Carry Nation's Hatchet: Smashing the Hotel Carey
Near Wichita, Kansas
On the morning of December twenty-seventh, nineteen hundred, six men stood at the bar of the Hotel Carey in downtown Wichita when a large woman in black walked through the door. She was six feet tall and carried a valise. Before the men could process what was happening, she reached in, drew out a rock, and threw it at the mirror behind the bar. Then another rock. Then an iron bar. Glass rained from the large painted nude above the shelves. Bottles of whiskey shattered. The men ran.
Carry Amelia Nation had been building toward this moment for years. She had been born in Kentucky in eighteen forty-six, and her first husband, Charles Gloyd, was an alcoholic whose drinking killed him and left her to raise their child alone. The experience burned into her. When she later settled in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, she watched saloon owners openly violate the state's prohibition law, which Kansas had written into its constitution in eighteen eighty. She wrote letters to officials. She prayed outside the saloons. Nothing changed. She concluded that quieter methods would not work.
Her first saloon-smashing happened in the summer of nineteen hundred in Kiowa, Kansas. Then she came north to Wichita, and the Hotel Carey bar, with its expensive fixtures and its celebrated painting, became her most spectacular target. The damage ran to several thousand dollars. She was arrested. She was released. Front-page headlines reached New York and Boston within days. The photograph of a scowling, hatchet-wielding woman became one of the most widely reproduced images in American newspapers.
Nation was arrested more than thirty times across multiple states. She sold souvenir hatchets to pay her legal bills, which she considered a kind of divine comedy. She also established what may have been the first domestic violence shelter in Kansas, a home for the wives and mothers of men destroyed by drinking.
She was not wrong about the law being flouted. She was not wrong that something had to crack. She simply believed that something was the furniture.
