Aka David Carl Henry, Carl Henry, Carl Henry Leverage, Charles Henley, Winfield Byrd, Sing Sing No. 65368
Author, Newspaper Editor, Movie Scenarist
Born October 9, 1879, Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas
Died February 24, 1931, Druskin Hospital, New York, New York
I began with the author Henry Leverage on June 30, 2022, but gave up on him when his case became too complicated, confused, unclear, and uncertain. Usually when you're doing this kind of research, if something seems wrong, it is wrong. Or as a fence builder I met in the Missouri Ozarks said when talking about fence posts, "If it looks crooked, it probably is crooked." Anyway, there was a reason for my confusion, and it's because "Leverage" was a liar, and he seems to have lied about everything in his life. From more than one hundred years distance, he looks crooked, like a crooked post. In fact he admitted that he was a crook, and so I can honestly say that I'm not impugning the reputation of a long-dead man. Yes, he was a liar, or a teller of tales if you want to be nice about it, and a convicted criminal, but he also told real fictional tales--i.e., pulp fictional tales--after he was released from prison. You could say that Leverage leveraged his lies against potential profits to be made as an author. Maybe personal economic considerations decided him on his adopted surname.
I am not the discoverer of Henry Leverage's identity. That distinction goes, I assume, to Robert Messenger of Canberra, Australia, who writes on the blog ozTypewriter: The Wonderful World of Typewriters. You can find Mr. Messenger's posting on Henry Leverage, entitled "Henry Leverage -- The Pulp Fiction Author Who Made His Corona 3 Portable Typewriter Sing Sing: Seven Million 'Sold Words' in 11 Years" and dated November 7, 2019, by clicking here. Mr. Messenger's angle is to write about Leverage's use of a Corona portable typewriter during his successful career as an author of short stories and novels. I won't rehash Robert Messenger's biography of Leverage. I'll just provide some facts, many of which are peripheral, as well as make some corrections.
According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage was actually David Carroll Henry, not British at all, as he claimed, but peculiarly American and born plumb in the middle of the country, in fact about one hundred miles from the geographic center of the United States at that time. His father was John Cummings Henry (b. June 19, 1848, Ontario, Canada; d. May 3, 1901, at home, Denver, Colorado), who is supposed to have invented the first electric streetcar in the world, put into operation in Kansas City in 1883. The elder Henry was an electrical engineer and was supposed to have held more than 70 patents. He was more than that, too.
I have found John C. Henry in the U.S. Census of 1880 in Wa-Keeney, Kansas. His son, David C. Henry, was then eight months old. It is from that record that I have been able to find out more about John C. Henry and to trace him and his family through public records. Unfortunately, the man later known as Henry Leverage is hard to find in those records, and so his life story and all of the assumptions I must make about him are secured only on one end, at least at this point in my research. (We'll see how things develop.) If Henry Leverage wasn't David Carroll Henry, then I don't know what to think. It seems like he was, though.
John C. Henry was a pioneer in what is now Trego County, Kansas. I assume that he arrived in that place by railroad, which had been laid down in the area in 1868. A newspaper item from 1888 states that Henry was "the first to obtain a patent for a quarter section of land [i.e., 160 acres]" and "the first to build a substantial residence" in Trego County. The first patent for his quarter-section of land was dated March 1, 1873. I have found record of a second patent, dated September 6, 1876*, for that same quarter-section, namely, the Northwest 1/4 of Section 8, Township 12 South, Range 23 West. A newspaper article from 1879 says that "the first furrow of prairie sod [in Trego County] was turned by him." He later grew millet and wheat. Henry built his house, a stone construction, at Trego Tank in 1875. His farm, described as "handsome" and "prosperous," was about a mile west of the later site of Wa-Keeney.
Prior to that, on May 28, 1874, Henry was appointed postmaster of Park's Fort, a 30-foot x 30-foot sod embankment with no buildings, only tents, located about six miles west of Ogallah and about two miles east of what became Wa-Keeney. That same article states that the railroad station at Park's Fort was moved to Henry's farm, and though the wording is ambiguous, it appears as though there were two or three saloons there, while "the principal industry was the collection of buffalo bones and hides." In other words, Henry's farm seems to have been the original settlement in Trego County, before the founding of Wa-Keeney in 1877-1879. In 1879, Henry and a partner acquired a general store in Wa-Keeney, renaming it Henry & Kyle. He ran a meat market in a 12 x 15-foot building in Wa-Keeney and became secretary of the Wa-Keeney Coal Prospecting Company in 1880. Henry seems to have been a prominent and accomplished man in his adopted home country, state, county, and town.
