Kansas Mediocrity

Labette Community College history instructor John Mack was published in this month's Kansas History magazine.

The article entitled "United We Stand: Law and Order on the Southeastern Kansas Frontier, 1866-1870" focuses on how after the Civil War thousands of settlers poured into Southeast Kansas seeking new opportunities for economic success that had, perhaps, eluded them back east.

In Mack's article, he discusses that from the settlers' perspective, this was still a raw frontier land, and facing political and legal uncertainty, they looked to each other for sustenance, support and strength. Acutely conscious of their vulnerability, settlers created extra-legal cooperative clubs and committees by which they defended their nascent communities against those intent on circumventing the law.

Mack examines the formation of these extra-legal committees by explicating the cultural values that supported their attempts to establish ordered communities on the southeastern Kansas frontier.

"From the vantage point of twenty-first-century social norms," concludes professor Mack, "these settlers were taking the law into their own hands. . . . [but] they viewed their actions differently."

If the legally constituted authorities could not insure "social order," the settlers would do so themselves. "Any assault on their property or their families was a direct attack on the social order they were seeking to establish and neither would nor could be tolerated."

The article can be found on the Kansas History website at www.kshs.org.