4B the university daily kansan
friday, october 17,2003
1863-1899
CHRISTMAS WISH — 12.25.1856
In the early hours on the morning of Aug. 21, 1863, a man named William Clarke Quantrill led a rag-tag band of more than 400 Confederate riders down Massachusetts Street, seeking reprisal for a number of Jajhawker incursions across the Missouri border. In a few horrific hours, over 200 men and boys of Lawrence were dead, and more 200 homes and businesses were destroyed. Immediately, all concern for the fate of the fragile, new university established only a few months earlier — was pushed to the back burner.
several decades, was an eventful and memorable time period. The concept of having a state school officially became possible in 1855 when the Kansas territorial legislature granted permission for the formation of a university within the territorial limits, but nothing really came of it until Kansas earned official statehood in 1861.
The first 40 years for the University of Kansas, or Kansas State University, as it was known for
Lawrence boosters sponsor a hastily called mass meeting in an attempt to stampede Kansas Territory into selecting the free-state stronghold as the location for the proposed public university.
Unfortunately for Lawrence, there were four other cities that considered themselves capable of meeting that criteria: Topeka, Leavenworth, Emporia and Manhattan. What ensued was a "battle royale" of sorts as each town did anything it could to earn the votes of state representatives, including bribes at the rate of $5 a vote.
Kannan Collection, University Archives, Spencer Research Center An illustration in *Harper's Weekly*, Sept. 5, 1863, depicts William Quantrill's raid.
FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL 9.12.1866 Opening day of classes at the University of
attempt to help split the riches more evenly, a "teacher's school" was awarded to Emporia, while Manhattan gained the state's
The will of Lawrence won out, and on Feb. 20, 1863, the town earned the right to establish the first university in Kansas. In an
school of agriculture.
Kansas.
Quantrill's raid seriously challenged the prospects of keeping the university in Lawrence. Although the state permitted the school to be founded in the town, it had left all fundraising to be done by its own residents. After a majority of the town had been completely leveled, there was no chance of finding the $15,000 cash due to the state legislature on the first day of November.
Enter Amos Lawrence, a wealthy Boston textile tycoon and the town's namesake. At a time when most residents were without a home, Lawrence donated $10,000 to the University and, along with the state legislature's
generosity in lowering the required amount by $5,000, the University of Kansas was, against all odds, saved.
During the next 20 years, the school that started with three teachers and a handful of students blossomed into one of the finest institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi River. In 1883, the school boasted an enrollment of 583 students.
— Story by Cole Robinson.
Edited by Dave Nobles
Additional material for this article was supplied by This Week In KU History, www.kuhistory.com, a project of the KU Memorial Unions.
Aswell yell
During the 1880s, prior to the formal organization of intercollegiate athletics, University pride
manifested itself through somewhat different arenas—debates, oratorical and mathematical contests, and college yells. In early 1886, the University Courier, the University's weekly student paper, published a plea for the University to "adopt a yell" prior to that year's state collegiate oratorical competition. While no cheer was agreed upon in time for event, the University Science Club inadvertently responded to the newspaper's request later that spring when it devised its own yell one that the rest of the University would quickly adopt.
The Science Club served primarily as a social club, admitting members by election and demanding yearly dues. It met weekly where it welcomed the periodic reading of papers and offered tutoring for
younger students. Once a year the club sponsored an annual dinner banquet known as the "It," at which professors presented farcical papers celebrating their "discoveries" and lampooned one another for the students' enjoyment.
In the late spring of 1886, the Science Club decided that it
needed to adopt a cheer. After rejecting several proposed yells, on May 21 of that year, club members approved one suggested by E. H. S. Bailey, a chemistry professor (and namesake of Bailey Hall). The student body at large quickly embraced the club's new cheer which consisted of the phrase "Rah, Rah, Jay Hawk, KSU" repeated three times quickly with a staccato emphasis.
In the late 19th century, the terms KU and KSU were used interchangeably. The KSU in Bailey's
cheer did not refer to Kansas State, which at the time was known as KSAC but has since adopted the KSU initials. The term "jayhawk" was originally a pejorative used by pro-slavery Kansans to describe Free State supporters during the "Bleeding Kansas" period in the 1850s. Over time, "jayhawk" lost its negative connotations and Kansans came to embrace the title as a term of endearment.
Within a year, "Rah, Rah" had morphed into "Rock Chalk." The person (or people) responsible for this change is unknown, but it is likely that the professors of geology in Snow Hall — whom Bailey credited with the alteration — played a role in altering the cheer. Kansas is one of the few places in the United States where chalk rock, of the sort perhaps best exemplified in England's Cliffs of Dover, occurs naturally.
By 1889, an elongated, rolling cadence had replaced the original staccato meter of the yell, and students were belting out the cheer with a swagger that revealed the degree to which the chant had become a tangible manifestation of the University's dignity. Indeed references to "our beloved Rock
Chalk" were fairly commonplace in KU publications well into the twentieth century.
The enormous amount of pride that University students and alumni took in their cheer bred a mythology all its own. The myths ranged from the yell's originating in the clicking of a train's wheels as it was heard from a "swaying railway car" crossing the plains to supposed chalk rock outcroppings on Mount Oread. In 1956, the geology department pointed out that although no such outcroppings existed on the hill, they are found in western Kansas.
According to legend, the publication of an article in the Harvard University paper that ranked the University's yell as the best college cheer in the country thwarted an attempt to replace "Rock Chalk" in the mid-1890s. Since the University's conceit at the time was that it was the "Harvard of the West," the cheer could hardly have gained a more fortunate endorsement. But then a son of Harvard trumped his alma mater one better. Theodore Roosevelt was reputed to have declared KU'syell "the greatest college cheer ever devised." And so the notion grew among those affiliated
with the institution that KU had the greatest college cheer in the world.
Thus in December 1928, when KU Athletics Director Phog Allen issued a brochure which ostensibly laid out the cheer's history - but really served as a compilation of the legends celebrating the University and its cheer - he titled it "The Most Famous College Yell in America." The brochure exulted in events both real and imagined. It enumerated, for instance, the places in which the "inspiring cry, which now kindles fire in the hearts of Kansas athletes" had been used as a battle cry — Cuba, the Philippines, China and the trenches of Europe during World War I. It likewise celebrated the story that a "group of athletes gathered from every quarter of the United States" at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, had allegedly chosen "Rock Chalk" to be given before the assembled European nobility in response to their request to hear an American college yell.
Despite the emergence of such a mythology surrounding the cheer, by 1928 many feared that the yell was dying. Numerous alumni wrote letters to local papers lambasting KU students for abandoning traditions. The authors of some of these missives swore melodramatic oaths to keep the yell alive until "Mount Oread has crumbled and been washed into the Kaw" and other epithets to that effect.
Former KU student William Allen White, however, refused to lament the cheer's decline and maintained instead in an editorial for his Emporia Gazette that if "Rock Chalk goes, something else will replace it - if replacement is needed. If not-it's dead wood. Lop it off."
The reports of its demise, as it turned out, were premature. The cheer continues to echo down to the ears of KU athletes from their supporters. It is even etched in stone.
The gargoyles atop the walls of Dyche Hall hold in their arms shields upon which are carved the words of the "Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU" cheer. Those who feared its abandonment might rest assured that stone statues are keeping watch over their beloved yell.
— Reprinted with permission from KUhistory.com. Copyright 2003 University of Kansas Memorial Corporation. All rights reserved.
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