May Calvin, Another Female Horse Thief

Last week I wrote about Della Oxley, a female horse thief who made headlines in Southwest Missouri in the early 1890s. Shortly after Della was sent to prison, May Calvin appeared on the scene to take up the work of horse thievery. May’s exploits were sensationalized in the press even more than Della’s, and she eventually joined her predecessor at the big house in Jefferson City.  

May came to Webb City around 1890, when she was about fifteen years old. Shortly afterward, she dropped out of school and joined Robinson’s Circus in St. Louis as a rider. Before long, she came back to southwest Missouri and drifted across the state line into Kansas, where she went on a criminal spree.
About the middle of October, 1892, May stole a horse and buggy at Fort Scott and immediately started south. She was captured at Weir City, brought back to Fort Scott, and placed in the Bourbon County jail. However, her youth and good looks won her the sympathy of the prosecutors, and the case against her was dismissed on January 21, 1893.
Less than twelve hours after gaining her freedom, a May appropriated a horse and buggy from a barn near Hepler, Kansas, and drove back to Fort Scott. She then “drove furiously” to Nevada, Missouri. There she left the stolen rig at a livery as security for another horse and buggy and resumed her mad dash. The day after she passed through Nevada, a posse captured her, and she was turned over to Crawford County authorities for the Hepler heist.
Placed in the county jail at Girard, May escaped or was again released in March or April, and she soon turned up in Joplin. Calling at the livery stable of W. V. White, she hired a horse and buggy for the stated purpose of driving to East Joplin, but she conveniently forgot to return the rig. Around the first of June, White recovered his stolen horse, but there was no sign of his buggy, nor of May Calvin. Then, on June 5, May was arrested in Columbus, Kansas, for disturbing the peace. The local officers held her until a Joplin constable arrived on June 7 to take her back to Jasper County. Unable to post bond, she was taken to Carthage and placed in the same jail cell where Della Oxley had been housed in 1891.

May was charged with grand larceny, but before she could be tried, she and a fellow female inmate made a daring escape from the county jail on June 16, 1893. According to the Carthage Press, they escaped through the same opening “commenced two years ago by Della Oxley.”

May was recaptured a day or two after her escape and taken back to Carthage. On June 22, she pled guilty to horse stealing and was assessed two years in the state penitentiary. Unabashed by the punishment, May greeted reporters cheerily as she was being escorted back to jail and asked them to “write her up right.”

A Press reporter proceeded to oblige her with an embellished account of her misadventures. “She…now goes to the penitentiary for the first time,” the newspaperman concluded, “though she has stolen dozens of horses and vehicles.”
The Carthage newspaperman’s account was tame compared to some of the incredible stories about May that appeared elsewhere. May made headlines across the country and even internationally. One story, first published in the US and later picked up by a New Zealand newspaper, called May “the phenomenal girl horse-thief,” whose career “surpassed anything of the kind before known.”
The stories about May continued long after she had been sent to the state prison. In 1894, a St. Louis Republic reporter visited May at the Jefferson City facility and wrote a fantastic story entitled “A Beautiful Horse Thief.” The newspaperman’s description of May bordered on the titillating, calling her “pretty as a picture” and “a rustic beauty,” with “great blue eyes and a mass of tousled hair of Titian hint. Her form is luscious…. Her mouth is one that an impressionable artist would go wild over, with its cherry red lips of sensuous curve.”
Admitting that she was guilty as charged, May told the Republic reporter, “I have no hard luck story to tell.”
May said she didn’t know why she’d turned out so bad because her mother and father had treated her well. She added, “I’m not like other women, either, in blaming my downfall on any man.”
After serving eighteen months of her two-year sentence, May was released from prison on December 22, 1894. What happened to her after her discharge remains a mystery.
This story, like the one last week about Della Oxley, is condensed from my book Wicked Women of Missouri.

                                                                                                     

Della Oxley: Female Horse Thief

During the puritanical Victorian era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a woman who stepped out of her expected domestic role as wife, mother, or obedient daughter stirred gossip. If she ventured out too far, she created scandal and sensational newspaper stories.

