The Van Zan Record

Prequel to Reign of Fire (recovered notebook of Denton Van Zan Part 1)

Not sure where to begin. Guess I should start writing it all down, to the best of my memory before the shit really hits the fan. My early years I’d been a Boy Scout, played more football than baseball. Not much to do out in Kansas. Mom and pop never let us sit inside and watch TV. They’d tell us to get out in the world and make our own fun. And we did. By the age of 12 it wasn’t a problem for me going camping with nothing but a blanket roll and a rod an reel. I knew how to handle myself. I knew how to rig a line down on the river and catch a fish, or set a trap and grab a squirrel. Catching fire was pretty easy to. To know where I came from, the place, the past is to know where this story is going and how it ends. My name is Denton Van Zan and I am from Coffeyville, Kansas.

The place I hail from sits on the Verdigris River in the corner part of Montgomery County, bottom right corner Kansas, in the Central part of the good ol’ United States of American. If you want some precision then about 75 miles (121 km) north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and 60 miles (97 km) west of Joplin, Missouri, about one-half mile north of the Oklahoma state line at 37°2′16″N 95°37′35″W (37.037708, -95.626438). The city is the location of the lowest point in the state of Kansas at 679 feet (207 m) above sea level. Don’t ask me how I can know this. I just do. Some things stick. Urgency requires demand.

The town was founded in 1869 as an Indian trading post by Col. James A. Coffey. Back then the Oklahoma border was in Indian Territory. The town was expanded by the arrival of the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad in 1871. With the arrival of the railroad, a young surveyor, Napoleon B. Blanton, was dispatched to lay out the town. The naming of the town was left to the toss of a coin between Col. Coffey and U.S. Army Captain Blanton. Blanton lost the toss and the town was officially named Coffeyville.

Most of history knows Coffeyville for the Dalton Gang. On October 5, 1892 four of the gang were killed while Emmett Dalton survived with 23 gunshot wounds and was imprisoned for 14 years before being pardoned. They had been attempting to rob two banks, First National Bank and Condon Bank. The citizens recognized them under the fake beards and fought them after coming out of one of the banks. The two banks at the time of the attempted robbery were directly across the street from one another. Four citizens, including a U.S. marshal, Marshal Charles T. Connelly, died in defense of the town. The town holds an annual celebration each October in remembrance of the Dalton Raid and the lives its citizens lost.

We were hard working people. Coffeyville is also home to John Deere Corporation's Coffeyville. Works which is a major manufacturer of off road equipment automatic transmissions for the construction, agriculture and mining industries. Southwire Corp is a maker of stranded and solid core wire and acquired the Leviton Industries facility of American Insulated Wire in 2010. Acme Foundry is a foundry that has been in operation since 1905 and employing more than 300 people. Taylor Crane & Rigging is a regional hauling operation, full-service industrial mover and craning services company. Taylor also maintains a facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Other nearby in county employers include Cessna Aircraft Division of Textron and Spears Manufacturing, a large producer of extruded PVC pipe products.

Both ironic and coincident that Coffeyville’s industrialist Douglas Brown founded Coffeyville Multiscope, which produced components of the Norden bombsight which played a determining role in the perfection of precision day light bombing during World War II as a result of the bombsight's advanced accuracy and drift correction capability.

Coffeyville Municipal Airport is a few miles northeast of the city along US-169. Though Coffeyville is the largest city in Montgomery County, the county seat is Independence, 16 miles (26 km) northwest of the city.

Coffeyville had a long history as a center of industry and manufacturing. CVR Energy, operated a 100,000 barrels per day refinery and a large nitrogen fertilizer plant using a unique Texaco process of ammonia extraction from coke by products produced in the refinery. Sherwin Williams Chemical Co. has operated a chemical plant in the community since 1909. Maybe that’s why they came. They could smell the fuel. Coffeyville enjoyed rapid growth after the discovery of plentiful natural gas and abundant clay and was from the turn of the century to the 1930s one of the largest glass and brick manufacturing centers in the nation. During this same period, the development of oil production in the area prompted the establishment of several oil field equipment manufacturers. They sniffed us out from 8000+ miles. Who knows? They came and burned it to ground. All of it. Every last building. Every last hope and dream. To the last drop of it. But I will make sure history will tell it; they picked the wrong nest to loot.