The first major novel by the best-selling female author in Kansas history, the 100th anniversary of the orignial publication of The Price of the Prairie makes it stand out as the perfect vehicle with which to kick off Ad Astra’s new Kansas Classic Series.
Born to Quaker parents on May 2, 1860 in Carthage, Indiana, Margaret Hill arrived in Topeka, Kansas, in 1888 as an English teacher. She met and married Dr. William McCarter, and together they raised three children. McCarter always described herself first as a wife and mother, then a Kansan, and last an author.
McCarter’s career as a writer started when she realized that she could write stories that could also be used as teaching tools. Her writing goal was always to create fiction in the writing style popular at the time that would both educate the reader and yet provide reading pleasure. Her first published work, the short story A Bunch of things Tied Up in Strings, appeared in 1901. Over the next twenty-five years Margaret published nine more short stories and eight full-length novels, including The Price of the Prairie, The Peace of the Solomon Valley, and A Wall of Men, which became standard reading in many Kansas schools. The majority of McCarter’s novels became national bestsellers. Her last story, The Candle in the Window, was written in 1925.
In addition to writing fiction, McCarter was an active civic leader with several local organizations and clubs. She was also politically active in the Republican Party, becoming in 1920 the first woman to ever address the Republican Party National Convention. Margaret died in 1938, leaving a legacy of literary works that continued to be popular among future generations of readers.
An immediate success and national bestseller when it was first published in 1910, The Price of the Prairie is a historical novel reflecting the settlement of Kansas from just before the Civil War through the Battle of the Arickaree in 1868.
Ad Astra’s reprint of this classic tale is the first of eleven new volumes that will encompass McCarter’s entire published body of work.
“Le Claire reached the Osages only an hour before an emissary from the leaders of this infamous plot came to the Mission. The presence of the priest counted so mightily, that this call to an Indian confederacy fell upon deaf ears, and the messenger departed to rejoin his superiors. He never found them, for a sudden and tragic ending had come to the conspiracy.
It was a busy day in Kansas annals when that company of Rebel officers came riding up from the South to band together the lawless savages and the outlawed raiders against a loyal commonwealth. Humboldt was the most southern Union garrison in Kansas at that time. South of it the Osages did much scout duty for the Government, and it held them responsible for any invasion of this strip of neutral soil between the North and the South. Out in the Verdigris River country, in this Maytime, a little company of Osage braves on the way from their village to visit the Mission came face to face with this band of invaders in the neutral land. The presence of a score of strange men armed and mounted, though they were dressed as Union soldiers, must be accounted for, these Indians reasoned.
The scouts were moved only by an unlettered loyalty to the flag. They had no notion of the real purpose of these invaders. The white men had only contempt for the authority of a handful of red men calling them to account, and they foolishly fired into the Indian band.
It was a fatal foolishness. Two braves fell to the earth, pierced by their bullets. The little body of red men dropped over on the sides of their ponies and were soon beyond gun range, while their opponents went on their way. But briefly only, for, reinforced by a hundred painted braves, the whole fighting strength of their little village, the Osages came out for vengeance. Near a bend in the Verdigris River the two forces came together. Across a scope five miles wide they battled. The white men must have died bravely, for they fought stubbornly, foot by foot, as the Indians drove them into that fatal loop of the river. It is deep and swift here. Down on the sands by its very edge they fell. Not a white man escaped. The Indians, after their savage fashion, gathered the booty, leaving a score of naked, mutilated bodies by the river’s side. It was a cruel bit of Western warfare, yet it held back from Kansas a diabolical outrage, whose suffering and horror only those who know the Southwest tribes can picture. And strangely enough, the power that stayed the evil lay with a handful of faithful Indian scouts.” – Excerpt from The Price of the Prairie.
The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas by Margaret Hill McCarter. Softbound, 604 pages on Superior Stock Paper, with a new Foreword, original illustrations by John N. Marchand, and two new photographs courtesy of Margaret Hill McCarter's descendants. ISBN #978-1-60614-007-8.