Both of these specimens of natural history were bred, nurtured, and let loose in countless numbers to prey upon the people in the early days that witnessed the opening of the Northwestern territories to settlement. The wild-cat dollars waxed fat upon the blood and brawn of the settlers who had already arrived; wild-cat town-sites found ready victims in the thousands of Eastern people who desired to better their fortunes, and who lent ready ears to the golden tales of unscrupulous promoters, that told of wonderful cities in the West, whose only reality was that blazoned in the prospectuses scattered broadcast through the East.

The younger generation, whose only acquaintance with the circulating symbols of wealth that we call "money", is confined to the decades since the close of the War of Secession, can have no idea of the laxity of banking laws of the fifties, in the Northwestern states and territories, nor of the instability of the so-called "money" that comprised nine-tenths of the medium of exchange then in use in the West. Nowadays, a bank bill stands for its face value in gold, if it be a National Bank issue. If a state bank—and bills of this sort are comparatively few in these days—they are also guaranteed, in a measure, by the laws of the state in which the bank is situated. In the days of which I am writing, and especially in the unsettled and troublesome times just before the war (from 1856 to 1862), the money that was handled on the river in the prosecution of business, except of course the small proportion of gold that was still in circulation, had little or no backing, either by federal or state enactments.

A man went into an embryo city, consisting in that day of two or three thousand town lots, and from fifty to a hundred inhabitants, with an iron box costing twenty-five dollars. In this box he had ten, twenty, or thirty thousand "dollars" in new bank bills purporting to have been issued from two, three, or four banks doing business in other equally large, populous, and growing cities, situated elsewhere in Wisconsin, or preferably in Illinois, Indiana, or Michigan. How did he become possessed of all this wealth? Was it the savings of years? The iron box was, perhaps; perhaps he got trusted for that. The money was not usually the savings of any time at all; it was simply printed to order.

Five or six persons desirous of benefitting their fellow men by assisting them in opening their farms and "moving their crops", would get together in Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, wherever there was an establishment capable of engraving and printing bank bills—and not very elegant or artistic printing was required, or desired. These men propose to start as many banks, in as many "cities" in the West. They have money enough, each of them, to buy a safe, an iron box into which any carpenter could bore with an ordinary brace and bit, and enough over to pay for the printing of twenty thousand dollars' worth of bills in denominations of one, two, five and ten dollars. The printing finished, each man would sign his own bills as president, and one of the others would add the final touch of authenticity by signing a fictitious name to the same bills as cashier. Then it was "money".

But it would have been overloading the credulity of even the most gullible denizens of his adopted city to ask them to accept his own bills as legal tender; so a swap was made all around, and when the requisite amount of shuffling was completed, each man had his twenty thousand dollars in bills on four or five banks, but none of his own issue. There was a double incentive in this transaction: first, it inspired the utmost confidence in the minds of the men who were to borrow this money. How could this banker who had come among them for their good, have acquired this money by any other than legitimate transactions? If it were bills on his own bank that he proposed to put into circulation, there might be some question as to their guaranty; but he could not get this money by merely going to the printing office and ordering it, as he might in case of bills on his own institution. It certainly must be good money. Secondly, by distributing his bills in as many different localities as possible, the chances of its never being presented for redemption were greatly multiplied; it might be burned, or lost overboard, or worn out, in which case he would be just so much ahead, and no questions asked.

The foregoing may be a somewhat fanciful statement of the way in which the bankers proceeded, but in essence it is a true picture. They may not have all met in Chicago, or anywhere else, to perfect these arrangements, but the arrangements were all perfected practically as stated: "You put my bills into circulation, and I will put out yours; and in each case the exchange will greatly assist each and all of us in hoodwinking our victims into the belief that it is money, and not merely printed paper which we are offering them".

