Carry Nation

After Kiowa came a decade of arrests. Between 1900 and 1910 Nation was arrested at least 32 times for what she called hatchetations, paying her fines with lecture fees and the sale of hatchet-shaped stick pins supplied by a Topeka pharmacist. Bar rooms took up the slogan "All Nations Welcome But Carrie." She took her lectures into vaudeville and British music halls; an egg struck her in London in 1909. She collapsed during a speech in January 1911. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union later set a stone over her grave at Belton, Missouri: She Hath Done What She Could.

What the plaque says

Carry A. Nation Carry A. Nation, the militant crusader against illegal saloons, launched her career of saloon-smashing in Kiowa. She and her followers in Medicine Lodge, her home town, had closed the local saloons by holding prayer meetings on their premises and displays of force. However, as the Women's Christian Temperance Unions jail evangelist, she found as many drunks as ever in the county jail. These men named Kiowa as their source of supply. A voice spoke to Carry, telling her to go to Kiowa and smash the saloons. On June 1, 1900, she attacked three "joints" in Kiowa, using stones, brickbats, full malt bottles, and one billiard ball as ammunition. Carry's attack surprised local officials, but because of the fact that the operation of such "joints" was illegal she was not jailed as she would be later in other communities. She did not adopt the use of her now famous hatchet until her visit to Wichita some six months later. The Kiowa attack quickly received national attention and instigated great debate even among the temperance organizations. Carry Nation spent the remainder of her life in the crusade against the liquor interests and lecturing on prohibition. She died June 9, 1911.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medicine Lodge Treaty Site and Memorial Peace Park — 19 mi
  The council ground where five Plains nations met the Peace Commission in 1867, found again in 1926 by a Kiowa sergeant who was there as a boy, beside the town's pageant park.
• Carry A. Nation Home and Stockade Museum — 19 mi
  The small brick house on US-160 where Carry A. Nation lived from 1889 to 1902 and first led Medicine Lodge's temperance women against the town's liquor, shown together with a replica of the 1874 stockade.
• Gyp Hills Scenic Drive — 20 mi
  A 22-mile loop of mostly gravel road west of Medicine Lodge through red Permian mesas capped with white gypsum, past open range and cedar canyons in a county with more than a hundred cataloged gypsum caves.

More markers nearby

• Medicine Lodge Peace Treaties — 19 mi