The Chosen Valley The Story Of A Pioneer Town

a chosen valley

977.616 8650 56-08159
Snyder $k.QQ
The chosen valley

D DDD1 050753=1 7

4 '-'

DATE DUb

THE

Qliosen Valley

THE

The Story of a Pioneer Town

Margaret Snyder

W W - NORTON & COMPANY - INC New

A Note o

THIS BOOK is about the way in which one small valley of the
beautiful American midland was changed from wilderness to
thriving town. In the years before the second World War it an-
nounced to travelers on Highway 52: "Fourteen Hundred
Friendly Folks Welcome You." The signboard now claims six-
teen hundred population, but the folks are still friendly, as I
have full reason to know.

They are no less friendly in hundreds of our country's small
towns. I have lived in a score of them, and I suspect that any one
would yield to patient search a story no less interesting than
Chatfield's. A common theme would run through them all
the theme of this country's transformation from a rural to an in-
dustrial civilization though no two stories would be alike in
their patterning of that theme. That I have written of Chatfield
is the accident of personal experience.

Although the customary paraphernalia of scholarship has been
deliberately omitted from this book, it contains no statements
that cannot be verified by the approved devices of historical re-
search. Not even the conversations have been invented at least
not by me: they have been gathered through a good many years
of listening to, and setting down in notebooks, the talk of Chat-
field people.

In general, I have drawn my material from three main sources:

First are the written reports contemporary with the events

7

A NOTE OF THANKS

themselves. The files of Chatfield newspapers have been of huge
importance here, also the official records of village, township,
county, and school district. Lodge, club, and church records have
also been freely used, and immense amounts of business pa-
pers have been gone through. Those of J. C. Easton and of
G. H. Haven are incredibly voluminous and may be examined
in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. Of even
more value, for the kind of personal illumination that has been
one of the chief aims of this study, have been the scrapbooks,
diaries, and letters that I have been privileged to use; they
turned up in more abundance than I dared hope when I em-
barked on this work.

My second major source has been the important body of
scholarly studies produced and preserved under the encourage-
ment of the Minnesota Historical Society. Scarcely a volume of
the Society's publications has failed to yield some detail of
specific value for this book, and their sum is rich in suggestion
as well as in solid documentation. The Society's collections of
both published and manuscript materials are impressive and in-
valuable, and I owe large thanks to the Society's staff for the
help they gave me in finding my way through those collections.

I have of course drawn heavily upon the work of non-
Minnesota scholars for interpretation of the national develop-
ment within which the Chatfield story has unfolded. Of these
the chief are that matchless pair, Charles and Mary Beard,
whose Rise of American Civilization has greatly aided my efforts
to understand this country's life. The intimate relationships of
that life to the earth-forms through which it moves have been
richly illuminated for me by Lewis Mumford's writing. And my
attempts to evaluate the living reactions of the persons who
made the Chatfield story owe more than can be defined to the
structural analysis of human functioning worked out by Alfred
Korzybski.

But beyond all other sources this book has drawn upon the
people of Chatfield. In their homes, on the post office steps, in
the hardware store, in riverside meadows, they have shared with

A NOTE OF THANKS

me their memories and their salty, earth-rooted wisdom. I could
not possibly list all the people who have helped to make this
book: I have tried to do it, and have come to realize that if I
omitted any single name of all the Chatfield people I have
known, my list would be incomplete. So I have reluctantly de-
cided against naming any living person, either in the text or in
this note of thanks.

With one exception. For scholarly concern to preserve sig-
nificant memorials of his community's history, and for tireless
generosity in sharing his wealth of remembrance, both personal
and familial, I am deeply indebted to George A. Haven of Chat-
field, son and grandson of pioneers.

One further gratitude remains to be expressed. Without the
University of Minnesota's grant of a fellowship in regional writ-
ing, the long labor of this book could not have been finished.
Theodore C. Blegen, Dean of Minnesota's Graduate School,
was responsible for setting up those fellowships, and for ap-
proval of my request for aid. Beyond the lift of that financial
aid, I am grateful to his faith in the job I was trying to do.

MARGARET SNYDER
Charlottesville, Virginia
July 1948

(Contents

Page

A Note of Thanks 7

PART ONE. Mr. TwiforcTs Town 11

PART TWO. The Lovely Land 35

PART THREE. The Wheels Roll West 63

PART FOUR. New Worlds for Old 97

PART FIVE. Everyman: Speculator 131

PART six. The Law Made Visible 165

PART SEVEN. Be It Ever So Humble 201

PART EIGHT. The War Drums Throb 243

PART NINE. Churches Are Good for a Town 259

PART TEN. Wheat Is King 285

PART ELEVEN. Happy Is the Miller 313

PART TWELVE. The New Gospel: Diversify 341

PART THIRTEEN. "If You Could Eat Scenery" 371

PART

One

Mr.

ALONG THE wilderness trail that ran from Dubuque to St. Paul
a solitary footman made his way. Where the trail ran through
the river, for at least the twelfth time, he paused and looked about
him. There was nothing here to make a townsite except water
power, and he had seen plenty of water power along the Root
River. The trouble with Minnesota was too damn many places
that looked good enough for a town, he thought as he stepped
warily into the river, feeling his way with the length of ironwood
sapling he had cut that morning. How was a man to know which
one would make a go of it? This time he had to be sure. That
Iowa town had looked like a sure thing, but when Allamakee
County voted Lansing its county seat all he'd got out of it was
the contract for the courthouse. He wouldn't make the same mis-
takes this time.

He climbed up the north bank of the river and trudged on,
a lean, tireless figure that walked through the virgin forest as
a woman might cross her kitchen, alert to its demands but un-
alarmed. The trail bore slightly west beyond the crossing, towards
the place where the river would come down against the rise that
swung it out of its southerly course.

Where the ground sloped up from the bottom land, thick with
water elms, he heard a spring flowing out of the limestone ridge
and stopped to sample it. Sweet, like all the springs of the region,
and big enough to water a lot of stock if there hadn't been a river

12

MR. TWIFORD'S TOWN 13

handy. But a spring didn't make a townsite. He pushed up the
slope, sharper beyond the spring, his eyes busy estimating the
quality of timber through which he passed. Plenty here for a
sawmill. For a dozen sawmills, he laughed shortly to himself, but
you had to have settlers to make a sawmill pay. Even there in
Iowa he wouldn't have made a penny if he hadn't got that court-
house contract to use up the lumber he cut in his mill.

But he was ahead of the game this time. There weren't twenty
families in the whole of Fillmore County that Minnesota's terri-
torial legislature had set up last March. Government surveyors had
just begun to run the township lines through two and a half mil-
lion Minnesota acres, lying in the corner between the Iowa bor-
der and the Mississippi. Thomas Twiford himself could have
joined the surveyors, but when he heard they were going he had
set off to pick a townsite of his own.

For two weeks he had tramped the Root River region, lying
just north of the Iowa line, and he was filled with the look and the
feel of the land he had seen in its late summer fullness. It was
rich with wood and water, those two prime essentials for the
settler, and its hills folded about generous valleys and uplands
where farms could not help but flourish. If a man picked the right
place, and got the county seat for his town, he would make his pile
in no time.

He came suddenly to the top of the rise he had been climbing
and stopped short to look at the valley that opened before him.
Its curving serenity held both space and shelter to define a living-
place rich in human dignities.

But in Thomas Twiford, as in thousands of others moving
through the American mid-continent a century ago, the amazing
virginal beauty of the land stirred chiefly a lust for the money
to be made by its lucky exploiters. While they could scarcely
escape some dim sense of taking part in a vast historical process,
their common level of articulation was to brag of "making a
pile." Whatever hazy notions they might have had of a satisfying
social order seldom found better expression than the boast: "My
town's the best town in the whole damn country/'

14 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

It was of such a town that Thomas Twiford dreamed. As he
stared at the hills that closed in the valley at the far northern
end, he thought chiefly that they'd serve to shut out the nor'-
westers that swept the Mississippi country in winter.

Slowly his gaze traced the westward bounds of the valley. It
was something over two miles from where he stood to the head of
the valley, and most of the way the river flowed close to the west-
ward hills. Steep bluffs rose from the river's edge for half its length,
then opened out to let a creek come through. Good water power
and a place for a road to haul in timber from the distant woods.
Below the creek the bluffs pushed farther west, and the gentle
slope between river and hills was almost bare of trees. It looked as
though the Indians had burned it off, but the fire had stopped at
the bench halfway up. There was blue clay on the bench, probably,
and springs in the ledges above, making a bog that had stopped
the burning. Except for that one slope the hills were thick with
timber, and they closed down again to the river a quarter of a
mile to his left. His gaze measured the river from that point to
the big bend at his feet: no water power there, but the stream
flowed full even in late August. There'd be a good rush of power
up where the creek came in. ... His thigh muscles twitched
with the impulse to plunge down the hill and measure the valley
with his stride, but some superior urgency held him where he was.
He sat down slowly on the rock where he stood, easing the pack
from his shoulders.