An unusual outbreak of horse stealing by young women in the southwest Missouri area during a twelve-year period from the early 1890s to the early 1900s provided just the kind shocking material that journalists of the time thrived on. Della Oxley was the first of three female horse thieves from the region who made headlines across the country.

Twenty-year-old Della first ran afoul of the law in 1890 when she and her husband, Perry Oxley, were charged with prostitution in Kansas. Then she wrote her name in the annals of horse thievery in 1891 after she and Perry drifted into southwest Missouri, where she got arrested in Jasper County for stealing a horse on the Fourth of July near Medoc.

Tried at Carthage on October 24, Della was convicted and sentenced to five years in the state prison at Jefferson City. When officers went to take her breakfast the next morning, she had escaped by sawing one of the cell bars in two and dropping to the ground below. It was thought someone from the outside had supplied her with the saw.

A note in which Della appeared to contemplate suicide was found in her cell after her escape, but a Carthage newspaper dismissed the letter as a ruse.

After her escape, Della made her way to Baxter Springs, Kansas. Arriving on Monday morning, October 26, she “proceeded to take in the town,” according to the Baxter Springs News. Among other activities, Della reportedly had her picture taken and mailed to a friend. She had cut her hair short before her escape, and when she arrived in Baxter, she was dressed in men’s clothes and “presented the appearance of a smart, smooth-faced young man,” according to the News.

An effort to upgrade her wardrobe led to Della’s recapture. She went to a clothing store and bought a pair of trousers and a cowboy hat, but in changing trousers she left a letter that was addressed to her in the old pair of trousers. The letter aroused the suspicions of the storekeeper, and he notified Baxter Springs law officers, who arrested Della about 11:00 o’clock that night. She admitted she was the escapee from Carthage, and Jasper County authorities came to Kansas and took charge of the prisoner. Bidding adieu to Mrs. Oxley, the News claimed she was a notorious burglar and thief who had “broken out of several different jails” and a Joplin paper dubbed her “the female horse thief.”
Upon her return to Carthage, Della was assigned to her old quarters, but she was securely chained to the floor. On November 4^th, officers discovered her shackles had been filed almost in two. A threat from the sheriff to put her in a dungeon induced her to give away the two accomplices who had helped her escape the first time and had supplied the file for her latest jailbreak attempt. Both young men were arrested and lodged in jail at Carthage.

On November 11, Della was shipped to Jefferson City to serve the five-year term she had been previously assessed. A correspondent to the Fort Worth Gazette gave readers an exaggerated and inaccurate description of Della at the time, starting with the fiction that she was thirty-six years old and was born “in a New England village.” In addition, Della had supposedly become “a hardened criminal” when she was only twelve years old. The Gazette correspondent continued his extravagant account: “She drifted to the West and organized a band of horse thieves and burglars, which had for its range the states of Kansas and Western Missouri. For the past ten years these robbers have been living off of the farmers of this section, and all the raids and burglaries were planned by the woman, Della Oxley.”

Della was, in truth, only twenty-one years old, not thirty-six, and ten years earlier she was not organizing a gang of horse thieves in Kansas and Missouri, since she was an eleven-year-old girl living in Indiana with her parents at the time.
Della was released from the Missouri State Penitentiary on August 13, 1895, under the state’s three-fourths law. The following January, Perry Oxley filed for a divorce, and later in 1896, Della was remarried in Illinois. She died in Taylorville, Illinois, in 1898 at the age of 28.

This story is condensed from my book Wicked Women of Missouri.

Ben Davis Apples

Growing apples was a big industry in Missouri during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Missouri was one of the top two or three states in the country for apple production during this time, and the Ben Davis variety was king in Missouri.
According to the Kansas Farmer, the Ben Davis apple was brought from North Carolina to Kentucky with other seedling apples by the Davis family. Later the Davis family moved to Butler County, Missouri, and planted the state's first Ben Davis orchard. Some years later, as the new apple variety gained popularity, the question arose as to what to call it, and the name Ben Davis was settled on, because he was the person who first brought the seedling sprouts from North Carolina.
Almost from the very beginning, the Ben Davis apple had its detractors, because it was not very flavorful and its color was not very good when grown in northern climates. However, for many years, these deficiencies were more than offset by the variety's good qualities, at least in the eyes of many growers. In southern Missouri and other temperate climates where the seasons were long enough, the Ben Davis grew to be a large, colorful fruit, and Missouri became known as "the land of the big red apple." As one observer commented in 1906, "People will buy fruit on its looks, even if they know its quality is not as great as the quality of some other fruit." Also, the Ben Davis was very productive, making a good crop every year, whereas some varieties produced no or very little fruit in alternate years. Growers of Ben Davis apples could count on having a steady income year after year, even if the apples sold for up to $2 a bushel less than other varieties like the Jonathan, as was sometimes the case. The Ben Davis apple was a good keeper and could be stored for long periods of time without rotting. When it was bruised, it merely dried up at the point of the bruise and formed a hard crust, which could later be cut off, whereas most other apples would immediately start rotting if bruised. In addition, the Ben Davis apple tree was said not to be as susceptible to infection and disease as certain other varieties. Finally, the Ben Davis was known for its soil adaptability. It could be grown almost anywhere. Thus its popularity spread to growers in other states.
The popularity of the Ben Davis variety began to wane, however, by the early 1910s. 
There were a number of factors that led to the decline of the Ben Davis and to the apple industry in general in Missouri. Some growers began to neglect their trees, and insect and disease spread to neighboring orchards. Drought has also been cited as a factor, but the main reason for the demise of the apple industry in Missouri was its growing reputation for shipping inferior fruit, particularly the Ben Davis. The Pacific Northwest soon supplanted Missouri as the apple-growing capital of the US.
Commenting on the decline of the apple industry in Missouri in 1920, a columnist for a Jefferson City newspaper remarked, "Missouri, in the zenith of its apple-growing fame, never was especially noted for its fancy 'eating' apples. The Ben Davis has been the great product of the state. Those who have ridden down Missouri lanes flanked with great orchards of Ben Davis apples just about the time of year when the first breath of winter is in the air, will never forget the sight. A Ben Davis apple orchard with the big red apples backed by the green leaves of the trees is a pastoral picture ever to be remembered. To the uninitiated, it creates a desire to eat, a most unfortunate urge because Ben Davis apples, for eating purposes, don't live up to their beauty. Take them home, however, fry them and dish them up with strips of broiled bacon, plenty of hot biscuits and great glasses of foamy milk and you have a real Missouri supper worth the name."
One of the curiosities left over from the boom days of the apple industry in the Ozarks is the small community of Bendavis, located on Highway 38 in Texas County, Missouri. It was platted about 1910 by James J. Burns, who hoped to build a town at the site, and he named it Ben Davis or Bendavis, because he planned to grow Ben Davis apples in his large orchards there. However, by 1910, Ben Davis apples were already in decline, and the town never amounted to more than a general store and a post office. Today, it is just a wide place in the road.

