In 1901 scarcely an American lived who was unfamiliar with the story of Frederick Funston, the hero of the Philippine insurrection. Through a daring ruse this Kansan had captured Emilio Aguinaldo, the insurrectionist leader, and broken the back of the uprising. Previously he had won the nation's highest award for valor, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Funston's adult life was one of almost unbelievable adventure, though his boyhood had been prosaic enough. Son of a Kansas congressman, Edward H. Funston, who had come to Allen county, Kansas, from Ohio in 1868, young Fred graduated from Iola High School in 1886. The he entered the University of Kansas, but departed without earning a degree. His next venture was as a reporter on a Fort Smith, Ark., newspaper. In 1890, he joined a Department of Agriculture expedition to the Dakota badlands and in the following year served as a botanist on a similar expedition to Death Valley, Calif. After his return in the fall of 1891 Funston found a job on a newspaper in Kansas City, Mo., where his roommate was an old Kansas University classmate, William Allen White.

In 1892 he was off again to study the flora of Alaska, and in 1893-1894 he wintered alone on the banks of the Klondike. In the spring he built a boat and paddled 1,500 miles down the Yukon river into the open sea, where he boarded a ship and was transported to California.

Later in 1894 Funston tried unsuccessfully to establish a coffee plantation in Central America. Then he moved to New York as deputy comptroller for the Santa Fe railroad. There he visited an exhibition presented by the Cuban Revolutionists in Madison Square Garden. Cuba was then fighting for independence from Spain and the exhibition, plus a speech by fiery Civil War Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, stirred Funston to enlist in the Cuban Army. While waiting to be called up he learned the workings of a Hotchkiss twelve pounder, and when he arrived in Cuba in the late summer of 1896 he was made a captain of artillery. Before he was invalided home with malaria in 1898 he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Hardly had Funston recovered when the Spanish-American war broke out and Kansas was called upon for troops. Gov. John W. Leedy remembered Funston and appointed him Colonel of the Twentieth Kansas infantry, one of four Kansas regiments enlisted for the war.

The story is told that Funston bought a book on military tactics which he read as he traveled west to join his command at San Francisco. When his father asked: "What do you know about military tactics Fred?" the son answered: "Not much, but I am halfway through this book and by the time I reach San Francisco, I will have mastered it."

The Twentieth Kansas drilled at Presidio until October, 1898, when it was ordered to the Philippines. On February 4, 1899, the filipinos, whose declaration of independence was not recognized by the United States, attacked the American outposts around Manilla. The Twentieth Kansas was one of the first units committed to battle. In their first attack the Kansas carried far beyond their assigned objective, an occurrence which was to be repeated several times before the war was over.

For several weeks Funston and his Twentieth Kansas were engaged in the drive to take Caloocan and the rebel capital at Malolos. After the latter fell the Associated Press cabled: "Colonel Funston, always at the front, was the first man in Malolos, followed by a group of dashing Kansans."

Late in April the advance was brought to a standstill bu the partial destruction of the bridge spanning the Rio Grande de la Pampanga at Calumpit. According to Funston, the "position was by all means the strongest that we had yet been brought against, the river being about four hundred feet wide, deep, and swift, while to opposite bank was defended by fully four thousand men occupying elaborate trenches." After several attempts of crossing the river had failed a small raft was discovered which Funston undertook to use as a ferry. Two Kansas privates, William B. Trembley and Edward White, volunteered to swim the river and attach a tow rope on the opposite shore. Under the protective fire of their own comrades they accomplished their mission and the raft made its first trip carrying Funston and seven others. When enough men had been ferried to the little beachhead the Filipinos were driven from their trenches. The damaged portion of the bridge was then repaired and infantry troops began making the crossing.

For this heroism in action, White, Trembley and Funston were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and a week later Funston was promoted to the rank of brigadier general of volunteers.

He was given command of a brigade composed of the First Montana and the Twentieth Kansas, the latter now commanded by Col. Wilder S. Metcalf, but these troops were soon replaced by fresh units and the veterans were ordered home for discharge. General Funston, too, was instructed to report to San Francisco for mustering out and so, though no longer officially connected with the regiment, he accompanied it home. However, upon arriving at San Francisco, October 10, his orders were changed and he was sent back to service in the islands.

By this time the fighting had changed to guerilla warfare which continued for the next year and a half. Finally, in February, 1901, a defecting insurgent messenger disclosed the whereabouts of the elusive rebel leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. In Aguinaldo's capture Funston saw a chance to stop the wasteful and useless skirmishing which was sapping the energies of both Americans and Filipinos.

He and his officers developed a plan to masquerade as captured American enlisted men in the hands of rebel reinforcements which had been ordered to the insurgents' capital. Five American officers, one of whom was Funston; five former insurgents, including the defecting messenger; and 79 loyal Macabebe scouts who were chosen to pose as rebel Tagalos made up the force designed to capture Aguinaldo.

Early in the morning of March 14, 1901, the gunboat Vicksburg landed Funston and his force at Casiguran Bay, over a hundred miles from the rebel capital of Palanan. The march up the coast was begun immediately and ten days later they entered Palanan. The insurgents led the supposed Tagalos directly to Aguinaldo's house. Funston and the other Americans were not with them, for Aguinaldo, to keep his whereabouts secret, had forbidden prisoners to be brought into the town. The Americans, however, were able to elude the small guard placed over them and were only minutes behind the main column when it entered Palanan. So suddenly was the capture accomplished that Aguinaldo was already a prisoner when Funston arrived.

Aguinaldo seizure failed to crush the rebellion, but did shorten it materially. The administration at Washington called it "the most important single military event of the year in the Philippines." for his part in the capture Funston was commissioned a brigadier general in the regular army.

During the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Funston was in command of the Department of California. Though martial law had not been declared he offered troops and supplies to the city authorities and through this assistance much damage from fire and looting was prevented in the devastated area. Funston's actions were praised 11 years later by President Woodrow Wilson when he wrote: "His genius and manhood brought order out of confusion, confidence out of fear and much comfort in distress."

In 1914 General Funston was commanding troops on the Texas border and when Vera Cruz, Mex., was occupied he was appointed military governor of the city. He was promoted to major general November 17, 1914.

A heart attack took the life of the 51 year old general on February 19, 1917. Years later his old friend William Allen White, who called him the "eternal boy," wrote: "Only a breath of wind, the flutter of a heart, kept out of Pershing's place in the World War, one of the most colorful figures in the American Army, from the day of Washington on down. We had a man as dashing as Sheridan, as unique and picturesque as the slow-moving, taciturn Grant, as charming as Jackson, as witty as old Billy Sherman, as brave as Paul Jones." Some persons have conjectured that had he lived, Funston might have been the Republican Presidential candidate in 1920.

The house in which Fred Funston spent his boyhood and to which he returned a hero was a simple farm home. Until the Funstons moved in it was a homely unshaded place of only three rooms, dating from about 1860. Edward Funston added a summer kitchen in 1868, planted a yard full of elms that year, put a bay window in the living room and made other improvements until the house finally appeared as it does today.

In March, 1955, the Kansas legislature authorized the Kansas State Historical Society to accept the home and grounds as a gift of the Funston family. The Society opened the home to the public in April, 1956, and now administers it as a state museum.