From the mid-point of the west creek's inlet he looked a mile
or so eastward where a strong ridge thrust into the breadth of
the upper valley. It leveled off southward in a wide bench that
carried an open grove of oaks, and a second creek swept around
the foot of the bench toward the river. Half a mile from where
he stood the bench dropped sharply to a minor transverse valley,
and still a third spring-fed stream came in from the east. Be-
tween the two creeks the river ran full and silver to the foot of the
hill where he stood.

The sharp slope from his feet to the water's edge was half grass,

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 15

half rocks whose gray edges were softened with moss. Sprangles
of cedars rose between the rocks, and a bittersweet vine twisted
through the branches of one, its berries pale gold against the
cedar's green. There had been bittersweet on the fences back
home, he remembered. A clump of birches grew farther down
the bank, slender and white-stemmed against the cedars, and
across the streams were signs of a recent Indian encamp-
ment

The rock where he sat was warm from the sun, and for a mo-
ment he only looked at the sheltered place before him. For two
weeks he had scarcely stopped walking except for brief nights
when he rolled into his blanket beside a solitary fire. This felt
strangely like journey's end. The knowledge that Indians had
found it a good place to stop strengthened the sense of human
dwelling . . . though Indians scarcely counted as people.

Thomas Twiford slept that night in the middle of the east-
ward bench, under a hazel bush where dim fire marks told that
another man had been, earlier that summer. The next day he
walked through and about the valley, verifying his first estimates
of water and timber and roadways out of the valley. He had seen
it all by midafternoon, and he caught a fine trout at the mouth
of the west creek before he returned to the bench. He cut and
trimmed four maple saplings and laid them in a square near his
hazel bush. He cut his initials deep into a near-by oak; any claim
association would recognize the double mark as fixing his right to
the land. He slept the second night under the bush with a curious
sense of homekeeping. At least one other man had chosen the
place for a lodging. Perhaps it was a sign. He tidied his campsite
with unusual care before he set off the second morning.

He was done exploring. This was the place. He pushed rapidly
up the eastward hill in the early light, pausing briefly for a drink
from the spring halfway up the bluff, and a last look from the top
of the hill before he turned to Winona. The sun had not yet
risen, and the valley was touched with mist along its water courses.
But the sun would shine there. Already he saw how his town

l6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

would stand in that sunshine, and the vision set him far on his
way before that morning's sun was high enough to dazzle his
eyes.

He came to Winona that night forty-five miles on his own
feet. He found the log hostelry on the water front overflowing
with travelers, and in the warm conviviality of the tavern Thomas
Twiford talked as largely as any of the country through which
he had come. But of his townsite he did not speak that evening:
he was resolved to see how the game lay before he played his
cards.

He discovered that there were more people in the region than
he had guessed. At the first meeting of the county commissioners,
the May before, fifty-three men had been listed for jury service,
and two or three times as many more had come in since then,
it was certain. The county commissioners had met in July and
again in August to draw up assessment rolls and lay out several
roads. They had even established four election precincts along
the River frontage of the county. The present commissioners
were the appointees of the Territorial governor, but new ones
were to be chosen in the county election called for October 11.
No one said much about the county seat: it was evidently taken
for granted that Winona had the honor secure. But Winona,
Thomas Twiford thought, was on the far eastern edge of a county
that stretched sixty or seventy miles west from the Mississippi.

The first day he listened and asked questions. He had resolved
against playing a lone hand this time. A rankling feud of which
he had heard, between Henry Gere, one of the county com-
missioners, and a man named Laird, seemed to offer the opening
he sought. In the first winter of Winona's settlement Gere had
won a disputed claim in long legalistic argument before the
local Claim Association, then left it vacant while he returned to
Pennsylvania for his family. While he was gone, Laird and a
widowed sister moved into the shanty Gere had built and entered
his claim to the plot of ground. Laird and his sister came home
from Baptist meeting one Sunday morning to find Gere on the
roof of the house, cutting a hole for the pipe to a stove he had

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 17

set up inside, and Mrs. Gere placidly rocking in a chair she had
brought with her.

The fist-and-club fight that followed was as heartily helped on
by the women as by the men, and practically everybody in the
little settlement got mixed up in the all-day melee. Gere asked
for an armistice at midnight, and Laird and his sister supposed
the fight was over. But when Laird left the house the next morn-
ing Gere returned with furniture he would have moved into
the house if Laird's sister had not fought him off with her bare
fists. The Geres were finally routed, but they took the case through
the courts clear to the Supreme Court of the Territory, in a fruit-
less effort to get legal possession of the claim, on which Laird
continued to live.

All this had happened the year before, in 1852; but hard feel-
ings still rankled. Gere had since been appointed one of the
three commissioners for Fillrnore County, and his brother George,
who brought the title of "Squire" from long Pennsylvania
practice, was commissioned justice of the peace, but neither of
these dignities served to offset the resentment that the whole
Gere clan cherished against John Laird and the Winona people
who had sided with him.

Oddly enough, it was Laird's fire marks that Twiford had
found on the bench of his valley; Laird had slept there one night
a month or so before on his way from Iowa where he had gone
on business. He remembered the place when Twiford spoke of
it, but he had no ear for Twiford's schemes. Laird was busy run-
ning a sawmill and was quite content with the bustling trade of
Winona.

The Geres, however, listened readily to talk of the new town-
site and saw at once how admirably it might serve to cancel
Winona's claim to the county seat. Squire Gere's eldest son,
William Beecher Gere, was particularly eager: a county seat in
which he and his family had proprietary right would serve ad-
mirably as background for the political career he was beginning
to shape for himself.

Within a week the Geres, together with Myron Toms, the

l8 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

second of the Fillmore County commissioners, and seven other
men, had become interested in Twiford's scheme to organize a
town company. All eleven set off one fine September morning
to look at the valley Twiford had chosen.

They came back in high spirits. It was the paragon of town-
sites they had found, and they had already settled among them-
selves to call it after Judge Chatfield of the Territorial courts, a
name substantial and respected even beyond the bounds of
Minnesota. The eleven men * promptly incorporated them-
selves as a company and set to work to promote the transfer of
the county seat to the new 'town' where Twiford's four crossed
poles were still the whole amount of building.

John Luark, the third appointed county commissioner, had
not joined the Chatfield company, but he was neutrally disposed
between the Laird and Gere factions. The Chatfield men de-
cided to act at once and called a meeting of the commissioners at
the Winona House. Word of their plans, however, leaked to the
opposition, and a crowd of Winona partisans pushed into the
commissioners' room.

The argument ran hot and high, with more recrimination than
logic, for the many who had pinned their prospects to Winona's
fortunes were vociferous for their 'rights/ The Chatfield party
was near to being overwhelmed by sheer noise, despite their
voting majority of the commissioners: it was not long before
that a Winona man had been shot in a townsite quarrel less
serious than this and was saved from death only by the thickness
of the town plat he carried in his breast pocket.

In so much hubbub the Chatfield men welcomed the diversion
created by the arrival of a party of surveyors returned that evening
from running the section lines through the very valley that was
under dispute. Both sides fired questions at the newcomers but
neither got much satisfaction from the answers. It was good coun-

* Their names were Henry C. Gere and Myron Toms (county commissioners) ,
Robert Pike (elected commissioner Oct. 11, 1853), "W. B. Bunnell (elected com-
missioner), W. B. Gere (elected register of deeds) f G. W. Willis (elected county
clerk), T. B. Twiford, Harvey Hubbard, John I. Hubbard, James McClellan, and
G. M. Gere.

MR. TWIFORD'S TOWN 19

try thereabouts, and forty-five miles from Winona, was almost all
they would say.

The head surveyor, whose month's growth of beard did not ob-
scure a certain suavity of bearing, detached himself utterly from
the noisy argument that threatened to break into general fisticuffs.
Distance was this man's business. Before long he would be sur-
veying a farther forty-five miles beyond Twif ord's valley, and then
another, across the limitless plains and so to the Rockies, and then
to the Pacific. This local feud was nothing to him.

Yet it was he who broke the impasse. At a moment when the
argument subsided for sheer want of breath he straightened from
the doorway where he lounged and strode into the light of the
candles burning on a bracket above the commissioners' table. His
height dominated the confusion of shadows and all listened when
he spoke.

Had they considered the legal aspects of the issue, he inquired
in a voice whose smoothness commanded attention. The present
commissioners he inclined his head courteously to the three men
at the table were the appointees of the governor of the Terri-
tory. That governor was in turn the appointee of the President a
long and circuitous remove from the will of the sovereign people.
Was it right to put on them the heavy responsibility of deciding
where the county seat should be? Was it not more fair to the gen-
tlemen themselves to relieve them of so burdensome a decision
until they should be given the clear mandate of the people in the
election which was shortly to be held?

The words were so impressively legal that the crowd was mo-
mentarily silenced. Beecher Gere seized the occasion to move the
adjournment of the meeting. Exhaustion prevented objection and
the crowd was well out of the room before the argument could be
resumed.

It was extended in the campaign. In the election Winona put
John Laird in Luark's place, but two Chatfield men were elected to
the board of commissioners, and the county clerk and the register
of deeds were likewise Chatfield men. The new town had a clear
margin of success.

20 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The election safely over, Twiford took a young fellow named
Case back to the Chatfield valley and built a log house on the site
of the four crossed maple poles. That the survey had shown the
spot to be only a few hundred feet inside Fillmore County's north-
ern boundary was a most unimportant detail.

