Crescent was wild, mad, wide open.

When the big news broke, I beat it for Nevada. Frank and I and associates owned three claims in the very heart of the Crescent district. Also, I personally owned an adjoining claim on which Frank had caused one of his men, Paul Stahmer, to do the required ten feet of work to hold it for one year, at a cost to me of $100. The work was done on a $544 gold showing.

Having operated with Frank rather disappointedly in the lead-zinc-vanadium camp of Goodsprings, thirty miles away, through the years since 1904, I believed that here at last—at Crescent—I was about to pounce, in one fell swoop upon the legendary pot of gold. It was a fantastic notion, of course—but oh, the magic thrill of it!

Charles M. Schwab, Pennsylvania multi-millionaire steel magnate, who held mining interests in Nevada, lent encouragement with an on-the-spot pronouncement: “In the past the great fortunes have been made in manufacturing, but henceforth the really big money will be made in mining.” Also, operators from Goldfield, the Nevada camp that gave George Wingfield, a lowly cowhand, twenty million dollars almost in a jiffy—men in the big money up there said in my presence, “If we had such surface showings at Goldfield as you have at Crescent, any old claim would sell for a fortune.” I don’t mind telling you that I had fed rather too optimistically upon the glorious prospect of grabbing a quick fortune at Crescent. But the unveiling of facts there proved a solvent for the nightmare in which a lot of us had been living for months.

With fabulously rich surface showings — high assays, $500 to $20,000 to the ton reported almost everywhere — Crescent proved, in the end, the greatest bubble of them all. Countless thousands of dollars were expended, over a period of two years, in a frantic effort to bring out a profitable producer. But if there ever was as much as a shirt-tail full of ore shipped from that camp, I don’t know it. And though I never had the time nor the inclination to compare notes, I’ll bet Elsie had better pickings than any of the hopeful miners who wore pants.

It was with reluctance that we pulled out of Crescent. It’s most fascinating, this thing of prospecting for gold — like participating in a big-game hunt. Were I full-handed, even now, I would go back to Crescent and give our Shreve-port group another try. Someday, somebody is going to find the “mother lode” there.

There was honest effort—a lot of honest effort—as well as the usual faking, at Crescent. A $20,000 gold strike was reported near the summit, between our claims and Crescent. The first day out there, I was all for seeing this strike right away. My partner said, “Oh, wait until tomorrow—we’ll be going past it when we go over to Crescent.”

The next day, starting from our claims by way of a perfectly good wagon road down the canyon a ways, Frank took me by a tortuous climb, off the road, to near the top of the mountain. He pointed out the spot where the assay had been obtained. When I began to examine the shallow trench, he said, quickly, “It took all the ore in sight to make the assay.” Twenty steps farther on we reached the summit where we could look down on Crescent a mile below. And then we stepped out onto a very good wagon road. On inquiry, he said, “It’s the same road we left back there in the canyon.” I asked him how come we made that rough climb? Frank said, “You know, it’s about as much as a man’s life is worth to be caught showing up that strike to a tenderfoot.”

This was an eye-opener—the first clear signpost on a long and uncertain road.

At another time, later, Frank and I paid a saloon keeper in Nipton, the railroad station, twenty dollars to drive us over the Crescent district, for the full day. We visited our claims first, got dinner in Crescent—then to a saloon where drinks were 50 cents each, whether whiskey, beer, or water. The bartender simply counted noses or glasses, as it were, and summed up the charge. There were about twenty saloons in the camp, and our “host” deemed it his duty to visit them all. I am sure he dumped the $10 I paid him on twenty glasses of water for me. It was a spot where you couldn’t afford to shake your head and say, “No thanks.” When asked to drink, it was wise to call your drink.

The main object of the drive—on my part, anyway — the thing we had paid twenty dollars for, was to visit a highly newspaper publicized mine two miles south of Crescent, where it was shamefully claimed immense bodies of rich gold ore running into the millions, were blocked out. But the desert twilight caught us still drinking Adam’s ale and the Indian’s “fire water.” Our driver knew his business all right—and I suspect Frank knew from the start that we would never fetch up at that mine. Nothing, absolutely nothing—but the truth—was barred in that camp.

I shall now leave the desert momentarily, and write candidly about my earlier “mining” experience. This, and other notations here—until we get back to Crescent—are throw-ins, kindred situations not contained in the printed’ article.

With our townsman Green Campbell’s enviable mining success as an incentive, it has ever been my hope that I might someday also strike it rich—and mining seemed to offer the best lure. I therefore joined a group of Wetmore and Horton men in an effort to rejuvenate a gold mine at Whitepine, Colorado, twenty miles north of Sargent on the narrow gauge branch of the Denver & Rio Grande railroad. With the Wetmore group—Dr. Augustus Philip Lapham and wife Elzina Brown-Lapham; Jay Wellington Powers and wife Helen Hoyt-Powers; Charles Samuel Locknane and wife Coral Hutchison-Locknane; and Mr. C. A. Mann, the owner, backed by Scott Hopkins, Horton banker, and other moneyed men of that city, I spent a week at White pine looking things over.

The mine was really six miles up the canyon from White pine—just beyond the abandoned town of Tomichi, not far from the “Top of the World.” Tomichi had been hit by a snow slide which wrecked a number of houses, killing several people. The residents, numbering about 1,000, had abandoned their homes and places of business, leaving the buildings intact—a true “Ghost Town.” Thinking in terms of the present, one might wonder why had the buildings been left to rot down? A mill had sawed the lumber on the site — and in that out-of-the-way place, the material was not worth salvaging.

The tunnel of the Mann mine was about 150 feet up-slope from the wagon road on the floor of the canyon, which road was also Main Street in Tomichi. To get up to the tunnel, the trail started several hundred feet up the gulch and then swung back around a projecting ledge where the footing was rather insecure. To negotiate it the men would use the lines off the harness. The women could remain at the wagon and watch the men fall, if such might be the case.

And here I pulled a boner—not my first, nor last, I frankly admit. I looked across to the “scary” ledge, and straight up to the tunnel—and then I started up on the run, the loose rock in places sliding me back almost as fast as I was gaining. However, I made the tunnel, completely exhausted. I did not sit down to rest. I fell down. And I crawled into the tunnel where there was ice—in July—and revived quickly. One of the men was hampered in that climb with a wooden leg, which afforded me ample time to recover before their arrival—but my own legs were still shaky as I eased myself around that projecting ledge, grabbing the strap now and then, while coming down. I don’t know how the first strap-holder got around without help—nor the last one, either.

Mr. Mann said I had taken a great risk; that he had called to me to come back; that the exertion required to negotiate that heap of sliderock was really too much for one unaccustomed to the high altitude; that he himself—a seasoned mountain man—would not have undertaken it for the whole mine. And, you know, after I had taken one peep at the spot of interest in the tunnel, I thought, “Neither would I.”

The prospect did not look good to me—nor was I fooled by the enthusiasm of my inexperienced associates, but I wanted to go along with them. The other Wetmore men thought enough of the prospect to locate adjoining claims, naming them for their children—The Marsena, The Gracie, and The Marguerite. I had no child, not even a wife—so no claim. But I then and there made a resolve to learn something more about that enticing mining game, perhaps elsewhere. And in the final analysis I suppose I have.

Doctor Lapham was the principal exuder of enthusiasm, an inborn trait which came to the fore again in a big way on the train enroute to Salt Lake City. The Doctor had spent some time in the smoker, and came back to the coach all “hepped” up. Rubbing his hands together in his characteristic manner, he said he had gotten—on the qt—a tip from the newsboy that an observation car was to be hooked on at Gunnison, for the trip through Colorado’s most colorful canyon. The observation car would be on a siding to the left of our train—and that the favored few were to make a dash for it the moment the train stopped.

The Doctor was always putting forth his best efforts to make us all comfortable—and happy. He said he had bought a book of views, paying $2 for it, something he really didn’t care a whoop for—but he wanted to reward the boy for his kind tip. With an eye for business, the newsboy had also tipped off other passengers.

The “observation” car was only a coalcar having temporary backless board seats placed crosswise of the car. One had to climb over the seats, or step across from one plank to another to get to the rear end of the car—all right for the fellow who had so recently clambered up the tunnel dump, but very awkward for the women and the man with the wooden leg.

Many of the passengers looked at the thing and went back to the coaches, and some abandoned their seats and went inside after the train started—but our men folk, being well to the rear and encumbered with helpless women whom they did not wish to lose just then, couldn’t even do that once the train headed into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a narrow gorge with 2800-foot almost perpendicular walls, following the serpentine course of the Gunnison river, on a steeply down grade, switching the “observation” car like a whipcracker from one black wall to the other. Hot cinders rained down on us so that we could look neither to the right, or the left—nor up. Now, Lap’s newsboy came aboard crying, “Goggles, goggles, goggles!”

And the appreciative Doctor gave the boy some more money.

We had done Denver, Colorado Springs, Manitou and Pike’s Peak—and Cripple Creek. And we had all climbed “Tenderfoot” Mountain while waiting over-night at Salida for train connection—and I individually had literally sat on the proverbial powderkeg for three hours during a twenty-mile overland drive. Mr. Mann had provided a spring wagon for the other members of the party, and I, being unexpected, was conducted to a freight wagon going our way. When told, near the end of the journey, that I was sitting on a box of dynamite I blew up—in spirit. But nowhere had we experienced anything so disappointing as this “observation” car ride. It is anchored in my memory as the one really big scene that beggared description.

NOTE — The railroad through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison has been abandoned, and sightseers may now view this colorful canyon from their automobiles over a highway—a “highway,” mind you, more than a half mile down in a narrow slit in the earth.

Then, again, my newspaper friend, William Allen White, of the Emporia Gazette, toured the western mining districts and wrote enthusiastically about some newly discovered mining opportunity in the west, known as Thunder Mountain. It stimulated my desire. I wrote William Allen, asking him if he would, as one newspaperman to another, advise me to try my luck at Thunder Mountain? His personal letter to me was even more optimistic than was his editorial. Like Horace Greely, his advice was substantially, “By all means go west, young man, and give it a try.”

But I did not fetch up at Thunder Mountain. On the advice of another friend, I dumped the proceeds from the sale of my newspaper, sight unseen, in a hole in Nevada — while the wise Mr. White kept on publishing his Gazette; wrote a best seller book, “A Certain Rich Man,” and got rich himself. His name and fame are to be perpetuated in the erection of a public library building in Emporia; while I, his misguided friend, still have my laurels to make. And, incidentally, as a mining man, after that first big blow, I never again heard of Thunder Mountain.

Now back to the desert—and the printed Crescent story.

Our contribution here at Crescent, with a minimum of outside help, was a 500-foot tunnel driven into the side of a mountain—the rock shot with high assay in gold and silver and copper. But the cost of this work, though a dead loss and highly disheartening, was as nothing compared to the outlay for the 2197 feet of tunnels and shafts we have driven—also with a minimum of help—through solid rock on our Goodsprings claims, where production, though quite good at times, has never caught up with expenses.

And the end is not yet.

You can take it from me that a man has to be insensible to pain to laugh this off.

On the train away back in the valley on this my first trip to Crescent, the conductor had pointed to a distant cluster of white flecks barely discernible through the shimmering, sun-drenched haze that lies always, like a pall, over the desert, and said to me, “There she is—the biggest thing in all Nevada!”

I had become chummy with the conductor, and that chumminess increased mightily when we learned that we were both on the way to become millionaires—as we visualized it then—through the mining route. He told me that he knew my mining partner, that he had engaged Frank Williams to look after the assessment work on some claims he himself owned over in the Goodsprings district. And when I asked the conductor his name and made a move as if to write it down, he shook his head negatively and threw out his hands in a gesture of utter uselessness, and said, “Oh-hell, man, you couldn’t forget it as long as you are in this country. It’s Dry—just plain William Dry.”

My friend’s parting words to me were a mixture of jocularity and serious hope. “Well, so long, old top,” he said. “See you again when we fetch up at the end of the rainbow.”

And do you know, the next time I saw that conductor, two years later—and I might say before either of us had made any appreciable advances on the rainbow’s elusive end — he recognized me at once, and in offering his hand, said: “It’s Dry.” And I said, “Oh-hell, man, don’t I know it!”

And so it was.

That meeting was in Superintendent J. Ross Clark’s private car, hitched to the flyer. We had exchanged some correspondence before, and Ross wanted to tell me in as hopeful words as possible that the officials of his railroad were still watching the situation closely and would build a branch line into our district—to our claims and to his claims — just as soon as the required tonnage was assured. You see, J. Ross Clark, too, was possessed of the desire to harvest a quick fortune and owned mining claims across the flat from our claims in the Goodsprings district.

That meeting with J. Ross Clark bore fruit for me, though—and it was the means of holding up the Los Angeles Limited for an hour, as well. Several years later I had an important engagement at Goodsprings and was delayed seven hours in Pueblo on the way out there, owing to a change in time of the Denver & Rio Grande trains. The best I could do then was to arrive in Salt Lake five minutes after the Limited’s leaving time, at one o’clock at night, with depots a mile apart. Failure to keep my appointment at Goodsprings would mean disappointment to others and a money loss to me, as well as a wasted trip. In desperation, I went to the up-town office of the Denver & Rio Grande, and asked the agent there to try to have the Los Angeles train held for me at Salt Lake. Nothing doing. That important personage swelled up to full capacity and said, “Evidently, if the San Pedro people wanted to neighbor with my Company they would change their leaving time.”

Next, I asked the conductor on the Rio Grande train to wire ahead for me—and I am happy to state he was a gentleman. Also he was a one-time miner. “Tried it once over at Aspen,” he told me. And right away there was a bond of sympathy, or something, between us. That conductor really wanted to help me. But, as he told me he had wired the San Pedro people several times without results, I had to think of some other way, for I wanted to make that Limited as a lost soul wants to make Paradise.

It was then I thought of J. Ross Clark. What was the good of making friends, if you could not use them? The Rio Grande conductor obligingly held his train for me at Green River, Utah, while I filed a message to the Superintendent of the San Pedro lines. We arrived in Salt Lake ten minutes ahead of time, and the conductor, pointing to a hack-stand, said to me, “Now hurry—the Los Angeles train may be a little late in getting away.”

At the San Pedro station I found the Limited all steamed up, ready to go—and I boarded it quickly, all out of breath. But there was no need for hurrying. Presently the conductor came along and asked me: “Did you come in on Rio Grande Three?” I told him I did. Then he asked, “First or second section?” I admitted that I didn’t know the train had been split up at Grand Junction. The conductor, wanting to be sure of his order, drew a yellow slip from his pocket, and re-read: “Hold for one or more passengers off Rio Grande Three.” He then said, “Yes, that’s it. I’m sure you are the man I’m holding for—but I’ll have to wait for the second section.” And it was an hour late.

I think perhaps Ross had put in his order the words “one or more” solely as a precaution against the possibility of being accused of showing partiality to his mining neighbor, in breaking rules. Anyway, J. Ross Clark had no call for worry. His brother, William A. Clark, a mining man, controlling, among other holdings, the fabulously rich United Verde mine at Jerome, Arizona, owned also forty-nine per cent of the San Pedro lines—and was at this time operating the road under a twenty-year control agreement. It is now in full control of the Union Pacific.

The Limited was not scheduled to stop at Jean, Nevada, my destination. The regular procedure would have been for me to go on down the line forty miles or more and then double back on a local train. But when the Limited began slowing down on approaching Jean, the conductor said to me, “No, don’t jump—wait ‘till she stops.”

The engineer climbed down from his cab. The conductor hopped off the train and yelled, “Hey, Bill, what’s wrong?” I knew what was wrong. And Bill knew; and the conductor knew; and possibly one other knew—but that was all. And whose business was it, anyway?

The lost hour had been made up before the train pulled into Caliente, Nevada, where it halted ten minutes. And, paradoxically, it gained another hour there in that ten minutes. Caliente—Mexican for hot—is where Pacific time begins.

Bill had left that division point “on time” and held to the fast schedule all the way. And I’ll bet Bill and his relief engineer landed the old Limited in Los Angeles on the dot — even though there were miles and miles of desert wasteland, with two high mountain ranges, and, finally, a beautiful irrigated valley with orange groves and banks and banks of rose.s, yet to be crossed.

As the Limited started to move again the conductor threw me a last cheerful word: “You’ll have only a little way to walk.” And I could only hope that there was no one to report that conductor—nor my friend Ross.

You see, it was Dry again.

All about lay the eternal waste of the desert and mountain slopes, barren and desolate, walled in that arid corner of the world.

THE WIFE—AT GOODSPRINGS

Not Hitherto Published — 1947

By John T. Bristow

To round out the foregoing story, I might say here that my wife was a guest for the week during my absence in Crescent, at Mrs. Yount’s hotel in Goodsprings. Sam Yount, the landlady’s husband, was leading merchant, postmaster, private banker—and miner. And he backed the hotel proposition too. The sleeping quarters of the hotel were a detached row of ground-floor rooms close by the main structure. It was before the building in Goodsprings of the Southern Nevada Hotel, said at the time to have been the most commodious hotel in the state. It was before the camp boasted a newspaper, even before the camp got electricity.

My wife was not versed in the ways of the West; and she had some misgivings about making this stop-over on the desert, particularly because of the lateness of our train, while on our way to visit my people in California. I had told her that of the many times I had been out there I had never seen a gun-toting man—and that there was a fixed impression that it would be about as much as a man’s life was worth to molest a woman.

This trip was made at a time following the great flood that had wiped out all the railroad bridges for many miles along the Meadow Valley Wash, in eastern Nevada. Owing to a slow track, our train, due in Jean in the forenoon, did not arrive until near midnight. There were no accommodations at Jean when I was last out there, and I had told Myrtle that, as we would now miss the stage, we might have to sit in the depot until morning, or walk ten miles across the desert to Goodsprings.

