Before immigrating to the United States from Ripon, England, John Fenton Pratt, the man who built the Cottonwood Ranch, worked as a bookkeeper for his father, Abraham's numerous businesses.

While building his life on the Great Plains of America.

Pratt continued the bookkeeping for his own interests, filling numerous ledgers with detailed records of almost every financial transaction.

Study of these ledgers sheds light on many aspects of pioneer life, including the vital role of one major player in shaping the American West -- the mail order catalog.

With John Fent's itemized ledgers we can get a lot of information out of it.

We talk about mail order on how important it was for the railroads to be through here, to be able to get things by mail.

But then there's a problem that I have personally is what is mail order?

Is mail order just ordering by mail that we can even do today, even in an infomercial, or is it ordering from mail order houses such as a big company such as, at that time, Montgomery Wards or even today in comparison, Amazon.

But with John Fenton Pratt's ledgers, we have a lot of instances where he was ordering by mail.

You have to consider that the first settlers out here, there wasn't a raft of tailors or blacksmiths or foundries out here.

And so the mail was very important to obtain items and have them freighted and by train.

His ledgers are full of things and he was using the mail a lot.

On April 3rd, 1891 he was ordering whiskey, bought a G. Buente' 5 pounds of tea, and that tea was a dollar for the 5 pounds and the freight.

Now there is a box that is here on the site that was found in the shop that probably was a tea box.

It has an oriental motif on it and it would have held probably 5 pounds of tea.

Is that the box that this concerns?

We do not know, but it might have been the very same box from March 18th, 1890.

Mail order catalogs were very important to get the goods you needed because, sure, there were general stores and other stores around where you could obtain it locally, but it might not be the style because many of the merchants were limited on what they could carry as an inventory.

They were trying to make a living too.

And also it was the price if you could find a price cheaper in the catalog and the freight was paid, or if the freight was little, you received what you wanted.

So the mail order catalogs were very important.

A round top, corduroy hunting cap, size seven and eighth.

But the other time he's also getting a box of rivets, he's ordering parts for a home on wheels.

He's ordering wagon parts for a dandy double tree blacksmith tools such as tongs.

He even had a big forge, a champion forge, and freight was a total of $15.

So hunting hats and all this and this is all from Montgomery Ward in March of 1900.

The fireplace mantel was ordered from Montgomery Ward that's a quarter sawn white oak with the mirror included.

He ordered the bathtub from Montgomery Ward in 1896.

Pratt was a hunter.

He had several firearms and he reloaded his own ammunition.

In this order he has ordered a half keg of powder two boxes of wads, number 14.

He was known as a photographer that we have so much of his photography but he was ordering supplies.

September 2nd, 1891, he ordered from Mullet, M-U-L-L-E-T, or it may be Mullee' Brother's, a company I'm not familiar with, sent off for five frames and photo materials on January 17th, 1893, $8.80 for photo goods.

Now whether these were prepared or glass negatives, if they're picture frames, If they were mounting stock, he was ordering all of that stuff And interestingly enough when he photographed somebody he would have how much they paid for him to photograph and he would charge them just the cost of the materials but he knew the cost of the materials of, you know, approximately what it took to develop the film, the mounting stock, and what the glass plate would have cost.

That's the thing with the research of these records.

They are so good and of the material we have that it will be years before you get a complete story out of these things and be able to track some of this material down, where he was ordering and where these companies were, where it came from.

To gain further perspective on the important role of mail order.

Don spoke with Leo Oliver, long time professor of history at Fort Hays State University.

I grew up on a farm in Rooks County and attended Fort Hays State University, taught there for a number of years, and I taught in the history department, taught American West and Southwest and Indian history and Kansas history and still live on the farm where I grew up, so.

Everything that we're talking about has to be connected to the railroad, which is the key to the settlement of the whole region and almost everything that happened leads back to the railroad.

So that the mail order catalog wasn't possible until we had railroad service.

In fact, regular mail wasn't available until the railroads were built.

But by the 1890s, 80% of all the farms in the United States were within ten miles of a railroad track.

Now, that's not a railroad station, but within so, you know, the railroad penetrated.