There is still a house in that lonely quarter, located not far to the west of the current Wakeeney. (The hyphen was dropped in the early 1900s.) An online "street" view from dusty Old U.S. Highway 40 shows a lane behind a double pipe gate that leads to a distant, weathered house, well away from the road. It looks like there are other structures there, too. Was that Henry's house? I can't say. But Trego Tank was located one mile west of Wa-Keeney, and so it was in about the right place for Henry's quarter-section and that old gray house still standing. Trego Tank was for several years the only stop along the Kansas Pacific Railroad in what became Trego County. There was a deep well there and a large windmill. I don't see a windmill in the "street"-view picture I'm looking at, but there is a low, brushy area with a few trees, and so maybe there is water not far below the surface. This is at the top of a ravine that flows to the south, soon into Big Creek. There must be water there after all. Now comes news that Henry's horse Patsey was killed at Trego Tank on July 16, 1880, by a westbound train. Called "the old favorite," Patsey "had a reputation second to none for his speed and endurance." A month later, an article by Henry on "changing the climate" made the rounds of Kansas newspapers. His article was about water, which was and is one of the defining resources and issues of the American West.
Platted and established in 1877-1879, Wa-Keeney was named for its founders, Albert E. Warren and James F. Keeney. The two men were boosters, and the place that they founded is referred to on line as a "colony." That colony seems to have been from Chicago. A plat map from 1886 shows a place west of Wa-Keeney called Colony Station. I'm not sure whether there is a connection between the "colony" of Wa-Keeney and the place called Colony Station. In any case, by 1883, Wa-Keeney was in decline due to crop failures and other misfortunes. Nonetheless, Wakeeney still exists as the seat of Trego County government. As it so happens, we drove that way several years ago on our way to Denver. Not long after that, I based a long short story on that trip and one of its sights, the World's Wonder View Tower, or Tower Museum, at Genoa, Colorado.
John C. Henry seems to have been gone from Trego County by 1884, when he appears to have lost his farm after having become delinquent on his taxes. Maybe the misfortunes of the early 1880s turned Wa-Keeney from a boomtown to a bust. Anyway, when I said that Henry Leverage was peculiarly American, what I meant is that he may have been what I have described before as an American type, the commercial crackpot or the earnest conman. He seems to have been a low type of character, but maybe he came into the world in a place started by high and respectable men of the same essential type. Maybe he learned something from them.
By the way, Trego County was named for Captain Edgar Poe Trego (1838-1863) of the 8th Kansas Infantry, who was killed in action at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19, 1863. So it looks like Henry Leverage, a teller of weird tales, began life in a place named for a man who was named (presumably) for the original teller of weird tales in America, who was of course Edgar Allan Poe.
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*That was less than three months after the Battle of Little Bighorn, which happened two-and-a-half states and about 700 miles to the northwest of Trego Tank.
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According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage, né David Carroll Henry, was born in Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas, on October 9, 1879, so just a few months after Trego County was organized on June 21, 1879. His father was, again, John Cummings Henry. His mother was Susan Ann (McFadden) Henry, a Pennsylvanian born in about 1856. David C. Henry and his younger sister, Sadie Lucinda Henry (b. July 28, 1881, Kansas City, Missouri; d. ?), were baptized in Philadelphia, at Norris Square Methodist Episcopal Church, on November 4, 1886. The Henry family lived in Wa-Keeney, Kansas, and Denver, Colorado, presumably also in Kansas City, Missouri (in the 1880s). John C. Henry died at home in Denver on May 3, 1901, and was buried at Fairmount Cemetery in that city. His wife and daughter afterwards shared a household in Montclair, New Jersey (1910, 1920, 1930). By 1940, Susan A. Henry was gone. In the meantime, Sadie L. Henry had married Edward J. Vintschger, later chairman of the board of Markt & Hammacher Company, a New York-based export firm co-founded by his father. They lived in Montclair for many years. David C. Henry was nowhere in sight. Sadie's husband, then, was presumably straight, while her brother was admittedly crooked.
To be continued . . .
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| Wa-Keeney, Kansas, 1880s, from the website Legends of Kansas. |
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