Frankly, she was not of a mind to do anything of the kind. She said we could remain on the train, go on to Los Angeles, and maybe stop at Goodsprings on our return trip—or we could, as far as she was concerned, pass it up altogether. I pointed out that we could hardly do this, with her trunk and all her fine clothes—clothes she didn’t need at all—checked through to Jean. And besides, we would be returning by way of San Francisco.

Remember, I had told her that I had never seen a gun toter in the West. Remember also that this was before Crescent. Then, imagine my surprise, and the wife’s renewed misgivings, when, on getting off at Jean, the first and only man to be seen had a murderous looking six-shooter strapped on him. And the wife had so little respect for my veracity as to tell me right out loud that in her best judgement I had purposely misrepresented matters to her.

George Fayle, whom I had known in Goodsprings — associated with Sam Yount—had come over to the railroad to engage in the mercantile business. He owned a general store, a restaurant, and was building a hotel. This made matters fine for us—almost. Fayle was postmaster, and handled pouch mail between the postoffice and the trains. The gun he carried was only routine.

George Fayle took us to a ground-floor room in his unfinished hotel. The room had wallboard partitions, bed upon springs flat on the floor, with a blanket hung across the outside door opening, leaving one-fourth of the space with nothing but thin desert air between us and the unknown. George did not tell us what kind of characters he was harboring beyond the cardboard—but he did wish us a pleasant good night, and, patting his six-shooter, said we would be perfectly safe, as is.

But the wife did not readily catch the spirit of the West. I had told her that the desert was overrun with lizards and sidewinder rattlesnakes, the poisonous kind that travel in spiral form with head up ready for a strike at all times. She put in most of the remainder of the night watching the 18-inch opening between the blanket and the floor—precisely for what, she could not be sure. Luckily there was no wind. The blanket hung limp throughout the night. I can swear to that. Two of a kind, you might say.

At breakfast, George told me there had been a manhunt the day before over in the country west of Goodsprings — that an escaped convict was reportedly holed up in the hills east of Sandy. That would be in the neighborhood of our lead mine. The wife took this in without comment — but it was plain to be seen that she was stowing it away for future consideration.

When Frank and I had returned from our tour of inspection at Crescent, after nightfall, we found the Good-springs camp in an awful state of alarm. My wife, fully dressed, was sitting upright in the middle of the bed in our ground-floor room, afraid to put foot on the floor. She had been so since shortly after dusk. Dusk—that indeterminate translucent veil which, like a mist, screens and magnifies, transposing even the most common objects into phantom figures.

She had heard a scraping noise, likely a block away, but at such times the imagination does tricks to one’s reasoning. In her state of nervous tension, it was but natural for her to imagine that indistinct noise had come from under the bed, the obvious place for an intruder to hide.

Ordinarily Myrtle was not given to such fits of timidity. But she had entered the country under trying conditions, and therefore was not prepared for the many unexpected irregularities. We had not counted on our train being so far behind time as to land us out there in the middle of the night. With my memory of the surroundings as I last knew them, it required a lot of silent argument with myself to get up courage to subject her to the risk we must necessarily take in finding accommodations of any sort, at Jean. I knew there were ten miles of desert on either side of the railroad station. That the country was not inhabited might or might not have been in our favor. Certainly, it presaged loneliness—and it was dark.

A woman at the hotel in Goodsprings thought she had glimpsed the deadly thing, at dusk, near the sleeping quarters—and Myrtle’s door had been left open for a brief spell while she was out. Or rather the door had been found open on her return—she just wasn’t sure how it was. Myrtle informed me that all the other women in camp were just as frightened as she was. And she bade me look under the bed, forthwith.

The thing I was supposed to make sure was—or wasn’t — there, had an overall length of about two feet, a width of four to five inches, an inch or so less in height when inactive—and it was a little pot-bellied. It was rusty in color, with yellowish spots distributed the full length of its body. It had a fat meaty tail, and a broad ugly looking head.

There really was something alive under the bed. It moved. Its eyes moved toward me. Also there were now two people upon the bed. And simultaneously the door swung open, as if the devil was in cahoots with the thing, bent on letting in all the demons of a wicked world. I had hit the bed on the bounce with a jarring thud, causing the door to swing in, as it invariably did when not securely latched. And the cat “hightailed it” out into the night.

But the house cat was not the thing so much dreaded.

Mr. Springer’s Gila Monster, a lizard-like reptile, even more poisonous than the rattlesnake, was on the loose. It had got out of its place of confinement two days back, and diligent search by the whole camp had failed to locate it. On the third day, however, the Monster was found at a water-hole, an old trench dug years before by our former Wetmore citizen, Green Campbell. The camp demanded that the reptile be killed immediately.

Elwood Thomas, also formerly of Wetmore, was a close neighbor to Mr. Springer, and he had carried the word of caution to Myrtle. It was all so very exciting—even worse than a panther scare. And, miraculously, the wife was to experience that one too before leaving the Goodsprings camp.

We were to go with Frank Williams to stay over Sunday at our lead mine, which was twelve miles over the mountain range on the west side. The daily stage (except Sunday) passed within a few hundred yards of the mine. Frank and I started to walk over, at sunup, on Saturday morning. Myrtle was to go over on the stage in the afternoon.

To make a short cut, Frank and I took a burro trail at the summit, near the Columbia mine. While trailing that rugged miner ten yards in the rear, going down on the west side, I sprained my right ankle, badly, rolling down the slope almost to where Frank was—my camera trailing in the wake, taking the bumps.

We stopped for a brief rest at the Hoosier mine—formerly owned by Frank’s uncle, Elwood Thomas—where the miners were taking out zinc ore, a new find in that district. And “tenderfoot” though I was, I made a discovery there which had escaped my seasoned miner-partner for a whole year. At least I thought I had done this to him. Frank had cut through a 12-foot body of identical appearing stuff in running the tunnel, and had several tons of it ricked up on the dump. It would require an assay to convince him that we had a zinc mine, as well as a lead mine.

In accordance with the miners’ code we were invited to stop at the Hoosier shack in the foothills and get our dinners. By this time my swollen ankle was hurting so badly that I preferred not to stop until we could get out to the stage road a mile farther on—but Frank said it would be an insult to the Hoosier boys for us to pass them by. And besides he was hungry. Also, according to the miners’ code Frank had to wash his dirty dishes. This is a must in the mining country.

This is where I went down—second time. Took this picture while waiting for the stage. Frank’s mail box is about a mile around the bend of the road. The trail—foot path—going over the mountain starts near the right edge of this view’ and tops the mountain starts near the right edge of this view, and tops the mountain at the head of a canyon, on the other side.

We reached the stage road about two hours before the stage was due. Frank walked on three miles farther to the mine, and I hobbled along until within a mile of “our” mountain—then my ankle toppled me over again, and I lay there with my head shaded by a single sagebrush. As the sun moved along on its westward course—which of course it didn’t do at all—I had to scratch gravel frequently, sliding on my back, to keep my head shielded from the burning desert sun.

The stage-driver let us off at Frank’s mail box, and Myrtle had a hard time helping me over the hump and down the canyon to the mine. We took the short cut over the mountain instead of going a mile or more around on the wagon road; through a saddle-back, and then up the canyon to the mine, which would have been less arduous. We were carrying provisions for six meals for the three of us. There was water at the mine. It had rained a month before, and Frank had scooped up the water out of a ditch. No fiction in this. Water really “keeps” out there—when in an underground house, anyway.

We had overlooked the need for candles and coffee—or rather they were missing from the pack. Acting on Frank’s suggestion, Myrtle went out on the mountain side, gathered leaves from the lowly sage brush—and we had our tea. But the absence of candles was a more serious matter. Frank hunted the underground house, and the tunnels, finally finding a two-inch piece of candle at the far end of a 500-foot tunnel.

The wife and I slept—no, bunked—the first night in the underground house. To get into the place we had to hug a wall as we approached the door to avoid dropping into a 60-foot shaft by the side of the entrance, where Frank had taken out $65 worth of RICH silver ore—at a cost of $500 for digging the hole.

There were mice, and probably lizards too, running over our bed on the floor. Little lizards were very active on the outside, in the daytime. And Frank and I had killed a rattlesnake while strolling about over the grounds the year before. The crack under the door was big enough to let in almost anything short of a panther.

Also, a big body of ore protruding from the ceiling directly over our bed looked as if it might slip from its moorings with the slightest jar, and there was some jarring force at work all through the night. Grains of crushed limestone, like sand, sifted down upon us almost continously. Myrtle spent the night lighting, blowing out, and relighting that little piece of candle. In this way she made it last until morning.

The next night—Sunday night—we slept, or rather bunked, on an ore-sorting table out on the tunnel dump, under the stars. Frank had taken his bedroll a hundred yards down the canyon to find level “ground” on which to make his spread. I had sent an old trunk filled with bedding including a couple of pillows the year before. The wife thought Frank had been a little lax in the matter of laundering same.

After going over the mountain (at left) we — Myrtle and I — came down the canyon to the mine. The tunnel dump shows between the two arms of the mountain — about a half mile away. Getting down from the top was tough. I had to back down much of the way — and have a lot of help. Frank had said he would meet us at the mailbox — but he was taking lessons in French off a gramophone and did not show up until we were well along the way to the mine. Frank’s and Edith’s first tent house — part canvas — was built was built on this dump.

This, of course, was before Frank had gone East to study political economy. Also it was before he had brought back to the mine a New England school teacher called Edith, bearing his name. There was no laxity after Edith took charge. And, with this touch of “new life” on the job, the mine, besides yielding rich ore, sparingly, produced two fine little girls, Ruth and Helen—girls that grew up at the mine. With their father a graduate of Campbell University, Holton, Kansas, and their mother holding a teacher’s certificate, the girls didn’t fare badly, even in semi-isolation. As a matter of fact, district school was held for a time in their home, with their mother as teacher.

The home at this time was a four-room house on a 5-acre water claim—held in connection with the mining claims — on the edge of Mesquite Valley, one mile from the mine. There was a 75-foot dug well, with windmill, and running water in the house. And there were growing fruit trees, a vineyard in bearing, and a green—very green alfalfa patch. The two Williams girls represented two-sevenths of the possible pupils for the school.

Then a little green school house was erected not more than three hundred yards from their door—with Miss Leah Lytle as first teacher—where all seven of the miners’ children studied their lessons, romped and played among the sage and mesquite. While so doing, Helen Williams was bitten by a rattlesnake. She was taken to Las Vegas, the nearest big town, fifty miles away for treatment—and that move spelled the end of the little green school house in the Mesquite Valley so far as the two girls were concerned. They finished their schooling in Las Vegas, graduating from the high school there. Then, when Rex Ewing, Frank William’s closest mining neighbor, moved to Las Vegas to capture some of the prevailing high wages, the school blew up. Rex had supplied the other five pupils. The sequence of events as set down here may be faulty—but were I able to chronicle them in order, the result would be the same.

This, I believe, is noteworthy. Besides the single claim purchased by Frank and me from S. C. Root, operator on Bonanza Hill, one mile south of our holdings, Frank Williams located three more adjoining claims, taking in practically all the surface ore croppings on this mountain—and recorded them in one group, which meant that the work done on any one claim of the group, if extensive enough, would satisfy the $100 annual assessment for each claim.

There was, however, a small showing of ore apparently like the zinc at the Hoosier mine just outside those claims, on the west, close to the wagon road Frank had blasted out, at considerable expense, to get up to the tunnel he was driving. There were no other operators on that mountain. Frank was lonesome. He wanted neighbors. Old man Ewing and son Rex, nomad sojourners in Goodsprings, were invited to come out and try their luck on that small cropping.

The Ewings struck pay ore almost from the start, and began shipments, while Frank was still driving his tunnel — with ever increasing high hope. Frank’s wagon road proved to be a big asset for his new neighbors. Rex Ewing also mined commercial lead ore back on the high end of his claims, which was brought down to the wagon road by burro pack. Large trucks now travel that wagon road right up to Frank’s ore bin, at the mouth of the tunnel, and take off with five tons to the load.

At this juncture I might say that though Frank has spent fifty-five of his seventy-six years—as of this date, 1947—in the Nevada mines, he has met with only two accidents, and neither of them was actually in the mines. He was working alone at our Crescent claims, and by way of a little deviation from routine work, undertook to blow open a big boulder—just curious to see what was inside. It was not in the way—and it would have told him nothing of advantage had he proved his suspicion that it contained gold, for gold was showing in the ledge up slope from which the boulder had been dislodged. What I said to Frank when he told me he meant to waste a day in blowing open that big rock does not matter now. Nor did it matter then.

Even before Frank had started to drill the boulder, while clearing away some loose rock, it rolled half-over, pinning him underneath. I judged the boulder would weigh two tons, maybe more—but a smaller rock had prevented it from crushing the life out of Frank. Two miners were working, in sight, across the canyon about a quarter mile away—and Frank called and hollered for seven hours without attracting them.

Now, here is something that, from my power of reasoning, is inexplicable. There are, however, people who would have a ready explanation for it. Elwood Thomas, Frank’s uncle, had driven his team of ponies from Goodsprings over to Searchlight, ten miles beyond Crescent, and was returning late in the afternoon, aiming to go by way of Crescent, as it was shorter and a better road.

Elwood told me that when he had come to the by-road leading through the canyon past his nephew’s location, he naturally thought of Frank, and as he drove on toward Crescent he began to think he should have gone the other road. He said, “Something told me to turn around—I wouldn’t pretend to say what it was—but it was so strong, so insistent, that I did turn around after I had gone a mile.” He found Frank still hollering for help—but his calls were now very feeble. With the help of the two miners Frank had been trying to attract, Elwood got him out from under the boulder, loaded him into the wagon, and drove on down through the canyon and across the big flat to Nipton, the railroad station. Frank was put on the train and taken to a hospital in Los Angeles. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Six weeks in the hospital fixed him up as good as ever. Frank was on his own then—that is, had no insurance. The expense was terrific. I think Frank never did get his curiosity satisfied about the boulder.

As his inactive partner, I cautioned Frank against working alone in those remote places—but it did no good. He said he was safer working alone in the mines than I was when riding the trains between Kansas and Nevada. When I first went into the mining country, I observed that practically all prospectors had partners. I asked an Irishman (a miner) why was it so? He said, “And how the divvel would a man pull his-self up out of a hole widout a partner?” But there was a more important reason. It was for protection against accidents such as Frank had just experienced.

Frank’s second accident, more serious than the other one, was at our Goodsprings mine, while loading out vanadium ore on Government contract, in more recent years. He was unable to tell how it happened. The trucker had left with a 5-ton load, and Frank was “waiting around” for him to come back for a second load. When the truck driver got back from his ten-mile trip over the mountain, he found Frank wandering around down on the road below the ore bin, in a dazed condition—really worse than that. Frank wrote me later that he remembered standing on the ore bin after the trucker had gone with his load, and thought he must have fallen off—but remembered nothing more. The ore bin is built against the slope of the mountain, having a flat top about 16x20 feet, on a level of the tunnel, with car-track extending to the outer edge, where a drop would be about 18 feet—and less, (to nothing), at the upper end of the ore bin. Frank did not say where he was standing in the last moments of consciousness—but a fall from anywhere near the upper edge would mean a rough tumble all the way down to the road.

When Frank was taken to the Las Vegas hospital, it was found he had a broken collarbone, a bad head injury — and a touch of pneumonia. He remained two months in the hospital, at state expense, plus $90 per month compensation — with final payment of $1,500, on a basis of one-fourth incapacitation.

In Nevada now you don’t have to apply for state insurance. If you are a miner, you’ve got it, with monthly billing—unless you have filed notice that you do not want it.

The Williams girls are both married and live in Las Vegas. Helen is the wife of Vaughn Holt, a barber. When I called at her home in 1941 she had a very sweet little girl not quite a year old. Ruth’s husband, Charles Thomas, is a linotype operator on Frank Garside’s Daily newspaper. He is not the Charley Thomas who grew up in Wetmore and spent many years in Nevada. That Charley was the son of Elwood Thomas and was Frank William’s cousin. And it so happens that Ruth now takes her grandmother Williams’ maiden name—Ruth Thomas.

Frank Garside, postmaster at Las Vegas, and publisher of the Daily Review there, formerly lived in Atchison. His aunt, Frances Garside—well known to me at that time — made a record writing “Globe Sights” for Ed Howe’s Daily Globe, back in the “Gay Nineties.”

And now the panther. Maybe it was only a wildcat, but its scream was enough to put fear in the “sleepers” out on the tunnel dump. The varmint came yowling down the canyon, fifteen feet away from our bunk, going on down the trail Frank had taken with his bedroll. Frank said the thing had been heard several times before, and he was not sure if it was a panther, or a wildcat. Panthers—called cougars in the west—he said, were very much in evidence down on the Rim; that is, the high bank of the Colorado river. And something very like the cougar in habit had killed a calf in the valley, close by. Myrtle regarded the thing as a threatening menace, and had it not been for that exposed shaft at the entrance of the underground house, she doubtless would have made a break for shelter. And I think that, notwithstanding my black and blue ankle, I should have followed pronto.

However, Myrtle was compensated for all this by the fact—vouched for by Frank Williams—that she was the first white woman to set foot on that mountain. By the same line of reasoning, Edith Willams was, I suppose, if we can be sure Frank knows his history, the second, and probably the last, white woman to climb Hunter mountain.

Looking across the canyon, and gesturing toward the mountain-side where some work had been done, Myrtle laughingly said to Frank and me, “I suppose you two old grizzled miners think that ‘Thar’s gold in them thar hills’.”

