The Last Outlaws by Tom Clavin

Author:Tom Clavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

ACT IV

THE SHOOT-OUT

CHAPTER 23

A TOWN IN ITS TIME

Coffeyville may have been a fairly small city tucked away in the southeast corner of Kansas, but many of its citizens paid attention to events in the rest of the United States and in the world. In October 1892, Guglielmo Marconi was still five years away from founding his Wireless Telegraph Trading Signal Company (i.e., radio), so the most available sources of news remained what came across the telegraph lines and what was printed in the daily or weekly newspaper. The Coffeyville Journal had begun publishing in 1875, yet some citizens also had access to newspapers from Wichita and even as far north as Kansas City and St. Louis to the east.

In October 1892, a presidential election would be held the next month. The Democrat Grover Cleveland, from New York, who had already been president from 1885 to 1889, was back to challenge the Republican incumbent, Benjamin Harrison. This election would wind up being a historic one, with Harrison becoming the first president to lose the popular vote twice since John Quincy Adams in the 1820s, the first time that incumbents were defeated in consecutive elections, and the only time a Republican was voted out of the White House after a single four-year term, a dubious achievement that would not be repeated until 1992.*

The residents of Coffeyville may have read or otherwise learned that Ellis Island in New York had begun accommodating immigrants to the U.S.; that in March in Springfield, Massachusetts, the first game of a new sport called basketball had been played, with the final score being five baskets to one; Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was designated a national holiday; a device called the escalator made its debut at Coney Island Beach in New York; in Argentina, the world’s first fingerprinting bureau opened; the Johnson County War in Wyoming, which pitted small farmers against large ranchers, was still raging, killing as many as thirty-eight men (including those who were lynched); in big business, the General Electric Company was created; Oil City in Pennsylvania caught on fire, killing 130 people; John Muir organized the Sierra Club in San Francisco; Chicago opened an elevated railway; the arrest of Homer Plessy for sitting in a whites-only railroad car in Louisiana led to an unsuccessful attempt in the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine; the “Great Fire of 1892” almost destroyed St. John’s, Newfoundland; Lizzie Borden hacked her father and stepmother to death in their Massachusetts home (she was acquitted); William Gladstone became the prime minister of Great Britain; for the first time, the Pledge of Allegiance was recited in America; it was discovered that Jupiter had a third moon, and it was named Amalthea; and The Baltimore Afro-American, which would become the longest-running African American family-owned newspaper, published its first issue.

Since fixing its incorporation glitch in 1873, Coffeyville had steadily prospered. Surrounded by mostly successful farms, the city flourished as a trading destination along with becoming one of the most important grain and milling centers in the central west region.

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