A BUBBLE BURSTED

Newton , Harvey CO., KANSAS, February 9th, 1886 (click here)

The February 6, 1886 edition of the Newton Republican gives J. R. Norris’s tale in which he was “persuaded” to join “a very large hunting outfit in which were several English and European high flyers, or nobles as they were called.” As the story goes, their hunting grounds comprised Harvey, Reno, and Sedwick counties. At one point, they went into bivouac on Sand creek, “where some water animal, a mink, I think, (more likely muskrat) showed itself right by our encampment and a lot of the boys got after it with anything they could lay hands on, several grabbing chunks of coal to pelter it with. Probably some of this same coal is what Mr. Spencer found.” 

As Mr. Norris explains, “I do not wish to throw cold water on the coal project…” 

I find the chronicle of this expedition exciting for obvious reasons. My surname being Spencer, I live in Harvey County, Kansas, and I am a scholar of my past. But more importantly, descriptions of the expedition’s participants and the various flora and fauna native to this section of the country in the 1860s give life to the story. But just because his surname was Spencer and this occurred in Harvey county in 1866, and it’s also consistent with his nature as a promoter of similar civic projects, does not necessarily mean that this erstwhile said entrepreneur was none other than “A Star Cus.”