Myrtle had trod some pretty rocky ground, literally and figuratively, since coming into camp—besides heating gallons of water from time to time at the mine to bathe my sprained ankle—and she certainly was entitled to indulge in a little “fun” at our expense. Myrtle had quoted correctly, but that “grizzled” reference belonged to quite another class of miners. And I may say this was the first and only time I had ever heard that bewhiskered old saying while in the mining country. It was of course a carryover from another era. And, had she not questioned my statement about the gun-toters, I should have told her that there are no such animals in the mining country now.

Myrtle was holding in her hand a gold nugget—real, glittering, yellow gold — about the size of a walnut, and Frank knew instantly its source. She had taken it out of my pocket—but I doubt if Frank knew positively, until this minute, that I had it. He said to me, “You better drop it in that shaft over there by the underground house. There’s but one place that it could have come from—and if exhibited around here, it might get somebody in trouble.” He hastened to say, however, that it would not be me; that he was sure that I had got it legitimately, though maybe a little less openly than the $10 nugget I had secured when he and I were exploring the depths of the famous Quartette mine at Searchlight. That’s the place where someone had said before the camp was named that it would take a searchlight to locate pay ore.

I said, “Yeah, drop it in the shaft and have someone in the future find it, and then spend thousands of dollars trying to locate its source.”

He said, “Any miner who knows his stuff would know that it didn’t originate in this lime formation. It’s straight out of a porphyry dike—and was, until you got hold of it, closely guarded under lock and key.”

I could have told him that I knew all this, but a more brilliant idea struck me—leastwise just for the moment I thought it was bright. But, then, on second thought, what if the assay on our big body of material I had been so sure was just like the Hoosier zinc, should prove me wrong. Well, anyway, I would “ shoot the works.”

I said, “It strikes me that there are some men around here who count themselves miners that do not exactly at all times know their stuff.”

Myrtle said, “Now, now—don’t commence on that zinc again.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll still bet my old hat that it is zinc.”

Frank said, quickly, “If it’s zinc, I’ll eat your old hat — and do it with relish, too, brother.”

“And in that case, if you win, smart boy, you still stand to lose your hat,” said Myrtle, to me.

I believe Frank had already begun to see the light, sense a probability, cherish a hope. Although lead ore running 71 and 72 per cent by the carload had been shipped, the present lean condition of our lead mine could well stand bolstering with a big body of zinc. But of course he would not want to admit, first off, that his “tenderfoot” partner had stumbled onto something of such vital importance. In school, and at countryside lyceums back home, Frank was a top negative debater—always on the “contrary” side. And it was probably the stubborn Welsh in him that caused him to stick by his guns now”His father had been a miner back in Wales—in the identical neighborhood’ that afterwards became known as the locale of the movie, “How Green Was My Valley?”:

I do not know the result of the assay made by Harry Riddell for Frank—but I do know that Frank wrote me, that fortunately, I was going to be minus an old hat, someday. But, for the present, would I send him $500 to start operations on “our lucky zinc find?”

An assay made for me, by C. S. Cowan, whom I met on the train, and who was assayer at W. A. Clark’s United Verde mine, Jerome, Arizona, showed fifty-five per cent zinc. Assayer Cowan wrote me that it was a big surprise to him. He had told me he doubted if the sample would show any zinc.

In the crude, it shipped out by the carload at forty-three percent. But at that, it was no bonanza. Western smelters could not handle that class of ore—and the freight rate to the zinc smelters in the gas fields of southern Kansas, was $500 a car.

Unlike the dark sulphides of the Joplin (Mo.) and Galena (Kans.) district, where paying mines were operating on six per cent zinc, ours was a carbonate ore, running to high values. It was light in color, with the richer ore comparatively light in weight. Frank said it would likely, as she goes down, turn to sulphides and be more permanent, with less values.

But, brother—”she” didn’t go down.

By way of explanation, I might say here that on the preceding Friday, Frank and I paid a visit to the Keystone mine near the summit, north of the Goodsprings highway. Situated in a porphyry zone, it was the only gold mine of importance in the district—with an output of more than a million dollars up to that time. And it might be consoling to my partner, who at that time (1907) had spent sixteen of his thirty-seven years working in the Nevada mines, to state here what he already knows—in fact, he’s the source of my information—that Jonas Taylor, working a silver deposit on his claim, allowed the Keystone gold ledge to lay dormant for three years after he had discovered it. But when he did finally wake up to its possibilities, three days work rewarded him with a four-foot vein of gold ore running $1,000 to the ton—in shipments.

Our former Wetmore citizen, Green Campbell, did not get in on this—but he located, and his estate still owns the Golden Chariot, adjoining. And one of Green’s associates, William Smith, hurriedly fetched his friend Samuel Godbe over from Pioche, and after one look at the uncovered ledge, the latter played a winning hand in a big game without risking any chips. Mr. Godbe asked for, and received from Mr. Taylor, a thirty day option on one-half interest for $20,000. Mr. Godbe then rushed to San Francisco and sold half of a half-interest to Mr. Perry, a banker acquaintance, for $20,000 cash. A few months later Mr. Perry sold his quarter interest to Mr. Blake, of Denver, for $40,000. And nobody had lost any money — yet.

We had driven Sam Yount’s big sorrel mare up Kerby gulch to the Kerby mine, owned by the Campbell estate. From there, we walked maybe a couple of miles—a pretty rough climb—to the Keystone, arriving at about 10 o’clock. The camp cook, the only man above ground, thought the miners were working on the 800-foot level. Frank said he knew his way around—that we would go down in the mine and contact them. He had worked in the Keystone a short while before.

Like an addict bucking a slot machine always hoping for the next turn to crack the jackpot, Frank had put his last dollar into the development of our own prospect, and consequently had been compelled to work in other mines to get a stake. And since it was not in the cards for Frank to distinguish himself, as part owner of the Kansas-Nevada mine — and also, in later years, as if finding a good mother for his “kids” while on that political economy excursion into the East was not enough, he cashed in on that outlay by getting himself elected for the fourth time, to the legislature — assembly, it is called in Nevada. Then to Reno as Regent of the University of Nevada. Also, still later, he started a one-man crusade against gambling. But in Nevada—well, it was slow work.

And, mind you, we ourselves, Frank and I, were at that very time stuck in a mine gamble which might—and did — keep us feeding the “kitty” for years before we could know whether or not we would ever be able to pull out with a winning.

We lighted candles and started down by way of an incline shaft. The Keystone doubtless had a vertical shaft, I believe back on higher ground, straight down to the 1,000 foot level, with safety cage, operated with power. Likely a standard shaft! under state supervision, similar to the one which Frank and I were eased down to the 1100-foot level of the Quartette mine at Searchlight—on a day off from our inspection at Crescent. My cousin, Ella Bristow-Montgom-ery-Walter, lived in Searchlight, and Joe Walter, her husband, had taken time off from his barber business to show us around. Frank had seen the manager of the Quartette, likely through the solicitation of Joe, give me a gold nugget, worth maybe $10.,

I did not collect these rich specimens for their intrinsic value—but rather for study and comparison. Our hope for gold at that time lay at Crescent, between Goodsprings and Searchlight. The specimens from neighboring camps could be helpful in determining our course of development.

At the Keystone, we had gone down that incline shaft to the 700-foot level before the tenderfoot in me began to assert itself. We had walked down the incline easily enough, then climbed straight down on a ladder for maybe twenty-five feet—and then repeated by incline and ladder, gaining distance away from the portal, as well as in depth.

At the 700-foot level, Frank had a sudden notion that we might be heading for trouble. There were crosscuts going out from the various levels, and the miners might be working in any one of them. And it was about time for the shots to be fired. He said we could get out quicker if we were above the works when the powder smoke began to come out. And I was positive that I had had enough. The mine was dripping water—and my nerves were shot.

It gave me a “weak” feeling not unlike I had experienced when Frank took me about 300 feet back into the tunnel at our lead mine to demonstrate a drilling, and the firing of a shot. It was late in the afternoon, almost sundown. Frank said we would have to hurry, as daylight was running out on us, and we yet had to make our beds out on the dump—that is, find places where the crushed rock had been trampled down to some semblance of smoothness. He said he was drilling in soft white lime; that the blue lime at the contact two hundred feet farther in, for which the tunnel was projected, and where, it was confidently believed, we would encounter a big body of lead, was hard as granite. He drilled a hole sixteen inches deep, then cut a suitable length of fuse, fitted a dynamite cap to one end, tapped it together lightly with his steel drill—then shockingly gave that dynamite cap, having a 500-pound explosive force — which alone has been known to blow a man’s hand off when hit with a hammer—a final clinch with his teeth. He had a little tool for clinching the caps, but he didn’t want to waste the time to fetch it. He “hooted” at my protest of that dangerous performance. We were about twelve miles from civilization, and I didn’t relish the prospect of being left alone out there in the night. He slit a stick of dynamite with his knife—dynamite has been known to explode with rough handling—but he eased my fears by saying a cow had chewed up a stick of dynamite without harm. He inserted the capped end of the fuse in the slit, squeezed it together and dropped it in the hole. He filled the hole with fine rock drillings, and nonchalantly tamped it with an iron bar. He lighted the fuse with a match—and said it was time for us to skedaddle to the portal. No report. Frank said he would go back in the tunnel and dig it out, and fire the charge. Now, I did protest. I told him to defer that job until morning. He thought maybe it would be best, said that a fuse would sometimes hangfire. Dusk was upon us. However, we found suitable spots for bedding down, and I rolled up in nice clean blankets I had purchased in Los Angeles the day before—and, using a “soft” white lime rock for a pillow, slept the sleep of a budding plutocrat. And, believe it or not, that delayed shot waked me before dawn. Frank had performed the dangerous task of digging out that dud, and reloaded the hole. He said, “It was no job for a simpering tenderfoot to watch. And furthermore, if you will stick around me you’ll learn something.” And that was no boastful exaggeration.

The Keystone manager took us to the administration building, unlocked a door, and showed us five tons of very rich gold ore piled in one corner of the office. A narrow strip of one inch and less—along the hanging wall of a four-foot vein of $40 ore—shot with particles of pure gold, averaging $72,000 to the ton, had produced that $360,000 pile of Keystone wealth.

The manager was very kind to me. He pointed out some extremely rich specimens, and watched me “eat ‘em up” — figuratively, of course. I knew that it would have been unethical, if not worse, for him to have offered to give me a specimen, especially at a time when all that “high-grading” was going on in Nevada, particularly at the Goldfield Consolidated Mines.

Satisfied that I had been sufficiently impressed, the manager turned to Frank—they were old associates, you know—suggesting that he might be interested in having a look at the work-sheet, blue-print, or something of other entertaining, on the desk. When Frank was sufficiently absorbed, with back to me, the manager stepped out the door, “whowhoed” and gestured—probably held up two fingers — which I afterwards interpreted to mean he was making known to someone he would have guests for dinner. And I still think I read the signals aright. Anyway, my hurriedly selected specimen had only the gold content of one double-eagle—and that would have been grand larceny in my state.

I do not know if the Keystone maintained a change-room, such as the management of the Goldfield Consolidated was compelled to install about this time to cope with its “high-graders,” But the Keystone had had experience with “high-graders.” Frank said that in earlier days, off-shift miners would ride the ore-wagons down to the mill in the Mesquite Valley near the town of Sandy, dropping rich pieces of gold ore by the roadside for their confederates, following on foot, to gather up.

At the Consolidated Mines in Goldfield every miner on coming off shift, besides having to shed his work clothes before he could pass the doorkeeper to get to his street clothes, was compelled to say “Ah!” Perhaps you can think of some other way a stripped miner might conceal a bit of gold? The miners did. And the detection of that unique manner of “high-grading” precipitated a riot that had to be quelled by the state militia. The Union miners agreed, magnanimously, to submit to the new order of things—provided that they be permitted to name the doorkeeper from their own ranks. The Consolidated had broken into some extremely rich ore, streaks of almost pure gold—and the miners were averse to overlooking any bets.

Back at the lead-zinc mine, Myrtle told us what she had experienced in Goodsprings during the week when Frank and I were at Crescent. As the wife of the partner of Frank Williams—no intent of implying self importance—she was at once taken into the hearts of the camp people. Perhaps her own personality was a factor. She had met, at the hotel, Mr and Mrs. Potter, of the Columbia mine; Mr and Mrs. McCarthy, (he was the surveyor); and Harry Riddell, the assayer—all late of Boston. And she had really begun to love the desert, with its ultra-sociable people. Even Mrs. Yount’s squaw cook—maybe she was only kitchen help—a Paiute Indian woman from up Pahrump way, Myrtle said, was friendly.

And, best of all, the camp children had supplied her daily—except of course those two days when Mr. Springer’s Gila Monster had the run of the camp—with a bouquet of wild flowers gathered from the mountain slopes. She loved that.

Also, she had enjoyed, particularly when with the children, watching a reddish-brown dog resembling a cocker spaniel, ride a horse, standing up behind a man. A prospector working a claim up near the summit, five or six miles out, rode a bay horse daily out of Goodsprings, to and from his work—always with the dog standing on the horse’s back. As it was a daily occurrence, the children had become accustomed to seeing the dog ride the horse—but they were especially anxious for Myrtle to view the spectacle, with them. Myrtle had met, and visited with, some of the children’s mothers. One of the women was from Soldier, Kansas, near our home. In fact, with faithful Elwood Thomas as escort, Myrtle had been pretty much all over the camp — except of course saloon row on the north side—Hobson street I believe it was called. Elwood had told her it was not the lowest spot in Nevada, but even so, it was no place for a lady.

Myrtle had now really caught the spirit of the West. She was actually planning on the spending of the yet undelivered profits of the mine, on a home in Goodsprings. Everyone had told her that we were on the high road to a big success. Our home would be on the “bench” near Charley Byram’s place, where we could be sure of getting water. Bachelor Charley Byram, I believe, had the only private well, with windmill, in Goodsprings. He was the son of August Byram, former partner of Green Campbell, in the sensationally rich Horn Silver mine at Frisco, Utah. Born in Atchison, Kansas, Charley was now — in Nevada and Los Angeles, where he lived with his mother and sister — -a typical Westerner, seemingly without the proper appreciation of a native son for his old home town. He said to me, “The last time I was back in Atchison, two years ago, I could have fired a shotgun down the full length of Commercial street without hitting a soul.” To one who knows the unobstructed and flat straightness of Commercial street, it seemed as if he should have been able to do better than that. Charley would have to up his sights and show marksmanship if he were to hit pay ore on his claims up in the porphyry zone. I believe he missed in this.

Myrtle said she wanted flowers, lots of roses, and green grass—a show spot, sort of oasis in the desert as it were. Something that everybody else didn’t have. Well, I too had been caught by the spell. Why not let her have them? Contingent, however, on one little reservation. Only if, and when, the lead-zinc mine should give up its treasure. We couldn’t spend all that money living a prosaic life.

Before leaving Goodsprings for California, Myrtle said to me, “Let’s come back this way. I’d love it. And since you think you are so good at discovering zinc overlooked by your partner, maybe YOU could, after all, find gold in ‘them thar hills’.”

Might say here that eight years later Myrtle had the chance to repay the old miner, Elwood Thomas, for his kindness by entertaining him in our home. Elwood — just in from Nevada — came into the Wetmore hotel one evening about eight o’clock when I happened to be present. Also, Henry McCreery—sometimes affectionately called “Henry Contrary”—Elwood’s brother-in-law, was in the hotel office at the time. We had a good visit together. When Henry was ready to go home he said, “Well, Elwood, I’d like to ask you to go home with me for the night — but I’m afraid Becky wouldn’t like it.” Becky Thornton was Henry’s sister and housekeeper—his wife Patience, Elwood’s sister, having passed on some years earlier. Elwood said, “Oh, it’s all right. Maybe I ought to go out and see the Old Man” — meaning his bachelor brother Manning, living a half mile east of town. Elwood was the oldest and Manning was the youngest in a family of seven children—but the older one was the younger in appearance. I said, “Come along with me, Elwood—I know Myrtle will be glad to see you.” And she was. They had done Goodsprings all over again before retiring that night. And, sadly, we were to see our very fine old friend laid to rest in the Wetmore cemetery within the week. He was fatally injured in a horse-and-buggy accident while visiting his daughter, Mrs. Maude Ralston, in Holton.

Elwood had told us that he had a message from a miner in Goodsprings to deliver to a woman in Wetmore, but he could not remember her name. The wife and I put in a portion of the night trying to figure out who it might be with a connection out there. The next morning after breakfast, I went with Elwood down to the Spectator office. Editor Turrentine gave him a personal, with comment, naming the man in Goodsprings whose message Elwood would like to deliver, if he could find the woman. It brought results. Mrs. Nels Rasmus drove over to Holton the day following publication — and received her message. Mr. Thomas had gone over there to visit his daughter. Mrs. Rasmus had lived in the home of P. T. Casey, the Corning banker. I believe she was an adopted child. The Good-springs miner was connected in some way with one or the other of the two Corning families.

Two years later—1917—I chanced to meet this man with a stalled Model T Ford near the summit west of Goodsprings, on a very slippery road, deep in snow and slush. In the car with me, were Joe Walter, Frank and John Williams, and the driver. We were coming down the grade, and he had been going up. Recognizing the name on introduction, I asked him—just to be sociable—what was wrong with his car? He answered rather smartly, “If I knew I wouldn’t be here.” It was probably a very correct answer — but I thought it was no way to dismiss a fellow who had a message from Mrs. Rasmus for him.

NOTE—Frank Williams died in a hospital in Las Vegas. Nevada, December 19, 1947. This story is printed, without change, just as it was written prior to his death.

MONEY MUSK

Published in Wetmore Spectator—

January 24, 1936.

