By Diane Euston
To be the oldest settler still living in Kansas City at the turn of the century was quite the honor, and it was an honor that William Mulkey didn’t shy away from.
He arrived when he was four years old in 1828 when Jackson County was only two years old. The countryside was still a complete wilderness, full of forests, virgin land and vast opportunities for the daring pioneers from the South who gambled on a fresh start.
William Mulkey saw it all, he later proclaimed. He was there before most– and well before Kansas City was even a thought. Through his kind eyes and bent stature due to his advanced age, Kansas Citians reveled in the memories that this old pioneer would recall from his rocking chair at his homestead at 13th and Summit.
William Mulkey’s Early Life
William Mulkey was born in 1824 in Ashe County, N.C., the second oldest of four children born to his mother, Nancy Johnson Mulkey (1792-1870) and her first husband. Surprisingly, the name of William’s father remains a mystery, but it may have been John.
The Mulkey and Johnson families, like many 19th century families, were interrelated with multiple connections. After Nancy lost her husband in Ashe County, she opted to follow her Johnson family to Missouri in the fall of 1828.
Just three years earlier in 1825, a group of 50 families waited at Fort Osage for word that the land west was open for white settlement. Among these families was John Johnson (1770-1833).
On October 10, 1825, “these first settlers numbering 12 persons, crossed the Blue, with five wagons, 20 horses, 13 cows and 50 head of cattle, a flock of sheep, and some domestic fowls.” Johnson built a log cabin, 25 feet long and 20 feet wide on land at current-day 14th and Benton Blvd. There were no nails available, and in between the cracks they filled the gaps with sticks and hay. A whopping 21 people settled in this home.
Slowly but surely, John Johnson’s own children picked up their own claims of land in the area. In 1828, Nancy Mulkey joined her extended family in Jackson County, Mo. traveling with her four children, Wesley (b. 1817), William (b. 1824), Henry (b. 1826) and a daughter. She first made her home with John Johnson and later purchased 40 acres of land near 15th and Prospect.
William Mulkey recalled what he found when they moved. “In those days no one thought of cisterns or wells, and fine land was often abandoned for worse land which had water on it. There were only five families in what is now Kansas City for some time after I came here. These were the Johnson brothers, the McGee family and the Bales family. These families were scattered over the present site of the city, and it was some years before the settlement on the river front, where the business was done, was established. In the West Bottoms, then known as the French Bottoms, was a little settlement of French trappers.”
Settlement in Jackson County had increased exponentially in the early 1830s, and among these early settlers was none other than Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of Mormonism. He declared to his followers in 1831 that western Missouri was Zion, the gathering place for his followers. Between 1831 and 1833, about 1,200 Mormons came to Jackson County.
In August 1831, Joseph Smith with 11 of his followers laid logs for the first school in Jackson County on the south end of current-day Troost Lake Park near 29th and The Paseo. This first meeting house and school was on the Independence Road, and the Mormon pioneers took turns teaching there. Seven-year-old William Mulkey attended the school for six months.
He later recalled, “I didn’t take much stock in [Joseph Smith]. He was the kind of feller to go when the spirit moved, sort of a superstitious feller. But the Mormons entered a heap of land and were doing well when they were drove out.”
History tells us that the Mormon War in 1838 forced 8,000-10,000 of them to leave the state of Missouri for good due to religious persecution. They would later find their permanent home in Utah.
After John Johnson died in 1833, Nancy Mulkey married William B. Poe (1805-1858) and had three children with him. Her son, William, often stayed with Robert Johnson who had settled near Westport.
In these early days, children often walked around barefoot, and young William Mulkey was no different. The first pair of boots he ever had were made by John Self (1803-1889), and he traded a rooster for them. “We never wore shoes till nearly Christmas,” Mulkey proclaimed.
When William was about 12 years old, he was trading with Native American tribes to the north and to the west. When a smallpox epidemic hit the Native American population in Indian Territory in 1837-38, Westport was no longer safe due to the population of Native Americans who traded in the town. Mulkey left the area for a short time, moving back near the land where his mother had a small cabin./
By the time the Town Company gathered at the riverfront in November 1838 to bid on the land that would become Kansas City, William Mulkey had been a part of the community for 10 years.
From the 40s into the 1850s
Trade with Native American tribes also gave Mulkey a chance to barter for some pretty fast horses, and this spawned his love of racing. “I began horse racing before I was 20 years of age,” Mulkey explained. “When I was a mere boy I used to trade knick-nicks to the Indians for ponies and then, after training them, I would get the redskins to race me with the best ponies they had in stock.”
