A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [8]
The Flint Hills were tough to cultivate but they made ideal pasture. Cowboys drove cattle overland from Texas to Kansas for summer grazing, then on to railroad cattle towns for shipping to feedlots and eventual slaughter. As the railroads expanded, small towns became shipping points for cattle to be loaded on trains to Kansas City and Chicago. Cow towns such as Wichita, thirty miles west of El Dorado, flourished. In 1886, Butler County discovered kaffir corn, a tropical African variety of sorghum used to feed cattle and poultry, and ideally suited to the Kansas climate. Kaffir corn was drought- and heat-resistant, and thrived in dry warmth. As Butler County farmers turned increasingly to cattle raising, the price of kaffir corn soared. By 1911, nearly sixty thousand acres were planted with kaffir corn. To celebrate, the Knights of Mapira, a fraternal order, organized the first Kaffir Corn Carnival, a three-day celebration in downtown El Dorado that included parades, pageants, and contests. A triumphal arch made of kaffir corn and other crops spanned the first block of East Central Avenue. Twenty-nine townships in the county built booths decorated with animals, township maps, and the seal of Kansas, all out of kaffir corn. Men competed in fence-building, nail-driving, and hog-calling contests. Women did chicken calling, geese picking, butter churning. There was turtle racing and a float competition. In October 1926, the title of Miss El Dorado for that year’s carnival went to Stanley Ann’s great-aunt Doris Evelyn Armour, a 1923 graduate of El Dorado High School and a former student at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia, whom the local newspaper described as “a genuinely beautiful girl, with dark brown bobbed hair, brown eyes and a delicate coloring that is entirely natural and most becoming.”
Butler County had another resource, even better than kaffir corn and far more unsettling. A few years before the births of Stanley Dunham and Madelyn Payne, a massive oil strike upended the economy of the region almost overnight. In the porous stone along the eastern edge of the Nemaha Ridge in southeastern Kansas, there were pools of oil and natural gas. On October 7, 1915, the Wichita Natural Gas Company struck oil on land owned by John Stapleton about five miles northwest of El Dorado. It was one of the largest oil strikes of the time. Oil companies and entrepreneurs thundered in. In 1918, the year Stanley was born, the El Dorado field produced 29 million barrels, a figure that Craig Miner says was more than nine times the total output for Kansas three years earlier. El Dorado was the largest-producing single field in the United States. It was wartime, too, so oil prices were high. There were more strikes near Towanda and Augusta. Derricks and tank farms sprung up. Soon there were eight refineries in towns such as El Dorado, Augusta, Wichita, and Potwin. The population of El Dorado and the surrounding township soared to 14,459 in 1920 from 3,262 in 1915, more than quadrupling in five years. Hundreds of one-room shacks and tents were thrown up, as El Dorado home owners leased their backyards and gardens, and built houses in vacant lots to rent out. Oil companies rolled out instant towns, with names such as Oil Hill and Midian, replete with tennis courts, swimming pools, baseball teams, and horseshoe pits. Oil-field lease houses—with walls made of compressed wood pulp, no indoor plumbing or electricity, and heat from a single stove—rented for an average of seven dollars a month. Oil-field employees worked twelve-hour shifts around the clock. Drugstores stayed open late into the night. Then the storm passed. In 1925, the year Madelyn turned three and her family moved from Peru to Augusta, the boom peaked. By the 1930s, the oil companies had turned their attention elsewhere. The population of Butler County dwindled. Left in the boom’s wake was the memory of a bonanza that had barreled through town like a westbound train.
In December 2008, I visited Ralph Dunham, the brother of Stanley Dunham and uncle of