Waconda Spring (Great Spirit Spring)

Below the North and South Forks of the Solomon River, in what is now Mitchell County, Kansas near the communities of Glen Elder and Cawker City, Waconda Spring rose as a natural artesian spring. It was also called Great Spirit Spring. The site held deep spiritual significance for Native American tribes of the Great Plains and later served as a commercial health spa before disappearing beneath Waconda Reservoir when the Glen Elder Dam was completed in December 1968.

The name Waconda is from the Kanza language and translates as “spirit water” or “Great Spirit Spring,” and the Glen Elder site says Wakonda with a “k” was the Kanza word for the supernatural, roughly translated “great spirit.” The Pawnee, who controlled the territory, knew it by two names: Pahowa and Kitzawitzuk, the latter translated as “water on a bank.” In Pawnee religion, the supreme being Tirawa allotted supernatural powers to certain animals called nahurac, which served as messengers between the divine and the people. Waconda Spring was one of five sacred nahurac lodges, spiritual centers through which Tirawa communicated with the Pawnee.

Numerous tribes regarded the spring as sacred ground. The Pawnee, Wichita, Kanza (listed as Kaw on the Glen Elder site), Kiowa, Sioux, Arapaho, Comanche, Miami, Crow, and Cheyenne all visited the site, which served as neutral territory where warring groups could gather without conflict during their annual buffalo migrations. Tribes cast offerings into the waters, including blankets, robes, blue beads, eagle feathers, and moccasins, and believed the water possessed healing powers and contained animal spirits from which knowledge could be gained.

The spring sat on a cone-shaped limestone mound, and accounts of its size differ. Kansapedia and Legends of Kansas describe a mound about 300 feet wide rising 40 feet above the Solomon River Valley, and Legends of Kansas and the Glen Elder site give the pool as 50 feet across and 15 feet deep, while surveyor David E. Ballard in 1866 put the rock at about 200 feet across at the base and 30 feet high, with a basin about 30 feet in diameter. A myth held that the pool was bottomless. The water ran “exceedingly strong with salt” and contained calcium, magnesium, iron, silica, sodium chloride, sulfate, and bicarbonate. Geologists believed the mound formed from mineral deposits forced upward by artesian pressure.

General Zebulon Pike made the first recorded visit in 1806, learning of what the Indians called the “Great Spirit Spring” while concluding a treaty with the Pawnee. He altered his route to see it on his way westward. The last great Native American pilgrimage occurred in the early 1870s.

Settlement didn’t come until after Kansas became a state in 1861. The first claim on the property was taken out in 1870 by a man whose name the sources spell two ways, Pfeiffer in Wikipedia and Pfeifer in the account of his sod house on Legends of Kansas and the Glen Elder site. A few years later a man named Burnham set up a bottling works and sold the mineral water as “Waconda Flier,” a health tonic. Its sales drew an eastern investor named McWilliams, who in 1884 began building a stone sanitarium, and under G.W. Cooper’s management it became a hotel and health spa. In 1904 the water won a medal at the St. Louis World’s Fair for its medicinal value.

Dr. G.P. Abrahams, who had run a bathhouse in Mankato, bought the property from McWilliams in 1906. Kansapedia instead names Dr. G. F. Abraham of Mankato and dates his health spa to 1907, and Humanities Kansas calls the enterprising doctor G.F. Abrahams. Over the years, Legends of Kansas says, the facilities offered physical and hydrotherapy, electric therapy, and dietary regimens, and water from the Spring was piped into every bathtub in the 60-room sanitarium. The business passed to his son-in-law Carl Bingesser in 1924 after Dr. Abrahams’ death, then to their son Carlos Bingesser, born at the springs in 1932. Three generations of the family operated the spa until it closed in 1964.

Among its patients was Perry Weston of Shelton, Nebraska, who made several trips between 1916 and 1937 for a heart ailment. Doctors there gave him hot and cold baths, massaged his back and put him on juice diets. “Just when I got to sweating good he turned on the cold water and froze me. This is a funny place to doctor,” he wrote in one letter home. He kept coming back anyway, and a Red Wing Stoneware jug he used to carry spring water home to Nebraska is now in the Kansas State Historical Society’s collection. John Bingesser, who was born on the site in 1939, remembered the spa regularly hosting 40 patients a day, most of them staying for many weeks.

Plans to flood the spring with a federal dam had been discussed since 1944. The Bingesser family fought the project, hiring a hydrologist who testified that Waconda Spring was unique and possibly the only one of its kind in the world. Dam supporters dismissed these findings, calling it a “mud hole.” Massive floods across Kansas in 1951 renewed demands for flood control infrastructure.

During the spa’s peak, a deep-sea diver was hired around 1908 to validate claims that the spring was bottomless. Witnesses said he found no bottom and recovered trinkets interpreted as past spiritual offerings. Forty years later, according to Kansapedia, University of Kansas geologists using sonar measured the well at nearly 115 feet deep, far deeper than the 15 feet other sources give for the pool.

Construction of the Glen Elder Dam began in 1964. Engineers bulldozed the sanitarium buildings and dumped the debris into the spring pool before dam construction was completed in December 1968. The valley filled with water from the Solomon River by 1970, and Waconda Spring disappeared beneath Waconda Reservoir.

Today, a replica of Waconda Springs stands at Glen Elder State Park, located west of the historic Hopewell Church. A hiking trail leads to a scenic bluff overlooking the site, and educational signage covers Native American history, early explorers, the health resort era, and the building of the dam. A small museum, the Waconda Visitor and Education Center, is also in the state park. The Glen Elder site says Waconda Lake inherited its name from the spring.