Stone Gardens: Benton County mother trying to shield her children from seeing mating horses was shot and kllled in 1916
Olive May Miller Arnold stepped into the lane outside her home in Springtown (Benton County0) on the evening of May 6, 1916, to shield her children from the sight of two neighboring farmers breeding a mare in season to a stallion. The confrontation that followed ended with a shot that struck her in the thigh.
She lingered through the night in shock and died at 3:45 the next morning, May 7, at the age of twenty-four. The physician who attended her was Joe Cleimire. There was no undertaker. According to family accounts, she rests in an unmarked grave in Springtown Cemetery.
She had been born May 31, 1891, in Syracuse, Otoe County, Nebraska, to Charles Jay Miller, a carpenter and teamster, and Mary Hannah Sherlock Miller. The couple had married the previous year in Hays, Kansas, and moved north in search of work. After roughly seven years in Nebraska, they returned to the Salina area of Kansas, where other members of both families had settled.
At seventeen, Olive met Albert Arnold, a widower of about thirty-three whose first wife, Rosa Mae Speller, had died of childbed fever in 1906, days after the birth of a sixth child who also did not survive. Olive and Albert married on June 14, 1909, two weeks after her eighteenth birthday.
Their first son, Lawrence Earl, was born in 1910 and Mary followed in January 1912. That fall the family moved to Flint Township in Benton County to homestead near Springtown. Rollan Louis was born there in February 1913. Olive took in Albert’s four surviving children from his earlier marriage and kept a household that valued propriety and the protection of the young.
On that May evening the two farmers met in the road with their animals. Olive, unwilling to have her children witness the spectacle, went out and objected. One of the men shot her. Albert fetched the doctor at once. She survived about eight hours. In September the man who fired the shot was tried in circuit court and convicted of second-degree murder. He received a sentence of seventeen years.
The Journal-Advance reported the verdict without naming him. A little more than a year later, in December 1917, Governor Charles Hillman Brough granted him a full pardon. He had been a school teacher before the killing and, while at the Cummins prison farm, served as assistant commissary clerk and bookkeeper.
Prison officials described him as trustworthy and obedient and said he had been punished sufficiently. Petitions signed by two thousand Benton County residents, including the entire trial jury and the deputy prosecuting attorney who had handled the preliminary hearing, supported his release.
Family tradition has long held that the man who shot Olive bore the surname Cash. People of that name are buried in Springtown Cemetery, a circumstance that lends some credence to the identification even though no contemporary newspaper, court, or pardon record recovered so far confirms it.
Albert Arnold lived until 1954 and is buried in Edgar, Nebraska. Their son Lawrence died in 1927. Mary lived until 1995 and Rollan Louis until 1988. Olive’s own life, begun in Nebraska and ended in the Arkansas Ozarks over an effort to spare her children an unseemly sight, remains marked only by an unmarked grave and a memorial that still withholds the name of the man who took it.