Equipped with these goods, and with a charter from the state in which he proposed to operate—a charter granted for the asking, and no questions raised—the banker transports himself and his box of money to his chosen field of operations. The newspaper which has already been located in the new city heralds the coming of Mr. Rothschild, our new banker, more or less definitely hinting at the great wealth lying behind the coming financier. A bank building is rented, a sign hung out, and he begins to loan his money at five per cent per month on the partially-improved farms of his neighbors, or the house and lot of his "city" friends. He is a liberal man, and if it is not convenient for you to pay the interest as it accrues, he will let it stand—but he does not forget to compound it every month. The result is inevitable. The debt mounts up with a rapidity that paralyzes the borrower, and in the end a foreclosure adds farm and improvements to the growing assets of the banker. Within a very few years he is the owner of eight or ten of the best farms in the county, and perhaps half a dozen houses and lots in the village, and all with the investment of less than a hundred dollars invested in printing, and an iron box, and without the expenditure of an ounce of energy or a legitimate day's work. And the victims break up and start anew for the still farther West, to take new farms, to be engulfed in the maws of other sharks. One may not greatly pity the men themselves, for men are born to work and suffer; but the women! God pity them. Worn, tired, broken-hearted, they must leave that which is dearest to them in all the world, their homes, and fare forth again into the wilderness, to toil and suffer, and at last, blessed release, to die.

177 178 And the bankers? They were counted honest. If by any chance one of their bills came to hand and was presented for payment at the home counter, it was promptly redeemed, sometimes in gold or silver, but oftener with another bill on some other bank belonging to the syndicate. I personally knew some of these bankers. Some of them were freebooters without conscience and without shame. Under color of law, they robbed the settlers of their lands and improvements, and defied public opinion. Others put on a cloak of righteousness; they were leaders in the love-feasts and pillars in the church; and they also had their neighbors' lands and improvements. Their descendants are rich and respected to-day in the communities where their fathers plied their iniquitous trade; and these rule where their fathers robbed.

As a clerk on the river, I had some experience in handling the wild-cat money. At Dunleith, before starting on the up-river trip, we were handed by the secretary of the company, a Thompson's Bank Note Detector, and with it a list of the bills that we might accept in payment for freight or passage. We were also given a list of those that we might not accept at all; and still another list upon which we might speculate, at values running from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent of their face denominations. Thus equipped we started upstream, and the trouble started with us. At McGregor we put off a lot of freight, and were tendered money. We consulted our lists and cast into outer darkness that which had upon it the anathema of Mr. Jones, the secretary. We accepted all on the list of the elect, and compromised upon enough more to balance our freight account. The agent at McGregor had a list of his own which partly coincided with ours but in general disagreed. In the meantime another boat of our line had arrived from up river, and we get from her clerk fifteen or twenty lists of bills which would be taken or rejected at as many landings above. This helps somewhat, as we see our way clear to get rid of some of our twenty-five per cent stuff at par in exchange for cord wood or stores on the upper river, and we sort our stock out into packages which are reported current at each landing. We also see an opportunity to swap at Dunleith some bills which are not current there at all, but which are taken at par at Prescott or Stillwater, for other bills which they do not want but which will be taken at the company's office at Dunleith in settlement of our trip. It required a long head to figure it out. Mine was long enough, but unfortunately it had the same dimensions both ways, and was not to be depended upon in these finer transactions. Mr. Hargus labored with the problem, studying lists until he came nigh to the point of insanity, with the result that when we "cashed in" on our return it was usually found that we had from five hundred to a thousand dollars that was not acceptable. This we kept, and the boat was debited with the amount on the company's books. On the next trip we would usually be able to work off some of this stuff. At the end of one season I recollect that we had some two thousand dollars, face estimate, of this paper on hand, which the treasurer would not accept, for the banks on which the bills were drawn had gone out of existence.

The town-site industry was on the same plane of deception and robbery as the banking frauds, but it found its victims "back East", instead of close at hand. Being Easterners, who had been educated to suppose that integrity and honesty were the basis of all business confidence, and themselves practiced these old-fashioned virtues, they all too readily accepted the assurances of the land-sharks, and invested their money without seeing the property which was so glowingly described in the prospectuses sent out by the Western promoters. The result was, that they were "taken in and done for" by the hundreds of town-site sharks who were operating all along the river, between Dunleith and St. Paul. I shall refer to but one of which I had personal knowledge, and to another described to me by Captain Russell Blakeley.