By the 1890s, every county in Kansas had railroad service, to give you an example.

So the first mail order catalog that was really designed for a large market with the railroads was started by Aaron Montgomery Ward in 1872.

His first catalog I had read someplace was one sheet of paper, you know, everything was printed on two sides of a sheet of paper and how to order it even so that that wasn't very many items, but that was how it started and just grew.

But the more famous mail order business developed a little bit later.

Richard Sears was a railroad depot agent in Minnesota.

There was a company in Chicago that manufactured pocket watches, and they would ship a box of watches out to a jewelry store or to a general store that hadn't been ordered.

And then they expected to hear back from them, "We didn't order these."

And then they would say, "Well, you keep those, sell them, you know, and you owe so much money."

Well, they shipped a box of pocket watches to North Redwood Falls, Minnesota, where Richard Sears was the depot agent, and the local store refused them and took them back to the depot to ship back to the company.

And so he he sends a telegraph to the company in Chicago.

"What am I supposed to do with these pocket watches?"

And they said, "Well, you know, you've got all these connections with the telegraph and railroad people.

They're looking for pocket watches.

Why don't you just sell those and send us the money?"

So he did and pretty soon he's ordering more pocket watches, and he claims in six months he cleared almost $5,000 in selling pocket watches, and he quit the railroad and he opened his first business was the Sears Watch Company.

And he decided to move to Chicago.

And he hooked up with a watch repairman named Alva Roebuck.

They got to thinking, you know, we could be selling a lot of other things.

And so they developed Sears, Roebuck and Company and and the catalog business, which started in the early 1890s.

But it became it became the major catalog business.

These products that had not been available to people in rural areas, all of a sudden they could obtain.

So it changed everything about the life of people in rural America.

And the mail order catalog became probably one of the most famous institutions in the country.

As a result of that.

Some of the catalogs that Sears put out ran up to 500 pages.

And the main attraction was the service didn't take long and the price was less than almost any other way because they eliminated that middleman of the local dealer.

And they offered a number of items that just couldn't be possible in a small rural town.

On the other side of that, over time, the catalog business began to put local businesses out of business.

There would be local businesses during the early days of catalog that would encourage people to shop local because that keeps the money in the community and, you know, that employs more people.

And the point that the mail order catalog really contributes nothing back to your community has been an issue.

And it's the same thing with Amazon today.

I mean, the money's gone out of your community if you go there.

During the Great Depression and after, there were a lot of local businesses that went under and a lot of them said if people would have bought local instead of ordering through the catalog, we could have survived.

So it was a it was a big deal during the depression and and then on to the early 1940s.

And I'll share a true story with you.

In Hays, Kansas, there was the Philip Hardware Store that operated for almost a century.

Five generations of George Philip.

And a farmer came in to the Philip Hardware Store, and he needed a hammer and so George Philip, whichever one it was, he brings out the hammer.

"Yeah, that's what I want."

And he says, "Well, that'll be $3."

And the guy says, "You know, I could order that from Sears and Roebuck for $2."

So George Philip says, "Okay, I'll sell that to you for $2."

And the guy paid, and George stuck the hammer under the counter.

And the guy said, "Well, what about my hammer?"

"Well," he said, "If you order from Sears, you'd have to wait for it to come by mail."

He said, "You come back in five days and I'll give you your hammer."

So the guy pulls out another dollar and took his hammer right away.

But I think that's a true story, and I think it illustrates what was happening.

Today, of course, on Internet, you can order something from Amazon or some other company, and they have the order within seconds.

Of course, the mail order, in the old times, it was an envelope.

You probably sent a check.

You would find the item that you want in the catalog, and there's an order form Order forms that come with the catalog.

And so you fill out that order form of what you want.

You've got to have a way of paying for that.

And, you know, this could be with a with a personal check or it could be with a a money order through the Postal Service or a bank draft.

So they didn't have a credit card to do it, to be able to send in or call in and give a credit card number.

And there were very few call in orders.

So the order's sent in.

Now how long it takes to get there?

Several days by mail probably.

Then the order is filled and is shipped.

