Plains Folks: Memory springs eternal in the Flint Hills
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
Since writing about Baxter Springs in my last column, I've been thinking about some of the springs closer to my own area. My mother, for instance, was from Conway Springs in Sumner County. Pure water supplied the needs of the town. To my taste, however, being accustomed to the harder water from our well at home, it was a little flat.
Our home place is probably a little less than a mile from Sycamore Springs, the original settlement that, when moved a mile and a half east, became the town of Cassoday. I have seen an old photograph of a two-story building at the site, a trading post on what was sometimes known locally as the California trail. I think it started in Arkansas and cut across country to intersect with the real California-Oregon Trail farther north.
The Ross Harsh family home was near Sycamore Springs, which, I am told, still flows into the Walnut River but now is all grown over with trees and brush. I kind of hate to admit it, but I've never actually seen Sycamore Springs. The springs were beyond my ranging area on the Walnut when I was a kid, and I've otherwise never had an occasion to seek them out.
Nearly 20 years ago I interviewed a man from Cedar Point who told me a story about Sycamore Springs. A gang of horse thieves, some four in number, were caught in the act in southern Chase County. The nearest trees large enough for hanging them were at Sycamore Springs, so it was there that vigilante justice was carried out. Interestingly, about a month later at the Old Settlers' Day picnic at Cassoday there were a full dozen men and women in attendance who were over 80, two or three in their 90s. Not a single one of them had ever heard about a lynching at Sycamore Springs. But each of them could have told about the unremovable bloodstain on the porch floor of the accursed Brandley mansion near Matfield Green, a stain that people living there deny ever existed. I think these stories are a manifestation of regional rivalry, with Chase Countians telling tales about Butler County, and vice versa.
The most memorable spring from my youth was a small unnamed one in the northwest part of the Harsh Hill pasture east of Cassoday. It was the last place to get a drink of water when we were driving cattle from Greenwood County pastures to the Santa Fe stockyards at Cassoday. The adults didn't seem to be bothered, but even after filling up at the spring, we kids would be spitting cotton before we got through the Watkins Flat pasture.
Maybe the best known spring in my home country was a mile or so north of the county line in the Farington pasture. Its official name, according to the Kansas Geological Survey, is Jack Spring, but I've heard it called Jack's Spring, and we always referred to it as Jack Springs. When I rode that pasture for Wayne Rogler, Jack Springs always was a great place to get down from your horse, get a cold drink, and eat a little watercress.
When I was a freshman in high school, a couple of seniors crawled into the opening of the cave from which the spring flowed. It was a small hole, but once inside, they said, the cave opened up into a small room where they found some empty bottles and other bootlegging paraphernalia, remnants of the days of Prohibition.
I've visited a couple of the more famous springs in the Flint Hills (Alcove Springs on the Oregon Trail and Diamond Springs on the Santa Fe Trail), but there are others I'd like to see — Lost Springs, Blasing Springs, Chingawassa Springs. Then there's Gueda Springs down in Cowley County, which local legend says was discovered by Ponce de Leon and is the very Fountain of Youth for which he was searching. We can't let the fact that Ponce never got to Kansas stand in the way of a good story.