On the nineteenth of December, 1853, Henry Gere and Myron
Toms, no doubt feeling strengthened by the mandate of the elec-
tion, rode quietly out of Winona, with G. W. Willis, for a meet-
ing in "Root River Precinct, residence of Mr. Case/' as Willis re-
corded in the commissioners' book, acting as clerk pro tern. The
"object of said meeting*' was "to locate the county seat/' The two
commissioners "then and there resolved that the county seat
should be located at Chatfield, in the center of section 6, Town-
ship 104 North, Range 11 West," and adjourned immediately
thereafter. The sovereign people had prevailed.

The uproar in Winona when the decision was announced was
terrific. As appointed commissioners, Gere and Toms had no right
to make such a decision, Laird cried in wrath; neither had they any
right to act as proxy for their elected successors, however nefari-
ously the two groups might connive. Besides, they had not notified
the third commissioner, either appointed or elected, of their in-
tention to hold a meeting.

Gere and Toms and their successors did what they could in self-
protection. They called the first meeting of the elected commis-
sioners for January 2, 1854, at Minnesota City, several miles up-
river from Winona. But despite bitter weather, and New Year's
celebrations the day before, a considerable number of Winona
men were at the meeting. There, as one of them wrote long after-
wards, "the matter was so mixed that they did nothing."

The violence of partisanship had scarcely diminished with the
months; but cooler heads began to consider that an area upward of
three thousand square miles could well afford more than a single
county government. John Laird led in laying before the Territorial
legislature a proposal to divide Fillmore County, and by January
30 the decision was so far advanced that the commissioners once

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 21

more voted Chatfield the county seat. Two new counties were
made from the excluded portions of the original Fillmore, and
Winona was specified as the seat of one of them. It was a com-
promise reasonably satisfactory to everyone.

In the meantime Thomas Twiford had made a survey more
optimistic than accurate of the Chatfield site and sent it to Ga-
lena in Illinois to be lithographed. He and his associates sent the
prospectus to relatives and acquaintances and newspapers 'back
home" with letters extolling the charms of Chatfield which
looked quite impressive on the lithograph. Those letters were pub-
lished in every state of New England and in the villages of New
York and Pennsylvania. In half a dozen states that had been "the
West' only the other day, people heard of the wonderful town in
the newest 'West* and began to wonder whether it was not better
than the places they had chosen in Indiana or Ohio, in Illinois or
Michigan, in Wisconsin or Kentucky. Maybe they ought to go see,
when spring opened. . . .

Roads had now to be laid out. The lower house of Minnesota's
legislature had already approved a Territorial road to run south
from St. Paul to the Iowa line along the path of the old Du-
buque-St. Paul trail; Chatfield promoters helped the promoters of
other embryo towns on that route to persuade the legislators to
start work on the road even though the upper house and the gov-
ernor had not yet acted on the bill. All through the winter men
toiled with axes and ox teams to mark a way for the stream of im-
migrants confidently expected with the opening of spring.

The trail from Winona westward was fairly well marked for
twenty miles or more; and for men who were practiced in making
their way through the wilderness, it was not difficult to find Chat-
field. James McClellan, one of the town's incorporators, did his
part toward further marking that trail before the snow melted. He
bought enough lumber for a house and hauled it by ox team and
runners from Winona to the Chatfield valley. He had double rea-
son for haste: his house would insure his claim to the eighty acres

22 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

lying north of Twiford's acres, and it would give to his wife the
reward of the town lot offered to the first white woman to live in
Chatfield.

His coming was welcome indeed to the man who had lived
alone in the valley for many weeks. With young Case's help, Mc-
Clellan soon raised the thirty-foot frame of his house, well
fastened together with stout hand-whittled pegs. When he went
to Winona to bring his wife he brought also a stock of groceries
and liquor. Chatfield's first frame house was not only a home for
a family but a grocery store and an inn as well

Twif ord and Case had laid out six wide streets the length of the
bench, and any traveler who would stop and work for a few days
was hired to cut out trees along the lines of those streets. Next to
the hill was Winona Street, then Fillmore, then Main; beyond
Main lay Twiford, Bench, and River Streets. The block bounded
by Main and Twiford, between Third and Fourth Streets, was set
aside as the Public Square, to belong forever to the municipality of
Chatfield. Winona, Fillmore, and Main were eight blocks long;
the others were shortened by the narrowing of the bench. They all
followed the main axis of the bench, from northwest to southeast,
though no one then gave a thought to the fact that such an angle
would give each house its maximum exposure to sunlight. The
cross streets were numbered from the northerly end of the town
plot. There was plenty of room for expansion, across the river and
around the foot of Winona Hill; McClellan promptly laid out
McClellan Addition beyond his house at the northerly end of
Winona Street.

Grove Willis was the next man to bring his family to Chatfield.
He built a log house some two or three blocks southward from Mc-
Clellan's, on Winona Street. By midsummer he had been ap-
pointed Chatfield's first postmaster and distributed the infrequent
mail from the desk that stood between the bed and cookstove in
the crowded single room. The lot next to his own he reserved for
his brother-in-law, Dr. Nelson Allen, who was to bring his family
out from Winona early that summer. But before the Aliens ar-
rived, J. R. Jones came up from Iowa, where he had recently been

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 23

admitted to the bar, built a shanty on Second Street near Main,
and hung out his shingle as Chatfield's first lawyer. Where there
were town lots to be sold, and a whole county to be pre-empted,
there was bound to be legal business.

Those were the first three houses built after Thomas Twiford's,
and each of them housed a family. They did not stand alone for
long. John Luark, county commissioner, brought his wife and two
little children from Winona and built a log house between two
oak trees at the point where Second Street ran into Winona Hill.
Halfway up the hill behind the house was the fine spring where
Thomas Twif ord had drunk on the morning he first left the valley,
and John Luark found time to devise an ingenious system of hol-
lowed log pipes to bring water down the hill for his wife's conven-
ience. She was a delicate young woman, who took the frontier
hardships with a gaiety greater than her strength.

Squire Gere and his family came early that summer and built
a log house at the far southerly end of Winona Street, beyond the
bounds of the original Twiford plat. Beecher Gere claimed that
eighty acres, and platted it as a second 'addition' to the town in
partnership with another man. Young Gere was the busiest man
in town: scarcely a traveler passed who was not impressed by the
young man's vigorous charm and his grasp of the political issues
of the day.

The Squire and his wife, with their two daughters and three
sons, lived in the little house, where Squire plied his double trade
of shoemaker and justice of the peace. They were never too
crowded to find a place at their table or a corner to sleep for any
extra person who came by. Indeed, with increasing travel along
the Territorial road from the south or over the hill from Winona
there was seldom a night when Chatfield lacked one or more
guests. When McClellan's inn overflowed, the other houses were
gladly opened to travelers, and before the middle of summer Isaac
Day came up from Indiana and built a second inn, on the corner of
Main and Second Streets.

Travelers came in a never-ending stream that summer. All of
eastern Minnesota knew their passing, and here and there little

24 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

groups stopped and claimed land to live upon. Many were on foot,
a few on horseback, more drove oxen hitched to wagons that over-
flowed with families and their possessions. Those who came
through Chatfield were caught by the town's bustling exuberance;
some quality in its valley setting marked it as different from other
frontier towns they had seen. Travelers began to talk of the Root
River country as the Chosen Valley and people who had never
seen Chatfield came to associate it with that name.

Now the shrill whine of the sawmill rang across the valley. The
sawmill was }. R. Jones's most profitable undertaking that summer.
Twiford was too busy promoting the town, and bickering with his
partners, to attend to such lesser matters. The man who brought in
the machinery built his mill half a mile from a spot Twiford had
chosen, on the creek that came down from beyond the bench, but
before it was finished he sold out to Jones and disappeared. Jones
moved his family to the millsite and with characteristic Yankee
ingenuity set the machinery running. It paid him rather better
than his lawyering; perhaps he knew more about a sawmill.

In the midst of the summer's bustle, James McClellan's wife
gave birth to a baby girl. The event brought immense elation to
the townsfolk: what better omen could there be of the new town's
increase? The accouchement was attended by two physicians: Dr.
Refine W. Twitchell, with his diploma from the University of
Michigan, arrived just in time to share with Dr. Allen the honor of
attending the first birth in Chatfield. When TwitchelFs wife bore
a son, not long after she had settled into the log house on Main
Street which served as drug store and office as well as residence,
the town's rejoicing was complete. Fannie McClellan and Herbert
Twitchell, Chatfield's first two babies, were praised by everyone
for giving the new town life's most significant sanction.