It's going to come by rail.

It may it may come to your local depot area, probably.

Then you're notified that it's there and you can go to the depot and pick it up.

If you received something at the at the railroad Sometimes you knew when it was coming in and they would contact you, a neighbor would because the railroad is very active and all the neighbors would go down to see the train come in.

A lot of the depot agents or other agents in the area had a dray service.

So this was like a Federal Express or U.P.S..

They were a freight service that would get the freight and they would deliver to you wherever you may be because there were freight lines connecting between the railroads all throughout western Kansas and they had basic routes and sometimes even a freight line was called the stage.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it was a stagecoach.

If you knew a certain item was coming in, you could contact the stage driver and they would look for it and deliver it to you as soon as they could.

But on a route We always think of stagecoaches full of passengers.

Sometimes they weren't because they were making money without passengers.

You didn't have passengers every day.

The Overland Butterfield Dispatch was a mail route that they just happened throw... That was a contract.

So they just happen to throw passengers in.

This process can take several days or maybe even some some weeks.

People learned very quickly that... Plan ahead.

Farmers would probably sit down and think What am I going to need this spring that I don't have and get the orders in and have things delivered in time.

But before you actually needed that product.

Mail order for the sheep business, there's sections in there where he's ordered from Hagley Brothers - H-A-G-L-E-Y - several sets of sheep shears, sacks, wool sacks, which were burlap bags that were specially for the wool.

They were about eight feet long, and you couldn't buy those locally, even the twine to tie the sacks shut.

Well, I know the early Western catalogs, especially by Wyoming saddle makers and stuff there was a picture postcard and so they might have a postcard of all bridal bits on it or all spurs, but every one of them is priced differently.

And there were rows, so you could say, you know, row two and a $16 bit or something and send that in.

But it was, it was the way to get things because other than that, if the if the product were not available locally, you just wouldn't have a chance of getting it at all.

Some of the old pictures of the old stores and stuff, and there's a lot of catalogs in there of items that they can get their hands on that you can purchase through the store and get them everything from dishes to kerosene lamps to lamp chimneys to doors.

Samples to men's suits, and men would come in and order a suit by looking at the samples of fabric.

You mean he didn't dry them on, no.

It was just a picture.

You ordered a suit and chose the fabric that you wanted.

And hoped it fit.

The grocery store sold everything.

That's what I was thinking.

It was called Pratt Brothers General Merchandise.

And I had a quilt made out of all of those samples of men's suit material.

You know, we're talking about items of clothing.

We're talking about pianos, we're talking about blacksmith materials to come in.

But you could also order books.

You could be in a book club, and that might not be particularly mail order from a particular catalog.

But you know, the old thing of the Book of the Month club, you got a book every month from something and it might be a particular author because it was very popular.

And what we've all seen ane are around, Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club.

Every home had them.

I remember people around here, they made kind of a traveling library between individuals that they would keep trading books.

And so there was a study done at one time that western Kansas People were some of the best read people in the state, but the books came mail order and books were very precious.

If people had books they kept them.

And a lot of country people on the farms had very sizable libraries of books, and a lot of them were the classics So the mail order catalog served many purposes.

And one of the purposes, of course, was the paper.

A lot of the catalogs were printed partly with newsprint and partly with slick paper, with with pictures.

These catalogs found their way into the outhouse And then they had those good catalogs that worked really well if you didn't have toilet tissue.

And those yellow pages were softer.

You could roll them up in your hands and they were much softer.

One of the stories that you could around here that deals with mail order is the Pratts at the Museum Ranch that were no relation to the Pratts at Cottonwood Ranch, had ordered several dozen chicken eggs, and the breed of chicken was Blue Andalusian, and they were supposed to come in by rail to the depot at Studley.

They had express trains so the trains could be here in a few days and so it wouldn't hurt the eggs.

Frank Brandrum was an Englishman that lived around here, and he was quite a character and traveled back and forth a lot between Studley at his homestead, uh, about eight miles west of here.

So anyway, they asked Frank Brandrum if he would check at the depot daily, and if those eggs came in, would he bring them and deliver them to them?