By John T. Bristow

The deep snows of the past month recall the winters back a half century, and more. It seems there was always snow on the ground in the winter months then.

In the early days, besides making boots and shoes, my father, William Bristow, hunted and trapped a good deal, whenever he could spare the time from his business. Always one or more of his boys would go with him on those outings. We all loved the outdoors—and with my father we were like pals.

Among his catches were mink, raccoons, lynx, bobcats, and sometimes a catamount. The catamount was an overgrown wildcat between the bobcat and the cougar in size. The largest one he ever caught weighed sixty-seven pounds. There are none here now.

My father did not trap for the little fur-bearing, stink-throwing skunk, but often one would be found in one of his mink traps. Then, from a safe distance, he would shoot the skunk, carefully remove it, and deodorize the steel trap by burning before making another set.

The time came, though, when my father thought he might just as well save the skunk pelts. Skunk fur was in demand at a good price, the best skins bringing around four dollars. My father was not avaricious. But times were close—and he had many mouths to feed. And four dollars was four dollars.

My mother, of course, did not like to have her home polluted with skunk essence—and her boys refused to help with the skinning. So, when my father would find a well-marked skunk in one of his mink traps he would say, rather sadly, as he tossed it aside, “That’s four dollars thrown away.”

Then, one Sunday when William Peters was along—he was called Methuselah, or Thuse, for short—my father found a big skunk in one of his traps. It had fine markings. He said, “I’ll skin this one, if Thuse will help me.” Thuse said he didn’t mind; he had trapped and skinned a lot of them without getting stunk up.

It was a cold day—ice and snow everywhere. And while they skinned that skunk my brother Charley and I built a roaring fire with the scaley bark ripped off standing shell-bark hickory trees, and some fallen dead tree limbs picked out of the deep snow.

When they had finished skinning the skunk my father walked over to the fire and threw the carcass into the flames. He and Thuse then went over to an open spring that came out from under the roots of a big elm tree on the Theodore Wolfley farm west of town, and washed their hands. They had returned to the fire and were bending over the blaze drying their hands, when my father said, “So you boys think you’re too nice to help your old daddy skin a skunk.” He laughed. Methuselah chuckled. Then, spreading his hands with a sort of satisfied air, my father said, “It’s as easy as falling off a log when you know how.” Thuse chuckled again, and said, “Pshaw—of course it is!” And then, as if giving instructions for his sons to note, my father went on, “I shot him in the head before he had time to kick up a stink and of course we were careful not to cut into the stink-sack.”

Charley said, “Smart guys—you two.” Father gave him a withering look, but said nothing.

Thus chagrined, Charley and I started away to gather some more fuel. Then there was a sharp pop—a sort of explosion, as it were—in the fire. We looked around into an atmosphere suddenly made blue with sickening fumes and sulphurous words of condemnation. We saw Pop clawing frantically at his whiskers—he wore a full beard then—and the two Willies were dancing around the fire like Comanche Indians.

It was all so sudden. That darned skunk carcass, as if in a last noble effort of defense, had exploded and the contents of that carefully handled stink-sack was hurled at those two self-assured skinners, with my father’s whiskers as the central target for some of the solids. Pugh! It was awful!

Adopting Indian lingo, Charley laughed, “Heap brave skunk-skinners!”

Father said, “I don’t like the way you said that, young man. One more crack out of you—and I’ll tan your hide.” But he wouldn’t have done that. Charley was a model of perfection, and no one appreciated that fact more than did his daddy.

Now, have a look at Thuse. A weazened little wisp of a man in his twenties—wrinkled, uncouth, slouched in his clothes always much too big for him, he looked as if he had already lived a goodly portion of the long span of years accredited to the ancient Methuselah.

On the way home, Methuselah, speaking to my father, said, “They’ll want to run us out of town, Bill, when we get back to Wetmore.” My father said he could bury his clothes, but still he was greatly worried about his whiskers. And, naturally, he was thinking about my mother, too.

Charley said, soothingly, “Oh, just go on home Dad, and play her Money Musk, and everything will be fine. Money talks, you know. You’ve got as good as four dollars in your game sack, and God only knows how much musk, if you want to call it that, you and Thuse have got on your own hides.”

My father played the fiddle, and while “Over the Ocean Waves” was his favorite, he played equally well another tune called “Money Musk.” He would entertain his family in the home of evenings with his old-time fiddling.

We reached home about dusk, purposely timed. My father and Thuse were both increasingly worried. Thinking that it might be more satisfactory to let father face his problem alone, or with only Thuse present—and for other reasons—Charley and I went out to the woodpile and stalled around a bit. Old Piute and Queenie came out of the doghouse to greet us. Father never took the dogs along when running his trap line.

My mother came to the door and called in her gentle, sweet voice—she was always gentle and sweet with her boys—”Come on in here, you little stinkers, and get your suppers!”

My father was not at the festive board that Sunday night. He was nowhere about the house, that we could see — and we ate our supper in comparative silence.

Occasionally, my mother would sniff at us, but she offered no protest. Doubtless her two darling boys carried more than a suspicion of the polecat’s pollution, but, having just had a whiff of those two Willies, her keen nose was unable to separate the real from the imaginary.

It was almost two hours later when father came home. Methuselah was with him. They were both appreciably slicked up—but not really so good. Father was, more or less, shorn of his beard, and looked “funnier” than his boys had ever before seen him. And, would you believe it, the first thing he did was to pick up his fiddle and play Money Musk. I looked at my mother—then turned to Charley, giggled, and whispered, “I don’t believe it’s going to work.”

Charley giggled, too, and said out loud, “I betcha I could name some slick skunk-skinners who are maybe going to have to sleep out in the doghouse tonight.”

Sitting ramrod straight on the edge of her chair, with a hitherto wordless dead-pan expression, my mother said, “You tell ‘em, kid.” That did it. Dad snapped, “You don’t smell so darned nice, yourself, young man!”

William Peters could play the fiddle almost as well as father. They teamed well in furnishing music for the town dances, in the old days. They now played as if there was urgent need for prolonging the agony. Nero blithely fiddled while Rome burned. And likewise those two Willies fiddled well into the night while my mother stewed.

GONE WITH THE WIND

Published in Wetmore Spectator,

January—1943.

By John T. Bristow

I have been asked to “write up” the Kickapoo Indians. This I cannot do satisfactorily without more data. I do not know the history of the tribe and, at this late date, I do not choose to waste time in acquainting myself with the particulars. It takes a lot of research to do a story of that nature. And, historically written, it would be rather drab. Anyway, this is a hurry-up assignment I am writing now to help out Carl, The Spectator Editor, while he is playing a lone hand during his father’s sickness.

WANTS WRITEUP OP KICKAPOO INDIANS

From Porterville, California, George J. Remsburg, who formerly lived in Atchison, and years ago had some excellent historical articles pertaining to Northeast Kansas printed in the Atchison Daily Globe, writes:

“A while back I received from you a copy of the Spectator containing your article, Turning Back the Pages. You have given us a splendid story of the Old Trail days in Northeast Kansas. I read every word of it with intense interest, and am preserving it for future reference. Also accept my thanks for copies of the Spectator containing your Memory’s Storehouse Unlocked. It is a most interesting narrative, and I am glad to have it for my historical collection.

“Why don’t you write up some recollections of the Kickapoo Indians?

“Mrs. Robert T. Bruner, of your town, is my much beloved cousin—as good a girl as ever lived.”

Marysville, Kansas, Dec. 18, 1938. Dear Mr. Bristow:

I have just received the Diamond Jubilee number of the Seneca Courier-Tribune, and among other feature articles read your article on “Green Campbell.” I want to congratulate you on this product of your able pen. It presents the theme in a fascinating, interesting manner; and incidentally garnishes the subject with a lot of worthwhile pioneer history.

It is too bad that persons with your ability to write—to draw word pictures — with words from an apt, concise, and well-stocked vocabulary, should lay down the pen. Those products, tho very interesting now, with the passing of years become literary gems. So keep on writing, Mr. Bristow; we love the articles of your able mind and eloquent pen.

I don’t believe you have ever written up the Kickapoo Indians—right at your door? Why not reconsider—and do it now?

Under separate cover I am mailing you one of my latest books, “The Jay-hawkers of Death Valley.” I want to give you the opportunity to read it. You need not buy it.

John G. Ellenbecher.

Mr. Ellenbecher has been writing historic articles for many years—principally about the old Overland Trail. In company with Abe Eley, formerly of Wetmore, Mr. Ellenbecker called on me when I was writing the Green Campbell story. I told them that it would be my last. But it was not. I reconsidered. Twelve of the stories in this book have been written since. And I may write still another one.—J. T. B.

However, there are some incidents having Indian connections which might make fairly readable matter. The Kickapoos were, I judge, just like other Indians — pushed out of civilization to make room for the whites. They had come here before the white settlement, of course. Where they came from I do not know—Michigan, maybe.

The Kickapoos did not war with other tribes. Nor did they molest the whites. Still, they were Indians, and it was hard for the early settlers to believe that they would have a lasting record as such—since hostile Indians roamed the country west of the Blue river. Back in the early 90’s when the Kickapoos took up the Sioux “Ghost Dance, or Messiah Craze,” as it was called, and held all-night pow-wows for several weeks, there was some nervousness among the whites.

In the early 70’s the Kickapoos came to Wetmore to do their trading. They had Government money and were good customers of the two general stores. Later they did their trading at Netawaka, and still later at Horton. My father, a shoemaker, came to know some of them rather intimately. I knew many of them too.

Masquequah was Chief then. Many are the times I have sold him white sugar and red calico—the Indians would not buy brown sugar if they could get white sugar. This was when I was a clerk in Than Morris’ store. Associated with me then were Curt Shuemaker, George Cawood and “Chuck” Cawood. In the good old days we often piled up a thousand dollar sales of a Saturday.

I should, perhaps, amplify this assertion about the sugar. We sold at that time about four times as much brown sugar which came in barrels marked “C” sugar, as we did white sugar. One day the boss said, “The town’s full of Indians; sell no white sugar to anyone until after the Indians leave.” When I told the Chief we had no white sugar, he said, “Ugh, Indian’s money good as white man’s money—maybe. Indians go Netawaka buy white sugar.” And that is what they did. Sorry, I can’t tell you why Morris did not want to sell the Indians white sugar that day. It could hardly have been because it consumed more time-it was a busy Saturday—to “tie-up” white sugar. We had no paper sacks then. The system was to weigh-up the sugar, lay a piece of wrapping paper flat down on the counter, empty the sugar onto it; then tie it up—if you could. A green clerk like myself could waste a lot of time trying to wrap up a dollar’s worth of granulated sugar. Brown sugar would pack together, and wrap more easily.

The story got out that the Netawaka merchant would sell the Indian a bill of groceries, put it in a box, and a clerk would obligingly carry it to the Indian’s wagon—and then, while the Indian was loitering in the store, the clerk would slip out and rob the box, in the interest of the merchant. But, if this were true, the Indians seemed to like it. They followed the Netawaka merchant to Horton when that town got started in 1886. Also, it was said, a certain white farmer living near the southwest corner of the reservation, would sometimes ride out from Netawaka with one of his Indian friends, letting his hired hand follow up with his own rig. At opportune times, the white man would reach back and throw out packages for the hired hand to gather up. Methinks Sam would have had hard luck in fishing out a package of granulated sugar such as those tied-up by me.

The old, old Indians are, I believe, all dead now. Of the younger generations, I know little—except that they are the descendants of a once relatively large tribe, and that their once large domain has been reduced to thirty sections, and that much of the land within the boundaries of the reservation is now owned by white people.

H. A. Hogard, Educational Field Agent, and Grover Allen, Indian, were in Wetmore last Sunday practicing archery with George Grubb and Ollie Woodman. They told me the Indian population now numbers about 280. There are about fifty families.

For my first episode I shall tell you about a deer-hunt my father and I had with the Indians. In a former article I told you about an Indian with a party of deer-hunters we chanced to meet in the John Wolfley timber, whom my father named Eagle Eye. His Indian name was far from that, however.

It was Eagle Eye who had arranged this hunt. He brought along from the reservation, eight miles northeast of here, two extra ponies—one of normal size and not too large at that, and a little one for me to ride. While putting the saddle on the little pony my father asked the Indians if it were a gentle pony. Eagle Eye said, “Him heap gentle like lazy squaw.”

It had snowed during the night and was still snowing when the Indians arrived at day-break. Two deer-runs were to be covered and it would take a full day to do it. Then, too, our party wanted to, if possible, get onto the grounds ahead of other hunters. It was not very cold, and my father was pleased with the snow. Tracking would be good. A natural born hunter, snow always appealed to him. He had killed a great many deer in his native Tennessee.

In the old days in Tennessee there was hardly ever enough snow to do a good job of tracking. However, hunters down there this winter would have had snow aplenty to track deer—if deer still remain to be tracked. A foot of snow and thirteen degrees below zero was recorded January 19th at Nashville—where I was born, the second son of a tanner, at 11:30 p. m., December 31, 1861.

Also in our hunting party, riding a small pony, was a little Indian boy whom they called—shall I say—Nish-a-shin. This might not be correct. When we got lined out, Eagle Eye rode first, then my father. I was third in line and Nish-a-shin was fourth. Three Indians followed in single-file formation with long rifles carried crosswise in front of them. The Indians all rode bareback, even Nish-a-shin. My father had secured two saddles for us.

In the gray of that early Sunday morning after the storm abated and the white prairie lay still, Eagle Eye headed west toward the John Wolfley timber. We traveled in silence, never out of a walk. From the head of Spring creek we went across to Elk creek and Soldier creek.

At that time the whole southwest country was practically virgin prairie. The Dixon 40-acres where Maurice Savage now lives, and the Bill Rudy land where Joe Pfrang’s home now is, were the only fenced tracts in that section of the country. Bill Rudy went to California. Years later when my father went out there they renewed their friendship. And one time when I was visiting in Fresno my father took me to see Mr. Rudy. He owned an 80-acre ranch and seemed to be well pleased with the change he had made. He had much to say about the intense cold weather he had endured on his homestead here. The winters Mr. Rudy experienced in Kansas were very much like the one we are now having, only in the old days real blizzards were the rule.

On October seventeenth, 1898, Jack Hayden lost nineteen head of cattle, in a pasture north of the Rudy — or Pfrang — place, in an unusually early and unusually severe blizzard. The cattle drifted with the blinding snow-storm over a bank and piled up in a ditch. I was in Chicago at the time. It rained in Chicago, but coming home on the Burlington, the first snow appeared near the north line of Missouri, got heavier toward Atchison, and from Atchison west on the Central Branch, it was really heavy. That snow, and succeeding falls, kept the ground here covered in a sea of white until spring.

Those Indians called me “paleface papoose.” I was, of course, beyond the normal age of a papoose, but your old Indian was no fool. They probably reasoned that whiteman would not understand Indian’s word for youth. Eagle Eye had started calling me “paleface papoose” when my father was saddling the pony. Maybe it was because I had to have a saddle. Little Nish-a-shin you know rode bareback. He did not make much talk.

It was in the wilds of Soldier creek, in the big timber, where we made camp for dinner. One of the Indians carried a stew-kettle in a grain-sack and I carried a flour-sack having in it several loaves of bread baked by my mother, and maybe four or five links of butcher-shop bologna. Also two tin-cups, two tin-plates, with knives and forks for two. My mother did not think to put in spoons, but then of course she could not know the kind of mess we were in for.

With fallen deadwood dug up out of the snow a rousing fire was made—and the kettle put on. When the Indian dish corresponding to the whiteman’s mulligan was ready, all hands squatted down around the fire and devoured the food ravenishly, including my mother’s nice brown loaves of bread and the store bologna. My father had told me that I would be expected to eat of the Indian’s food and that I should pass our bread and meat around, as a token of friendship.

I cannot say now what kind of meat it was those Indians cooked in that kettle, but it was something which they had brought along. They had not killed anything on the hunt that day. However, I do not believe it was dogmeat. Surely Eagle Eye would not have done that to us. But maybe it was just as well that I didn’t then know anything about the accredited habits of Indians in general as with respect to their dogs. I can however truthfully say this much for the Indian’s stew. That dish—dog or no dog—didn’t gag me nearly so much as the bowl of Chinese noodles my father and my brother Frank cajoled me into eating with them and other members of their party — Harry Maxwell, a former Wetmore boy, and Dan Conner — while seeing Fresno’s Chinatown.

After traveling all day through the woods, following cow-paths and never deviating once from the single-file formation which characterized the start on that white morning away back in the 70’s we got back home at dusk. From sun-up until sun-down we had traveled, and not one deer did we see. Some tracks in the fresh snow were followed for miles. Only once did the Indians dismount and hunt a clump of woods hurriedly on foot, spreading out fanwise. They had glimpsed something moving among the trees—something which they did not locate. It was then I learned why they had brought the incommunicative Nish-a-shin along. Quickly he began gathering up the reins of the deserted ponies. I learned something else too. Pronto paleface papoose became a second edition of Nish-a-shin.

Starting up near Goff, the Spring creek deer-run came down to within a half mile of Wetmore, then went southeast across the prairie to Mosquito creek, thence up Mosquito creek nearly to Bancroft and across the prairie again to the head of Spring creek.

Three deer were the most ever seen at one time on this run. They came into a flock of 4,000 sheep I was herding for old Morgan on the Dan Williams place a mile south of town, where Clyde Ely now lives. The sheep were frightened and divided themselves into two bunches as the deer loped gaily through the flock.

If you don’t know, a deer-run is the feeding grounds of those ruminants. As long as the deer remain in the country they travel the same route closely. In the winter—in the old days here—they fed largely on hazel-brush and Other tender twigs.

