I most humbly beg your pardon for inserting here a short address to a Republican Convention when I was aspiring to the office of County Clerk for the second term. The chairman having instructed the secretary of the convention to cast the entire vote of the delegation for myself, I addressed the convention as follows:

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the Convention: Accept my profound thanks for the splendid manifestation of honor that you have conferred upon an humble individual like myself. I wish to impress upon you the political principles I outlined to you briefly two years ago, are the same today as they were then. I would rather be defeated honorably, squarely and honestly than to be successful with a tarnished character obtained through disreputable methods. I realize, as do all intelligent reasoners withholding myself to be the humblest among you, that character is something that is not acquired while we sleep. It is a constant every day struggle, a life-long battle. Take away our character and what have we left.

I desire to say to you gentlemen that during my lifetime I have been intimately acquainted with labor in its most aggressive form. I know what it is to stand between two shining bands of steel under a scorching July sun. I know what it is to stack hay under a sultry and oppressive heat. I know the loneliness and privations that comes to one who has tended stock in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I fully realize that these different pursuits require grit and determination, they are the hardest kind of labors, but I can say to you in all candor that I have never worked harder in my life than in the past two years endeavoring to serve the citizens of this county in the capacity of clerk.

If I have been competent, if I have been faithful, if I have done my duty, that is not for me to decide. You are the judges of these conditions, if you think I have, then I ask for your support and influence. You are a body of men from all parts of this county; if each one of you will work for the best interests of the party I see no reason why we should not be successful at the polls. The campaign this year is short; I wish to say for myself that I will not be able to get around much. The duties of my office for the past six weeks have been very strenuous and will continue so to be for some time to come. The state board of equalization were late in sending their report and not only being late, but were unkind, and raised the valuation on several of our taxable properties and this makes extra work for the clerk, so I trust you will be like the turkey in the tall tree and keep one eye open for the boy from Lodge Pole.

There has happened in my short career as an American citizen a good many things that I have felt elated over and proud of. I am proud that I am an American citizen, born under the stars and stripes and belong to a nation second to none. I am proud I was born in a state whose brow is bathed by the mighty Missouri and upon whose bosom flourishes the most productive crop of the union. But if there is one thing that I am prouder of more than any other, it is the fact that I belong to a party whose motto is principle and good government, and whose loftiest aim has always been to make America the ideal nation of the world. I thank you.

I will here relate an incident that happened when I first encountered experience in her knee breeches, I have termed it a fighting, explosive nauseating cough remedy. I would prefer calling it an egg nogg; but there is one extra ingredient that disfranchises the egg and in a peculiar way leaves the nogg there in a somewhat embarrassing condition.

When I was a youth, I had some peculiar traits in my makeup. My main instruction was received from that old professor, experience, and day by day I gained some valuable knowledge in the school of hard knocks. Being of a peculiar turn of mind I had implicit truth and confidence in all mankind, and on account of this trait I have often met with misplaced confidence.

For instance, the “Bonuses” and “Good Wills” heretofore related. I had contracted a bad cold of tenacious irritability down near the little hamlet of Paxton, Nebraska, while performing the menial labor of an every day workman on the renowned line of the Union Pacific. The work being accomplished was known as bucking steel. Through climatic conditions of contraction and expansion the rails on one side had gained from nine to twelve feet over the rails in the other side. The side that was ahead was being pulled back to the point opposite the other by a locomotive attached to a large cable. Some said this strategic work swelled the premium of the water soaked stock; but this contention is left to philosophers and those who study economic problems, as to whether or not the corporation was ahead rails at Omaha or short at Ogden.

The days were exceedingly warm, it being in the autumn of the year. I lost more perspiration than was due me and along toward evening, when old sol was getting ready to retire and also largely due to a scant wardrobe, a chilliness would steal over my spare physique. The ride home from the work in the evening, on flat cars, at a hurried speed, caused the night air to condense in the locality of the throat. Nature not doing her part, I tried to assist her in removing the obstruction and, as soon as the speed of the train would allow, I shot from the car in a mad race for the boarding house. Being sure footed and fleet, I was generally first at the wash basin, erasing from my countenance Nebraska’s productive soil and leaving what the water didn’t loosen on the old fashioned long rolling boarding house towel. These repeated conditions day after day commenced to tell and the slight cold became a hacking cough that embraced more forcibly than a Dutch lassie reared on eastern corn.

