arrived at Sumner on the steamboat "Duncan S. Carter". He came, it seems, in search of this city, which had been "depicted in a chromatic triumph of lithographed mendacity", and at the instance of "the loquacious embellishments of a lively adventurer who has been laying out townsites and staking off corner lots for some years past in tophet". Sumner was the Free-State rival of pro-slavery Atchison. Albert D. Richardson, later the author of Beyond the Mississippi, was a resident of the town when Ingalls arrived. The town was a few miles below the pro-slavery metropolis, and it extended to and beyond a bluff so steep and high that the main street was said to be "vertical". This town was founded by John P. Wheeler, a surveyor described as "a red-headed, blue-eyed, consumptive, slim, freckled enthusiast from Massachusetts". He also founded the town of Hiawatha. He named his river town not for Charles Sumner, as one would be likely to believe, but for George Sumner (brother), who was one of the proprietors of the place. Wheeler was an abolitionist, and his town was conceived in the same spirit that gave the Territory old Quindaro. When the Civil War began the pro-slavery people generally left Kansas or changed political faith. Atchison had the better location, and the people of Sumner gradually went there to live. In June, 1860, a tornado blew down most of the houses left in Sumner, and from this catastrophe its extinction is dated. Jonathan G. Lang (the original of "Shang" in "Catfish Aristocracy") continued to live there on a tract of land which belonged to Ingalls, and was, in jest, called "the mayor of Sumner". Ingalls followed the other inhabitants of the defunct city of "Great Expectations" to Atchison. HOME LIFE MRS. INGALLS I. Of domestic felicity an undue portion fell to Ingalls. In combat with men and the struggle to maintain himself in the world he was bold, diffident, imperious. In his home he was not so, although there his bearing was that of dignity. His ideal of home was a place of "sweet delights" whence man "goes forth, invigorated for the struggle of life". Man can not make a home. He can contribute something towards it. With due deference to modern movements to bring women into public life into political life - it must be said that a wise providence fixed bounds and limitations beyond which she can not properly go. And this was the judgment of Ingalls. The platform, the forum, the fierce competition of market and mart, the rough grapple at the polls - these are for men. Only woman can make a home. That is her domain. There she is supreme. There is the |