Crystal Cave, Crystal Cave, and Crystal Caverns

Having grown up in the Springfield area, I've known about Crystal Cave, located seven or eight miles north of Springfield, for most of my life. For many years, it was a pretty successful show cave, but it closed to tours twelve years ago or so, and, as far as I know, has still not re-opened. In fact, it was recently up for sale, but I don't know whether it still is.
As a longtime resident of Joplin, I am also fairly familiar with the old Crystal Cave that was located on West 4th Street in Joplin. It, too, was a tour cave during the early 1900s, but it closed in the early 1930s because of slackening attendance, high humidity inside the cave, and other problems. About that time or shortly afterward, mining in the Joplin area began tapering off and the cave began to fill with water, since the surrounding shafts were not being pumped out as they had been. An attempt was made in the 1940s to de-water the cave so that it might be opened back up, but the effort was unsuccessful and the cave was sealed back up. Today, a historical marker stands at the northwest corner of Fourth and Gray in Joplin as the only visible reminder of the cave's location.
However, I was not familiar with Crystal Caverns at Cassville until just a day or two ago. I think I might have vaguely been aware that such a place existed, but that was about all I knew until I started doing some research for this blog.
Crystal Caverns, located less than a mile north of Cassville just off Business Highway 37, was discovered in the mid-1800s, but it remained a private cave for almost eighty years. The website of the Barry County Museum says the cave was first opened as a show cave in 1924, but the Missouri Cave and Karst Conservancy says that 1994 marked Crystal Caverns's 65th and final year as a show cave. The latter statement seems to jibe with my own research, because, as best I've been able to determine, the cave was first opened for tours on July 19, 1930. A notice in the July 17, 1930, issue of the Cassville Republican announced that the cave would open on the 19th. Follow-up articles in the same paper make it clear that the cave did indeed open on or very near the 19th, and they also make it pretty clear that this was not a re-opening for the season but rather a first-time opening.
In the summer of 1930, the cave was being developed by Philip Eidson and John McFarlin. (McFarlin was married to Eidson's sister, and her and Eidson's father had previously owned the property.) It's clear from issues of the Republican in the summer of 1930 that the cave enterprise was a new or recent undertaking. For instance, the owners were still in the process of naming the formations in the cave. In addition, an article published in the Republican in early July of 1931 mentions that the cave "was first opened" less than a year ago. So, if the cave opened in 1924, as the county museum says, it must have been on a very limited basis and must not have been very well promoted.
When the cave opened in 1930, guided tours costs fifty cents, and they were conducted by flashlight and Coleman lanterns. The tour took visitors to six different rooms. At this early stage, the cave was sometimes called Crystal Cave. The fact that there were two other caves in the region by the same name may have been partly why the Cassville cave soon came to be called Crystal Caverns instead of Crystal Cave.
In the spring of 1931, McFarlin and his family went to Kentucky to tour several show caves in that state to get a better idea how to operate their own cave back in Cassville.
The McFarlin family or relatives of the family continued to operate Crystal Caverns, with a brief interruption, until Gary and Linda Sartin leased the property in 1977. The Sartins kept the cave open until 1994. It then sat vacant for about five years until the Missouri Cave and Karst Conservancy took it over. The group spent the next ten years or so surveying, mapping, and restoring the cave. The cave is now primarily an educational resource and is open by appointment only. In 2015, someone broke into the cave and vandalized it, destroying many rock formations.