We observed in our early hunts that the deer when feeding always traveled the circle in the same way, never reversing. Sometimes however when routed suddenly they would backtrack. And when pressed they would usually run with the wind. Probably that was not so much to gain speed as it was to camouflage the trail of their own scent and to more readily themselves catch the scent of their pursuers. When hard pressed they would sometimes take off with the wind and go ten or twelve miles off the run—in one instance, nearly to Sabetha. Whenever a deer would turn tail to wind we were ready to go home. I have seen them break out against the wind and then when off a reasonable distance circle around and go the other way. At such times my father would say, “Ah damn it, now he’s gone with the wind!”

Since I am employing a rather broad drag-line brand of technique, there is one more thing I might amplify here. In the beginning I said it would entail a lot of research to do a good Indian story, historically complete. Reliable information is hard to obtain. The old Indians—the Indians I knew—have all gone to their “happy hunting grounds.” The present generation does not seem to have a very clear picture of the old days.

For instance, I made two trips to the reservation about five years ago and interviewed a number of the older ones — second generation, of course—in a vain effort to obtain just one Indian word. You may recall that the tanyard story was, I might say, predicated on the Indian’s name of sumac. When a small boy, I had understood Eagle Eye to call it “sequaw.” I wanted to be accurate, as that flaming little bush played an important part in the story as well as in the tannery. Not one of them could tell me the Indian name.

I found one Indian, Henry Rhodd, 64 years old at that time, who said he could not tell me the Indian name for sumac, but he knew what their fathers used it for. He said they tanned their deer skins with it. That was the same thing Eagle Eye had so dexterously managed to convey to my father and me up in the Wolfley timber sixty-odd years earlier. Henry, whom I would judge carries a mite of French blood in his veins, sniffed as if he were inhaling the perfume of a fragrant rose, and said, “And oh it smelled so good.” This, however, did not coincide with my findings as a tanner’s helper. Still, I have seen my father sniff his newly tanned calf skins and say the same thing. Our tan-yard was just about the “stinkenist” place on earth.

In this connection I might mention that some years later I, myself, shot a deer on lower Mosquito creek. My brother Sam and I had started out one afternoon, the two of us riding our old roan mare, Pet. We struck a fresh trail south of town about where the three deer and the four thousand sheep had mixed. We followed the tracks to the Frank Purcell timber. There we ran onto John Dixon and “Dore” Thornton. They said they had been trailing the deer on foot all day.

John Dixon told me to go around to the south side of the timber; that they would follow the tracks through the woods. The deer came out running fast, and I shot it. The charge of buckshot from my muzzle-loading shotgun hit a little too far back to make a clean kill.

We trailed that crippled deer—it was shot through the body as evidenced by blood on either side of the trail—for a distance of ten miles to the very spot where it had been started in the morning. At the line between the John Wolfley place and the Mary Morris place, now owned by R. M. Emery, the following morning, we lost the trail because of melting snow and cattle tracks. The deer was found dead a few days later only a quarter of a mile away.

After it had been shot that deer laid down three times — at the Joe Boyce place, at the Bill Rudy place, and on the commons where the Ben Walters place is now. The first time it laid down the warm blood from the wound bored a hole in the snow. Darkness caught us at the old Dixon or Savage place. It was then we remembered the old roan mare was still tied back in the Purcell timber.

What boy is there who would not have been proud of that feat of marksmanship—plugging his first deer through and through as it ran past at almost lightning speed in its mad flight for life? Did I glory in the feat? I did. At first. As a big-game hunter I had, in my own estimation, scored high. Following in the footsteps of my father, a born hunter of big game, I had all but arrived. Plugged my first deer! I was the “toast” of the town! Or at least I could imagine I was. It would still be interesting to know just what would have happened had I brought home the venison. But I cannot now begin to tell you how adversely I was moved when the deer was found dead.

In a flash I saw it all—how I had dropped back into a crook of the old worm fence on the Roger O’Mera farm and waited for the deer, driven out of the Purcell timber by the three other hunters, to come within gunshot; how, as if it had wings, the deer, after being shot, cleared that high rail fence; and how its life-blood spurting two ways stained the fresh white snow where the little animal lit on the opposite side of the rails; how every few miles we saw it jump up from a brief rest and run on again, leaving more red on the white; and how, as we discovered the next morning after leaving the trail at dusk, that a wolf had taken up the chase and had sent the tired deer on and on without more rest back to the big timber from whence it had come and where, perhaps, in the throes of great agony, it sought its mate. And how, still pursued by the wolf, it had cleared in one great leap—its last grand leap—on a down-hill slope, a thirty foot hazel thicket.

Something indefinable, something unforgettable, made an impression on me then. And that something put the “kibosh” on my big-game hunting aspirations. I do not now count it a weakness. Though there were no game laws then, that crime was made all the worse because it was a doe.

My brother Sam, who rode with me that day, later, really brought home the venison, eclipsing all my past glory. But it took two trips all the way to Arkansas in a horse-drawn covered wagon to do it. The first and unsuccessful time he had for hunting companions Alex McCreery, John E. Thomas, and my father. Their bag was a few wild turkeys. The second trip Sam made with Roy Shumaker. This time they killed two deer. Then, for the first time, the sons whose father was a veteran deer-hunter, were to know the taste of venison.

Also, I used to chase wolves and jack rabbits with my horse and the hounds, and enjoy it—until one particular rabbit chase which spoiled the “sport” for me. It was on a Sunday afternoon in the quarter section adjoining town on the northeast—the south half of which is now owned by-Bill Davis. No horses were in this chase. The crowd from town, with several trucks, were stationed on the ridge near the southwest corner. The gray hounds started the rabbit over near the east line, and it ran north down a draw, out of sight. It swung to the left and topped the ridge north of the crowd, with the dogs in close pursuit. The rabbit turned south heading straight for the crowd, and jumped up into Frank Ducker’s truck, right at my feet. One of the men standing in the truck grabbed it while the dogs were on both sides of the truck. The rabbit squealed pitifully. The captor said its sides were thumping like a trip-hammer. Most of the men thought the rabbit had earned its freedom—but not so with some of the “sports.” Expecting to see another chase, they dropped the rabbit on the ground about two rods in front of the dogs, but when the rabbit saw the dogs it began squealing again—and the grayhounds rushed in and nabbed both rabbit and squeal before it realized that it must run again for its life. Every time after this when a rabbit chase was proposed, I could hear that frightened jack rabbit’s pitiful squeal.

But I never experienced any sickening wolf chases.

We had grayhounds and trail hounds under foot when we lived on the Hazeltine farm—but not one that I could call my own. I bought a yellow half-breed grayhound named Tuck from a farm hand on the Zeke Jennings place for one dollar, that proved to be a wonder. The unknown half of him was supposed to be bull dog. With Alex McCreery and his pack of trail hounds, and a half dozen other horseback riders and some grayhounds, a wolf was started out of an isolated clump of brush on the south end of the Len Jones farm, two miles west of Wetmore. I happened to be on the east side of the brush patch with my dog, while the other riders with the pack were on the west side. The wolf came out about a rod in front of my position, and Tuck got an almost even start in the chase. I had a pretty fast horse, but the chase led across a slough, and I lost some ground in heading this wash—but even so, I was on hand soon after the kill, one mile from the start, before Alex and the other riders and the dogs arrived. Alex said, “You and old Tuck was to-hell-and-gone before we caught sight of you.” Tuck had caught the wolf—and drowned it in an eighteen-inch pool of water, along the branch. I found him sitting on his tail at the edge of the pool—looking very pleased. In those days it was a boy’s greatest ambition to own a fast horse, and a fast dog. Now I had both. The only flaw was that I was no longer a boy.

Tuck also caught a deer in the big bottom south of spring creek on the Mary Morris farm four miles west of Wetmore. In this chase I was trailing pretty close, on my horse, when the dog grabbed the deer’s hind leg, causing both to tumble end-over-end. In the midst of this spill, it seemed to me as if deer and yellow dogs were scattered all over the ground. The deer got up first, and ran west toward the John Wolfley timber. My prized hound did not seem to have the heart to follow after it. I think there were moments now when Tuck did not know east from west.

Now, a last word about the Indians—and the Ghost Dance or Messiah Craze as participated in by the Kickapoos. The “craze” was a sort of spiritual delusion starting with the Sioux Indians, the same blood-thirsty red devils who got credit for the ghastly Custer massacre in 1876. This, and other depredations, were still fresh in the minds of the people, and there was widespread alarm among the citizens whenever the craze had taken hold. However, the craze was short-lived. I do not think the Kickapoos repeated after the first year. The dance that time at the Mission was kept going for three weeks.

I do not recall in what way this dance differed from the Green Corn Dance held annually by the Kickapoos, or other tribal dances. But undoubtedly it carried a threat to the whites. Except for brandishing tomahawks at certain periods of the dance—it looked to the casual observer like other Indian dances. Old Sitting Bull, of the Sioux, had made much bad medicine, and the threat was in the air, if not actually in the dance. Gold had been discovered earlier in the Black Hills country. The Government had withdrawn a part of the Indian lands for development by the whites. This the Sioux resented. There was fear among the Indians in general that their lands might be taken away from them. I cannot now be sure of this, but I believe the Government took a hand in suppressing the Ghost Dance.

I can best explain things with a reprint of what I wrote for the Spectator at the time. Incidentally, I might say that in looking up the old files I observe now that this story appeared in the first issue of The Spectator after I became its owner. Also, that the article was illustrated with a splendid woodcut engraved by my brother Sam. Illustrations in that day were engraved on cross-grain box-wood blocks.

The following excerpt is copied from the issue of December 12, 1890: During the past week or ten days, our people have visited the Indian Mission, eight miles northwest of Wetmore to witness the Indian pow-wow which has been in progress for several weeks. Although a more civilized tribe than the Sioux with which the “Ghost Dance” originated, the Kickapoos have caught the “Messiah Craze” and have made things lively for a while. The dance has been watched with considerable interest and no little alarm by many visitors and citizens living near the reservation. However, the conclusion now is that there will be no outbreak. The neighbors along the line look upon their actions merely as a curious freak of superstition.

When asked how long the Indians kept up the dance, an old Indian who was too feeble to participate in the festivities, in broken English, said, “Messiah come at sunrise.” It was afterwards learned that the Indians continued dancing all night with the expectation of seeing Christ, or the Messiah, at sunrise. This is, in a manner, following the custom of the ancient Aztec sun-worshipers of Mexico, who years ago builded mounds, some of them 600 and 800 feet high, where they would assemble at sunrise and carry on their festivities in the anticipation of the coming of some great divinity.

Two Sioux Indians got an inspiration from on High—or elsewhere. It was only a dream, of course—but then why should not the Indian be allowed to dream as well as the white man? He has proven his capability, and has gone the present generation of white men one better.

A careful study of ancient recorded stories shows this one to be no more fantastic than the feat accredited to Moses, who, with an outstretched hand caused the waters of the Red Sea to part so that the Children of Israel might walk across on dry land. But, I believe, Moses credited the Lord — collaborating no doubt—with making the big wind which actually drove the water out of their path. Our Kickapoos were not much on the big blow—but it seems that a couple of Sioux, in this instance, made a heap lot of big wind.

According to a recent writer on the subject, the Messiah craze is the out-growth of a startling story related by two Sioux Indians, which, in substance, lays bare the assertion that Jesus had come down upon earth again and had appeared to the Indians. According to the report He was discovered by two Indians who had followed a light in the sky for 18 days over a country destitute of water. The most peculiar part of the story is that at each camping place they were supplied with water from a little pool that came up out of the ground and furnished just enough for their needs and no more. At the end of the 18 days journey they came to a secluded place near a mountain, and there they found a hut, built of bull-rushes, and on entering they saw Jesus, who told them that He had come once to save the white men and they had crucified Him—and this time He had appeared to the Indians and that they should go back and bear the news to the other Indians. The two Indians were then borne up in a cloud and in a very short time were set down at their home where they related what they had seen.

Published in Wetmore Spectator, and

Seneca Courier-Tribune, January—1943

By John T. Bristow

COURIER-TRIBUNE Editor’s Note:—History can be dry or it can be interesting. When it is colorful, filled with the lives of people, it will be remembered far longer than if but dry facts are presented. We think that this true story by John Bristow of Wetmore is one that will make the English Colony of old Nemaha County days long remembered.

Although at the outset you will likely be thinking of a current and very popular song hit, you must read far into this contribution before you can put your finger on the line from which the above caption stems. Also, for a clear picture of it all, you must go back with me three score and five years to a favorite hunting grounds in the upper reaches of Spring creek.

My father had bought a coon-dog from a traveler. This night—Christmas Eve—was to have been the try-out but the way it turned out, Dad could not know then how badly he had been “skinned.” That came later. Old Drum had a wonderful voice, and though he “lied” a few times on later occasions, he never did tree a coon.

In the party were Roland Van Amburg, Bill (Thuse) Peters, Jim Scanlan, Bob Graham, my father and myself. Incidentally, Van Amburg was the last man to take up a homestead in these parts. He homesteaded the 80 acres now owned by Ambrose McConwell, almost adjoining town, in the middle 70’s. He was a happy-go-lucky, clownish sort of man.

Well, Van was not exactly the last one to file on a homestead here, but he was the last one to do it in the regular way. Lawyer F. M. Jefferies, while publishing the Spectator in Wetmore in the 80’s filed on a quarter a few miles northwest of town—but it developed that the land was improved and occupied by Eli Swerdfeger, who had by mistake filed on another number. When Eli’s neighbor threatened to do mayhem to Lawyer Jefferies, he relinquished — and Swerdfeger’s correct filing was even later than Van’s. They called it “claim jumping”—though it was hardly that, in the true sense of the term. There had, however, been some claim jumping earlier, where settlers were negligent in fulfilling the lawful requirements. A claim jumper in the old days was held in about the same degree of contempt as is now the “scab” workman in a unionized community.

With team and wagon and dog, we reached the timber about dusk, barely ahead of a blizzard. Owing to the storm, the projected coon-hunt did not take place. The whole night was spent around a bonfire out there in the deep wood. The men talked about going home, but the intervening six miles of unbroken prairie would have been hard to negotiate with a team on a night like that.

Fortunately for us, it was not very cold. Disagreeably cold, to be sure, but in severity—low temperature—it did not compare with the blizzard which blew in upon us last Monday (Jan. 18, 1943) with a temperature of 10 degrees below zero, to be followed the next morning with 22 degrees below.

The campfire, built in a sheltered spot, was near a tree which had some holes cut in a big limb, old choppings which were assumed the work of Indians. Those holes started Thuse Peters to talking. In telling of an occurrence alleged to have taken place on the Kickapoo reservation, in which he himself had figured rather conspicuously, Thuse graciously endowed the mate of the squaw in his story with a fine growth of whiskers—which whiskers, however, the Redskin did not have. Or did he? Thuse was a little wild of the mark in some of his statements, probably all of them. Bob Graham called him for that one about the Indian’s whiskers. “I’m surprised,” said Bob, “you living here against the Indian reservation all your life. You should know Indians do not have beards.”

“Well,” inquired Thuse, glancing toward one of the party having heavenly hirsute adornment, “does an Irishman have whiskers?”

“What a silly question,” broke in Roland Van Amburg. “Just take a look at Jim Scanlan over there by the tree-trunk. I’d say an Irishman has whiskers.” Jim Scanlan was section foreman here. There could be no mistaking his nationality.

Said Thuse, “I just wanted to be sure of that.” He went about replenishing the waning fire. This done, he said, “That Indian was half Irish.”

One story led to another, and finally my father told of hunting panthers in Tennessee. He said it was claimed by old woodsmen that the panther made a noise like the cry of a woman, but he had never heard a panther scream, and he didn’t believe it.

“Do you suppose, Bill that there ever was a panther seen in this country?” This inquiry was made by Mr. Scanlan.

“Maybe,” said Dad, “I once tracked a varmint that might have been a panther through these very woods.”

Van chimed in, “Did they ever learn what killed the farmer’s stock over on Elk creek? That was believed to have been the work of a panther. And what about that varmint on the Rudy place?” Van was, as I knew stating facts.

It was generally known here that a prowler of some kind had killed a calf on the Bill Rudy farm, and had dragged it several hundred yards to a hazel thicket—and after eating its fill, buried the remaining carcass under leaves, after the habits of the panther. Bill Rudy owned the land where Joe Pfrang now lives.

The storm grew in intensity. It had filled the woods with voices. If you turned your imagination loose you could hear a cry, a laugh—anything you chose. Then suddenly, astonishingly, there it was. A woman’s scream. Or was it?

Thuse said, “It’s Bill’s panther.” Bill was my Dad. Old Drum raised his voice. He made sound enough, in the tree-walled confines of that hunters’ paradise, to raise the dead.

Bob Graham said, “I feel spooky. Think I need a bracer.” He uncorked his bottle and took a good one.

Well, whatever it might have been, that thing had the men baffled. Albeit the storm raged fiercely in the tree-tops and upon the hillside from whence the sound came, a deadly calm settled around the bonfire. The men looked at one another in complete silence for a tense moment. I believe everyone was wondering if maybe Thuse had not named it.

By this time everyone was, shall I say, panther-conscious. I would not want to say that the men actually were waiting in expectancy for the appearance of that killer. You know how it is. After a menacing thing has been discussed in your presence for hours, without realizing it, you just don’t forget.

Then suddenly, miraculously, there it was again—something very like a woman’s voice coming in swells above the howl of the storm. Van, who had repeatedly urged the men to break up camp and make a try for home, said, “It’s the voice of an angel—an angel come to tell us to get the hell out of here while the going is still possible.” Dad scoffed, “An angel out here in the woods on a night like this—man, you must be crazy!”

Jim Scanlan said, “Well, anybody who don’t believe in ghosts is maybe going to pretty soon.”

