope “Nellie” Maxey was twelve and very excited and a little frightened. The day before, some mean boys had jerked on her braids and told her that Indians would scalp her.

“Our wagon was very well built and warm,” recalled Nellie in an interview celebrating Kinsley’s 1973 centennial. “Father had it built wide over the wheels so beds could be arranged sideways and that is where we slept. And don’t forget to mention my dog Bounce. He trailed the wagon, walking all the way from Illinois.”

Despite his wife’s warnings to not be swindled, in Missouri George traded their faithful horse for a mule “with more endurance.” It was a long, hard trip, and the family arrived at Clara’s brother-in-law’s brickyard on November 7. “We slept in a tent that first night we were in Kinsley and nearly froze,” Nellie remembered.

The following day, they headed nine miles south to homestead next to Clara’s sister. Remembering her mother’s warning, Nellie said, “When we got halfway there, the mule, Jack, laid down and died. Father walked to my aunt’s place and brought back a horse to team with the other to take us on our way.”

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered “free” land to settlers if they would build a house, make improvements, and farm the land for five years. The Maxey’s claim was ancient sand dunes covered with short buffalo grass and a few thorny plum bushes – no tree in sight. Regular prairie fires and grazing buffalo herds eliminated trees in the prairie ecosystem.

In this area, building with sod was the quickest, most inexpensive way for settlers to improve their claims. Sod blocks should not be confused with the dried adobe bricks of the Southwest. With sod, thick buffalo grass roots held the soil together, and blocks could be cut and lifted intact. Typically, blocks were 24 inches long, 12 inches wide, and four inches deep. They weighed 50 pounds each, and it took 3000 blocks to build a 16-foot by 20-foot house.

There are no pictures of the Maxey house, but a family of eight would have needed shelter quickly. The sod would have been broken with a plow, cut into blocks and stacked. For some families, red clay from the banks of the nearby Arkansas River was mixed with sand and used as mortar. After this mortar dried, it became almost as hard and durable as cement. The same mixture could also be used to stucco the inside and outside of the house.

Sod homes often were topped with rafters covered with tarpaper and a thinner layer of sod, grass side up. Sometimes boards were laid loosely, covered with several layers of asphalt roofing and left exposed.

Living in a soddy had some advantages. The insulating, two-foot-thick walls offered coolness in summer and warmth in winter, aided by burning buffalo chips. However, housewives found many disadvantages. Bugs, mice, and snakes, including rattlers, liked to move in. Dirt floors were hard to keep clean. Heavy rains eroded walls and leaked through the roof, leaving wet furniture and muddy floors.

After the Maxeys settled in, Nellie learned there was no need to fear Native people. The U.S. government had called for the eradication of the buffalo in order to defeat the Plains tribes who resisted the takeover of their lands by white settlers — including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche. No buffalo meant no food and no Indians.

The next summer’s real threat came from hot winds and drought. The sun beat down every day. Their corn crop withered despite all efforts to carry buckets of water from the well to every stalk. The land was lonely and harsh, threatened by grasshoppers, rattlesnakes, hail-storms, and occasional cyclones and prairie fires. At night, Nellie would lay in bed listening to coyotes howling.

One hundred years later, in 1989, I too found myself moving to the sandhills. I was luckier than the Maxeys, as we purchased an existing six-room, one-bath frame farmhouse built by homesteaders in 1907.

Our moving train consisted of a U-Haul truck, two cars, two pickups, and three trailers hauling our riding horse, two miniature horses and a1959 Ford tractor with implements. The dog rode in the car with our two teenaged sons.

Our entourage took one long day to move 500 miles at a top speed of 50 mph. Compared to the Maxeys, my hardships were minor. I broke a finger loading the horse into the trailer. We arrived after dark to find the barn full of eighty years of detritus. When I put the riding horse into the corral, four-foot weeds obscured my view of an open back gate. She escaped into the dark. Fortunately, the pasture fence was intact, and she appeared back at the barn in the morning, covered in biting flies. When I applied fly repellent, it must have stung, because she reacted by landing a good back-kick on my knee. All I could do was crawl out of the corral, driving sharp sandburs into my shins. Less than 24 hours in Kansas, and I was ready to leave.

In time, life became more manageable for both Nellie and me. She would marry a lawyer and live in a large Victorian house as one of Kinsley’s leading ladies until her death at age 85 in 1959. After thirty-five years, I still live in the old farmhouse, which has since been remodeled with a large master bedroom and bath.

Now, I go to the sod house museum to discover stories like Nellie’s. The names on the donated artifacts I see there are familiar surnames of my friends who are their descendants. I spend time talking to those friends and researching in the old newspapers and the library archive. I suppose I’m a little like the sod house museum, as I too want to preserve and share the stories of the early people who settled midway across the continent.

Joan Weaver has been the director of the Kinsley Public Library for twenty-seven years.  She has a passion for discovering, preserving, and making the stories of her adopted prairie community digitally accessible. Currently she is working on a book about Kinsley’s role as the regional center for culture and the arts in the early twentieth century.

Photo by Bob Obee.

