A satirical weekly article highlighting humorous moments in Midwestern history
By Silas P. Whitmore, Leroy, Kansas, April 21, 1897
It was during the third week of April, in the year of our Lord 1897—a year already promising abundant corn, scandalous hemline experimentation in Wichita, and no less than five confirmed sightings of Methodist ghosts—when the peaceful township of Leroy, Kansas found itself tangled in the most bovine and celestial confusion her prairies had ever known.
The story begins on a dewy spring evening, when one Mr. Alexander Hamilton—not the one of national renown, but a farmer of fine beard and middling reputation in Leroy, Kansas—was enjoying a pipe and contemplating fence repair, when a low, resonant hum filled the twilight air. This was no ordinary hum, mind you, like those that preceded the approach of Mrs. Thistlewaite’s treadle sewing machine, but a sound so deep it seemed to come from beneath the soil and above the stars simultaneously.
Looking skyward, Hamilton beheld an apparition so unholy it nearly caused him to renounce the entirety of his seed catalog. Floating some twenty rods above his pasture was a great vessel—cylindrical, luminous, and festooned with blinking lights that suggested either advanced propulsion or poor taste in lantern placement. Out from this strange contraption lowered a red cable of questionable structural integrity, which, with mechanical precision, looped itself around one of Hamilton’s more respectable heifers, a sturdy milk cow by the name of Matilda.
Young Emmett Hamilton, barely 14 and already an expert at both fence jumping and lying to Methodist schoolteachers, leapt into action. “Pa! They’re takin’ her!” he cried, brandishing a pitchfork with the courage of a boy who’d never successfully fought anything larger than a hen.
Matilda, meanwhile, offered protestations that shook the very grass. Her bell clanged madly as the airship began to ascend, dragging her skyward like some celestial livestock rapture. Hamilton, seizing a fence post with the vigor of a man who once arm-wrestled a hog for a nickel, attempted to liberate his cow by hacking away at the enclosing boards. The fencing splintered; the cow mooed in ascending keys; the ship emitted a metallic groan not unlike a calliope in mourning.
And then—it vanished. Not in a puff of smoke, nor with the thunderous clamor of earthly engines, but with the quiet snap of a soap bubble, leaving only trampled grass, a bent fence post, and the unmistakable scent of warm ozone and frightened bovine.
News of the incident traveled faster than cholera at a summer wedding. Townsfolk from Leroy to Broken Bow offered their theories: some claimed the vessel was from the planet Mars, others suspected a government dirigible built for cow espionage, and at least one elderly woman declared it was surely the return of Ezekiel’s wheel, this time demanding tribute in dairy.
Sheriff Ellery Tibbets, who had once successfully arrested a tornado (on paper, at least), rode out to Hamilton’s farm to investigate. He declared the incident “highly irregular” and confiscated a cowbell “for evidentiary purposes,” which he has since used exclusively in local square dances.
To this day, the tale of Matilda’s unholy ascension is told in hushed tones over checkerboards and whiskey jugs across Kansas. And though skeptics abound—claiming hallucinations, mass hysteria, or fermented beet mash—the legend persists. For in Leroy, they say that when the April winds blow just right, and the moon has that peculiar tilt, one might still hear the distant, mournful moo of Matilda… orbiting somewhere above the plains, awaiting her return, or perhaps merely confused.
So ends the chronicle of the skyward cow—an udderly improbable tale, but one not so easily dismissed.