With only a few small patches of garden planted that year,
there was need for constant renewal of food supplies. Three stores
had been set up in Chatfield, and their owners kept hired men busy
hauling in supplies from the River, The trail to Winona was well
marked that summer and each trip brought back word of new set-
tlers clearing a spot of ground somewhere on the way. By another

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 25

year there would be a lot of Minnesota wheat, and Chatfield
would have a mill to grind its own flour. In the meantime the
women baked bread from imported flour and made preserves to
eat on it from the berries and plums and crab apples that grew at
their very doorsteps. Butter was almost unknown: the two or
three cows that had been brought into the valley scarcely gave
milk enough for the children, and the butter shipped in from older
sections was hardly fit to eat. When the salt pork, hauled in barrels
from the river, grew unbearably stale, venison was to be had for
occasional change, and there was plenty of prairie chickens and
wild duck. Even town-bred families, whose menfolk had no taste
for hunting, shared those delicacies when the country dwellers
brought game to exchange for the things they needed from the
storekeepers' shelves.

So the summer flowed on. Nobody knew just how many people
there were in town, because they came and they went. But on the
evening when a band of Winnebago Indians came up the Root
River from the south and set their tepees in the big bend where
Thomas Twiford, a year before, had seen the marks of their en-
campment, there were those who counted up, in secret uneasiness,
the number of white men in Chatfield. It came barely to twenty-
five, and the Indians were more than twice as many.

Their swarming over the town was tolerated with wary caution:
if they were not annoyed they would probably do no serious harm.
But when J. R. Jones visited their camp the next day and saw a
number of suspiciously fine horses, he lost no time in taking ac-
tion. Those horses were stolen. No doubt of it. The dirty vermin
must be taught a lesson in the majesty of white man's law.

He looked about for the largest and cleanest tepee and walked
boldly into it. To his amazement he found there a chieftain who
spoke a more excellent English than Jones himself could com-
mand. He said his name was William Bradford and showed a di-
ploma he had earned from a college in Illinois. When Jones re-
covered his breath, he asked the disturbingly self-possessed Indian
about the stolen horses. Bradford admitted the theft but said the
thieves were mere hangers-on of the tribe who had come along

26 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

without being asked. He admitted that 'the soldiers' might make
trouble if they heard of the matter and finally agreed to let the lo-
cal white authorities reclaim the horses and arrest one of the
thieves. To take more than one, he insisted, would cause resent-
ment in the tribe.

Jones hurried back to town and reported the dramatic situation
he had found. Squire Gere made out a justice warrant for the ar-
rest of the designated thief and swore in John Luark as constable
to serve the warrant, with a posse of six men to support the majesty
of the law. The hotheads who wanted to take their guns were over-
ridden and the seven newly sworn officers went to the Indian en-
campment armed only in the invincible superiority of white law
and white skins over red.

They made the arrest in due form and started back to town with
their prisoner. But nearly all the Indians followed the posse, with
so "evident a disposition to take the management of the matter
into their own hands/ 7 as one of the Chatfield men wrote years
later, that the posse paused to parley. They ended by releasing the
prisoner and paying three dollars a head to get possession of the
stolen horses. Thus was the dignity of the law upheld!

The Indians moved on a day or two later and the whole town
breathed easier. The recaptured horses were claimed the next day
by their original owners, who paid the Chatfield men what they
had given to the Indians. No one knew or cared that the ancestors
of the departed tribesmen had fought for and won the privilege of
hunting in that valley.

They did not come again that summer. But all about Chatfield
white men were coming, sometimes singly, more often with fam-
ilies, frequently in groups of two or three families, to make homes
for themselves. Most of them were of that older American stock
which accepted uncritically the generic label of Yankee, whether
they came from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, or the
younger states that lay west of the Appalachians. There were many
young men among them, and they had all worked on farms, in
wagon shops, in stores, or taught school before coming West. In

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 2J

the new country they did whatever job came first to hand, and
there was no dearth of jobs.

Here and there an older man represented a striking deviation
from the prevailing pattern of experience. One, for instance, had
sailed in his father's whaling ship from Nantucket around the
Horn before going to Indiana to make a farm out of wilderness
acres there. After twenty years he had sold that farm and gone to
Minnesota to get a bigger one for his growing family. Another,
who platted a village three or four miles up the river from Chat-
field, had worked thirteen years in the Chickering piano factory
in Boston, and served by night on the Boston city guard.

There was also a sprinkling of men bora in other countries. A
French-Canadian and two Englishmen took land south of Chat-
field that summer. One of the Englishmen, London-bred, had
served a term on a British man-o'-war. Four Irish settlers also en-
tered claims in that neighborhood, and a good many more marked
out and began work on claims they would pre-empt as soon as they
had lived in America the year required for first citizenship papers.
Norwegians, too, came into the region: the township east of Chat-
field had more Norwegians than Yankees.

As the number of settlers increased, little centers of population
grew up in the region. In each, some enterprising Yankee set up a
store and an inn and usually managed to get his crossroads desig-
nated as a post office. There was a particular pride in the latter,
even though the mails that summer came only haphazardly. A
post office put a place quite literally on the map and gave to the
people who lived near it the sustaining assurance that they were
known and taken into account by that vague entity, the Govern-
ment, which stood as a kind of symbol for the social order they
were re-creating in the West.

By the end of 1854, there were a dozen such centers within a
radius of ten or twelve miles of Chatfield. One of them began to
offer a real threat to Chatfield's pre-eminence. Carimona, twelve
miles due south of Chatfield, was almost exactly in the center of
the. new Fillmore County and its promoters were making much

28 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the same kind of campaign that Chatfield had pushed the year be-
fore in Winona.

Thomas Twiford was less alarmed by the threat to his county
seat than might have been expected. In the year he had spent in
Minnesota new ways of getting rich had opened before him. The
big money, he began to see, would come from railroads, and that
was a game a man played better with as few associates as he could
manage. He spent the summer getting rid of all but two of his
original partners. Grove Willis and Beecher Gere were good at pol-
itics, and politics was part of the railroad game. If a man played
a strong hand there he needn't worry about a county seat.

A lesson in the political involvements of railroad building was
already unfolding for Minnesota's enlightenment, though not all
of its implications were yet clear. As early as December 19, 1853
the very day that two county commissioners met in Twiford's
cabin to name Chatfield the county seat Minnesota Territory's
delegate gave notice in Congress of a bill to grant public lands in
aid of railroad construction in Minnesota. It was the first such bill
to be laid before Congress by a Territory and although the Senate
passed it without division the House brought the whole policy of
railroad land grants under review.

The first such grant had been made in 1850 to the Illinois Cen-
tral, under the skillful manipulations of Stephen A. Douglas, and
the company was using the proceeds from selling its lands to build
the road at twice the speed required by the terms of the grant. Yet
despite this demonstration of the effectiveness of the policy, there
was strong opposition to giving a corporation a million acres of
land which, as one Congressman said, belonged to the landless
people of the world. In May, 1854, the House decisively turned
down the proposal, largely on the grounds that the corporation al-
ready chartered by Minnesota's legislature was so constituted as
to offer no assurance that lands granted it would be used for any
other than speculative purposes. It was even rumored that Con-
gressmen supporting the bill had been illicitly provided with stock
in the company, and that the White House itself was not indiffer-
ent to the fortunes of the enterprise.

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 29

Chatfield and the other communities of southern Minnesota
were not too well pleased over the plans of the Minnesota and
Northwestern, for its proposed route lay north from St. Paul to
the head of Lake Superior, which was frozen shut for half the year.
What southern Minnesotans wanted was a railroad to connect
them with one of the railroads building west from Chicago and
southern Minnesota had four-fifths of the Territory's population.

Yet so great was the political effectiveness of the group inter-
ested in the Minnesota and Northwestern that in June they suc-
ceeded in getting Congress to grant Minnesota virtually the same
lands which had been denied the Territory the month before. To
be sure, the new law was drawn with the avowed intention of ex-
cluding the rather unsavory "New York speculators" of the Min-
nesota and Northwestern from getting those lands. The bill, as
voted on, provided that the lands should be held in trust by the
government of Minnesota until some "future" legislature decided
on their disposal; also, that the land should not be given to any
company already "constituted or organized." But in the interval
between the passage and the printing of the law someone per-
suaded the Clerk of the House to alter the or to and, and to omit
the word future. On the basis of the printed text the Minnesota
and Northwestern company set up its claim to the whole million
acres. The case dragged on for years, under varying pressures from
Washington, before it was finally lost by the company, but the im-
mediate effect on Minnesota railroad hopes was stunning disap-
pointment. When Congress discovered the fraud that had been
practiced upon it, the whole grant was rescinded, and Minnesota
was left without an acre to give to its clamoring railroad com-
panies.

The lesson of that episode was pondered long by Minnesotans.
Most agreed that such flagrant corruption deserved punishment,
though it seemed a pity that the whole Territory should suffer for
the chicanery of a few. More important was the light shed on the
relations between railroads and politics.

To build a railroad required more money than anyone in
southern Minnesota had. The best way to raise that money was

JO THE CHOSEN VALLEY

to get a land grant big enough to interest Eastern capitalists. The
only way to get a land grant was through political influence. Twi-
f ord, and Willis, and Gere, and men of similar interests in other
towns of the region, grew more and more absorbed in maneuvers
for political advantage.

They had plenty of support from their neighbors. In Chatfield
every man, woman and child was hungry for news of 'our railroad/
Chatfield men talked about the money a railroad would bring to
their town, and so to themselves; but the women put into words
what the men scarcely deigned to admit that a railroad would
bring them closer to the old home-places. The iron horse became
a kind of symbol for the whole process of webbing the frontier into
the larger life of the country.

