Rewind a couple of decades or so to 1995.
The Allen County Historical Society, under a project spearheaded by Iola attorney Clyde Toland, had raised enough money to bring the old, crumbling boyhood home of Maj. Gen. Frederick Funston from its original site several miles north of Iola to the west side of the courthouse square.
Toland, eager to capitalize on Iola’s newest tourist attraction, figured museum visitors would want to know more about Fearless Fred, and how the local farm boy and son of a state legislator eventually became one of the country’s most prominent military leaders of the early 20th century.
“It dawned on me, we really need a book of Funston to sell,” Toland said this week. “I very naively thought we could put together a short book. Now, we have a biography to sell — 27 years later.”
The first volume of Toland’s “Becoming Frederick Funston” trilogy — titled “American Hero, Kansas Heritage: Frederick Funston’s Early Years 1865-1890 — is now for sale at the ACHS museum gift shop, or via Amazon or other online outlets.
Volumes 2 and 3 are slated to be published later this year.
Toland’s original plan, to release the entire trilogy as a single book, took a detour once he largely finished writing the book in 2019, and realized the tome clocked in north of 700 pages.
“It was very obvious it was too long, and I needed to divide it up,” Toland said.
Fortunately, Funston’s early years had three primary focuses as well.
The first volume deals primarily with Funston’s childhood and early careers, where he worked as everything from a newspaper reporter — he was great friends with Charles F. Scott, the first ever publisher of the Iola Register and great-grandfather of current publisher Susan Lynn — to farmer and ticket collector for the Santa Fe Railroad.
“He’s no different than most of us in life,” Toland said. “He didn’t know growing up what he wanted to do.”
Volume Two focuses on Funston’s years as a botanist and explorer, and his famed exploration and surveying expeditions through the brutal Death Valley desert in California, then a couple of years later in entirely polar opposite conditions across northern Alaska.
The third and final volume begins with Funston’s military career after he joined the Cuban Liberation Army and found the military to his liking. He eventually became a general.
Inasmuch as the story focuses on Funston, Toland’s book also provides a keen insight on life in Iola and Allen County more than a century ago.
Stories of Iola’s early rivalry with Humboldt as both towns strived to become Allen County’s official county seat, or President Rutherford B. Hayes when he visited Neosho Falls in 1879 are featured prominently in Funston’s story.
