When a tobacco box was found Saturday afternoon by boys playing near Wichita’s Second Street Bridge, they surely believed they had found a long-lost treasure. Their eyes must have sparkled with delight at the sight for it was no ordinary tobacco box.

Little did they know the story it could tell.

According to Monday’s Wichita Daily Beacon, “The box had been found Aug. 10, 1895. It was 6 x 3 inches in size, made of German silver and peculiarly marked.”

At the newspaper office, a party of men gathered around the box trying to decipher the peculiar markings. By chance, pioneer Wichita grocery man Fred Sowers happened along. As soon as he saw it, Sowers announced, “I will tell you all about it. That box proves a theory I have had in my mind for 20 years.” Sowers continued, “You young settlers cannot imagine that in this very county ... at one time the revolver and Winchester were the stern judges that settled all disputes.”

Apparently, the boys had found the box amid a congregation of moldering bones, but as editor H. J. Hagney related, finding human bones in the vicinity of the boys’ discovery created no excitement in Wichita. Early burials had taken place in the large cottonwood grove that had once stood at that location, just below the confluence of the Big and Little Arkansas Rivers.

Taking a fresh chew of tobacco, Sowers recalled the day a particular stranger came to town. May of 1871 was a desperate time for the fledgling settlement.

“You must remember,” Sowers reminded, “that at that time there was not many Sunday school teachers or scholars located at this point.”

With little organization, the town was filled with men whose chief objective was to keep out of the reach of the law. The horse thief crowd was made up of known desperados, including Jack Ledford, Curly Marshall and Ike and Curly Walker. Curly Marshall was the city marshal at the time. Unsure of the stranger’s intentions “the boys” kept a close eye on him before taking him into their circle. Some said the stranger was a butcher, fresh from Emporia. Sowers remembered that the butcher, “Dutch Jake,” had arrived with three ponies which he kept north of town on Chisholm Creek. Dutch Jake began to make himself familiar to the tough element and could readily be found lounging in Wichita’s drinking houses.

A recollection published in the July 23, 1890, Wichita Weekly Journal described a dismal day of rain that kept men inside. At Polk and Thompson’s saloon, Dutch Jake called up drinks for the crowd and proceeded to pass the time drinking. Curly Marshall and Ike Walker were at a table with some of their crowd. They too proceeded to “liquidate.” Everyone was enjoying the merriment. Dutch Jake was hilarious in his own way. But as the day wore into the evening, hilarity turned to contention.

Sowers remembered the night well. He was down the street working on a stone slab and repeating the words of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” when he heard two shots, not particularly unusual at the time. He didn’t investigate until morning when he learned that Marshall and Walker had killed a stranger. They did not deny the killing, but said it was not Dutch Jake. They insisted that Jake had left town.

The story was later told that under the influence of the day’s whiskey, Dutch Jake had claimed he was a deputy marshal with papers for the arrest of Jack Ledford. He was hunting through his pockets for the papers when Ike Walker pulled a pistol and “planted a bullet in the poor fellow’s head.” The force of the impact sent Jake’s hat flying out the open door into the alley. Marshall followed with the second shot before Dutch Jake’s body was dragged outside and left on the cellar door.

Jack Ledford arrived just afterward and when shown the body, found that the unfortunate man was still alive. Placing his pistol against the dying man’s breast, Ledford pulled the trigger and “actually blew his heart out of his body.” Sowers learned that the body had been taken in the direction of the old cottonwood grove, but no one would confirm that it was Dutch Jake, even though the black hat in the pattern of the one worn by him was found the next day in the alley. Sowers felt certain that they had killed Dutch Jake, but going against that crowd would have meant certain death, and so the death went unpunished and unknown.

Turning to the silver tobacco box, Sowers felt validated in his suspicions. The day before he was killed, Dutch Jake came into the Wichita Vidette newspaper office. “I asked him for a chew of tobacco (and) he handed me that identical box. It had a secret spring and I had to have him open it.”

The box found by the boys was that very silvermounted tobacco box.

There are many secrets quietly held beneath the Kansas sod, and though found long after the men could be brought to justice, one very unique tobacco box was able to speak from a grave found by chance on The Way West.