That process was considerably helped on by the gigantic excur-
sion staged by the Chicago and Rock Island railroad the summer
of 1854. To celebrate the completion of the first railroad to reach
the Mississippi, its builders invited a thousand prominent East-
erners to share a lavish expedition to the river and thence by boat
to St. Paul. Every newspaper in the West acclaimed the excursion
as it passed, and when its financiers returned to their homes they
filled the Eastern periodicals with glowing praise of Minnesota
and its capital. Such public interest should make it easy, the set-
tlers in the valley felt, to find backing for a railroad to a promising
town like Chatfield. A line from Chicago would soon reach the
River opposite Winona and another was pushing fast towards La
Crosse, just opposite the mouth of the Root River. A connection
with either would bring Chatfield its rightful importance as the
first metropolis west of the River. ... So the summer's excited
speculation ran, and Chatfield, like every other settlement west
of the Mississippi, saw itself well on the way to metropolitan
glory.

But as the summer waned and travelers came less frequently,
the future grew less urgent and men bent their efforts to assure the
comfort of their families through the coming winter. Great stacks
of wood were piled up behind the little houses, and earth was

MR. TWIFORD'S TOWN 31

banked against outer walls to keep the worst cold off the floors.
Livestock that had wandered in the open all summer was brought
into hastily built log and straw shelters. Merchants sent extra
teams to the River and south into Iowa for supplies of pork and
flour. Housewives counted such dried and preserved foods as their
gardens and the forest had yielded, and hoped they would last un-
til spring brought new abundance.

And a school was begun. Chatfield had plenty of children: Dr.
Allen and two of the merchants mustered eleven of school age,
and those were only three out of twenty-odd families. It was un-
thinkable, the more enlightened argued, that when the legislature
had provided the legal machinery for public schools this fine new
town should not have one. Yet somehow no such organization
was effected. Instead, Miss Mary Edwards was employed by pri-
vate subscription, and held her school in a little log house on Fill-
more Street.

That school became, in the uncalculated fashion of human re-
lations, a symbol and a center for the town's self-sustaining life
in the face of rigorous cold. When summer blazed up in the final
glory of frost-touched maples and oaks, the school children and
half the rest of the town made a holiday of gathering the walnuts
and hazelnuts that lay thick on the ground. As the leaves fell and
the snow came there were spelldowns and 'sings' in the little
schoolhouse at early candlelighting, and folks came, afoot and by
ox team, from every corner of the valley to share the brief assur-
ance of 'a party/ At a box social to raise money for books and pen-
cils for the school, every girl and woman brought a lunch in a gaily
decorated box for which the men bid against each other. When
the serious business of the evening was done, whether spelling
school or debate, the benches were piled against the walls, and, if
someone had a fiddle, the dancing was gay. If there was no fiddle,
the games that went with rollicking songs gave as much pleasure.

There was "Happy Is the Miller," for instance, where the cou-
ples marched round in a circle, the girls on the outside and a part-
nerless man inside the circle waiting his chance. They sang:

32 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Happy is the Miller that lives by himself,
As the wheel turns round he is gaining his wealth,
One hand in the hopper and the other in the bag,
As the wheel rolls round he cries out "Grab/'

At the last word each man stepped forward one place, and the one
in the center tried hard in that shift to get the partner he wanted.

Or, they might play "King William/' For this the whole party
joined hands in a ring and marched round and round under the
uplifted hands of a boy and a girl, who dropped their hands to stop
the chosen one at the right point in the song:

King William was King James's son
Upon a royal race he run
He wore a star upon his breast
To represent the Prince of War.

Go choose your East ... Go choose your West

Go choose the one that you love best,

If she's not here to take your part

Then choose another with all your heart.

Down on this carpet you must kneel

As sure as the grass grows in the field

Salute your bride with a kiss so sweet

And rise again upon your feet.

Nor did the singing end when the party was over. As the little
groups set off on their various ways towards home the valley rang
with their songs, the songs that had been sung by many a campfire
as these and other people made their way into the West.

Away to Minnesota a journey I'll go

For to double my fortune as other men do.

Another song that went with the crunching of feet in the snow:

Cheer up brothers, as we go
Over the mountains, westward ho!
When we've wood and prairie land

Won by our toil,
We'll reign like kings in Fairy Land

Lords of the soil.

MR. TWIFORD S TOWN 33

Householders paused to listen a moment as the singers passed out
of hearing:

Then over the hills in legions, boys,

Fair freedom's star
Points to the sunset regions, boys,

Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Whatever fears or loneliness might lurk in grimmer hours were for
the time forgotten.

And there were grim hours. When January let loose its fury the
hills were no shelter against the blizzards that blotted the world in
a frenzy of snow, or the sly cold that crept into bed with the sleep-
ers. John Luark's wife died in the depths of that winter's cold, de-
spite the care of two doctors. Every man in town took his turn in
the sad labor of chipping out a burial place in ground flint-hard
with frost. They made her grave on the slope between the little
house she lived in and the road that wound up the side of Winona
Hill The townsfolk stood silent about the grave that January of
1855 as the first of their dead was buried.

PART

Two

The Lovdy Land

I

THE MAN SETTLED the heavy plow into place and leaned a little on its
handles, looking back over the furrow he had broken. The soil curled
black and shining over the edge of the flowering sod. Never before had
it felt the touch of the sun. Since the earth was made these acres had
never been stirred. He leaned over and broke a lump with his hand. He
pressed it against his mouth, ravished by the moment of delight. It was
his, this earth. His strength had redeemed it from the forest.

All winter, in cold that lasted longer than Norway's, he had struggled
with the trees that stubbornly claimed it as their own. Now they were
conquered, cut up for the fires of his house, their roots destroyed in
the smouldering piles that had burned through the days of the sun's
reluctant returning. His! Five acres of field that he had made.

Here in this virgin earth he would plant wheat five acres of it
Bread for his wife and their little ones. Maybe, even, his Oluphina
would make the white bread that only rich ladies made in the Old
Country. White bread on his table! From wheat that he had made
grow, on land that was his own.

A meadow lark skimmed the grasses of the field and settled on a
stump at its edge; its song rang across the morning, the very voice of the
land. The man laid his hands strongly on the plow and urged his
patient oxen across the field. Now that the earth permitted itself to be
worked there was nothing he could not do, in this America, this Min-
nesota, where the government let a man own all the land he would
faithfully serve.

"Chee-chee, Buck!" he shouted. "Chee-chee, Bright!" The furrow
swelled over the Maytime flowers and lay still beneath his feet as he
moved forward.

36

II

IT WAS THE LAND that drew the people into the West. Working on
their stony acres, or in the new-fangled factories where machinery
cut into a man's pride of making, men dreamed of the independ-
ence they could find on the fabulous lands of the West. The rich
and powerful of older regions, who wanted 'hands' for their ex-
panding industries, might protest as they would. Men were not
enduringly bought by factory wages when virgin acres lay waiting
in the West.

It was the land that had defeated the purpose of colonial propri-
etors to keep in the New World the same social strata that existed
in the Old. In both Massachusetts and Virginia the leaders in-
tended to keep their bondservants in decent subjection to author-
ity. But when land was to be had for the clearing, and the man of
property was seen to die as readily as his servant, of dysentery or an
Indian arrow, the bondsmen plucked up courage to defy the wil-
derness, and so breached the feudal pattern.

The land played its part, too, in helping thirteen colonies to be-
come a country of united states. Each of those colonies claimed
vast regions west of its actual settlement. Conflicts over their
claims added to the troubles of the Continental Congress even
before independence was won. When those claims were finally
pooled under the single authority of the Congress, a large step
was taken towards the growth of a united country.

It was not easy to develop a workable policy for making use of
that land. What was to be done with obstinate creatures who
ignored government regulations and built their huts and grubbed

37

38 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

their fields OE whatever spot of the public domain suited their
fancy?

Congress 'settled' the question not once but many times. In
1800, local land offices were set up in what was then the West.
There land could be bought in minimum tracts of three hundred
and twenty acres, for as little as two dollars an acre. Twenty years
later that price was reduced, because of protest from Western
voters, to a dollar and a quarter an acre, and as few as eighty acres
could be bought

Still settlers persisted in pushing ahead of the legal authority
and devised such means as they could for giving their claims the
semblance of legality. With the passion for organization so char-
acteristic of American life, they set up Claim Associations com-
plete with officers, constitutions, and by-laws. (It was such an
association that had upheld Henry Gere's claim at Winona.)
Their chief function was to protect actual settlers, who had oc-
cupied and improved a piece of land, from being outbid and dis-
possessed by 'outsiders' who tried to buy the land for speculative
purposes. Their methods were direct rather than subtle, and they
were effective, especially in Iowa where the movement came to
its height during the 1830'$. (The grandsons of those Claim As-
sociation men remembered the lesson a century later when Iowa
farm mortgages were being foreclosed by banks and other 'out-
side' agencies.)

But Western people were not content to remain outside the
law. Again and again Congress was petitioned to grant pre-
emption rights to particular areas where the settlers felt them-
selves peculiarly imperiled by speculators. When the panic of
1837 broke the fever of speculation, the idea of general pre-
emption was strongly pushed. In 1841, Congress passed an act
which was supposed to make it forever impossible for any but
actual settlers to claim a share in the public domain.

