I was sitting in Kalida Cemetery, near the final resting place of John Welch, who was killed in the infamous gun battle on the Yates Center square sometime around April 1880, when the town was only a few years old.
It began when John’s brother, Wiley, and other cowhands from Garnett had left a dance out at Dry Creek in northwestern Woodson County one frozen Christmas night.
Perhaps grimacing at the thought of the frigid wind sweeping across the open ranchlands, Welch stole a coat and pair of gloves belonging to Warren Walters.
Not long after, Welch was apprehended in Le Roy and arrested, and would spend the next three months in the plank-board jail near Yates Center square’s northeastern corner.
ON THE day of Wiley Welch’s trial, the townsfolk had gathered at the old Defiance courthouse in droves, which also sat on the square’s northeastern corner.
In a wild tear, though, they had poured from the benches and into the dirt streets after hearing gunfire, then just as quickly darted back behind whatever cover they could find.
Abraham Smith, who’d just finished his term as Sheriff, would take a less cautious approach and end up with a bullet-hole through his hat and bruise on his cheek where another stray ball just missed him.
John Welch and his accomplices, including Curly DeLang, the half-Cherokee mercenary, had begun their doomed adventure on the square’s opposing western side, at Clark Stewart’s harness shop, where farmer Albert Alvord had left his team and wagon.
That was all the opening they needed, seizing the reins and erupting south toward the place where Deputy Francis “Frank” Cannday was getting Wiley some air before the trial.
In a memoir written by eyewitness Eva Depew some 50 years later, she wrote: “As our home was just across the alley from the south side of the square, the furor of yelling and shooting that suddenly rent the air sent me hastily to the kitchen door. As the store buildings were pretty far apart my view was unobstructed. I saw a team and wagon carrying two men careening wildly down the street, pursued by a mob of some men afoot and some on horses.”
I was sitting on the square’s south side as I transcribed her words, dreaming Welch’s men thundering around the corner down the street.
That fateful day the sky might have borne little difference, with the wind weaving through the humid air, the clouds thin and frail overhead. The ebony swallows may have darted away from the wagon with jet black horses just as they now dodged the beat up pickups and cars with chipped paint.
Nearby, deputies Frank and Jim Cannady were taking cover, leaping up only when the moment arose to shoot.
I dreamed bullets whizzing through the air, the frantic shouting and confusion, the few wood-frame buildings that stood at the time being struck with stray balls or used as refuges from the melee.
Had I been sitting where I was while writing this account, might I have met my end as well?
Curly DeLang took a blast straight to the face from Jim Cannady’s shotgun, and was left permanently blinded in one eye.