We had along a sharp axe and several good woodchoppers. At first fuel for the fire was gleaned from old dead tree tops lying on the ground—tops of blackoaks my father had cut some years before for the tanbark to be used in his tannery. But as the snow became deeper, and the puzzling voices in the woods persisted, the men—including yours truly — somehow did not seem to want to venture beyond the circle of light. They fetched fuel from a close-in rick of cordwood—four-foot lengths. Without leave, we burned Anna Buzan’s wood, a full cord, that night. It was wood my brother and I had cut on shares. Adjustment could be—and was—made later.

Back there on the ridge high above us, in the thick of that blizzard, a woman was singing, as it were, for her life.

Let me explain. Three people—a woman and two men enroute to the old English colony, from somewhere farther south, had bogged down in the storm two miles from home, and were desperately in need of help.

The old road in those days, coming in from the prairie lands on the south, followed the ridge approximately on the line between the John Wolfley timber on the east and the Anna Buzan timber on the west, to a crossing on Spring creek. The road was first used in bringing out cross-ties for use in building the railroad which now skirts the woods on the north side of the creek. Back on the ridge several old wagon trails led into the forest. The team those Colonists were driving, to a ramshackle old spring wagon, had wandered off the road and had floundered in one of those side leads, upsetting the wagon. This had been the cause of that first scream.

Having broken harness which they could not repair in the dark, they had started on foot to where, in passing, they had seen the light of our bonfire, hoping it would lead them to the home of a settler. But when close enough to see it was only a bonfire, misgivings began to assail them. What if it should prove to be an Indian camp, or maybe horse-thieves in hiding? These facts were made known to us after they had reached our fire.

When Van’s “Angel” had come in the flesh—her long skirt, held up in front, trailing atop the snow as she moved in—we could see that she was not garbed in the traditional folds of flowing gauze-like fabric, as becomes an angel. It would have been all out of place on a night like that. As it was, I thought she was dressed rather too thinly.

Bob Graham said, “If you wouldn’t be offended, young lady, I’d offer you a swig of my whisky.”

“Liquor,” she said, “I can take it,” Bob passed the bottle to her. “O-oo, so little,” she complained. “I ‘opes it will ‘elp.”

Their names were Bill and Teddy and Minerva. Bill led off as spokesman. He said, “When we sawer men walking around the fire we knew there would be no ‘ouse ‘ere. And I asked Teddy wot shall we do now?”

“Ted ‘e said,” continued Bill, “Blast me ‘ide if I know wot would be best. Wot you think, Minerva? Want to chawncit?” Teddy spoke for Minerva. He said, “Minerva ‘ere,” pointing to the girl, “said to us—Now you just ‘old your ‘orses, men I got it. I’ll sing ‘em a song.”

Let me remind you here that it was their ability and their willingness to sing on any and all occasions that made those Colonists extremely popular at the country school-house lyceum of that age.

Bill talked again. He said, “Then I said Hindians or ‘orse-theives, whichever they are, would know that ‘appy, singing folks bode nobody ‘arm.” For the purpose intended, Bill’s idea was not bad—but Minerva challenged it promptly. She said, “You can just drop that ‘appy part of it, Mr. Bill.”

Their reasoning was logical. And their manner in coping with the situation was unique. For them to have burst in upon a band of horse-thieves in those days would, most likely, have been suicidal. But with Indians of the times, it is my belief, they would have had no trouble at all.

When they had thawed out, after Minerva had obliged us with more songs—and believe me, that girl could sing — Teddy said he would fetch his concertina from the wrecked wagon. It maybe was a good thing he didn’t know anything about all that panther discussion.

However, after Ted had returned, Van, who, as a boy, had lived in a panther country back east, told the newcomers about the Elk creek incident and other periodical panther scares elaborating on the dangers of same. He told those people they could count themselves lucky in finding our fire. “Wild animals,” he said, “won’t go near a fire.” I knew that this was not news to any of our party. And I knew, too, we would keep our visitors for the duration.

Van started it. When he had guessed the hour of midnight had arrived, he yelled so that all could hear above the roar of the storm—”Merry Christmas!” Our English visitors returned the greeting—though, enveloped in swirling snow, they didn’t seem to put much heart in it.

Looking up toward the high heavens in readiness to speak, Dad was caught full in the face with a gob of dislodged snow from the treetops. He said, clawing the snow out of his whiskers at the same time, “It didn’t look like this could happen when we started out yesterday afternoon — it was so warm, almost like spring. But then maybe this snow is a godsend.” He clawed again at his whiskers, saying “Dammit!” He probably would have quoted the old saying, “A green Christmas presages a fat graveyard” — but old Drum raised his voice again, bringing everyone to rigid attention. The dog ran out a few paces, turned around and came back. He had not gone beyond the circle of light.

Together, or rather alternately, Minerva and Teddy made music against the howl of the storm until morning. They could not team together. This nightingale who had come to us out of the storm, was from another colony—perhaps English Ridge, south of Havensville. Bill sang some, in a comical way. Our improvised shelter, hardly worth mentioning, and our fire had kept them from freezing. They were grateful.

They were of the old English Colony folk—Bill and Ted. This is not to say they were scions of the favored six families who occupied Llewellyn Castle on section 25, in Harrison township. They might have been from any one—or two — of the dugouts scattered about over the prairies outside the Colony-owned section. But they were decidedly English, and none the less Colonists.

When at last morning had come, and we had seen our visitors off, we drove out onto a vast prairie covered with snow, homeward bound. We would be doing well if we reached home in time for dinner. Deep drifts lay ahead of us and there was a sea of white on all sides as far as one could look.

Incidentally, I might say here that the streets in Wetmore were completely blocked by that storm. The main street in the business section was drifted so deeply in snow that to facilitate traffic a cut was made down the center of the street, and one standing up in a wagon had to look up to see the top of the cut.

Van stroked old Drum’s head. He said, “Too bad, old boy, you didn’t get a chance to show Bill how good you are. Skunked this time, but maybe better luck next time. Wish you could tell us what kind of a varmint you saw, heard, or scented, when you made all that commotion back there. You wouldn’t lie to a fellow, old longears, and you are not afraid of the dark—are you?”

Dad said, in a tone that indicated his great disappointment over the bogged down coon-hunt, with maybe, also apologies to his guests, “Well, damn it, men—it wasn’t a complete waterhaul. We’ve got a white Christmas.”

UNCLE NICK’S BOOMERANG

Published in Wetmore Spectator

March 5, 1943

By John T. Bristow

The hunt was staged in Uncle Nick Bristow’s timber — way back in the 70’s. It was on the home place over on the Rose branch, the farm now owned by Bill Mast. The trail of the hunters would range down stream, overlapping into the Jim Hyde and Bill Rose woods, and on down to the junction with Wolfley creek. Ostensibly, it was to have been a coon-hunt, but it soon developed into something bigger and better. ‘

There was a good moon—but to attract the hunters, a big bonfire was built in the woods, and the men flocked in from all directions. The interesting part of it was that three of them were from the old English Colony, two miles west of my uncle’s farm — ”Green Englishmen,” the Wolfley creekers said they were. Couldn’t name them now—and be sure. One of them was a stocky little man, very talkative, very agreeable.

Then there were the Porters, the Pickets, the Piatts, the Snows, the Mayers, the Barnes boys, and others—not aiming to overlook my Uncle Nick and his son, Burrel. The elder Mayers, Gus and Noah, were Pennsylvania Dutch, with Holland ancestry. Gus liked his fun while Noah liked to stay at home and mind his own business. But some of Noah’s boys were in the gathering, as was also Peter Metzdorf, who had a while back married Gus Mayer’s daughter, Anna. Peter was German—the real thing. He lived in Wetmore.

Of the five Porter brothers, Ambrose was the only one that I can now positively say was present. But John and Tom and their brothers-in-law, Bill Evans and Ben Summers, were probably around somewhere. Bill Porter had just married my Aunt Nancy, late of Tennessee, and he couldn’t come. And Ben Porter—well, they said he was too contrary to appreciate a good thing like this. Ambrose wore his red hair—it was really red—at shoulder length. He wore gold earrings, too, and three gutta-percha rings on one finger, rings he himself had made from old coat buttons.

It was good to have Roland Van Amburg with us. Roland was a grand old sport. Moreover, Roland Van Amburg had much in common with my Uncle Nick Bristow. They had both suffered, or were due to suffer, heavy losses in large herds of Texas cattle they had bought from Dr. W. L. Challis, of Atchison. It is barely possible that those cattle might have been milling about on the western part of Uncle Nick’s farm that night.

The bonfire was built on the edge of a small clearing, with a large tree backed up by a clump of small growth on the right. In the distance—not too distant—was a big log lying on the edge of a ravine, with a 10-foot bank at this point. A small tree with good height stood at the top end of the log on the left side of the clearing. One approaching from the north would see the log only after advancing so far, and even then only if not otherwise attracted. Had it been a plant for a modern movie scene it could not have been a more perfect setting for the thing that actually happened.

While yet around the bonfire the talk turned to panthers. One had reportedly been seen, or heard, in the woods a couple of miles away—up in the Rube Wolfley neighborhood. The men would be careful not to hunt that timber because they didn’t want their dogs to be torn to pieces. Uncle Nick owned a timber lot over in the panther country.

The natives saw in this hunt a chance to have some fun at the expense of the Englishmen. Also, they wanted to impress those Colonists in a way that might be the means of keeping them on their own reservation, so to speak. A lot of timber-stealing had been going on and the Colonists were suspicioned. As a matter of fact, timber-stealing in those days was widespread. But in that business the Colonists were no worse than the natives, but the Colonists were always sure to get the blame.

While people generally scoffed at the idea of panthers roaming the woods, there were some who said it was not altogether improbable—that one might have escaped from a menagerie. You must understand that practically all the older men here at that time had come from panther states back East—and, I might say, the rising generation had more or less been steeped in panther talk.

It is written in the family records, and was generally known here then, that the grandmother of Bill and Ben Porter was killed and partly devoured by a panther back in Indiana. She would have been the great-grandmother of Jim and Bill Porter, and Zada Shumaker and Harry Porter.

Also, there is one man now living in Wetmore—G. C. Swecker—who would tell you how one of those ferocious beasts hopped upon the roof of his father’s hunting lodge, while occupied, back in Virginia and ripped the clapboards off. He also declares that panthers do scream like a woman. And, as one old fellow around the fire had said, they do sometimes migrate. I myself recall that during a severe winter in the Rocky mountains nearly a half century ago, that those killers actually came right down into Colorado Springs.

At that time panthers were quite numerous in the Missouri hills across the river from Atchison—and with the Missouri river frozen in the severe winters of the old days, it would have been an easy matter for them to cross on the ice to this side; and then only a distance of forty miles to get out here. And supposing—just supposing—that, perchance, they might have come over in pairs, and carried on in the usual cat tradition, there was the bare possibility of our coon-hunters even running into a “family” of them. The panther’s young stay with the mother until grown.

Let’s say, then, that there was just enough to it to keep timid people on edge. I doubt if there ever was a night coon-hunt in those days when some of the hunters didn’t give some thought to that killer. The thought seemed to hit one the moment he was in the deep woods. And on moonlight nights that thought was simply unshakeable. A shadow in the wood—a shadow that was somehow alive—could be highly disquieting.

Uncle Nick and the men, with the dogs on leash, took a turn about the woods while waiting for my father and the inevitable Thuse Peters to arrive. They would be coming out from town. I had gone out earlier that evening with my cousin, Burrel.

Uncle Nick bade me remain at the fire so as to direct Dad and Thuse when, and if, they should come while the hunters were away. Ambrose Porter said, “Nick, you’re not going to leave that boy all alone out here. I’ll- stay with him.” Uncle Nick said, quietly, “Oh no, you won’t.” Uncle knew that Ambrose never liked to exert himself needlessly.

If not inclined to discount my statements — and you really should not—you are now maybe thinking what I thought that night—that it was a darned shame to leave a boy all alone out there in the woods like that.

The hunters were now coming in from the north. Uncle Nick and the Englishmen well in front. Uncle Nick called out, “Johnny my boy, where are you?”

I had climbed the small tree at the end of the log—as far up as I could go. I called back, “Up here in this tree, Uncle Nick. Look on the log—quick!”

The hunters had now advanced a couple of steps, bringing the log into view. I glanced back in time to see them shift their gaze from my tree-perch to the log—and I took one more look at the log myself, just as Uncle Nick fired his rifle. In that split second I could see two eyes shining brightly in the glare of the bonfire—and I saw the yellowish form of the ugly thing fall off the log.

Uncle Nick was a sure shot with a rifle. And quick too. As told in one of my former articles, he had killed a mountain lion in the Rockies while placer mining in Colorado in 1858. The great beast was shot in the nick of time—in midair, after that 200 pounds of destruction had made the spring for my uncle from an overhanging limb of a great pine.

Addressing Uncle Nick, the little Englishman said, “I say, my good man, let’s ‘ave another one soon. Over in the big woods. Beard the lion in ‘is den, so to speak.” In high good humor, he shook a pudgy fist at my uncle, saying, “Hand mind you, if I am h ignored I shall be disappointed.”

The one mistake of the whole evening—if one can be sure there was a mistake—was when the hunters, after they had “impressed” the Englishmen with the danger of the panther to their dogs, turned the dogs loose on the trail of the pet coon they had brought into the woods at the right movement to make a “hot trail.”

It had taken four yoke of oxen to plant the log—and my Aunt Hulda gave the men a spirited tongue-lashing for making use of one of her hens to bloody the trail.

Now, imagine if you can, my uncle’s surprise when the next time he went over to his cherished timber lot he discovered that someone had robbed him of valuable post and rail trees. Not being present at the time, I have no way of knowing what his immediate reactions were. But had it been my Dad instead of my uncle, who never swore, I’m darned sure I could name more’n half of the irreverent words he would have employed in taking the epidermis off that stocky little Englishman.

SHORT CHANGED

Not Hitherto Published — 1950

By John T. Bristow

You can never tell by the caption of one of my stories what all is going to be in it—the caption might well have been something else—but the line that inspired the heading is sure to be apparent to the careful reader; if he, or she, will look for it.

The oil strike on the Oreon Strahm land one mile south of the Sabetha hospital, in August, 1950, and the two producers previously brought in on the Mamie Strahm land three and one-half miles to the southwest, refreshes my memory of an earlier try for oil in Nemaha County—and some of my own experiences in this greatest of all “get-rich-quick” opportunities.

In 1904 Dr. Joseph Haigh and Dr. A. P. Lapham secured a block of oil leases around Wetmore, and contracted with a driller, W. H. Hardenburg, of Oklahoma, to drill a well to the depth of 2,000 feet—or to the Mississippi lime—for $5,000. The site was on land owned by Dr. J. W. Graham in the west part of town; later owned by Mr. Mathews.

The drillers struck a little gas at 1700 feet, which spurted water over the 80-foot derrick. This caused a great deal of excitement—but after “pulling” the fire in the coal-burning power plant and quickly taking other precautionary measures, the drillers said “there was nothing to it.”

Gas had previously been encountered in two water wells in the north part of town—on the Cyrus Clinkenbeard property west of the school grounds, now owned by the Thorn-burrow girls; and on the J. W. Luce property near the cemetery, now owned by Gene Cromwell. The flow in the Luce well was the stronger, agitating the water in a way to produce a bubbling sound. It created a lot of excitement. But the State Geologist said it was helium gas, which, rather than burn, would extinguish fire.

In the oil test on the Graham lot, at about 1800 feet, a hard formation was encountered, which the drillers pronounced the Mississippi lime—but State Geologist Haworth said it was not. Then the drillers completed the contract at 2,000 feet. Mr. Hardenburg had a drilling contract coming up in Oklahoma, but he remained on the job here about a week longer, at $40 a day—and the hole was put down to 2225 feet. It was planned to have Mr. Hardenburg come back and drill the test deeper, but he got rich in his “share-the-profits” contract in the Tulsa oil field—and retired to a home on “easy street” (Morningside Drive) in Kansas City.

When Hart Eyman was getting up a block of oil leases here in 1934, I called up Mr. Hardenburg, while in Kansas City, and told him of the activity out here. He asked me to let him know when the first test was to be spudded in here, saying he would drive out. He said he still had faith in this section and that he would have been glad to have finished our test. I believe our people failed to raise the necessary funds. The money for the original test was raised by selling stock. And it was a clean promotion—but that is more than I can say for some of the outside oil promotions in which our Wetmore group dipped.

In view of the recent strikes in the Strahm field, with a 30-barrel producer in the Hunton lime at around 2800 feet; and the Mamie Strahm number 2, rated at 1440 barrels in the Viola lime at approximately 3600 feet; and the Oreon Strahm test, with even greater potential production in the Hunton and Viola and still another producing sand topping the granite at around 3900 feet, it looks as though we Wetmore “investors” might better have kept our speculative eggs all in one basket, so to speak, contrary to high-powered promotion advice—and completed the Haigh-Lapham oil test. And I still believe we overlooked our best bet right here at home.

But then we had no data to enlighten us. The nearest and only drilling at that time was ten miles south of us. It was not deep enough to prove or disprove anything. In the heyday of his great financial flight—in the 1880’s—Green Campbell drilled a test to the depth of 1,000 feet on the east edge of Circleville. I believe the incentive was a reported seepage of oil in the creek south of the town.

Then, some twenty years after the Wetmore try, a couple of promoters came out of Kansas City, with a plan to rejuvenate interests in the Haigh-Lapham test—and “feather their own nests.” Joe Searles’ drugstore in the east room of what is now the First National Bank building, was the unofficial headquarters for oil hungry “investors”—local and transient. With Joe and the two promoters, I went over to the Matthews lot, now owned by Bert Gilbert. Mr. Hardenburg had left the top 100 feet of casing in the well to prevent cave-ins against the time when he might return to finish the well. Measurements to the exhaustion of the string available showed the well open for fifteen hundred feet—and likely all the way down to the bottom.