The act provided that as soon as a man had cleared and fenced
a half acre of land, built a house on it and lived there for a month,
he could file in the nearest land office a declaration of intention
which gave him a temporary right to hold as much as one hun-

THE LOVELY LAND 39

died sixty acres. A nominal fee of two dollars and a half was
charged for the filing, but no further cost was involved until the
land was proclaimed for sale at public auction on a date fixed
by presidential decree. Before that date the settler could buy
'his 7 land at the minimum price of a dollar and a quarter an acre.

Any citizen who was twenty-one could pre-empt, and widows
or minors were allowed to file in the same way in the absence of
husband or father. Immigrants who had been one year in the
country and had their first citizenship papers could also file such
claims.

Such was the law when the Chatfield region was settled. The
workings of that law were inevitably tied to the workings of
the government's Indian policy. The gaudy fiction of national
sovereignty attributed to each separate tribe had served well to
rationalize the endless series of border wars that cleared the West
for headlong settlement.

Minnesota's first delegate to Congress made a stirring appeal
for a revision of that policy that should be "worthy of a ...
generous Christian people. . . . Your pioneers," 7 Henry Hastings
Sibley said, "are encircling the home of the red man as with a
wall of fire . . . you must approach the tribes with terms of
conciliation and real friendship or ... this nation will subject
itself to additional and awful retribution of Providence/' Sibley
had lived for more than a decade among the Sioux and knew
whereof he spoke.

But his plea was ignored. A year later the Sioux were removed
from their ancient hunting grounds by the old, bad method of
negotiating a 'treaty/

They were reluctant. It took two months of government beef
and traders' champagne to persuade them, that summer of 1856.
A St. Paul editor reported the 'lean and hungry look" of the
tribesmen and cited the proverb about the Devil bobbing for a
miser's soul with a shilling. "So Uncle Sam baits for Sioux with
bullocks, and the way they take the bait off is amazing/'

When the 'treaty' was finally signed one of the eldest Sioux
said: "You think it is a great deal you are giving for this country.

40 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

I don't think so, for both our lands and all we get for them will
come at last to ... the white men who trade with us." But
the editor praised the treaty because it would teach the Indians
"thrift, economy, and avarice, 'that good old gentlemanly vice/ "

He also chanted prophecies of "magic villages and cities" in
the newly opened Suland, that was "larger and fairer than Ohio/'
Even when he wrote, two years before Thomas Twiford chose
his valley, isolated cabins were being built up and down the west
bank of the Mississippi. By 1854, when land offices were opened
at Winona and at Brownsville, farther down the river, claims
had been staked on most of the land for twenty miles west.

It was in the Brownsville office that Thomas Twiford registered
his claim to 156.48 acres on August 8, 1854. He paid cash
$195.60 that same day.

Twice the President announced a date for the sale of those
lands, and twice the sale was called off. Settlers were not eager
to pay out hard cash, and they were apt to vote for politicians
who could get a postponement of the necessity. When rumors
rose that still a third sale date would be canceled, the Browns-
ville officials protested strongly. The sale was urgently necessary,
they wrote, for the sake of "the morals and peace of the country/'
Houses were being burned down and families driven or dragged
from the premises by rival claimants. Things had come to such
a pass that "if a man so much as walks over or looks at another
man's land the owner brussels up for a fight."

Between thirty and forty thousand people poured into
Minnesota the summer of 1855 three or four times as many
people as lived in the Territory at the beginning of the year.
Along the waterways and the upland trails they poured so fast
that when the sale was finally held that October, the land was
bought for fifty miles west of the river.

In that sale Brownsville felt the cold breath of loss. If its land
office was moved farther west there would be little to keep alive
the gaudy excitement on which the village had thrived.

But Chatfield expanded in confident pride. It had three times
as many buildings in October as it had in March. Where else but
to Chatfield could the land office be moved?

Ill

O. S. ARMSTRONG, a young Vermonter who came up from Iowa
the summer of 1855 and taught a few weeks of subscription school
in Chatfield, counted twenty-six houses in the town. Five were
framed of lumber sawed in J. R. Jones's mill across the river from
the town proper. Young Armstrong bought one of the frame
houses on Fillmore Street, and late that fall brought his wife
to live in it. She stayed at Isaac Day's hotel while the walls of
the little house were being plastered; the first night spent in the
new house was so cold that the plaster froze solid. It didn't thaw
out until spring.

In that chilly place young Mary Armstrong kept house as best
she could. There was one fine advantage in the location: they
lived just across the street from a pump that supplied water to
most of the town. The pump was fed by an extension of the hol-
lowed log pipes which carried water from the spring behind John
Luark's house it was easier to lay pipes than to dig to water
through the many feet of stone that underlay the bench.

All these things young Armstrong recorded in his diary. Chat-
field, as he described it, did not sound like much of a town, yet
to the people who lived there in the winter of 1855 it was al reac ty
pregnant with the hope of a new life, already knit together in
the sharing of significant memories. The dignity of the enfolding
hills was somehow wrought into the necessities which adapted old
customs to the new country, and afterwards the people who had

4*

42 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

lived in that place remembered how they had been comforted by
the ancient psalm: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from
whence cometh my help/'

Here, for example, a man died, and there was no fitting place
for his burial. John Luark's wife had been laid to rest on the hill-
side behind her home, but it was unthinkable that every house-
hold should bury its dead in its own back yard. When James Mc-
Clellan died, in February of 1855, the men of the town took
characteristic action for the future. They organized a Cemetery
Association and bought five acres of land a stone's throw from
the spot where Twiford first saw the valley. When they buried
James McClellan in that plot there was grief at the loss of one so
closely associated with the town's beginnings, but there was also
a kind of reassurance in the beauty that surrounded "God's new
half acre."

There was assurance, too, and challenge, when the Reverend
Gardiner K Clark came to Squire Gere's house one Sunday
afternoon and preached the first sermon ever heard in the Chat-
field valley. He had arrived a few weeks before in Saratoga, half-
way between Chatfield and Winona, to organize a church in
that thriving village, but with true missionary fervor he extended
his pastoral concern to other settlements. So many came to hear
him preach that the little log house would not hold them, and
benches were improvised in the clearing behind the cabin.

The Reverend Mr. Clark was a tall and striking figure with
white hair that hung to his shoulders. When he rose and an-
nounced his text, from the second chapter of Hebrews, the con-
gregation settled to intense consideration of his words: "How
shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" Through the
accents of sound classical and theological learning he spoke his
benevolent understanding of Western conditions, and the hearts
of his hearers were stirred to the need of a church for their grow-
ing town. That was in midsummer of 1855.

The need found an answer sooner than, at that moment, could
have been expected. Late in the summer a young man named

THE LOVELY LAND 43

George Stephens rode into town and announced that he was
licensed as a Methodist local preacher. He lacked the learning
and the experience of Father Clark, but so effective were his
activities that on November 24 and 25 the Methodist Episcopal
Church of Chatfield held its first quarterly conference in the
stone blacksmith shop on Main Street, with a presiding elder
from one of the river towns to legitimatize the occasion. His
presence was a visible assurance that Chatfield was webbed into
the larger pattern of civilized life through its activities as part
of an established church organization.

Although a church body flourished in Chatfield the second
winter, the village still had no public school. The men who sup-
ported subscription schools for their own children took the lead
in trying to set up a free public school, but they were opposed
chiefly by the poorest and most westernized people in Chatfield.
Men who had been born in Ohio or Illinois were apt to be filled
with the old frontiersman's disdain for "book-lamin'," that cut
down no trees and made no crops. Why should anyone want to
pay out good cash-money for school taxes to educate other
people's brats? Thus the argument ran.

By the end of April, 1855, ^he discussion had gone so far that
"the electors of Chatfield" met "at the house of Isaac Day,"
innkeeper, and organized a school district. Three sound Yankee
citizens * were elected trustees and the meeting was adjourned to
the following week. But the adjourned meeting was never called.
Perhaps the original group had acted in semi-secrecy, counting
on the weight of an accomplished fact to overcome the opposi-
tion. Whatever the reason, the "Chatfield School District" did
not meet again until September 14, and the worn calf-bound
minute book gives no clue to the reason for the long hiatus.

At the September meeting those present (there is no record
of the number) "voted to build a School House . . . and to raise
a tax of ($400) Four Hundred Dollars to apply to its erection."
A "comity" of three was appointed to select a site for the school

* T. J. Safford, B. F. Ferrington, Dr. R. W. TwitchelL

44 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and the trustees were "instructed to receive sealed proposals for
building a School House up to Saturday, Sept 22, 1855, at 6
o'clock P.M."

Once more opposition developed, and on November 9 the
trustees called another meeting of the electorate. There the
trustees were instructed "to see" the man who had been given
the contract for the new building and "compromise with him to
let the School House that he contracted to build lay over till
Spring/' By way of compromise the subscription school begun
by a Mr. Colby from New Hampshire was to be made public to all
children of the district by levying "a Tax on the property of the
District to pay for his services/' There were still a lot of people
for whom larnin' was a waste of both time and money.