After the work was completed, the men were returned to the various localities. Upon arriving safely at my destination, I went to the home physician. “Doc” when not incarcerated in the county bastile for dispensing a compound familiarly known as whiskey but better known to home residents as hades corked up in a bottle, prescribed, from his oft water stock. (I pause for a scalding sensation felt on my cheeks.) Poor Old “Doc” is sleeping beneath the sod.

Constant concoctions bringing no relief, I was at last listening to a well meant prescription from my co-laborer Dick. He said his remedy would give unwavering satisfaction to ailments like mine. I don’t think his remedy would stand the pure food law test; but when you get to clutching you’ll clutch anything. So I listened to the unlearned pharmacist and keenly assented and he started to compound two well known ingredients in equal parts. One ingredient was controlled by that magnetic dollar chaser, John D., and the other was controlled by nobody, it did the controling, i. e., oil and whiskey. I’d cover up this last ingredient and give it a better concealed classical standing but ignorance is bliss and there you are. This carefully prepared drink, my friend said, should be taken five minutes before breakfast. So according to directions I hoisted the tin cup and down went the fluids. Just enough oil in it to make it slip quick, and you had it before you really knew it.

It is now twenty-three years since I swallowed that conglomeration and I can’t hardly pass a home one-gallon kerosene can full or empty without a keen desire to kick the bottom out of it, but you have to be careful with other people’s property, whether it’s mortgaged or not. No matter how keen or fertile your imagination may be you can’t realize a dose of this character unless you taste it. Take the minutest equal parts of each, mix them, drink them and be convinced. Was I sick? Of all the great guns of all our wars, Civil or uncivil, I will take my oath before any judge of common jurisdiction, sitting as a court of record and say I WAS.

The only recollection I have of the breakfast menu was the two hard boiled eggs and a faint remembrance, as I was leaving the table, of a fruit picture on the wall tipping up and down. That was the first time I ever saw anything inanimate acting so. Mercy, the taste of that oil and the remembrance of it, mixing in a place the size of your fist! Think of that rip-roaring, sizzling tobacco flavored, ingredient, trying to slip one over on that kerosene and knock out those two hard-boiled, well matured, boarding-house eggs. I say in all candor, I don’t blame John D. for watering the oil. Water it more, John, it will be milder to take. I went through the oil belt in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and all the rest, I visited all the stills, illicit, and otherwise of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Colorado; and as soon as brother Pat could get me to my room and my head out of the window I hoisted the hottest fluids and food stuffs ever contained in the stomach of man or beast. I have always felt sorry for those eggs on account of their age.

I must take a short glimpse here of a peculiar incident that transpired under my roof between two men of the cloth. One was a M. E. minister and the other a seven day advent. The advent had been staying in town for several weeks and I became fairly well acquainted with him and his estimable wife, and he asked me if they might have a few meetings at our home in the evenings, and I said certainly and he came. Both he and his wife were scholars, well cultured and refined and we enjoyed listening to their version of the scriptures. How the M. E. minister came to be there one evening is still a mystery to me, but I think some one of his parishioners must have told him that Satan had entered our home and he had better intervene and see if he couldn’t extricate us from the wary gentleman’s clutches.

The evening entertainment was progressing nicely and the advent man was in charge of the machinery, when suddenly the M. E. man took issue with him over his version of one of the scriptural passages and quick wit and repartee was fast and furious. The advent was the superior in scriptural knowledge and the way he got the other fellow in the meshes and so completely tangled him up is an event that can never be erased from my memory. The M. E. man was nonplussed, red of face and angry; and so ungentlemanly as to let all the fireworks in his dignified Sunday nature explode and told the cool, calm advent that teachings of his kind should be in hell. You may lay this excitement to anger, being worsted, or anything you like, but I think the gentleman he came to remove from our home entered him one hundred per cent strong. Why he was on his feet with his Methodist fists clenched, ready to fight, and if it hadn’t been for the soothing, pacifying utterances of his good wife saying, “John,” “John,” I don’t know what would have happened. The other fellow laughed at him and I really think if the worst had occurred he would have given the angry man a fuller meaning of the Bible and turned the other cheek.

