When idealism clashed with pragmatism, Octagon City, meant to be a refuge for vegetarians south of Humboldt, failed to take root.
The husband-and-wife writing team of Aaron Barnhart and Diane Eickhoff gave that take Tuesday evening at Iola Public Library.
The duo are in the process of writing a chronicle of the vegetarian colonys brief existence and the life of Henry Clubb, the idealist who meant to create the meatless utopia in Kansas. Were trying to tell the story in a fresh way, said Eickhoff, author of more than 20 books.
Along the way they have learned that a diary transcribed to book form, Went to Kansas, in 1862 from the hand of Miriam Davis Colt didnt do the colonys history justice. Colt and her family were among settlers who accepted Clubbs offer to move to Kansas and live a simple and ethical lifestyle.
The outcome was more dystopia than utopia, but perhaps not as harsh as Colt related. The settlers expected challenges, as any examination of settling out West in the mid-1800s portrays, but they did not anticipate Clubbs managerial ineptitude.
Three people died during the sparse occupation along what today is known as Vegetarian Creek, the authors said. But Colts diary would lead a reader to think death visited often.
A metal placard positioned on a small boulder along old Highway 169 three miles south of Humboldt fixes the site of the colony two miles to the east. It claims 150 settlers came and scores died because of drought, fever, mosquitoes, malaria and dysentery. Eickhoff and Barnhart claim food was sufficient to sustain colonists. Some did suffer from ague fever and chills but recovered in a reasonable time, they claim.
Their sources are from accounts contained in letters, some found in the United States, some in England. Among the letters were those written by Colt, which didnt follow the same theme as her diary. They think the diary was negatively colored by the despair she suffered trying to make a go of it in the harsh reality of mid-1800s Kansas. She once wrote, I hate Kansas.
A letter penned by another colonist, William Somerville, dated July 13, 1856, supports the contentions of Barnhart and Eickhoff.
The colony might have had a chance had it lasted through the winter of 1856-57, Barnhart opined. But those who came to settle in Kansas soon began returning to their homes back East, disheartened and disillusioned.
Colt and her family arrived in mid-May 1856 and abandoned their makeshift dwelling three months later. What may have affected her diary entries was the death of a young son, Willie, and her husband in Boonville, Mo., on their way home. Information Barnhart and Eikhoff have uncovered have led them to question whether their deaths were attributable to their time in Kansas, or from tainted water they drank in Missouri.
Eickhoff and Barnharts book is a work in progress, and its focus has teetered between Clubbs life and the Kansas vegetarian colony.
CLUBB, BORN in England in 1827, emigrated to the United States in 1853, arriving in New York when causes celebres were the rage.
Clubb embraced the roots of the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) and the attendant trend to vegetarianism. He also joined those opposed to slavery and supported womens rights. (It was 63 years, a lifetime for the era, before women achieved suffrage in 1920.)
He also promoted hydropathy (water cures) and abstinence from dairy products, alcohol and tobacco.
That within two years he adopted a plan to establish a utopian colony in the West Kansas was convenient free of what he considered vices was no surprise to contemporaries.