To be fair, William Mulkey was a man of many interests. He was a saloon keeper at one time, dealt in race horses and was a well-known gambler.
Just like most of the population at the time, William especially loved watching steamboats dock at Westport Landing, the future site of Kansas City. In 1841, Mulkey and others watched in amazement when the Annawan, a double-engine steamer, beat all records. “The Annawan made the trip from Weston to St. Louis, a distance of 300 miles or more, in 12 hours,” Mulkey recalled. “The river was up, the current swift, and she made no stops.”
In about 1843, William Mulkey constructed his own version of a pontoon boat perfect for navigating the shallow waters of the Missouri River. This wooden pontoon, known as “The Little Blue,” was used to carry mail at Westport Landing to places such as Independence and Fort Leavenworth.
In 1844, his older brother, Wesley (1817-1887) traveled overland with his wife to settle in Oregon Territory. The idea of traveling into the unknown was right up William’s alley, but it wasn’t to be so.
In 1849, the cholera epidemic gripped the nation, and towns like Kansas City where emigrant wagon trains from all over embarked west were hit hard. Kansas City’s physician, Dr. Isaac Ridge (1825-1907) was stricken with the disease.
William Mulkey was there to help nurse him back to health, relying partially on a keg of brandy that he grabbed from a steamboat. On one steamboat, 900 passengers started their journey up the Missouri River when cholera overtook them. “She got to Council Bluffs with only 200 left,” Mulkey explained. “The rest died of the cholera. More than 200 passengers died while the boat was here, and they were all buried on a sand bar on the other side of the river.”
By 1852, his mother, stepfather, brother, Henry and three half siblings left to head out to Oregon as well. It may seem a surprise that William Mulkey didn’t join them, but he had his eyes on a special lady he met in Jackson County.
Her name was Catherine Drips, a 20-year-old beauty who was half-Otoe Indian through her mother.
Catherine’s father, Andrew Drips (c.1789-1860) was born in Pennsylvania and began working for the Missouri Fur Company out of St. Louis in 1820. He became a partner in the business and was stationed near Bellevue, Neb. There, he met and married an Otoe woman named Mary in 1822.
By 1830, Drips joined the western department of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Catherine was born during a fierce battle between fur traders and Gros Ventres tribe in present-day Idaho in 1832.
The first five years of Catherine’s life were spent on the plains in current-day Yellowstone Park living among Native Americans. She bore many of the features of Native American child with a dark complexion, dark eyes and high cheek bones.
In 1838, Andrew Drips and his family opted to settle amongst the French-Canadian fur trappers in the West Bottoms. Catharine was raised here except for a time when she was sent from 1845-1847 to Carondelet to be educated by Catholic nuns. It wasn’t until then that Catherine started to dress “like white people.” Her father built a log cabin near 13th and Summit where the family lived.
Catherine was partially raised by an old French trapper and colleague of her father’s named Jacques Fournaise, commonly referred to as “Old Pino” who allegedly died in 1871 at 124 years old.
Marriage and Family
It was love at first sight for William Mulkey when he first set eyes on young Catherine Drips. The couple was married at her father’s log cabin in 1853 by Fr. Bernard Donnelly (c. 1810-1880), the resident Catholic priest whose small log cabin church sat nearby at present-day 11th and Broadway.
The couple settled on 40 acres of land between present-day 12th and 17th Street from Summit to the bluffs. The land included an orchard planted by Clement Lessert, a Kaw Indian interpreter, in 1841.
The couple didn’t have children of their own, but a surprise showed up one early morning in May 1857.
William recalled that there was a heavy frost that night. “My wife woke up around three o’clock in the morning and said to me, ‘I hear something crying on the front porch. Sounds like a baby.’”
He thought she’d lost her mind, but his wife rose from bed and looked outside. Just under the log roof on the front porch, Catherine found a newborn baby girl wrapped in a piece of white flannel. The baby almost succumbed to the freezing temperatures, so all night they tried to comfort the child.
They called on Dr. Ridge to give the baby medicine, and the couple opted to adopt the little girl since her parents had abandoned her. They named her Mary Celestine, and they took her to Fr. Bernard Donnelly to be baptized.
In the pages of Fr. Donnelly’s early Catholic register of births, marriages and deaths, an entry for “Mary Celestine Porch” appears. They gave her the surname “Porch” because “she was abandoned at the home of William Mulkey and Catherine Drips.”