But when it came to railroads . . . Ah, that was a different
matter altogether. If a man was smart he could make fabulous
numbers of dollars out of the business of railroad building. If
he wasn't quite smart enough for that he still stood to gain from
the success of those who were: everybody within fifty miles of
a railroad would gather a part of the golden shower that would
follow its Midas-magic.

Chatfield folks had done a lot of planning about railroads
since the injudicious rascality of the Minnesota and North-
western had cost the Territory a cool million acres that might
have been used for railroad building. When the petition went
to the legislature, praying for the incorporation of the Root
River and Southern Minnesota Railroad company, only three
of the twenty-three signers were Eastern financiers. Three were
St. Paul men with strong interests in the southern part of
Minnesota. The rest all lived in the region where the railroad
was to be built. They felt that seventeen votes out of twenty-three
were a safe majority to protect the region in any possible situation.
Thomas Twiford and Beecher Gere represented Chatfield in
the company.

The charter was granted by the legislature March 22, 1855.
It authorized the company to build two branches. One, a modest
proposal, was to run south and west from St. Paul to the Missouri

THE LOVELY LAND 45

River. The other, of much more immediate interest to Chatfield,
was to follow the Root River northward from a point opposite
La Crosse, in Wisconsin, to connect with the railroad that an-
other company was to build west from Winona. Two Wisconsin
roads were already pushing westward from Lake Michigan to-
ward Winona and La Crosse. The Root River and Southern
Minnesota would insure its patrons a double connection to
Chicago and all points east. Chatfield was jubilant over this
assurance of its future.

But rejoicing was tempered by outrage when the text of the
bill was read. It was found to carry a provision removing the
county seat from Chatfield to Carimona, the village whose pre-
tensions had already caused much heartburning among Chat-
field people. It was dirty politics, they cried. But the fact was
accomplished.

A few craven souls followed the county records to the new
county seat in the first shock of the news, but most Chatfield
people, including Thomas Twiford, shrugged off Carimona's
gleeful assumption of triumph. There was bigger game to be
stalked in the political jungle. Chatfield was after the Land Office,
a much better way to make money than the capture of a mere
county seat. And while they waited for that consummation, they
worked to rebuke Carimona for its presumption. A county elec-
tion was called by the legislature for April, 1856, to choose be-
tween Carimona and two other villages as county seat. Chatfield
men set up so large a building fund for Preston that the choice
fell upon that new little village, which was safely within the
scope of Chatfield influence. With the expected Land Office,
Chatfield boasted it would have no time to bother with county
affairs.

The Federal order removing the Land Office from Browns-
ville to Chatfield was issued in May, 1856. The transfer was
not easy for the officials. Every team in the region was at work
in the fields through all the daylight hours, and outrageous prices
had to be paid for hauling families and households and office
records across the country. Once under way the party found

46 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the so-called roads so deep in mud, and the streams so
flooded, that travel was a perpetual peril. At each fording place
wagons had to be partly unloaded and two or three teams
hitched to each one, with further unloading and reloading to
get everything through the spring freshets. Each branch and
affluent of the Root River, which laced the region, was a new
and separate hazard.

For the two chief officers' delicately bred wives the trip was
an extreme ordeal. Mrs. Bennett, from the bluegrass country of
Kentucky, left her two-year-old daughter with friends in Browns-
ville. The eldest boy was fourteen and could look after himself
on the journey, but there was a little girl of nine and a baby a
year old to take care of on the trip, and Mrs. Bennett was already
carrying her fifth child. Mrs. McKinney, Virginia-bred, was more
advanced in pregnancy and had five children, ranging from thir-
teen to two years, in her care.

Yet when the sun was high and the young, green leaves shone
in its warmth, even fatigue could not obscure the wonder of the
opening land. Last year's fields were already bright with spears
of newly sown wheat, and where straining oxen broke the virgin
soil the travelers felt themselves witnessing the birth of a new
civilization.

The party eventually reached Chatfield without serious mis-
hap, and on the thirteenth of June the Land Office was opened
for business in a small frame building which Thomas Twiford
had put up between First and Second on the street bearing his
name. There was plenty of work to be done at once, for settlers
were pouring westward at a rate to make the most orderly pens
leap with superlatives of delight at the flood of immigration
which was raising Minnesota to unprecedented heights of pros-
perity. There was land in abundance for all, and to five million
acres of that land legal title could be cleared only in the Chat-
field Land Office.

The town boomed. Nobody had time to keep count of the
new buildings going up during the summer of 1856, or the new
people who came. An 'addition' to the town was laid out beyond

THE LOVELY LAND 47

the river and christened West Chatfield, and a dozen families
settled there. People came from everywhere, drawn by the lure
of such leaping prices for land as the country had never seen be-
fore. One traveler reported that he could lend out the few hun-
dred dollars he carried with him for such interest as would pay
all the expenses of his summer's travel and still leave him a 6
per cent return on his investment.

The greater number of the newcomers were farm folks,
single men and families, who sought land where their labor could
make a home out of the wilderness. But increasingly ChatEeld
drew to itself men of all sorts who hoped in the general specula-
tive increase to add to their own wealth.

Surveyors and lawyers and moneylenders swarmed in the Land
Office town. Men brought in stocks of dry goods and groceries
and liquors and went to storekeeping. An English brickmaker
set up a brick yard near the sawmill, the first one in all of South-
ern Minnesota, and a brick store was built from the first run of
its kiln. Other men built wagons, or furniture, or houses as the
occasion demanded.

Chatfield had many of those "proper individuals*' whom
Emerson praised as "capable of thought and of new choice and
the application of their hands to new labor." But it also dis-
played "the vulgarity of wealth" that stood against "any high
direction of public money," which Emerson was rebuking as
"the sad lesson of these days."

New England's great philosopher and essayist was to lecture
a year or two later in St. Paul, but it is doubtful that his words on
that occasion found much hearing in Chatfield except as a kins-
man living there may have repeated them. For a cousin of Emer-
son's was among the lawyers who moved from Brownsville to
Chatfield. Christopher Gore Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson
had the same grandmother, and Ripley's father, the Reverend
Samuel Ripley of the Old Manse in Concord, was, Emerson said,
"The hoop that held us all staunch." His mother, Sarah Alden
Ripley, was a close friend of the Aunt Mary Moody Emerson who
was so potent an exhorter of the essayist in his early years.

48 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Mrs. Ripley was known as one of the most wonderful scholars
of her time. At the age of fourteen she was widely read in the
classics of the Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian tongues
and had studied much mathematics and science. President
Everett of Harvard said there was not a place on his faculty
that Mrs. Ripley could not fill. She would have delighted in a
life of solitary scholarship, she wrote her friend Mary Moody
Emerson, but yielded to the urgency of family and friends that
she marry Mr. Ripley. When his salary as minister of the church
in Waltham proved insufficient for their growing family, Mrs.
Ripley and her husband conducted a tutorial school for boys
seeking admission to Harvard. She herself cooked and scrubbed
besides teaching Greek to "her boys/' until the Ripley children
were all grown and independently established. Thereupon Mr.
Ripley resigned his church and with his devoted wife retired to
live in the Old Manse which Hawthorne had vacated only the
previous spring.

The Ripleys' first son was named for an elder friend,
Christopher Gore, who went to London on the Claims Com-
mission acting under the Jay Treaty in 1789. That son, born in
1820, followed family tradition by graduating from Harvard; after
a further year studying law there he entered the office of a Boston
law firm in 1842, where he remained until he went West

His decision to leave the familiar and prosperous associations
of Boston was no sudden impulse, for Gore, as his sisters called
him, had always chafed under the restraints of New England
propriety and liked nothing better than to hear Cousin Waldo's
reports of his Western trips. When his suit for a gracious young
widow, Fanny Houghton Gage, came up against her steadfast
refusal to marry until her daughter should be settled in life,
C. G. Ripley felt that only distance could make endurable the
constraint imposed upon him by his lady's immovable decision.
He went to Brownsville to practice law, and at the first hint of
the Land Office transfer pre-empted a piece of land lying be-
tween Twiford's town plat and the Root River. When the Land

THE LOVELY LAND

Office was actually moved he set up bachelor's hall in the little
log cabin on his land.

Another figure prominent in the pageant of Chatfield's expan-
sive life in the summer of 1856 was Ignatius F. O'Ferrall. He was
three years younger than Ripley and was born in Maryland; his
grandfather, first of the family in America, had sat in the Virginia
legislature when Patrick Henry uttered his treasonable cry of
"liberty or death" and his father later sat in the same legislature.

The OTerrall family, however, had older and prouder claims
to distinction than mere American Revolutionary activity. They
were descended, as every biographical notice of I. F. OTerrall set
forth (in later years when Minnesota became avid of local biog-
raphy) "from Rossius, son of Rodicus Magnus, or Rory Mor, 86th
monarch of Ireland, and Maud, Queen of Conaught, from whom
was descended Fergal, king of Conmacue, whose great grandson,
Braon, was the first to assume the name of O'Ferrall."

