How a ‘border ruffian’ who supported slavery got a monument honoring him in a KC park
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On a recent visit to Penn Valley Park, a reader noticed an oddly placed stone along Penn Drive south of the lake. A plaque embedded into its surface reads: “To the author of Annals of the Great Western Plains, Charles Carroll Spalding, who in the day of small things had the bold vision to foresee the future city.”
The plaque provides the book’s publication date, 1858, and states that the monument was erected in 1918, but provides no additional information. The reader asked What’s Your KCQ?, a partnership between The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library, to explain its significance.
The Spalding name is familiar to KCPL’s Missouri Valley Special Collections staff. His book is regarded as the first history of the city, and an 1855 map of Westport drawn by Spalding hangs on the fifth floor of the Central Library in the Missouri Valley Room.
SPALDING GOES WEST
Spalding was born in Vermont in 1826, grew up comfortably in a prominent Montpelier family, and studied civil engineering before seeking his fortune in the American West.
He made his way to California during the gold rush years, but like many, failed to strike it rich, and went on to ply his trade as an engineer. He worked as a land surveyor for railroad firms in several western states, and by 1854, records of his activity show up in the newly created Kansas Territory.
Upon arriving in Kansas, Spalding worked as a correspondent for the New-York Tribune, penning dispatches designed to lure easterners to his new state. He took to the business and, in 1854, started his own paper, the Frontier News, across the border in Westport.
He also worked as city clerk and engineer there, where he produced his 1855 map of the town.
BORDER RUFFIAN DAYS
Spalding still wanted to make his fortune, and through his newspaper’s mission made clear what he thought was necessary to ensure success — “The paper will be devoted to the interests of the frontier, and the south, and will advocate the cause of slavery, as an institution sanctioned by divine law,” proclaimed an announcement published in another local paper, the Weekly Leavenworth Herald.
Spalding backed up his words.
Following passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that mandated that popular vote would decide if slavery would be extended into the new territories, pro-slavery advocates flocked to the area hoping to influence the decision. Conflict erupted along Missouri’s western border, initiating the pre-Civil War violence known as Bleeding Kansas.
Emigrant aid societies designed to attract eastern abolitionists to Kansas began popping up in 1854. Spalding, on the other hand, helped organize the Jackson County Pro-Slavery Pioneer Association to attract Southerners interested in making Kansas a slave state.
On Aug. 29, 1855, Spalding participated in a convention of the Pro-Slavery Party held at the Shawnee Indian Mission, then serving as the temporary territorial capital, to nominate a slavery supporting delegate to the U.S. Congress. Their candidate won an assured victory once the free-staters refused to participate in a subsequent election claiming widespread voter fraud by Missourians.
To what degree Spalding participated in violent conflict or personally influenced Kansas territorial elections is not known. However, later in life, he was fond of recalling his days as a Missouri “border ruffian.”
MOVE TO KANSAS CITY
Records show that Spalding married in 1855 and accepted a position as editor at The Western Journal of Commerce, future mayor Robert T. Van Horn’s newspaper. Van Horn would remain a mentor and associate for the remainder of Spalding’s career in Kansas City.
In addition to newspaper work, he platted McGee’s Addition, an area of land south of 12th Street that effectively doubled the size of the city in 1857. Spalding and his wife, Matilda, relocated to a cabin at 17th and Locust for the job.
In 1858, Van Horn published Spalding’s book. While known as the city’s first history, the work is largely promotional in nature, the original town company having been formed just eight years prior. In the text, he hints at his support for slavery and is preoccupied by missed economic opportunities in Missouri due to the activities of East Coast abolitionists.
Spalding continued to promote the new city in print, and he likely would have continued had the Kansas-Missouri border conflict not escalated into all-out war.
THE CIVIL WAR
As the country steamed toward civil war following the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. President, Spalding wrote to his father in December 1860. In the letter, he blames the country’s turmoil on the “the licentiousness … of the American Press.” Interestingly, he omits mention of his border ruffian escapades.
He also doesn’t blame slavery for the conflict. He does, however, affirm his loyalty to the Union. It was this stance that would bring an end to his investment in Kansas City.
With Missouri’s secession decision still up in the air, nearly all business activity in the city ceased — including newspapers. Much of the populace supported the Union, but rural areas and towns like Independence and Westport saw increasing Confederate support. Once the Civil War broke out in April 1861, secessionists converged on the city.
The newly elected Mayor Van Horn struggled to defend the city from secessionists armed with weapons stolen from the federal arsenal in Liberty. By June, he had formed a volunteer battalion of reserve corps and established a camp called Fort Union at 10th and Central streets. Kansas City would remain in Union hands throughout the war.
An account of Spalding’s departure in the New York Herald records that his newspaper office was attacked and that he was given until the next morning to leave the city. He fled to the countryside and accepted a job as a schoolmaster. He took his family back to Vermont as soon as war was declared.
The move wasn’t driven by cowardice. Spalding joined the Fifth Regiment of the Vermont Infantry as a combat newspaper correspondent. The unit was charged with the defense of Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1861 and later saw action on the Virginia Peninsula. In October 1862, Spalding was discharged due to poor health.
EAST COAST NEWSPAPER CAREER
Once back in Vermont, Spalding started another newspaper, the Newport News. He pledged that the new title would avoid party affiliation and would “let the negro severely alone,” an indication that he intended to hold his tongue on slavery.
The publication didn’t last, and by the late-1860s Spalding had accepted a position with the Boston Herald and relocated there. During these years, he took up a new cause — temperance. He delivered speeches at teetotaler meetings in Massachusetts and Vermont championing abstinence from alcohol as the cure for American society’s ills.
Spalding passed away at the age of 50 following a bout with a “dropsical affection.” He was buried in the family plot in Green Mount Cemetery in Montpelier, Vermont.
SPALDING REMEMBERED
In 1918, the Missouri Valley Historical Society spearheaded the move to place a memorial to Spalding in Penn Valley Park. Former Mayor Henry M. Beardsley led a ceremony to dedicate the bronze plaque set into a granite boulder. The original bronze plaque was stolen in 1929 and replaced with a replica.
Kansas City annexed Westport in 1897 and the memory of Spalding’s 1855 map faded with time. In the 1930s, Westport pharmacist and historian Albert Doerschuk started looking for an early map of the area. A tip led him to Claude Halleran’s automobile repair shop on Westport Road, where he found Spalding’s map. Halleran reported that his grandfather, an early resident and wagon builder for the Santa Fe trade, had handed it down to him.
Halleran donated the map to the Daughters of Old Westport historical society, which placed it on permanent loan to the Library in 1974.
Despite spending less than a decade in the Kansas City area, Spalding left a mark on our history — a mark complicated by his outspoken support of slavery.
His opinion was in keeping with the general mid-nineteenth century mindset in Kansas City’s white business community, a community largely made up of Southern transplants who needed to keep all economic avenues open — pro-slavery, abolitionist, or otherwise. When the war came, many of them, like the author of the city’s first history, remained loyal to the Union if only to protect their economic futures.
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