J. V. Brower
It is necessary to
notice here the work of one J. V. Brower, who some years ago came into
Kansas and pretended to fix beyond question the exact spots visited by
Coronado. He published three books on the transactions of Coronado. He
made maps of Quivira and the adjacent country of
Harahey. On these maps he pretended to define the bounds of those
countries exactly—there was no conjecture, no possibility of error
admitted. In instances without number the lines of
Quivira bend around the heads of ravines as though a careful survey
had been made. The north line is carried along the south bank of the Smoky
Hill, falling sometimes within a mile or less of that stream, but never
permitted to touch it. The line between France and Germany was never more
closely adjusted than he made that between two tribes of brutish Indians
belonging to a common linguistic family. He pretended to rediscover the
principal villages and camps of Quivira and
Harahey. He caused to be erected granite monuments to mark the sites of
these supposed rediscoveries. And these shafts always bore inscriptions
telling how the sites they marked had been rediscovered by J. V. Brower.
Mr. Brower pretended to define these countries of
Quivira and Harahey by the extent of certain chart beds and the forms
of certain flint implements he found about the forks of the Kansas River.
He claims to have traced the inhabitants of Quivira
and Harahey from the Ozark Mountains to the locations he assigns them. He
did this by means of the forms of the flint arrowheads, knives, axes, and
hammers made by them. He even assures us that they lived on deer and wild
turkeys in the Ozarks, but became raw-meat eaters and blood-drinkers on
the Kansas plains where they could get buffaloes for food. This seems
strange when we remember that there were as many buffaloes on the plains
skirting the Ozarks as there were on the Kansas River, and as many deer
and turkeys on the Kansas streams as there were in the Ozarks. And even on
the Ozark ranges there were buffaloes in untold numbers. For the Ozark
Mountains were treeless and grass-covered until the expulsion of the
Indians. The timber appeared on them after the white man came and stopped
the Indian practice of burning the country over annually.
The methods of Mr. Brower cannot be approved. The shafts which he caused
to be erected may by mere accident be in proper locations. Most probably
they are not. He did not know. No one knows. No one ever will know. The
data to determine these matters does not now exist. So far as is now
known, this evidence had not been in existence for the past three hundred
years.
With Quivira Kansas made her first
manifestation. She broke on the world with a radiant flash as a recompense
to Coronado for Cibola and the pueblos of the Rio Grande—the mummy
villages of the dead deserts. While she was not appreciated and was left
to her "brutish people" and her rolling herds of wild oxen for some
centuries, it is a source of satisfaction to know that the Kansas plains
were ridden over by mailed knights generations before Jamestown and
Plymouth Rock were planted on our eastern shores. Vague Old Quivira plants
the feet of lusty young Kansas in the dim and misty fastnesses of the past
to give dignity and beget pride in the history of a state. Hazy and
distant Quivira is hoary with antiquity, but in
young and buxom Kansas she becomes the beacon of modern energy to light up
the ways of the world. Touched with the magic fire of Kansas, Old
Quivira had become a flame that burns across the
heavens—an inspiration, an ideal far superior in value to the crops or
herds or mines embraced in all her borders. For ideals are more precious
to mankind than material things.
So, Quivira takes its place as one of those
romantic incidents peculiar to Kansas history. It was all but forgotten
for two hundred years. Connected with any other state,
Quivira would have passed from the memory of
man. Or, perhaps, a few dry lines would have appeared in the misty annals
of the Southwest to tell of a fruitless trip to a desert land. But
associated with Kansas it became an indefinite mystery vital as the
pilgrimages to find the Holy Grail. Romances will have their seat in it.
Quivira is not only coequal with Kansas—it is
Kansas. It matters not now about exact metes and bounds, and never more
will matter, for they are not essential to Quivira.
It assumes a larger part—takes form as our earliest absorbing tradition.
It is our remotest background in which take refuge the mystic tragedies
incident to the evolution of the Great Plains. As a field for the fanciful
it holds an expanding value to the coming generations of Kansas.
Intangible as the luminous haze of a plains-horizon,
Quivira will become the swelling fountain of romance for all who shall
seek to connect their times with that mystic life which is to remain the
strongest support of civilization as long as the world shall stand.
