MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, CHARLES HAMILTON
This is a newspaper article from the Salina, Kansas, Journal of December 18, 1949. I was born two months prior to it being published.
Charlie Hamilton, sturdy, intrepid son of the Kansas plains, who thinks he has lived in Saline County longer than any other man now alive, begrudges every day he spends now in a wheelchair.
“This is no way for a man to live who was practically born in the saddle and has spent most of his 87 years on a horse”, he remarked quietly. “It’s terrible, sitting here like this, seeing everyone going by out there” - he gestured toward the street in front of his house - “and me sitting around the house.”
There is no trace of self pity. It’s only that C. T. Hamilton, in his spacious, comfortable home at 936 South Santa Fe, would rather be outdoors. A habit of 87 years is not easy to break and this true pioneer of Saline County actually has spent most of his life in the open and most of his years on a horse. He is willing to bet he has ridden more miles on a horse than any other man in Kansas today.
That habit was formed when he was little more than four years old and his father, O. P. Hamilton, gave Charlie a mare found at an abandoned Indian camp out north of Salina.
“I practically grew up on the back of this pony, “ Mr. Hamilton recalls. “Father bought lots of cattle that were driven up from Texas and my brother Frank and I had plenty of practice handling horses as we held the cattle out on the buffalo range.”
When the boy Charlie learned to ride and handle cattle it was just fun. It was to be his life work. He became and remained for long years one of the foremost cattlemen of Saline County and central Kansas, and always a colorful figure in a colorful occupation.
This was wild country when O. P. Hamilton brought his wife and two sons to a claim north of Salina. Charlie Hamilton was about six months old then.
Indians were not story-book characters. They were real, and Charlie Hamilton saw plenty of them.
Buffalo roamed the plains around Salina and ran through the streets - or what were called streets - of the hamlet of Salina. Charlie Hamilton saw plenty of them, too.
His folks were right in the thick of it the time the Texas Rangers came, lined up all the settlers on the town square, now Santa Fe and Iron, and took from them every shooting iron that would shoot.
Only Mrs. O. P. Hamilton, mother of the Salina man, wasn’t a settler’s wife for nothing. She had hidden a six-shooter in the feather bed at the house they were occupying in Salina to get away from the dangers at the settlement north of town. That was the only good gun the Rangers left behind that day.
Hamilton saw his last wild Indians here when he was about seven years old. He had been out with his brother and a hired man and rode up over a little rise and onto the Red Skin before he realized he had company in those hills. He did what any other boy of the plains in those days, trained to ride quick and sure, would have done. He simply threw himself over the side of his horse, hanging by one foot, he says, and got away from there around the same rise on the prairie that had concealed the Indian.
At home the boy’s father scoffed at the tale. But when word drifted in a day or two later about a raid along the Solomon and the capture of two white girls - a story that is legend of the early days of this area - O. P. Hamilton believed his son’s story.
The Indian, Hamilton well remembers, was lying prone, his gun pointed over the crook of his arm, scanning the horizon in the opposite direction from where the boy rode onto him.
There are other remembered incidents. Hamilton’s cousin, Al Brown, came out from the east and lived with the Hamiltons for a while. He went out one day looking for wild turkeys, came to a ledge, looked down, and there below were two Indians, sound asleep.
Brown did just what Charlie had done, only he had no horse. He got away fast. “I could have shot them”, he explained later, “but of course that would have raised Ned and put the Indians on the warpath.” It would have, too, agrees Hamilton. Brown was the grandfather of Paul Kuhn, 1512 Osbourne, and of Mrs. Loren Johnson, 948 South 5th. He has his experiences of the wild days of early Kansas, too, staking claims and being chased off them by the Indians, but that is another story.
Oh, those were stirring days, all right. Charlie Hamilton, sitting in his chair and itching for the day when he can get out again, has a lot of memories.
He recalls, among other things, the old log fort built by his grandfather and the other settlers north of Salina.