Excitement began to mount again.

Dr. A. P. Lapham presided over a packed gathering in the opera house—and appointed a committee of five to confer with the promoters. The committee met in the Thorn-burrow bank. The promoters came up with a contract whereby they would undertake to raise the funds for the completion of the well, against numerous and assorted requirements by “the people” of Wetmore.

I was offered the trusteeship—but I declined to accept it. I think the reason the committee offered it to me was because I had been the trustee—with no part in the promotion—of a block of eight hundred acres of oil leases in Elk and Chautauqua Counties, purchased from Charley Cortner, salesman, of Iola, and Dr. C. E. Shaffer, vendor, of Moline, by our Wetmore group, at $10 an acre, with further obligation of $1.00 per acre yearly rentals, for five years, which had been carried through to a successful termination, with no gain to the “investors” and a loss to me of only $85—aside from my $250 first come-in and my part of the rentals, $25 a year, through payments of rentals in general, as trustee, in excess of collections. I had to collect four hundred dollars twice a year from fifty-three people—and I didn’t quite make it. I therefore regarded the trusteeship now offered me as not a desirable recognition.

To keep the record straight, I shall now give with a little more enlightenment. I actually had a little velvet in the Shaffer oil deal—leastwise it looked like velvet at the time. Not for promotional influence—but for services rendered, and to be rendered.

I went with Charley Cortner, the salesman, and three other Wetmore men to the Moline oil field—paid my own expenses, even to transportation equal to railroad fare, and therefore was beholden to no one. The Moline acreage adjoined a block of leases on which the discovery well, a small producer, had recently been brought in. There was, however, big production—and growing bigger every day—at Eldorado, where we stopped on the way down to get our appetites (for oil speculation) whetted. I wanted to go in with them, of course.

You know, should you pass up an opportunity to go in with the home folks on something that was to pan out big, you would always feel that God had given you less sense than He had given your more fortunate neighbors. And, should you strive to live down the mistake, there would always be lucky ones to remind you of your dumbness. The hope of oil-money was in my system. Had been hankering to get in with the home folks on something good for a long time.

When reminiscing for entertainment, as well as for record of historic fact, with no particular theme to exploit, you will, doubtless, agree that it is permissible—nay, oft-times necessary, to break all the rules laid down by learned teachers; such as to never let one incident call up another. And, if you don’t agree—you are going to get it now, anyway.

Aside from the matter in hand, I may say that only a short time before this, I had been denied the chance to go with a Wetmore group on an inspection trip to another oil field in southern Kansas—because I had not as yet signed up, as they had, for an interest in the lease. Well, the energetic young salesman, after securing pledges enough here to put him in the clear, went ahead of the boys to the headquarters and bought the lease, at a discount, on partial payment, using his own money, which, had all gone well, should have netted him more than the promised commission. He intended, of course, to deliver the lease to the group up here at the contract price, or rather the pledged commitments, with only a few amounts yet to be peddled, or held in his own name, at his discretion. But the Wetmore group—the boys who had said that to let me go with them on the inspection trip without first making a commitment, would be unfair to those who had signed up—turned down the deal, cold. Then, after returning home, the group heard rumors of lawsuits—and counter suits. The lease vendor was demanding payment in full, and the poor boy-salesman could not raise the money.

Charley Cortner, the salesman earlier mentioned in this writing, had been here for five or six months selling life insurance. He was a whole-souled, persuasive, sort of man who had made many friends here. Cortner and Dr. J. R. Purdum, in whose car the trip to Moline had been made, went out among the people and in almost no time secured pledges for nearly enough money to take over the Shaffer leases. They were selling interests in $125 “units.” But, at the finish, to accommodate all the eager applicants, some subscriptions were taken for as little as $50 and $25—sub-divisions of a unit.

When they came to me—at the corn-house, where I had been sorting out seed corn—I surprised them (and maybe shocked them, too) by declining to subscribe. Not that I didn’t want to get in on the big prospect—but because, as I believe, it was an improper if not a dangerous way to form a syndicate. Somewhere I had acquired the notion that if fifty people chipped in and bought a thing that it would take fifty people to sell it. But I didn’t tell them this until after they had “flared up” and had their say. They started to quit me, in disgust—but the Doctor, who was regarded among my best friends, thinking to erase some of the unkind comment, said, “Well, John, when you get through sorting your sour corn, come and see us—we’ll save some units for you.” My corn was not “sour” corn. It was well matured, and making an average of eighty bushels, with some acres on grubbed ground making 125 bushels.

Now, for a little laughable reaction within a none too laughable story. The Farmers Union elevator manager, a farmer not so long out of the corn rows, refused to buy my culled corn, said it would be unfair to his company to permit me to take out the best ears. After I had sent several loads to the Netawaka elevator, as it accumulated in the house, after taking out only about ten per cent, the Farmers Union manager came over to the corn house, looked at the culled corn we were loading out at the moment, saying he guessed maybe he had made a mistake in refusing to buy the culled corn. The culled corn was far better than the general run of corn brought to market that year. It was an improved strain of Boone County White, which would shell out equal to Reid’s Yellow Dent.

While still at the corn-house that day of the Purdum-Cortner call, Charley had an inspiration. He said, “Why couldn’t you write something for us like you think we ought to have?” I said, “I can try—but it will have to be approved by an attorney before you can use it. I don’t want to cook up something that might get our people in trouble.”

But did I—or did I not?

Charley said, “Can you get at it right away?” So the “sour” corn sorting was postponed until another day—and I went to my home at 11:15. My typewriter and writing desk were in an alcove up stairs. I had hardly gotten the corn-dust and the insult to my purebred seed corn, which had been engendered within the hour at the seed house out of my system when my wife came to the stair door and said dinner was ready. I had no time for dinner. The necessary words had not come to me readily. Charley came at 12:30, sat close to me, in a more pleasant mood with occasional verbal expression indicating the reason for the improvement. But he was careful to hold back the main reason. His presence didn’t help in furthering the writing. However, we got away at the appointed time—one o’clock. No dinner.

Fred Woodburn, the corporation-wise member of Wood-burn & Woodburn, lawyers, Holton, Kansas, approved my draft, as written, with one exception. I had made provision for transfer of units. Fred said it would break the partnership. And, may I say, before I forget it, that I was censured for being so careless as to omit making provision for transfers—and this, too, by an individual who, as you will hereinafter see recorded, found fault with my correct line of reasoning in another instance—correct as in reference to the one incident, understand.

I’m not trying to “hand” myself a bouquet. The agreement cooked up by me was neither “air tight” nor “fool proof.” The Trustee had not a chance. The error was that I did not require the subscribers to include in their checks a sufficiency to take care of their rentals for the full life of the leases. True, there was the chance that rental payments might be legitimately discontinued before the expiration of the lease, as in case of production terminating the payments, or disposition of the lease. But it would have been a lot simpler and safer too for the Trustee to return the unearned portion of the lease money.

Charley Cortner paid the Woodburns for writing a new draft of the agreement—and asked me, on the road home, for my charge. I told him, “No charge.” He thanked me kindly. He felt good of course—but I could see he had not yet got all he needed to allay a worry, the thing that had hit them so hard at the corn-house.

Unauthorized, and unknown to me, in soliciting subscriptions, it seems, they had carried the impression, if not the promise, that I would be the Trustee—possibly demanded by some of the prospects. After miles of silence on the road, Charley said, “You know, I feel so good about this that I’m going to give you one unit; you can have it in cash, or in stock in the syndicate.” From the ultra pleased expression on his face when I said I would take it in stock, I’m sure he had been holding his breath awaiting my decision.

True, I had not as yet agreed to accept the Trusteeship—in fact, I knew nothing about their plans—but I was now as good as in, and they could, at least, make a plausible showing at the called meeting in the City Hall the following night, when the vendor would appear in person to deliver the leases. Charley’s gift to me was acceptable grapes—equal to $4.50 a line, or 45 cents a word for the writing. I really wanted to get in, and would have subscribed for an interest, anyway—now that apparently a safe and workable organization would be formed.

Well, Doctor Shaffer spent much of his time here in my home. He was agreeably pleased over Charley Cortner’s work, with my assistance in preparing the agreement—and said so in no unmistakable terms. He had a pleasant word for my wife, too.

In an aside, I will say, that while in Moline on that inspection trip, I was troubled with a slight attack of appendicitis—which had been chronic with me for twenty years, and still is—and had gotten temporary relief from the Doctor. Dr. Shaffer now said that should I ever decide to have an operation, for me to come down to Moline, and bring my wife along, that she could stay in the hospital—all free of charge. This was by far the best offer I had ever had.

First, I might say Dr. Sam Murbock, our old reliable, had said he could not tell me what his charge would be until he got into me. I told him that he would never get into me, or my pocket, without first naming his price.

Also, when a guest at the Stratford hotel in Kansas City, Dr. Pickerel, of the Stratford, went with me to the University Hospital early one morning. He said he would sit awhile in the lobby and he would spot the surgeons as they came in. I passed three of them, trying to get my nerves settled.

The fourth one was more in general appearance to my idea of what a good surgeon should look like. He was called—and we went up stairs to a room. On examination, Dr. Jabes Jackson, Kansas City’s top-notch surgeon, said I was just right for the operation. I asked him what would be his charge? He said, “One thousand dollars!” I told him that I would have to be a lot sicker before I would think of giving up a thousand dollars. Then, Dr. Pickerel said, “He doesn’t come under that class, doctor.” Dr. Jabes then said, “Three hundred—that’s the lowest.”

Again, while at the Byram hotel in Atchison I had a severe attack in the night—and believed that the time had come when I should have the old appendix taken out. I called for Atchison’s foremost surgeon. He was in Kansas City, but would be back at one o’clock. I went up to the Atchison hospital in the forenoon, asked for a little “home” treatment. In bed, the nurse felt my “tummy,” shook her head, and said, “You will have to wait for your doctor.” The doctor said I could have the caster oil and an enema—but he told the nurse I was to have no breakfast. In the morning, I was feeling pretty good and was about out of the notion of having the operation. However, I asked the doctor what would be his charge? He said, “You are most too weak to stand it now. Come back in a week—we’ll talk it over then.” One week later, the doctor said, “Owing to your long residence in the state, and your standing in the community, I’ll do it for five hundred dollars.” I recalled that our old Nemaha County reliable had done the job for one of my friends for a very reasonable fee, and also remembered that he had charged others less reasonable. I said, “If and when the time comes, I’ll just give you $150.” He said, “I’ll do it—but if you ever tell anybody, I’ll kick your butt all over town.” You may know that we were on quite intimate terms, having on earlier occasions met at Atchison’s friendly club—or he wouldn’t have dared to talk to me like that.

Back in my home again, after enthusiastically discussing the likely prospect of the new oil field. Doctor Shaffer went out on the street to mingle with his boys, and the prospects who were now coming in from as far away as Holton, Circleville, Soldier, Corning, Goff, Netawaka, Whiting, Sabetha, and intervening farms—including my long-time friend Tommy Evans, whose farm north of Capioma had the reputation of being the best kept and most productive in the neighborhood—saying he (the doctor) would be back soon. My wife said, “It looked like your promoter friends have all ready unintentionally cut you in on the big melon should you be mindful to follow up the lead—and wish to be bothered with the Trusteeship.” She laughed, “If you don’t make that Doctor Shaffer cut you in for a generous slice you are not as smart as I think you are.”

Well, maybe I needed this tip—and maybe I didn’t.

Doctor Shaffer came back, and without more preliminaries, proposed to cut me in for two units ($250) if I would prepare him two copies in blank, of the agreement I had cooked up for the home syndicate, and, incidentally, permit Cortner and Purdum to make good on their promise to the subscribers that I would be the Trustee. He said they were expecting it, and desired to have my acceptance before going into the meeting. Thus, I wouldn’t rightly know to whom I was indebted for the generous slice of the melon.

Or was it a melon?

I suspect it was as Myrtle had said, unintentionally cooked up by the two solicitors—and that, in its final phase, it was a joint settlement, with the solicitors having to kick back a portion of their rake-off. Anyway, it was more unsolicited grapes for me—twice over the $4.50 a line, or 45 cents a word for the original draft. I used a carbon and made the two new copies at once, while Doctor Shaffer waited. He had another sale on with a Missouri group.

Fifty-three subscribers crowded into the City Hall, and all signed the agreement, and each set down the amount of his subscription opposite his name—and all wrote checks. At the finish I had fifty-three checks totaling $8,000—my own check for $250, and Doctor Shaffer’s check for $1,000, included. Doctor Shaffer would reimburse me for this $250 and also pay me the $125 promised by Charley Cortner. I was instructed to send payment for the lease in two $4,000 bank drafts. I had no intention of paying out $8,000 until those checks had time to be cleared. In the meantime our attorney had called for complete abstracts to the acreage instead of the certificates of title supplied by the vendor—delaying settlement for several weeks.

But the eight thousand dollar payment was made, and I received the $375 velvet from Doctor Shaffer—I guess. For reasons of his own, unknown to me, Dr. Shaffer had a Wichita man mail me his personal check for $375, nothing more. I suspect one of those $4,000 drafts had been deposited in a Wichita bank. The transaction was legitimate. I had nothing to cover up. This payment to me had come off the salesman and the vendor, negotiated subsequent to the pledges made by syndicate members—leaving their full “investment” intact to work out its own salvation.

This is the God’s truth—and mine, too.

Now, kindly figure out for me, if you can, where anyone had been worsted through my part in the transaction. Two “bright” young clerks in the bank here—whom I shall not name—caught it at once. That mysterious $375 check had alerted them. They put their own erroneous construction on it—and passed the word along. Then I caught “hail Columbia” from the younguns’ superior (in point of banking tenure) who had “invested $125 in his wife’s name—the idea being that a banker himself ought to have more sense than to dabble in such matters. His “boys,” as he called them, meant well, of course—and it didn’t take me too long to convince the banker that I had taken no part in the promotion. But, what if I had? It would not have been a crime. I want to say, however, that the banker did me the favor of trying to correct the false impressions he had helped set afloat. Once in a blue moon even the worst of us will meet such a manful man.

In this story I only aim to hit the high spots—not, at any time, deviating from the truth. It was not all easy sailing for the Trustee. In a case of this kind, the conscientious person representing his friends, does not wish to let them down because of failure to collect rentals in full. With syndicate members widely scattered, the Trustee must make his own decisions—and quick. He can put up the delinquent amount himself, or he can forfeit the lease—if he does not wish to raise the ire of his friends who have paid.

Our syndicate was in reality an unfinanced holding partnership—barred from creating indebtedness, euphoniously christened “The Elkmore Oil and Gas Syndicate.” Here, I must give the wife credit—if, in the long run it really merited credit—for suggesting this expressive name, which embraces, in split infinitives, the location of the lease holdings (Elk County) and the home (Wetmore) of the “investors.” It pleased Dr. Shaffer—no end. I think it got Myrtle included in that proposed free entertainment at his hospital in Moline.

Like Doctor Purdum’s good natured crack at my purebred seed corn, those altruistically donated helpings of “grapes” showered on me by Cortner and Shaffer, had begun to “sour”—and, I may say, that they deteriorated until less than nothing was left of the windfall. It posed a perplexing dilemma.

As there was little chance of getting action before the expiration of the leases, aggravated by draggy collections of rentals, a feeler was mailed to all subscribers, in ample time before the fifth year’s payments were due. More than half of them favored dropping the leases, and sent me their written authorization. Nearly half of the interests remained expressionless. The four leases were canceled. The majority of the interests wished it so. But, it was the delinquents who hollered most, even censured me for giving up the lease—when some of the acreage came into production several years later. It seemed not to have occurred to them that wo would have lost out, anyway.

But, in the Moline field we got some experience which should have taught us a lesson, that a bird in hand is worth a whole flock in the bush—but it didn’t. We could have sold our leases at a nice profit.

An oil gusher was brought in on a large tract of pasture land one mile away from our holdings. Dr. Shaffer wired me to come down at once. He drove me out to the well. There was a terrific jam—at the well, on the road, in Moline. Crowds of people were at the well ahead of us that morning—Art Hough, a former Wetmore boy, and his oil-rich partner, from Independence, among them. Excitement was running high. One man was killed in his overturned car while rushing out from town. And I, myself, spent the night in a Moline hospital. This fact, however, does not necessarily pertain to the gusher—except to show that there was genuine good-feeling all round. I was the guest of Dr. Shaffer and his wife, who were the only other occupants of his new hospital, not yet ready for public patronage. Dr. Shaffer owned a one-eighth interest in our leases.

If you have never seen an oil-gusher, you don’t know what a thrilling sight it is—especially, if you own nearby leases. Oil spurted in gusts at regular intervals high into the air, spread out in all directions and arched down over the four case-setters, stripped to the waist, encasing them in a film of oil so heavy as to exclude them from view, at times. Art Hough and his partner, who owned some producing wells in the shallow field near Independence, wanted to buy our leases—but who would want to sell in the midst of all that excitement? And, anyway, I was not in a position to deal with them on the spot, as there were fifty-three signers in the group to an agreement which provided for fifty-one per cent of the interests to say when to sell. We did, however, later, arrange to sell part of the leases—carrying a provision for drilling—and the papers were sent to the Moline bank; but the prospective buyer was unable to come through with the money.

The gusher was on land owned, or controlled, by a Moline banker, and another man. I heard one of the partners say, not once but many times, always the same sing-song word for word, “I just told the Lord that since He had been so good to me, I shall never desecrate His holy name.” If I may express myself, unbiasedly, I would say the Lord played no favorites in the Moline field; that I think He had nothing to do with the man’s good luck, except, possibly, in a general way of being the creator of all things—else why would He have destroyed the gusher with salt-water, and got the owners the threat of a robust lawsuit to boot—for polluting a God-given stream of fresh water?

