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Marlene is an emeriti professor of Illinois State University and formerly a professor for 22 years at the University of Kansas. While at KU, she earned the name, "Mother of KU Women's Athletics," while serving as coach of women's basketball, softball, tennis, volleyball and field hockey. In March, she was inducted into the KU Hall of Fame.
MISSOURI MARAUDERS' VISIT
By L. Marlene Mawson
The 1872 July day in Missouri dawned hot and muggy, but perfect for threshing wheat. Before sunrise, the team of six draft horses had pulledthe heavy McCormick "Old Reliable" threshing machine up the dusty lane and into place on the wheat field north of the barn on the Tillison place.
A dozen neighbor men gathered in the barnyard, bringing their horse-drawn hayrack wagons to help load the shocked wheat in the field and haul it in for threshing.
Three weeks previously, William Tillison had cut his 80 acres of wheat with a horse-drawn binder. The turning binder-paddles swept the cut wheat stems off the binder platform and deposited neat clumps of green wheat stems in the stubble behind.
The Tillison boys, Billy, 20; Hannibal, 13; and Sherman, 9; walked along behind the binder, collecting the clumps of wheat, tying the wheat stems into a bundle with twine, and setting them upright in shocks.
The Tillisons came westward to Missouri in 1868 with an Indiana wagon train and settled in northern Bates County, 50 miles south of the fledgling community incorporated in 1853 as the "City of Kansas" named after the Kansa Indian tribe.
The City of Kansas was located at the crook of the Missouri River, near where Westport Landing outfitted wagon trains heading westward on the Oregon and Santa Fe Overland Trails. Much of rural western Missouri was yet unsettled. After the Civil War, there was government-confiscated property available in the four Missouri counties south of Kansas City, bordering Kansas, due to the "bloody border strife" during the Civil War.
Much of the "bloody border strife" between the slave state of Missouri and the free state of Kansas pre-empted the official proclamation of the "War Between the States" at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in 1861. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which slavery was prohibited in land north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, had been repealed with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This act called for popular sovereignty in Kansas to determine the question of slavery. An armed struggle between the pro-slavery position of Missouri bushwackers and the anti-slavery jayhawkers in Kansas ensued.
Starting with John Brown's 1856 massacre at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, there were seven years of killing, plundering and burning in towns close to the Missouri-Kansas border.
Then after Quantrill's Raiders stormed across the border to kill more than 180 men and ransack Lawrence, Kan., on Aug. 21, 1863, Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing, in charge of the Union Army at Ft. Leavenworth, issued Order No. 11 four days later in an attempt to remove all support, forage and hiding places for the border guerillas.
Order No. 11 stated that all inhabitants of the Missouri border counties of Jackson, Cass, Bates and Vernon south to the banks of the Osage River had 15 days to take their belongings and remove themselves to Union garrison towns of Kansas City, Independence, Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill or Harrisonville.
Union troops enforced evacuation of all civil settlements in the four counties along the Kansas-Missouri border byburning properties and crops in these counties. Thus, the ravaged rural properties in these border counties of Missouri were available for resettlement in the years immediately after the war, and so William Tillison purchased Bates County farmland a mile south of the Cass and Bates county line upon the family's arrival in Missouri.
HIGH NOON
The summer threshing season meant that the Tillison women worked extra hard too, preparing the noontime dinner for the threshers. Elizabeth Tillison had three daughters to help, Mary Bell, 17; Sonora, 15; and Jessie, 11. Of the younger sons, Charlie, 7, was expected to keep Warren, 3, out of the way of the women all morning.
The kitchen door opened onto the covered side porch, which wrapped around to the parlor door at the front of the house. Tables were set for 15 men helping in the wheat threshing, and steaming bowls of several helpings were ready when they came inside at noon. The women and young boys ate after the men had returned to the harvest field.
When the dishes had been cleared, washed and dried by the women, Mary Bell exclaimed that she saw visitors riding up the lane from the wagon road. Two young men rode up to the house and dismounted. One of the strangers walked to the door, knocked and asked to water their horses at the barn horse trough.
The stranger said they had stopped at this farmhouse because they saw the threshers in the field, and as they were hungry, they thought there would be extra victuals left from the noontime meal, and he asked if there was food for their dinner. In frontier life, compassionate neighborliness was expected, and Elizabeth Tillison invited them to water their horses at the barn and then come on back to the house, where she would fix them a plate of food.
The two men watered the horses and returned to the house, knocked and came inside, and lifted the kitchen table to position it in the center of the room, where they each could see through an outside door over the other's shoulder. They took off their hats, laid their unholstered guns on the table beside their place, and sat down across from each other at the table. When Mrs. Tillison placed their filled plates before them, they ate without further conversation.
SILVER DOLLARS
Upon finishing their meal, the men stood, holstered their guns, laid a silver dollar on the table beside each empty plate, and thanked Elizabeth for their dinner.
As they departed from the house, one man said, "Weappreciate your hospitality, ma'am. My name is Jesse and this is my brother, Frank. We are known as the James boys." And with that they stepped off the porch, mounted their horses and rode down the lane to the wagon road and galloped on. Not until the Tillison family read of the notorious James boys in the St. Louis Dispatch newspaper did they realize exactly who Elizabeth Tillison had served that day.
Frank James, a preacher's son from Kearney, Mo., joined the Missouri state militia in 1861, fighting for the Confederacy in the Battle of Lexington in Missouri, and in 1862 he joined Quantrill's Raiders and rode in thedeadly Lawrence raid a year later. His younger brother Jesse, joined "Bloody Bill" Anderson's Missouri bushwackers that same year and then Quantrill's band in 1863, and the gang carried on guerilla tactics inMissouri and Kansas border towns on behalf of the Confederacy during the war.
Once the Civil War ended, Frank and Jesse rode together, turning outlaw with their first bank robbery of the Liberty, Mo., bank in 1866, reportedly self-justified by their hatred of the victorious Union forces.
The James brothers continued robbing banks, stages and trains for eight more years. The ruthless lore of the James gang heists became exaggerated and romanticized by newspapers. Each of the brothers married in 1874 and settled down with their families. Even so, continued robberies in frontier towns were blamed on the James Gang until Jesse was murdered by a trusted gang member, Bob Ford, in 1882. Frank surrendered in a few months, and was tried and acquitted for several murder/robberies; he lived out his life on the James' home place near Kearney, Mo., dying in 1915.
Mary Bell Tillison (1855-1933) married Will Mawson in 1874, just two summers after the James boys stopped at the Tillison home. This family story of the visit of the James boys was told to each of Mary Bell's five children. One of her sons, Chester Mawson, retold this story to his seven daughters (including Marlene and Phyllis), each of whom grew up on their Missouri family farm not 5 miles from where this story occurred.
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