The baby only lived to be about four months old; she was too weak to survive further. Her death, according to William Mulkey, almost broke his wife’s heart.
The log cabin where the Mulkey’s lived was rudimentary as the Town of Kansas grew from the riverfront through the 1850s. Thus, William set out to build a more appropriate house for his wife.
He started the project in 1857, and it was finished in 1858. Around 120,000 bricks were fired by hand down near the Blue River and cost Mulkey $12 for 1,000 of them. The lumber came on a steamboat all the way from Pittsburgh, Pa.
“The lumber was piled up here three years before I began to build and was thoroughly seasoned,” Mulkey told the Kansas City Star. “It came here in the rough, and every stick in the house- the floors, doors, window frames, sashes and all was worked up right here in the house.”
Walnut grown on the property was used to build the windowsills, and the roof was made of shaved pine shingles. Built in the old Southern style, the 10-room brick house featured five rooms 18-feet square with fireplaces in each room. It cost him $9,000 in gold to build it.
The house became known far and wide for its hospitality, and Mulkey cleared his land that was thick with walnut and elm trees. He made a little extra cash by selling logs for years. “The squirrels and deer were so bad that they were pests rather than game,” Mulkey later recalled. “It was nothing in those days for a party to start out and come home with 700 to 800 squirrels. The deer were also so extremely plentiful and could be shot so easily that it was not sport to kill them.”
The home became a place where Kit Carson (1809-1868), well-known mountain man and pioneer, would spend quality time in between expeditions out west. “Kit Carson has stayed here at this house weeks at a time,” Mulkey later explained.
Kit Carson knew Andrew Drips and his daughter, Catherine Mulkey quite well. While in the area, Mulkey later explained, Kit Carson “used to sit under those apple trees in summer and in front of the fireplace in winter.”
It was a comfortable place – a permanent location for Catherine Mulkey to enjoy as she spent so much of her childhood as a nomad through the western United States. She clearly had no want to leave this place, and William Mulkey would do what his wife wanted.
When the Civil War broke out, Mulkey watched as Kansas City became a Union stronghold, and the countryside was littered with pro-slavery bushwhackers. “I was born in the South and owned slaves,” Mulkey told the Kansas City Journal. “But I was not in favor of the war. I did not want to enter the Confederate army. I was of those who thought that if the South had never fought against the flag there would have been no war.”
He and his wife, unlike much of the pro-slavery citizens of the area, stayed put throughout the Civil War. Although it was likely quite difficult, Mulkey and his wife were able to stay in their lovely home.
The Fast Life of Racing
After the Civil War, Kansas City was set to make the mark as a predominant stop on the railroads, thanks to the Hannibal Bridge that opened in 1869 across the Missouri River. Pioneers looked at their homesteads and saw dollar signs.
In 1869, William took a portion of his farm and created the subdivision “Mulkey’s Addition.” Paying homage to his family, Catherine Street (now Madison), Mulkey Street (now 13th Street) and Drips Avenue (now Belleview) were named by him. He still preserved six acres of his farm, even though Kansas City’s first suburban neighborhood coined Quality Hill built up around them.
William Mulkey became well known for his horse racing – a hobby he picked up when trading with Native Americans.
“I began racing horses before I was 20 years of age,” Mulkey later recalled. “When I was a mere boy, I used to trade knick-nicks to the Indians for ponies and then, after training them, I would get the redskins to race me with the best ponies they had in stock.”
In 1868, the first racetrack was built in the East Bottoms and was known as the Guinotte Course. By the early 1870s, Mulkey was prospecting across the country for fast horses, and he and Col. Milt McGee built a quarter mile racetrack in the West Bottoms near present-day Santa Fe Street.
In 1873, Mulkey attended a race in St. Joseph where a thoroughbred horse named Chiquita from Seneca, Kan. caught his eye. He bought the horse for a whopping $1,000.
He turned to his friend, Henry Avis (1840-1927), and told him he would give him meals and “let him sleep out in the barn if he would help tend the horses.”
William Mulkey had an eye for racehorses and the men who could train them. Henry Avis once worked for his father-in-law, Andrew Drips and was hired when he was just 20 years old as a rider on the Pony Express.
Chiquita’s training went well, and she placed in many races. Mulkey began to trust Avis’ opinion on all his thoroughbred horses, and his training was one of the biggest factors in the success of Mulkey’s horse racing business.