He can see - “as if it was yesterday” - the “peek holes” which so intrigued him and his older brother, opening left in the thick walls of that crude fort for observation purposes and for the settlers to shoot through if the Indians attacked. The fort was built on a corner of the Hamilton land and stood there for many years, along what is now the Ohio Street road leading out of town to the north farmlands and beyond.
As time goes on when you’ve lived in one community 87 years, that old fort disappeared only yesterday.
The Salina man remembers well, also, the scare his brother Frank gave his folks and all the other settlers one night when they had gathered after one of the all-too-frequent Indian scares.
Morning came. No Indians, but no Frank, either. The boy, then about four years old, was missing. All the doors were bolted. They couldn’t figure out what had happened. Of course, Indians were the fearful explanation.
A search was started and widened. Halfway to the Hamilton home, deserted by the family for the time being, the searchers met the boy Frank. He had gone home, but seeing men and horses, took to his heels. He thought he had seen Indians. It developed he had seen soldiers. Out to protect the settlers, the military had taken over the empty Hamilton abode.
In spite of hardships and real danger, it was a good life in those days, Charlie Hamilton says. The community into which the elder Hamilton brought his little family was a close knit and friendly one. It had to be.
“In those days we helped one another, “ this oldest Saline County resident says. “We never had a lock on the door and the latch string hung on the outside.”
Memories! There was that first Hamilton home, the first frame farm house in Saline County, built by O. P. Hamilton of lumber he sawed along the Neosho and hauled to the new Saline County claim by ox teams.
It wasn’t a fancy house. It was just a big, sturdy, two-story home three and a half miles north of Salina on the Ohio Street road.
But it had a big, roaring fireplace.
“I remember well how the men would snake up a big cottonwood log which they would roll into our fireplace, where it would burn for days.”, Charlie Hamilton muses. “And I remember how, later when we were friendly, the big Indians would come in and stand in front of the warm fire and my father would have to almost shove them out of the house when it was time to go to bed.”
“There was plenty of cottonwood on our claim, but father learned that a sawed cottonwood, unless weighted down, would warp and turn over every other day. If used on the inside work it provided a wonderful refuge for bedbugs. Other settlers learned this, too, of course. Out on the old M. S. Price farm they finally burned down the house so they could rebuild with pine.”
One of Charlie Hamilton’s biggest thrills, and a matter of pride to him even now, came to him as a result of his having been on horseback over most of this part of the country. He was just a boy, but every trail and ford was his friend.
So it was that he got a job piloting a herd of 1100 Texas cattle north across the Saline River. “The foreman of the herd came to town looking for someone who knew a good crossing. There were no bridges across the rivers in those days, of course. He was directed to me. I was ten years old then and felt pretty big riding beside that big Texan, trailing that long string of cattle across the river. I was also very proud of the big $5 bill in my pocket when I went home.”
The Hamiltons kept a cow, even when they moved into Salina because O. P. Hamilton’s second wife, a Boston widow named Delia M. Gould, couldn’t stand the farm. Charlie Hamilton, who “detested city life and missed the howl of coyotes and the big sunflowers that grew everywhere” had a little of his beloved open air when he drove the cows to pasture each morning and home again each night.
The grazing land to which he took the cattle was on the hills which are now Country Club Heights, “where the fine home was built many years later.” At 11 Charlie Hamilton just couldn’t stand it in town any longer and he was allowed to go back to the farm to live with his grandmother, who had come out in 1866 after Charlie Hamilton’s mother died.
The Salina man took one flyer away from the country he has called home so many years. That was in 1874 when father “got the mining fever” from a couple of men from Southwestern Colorado who talked gold strike. It was not a particularly auspicious trip, Charlie Hamilton says. He came home, leaving his pony and six shooter out there.
