Barbour County Index (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-Current
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,562 issues from 1880 to 1910, published in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Barbour County Index of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, was founded by Michael L. Sherpy in June 1880 as a Democratic paper. Barber County had been organized in 1873 in honor of Thomas Barber, a free-state settler in Douglas County who was killed in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1855 during the Wakarusa War between pro- and antislavery settlers. When the county was established, the name was inadvertently misspelled as “Barbour.” The spelling was changed to “Barber” in 1883 when legislation determined that the county should bear the name originally given to it; the paper became the Barber County Index in accordance with the official change. William Cutler called the Index “a shining light in the Democratic press of this region” in his History of the State of Kansas.
In July 1882, just over two years after its founding, Edward “Wiley” Payne purchased the Index. He remained its proprietor until his untimely death in May 1884 during an attempted robbery while serving as President of the Medicine Valley Bank of Medicine Lodge. Editor Edgar P. Caruthers assumed publishing duties and was joined by William G. Musgrove soon after. The newspaper’s politics remained Democratic until Henry C. Walker bought Caruthers’s shares in August 1890, and the Index became the “The Official Organ of the Farmer’s Alliance of the Seventh Congressional District of Kansas. “Charles C. Painter and Uriah Herr purchased the Index in 1894. It remained a Populist paper until 1904 when it reverted back to its…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Medicine Lodge, Kansas, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress