In the Press
Review of : The Jayhawker Cleveland: Phantom Horseman of the Prairie
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"This is a fun and informative biographical fiction with a strong western flavor, both as a result of its language choices and the deeds of its bad-boy hero. And its biographical fiction in the best sense of the term, with an author who has stayed true to the known facts and worked within them to create a plausible story line.
My only wish is that it was longer — I found everything about this book enjoyable."
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- Loretta T, Reviewer
NetGalley.com
Lawrence writer’s novel revives interest in ‘Jayhawker Cleveland’;
‘It’s a story that should become a touchstone in early Kansas history’
Hann says one of the biggest difficulties in writing the book was the fact that he initially didn’t realize that’s what he wanted to do.
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“I wasn’t thinking of writing a book,” Hann says. “(I was) just wanting to find out more information about this interesting character from the Kansas-Missouri Border War era. I often failed to note the newspaper and date where and when certain events occurred.”
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Hann found stringing the vignettes culled from 1860s news archives into a coherent narrative challenging.
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“A big help to me later on was the discovery of Newspapers.com, with its search facility,” Hann says. “(It was) much easier than trying to read and copy microfiche from 1860s newspapers. Also, restrictions on doing research at KSHS due to COVID hampered me, but Newspapers.com greatly helped me overcome that obstacle.”
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Despite the challenges, Hann was compelled to persevere with his novel by Cleveland’s quirky character. Hann found odd details about Cleveland amusing, like how he would refrain from killing his enemies. One time Cleveland disarmed a cavalry unit intent on apprehending him, yet returned their horses and weapons and let them flee.
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Another time Cleveland snatched weapons from a Missouri Guard unit, freed their slaves and instructed them to tell their commander to make sure future military members knew how to use their weapons when they came to Kansas.
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Brian Daldorph, a Lawrence writer who also teaches creative writing at KU, was intrigued by Cleveland as a character and by Hann’s storytelling skills.
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“Hann’s story of the life journey of Cleveland from his birthplace in New Jersey during the cholera epidemic, to Ohio, then to Kansas, is a wild ride indeed,” Daldorph says. “There are some brilliant scenes in the book which stay with me. In 1861, two young soldiers on Shawnee Street in Leavenworth, Kansas, pass a Wanted: Dead or Alive poster (featuring) Marshall Cleveland, a Jayhawker at war with the Missouri Bushwhackers. Then they see a tall handsome horseman riding towards them, proud and fearless: Cleveland, very much alive.”
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Litton believes the book should revive interest in Cleveland, providing not just entertainment, but historical enrichment.
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“(This) is a name and figure all but lost to history until David retrieved him from the dust for our reading pleasure,” Litton says. “It’s a story that should become a touchstone in early Kansas history and find a place on bookshelves in homes, libraries and schools, enjoyed by readers from eighth graders to those in their 80s.”
Lawrence Journal-World | January 14, 2022
By Chansi Long
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Before COVID, David Hann, of Lawrence, would occasionally spend hours at the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka poring over micro-fiche archives in search of interesting people, places and events. A former administrator at the University of Kansas, now a writer, Hann wasn’t looking for writing material; he was just enter-taining himself as a history buff.
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One day Hann discovered the story of a man named Marshall Cleveland. Propelled from article to article, Hann became convinced that he was unearthing a story of a man who never should have been forgotten.
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“Research revealed a most interesting and unique character,” Hann says. “As one newspaper put it, (‘Cleveland’s) story would be told around the fireside for a hundred years. Of course, the news-paper was wrong and his story has been forgotten.”
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According to Hann’s account, Cleveland — who had the aliases Kingman Moore and Charles Metz — was a liberator of slaves and horses during the 1861-1862 period of the Kansas-Missouri Border War. Hann’s book follows Cleveland from New York’s 1849 cholera epidemic to Ohio, where he drives a stagecoach, then guides a group of Free State settlers bound for Kansas into Missouri. Early on in the narrative, Cleveland is imprisoned for abolitionist activity in Ohio.
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“The judge connected Cleveland with (a group called) the Rescuers, who attacked (an) Ohio sheriff who had imprisoned escaped slaves,” Hann says. “It’s notable, at least to me, that the judge convicted (Cleveland) on the basis of what the judge thought he would do in Missouri—not for what he had done.”
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Hann then reconstructs Metz’s experience in the Missouri Penitentiary, from which he escapes. Metz changes his name to Kingman Moore and journeys to Kansas via riverboat on the Missouri River. Then he changes his name to Marshall Cleveland, joins Jennison’s Jayhawkers in Kansas and fights against slavery.
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Local writer Melvin Litton says Hann’s resulting novel, titled “The Jayhawker Cleveland: Phantom Horseman of the Prairie,” rockets the reader from chapter to chapter — much in the same way Hann was propelled by the news articles that inspired him.
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“David Hann is a storyteller . . . full of grit and determination and utterly void of cynicism, traits once common to the American spirit that I find so refreshing,” Litton says. “I found his narrative engagingly swift and succinct. (It) grabs you from the first page and rides you to the very end.”
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Review of : Kansas Past: Pieces of the 34th Star
"Author explores lesser-known characters:
'Pieces of 34th Star' unveiled in historian's new book"
A master of aggressive flamboyance, Green announced that he was starting a town to be called Greensburg and was not above using bribery to coax folks from nearby Janesville to move there.
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Eventually, the Janesville postmaster proved to be the lone holdout.
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But without a post office Greensburg wouldn't blossom, so the entrepreneurial Green hatched a plan. He and some buddies took the postmaster out for a few drinks.
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When the postmaster awoke the next morning, he found his bed, his house and the post office had been moved to Greensburg.
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"In his heyday, 'Cannoball' Green was a big name," Hann said. "Today, few people have heard of him."
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- How a Paola school teacher's history bee turned into Kansas Day.
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- The indictment of the state silk commissioner for taking bribes that led to moving the state-financed cocoon-buying station in Larned to Peabody.
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Kansas produced one-fifth of the nation's silk in 1888. A couple of years later, the market crashed, never to recover.
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- A Lebanon entrepreneur's ill-fated attempt to make money in 1956 by building a motel and wedding chapel on what was then the geographical center of the United States. The venture went flat after Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union.
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- The rarely mentioned snake-shaped terraglyph (a symbol carved into the earth) in Rice County, and the remains of the state's only pueblo dwelling: El Cuartelejo near Scott County State Lake.
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- How a joke about the high price of water gave Liberal its oxymoronic name.
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"Kansas history has so much to offer," Hann said. "I feel like I've barely scratched the surface."
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Kansas Past: Pieces of the 34th Star is Hann's second collection of mini-essays on Kansas history. His first is Sampling Kansas: A Guide to the Curious.
Lawrence Journal-World | December 16, 1999
By Dave Ranney
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David Hann likes to leaf through the card catalog —you know, those things you used to use to find a library book — at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka.
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"It's like opening a treasure chest," he said. "You never know what you're going to find."
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That's where Hann found out about Rossville's wannabe aviator Robert S. Gabbey, who, after an 1899 study of bird weights and wingspans, said the secret to flight was to build an airship with several small propellers instead of one or two big ones because, well, small birds seem to fly better than big birds.
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True, perhaps, but a bird is not a plane and Gabbey's idea didn't get off the ground. He was soon forgotten.
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But Gabbey was not alone. Kansas history, Hann learned, is loaded with independent thinkers who were hellbent on flying.
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"So much of this was going in Kansas, I suspect, because, first of all, there's enough open space here to land and fly a plane," Hann said. "And most of these guys were farmers. They were jacks-of-all-trades, they knew how to build things."
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Hann, and amateur historian, has a chapter on justly forgotten aviators in his latest book, Kansas Past: Pieces of the 34th Star," an off-beat look at some of the state's lesser-known characters, places and adventures.
