enter murderers

As we have the average morbid taste for reading about crime, we read Enter Murderers by Edward Hale Bierstadt, and found it satisfactory except for the omission of the Bender family... They are, on the whole, the most memorable of all American specialists in homicide, to our mind... May Lamberton Becker says they were, too sordid; but it's their technique that strikes our imagination... They used to induce their victims to sit down to dinner in a tent and then one of the Benders - there were a log of them, so the temporary absence of one was not noticed - went around outside the tent with a mallet... You can easily figure out the subsequent proceedings... - Oakland (California) Tribune, October 14, 1934

"Rose Wilder Lane writes to correct us on the habits of the celebrated Bender family... Someone else also gave us the facts, but we lost the letter.

"'I beg your pardon,' she says, 'the Bender family did not commit their murders in a tent. Or at least did not earn their deserved reputation in that way. Kate Bender lived in an ordinary house of the times, midway between Independence, Kan., and my grandfather's log cabin on the Verdigris in Indian Territory. My grandfather often stopped there, but though he had a good team, a wagon and (on the return trip) a load of supplies amply justifying his murder, he never could afford to buy a meal from the Benders, but frugally ate by his own campfire.

"'The Bender house, completely conventional, had a canvas curtain across the middle dividing sleeping and living quarters. A bench stood against this curtain, and a table before the bench. Prosperous travelers who could afford to pay for Kate Bender's good home cooking sat on the bench to eat it... My grandfather was one of the volunteer posse that pursued the fleeing Benders. Darkly, he said little about what happened... The ultimate fate of the Bender family is usually reported as shrouded in mystery... But there really was no tent. Kate Bender was the dominant force in that family, and was there ever a woman who could live in a tent if she could help it?'" - January 6, 1935

Rose finished working on her mother's High Prairie manuscript in June 1934. Little House on the Prairie was released prior to the holiday season the following year.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:16 PM