Carrie Nation: Kiowa Smashers, Hatchetations and a Kansas City Shelter

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Carrie Nation was born Caroline Amelia Moore in Kentucky in 1846, and her family moved repeatedly, to Texas during the Civil War and back to Missouri. Her mother suffered severe delusions, at times believing she was Queen Victoria, and died in an asylum. In 1867 she married Charles Gloyd, a physician and Union veteran who drank heavily; they separated before their daughter was born and he died of alcoholism in 1869. She used land sales to build a house in Missouri for her daughter and her mother-in-law, earned a teaching certificate at a normal institute in 1872, and studied history. In 1874 she married David Nation, an attorney, minister and journalist nearly 20 years older, and after a failed Texas cotton plantation they ran hotels.

In Kansas, a dry state where local officials took saloon fines as revenue, she started a Woman's Christian Temperance Union chapter and serenaded drinkers with hymns. In summer 1900 she reported a voice telling her to go to Kiowa, where she wrecked three saloons with rocks she called smashers. After a Wichita raid her husband joked that she should use a hatchet, and her "hatchetations" followed; she was arrested more than 30 times and divorced in 1901. She paid fines by lecturing and selling souvenir hatchet pins, published The Smasher's Mail and The Hatchet, and in 1901 opened a Kansas City shelter for wives and children of drinkers. She collapsed during a speech in early 1911 and died months later in Kansas.

• When David suggested a hatchet, she answered that it was the most sensible thing he had said since they married.
• A Kansas City, Missouri, judge suspended her fine on condition that she never return to the city.
• Saloons hung signs reading "All nations welcome but Carrie."
• During a 1909 London music hall lecture an audience member hit her with an egg, and she tore up her contract.
• She retired to Arkansas to a home called Hatchet Hall, and the inventor of the Pet Rock later named a California bar after her.