I think if an Advent says Saturday is the Lord’s day and should be observed on the Sabbath, the Methodist says Sunday is the day, and some other denomination says Friday is the day, I’m willing to be convinced. It beats having the Fourth of July come on Saturday, and if I had enough money so I needn’t work I’d say let seven different denominations have seven different days, and no matter which home I observed I wouldn’t be left out shivering in an undershirt. Something peculiar about church denominations, all of them headed for the same place, but each one anxious to route you. One tells you they have the old travelled road, founded on the Bible, another a different way, founded on the Bible, and others another different way, also founded on the Bible. I conclude the best and surest way is to be a Christian and read the Bible, live it and let God show the way. Sunday churches or Saturday churches carry no guarantee that you’ll reach Heaven.

Before I invested in “Good-wills” and “Bonuses” and other losing investments, I would occasionally take my family for a little trip on the Los Angeles limited and rub against the aristocracy and the diamonds. Years before when I was a day laborer on the same road over which this elegant train glides, I thought to travel on such a goddess of beauty was a luxury only for wealth and culture, and a pleasure unequaled, but hope beats eternal in the human breast and as I had lived largely on hope for over thirty years, I finally said hope can go to blazes, the opportunity is here and why not embrace it.

Well, it is certainly a big taste of wealth and affluence to settle in cushions a foot deep with all the wrinkles eradicated for once in a lifetime by a well filled stomach of the choicest viands in the culinary art. And oh the lofty thoughts as you settle down in the deep upholstery and listen to the clicking of the rails as you speed away on this overland beauty. There is a peculiar feeling under your vest as you notice the well groomed man, the well groomed woman, the sparkle of the electric lights and the glitter of the diamonds. Elegance everywhere. The very height of ingenuity. Then when you enter the dining car with its rosewood finish, tastily decorated tables, superb linen, and cast your eye over the choice menu and have the black gentry all attention and ready to care for your smallest want, you may feel as I did, pretty classy company for a boy from Lodge Pole. Of course there are snubs here and there, you find them everywhere. They are in a class that is well known for nineteen hundred years. They took the leading part in the crucifixion of the Nazarene. We can’t exist without having them, and if you will notice in any walk of life, there is a pain for nearly every pleasure, with corns and bunions thrown in.

As a hunter I never received any distinction and am forced to admit as such I am an entire nonentity and failure. My father owned a rifle which was the only one of its kind in our community for years and years. Its early history I am unfamiliar with and never learned it. It was in his possession when I was born and I suppose it was the gun he carried on the hand car for protection when the Indians were numerous in the latter sixties. At some time it received a broken stock and ever after its being repaired it was known as old splice. For many years when the old year died and the new year was born, old splice spoke forth at its birth and its missile of death generally lodged in the tail of the railroad wind mill.

Old splice was the type of one hundred years ago, when people weren’t killed as quickly as today, the loading was slow and gave one chance to escape; I remember brother Pat used it to shoot a dog that he had tied up with a rope. He took steady aim, pulled the old fashioned hammer and fired. When the smoke cleared away the dog was running with the fullest capacity of its limbs. The ball had cut the rope.

I never shot old splice but once and I’ll always remember the incident. A chicken hawk had been tormenting the poultry for a long time and I got bold and reckless one day, grabbed old splice (some one had been kind enough to leave it loaded) and sallied forth bent on destruction. The hawk was soaring high in the air but didn’t seem to want to descend any. Old splice was supposed to carry half a mile and as I knew this was not the distance from the gun to the hawk, I concluded to test out old splice and see if the prowess of the old fellow had been exaggerated. I had heard some one say you must get down on one knee, as an attitude of respect, I presume, and hold the stock solidly and lovingly against the shoulder. I did both of these things and fired. I felt my head strike the ground so amazingly quick and hard that it confused and startled me. I knew I was committing no crime and couldn’t account for such harsh treatment. At first I thought the bird might have struck me in the face and, it coming from such a height, would cause a terrible compact when one body met another, but I abandoned this idea, as no hawk was anywhere above or below. Then I thought I might have torn some planet loose, but this was an asylum idea also. Then I thought some one may have overfed old splice and made him bilious. I afterwards learned this was true. The miscreant still lives.