Pioneer life is hard. Time for a vacation.
But where to?
A charming city featuring scenic places to drive one’s wagon. Check.
Reasonably priced resort with free food. Check, check.
So where might one find this attractive gem, and will other members of high society be present to further distinguish one’s company?
Believe it or not, some of the finest ladies in all Kansas City, including Mrs. B.S. Henning, Mrs. Dr. N.N. Horton and others recommend the mineral well resort in Iola, Kansas, featuring its one-of-a-kind, unique-to-all-the-world Iola Mineral Water.
No sooner had they exited their posh palace car had they absolutely fallen in love.
“Mr. Acers, you have quite the little town here,” one dreams of them saying as they greeted their host at the park. “I also heard a rumor that the baths in your resort were once tubs from the distillery. Is that so?”
“Guilty as charged,” grinned the attorney-proprietor, as a blast from the jet black Santa Fe engine sounded on the tracks nearby.
The train hadn’t been passing through for more than a couple of years, but it was nonetheless a welcome sight bringing along with it the potential for countless guests.
Acers and crew had initially been prospecting for coal east of the tracks near today’s Riverside Park, but as former Register editor Charles Scott put it, “by a quirk of chance the bit that drilled into a gas pocket simultaneously opened a vein of mineral-laden salt water.”
The Water of Life. A wondrous substance to cure all that ails you.
Others, like the ladies from Kansas City, likely hadn’t come to be “cured,” but imbibed the putrid water all the same, with its delectable concoction of sulfurous saltiness.
Bathed in it, too, in their striped, full-body swimwear, while likely keeping their social distance from the afflicted.
In the 1870s, there was quite the menagerie of avoidables, though all listed as within the purview of the Mineral Water’s curative powers: erysipelatous, syphilitic, scrofulous and fever sores; sore eyes, catarrh, general debility, liver and kidney disease, blood poison, rheumatism, necrosis, hemorrhoids, pimples, asthma, headaches and heart disease.
But no matter what was bringing you down, you could be miraculously healed for “between seven to 12 dollars a week.”
Couldn’t make it in person? The proprietors shipped bottled Iola Mineral Water across the U.S. and around the globe, with enthusiastic converts as far away as Europe.
“Looking at the shipping book it appears the waters of the singular well have been sent out to 18 states, one territory, the District of Columbia and to London, proving clearly that how little value has been attached to the water at home, it has much significance abroad.”