For over 20 years, he and Henry Avis successfully earned over $250,000 in horse racing. Avis watched over the racehorse operation from Mulkey’s 175-acre farm in Ray County, Mo. He kept up his thoroughbred business until 1905 when he exited the business for good.
He wasn’t just making money in racehorses. Mulkey was also able to buy and sell land across the growing city and make a pretty penny. In 1886, he sold 126 acres of land near Troost Ave. and Brush Creek for a whopping $126,000.
The Push to Preserve the Mulkey Home
Both William and Catherine Mulkey were greatly attached to their little farm and two-story brick home. Even as the city grew around them, there was no way that they’d voluntarily leave their beloved home.
But they were left with no choice.
In 1896, the city condemned land for West Terrace Park and paid out over $800,000 to property owners. As part of the City Beautiful movement, West Terrace Park was slotted to be a showpiece of the Parks and Boulevard system. But to make it what they wanted, they had to take the homestead of the Mulkeys.
Ironically, the first park ever created in Kansas City was donated in 1882 by Catherine Mulkey and sat at 16th and Belleview. Originally known as West Prospect Triangle, the small patch of land was renamed Andrew Drips Park after her father in 1951.
The Kansas City Star wrote in 1896, “The chain of parks along the summit of the bluff at Eighth street, Eleventh street and from Fourteenth to Sixteenth streets will be among the most popular pleasure grounds of the entire park system.”
Despite the efforts, Mulkey was in for a fight to save his land – a fight that would go on for over five years.
By 1899, city leaders were behind saving the Mulkey homestead and repurposing it as a museum. William Mulkey and his wife loved the idea, stating, “The house is almost as good now as it was 40 years ago, and with good care it will be as good 100 years from now. . . I expected that me and my wife would live and die on this little piece of the old farm.”
William Mulkey meant what he said, and that land was sacred to him. An asparagus bed planted in the 1850s was part of a tract that someone offered $11,000 for. Mulkey said, “We have eaten that same asparagus every spring for 40 years and it’s the earliest and best asparagus anywhere ‘round here.”
Former mayor Milton J. Payne heard about this and commented, “You’ll never buy that corner as long as that asparagus bed is there, and the asparagus bed will stay there as long as Mulkey lives.”
The local historical society wanted to save the house “and make it a home for other historical possessions of the society.” Despite efforts for William Mulkey to see his house made into a museum, the Supreme Court upheld the decision to condemn the land in 1903.
The elderly Mulkey’s packed up their belongings and moved to 3224 E. 9th Street to a large home they shared with Catherine’s niece and her husband. She never got comfortable in that house, stating to guests, “It just seems like we are a’visitin’.”
Catherine Drips Mulkey passed away inside the home on 9th Street in April 1904. The Kansas City Times reported, “It is believed by relatives that moving away from the old homestead has been indirectly the cause of her death. Neither she nor her husband have felt at ease at their big home. . . They have been restless and dissatisfied there.”
Just months before William Mulkey would take his last breath, the homestead – so sturdy and symbolic to early Kansas City – was torn to the ground.
On August 6, 1907, surrounded by four generations of his wife’s family, William Mulkey died inside the home on 9th Street.
William Mulkey’s Patch of Earth Today
To think that his homestead was destroyed to make way for parks has a tinge of irony to it, as the interstate would later cut directly into the land and destroy portions of his once-condemned land for West Terrace Park.
But just off the beaten path at 13th and Summit – where distant highway noise can be heard and the iconic Power and Light building can be seen – is a patch of parkland that once held the Mulkey homestead.
The landscape wouldn’t be recognizable to the old pioneer, as the land was reconfigured in the 1950s to make way for the highway system and Southwest Trafficway. It’s almost as if a small island was carved out just to ensure old Mulkey’s homestead somehow survived redevelopment yet again. It is called Mulkey Square Park.
Yes, the house isn’t there, but it survives as parkland that includes the iconic Hereford Bull statue, a baseball diamond and a playground.
It certainly isn’t the honor that William and Catherine Mulkey deserved; can you imagine if that two-story brick house still stood?
Instead, we are left with a few photographs of this stretch of a pioneer homestead and left to our imaginations of what could have been. Sometimes those before us knew better than those with their eyes on progress.
The Kansas City Post stated true facts about William Mulkey when he passed away, writing, “He came of that hardy, pioneer stock that blazed out the path of our present civilization. . . There were giants in those days, not in physical stature, but in determination, endurance and courage.”
His life was full of firsts – a witness to a sea of change. William Mulkey saw it all in his 82 years on this earth, a true pioneer of Kansas City.