O. P. Hamilton didn’t last long at the gold business either. He came back and became noted for the surveys he made all over this section. His son says he doesn’t think there is a section corner in Saline County that the older Hamilton didn’t know. And as far as he knows only one survey of the elder Hamilton’s was ever questioned. That was when Lynn Wary was dissatisfied with the line at the bottom of the river, and the Hamilton’s, father and son, did it over. The line stayed right where Hamilton fixed it first - north of the river.
“Practically every claim in This county was surveyed by my father, “ the Salina man recalled this week, sitting in his living room facing a beautiful, satiny finished cabinet of Kansas walnut, made by O. P. Hamilton.
The Hamilton home north of town was a stopping place for settlers in the early days. It was called “Half Way House” because settlers from Solomon Valley would come by driving their ox teams on their way to Salina to trade, and their next day stop again on their way home.
“Our bill of fare, I remember, was corn bread, sorghum molasses and buffalo meat, three times a day.” That’s another memory of Charlie Hamilton’s boyhood. “Meat was plentiful ig you were a good shot.”
There were other settlers, the brothers Giersch - Steven, Mike and Pete who had worked with O. P. Hamilton at the Kaw reservation where Charlie Hamilton was born Jan. 1, 1862, near Council Grove. The Giersch brothers led the elder Hamilton to Saline County and they all settled near each other. Stephen Giersch’s son, William, still lives here.
After his grandmother’s death, when he was about 18, Charlie Hamilton lived alone at the old place, except at times when he could get a ,man and wife to work for him.
“Seeing other young men taking on permanent homes and wives of their own put matrimony into my mind” he says mildly.
He met a “pretty young woman” who lived on a farm north of Topeka. Her name was Cora C. Gurtler. Well, they were married Aug. 20, 1885. And they reared four daughters, Ruth, now Mrs. Alfred Humfeld, who, with her husband, lives with Mr. Hamilton; Capitola, now Mrs. Fred Magerkurth,207 South 7th; Cecile, now Mrs. Bailey, Kansas City, Kansas, who. Although blind, does her own housework, is musical, is a doctor, and writes regularly to her father; and Hattie, now Mrs. George Gebbardt, Gaston, Ore., who’s husband is a brother of Mrs. Clara Miller, 519 South Santa Fe.
So life has been good. Even with a broken hip, of all things, by a fall from a ladder right at his home here in town, Charlie Hamilton looks back on it with pleasure and ahead with anticipation.
“I’d like to square dance again, “ he smiles, remembering those square dances given in the old Hamilton house out on the farm. The family moved out there again during the Depression days and made life gay with regular Saturday night square dances. They are remembered by the Charles Smith’s, by Mrs. T. P. Worsley, by George Shank, and by many another who frequented them. Hamilton had built a really fine floor in his big barn for that very purpose. Now the square dance is sweeping the country and from his wheel chair Charlie Hamilton eyes it with longing. “I’ll be out there again”, he prophesies.
He had a reputation in those days when Dennis Serrault “called” his square dances. “I had the name of dancing all evening and never with the same partner twice”, he laughs.
The old house is gone now. It was torn down about two years ago, and the lumber, which was poplar and walnut brought at such a cost in the 1862 era, was used to build two homes in Salina’s military addition. Hamilton has never seen those two homes.
Born to the saddle, Charlie Hamilton fervently hopes to ride again. His hip is healing. He last rode about two years ago, cutting out cattle for Jack Beverly, and for years was a magnificent figure on horseback in Salina parades and ceremonials.
“I have lived through blizzards, prairie fires, drought, depression and a few grasshoppers”, he says, “but I never lost faith in good old Kansas, and I’ve lived here more than 86 years. I always thought of living to the age of 100 years and riding horseback all the way. When I stepped off that ladder - me who thought he could step down off a horse in a way equal to any man - it took a lot of conceit out of me. And yet, what I’d really like to do is get in on this square dancing on horseback that people have gone so wild about. I think I’ll do it, too.”
Charlie Hamilton, sturdy, intrepid son of the Kansas plains, who thinks he has lived in Saline County longer than any other man now alive, begrudges every day he spends now in a wheelchair.
