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[ 307 ] P rudence Crandall witnessed a remarkable transformation of the western United States during her years in Elks Falls, Kansas. The transcontinental railroad—completed in 1869—spawned rapid development. Settlers increasingly fenced and farmed the open plains. “How many changes we have passed through,” Crandall wrote.1 At the beginning of the 1870s, buffalo filled the grasslands of Kansas and other western states. Scouts reported herds fifty miles wide. When herds forced the trains to slow or stop, the railroads waged war against the animals. Hunters killed tens of millions of buffalo in the great slaughter of the 1870s.2 Tourists were encouraged to join in the killing. The London Times advertised a holiday hunt in Kansas where British citizens could “shoot from the window of a railway carriage on the Union Pacific.”3 The son of Czar Alexander II of Russia, Grand Duke Alexis, traveled to Kansas to join in gunning down the buffalo.4 By the end of the decade the animal was nearly extinct. “After the buffalo and the Indian disappeared, after the hunters were gone, the pioneers came,” Kansas commentator Sheridan Ploughe wrote in 1917. “It is but a half century from bison to shorthorn, from the untamed herds on the plains to the silos of modern farming.”5 Ploughe celebrated displacing “the tenants of the soil of a thousand years” to make way for settlers and domesticated livestock .6 The railroad extension into Elk Falls had increased opportunity and commerce. “There is a nice hotel built at the depot where four trains a day stop to take meals,” Prudence wrote to her grandniece. “It is quite surprising to see the amount of cattle that are passed through here on the trains together with every kind of freight you can men17 : Pursuit of Justice [ 308 ] Prudence Crandall’s Legacy tion.”7 Local dairy farmers increased the size of their herds to sell milk and cheese to other cities and towns. A gristmill produced flour for statewide markets. Local congregations built two new churches, and the state constructed a school in nearby Howard.8 “Our little city gains finely,” Prudence said.9 The railroad also created new hazards. In July 1880, when a few of Prudence’s cattle crossed the new tracks, a speeding freight train struck and killed one of Prudence’s prized oxen.10 Prudence’s niece Clarissa and her children moved out of Crandall’s home to a farm a few miles down the road in 1879. “We moved away from Aunt’s and lived by ourselves, not far away,” Rena Keith Clisby remembered , “near enough that we could go to see her at least once a week. We knew what awaited us on arrival—a warm welcome, with a ‘pop up little dears,’ as she told us to sit on her high couch bed.”11 Clarissa married a stonemason, thirty-six-year-old “John” Hannant, the same man who had convinced Prudence Crandall to trade her property in Cordova, Illinois, for his farm in Elk Falls, sight unseen, and took five hundred dollars from her as payment to build a stone fence that he never completed.12 In his dealings with Prudence he had heard her on more than one occasion remark that “everything I have shall go to Clarissa on my death.”13 Rena Keith Clisby thought Hannant had married her mother for her inheritance. A visit by Clarissa’s children on Sunday provided the highlight of the week for Prudence and Hezekiah. “Rena is coming soon to make a scrapbook of stories that she has been reading for a long time in the Windham County Transcript,” Prudence wrote to a grandniece. “She has read them with great interest ever since we have been in Kansas.”14 Rena had most likely read old stories describing the school controversy. In addition to copies of the Windham County Transcript, Prudence subscribed to the New York Tribune, the Boston Transcript, and a spiritualist journal printed weekly in Boston, the Banner of Light.15 “I enjoyed the séances and the testimonies of those who saw and talked with their loved ones on the ‘other side,’” Rena wrote. “No doubt, Aunt (Prudence) was psychic.”16 Maria W. Stewart published her collection of essays and speeches, Meditations, in August 1879. She enjoyed her new financial security for a brief time—she became ill toward the end of the year. Stewart, seventy-six years old, died in December. Rev. Alexander Crummell, a former student [3.140.185.147...

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