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Rock Springs Ranch

Junction City, Kansas

By Macy Davis

Niki Smith never names Kansas in The Golden Hour. She doesn’t need to. Every page of the 2021 graphic novel shows Kansas. It starts with the cover, which looks through wheat in the foreground to kids on a hay bale, the county fair in the background, a golden sunset lighting the scene. A few pages into the book, a Kansas state highway sign brings the reader directly into northeast Kansas. Many chapters end with landscapes dotted with cattle. A girl from Eudora wins the bucket calf event at the county fair. The main character, Manuel Soto, even fills out a form which clearly names “Douglas County” at the top. But the linchpin in this Kansas story is when Manuel and his friends go to agriculture club camp at White Springs Ranch.

The real-life White Springs Ranch is called Rock Springs Ranch, and it’s the Kansas State 4-H Camp, owned and operated by the Kansas 4-H Foundation. As a 12-year Kansas 4-H member, that last 15 miles of the drive, after you turn south from Junction City, was always the most exciting for me. My county extension agents hauled vans full of kids across the state, and even with a stop in Junction City, we were ready to be out of the car for good as we drove that last stretch, leaving behind the relative flat-land of U.S. Highway 77 to dip down into the creek bottoms. This small change made Rock Springs feel just different enough that you could forget you weren’t that far from home. When I read The Golden Hour for the first time, I gasped when Manuel and his friends got off the bus at camp. Then I immediately recommended this book to many of my 4-H friends, because Smith’s White Springs Ranch is clearly Rock Springs.  The name White Springs alone convinced me, but my favorite detail is the illustrations of the rings of cabins surrounding picnic tables and a bathhouse sheltered by trees. I felt like I should be unrolling my sleeping bag, tossing on a swimsuit, and getting ready to chow down on s’mores.

Manuel and his friends don’t spend long at White Springs, just a few pages really. Manuel ends up leaving camp early after the sounds of gunfire from the rifle range trigger his PTSD from witnessing a school shooting. Throughout the book, Manuel uses photography to ground himself in moments of anxiety. Often, he photographs the Kansas landscape, but the photos he captures of camp primarily focus on his friends and the fun they’re having.

The camp photos are on a two-page spread, highlighting the joy of the experience without a trace of the black and white shading or fractured yellow line work through which Smith indicates Manuel’s panic. For Manuel, camp represents freedom and friendship, which are both big steps after the trauma he experienced. To go away to camp for four days, Manuel worked with his therapist and his mom to determine he was ready. Even with its less-than-ideal ending, Smith captures just how meaningful a few days at 4-H camp can be.

Summer camp offers kids a space of freedom. It’s a place rife with new experiences and activities, and one full of new people who don’t know you. At camp, you can test boundaries and try out new elements of identity without the oversight of your family. That makes any camp special, but 4-H camps are unique, not least because their typically shorter sessions mean they serve far larger quantities of campers than the average overnight camp. It’s estimated that 1.5 million Kansans have camped at Rock Springs since the 1940s.

Graphic novels have a unique burden of proof in depictions of setting, particularly when representing real places, because they can show the whole picture, rather than just relying on the reader to supplement written descriptions with their own imagination or prior knowledge. It’s either right, or it misses the mark. Smith’s White Springs Ranch captures not just the look of Rock Springs but the feeling of being a camper there.

As a children’s librarian, I’m well aware of the underrepresentation of nuanced experiences of rural life in children’s literature. Urban and suburban kids are oversaturated with depictions of their lives, while rural kids may only see historical fiction or books that tell them the places they’re from are places to escape. I don’t feel like I ever saw Kansas or my lifestyle represented in contemporary fiction when I was a kid reading everything I could get my hands on. As much as I love historical fiction, it’s not the same.

The scholarship of children’s literature often relies on Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s argument that children should be able to find mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in literature. Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” The growing rural-urban divide makes it essential that representation of rural areas be presented with depth and compassion. Smith’s graphic novel counteracts outdated, negative images and depicts rurality as it is.

My favorite Rock Springs memory is when one of my friends from a different county and I made up goofy choreography to the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” at the Kansas Youth Leadership Forum when we were in high school — choreography we continued to utilize through college when we both ended up living in Alpha of Clovia 4-H Cooperative Leadership House at K-State. Manuel’s friendships and experiences in agriculture club remind me of my own experiences as a 4-H member embracing spontaneity and forming relationships that continued beyond the boundaries of Rock Springs.

Smith is a former 4-Her herself (even naming Manuel’s hometown after her 4-H club), and her use of Rock Springs as part of Manuel’s story offers rural youth positive representation that speaks to a specific experience while nonetheless representing a broad audience. After all, there are approximately 15,000 4-H members in Kansas. If this is a story that I, an adult almost 10 years removed from my 4-H experience, felt seen by, I can only imagine how young readers will feel. Even with the trauma Manuel experiences, he finds stability in the landscape, making The Golden Hour a love letter to a Kansas childhood.

Macy Davis is a proud Kansas 4-H alumna, Boston-based children’s librarian, and poet. She holds both a Masters in Library and Information Science and a Masters in Children’s Literature from Simmons University. Her work has been published in the I-70 Review and Wizards in Space. She spends her time reading, writing, planning storytime, and starting too many craft projects.

 Photo courtesy of the Kansas 4-H Foundation.

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