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"I like stories about people who may be 'common' in their origins, but who stand out for what they did or tried to do," said Hann, who works for Kansas University's Advisory Committee on Human Experimentation.
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One of Hann's favorite characters is Colonel D.R Green, who started the Cannonball Line stagecoach company after moving to Kingman in 1876.
Review of : Sampling Kansas: A Guide to the Curious
the plains at upwards of seventy m.p.h. and seems to have played the same role in the winning of the West that the Hindenburg did in the history of aviation.
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And down in Cherokee County there stands "Big Brutus," a strip--mining power shovel eight stories high, marooned at the bottom of a pit of its own digging. What Kansan, having seen it, could ever be impressed by the likes of the Spruce Goose or the Queen Mary, which our regionalist enemies, the Californians, make such a promotional fuss over?
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Author Hann is good at bringing such facts to light, and Sampling Kansas will be read mostly as a collection of anecdotes. The thoughtful reader, however, may notice that these seemingly diverse oddities are tied together by a certain wary pes-simism on the author's part about the meaning of life in Kansas. Hann signals this theme in his open-ing chapter, where he bypasses the conventional exhortations to adventure and opportunity in the West, choosing instead to repeat the warnings of less sanguine nineteenth-century observers about the Great Plains as impenetrable wasteland. In the succeeding chapters, these warnings are borne out in episodes of lives and works wasted or forgotten, with even the modest monuments intended to memorialize then gone to neglect and vandalism.
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There are moments of humor, to be sure, as in the tale of the Attica citizen whose tombstone epitaph is a tirade from beyond the grave against the Democratic Party. There are even examples of lives well led, such as those of Martin and Osa Johnson, whose museum in their native Chanute attests to their celebrity as explorers and documentary film-makers.
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For the most part though, Sampling Kansas portrays Kansas as a land of awe, rather than Ah's. It will strike the spark of recognition in those who appreciate the state's subtle charms while acknowledging its shortcomings.
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Books on the Hill
By Bill Getz
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On long drives across Kansas, haven't we all felt the urge to pull off the interstate at one of those historical markers, or to check out some hokey local attraction?
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It's a temptation that Lawrence writer David Hann has never been able to resist. He has, moreover, taken the time to research his observations on small-town oddities and historical anomalies, and has presented them in a new book, Sampling Kansas: A Guide to the Curious, available this month at better bookstores throughout the state.
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The book features curiosities from all parts of Kansas, spanning the state's history and illustrating its ethnic and cultural diversity. Some are familiar: the highs and hazards of the Pony Express, and the wacky "Garden of Eden" in Lucas, are well known even to casual Kansans. Others may come as a surprise. Even this reviewer, a seasoned veteran of cheap family vacations and Class B high school road schedules, had never before heard of the grave of the Unknown Indian in Morris County, nor even the Liberty Bell made out of wheat in Goessel, a scant 20 miles up the road from where I grew up! And, baseball buff that I am, I have always been proud that immortal Hall-of-Famer Walter Johnson hailed from Humboldt, Kansas, without suspecting that another baseball great, the Negro Leagues' George Sweatt, was a native of the same humble town. This is the sort of information, just one turn down a county road from the familiar, that makes Sampling Kansas fascinating reading.
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Along with unsung personalities and locales, author Hann seems drawn to monstrosities of technology that left their mark on the state, however fleetingly. The "wind wagon," for instance, a literal prairie schooner fitted out with a mainsail, careened across
Review of : River Memoir and Other Stories
Midwest Review of Books | May 2012
By Able Greenspan
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Everyday there is comedy, there is tragedy, there is danger. River Memoir and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from David Hann, who brings a wide variety of short fiction touching on the many angles of war, practical jokers, natural disaster, chasing the American dream, and most importantly, fishing. River Memoir and Other Stories is quite the novel that shouldn't be missed for general short fiction collections.