He said, sure.

He's going by all the time.

That's absolutely no problem.

That was a neighborly and courteous things to do, so they wouldn't have to make the trip.

So the eggs came in to the depot at Studley.

He took them to the Pratts and said, Here are your eggs.

They put them under their setting hens.

And after three weeks, which is an incubation period for the eggs, nothing happened.

So the Pratts started breaking open the eggs and found out that they were all hard boiled.

But according to the story is that Frank Brandrum went and boiled all the eggs before he delivered them to the Pratts.

I have no idea how much they cost, but they were expensive.

And Frank Brandrum, being the practical joker that he was, thought this was really super funny and it is if it did happen to you.

A good joke and a great story.

Over time, there was almost no item that you could not order through a mail order catalog, including houses.

You could order it on the catalog.

All the pieces came the instructions, how to put it all together.

In fact, you could buy a turnkey house with all of the appliances in it if you wanted to, such as the stove would come with it.

The bathtub, a kitchen sink, the bathroom sink.

Bedsteads and furniture.

The houses came in crates.

When you put it in, you open the crates and you had stuff we will say for a partition wall.

You did that.

Well then the crate could be the ceiling boards because they were all already precut in a size of crate.

So you had to do no cutting.

And the nails came in kegs.

So it was a whole deal.

You had to furnish the tools, but you, hey, you could have ordered those mail order also.

They had many plans, whether they were single story houses or story and a half, you know, a two story house with an attic all the windows, all the trim, all the siding, everything.

And there were about 70,000 prefab houses sold by Sears Roebuck before they quit.

And today they think there's about 70% of those houses still standing and in use.

And probably most communities have a Sears house some place in the community.

Even rural houses.

There's a mail order house, a Montgomery Ward house in Studley, Kansas.

A single woman by the name of Alice Turtle, she ordered the house and according to her relatives, Alice would order this house and had spread the word that once it came in she was going to put it up herself.

And the family said she had it planned all the time, that she would get help.

And she did.

Free help because they volunteered, and allegedly had they had the house up and approximately three days.

So then one of the Pratt nephews, Jess Pratt purchased that house.

They bought that house from Alice Turtle and 19 acres and the house for $3,000.

it's still intact.

There of course have been some modifications, with the bathroom fixtures and some improvements.

And it's currently lived in by a family of four and they really love the house it's so well built that they they like it.

So mail order was very important.

You had the transportation with the railroad instead of the freight trucking as we have now.

And it was all reliable and the mail order companies were very competitive on who could do the service and who could lower the price just as we have now.

It was a business, a very good business.

The rural people needed that because that's not that's the only way they can have it.

Another thing from the mail order catalog it did not discriminate against women, African-Americans, immigrants.

Everybody was treated equally and African-Americans, who would often be discriminated against at local businesses, could order from a mail order catalog.

Their identity was not known.

And so they had a freedom that did not exist locally.

And the same was true of women.

Women didn't have many you know, didn't have many rights for a long period of time, couldn't own property, couldn't have their own bank account.

But if they could order through the mail order catalog, their identity didn't need to be known.

So they...

It was a form of equality.

And the same thing with immigrants, you know, recent immigrants that were having trouble with the language might be frowned upon by the local business.

They turned to the mail order catalog as well.

So it had a social effect on on how people were viewed via the catalog compared to the local conditions.

So that was a factor as well.

Western Kansas is still an area that is a little bit remote compared to others.

You do not run downtown to the store in 15 minutes and you get what you want.

So mail order is still very important out here.

And times really haven't changed because that happened at that time too, of being able to get stuff.

But you could get practically anything just as you can on Amazon.

Mail order was very important to the rural citizens they probably couldn't have gotten by without it because they didn't go to towns that much and the supplies in the towns were limited.

If you had a big rural community and they were going to the cities, a lot of times they couldn't keep up.

They were having sales with clothing and stuff like that and it'd be sold out by the time you got on your wagon and and drove 4 hours to town, they were gone.

So mail order was a good, almost guaranteed program that you would get what you wanted and you could basically get anything you wanted if you had the money to buy it.