The city of Nininger, as delineated on the large and beautifully-engraved and printed maps issued by Ingenuous Doemly, was a well-built metropolis capable of containing ten thousand people. As delineated, it had a magnificent court house, this city being the county seat of Dakota County, Minnesota. Four or five church spires sprang a hundred feet each into the atmosphere. It had stores and warehouses, crowded with merchandise, and scores of drays and draymen were working with feverish energy to keep the levee clear of the freight being landed from half a dozen well-known steamboats belonging to the Minnesota Packet Company or the St. Louis & St. Paul Packet Company. An imposing brick structure with cut stone trimmings, four stories high, housed the plant of the Nininger Daily Bugle. This last-mentioned feature of the prospectus was the only one that had the remotest semblance of foundation in fact. There certainly was a Daily Bugle, issued once a week, or once in two or three weeks, depending upon the energy of the printer and his "devil", who jointly set the type, and the assiduity of the editors who furnished them with copy. This paper was printed upon the first power press that ever threw off a printed sheet in the Territory of Minnesota. It was a good press, and the paper printed upon it was a monument to the shrewdness and ingenuity of the honorable proprietor of the Nininger town-site. The sheet was filled with a wealth of local advertising—drygoods, groceries, hardware, millinery, shoe stores, blacksmith shops—every class of business found in a large and prosperous city, was represented in those columns. But every name and every business was fictitious, coined in the fertile brain of this chief of all promoters. It was enough to deceive the very elect—and it did. When the Eastern man read that there were six or eight lots, lying just west of Smith & Jones's drygoods store, on West Prairie Street, that could be had at a thousand dollars per lot if taken quickly, and that they were well worth twice that money on account of the advantageous situation, they were snapped up as a toad snaps flies on a summer day.

The paper was filled with local reading matter, describing the rush at the opening of the latest emporium; that Brown had gone East to purchase his spring stock; that Mrs. Newbody entertained at her beautiful new residence on Park Avenue, and gave the names of fifty of her guests. The whole thing was the plan of a Napoleonic mind, being carried out to the minutest detail with painstaking care by a staff of able workers, with the result that the whole prairie for two miles back from the river was sold out at the rate of ten thousand dollars an acre or upwards, and that before the proprietor had himself perfected his legal rights to the land which he was thus retailing.

Henry Lindergreen, the printer who did the mechanical work on the Nininger paper, was a chum of mine, we having set type in the same "alley" elsewhere, and that winter I went up to Nininger to help him out. The four-story brick block of the wood-cuts shrunk into a little frame building, the sides of which were made of inch boards set up on end and battened on the outside. Inside, it was further reinforced with tarred paper; and while I was there a pail of water ten feet from a red-hot stove, froze solid in a night, and the three printers had all they could do to feed the fire fast enough to keep themselves from freezing also, with the mercury down to forty degrees below zero. The editor who, in the absence of the promoter himself, in the East disposing of lots, was hired to improvise facts for the columns of this veracious sheet, lived in St. Paul, and sent his copy down to Hastings, as there was no postoffice at Nininger. If the editor or the proprietor had been found at Nininger in the following spring when the dupes began to appear, one or two of the jack oaks with which the city lots were plentifully clothed, would have borne a larger fruit than acorns. Even the printer who set the type, was forced to flee for his life.

One of the boldest-faced swindles I ever heard of, was the so-called Rolling Stone colony. In the spring of 1852, some three or four hundred people, chiefly from New York city, came to seek their purchased lands in Rolling Stone. They brought with them beautiful maps and bird's-eye views of the place, showing a large greenhouse, lecture hall, and library. Each colonist was to have a house lot in town and a farm in the neighboring country. The colony had been formed by one William Haddock, and none of the members had the faintest shadow of experience in farming. Boarding steamers at Galena, they expected to be put off at the Rolling Stone levee, for the views represented large houses, a hotel, a big warehouse, and a fine dock. But the steamboat officers had never heard of such a place. Careful questioning, however, seemed to locate the site three miles above Wabasha Prairie, on land then belonging to the Sioux Indians. As they insisted on landing, they were put off at the log cabin of one John Johnson, the only white man within ten miles. They made sod houses for themselves, or dug shelter burrows in the river banks; sickness came; many died during the summer and autumn; and when winter set in the place was abandoned. The people suffered severely, and the story of Rolling Stone makes a sad chapter in the early history of Minnesota.

While the craze was on, some made fortunes, while thousands of trusting men and women lost the savings of years. After the fever of speculation had burned itself out, the actual builders of the commonwealth came in and subdued the land. Nininger and Rolling Stone are still on the map, and that is about all there is of them—a name. La Crosse, Winona, St. Paul and Minneapolis have superseded them, and the population, wealth, and commerce of these are greater in reality than were the airy figments of the brain which they have supplanted.