Pages 1- 10 from Amazing Mentholatum

ISBN 0-9786173-0-4

The founding of the Yucca Company in September 1889 was the genesis of Mentholatum. It was a hopeful venture begun by three Wichita, Kansas, businessmen during an economic depression. Walter R. Binkley, a former partner of the Stallings Palmole Soap Co., saw an opportunity to start his own soap business when D. W. Stallings sold out to investors. Binkley had already developed a method of manufacturing vegetable-based soaps using the indigenous yucca or "soap tree," which grew in abundance on the Kansas prairie. Now all he needed to get started was financing. Binkley met Clayton K. Smith, a pharmacist trained at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy who had recently arrived in town, and convinced him to join the venture. They capitalized their new company with $600 from Smith's brother-in-law, Albert Alexander Hyde, "a local real estate developer and small-business investor." Binkley and Smith set up the Yucca Company on the ground floor of a three-story brick building owned by Hyde on Douglas Avenue, Wichita's main thoroughfare and route of the old Chisholm Trail.

A. A. Hyde was one of the young businessmen who helped build Wichita. As a twenty-four-year-old bookkeeper employed by the Leavenworth banking firm Clark and Company, he was sent to Wichita to open a new bank in early July of 1872. To launch the new bank, Sol and Morris Kohn, Wichita merchants and longtime customers of Clark and Company, matched Clark's $20,000 investment. Hyde put down $500, and the rest of the stock was purchased by a majority of the best business men of the place. With nearly $70,000 of the $100,000 goal on the books, the Wichita Savings Bank elected officers on the 17th of July. The new bank's rival in town was the First National Bank of Wichita, the only other bank Hyde said was "worth speaking of." The Kohn brothers were among a core group of wealthy speculators in their mid- to late twenties who had orchestrated a plan to lure the profitable Texas cattle trade to Wichita. Within two weeks of his arrival, Hyde had become a bit player in the launching of a new cowtown.

Each summer, Texas cattlemen drove longhorns up the Shawnee Trail to the railroad lines in Kansas City and St. Louis where their herds were loaded onto boxcars and shipped to the beef-hungry eastern markets. In 1868, a shorter route called the Chisholm Trail was surveyed. Drovers left Red River Station in Texas, crossed Indian Territory up into Kansas (where they forded the Arkansas River at a frontier trading post used by the Wichita tribe of Indians), and then crossed rolling grasslands northward to the Union Pacific Railroad at Abilene. But the Abilene terminus was not to last long. After only four years, the local citizens (called "nesters" by the cowboys) became fed up with herds trampling their crops, rowdies tearing up the streets at all hours, and the vice and crime that followed the cattlemen. The Abilene Chronicle announced to the cattlemen in February 1872 that the citizens would "no longer submit to the evils of the trade."

 

Wichita Opens for Business

Other frontier towns immediately stepped up to compete for the profitable cattle business. Speculators at the Wichita settlement were already building a new town that they hoped would become the next cattle terminus and shipping point. They convinced the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad to secure a rail extension from the main line at Newton, and the new track was completed in May of 1872. They also hired agents who traveled south to the cattlemen and east to the buyers to spread the news that Wichita was ready with the necessary banks, hotels, livery stables, stockyards, outfitters, and entertainment for the 1872 driving season.

As the tired drovers approached Wichita, they were greeted by a sign posted at the edge of town that read, "Everything Goes in Wichita," with one exception listed at the bottom: "Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check." The dusty streets and boardwalks were crowded with men on horseback and foot, and endless herds of "beeve critters" passing through to the stockyard east of town. There were bowlegged Texas cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, ex-slaves, Plains Indians, long-haired frontiersmen, immigrant sodbusters, merchants, Eastern adventurers, gamblers, and assorted loose characters. Bert Hyde, as A. A. was known by family and friends, recalled that the gambling houses and saloons, which operated all night and day, outnumbered grocery and outfitting stores. A variety theater, called a "Free and Easy," gave nightly exhibitions of exotic female dancers. A brass band played all afternoon seated on a balcony perched over the sidewalk. Bert wrote in his diary: "So much swearing I never heard before . . . the majority can hardly construct a sentence with out an oath as emphasis." He also observed, "The principal occupation here seems to be loafing. In front of every store the whole length of the street (half a mile) you will see from one to a dozen men occupying themselves whittling, talking or dozing. Whether it is the nature of the country or the nature of the inhabitants I have been unable to discover, possibly both."

In this wild and uproarious setting, Hyde opened the bank up for business in a temporary location: a small wood building on Main Street, which had formerly been a saloon. At night, he pulled a bed up in front of the safe, placed his pistol under the pillow, and tried to sleep through the outside din of drunks and keno gamblers. The room above him was used as a flophouse where there happened to be a hole cut in the floorboards just above his bed large enough for a man to drop through. In later years, he characterized this as "a fool arrangement on my part, but in those days horse stealing was the fashionable crime, and hold-ups and bank robbers were almost unknown." Within a few months he moved the operation into the newly completed Eagle Block office building on the southeast corner of Douglas and Main. This intersection was fast becoming the center of Wichita's economic and social life.

Millions of dollars changed hands during the next few years, and Hyde and his bookkeeper, Johnnie Walters, handled a large portion of it. In addition to the books, Johnnie's chief business was running the big saloon and gambling house called "Keno Corner" located diagonally across the intersection from the bank. Throughout the day, he would run over to the saloon to see how business was doing. For a few years in the early 1870s, Douglas and Main also marked the center of America's Wild West. Here was the proverbial crossroads between anything goes and law and order, a manifestation of that singular contradiction in the American psyche-that we want it both ways. Sometimes the two collided, as for several weeks in 1874 when Wichita was held hostage. The Texas desperado William Martin, known as "Hurricane Bill," and his gang of cattle rustlers shot up the streets and terrorized the residents. To stop them, Marshal Bill Smith hired several new policemen, including the young Wyatt Earp. Because the city did not tax its citizens, Marshal Smith used funds from gambling license fees and prostitution fines to pay his lawmen. Wichita wanted it both ways for most of the next decade. Hyde's conservative neighbors were torn between their disdain for open drinking, gambling, and prostitution on the streets, and their appetite for the tax-free prosperity that the cattle trade brought to their town.

In 1874, merchants were relieved when cattle were no longer allowed to enter at the Douglas Avenue crossing. The new Kellogg Avenue route to the stockyard put an end to longhorns crowding through the business district and kicking up dust.

In 1875, Bert married Ida Todd, the daughter of James H. Todd, a local grocery merchant and a cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln. In a bachelor town where most men had to return east to find a wife, Bert was lucky. Caught geographically in the middle of a popular saying of the time, "There is no Sunday west of Junction City and no God west of Salina," they were married on Tuesday, January 19, in Mr. Todd's home by Rev. McCabe of Topeka. Bert vacated the bank's back room that he had shared with Johnnie Walters and moved with Ida into a house that he purchased a week before on the southeast corner of Second Street and Topeka Avenue. The first of their nine children, Albert Todd Hyde, was born a year later in 1876. ... Read More, buy the book.