Great Infidel

Kelso tried to reinvent himself as a public lecturer, giving talks describing his military adventures but also voicing radical views on marriage and religion. To earn a living, however, he had to return to itinerant school teaching. But he also kept writing, producing hundreds of pages of poetry, essays, and lectures, including freethinking treatises on God and the Bible and a book-length verse satire. He participated in the civic life of Modesto, a railroad boomtown that had sprouted next to vast wheat fields and was run by its saloon bosses—except on those occasions when vigilantes donned masks to clean up the town. In 1881, he climbed a Colorado mountain he dubbed “Great Infidel,” in honor of himself, and pondered his “desolate and storm-beaten life.”

I Am Kelso

In January 1863, a large Confederate force swept up from Arkansas. Kelso and his men discovered the advance and were chased back to the fort at Beaver Station and then to the one at Ozark, both of which the Confederates destroyed as they marched north to their target, Springfield. The Battle of Springfield pitted about 2,300 Federals defending the town, including local men and boys in the militia and patients in the army hospital, against a like-sized Confederate force commanded by General John S. Marmaduke. The men fought all day with artillery shells flying overhead. Kelso went spying at night, creeping among the wounded and the dead. Unable to take the town, the Confederates withdrew the next morning. In the aftermath, Kelso’s conflict with his drunken commanding officer lead to court martial proceedings, but Kelso was acquitted.

The Cold, Dark River

After serving in Congress, Kelso resolved to open his own academy in Springfield. He supported the women’s suffrage movement in town. But he had borrowed heavily to build a large school building, and when few students enrolled, he was financially ruined. He ran for Congress again in 1868, but in a bitter campaign focused on monetary policy and filled with dirty tricks, he floundered and was badly beaten by his old nemesis, Pony Boyd. All of this only added to the strain of his marriage, already plagued by sexual problems and mutual jealousies. Kelso’s great tragedy, however, was not financial, political, or marital. In early September, 1870, his five-year-old son died suddenly from tetanus after stepping on a rusty rake. Only two weeks later, his fourteen-year-old son committed suicide. Kelso was shattered. The following year, his marriage in ruins, he took his eldest daughter Florella and headed west.

Introduction

A through-line in Kelso’s multifaceted life is his commitment to manhood. “Manhood” in nineteenth-century America was about more than the gendered distinctions between the masculine and the feminine. It was what distinguished the human from the beast, and the adult from the child. It had both political and economic characteristics. It demanded that the man take action according to the dictates of conscience. Moreover, there were different dialects of manliness, even among men of the same race, class, ethnicity, and region: competitive or fraternal, passionate or stoic, explosively violent or piously persevering. For Kelso manhood was at once an expectation for all adult males, a quality of character to be developed and expressed, and a prized achievement earned from others. This theme helps us see how aspects of nineteenth-century American culture that might seem worlds apart were in fact experientially connected.

Hell Town

In 1852, Kelso was a young schoolteacher in a place nicknamed “Hell Town” in Platte County, Missouri. He faced down a gang of knife-wielding teenaged boys who tried to control the school. Like many nineteenth-century schoolmasters, he used violence and humiliation to assert his authority: he beat the schoolhouse rebels with a dogwood switch (threatening worse), and ritually mocked the gang’s leader. But in the 1850s, the entire Missouri-Kansas borderland, and then the entire country, became a Hell Town, where authority broke down and men reached for weapons, threatening and inflicting violence. The issue was slavery. But which party stood like the schoolmaster, teaching a lesson about law and order, and which was the gang of rebels, needing to be mastered or humiliated and driven out? Proslavery vigilantes harassed anyone expected of abolitionism, and Free Soilers fought back. For the time being, though, Kelso and his young wife stayed quiet.

Electioneering with a Big Shotgun

While still serving and fighting, Kelso challenged the sitting congressman for Missouri’s Fourth District, Sempronius Boyd, for his seat in the 1864 election. Both were Radical Republicans, so Kelso had to make the contrast about character. He also gave a few political speeches clarifying his positions on Reconstruction, especially concerning Black rights and the treatment of rebels and the rebellious states. He discovered documents related to the secret rebel society, Knights of the Golden Circle. As Election Day approached, he was in the field as Confederate General Sterling Price invaded Missouri with 12,000 soldiers. Price was beaten and Kelso was elected.

The Great Mistake

Worn down by the summer of 1866, Kelso withdrew from the fall election. There was still work to be done, however, in the second session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress in the spring of 1867. He helped push the Radical Republican agenda for Reconstruction, including passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. He was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. He proposed another constitutional amendment, which would have promoted racial, gender, and social equality and given a federal guarantee to public education. But as lobbyists offered railroad junkets and stock schemes, he also saw political corruption firsthand. In retrospect, though, he felt his greatest mistake was in rejecting the administration’s offer to make him a diplomat, which would have changed the course of life and avoided the tragedies that shortly followed.

Hero of the South West

Kelso earned regional fame as a hunter of rebel bandits and bushwhackers. Stories about him spread by word of mouth and lingered into the later nineteenth century. Rebels called him a cruel monster; Unionists hailed him as the Hero of the South West. He was remembered as a polite, scholarly man who read books of philosophy or German grammar in camp, rode a charmed horse named Hawk Eye, and carried an oversized shotgun. He was renowned for his “individual heroism,” his fearlessness, and for fighting like a “tiger” in hand-to-hand combat. In the summer of 1863, however, his luck temporarily ran out when he was hit by a shotgun blast and crushed beneath his fallen horse.

Who the Devil Are You, Anyway?

Declining the chance to become an officer to make a point about patriotism, Kelso joined the 24th Missouri Infantry as a private. Sent on solo spy missions, he learned to assume the identity he needed: as a gentleman giving speeches at Confederate recruiting stations, or as a coarse, racist rebel denouncing abolitionists. Back home in Buffalo, after Union General John C. Frémont’s campaign to push the Confederates out of southwest Missouri was abandoned, Kelso’s secessionist neighbors burned his house down and drove his family out into the snow. He vowed to kill twenty-five rebels with his own hands in revenge. On another spy mission, he was captured and condemned to hang, but made a daring escape.

I Will Rule

Kelso spent his first nine years, in the 1830s, in a crude cabin in backwoods Ohio with his parents and six siblings. He later told tales of wilderness life: an attack by wolves, a swarm of pigeons, an army of hungry squirrels. He remembered his mother beating his backside with a beech limb when, after trying to teach goslings to swim by holding them underwater, he drowned them. Thinking his baptism was another punishment for misbehavior, he tried to run away, and then, when captured, bit the minister in the leg. Descended from a line of independent Scots, he thought his name meant “I will rule.”