The Monster of Leavenworth, Kansas July 21, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
***Thanks to Roberto for this tale***
This is a nasty little story from nineteenth-century Kansas. We are in Leavenworth in that state and enter Mrs. Green, note a suspiciously generic name. Mrs. Green is a midwife, a profession that has had many ups and downs at the hands of doctors, feminists, journalists (nota bene), witch-hunters and other demons of modernity. The Leavenworth Commercial reports:
On the night of the 29th of May last [1868] a vehicle might have been seen approaching the residence of Mrs. Green, and in that vehicle an elderly gray haired man.
Enter our villain. Elderly gray-haired man, persuades Mrs. Green to get in to his carriage and go and exercise her profession and for a hundred yards everything is normal. Then…
after having been driven a block or so, she was startled by a demand from the elderly gentleman that she submit to the delicate but uncertain process of being blind-folded. This, in the most peremptory manner, she refused. The persuasive powers of the old man were brought to bear upon her, to the end that she might do as requested. The quiet, gray-haired old gentleman, with all the courtesy due the sex, placed a loaded pistol at her ear and gave her the choice to be blindfolded or to become instantaneously and forever blind and oblivious to all sublunary things. She chose the blindfolding process, and a handkerchief was bound about her eyes so that she could neither see up nor down.
Beach has lived on planet earth a couple score years and he can say emphatically that invitations to put on blindfolds – be those invitations at children’s parties, stag nights, or in the underground cellars of the KGB – never end well. In any case ‘the quiet gray-haired gentleman’ drove Mrs Green around in such a way that she lost all sense of direction.
We are told that she finally arrived in ‘the most aristocratic and elegant portion of the city’, to which Beach wants to scream: this is Kansas in the 1860s not Versailles! But actually all this is supposition as the midwife only saw ‘an elegant chamber’ where she was conducted by a ‘negro servant’ and where the laboring mother waited.
Hours passed and the dim gray of morning broke over the murky Missouri. In the meantime a lovely girl of some thirteen or fourteen summers was a mother. The offspring was a curiosity. The lower part of its body was that of a well formed female infant, the upper part of the waist hairy and evidently belonging to the canine family. The mother was very low, and the elderly gentleman was informed by Mrs. Green that immediate medical assistance was necessary for her recovery. The offspring was also presented by Mrs. Green to the elderly man who had presented the pistol to her. He remarked, ‘just as I expected’.
What creates the horror here? The fact the baby is a dog above rather than below; the fact that Mrs. Green hardly seems to notice; the age of the mother; the fact that the mother gets rather lost in the confusion; the chilling drum-roll of that sentence from the father (?).
The story quickly winds down. Mrs. Green is brought home in secret and tells all her neighbours. Everyone presumes that the girl died as the grey-haired man would not have risked his reputation to search out a doctor (or did he blindfold one of them, too?); and the odds of the little dog girl were presumably practically nil.
There are several other stories of blindfolded nursemaids carrying out unusual commissions. But do any others end in monstrous births: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com.
30 Jul 2017, Bruce T: Fort Leavenworth was one of the main staging points for both the Santa Fe Trade and for later wagon trains heading west later in the 1840’s. It was the political center of the Kansas territory and it’s largest city, with roughly eight thousand people post Civil War, many whose families had become wealthy from the combination of the fur trade, the Santa Fe trade and outfitting and plucking the immigrants that were pouring into the region or heading to points further west. Leavenworth would have had an established elite by this time, with the wealth and power that brings, and those type of people do like to show it off. A note on the demographics of that section of Kansas. Puritan abolitionists from New England had been flooding the Kansas side since the 1850’s in a bid to keep the territory free, that’s when the fighting broke out between them and the slave holders of Missouri who had been crossing the river for years with their slaves to set up farms and settlements. These Puritans brought their odd ideas about the Devil being present everywhere. A dog baby coming from a suggested illicit relationship between a young girl and one of her older male relatives? Cue divine punishment and the arrival of the Dog Baby of Leavenworth.
