If you picture a valley as a bowl or a long trough between lines of mountains, Caney is not in a valley.    But Urban S. Gibbs, a patriarch who had the stern, unforgiving look of John Brown, was President of our bank and keeper of Caney’s money.  He called his bank "The Caney VALLEY National Bank."  Now Urban S. Gibbs was the kind of man whose picture might be alongside the word “credibility” in the dictionary.  If U.S. Gibbs said Caney was in a valley then, by George, it was in a valley.  Oh, there were a few hills rimming town.   A couple of miles east, south of the highway to Coffeyville, "Jacks' Hill" arose.   A small, rutted, dirt road, branching off the highway led across a little creek, then with a tight horseshoe turn, doubled back on itself and struggled upward to its summit.  Once there, we had a fine view of Caney off to the West. 

Smelder Hill, the road and hill had been named for a smelter that had operated alongside the road sometime in the early part of the century, stood about a mile northeast of town.  But the urchins I played with didn’t use the correct pronunciation “Smelter.”   It was a rocky, seldom traveled road that took us past Smelder Pond and on to the top of that hill’s steep slope.  It was tamed into a gently sloping hill when that road was paved and became US Highway 166. Conquering Smelder Hill was one of the rites of passage for the bicycle crowd in Caney.  The road was too steep and rocky for most of us to pedal to the top so after pushing our bikes to the top the challenge was to shove off, much like a toboggan, and ride all the way down without putting on the brakes.  Gravity and the steep slope pulled us down at an ever-faster clip.   It took courage, control, and a lot of luck to make it all the way to the bottom without hitting a rock or rut that threw us onto the rocky, skin-destroying surface of that road.

Smelder Hill was actually the eastern part of a long ridge.   About a half-mile west of Smelter Hill that ridge was called “The Shale Pit.”  The Shale Pit had once been intact, its side gently sloping towards town, but at some point in Caney’s early days a brick factory that needed clay to make bricks excavated most of its southern slope.  They left a semi-circle of steep cliffs and a large flat floor.  Had bleachers been built into its steep slopes, seats installed on the floor and a stage built the Shale Pit would have been a great place for outdoor performances.  But the only performances at the Shale Pit were those of young boys playing at mountain climbing. Erosion had turned the face of the excavation into an accordion-pleated surface.   It was a fairly difficult climb.  Shale was the primary ingredient in the soil, and shale is a slippery, brittle, rock.  Like sinners approaching heaven’s gate, our progress was three steps up, followed by a precipitous backslide.  Every boy eventually became adept in judging good footholds.   Some of the braver among us dared to ascend the cliff out on the face of its accordion pleats.  There was real danger in that because a slip out there might result in a head over heels tumble all the way to the bottom. 

Once we reached the top, the view was spectacular; so much so that it was the stimulus for my having what a psychologist told me years later was a “peak experience.”  My country had been at total war for almost as long as I could remember.  My brothers were all in the army.  My favorite older brother, Rudy, had been killed in a B-24 bomber: blown out of the sky on the way home to England after bombing Germany on April 1, 1944.  It was an emotional time for me.   One summer day while standing on top of the Shale Pit admiring the view off to the northwest, where the Santa Fe railroad tracks took travelers northward to far places and Cheyenne Creek flowed brown and sluggish southwesterly towards the Caney River I became caught up in some kind of feeling. Standing there throat-choked and gasping I sang the first verse of “America, the Beautiful.”  Tears were streaming down my cheeks from a feeling I did not understand.

The only other hill near Caney rose up northwest of town just west of US Highway 166/75.  This hill was simply named for its purpose.   It was called “Standpipe Hill” because on its round top stood a tall steel cylinder.  Its black paint was faded with age.   The word “CANEY,” its once-white paint now a faded grey could be seen alongside a skinny steel, somewhat rusted ladder attached to its side.  The steel cylinder was the reservoir for the water that came out of Caney’s faucets.  Boys who had climbed the precarious ladder all the way to the top said the standpipe was open on top.  That being true gave rise, at least in my mind, to serious doubts as to the purity of our drinking water.   But considering it was filled with water sucked from the Caney River; the same river that was used as a dumping place for raw sewage by towns upriver to Caney, I now know that whatever fell into the standpipe’s open top would have been of little consequence.

There were, and still are, no hills to the West or South of Caney.    Nevertheless, even after the venerable banker Urban S. Gibbs died, the bank continued to say we lived in a valley.  Decades later the local school system perpetuated the myth by naming their expanded school district the Caney VALLEY Unified School District.