In the matter of a fresh try to reopen the Wetmore oil test, I protested the contract offered by the two Kansas City promoters, maintaining that we had no valid authority to sign anything in the name of “the people” and that liability would fall on the individual signers. One of the committeemen who had been in various lines of business in Wetmore, and had finally settled himself in a real estate office, said, “Why, John—there haint a day but what I make contracts like that.” Questioning the man’s competency in such matters, I said, “I wouldn’t doubt it in the least—but it will take still more plausible argument to induce me to sign this one.”

The other members of the committee had caught the spirit of the meeting in the opera house, and were anxious to see further development of our oil prospect. They conferred the “favor” of the trusteeship on committeeman Sam Thornburrow, cashier of the State Bank—and they all signed the contract. Then the promoters went back to Kansas City to await the hatching of the egg they had laid here. And in due time, Sam got notice from a lawyer in Kansas City that he was about to be sued for breach of contract. Then one morning as I was passing the bank Sam hailed me. He said, “You know, those Kansas City fellows have sued me for $1,000—what would you do about it?” Remembering how they had “ribbed” me for refusing to sign with them, I said, “I’d pay it.” After he had turned this over in his troubled mind a few times, I told him to pay no attention to it—that the promoters were most likely trying to frighten him into a settlement; that they would have to start their action in Kansas—and that I doubted very much if they would risk doing this, as the contract would show them up for the grafters they were.” The Kansas City promoters did not follow through with their claim for damages.

It took only one more throw at the get-rich-quick oil game to convince me that it just could not be accomplished by throwing in with the other fellow on his home grounds, after he had carried the project to a point where any day’s drilling might bring riches. But I’m still strong on the home-test—for that would be furthering something for the good of all the home folks.

Our Wetmore group, with “investors” at Goff and Bancroft, contributed a sum said to be $14,350 toward the completion of a well in a producing field east of Enid, Oklahoma, on land owned by a Bancroft man. The headquarters of the Company was in a fair sized city in southern Kansas, with a department store owner as president, a physician and surgeon as secretary—and a banker deeply interested in a covered-up sort of way. The president and the land owner had departed with our money, supposedly to complete the well—and then we would all most likely be “sitting pretty.” But in about a week we got notice of a called meeting to vote $30,000 increase in capital stock. Also, we were advised of the bringing in of a gas well of ten million feet potential on the lease adjoining the company ground on the south, still farther away from the known production area on the north, proving that we were still “sitting pretty.” Had this been reported before we joined-up with our Southern Kansas financiers, I, for one, would have kept my money. Sane people do not let the public in on a speculative enterprise after its success is practically assured.

Our Wetmore “investors”, gave me proxies, and sent me down to investigate. I first went with the land-owner to the Oklahoma field. We found no activity at the well on his land, but the rig was still up. And the drillers were working on the reported gas strike just across the road. They told me that they had struck a small flow of gas—that it was not strong enough to blow your hat off the casing.

I got back to the Kansas headquarters on Saturday about noon, and went at once to the department store owned by the president. He introduced his wife, who worked in the store, and his father-in-law, whom I shall call Mr. Shapp—though this is not his real name. The president insisted that I take dinner with him at his home. I sensed something was wrong—but I couldn’t place it just yet. I learned later that Dr. Lapham had got wise to something pertaining to the call for an increase of capital stock, and had written him a critical letter. Dr. Lapham told me later that it was a “scorcher”—and I can well believe it was. They were all rather upset. Of course the president, and the secretary, and the banker, knew some things which I didn’t know—yet. My dinner host was a bit “jumpy” because of that “scorcher” letter of Dr. Lap-ham’s, and my appearance two days in advance of the called meeting. But had he known what I had just learned at the dinner table, he could have trusted me implicitly.

Some years prior to this I had sold, through advertisement in the Topeka Capital, 500 shares of our mining stock to the fictitious Monroe P. Shapp, of that address, and through him 200 shares in the name of his daughter, Ella J. Shapp. Now, when the merchant called his wife “Ella” I put two and two together—then I knew that I was among old friends. And I couldn’t find it in my heart to get rough with them.

Not that I had any apologies to make for our mine promotion. We had used their money, as promised, in the development of the mine, and at this time were still putting our own money into it—and we had no intention of going out and selling a block of stock to rub out the deficit. That would have been illegal in Nevada. But the fact remained that we had not as yet been able to make any returns to stockholders.

When I called on the secretary of the oil company, he said he could not give me any time that afternoon, that he had to perform an operation at the hospital at 4 o’clock. I said to him, in the presence of the president, “You fellows seem to be scared about something—but you need not be. I give you my word that I am not here to make trouble. All I want to know is what chance you have to make good, and if it will be to our interests for me to vote my proxies for the increase of capital stock at the meeting Monday.” The secretary looked at the president, and the president looked at the secretary—then they both looked at me. The president nodded—and the secretary said, “Come along with me.”

It seems the directors had carried on with the drilling after company funds were exhausted, incurring personal obligations, and stopped the drill when approximating the required depth for a strike, with a large deficit—which, with our contribution, was now reduced to something like $9,000. While in the office of the physician-surgeon-secretary going over the books, the banker—of German extraction, if not the whole thing—came in, and nodding toward a back room, said as if in great distress, “Dokther—I’ve got a stick in the eye.”

I decided that I ought not vote for the increase of stock—and, without leave, came home on Sunday. One of our group, an ex-businessman, attended the meeting on his own hook to get first hand knowledge of the situation. He wired Joe Searles Monday afternoon, saying, “Bristow absent; could I vote the proxies?” I told Joe to wire him, “Yes—if you have them.” I had just turned them in to Joe. In a couple of days Searles got a long letter from him—written by a stenographer in Kansas City—berating me for running out on them, and boasting of the business-like interest he himself had taken in the meeting, saying, “I stayed with them until we got in proxies enough the next day to get the money—and I bought $250 worth more of the stock.” He did not say—probably didn’t know—if his purchase was of the newly voted stock, or from the old issue. I had a strong suspicion that we had all ready bought and paid for a generous take of the newly voted stock—and got short changed as well.

I had called on that “stick-in-the-eye” banker a short while before, and obtained from him the log of a producing well recently brought in by Frank Letson and associates in the Enid field—and this, I think, might have been what had alerted the banker; or, maybe, the president had sent his partner scurrying in to forestall an admission of their questionable finagling. I wanted that log to compare with the log of “our” drilling, which I had obtained from “our” president. Then, too, Frank Letson was a younger brother of Ed and Ella Letson who were my schoolmates in Wetmore, when their father, Bill Letson, owned a general store here; before going to Netawaka to engage in like business. I had called at the Fleming and Letson bank in Enid two days before, but did not get to see either of my old acquaintances.

The Fleming bank, now an imposing brick structure having tall columns, on the east side of the square, was started on the south side, opposite the land office, in a small frame building in the new town after the opening of the Cherokee strip, in 1893. I also had occasion to call at the old bank about six months after the opening, to get a paper notarized.

Attorney Elwin Campfield, in the law office of John Curran, formerly of Seneca, on the west side of the Enid square, filled out relinquishing papers for me, without charge—we had been neighbors in the Bleisener building in Wetmore—and suggested that I wait in the Curran office a few minutes when he would have one of the office force notarize it for me, presumedly also without charge—a small matter hardly worth waiting for. Up here the fee for such service was then, and still is, twenty-five cents. I told Elwin I would go over to the Fleming bank and get it notarized, that I wanted to pay my respects to Ollie, anyway. 01 had grabbed off, at Netawaka, a red headed girl (Ella Letson) whom I had thought pretty nice when we were care-free kids running wild on the streets of Wetmore in the early days.

Well, 01 was sure glad to see me—and he would gladly remember me to Ella. When he had returned the notarized paper to me, I said, “How much, 01?” He said, “Five dollars!” I shot him a wordless blank look. He laughed, and said, “Oh, give me two-and-a-half.” There had been a time in that frontier town when one could get most anything asked for services, but that time was now over and passed—half-over, anyway.

That officious Wetmore man was in Dr. Lapham’s office when I reported my findings. I told the group that I had spoken only for myself when I gave those finaglers my word that I was not there to make trouble—that I had to do this to get them to open up. I told the group that I had no desire to pursue the matter further, but that they themselves were not barred; that any one of them who might wish to, could notify the Blue Sky Board in Topeka—and the Board would do the rest.

The man who had taken matters in his own hands and helped put over the vote for the increase of capital stock without the formality of first finding out what it was all about, popped up and said, “You had no right to tell them that.” He insisted that I should make the complaint. And the surprising thing is, he had some supporters. There were some hard losers in the group. I had not made the investigation with the intention of filing a complaint—wouldn’t have accepted the assignment had it carried any such provision. I don’t like fussing.

Then, too, the president and the land owner had not solicited me to buy stock, nor made promise to me that the fund would be used to complete the well. Their contact had been with Dr. Lapham and other members of the group. I went in with them solely because my neighbors had invited me to join them, and because I didn’t want to stand idly by—and watch them make a “killing.” However, on invitation, I went up to Dr. Lapham’s office at the virtual close of a “pep” meeting, after the check-writing had begun. I asked for information as to how the company was organized—particularly as to whether or not the stock was non-assessable? The president and the land-owner really didn’t know. But they went to Topeka the next day and secured a transcript of the incorporation papers, which were acceptable. And I was invited to go before the adjourned meeting the following evening, and voice my approval. Then the check writing was resumed.

Also, my conscience told me, in a flash, that it would be a rather poor spirited person who should wish to send his neighbor “up” for the mistake of keeping bad company. It looked as if our old farmer-neighbor had been caught in between two fires, and didn’t know which way to “jump”—or worse still, that there was now no open way out. Thus, it may be said, that our old Bancroft farmer-friend, in his most uncomfortable position, was comparable to the banker held as hostage by a bold gang of robbers who had just looted his bank. I know. I spent two days with the dispirited old man in the oil field.

The Blue Sky Board was fostered to check on promotions whose stocks were strongly, if not wholly, tinctured with the azure blue. Along about 1905-06-07 questionable promotions—mostly mining—sprang up all over the country. Kansas City had several going full blast at one time. I had occasion to call on one of them; had arranged the meeting through correspondence. I entered a very large room where perhaps thirty or forty girl-typists were busily preparing literature to be sent out by mail to inquirers secured through newspaper advertisements. The printed portion of the literature had been prepared by “experts” copy-writers—and it is surprising how those fellows could make an inferior proposition appeal to the gullible.

The Fiscal Agent’s secretary, or outside girl, stationed near his private office—he had a better looking secretary in his office—said she believed the “boss” was not in. I gave her my name and stated my business. She went into the private office, and returned saying, Mr. so-and-so would see me. However, had I been a questionable caller, the outside girl would have told me upon returning that he was not in, and that she had learned from his inside secretary that he had gone out of town and would not be back that day. This was the system. The “boss” did not want to see any of his subscribers—nor an officer of the law.

One of those Kansas City promotion companies was selling stock in what was called a Ten Million Dollar Development—that is, ten million shares, par-value one dollar, sold at two cents a share, the idea being to offer the purchaser a lot for little money, out in our mining district in Nevada. It was highly advertised as the “Extension of the Great (Searchlight) Quartette Vein.” The outfit was actually sinking a shaft about a half-mile out in the valley west of the mountain-situated Quartette mine—a rich gold producer—without reasonable chance of picking up anything in the way of values. Too many promotions like this were victimizing the people. The Blue Sky Board’s function was to keep them out of Kansas.

In our own mine promotion, I did some newspaper advertising in Topeka—but, first, I had to get a clearance from the Blue Sky Board (in Bank Commissioner Dolley’s office) showing that our company was on the square; that the stock was a fair risk; that purchasers were fully and truthfully informed; and most important of all, that the purchasers would get a run for their money—meaning that the money so collected must not be used in paying for a “dead horse.”

On full-page advertising in a number of papers, I received on the average one inquiry for each 3,000 circulation—but I sold practically all of them. This was only about one-hundredth part of the returns the Kansas City fellows were getting. And I had strong copy, too. The newspaper boys said it was unusually strong. But I made the mistake—from the promoter’s view point—of telling the readers the truth, that we had not carried the proposition to a point where we were about ready to begin handing out dividends, which was the Kansas City boy’s big drawing card. This was costing too much—and I discontinued selling the stock, hoping that we might yet find an Agent who would have better luck. We used up the funds on hand; then went at it individually again. And the six miners continued on the job, taking their full wages in our treasury stock.

Let it be understood that the mining stock I sold was far from being in the blue sky class—and that the job of selling it was “wished” on me. While in the process of incorporating, our president, Frank Williams, had made tentative arrangements with Los Angeles “Fiscal Agents”—that’s what they called themselves then—to sell our treasury stock, but failed to conclude a satisfactory contract with them. He had encountered the same questionable line of approach out there that caused me to turn down the Kansas City “Fiscal Agents.”

Might say that in the first place, on his recommendation, I had joined Frank Williams in the purchase of the initial lead-zinc-vanadium claim—only lead discovered then—on which our corporation was mainly based. Included in the corporation also were three (gold) claims in the Crescent district, owned by Frank and his brother Tommy Williams, A. M. Harter, and Jonah Jones. These Crescent claims were taken in on a basis of one-sixth of the combined value. Our lead claim had the further approval of that veteran millionaire miner, Green Campbell—indeed, had he not died suddenly of pneumonia, Green, instead of I, would have been Frank’s partner. Frank had been with Green Campbell, and his uncle Elwood Thomas—all three of the men former Wetmore citizens, in the Goodsprings district for twelve years, at that time.

Then, too, those Crescent gold claims held appeal. What think you that your heart would have done to you, had you been able to go out on your own holdings and scrape up dirt—disintegrated rock, assaying $544 gold to the ton—at a time when the fabulous production of the not too distant Comstock mines in Nevada, with less glowing beginning, was being proclaimed all over the land as having saved the credit of the Nation during Civil War days.

And, by the way, isn’t it about time for us to dig again?

Please—somebody, anybody, everybody—pray with me for a redeeming Comstock as of yore, only let it be such stepped up magnitude as to save, beyond the possibility of a slip, the credit of our Uncle Sam, even in his magnanimous undertaking to tide, piggyback, all those unstable old country states over the troubled waters of world unrest—in an effort to convince a certain belligerent-minded Old World character that war is, a la Sherman, indeed “hell.”

But remember, mines are made—not found.

Before incorporating, we (Frank and I), worked the lead claim for nearly two years—or rather, Frank did the work and I paid him one-half of the prevailing miner’s wage. We were trying our best to make a paying mine of it—and may I say that, encouraged by occasional shipments, there were times when we believed we were right at the door of accomplishment.

The point I’m trying to stress here is, that we did not acquire the mining claims for the purpose of launching a stock-selling enterprise, as was so of ter done about that time. But we learned that more often than not even promising mining prospects require the expenditure of more money than we, as individuals, could devote to it—hence the incorporation.

Thus it is that, in the fullness of Time, I have tried mining—to the tune of Six Thousand Dollars, plus; out of pocket—and I’ve tried oil, not once but three times; and I’ve even tried real estate speculation in the boom days of Port Arthur, Texas—all avenues leading up to the coveted get-rich-quick-field—and so help me, I have never taken down a dollar.

I promised my companion of the day that I wouldn’t tell about our “investments” in Port Arthur town lots. But that was a long time ago, between the time he was elected Governor of Kansas, from Nemaha County, and the time he served as Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Missouri. So I opine that it doesn’t matter now, since he is safely beyond the pale of political patronage. In the new boom town of Port Arthur that warm January day about the turn of the century, the “boomers” showed us the location, with rock foundation all ready in place, for a bank building, with brick enough piled on the site to build an edifice big enough to house all the money in the world. But the most revealing report I ever got from my friend, the Governor, on our investments, was that the restless bank foundation and its companion brick pile had gone on the prowl, virtually slipped from one end of the plotted business section to the other end, taking now and then a rest period.

The old regulars in our group of “investors” are about all dead now—or have dropped the Big Idea. Joe Searles, at present prescription clerk in a Sabetha drugstore, never in too deeply with the old group, is in line to get his now. He has taken on both leases and royalties in the Strahm field. The development so far has been done by the Carter Oil Company, holding most of the leases. But private interests are trafficking in royalties in a big way. Should Joe make good—that is, break into the big money where the Internal Revenue take would warrant him in throwing away a portion of his winnings in “wildcatting,” I suggest that he come home—and finish the Haigh-Lapham oil test. This—and other betterments for the old home town—is what I planned on doing, had I become burdened with mine-made money.

Also, let it be understood that I took no part in the organization of our group of “investors,” or the promotion of any of our oil speculations.

And now a last word.

Since it appeared that our Southern Kansas co-partners had risked their own money, or more likely their credit, in completing the drilling, incurring disappointment—and, crowded by an unseen hand, (which I believe I could have put my finger on), had taken the wrong way out of the dilemma, and if I were not mistaken they yet had a long, long way to go to get out of the woods; so then, let us be lenient. Why say an unkind word about your neighbor—when it gets you nothing? Don’t know if they ever sold any more of the newly voted stock, or if they did any more drilling. Never heard from them again.

In tolerance of human frailty, let me say that our old Bancroft farmer-friend, allied with keener personalities, had always been a reputable man—that the doctor-secretary, and the merchant-prince apparently stood high among their fellowmen—and then there was Ella J., holder of some mining stock. But, even so, had I not lost interest in the investigation, considered it hopeless, I believe I could have found “sticks” in more than one eye.