William Higgins,
of Bartlesville, has been a witness of
and participant in much that is vital in the history of this great
section of the Middle West for fully sixty years. He and his family
were in Kansas during the fratricidal struggle which made that a free
state. William Higgins cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln in
1864, while with the Union army at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory. He
is a former secretary of State of Kansas, and for fifty years has
been closely acquainted with Oklahoma citizenship and tribal affairs.
He first came to Oklahoma in May, 1899, in the service of the Indian
department with the Dawes Commission as appraiser of Indian lands for
allotment. At the beginning of the oil excitement he resigned and in
1903 went to Bartlesville and has been a prominent resident of that
city since 1904.
In Norristown,
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, William Higgins was born April 2,
1842, a son of Patrick and Elizabeth Jane (Flanagan) Higgins. His
parents were solid and substantial people, endowed with a large
amount of common sense, had good ideals and aims and endeavored to
put them into practice, and were both of the Catholic faith. Patrick
Higgins was born in the City of Sligo and his wife in Belfast,
Ireland. The former lived to be eighty-nine and the latter to
seventy-seven years of age. Patrick Higgins was an Irish schoolmaster
and mechanic. He was a free state democrat, but when he settled in
Missouri in 1848 found that such democrats were not popular. In 1854
he moved to Kansas and gave his aid and influence in making that a
free state.
First in Missouri
and then in Kansas Territory William Higgins spent his early years
beginning with his first conscious recollection. What schooling he
had came from his parents, and public schools, from a Catholic
academy and from printing shops, which have always been recognized as
a great university training school. However, his character has been
molded and shaped by hard experience in the frontier life of the
West. He has been in and has seen every territory west of Missouri,
Iowa and Arkansas come into statehood.
As a boy during the
terrible border warfare between the Missouri and Kansas people of the
’50s, he endured the hardship of frontier life and of drought
fanatical strife. He himself shared in some of the experiences of
those days, witnessed the destruction of homes and lives, and all the
brutal savagery and passions of the civil warfare, which beginning in
Kansas, in time enveloped the entire nation. Nowhere was the Civil
war fought with greater fury and hatred and with less regard for the
honorable rules of warfare than in the border district. William
Higgins is one of the few men still living who witnessed the battle
of Osawatomie on August 30, 1856, between the border ruffians under
Colonel Reid of Independence, Missouri, who had 300 men under his
command, and John Brown, who had about forty of his followers. Mr.
Higgins says this was not a battle, but a
very tame affair, between two parties of outlaws, neither of which
showed a keen desire to fight. Brown did his best to get away, while
Reid and his men thought Brown had from 800 to 1,000 sharpshooters in
the timber and marched into Osawatomie, a village of less than 600
people, sacked the town and burned the
homes, leaving women and children without shelter or food.
After witnessing
this battle Mr. Higgins, then a boy of fourteen, went to Leavenworth
on September 11, 1856, and in the same month he became a teamster and
drove a team for the Government to a supply train from Fort
Leavenworth to Fort Kearney. In 1857 he went into Salt Lake City,
Utah, with Col. Sidney Johnson’s army, and continued to follow the
plains life up to August, 1860.
He then returned to
the home of his parents at Paola, Kansas, expecting to go back to
Utah to engage in business. The Civil war prospects caused a change
in his plans, he resumed work at the case in a printing office. Some
years earlier he had gained his first knowledge of printing, and his
work as a newspaper man is one of the most important features of his
career.
On April 7, 1861, at
Paola, Kansas, he enlisted in the Union army for three years. He was
the first one to offer his services in Miami County, Kansas. He was
mustered out of the service at Fort Leavenworth October 19, 1865. He
has in his possession an honorable discharge as a private veteran of
the Civil war and his record as a soldier was clean. His service was
in the Western Department, composed of Missouri, Kansas, Indian
Territory, Arkansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. This department was more
a guerrilla war zone than one in which honorable war methods
prevailed. In the entire department only eighteen honorable battles
were fought between the regular army forces of the Union and
Confederate sides; though there were Indian massacres and outlaw
guerrilla warfare by Quantrill, Anderson and other outlaws.
After the war Mr.
Higgins started the Miami Free Press at Paola, but sold it in 1867,
and then established the Le Roy Pioneer in Coffey County, Kansas.
That paper he sold in 1868, and going to Coffeyville in Montgomery
County was associated with ex-Senator E. G. Ross on his paper. In
1870 the plant was destroyed, and he then established at Columbus,
Kansas, a republican paper which he conducted until 1878. While his
work in the newspaper field and otherwise did not bring to Mr.
Higgins great wealth, he has prospered, and his influence has always
been exerted on the side of improvement. All the papers he started
are still alive excepting the Miami Free Press.
In 1876 Mr. Higgins
became connected with the claim and law department of the Missouri,
Kansas & Texas Railroad, and in 1880 when that road passed out of
the hands of receivers he went with the claim and law department of
the Santa Fe Company. He has held but two public offices, has never
asked for nor sought an official position, has never asked a man to
vote for him, and he says that it has been his best pleasure to play
the political game for principle and good government and capable
citizenship rather than to hold an office.
However, in the
State of Kansas the name of William Higgins has long been well known
in state and local affairs. In 1888 and again in 1901 he was
nominated and elected to the office of secretary of state on the
republican ticket. He made a creditable record during his
administration in both terms. This was the only elective office for
which Mr. Higgins was ever a candidate before the voters. In earlier
years he had been honored by the Legislature and governors of Kansas.
He was appointed to state positions, and since coming to Oklahoma has
served as clerk of United States Court at Bartlesville, and President
Roosevelt appointed him postmaster of that city. The democratic governor of Oklahoma
appointed him a member of the Gettysburg Commission as the
representative of the Grand Army of the Republic. He has been elected
department commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of
Oklahoma, and has been a member of that order for more than
thirty-seven years.
The one organization
to which Mr. Higgins has been chiefly devoted throughout his life has
been the republican party. He is an old fashioned conservative type
of republican. He believes in high tariff, strong state and National
Government, and has had little sympathy with many of the theoretical
reforms which have held the stage of public attention during recent
years, particularly those designed to control and regulate business
affairs. Mr. Higgins says that he became a member of the republican
party organization and has kept his dues paid up ever since and
before he cast his first vote for Mr. Lincoln in 1864 in November
while with the army in Indian Territory.
As to churches he
believes in the good of such organizations, though he is not a
regular attendant. He was reared a Catholic. He also believes in
schools and all forces for education. He has tried to guide his life
in accordance with the divine laws and in Oklahoma as elsewhere he
has endeavored to support those laws made by men, but which he finds
have not been enforced by public officials in compliance with the
full meaning of the obligation of an oath of office.
On January 20, 1863,
during the Civil war time, Mr. Higgins married Miss Julia A. Gallaway
at Paola, Kansas. The two daughters of that marriage are still
living. At Parsons, Kansas, on November 30, 1879, Mr. Higgins married
Laura Virginia Knisley. To this union also were two children born,
Helen W. and Theo C. The daughter Helen died four years ago, and the
son is now living with his parents, unmarried. The daughters by the
first wife were Cora Jane and Alice Agnes Higgins. Cora Jane married
in 1884 Henry Mudd of Adrian, Missouri, a farmer, and they now live
in California. Alice Agnes was married in 1887 to Lincoln Etyner, and
they now live on a farm in Ogle County, Illinois. Helen W. Higgins,
who died at Long Beach, California, in 1911, married Franklin T.
Metzler, a wholesale merchant of Colorado Springs, Colorado.