William Henry Lynch and the Development of Marvel Cave

Today, tours of Marvel Cave, located on the grounds of Silver Dollar City, are free to anyone paying admission to the theme park. The cave is little more than a sidelight, though, and many visitors to Silver Dollar City bypass the subterranean tour altogether. Once upon a time, the situation was reversed. As most people who live in the Ozarks know, Marvel Cave as a tourist attraction predated Silver Dollar City by many years. The cave was not just the main attraction in the vicinity; it was the only attraction. Starting about 1960, Silver Dollar City grew up around the cave, but in the very early days of the theme park, the cave was still the main attraction. Visitors had to pay to tour the cave, but admission to Silver Dollar City was free. Quite a switch from the way it is today.
Evidence suggests that Marvel Cave was known to Osage Indians hundreds of years before white men inhabited the Ozarks, and early Europeans may have explored the cave as early as the mid-1500s. The first recorded exploration of the cave, however, was led by St. Louis lead-mining magnate Henry T. Blow in 1869. Blow's group didn't find lead, but in the early 1880s, another group of explorers, led by T. Hodges Jones, found evidence of what they thought was marble. Jones and his fellow investors bought the property, named the cave Marble Cave, and formed the Marble Cave Mining and Manufacturing Company. A town called Marmaros (Greek for marble) was platted nearby, and it soon had a hotel, a general store, and several other businesses.
However, no marble was ever taken out of the cave, and when the mining enterprise died, so did the town. In 1889, William Henry Lynch bought the property sight unseen and planned to develop it as a tourist attraction. When he explored it shortly afterward, he was especially impressed by Marble Cave's huge cathedral room, which he envisioned as an entertainment venue that could draw thousands of people to hear music, listen to speeches, and so forth. Lynch opened up previously blocked passages of the cave and installed ladders to accommodate tourists of the cave, and he began promoting the cave not only as a place to tour but also as an entertainment venue. He called the cave the "greatest natural chamber in the world." The thing that was working against the cave, however, was its isolated location and the lack of transportation to reach it. Lynch focused much of his attention on trying to bring a railroad to the vicinity of the cave.
In early 1893, there was still no railroad to the area, but word had gradually begun to reach the outside world about the wonders of Marble Cave, thanks to articles in magazines and newspapers like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Kansas City Times. While still waiting for a railroad, Lynch arranged, in the meantime, for a daily stage line to run between Springfield and Marble Cave. He also had plans to light the cave with electric lights and to build a hotel near the cave to accommodate overnight visitors. In the fall of 1894, Lynch staged a huge celebration in and on the grounds of Marble Cave, taking out entire newspaper supplements to publicize and promote the event. He advertised the event as a big musical bash, a literary convention, an oratory competition, a sightseeing expedition, and a religious observance all rolled into one. He even invited young couples to come to the event to get married in the beautiful cathedral room. He told the people of the region that the success of the event would help sell the Ozarks as a place where people would want to come and visit.
The fall 1894 event was a moderate success, but it demonstrated once again the need for a railroad. By late 1902, the nearest railroad to Marble Cave was still forty miles away, but the Missouri Pacific was in the process of building a line to the cave. As the project was announced and got underway, Lynch once again threw himself into promoting the cave. He gave speeches in St. Louis and other cities about the wonders of the cave and got write-ups about it in various newspapers. It was also in 1902 that the cave first started being called Marvel Cave instead of Marble Cave, at least informally. However, the two names were used almost interchangeably and the official name may not have been changed until after Lynch's death in 1927, as the Silver Dollar City website says.
Alas, the plans for a railroad to Marvel Cave never materialized, but by the 1910s, the advent of automobiles had made the question a somewhat moot point. For example, in November 1915, during a special event at the cave, auto service to the cave was offered from nearby Reeds Spring, which did have a railroad.
In 1927, William Lynch died, his daughters took over Marble Cave, and it officially became known as Marvel Cave, although, as I say, it had been called Marvel Cave at least on an irregular basis for twenty-five years. In 1950, the Herschend family purchased a 99-year lease on the property from the Lynch sisters. In 1960, the Herschends opened Silver Dollar City on the grounds of the cave, and over the years, the theme park has gradually engulfed the cave and dwarfed its importance. Although there are still many people who enjoy tours of the cave, there are many others who go to Silver Dollar City exclusively for the amusement rides and other entertainment.

Gambling in Early-Day Springfield

Gambling was prevalent in Springfield almost from the town’s beginning. In 1835, for instance, William Lloyd was indicted for keeping a faro bank. This is the only reference to faro in early Greene County Circuit Court records. However, there are numerous references to gambling devices or gambling tables, and it is safe to say that many of these pertain to faro, a card game that was very popular in gambling circles throughout the 1800s. The game usually involved a table with the thirteen cards of a single suit (normally spades) already painted or pasted on the tabletop. Players would place bets on one of the cards, and the dealer, using a separate deck of cards, would deal two cards from a device called a faro box, turning them face up one at a time. If the first card, called the dealer’s or banker’s card, matched the card on which the bet was placed, the player lost and the dealer collected the money. If the second card, called the player’s card, matched the card on which the bet was placed, the player won and collected from the dealer or banker an amount equal to the bet. If neither card matched the card on which the bet was placed, the player could retract his bet or let it ride for the next two-card turn. The term “faro bank” could refer to the stakes in a game of faro, to the gambling establishment where the game was played, or to the game itself. In Lloyd’s case, the charge against him of keeping a faro bank was dropped when the defendant could not be found in Greene County.
Sometimes even Springfield’s founding fathers or other leading citizens were involved in gambling. For example, John P. Campbell, the town's founder, was charged in Circuit Court in 1841 with “suffering a gambling device to be set upon his premises.” The same year, Benjamin Cannefax, brother of the second sheriff of Greene County, was found guilty of gaming and fined one dollar. Other gambling offenders in early-day Greene County included Ephraim and Levi Fulbright, sons of William Fulbright, who was one of the very earliest settlers in the area that became Springfield. Not surprisingly, some of the gamblers were multiple offenders.

Gambling of any kind was at least nominally illegal in early-day Springfield, but in antebellum Greene County the offense was made more serious if one gambled with the wrong person. For instance, at the December 1850 term of the Greene County Circuit Court, several men, including Fleming Taggard, were indicted for “Gaming with a Negro.” The following June, Taggard was again charged, this time with “Playing Cards with a Negro.” Augustine Yokum was charged in December of 1850 with the doubly grievous offense of “Playing Cards with a Negro on Sunday.”
Early Springfieldians did not need a device specifically designed for games of chance in order to enjoy gambling. Holcombe’s 1883 History of Greene County noted, for instance, that there was considerable betting in 1855 on the outcome of the elections that year. Betting on horse races was an even more popular pastime in the mid to late 1800s than betting on elections.
This blog entry is condensed from my book Wicked Springfield.

Budgetown

Located on Short Creek just a mile or so west of the Missouri state line, Galena, Kansas, sprang up in the spring of 1877 as a booming lead mining town. Like most towns founded as mining camps, Galena, during its early years, was a wild, raucous place where whiskey flowed freely. A prohibition law that went into effect in Kansas in January 1881 put a damper on the liquor trade in Galena, as all ten of the town's saloons quickly went out of business. However, the new law couldn't slake the rowdy miners' thirst for liquor, and two enterprising saloon keepers found a way around the new law.
They simply moved a mile east and started a new town on the state line of Missouri, where liquor was legal. The original idea was to start a regular town where people would want to live, but that idea never quite got off the ground. Instead, the town became just a place for the miners to go and raise hell, and it mainly consisted of just a couple of saloons. At least one of the buildings, called a "double building," actually straddled the border, with the saloon portion in Missouri and the Kansas portion serving as a gambling hall, since gambling was still legal in the sunflower state but not in Missouri.
Officially named Dubuque, the new town became known as Budgetown or Budgeville, because "budge" was a slang term for liquor in the Old West. From the very beginning, Budgetown had a bad reputation, and the respectable citizens of Galena looked upon their new rival with disdain. Commenting on the new town in March of 1881, the Galena Miner suggested that the "b" in Dubuque be changed to a "p," and the name of the town would then "be about correct." A couple of months later, a resident of Neosho, Missouri, traveled to Galena and reported back to his hometown newspaper, the Miner and Mechanic, that there was not a drop of liquor to be found in Galena but that a new town named Budge had sprung up on the state line and the "eyes and feet of the thirsty Short Creekers turn that way as the sunflower expands its charms into the sun."
In late May 1881, just a week or so after the Neosho resident's visit, the Galena Miner gave its readers an update on Budgeville. According to the newspaper, the new town had failed to prosper as its founders had envisioned, and it was generally very dull. However, "There are seasons when there are wild times," the newspaperman allowed. The rural residents in the vicinity of Budgetown regularly complained to law enforcement of the indiscriminate discharge of firearms in and around the town, and they lived in fear that they might be hit by a stray bullet. The Miner concluded by reiterating that Budgetown as a business enterprise was a complete failure and would continue to be so as long as the sole object of those inhabiting the town was to "drink whisky and play cards."
 
Despite the negative publicity Budgetown received almost from its beginning, rumors persisted in the spring of 1881 that the new town on the border was booming and already had a population numbering as high as 2,000. In early June, the Miner once again felt called upon to dispel the rumors. The editor assured his readers that the only place in Budgetown where a person could buy groceries had recently closed and that there was nothing left in the town that was in the least attractive to anyone except those who desired to "get where they have almost unrestrained license. Budgetown will never be a place where men will want to take their families."
The Miner editor was right. Budgetown remained little more than a place to drink and raise hell for the next few years. In early 1884, Joe Thornton, whose brother ran a grocery store in Galena, took charge of the only remaining business in Budgetown, a "double building" straddling the state line. Unlike his brother, Joe had developed an unsavory reputation, and it didn't take him long to start getting into trouble again once he removed to the state line. His troubles culminated in the summer of 1885 when he shot and killed a Joplin city policeman and was hanged by a mob later the same evening. You can read more about Joe Thornton in by book Wicked Joplin. I also have another book in the works about notorious incidents in Jasper County history, and one chapter of that book will detail Thornton's noted criminal career.
Budgetown was still shown on maps as late as 1895 under its official name of Dubuque. It was located on the state line between present-day Seventh Street and Old Route 66, in the general area where the Phillips 66 State Line convenience store and gas station is situated.