I. F. OTerrall did not introduce himself to Chatfield in that
manner. He came there from California, where he had gone in
1849 in the very van of the gold rush and mined for a year. After-
wards he turned to storekeeping and bought a share in a coast-
wise steamboat company, which paid dividends of 5 per cent per
month. Five years of such returns gave him ample stake for new
investments, and some chance of association or rumor on the long
overland trail east from California brought him to Chatfield.

Quite another sort of person was Dr. Augustus Trow, who ar-
rived in Chatfield before the frost was fairly out of the roads in
the spring. He was born in Massachusetts in 1832 and was grad-
uated from Castleton Medical College in Vermont in 1853. He
had served in the Vermont legislature and was ordained as a lay
preacher of the Baptist faith.

One of the first Sunday afternoons after his arrival in Chat-

50 THE CHOSE?* VALLEY

field he preached to a company gathered in an oak grove a little
north of the house James McClellan had built, reading the Word
of God from a sheepskin-covered Bible that his children and his
grandchildren were to cherish for years afterwards. So effective
were his exhortations on the Sabbath of May 21, 1856, that four-
teen people then and there signed the covenant establishing a
Baptist Society in Chatfield.

Chatfield's second church organization flourished. In the course
of the summer the Baptists collected nine hundred dollars toward
the erection of a church building, and they got the structure com-
pleted before snow fell that fall. In August they entertained the
representatives of three other Baptist churches in the region.

Those four churches organized themselves as the Southern
Minnesota Baptist Association and appointed two of their mem-
bers as "Messengers" to the State Baptist Association which had
been organized in St. Paul four years earlier and would shortly
be holding its annual meeting in that city. Other "Messengers"
were appointed to visit a similar meeting of a Wisconsin group.
The Chatfield gathering also petitioned the Baptist missionary
society in the East to send three missionaries and a colporteur, or
peddler of religious tracts, to labor in the rapidly opening field of
southern Minnesota. There was no regional isolationism among
these people of the opening West. They sought by every means
within their knowledge to knit themselves close into the larger
life of their times.

The agitation for more adequate schools continued. A school
census taken in January, 1856, showed seventy-nine persons in the
district between the ages of five and twenty-one, and it was
guessed that at least as many more came in the course of the sum-
mer. A new board of trustees elected that spring, with Squire Gere
as its chairman, succeeded in persuading the electors to levy a
tax of six hundred dollars for building a school. The tax was aug-
mented by four hundred dollars of Voluntary' subscriptions col-
lected from the 'land office gentry' whose capital lay beyond reach

THE LOVELY LAND Jl

of the school district's taxing power. A frame schoolhouse was
actually built that summer one of seventy-five new buildings
added to the town. It was "30 x 40 feet in the main," and twelve
feet from the floor to the roof an improvement over the hud-
dled quarters previously used on the third floor of one of the
'hotels' but still inadequate to the community's school need.

Men and women whose children were ready for instruction be-
yond the level of grammar school remembered the academies of
Eastern communities and began to talk of a similar institution for
Chatfield. The talk was crystallized into action by the urgency of
Augustus Haven, who set up a store in Chatfield that summer. He
had been for several years a trustee of the Black River Academy
in his native Vermont and his wife had taught in that institution
before her marriage. Their fifteen-year-old son George had been
for two years a student in Boston's notable English High School,
but his parents were not ready to consider his education complete.
Moreover, their younger daughter would be through with gram-
mar school in a few years. Augustus Haven took the lead in peti-
tioning the legislature to charter the Chatfield Academy.

The charter was granted late in 1856 and the list of its incorpo-
rators was a list of 'sound Yankee' names. Only two of them had
been born west of the Alleghenies, four were New York men, four
were natives of Vermont. Beecher Gere, Captain McKenny, and
Augustus Haven formed the executive board, and its chairman,
Mr. Haven, was also treasurer of the corporation, t Eight of these
men remained a part of Chatfield's life for many years: lived
there, raised families, and carried their full share in making the
community life.

t The incorporators were the following men, grouped liere according to their

birthplaces:

Vermont New York Others

C. M. Lovell Chauncey Jones I. F. OTerraH (Md.)

C. G. Hawley T. J. Safford C. G. Ripley (Mass.)

Augustus Haven G. W. Willis A. H. Trow (Mass.)

R. W. Twitchell F. G. Raymond J. H. McKenny (Pa.)

Mflo White W. B. Gere (Pa.)

Haven, McKenny, Hawley, and Willis were the only ones who were forty or

more years old.

52 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Yet oddly enough the man who first conceived the town had no
part in this or in any group activities for other purposes than the
getting of money. Thomas Twiford evidently felt he couldn't af-
ford to fuss around with things like schools if he was to keep his
mind on his business.

The biggest business was still the building of a railroad, Thomas
Twiford was certain. Getting the company chartered was only
the beginning. Stock must be sold both locally and in the East
where money was more abundant Political alliances must be
strengthened in behalf of a future land grant, and the control of
the whole affair gathered into as few hands as possible.

One of the most vigorous personalities drawn into the cause
was Henry Whitcomb Holley, a civil engineer from upstate New
York who invested in the Root River Railroad. When word got
about that J. H. McKenny, receiver of the Land Office, was about
to start a Democratic newspaper in Chatfield, Holley was per-
suaded to bring out equipment and set up a rival sheet.

The newly fledged Republican party had as yet comparatively
few adherents in Minnesota but men in the business of getting
favors from the government foresaw that their efforts would be
facilitated by the growth of a second party which could be played
against the dominant one. The gathering tensions of the 'irrepres-
sible conflict' between North and South, together with Western
unrest at the administration of the land laws, afforded hopeful
opportunity for such developments.

So the month of October, 1856, saw two newspapers begin
their careers in Chatfield. The Chatfield Democrat published its
first issue on the first day of October: Beecher Gere took an arm-
ful of the papers as they came from the press and passed them
out in all the business places of town, and wherever he stopped
men forgot all other business in their excitement over the town's
first newspaper.

"Cap" McKenny had turned out a good-looking sheet, with
eight columns of fine print on every one of its four pages. The
front and back pages had been printed somewhere in the East,
with news from Washington and scandal from New York, and

THE LOVELY LAND 53

abundant advertisements of patent medicines and books on phre-
nology and other popular subjects. The inside pages were printed
on McKenny's own press; its editorial salutatory declared sup-
port for the great Democracy and steadfast friendship to all that
made for the prosperity of Chatfield in particular and southern
Minnesota in general.

The Democrats swelled with pride, and the Republicans guf-
fawed in derision, and three weeks later the positions were re-
versed on the appearance of Holley's Chatfield Republican, which
proudly named itself the "sworn foe of cant/' and called slavery
the only real issue of the day. But through all the partisan chaffer
ran a strong uniting pride that Chatfield had not one but two
weekly newspapers when the town was less than three years old.
Find a town anywhere in the West to beat that!

But newspapers, the best of them, could not be eaten, and Chat-
field stirred from dreams of greatness to the uneasy realization
that its supply of flour was dangerously low. Heavy fall rains had
so mired the narrow trails that for weeks no supplies had been
hauled into the valley. Storekeepers counted their sacks of flour
and wondered if they would last until snow came and bobsleds
could be sent to the river.

When the rain let up for a few days young Milo White, a Ver .
monter who had bought a store during the summer, borrowed the
strongest team he could find and set off for Iowa; the Territorial
road south was easier traveling than the one to Winona, and
Iowa had been settled long enough to have flour mills of its
own.

The weather was reasonably good and the wagon empty going
down. He bought all the flour his wagon would carry and started
back. Still no serious rain hindered him, though the trail was far
from easy going, especially as he got nearer to Chatfield. The
night before what he had hoped would be the last day of his
journey, the heavens let loose their floods and he had no choice
but to wait. When the rain finally stopped, the second morning,
he set off to a heart-breaking task.

The last part of that journey cost days instead of hours. At one

54 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

point he carried the flour on his back, sack by sack, across a swollen
stream which by great good fortune was spanned with a fallen
tree. When the flour was safely across and piled on a rough scaf-
folding of branches to keep it off the sodden ground, he managed
to swim his team, with the wagon, across the torrent. There he
reloaded the flour and went on, soaked to the skin, in an icy No-
vember wind.

At Preston, the new county seat, he found the river so enlarged
above a new milldam that there was no possibility of taking a
team through. The men at work on the mill helped him; they
spent a day and much of a night building a kind of roadway along
the top of the dam to get the team and wagon across. They car-
ried most of the flour across on their backs.

Milo White got home at the end of the next day, every sack
of his precious load miraculously unspoiled. There was not a
pound of flour left in his own or any other store. The last had
been divided out that day among the families most urgently in
need.

The people of Chatfield slept better that night for knowing
that Milo White was safely returned. But with their gratitude
went redoubled certainty that they must get a railroad, and at
once. The iron horse, that ran in every weather, would put them
forever beyond the clutch of famine's bony hand.

The stockholders of the Root River and Southern Minnesota
had met in Chatfield a few weeks earlier to elect a new board of
directors. Five of the nine directors, and three-fifths of the execu-
tive committee, were Chatfield men t a safe majority to assure
the town against the connivings of rival interests.

The preliminary survey of the route was already begun. Holley,
the editor of the Republican, who was in charge of that survey,
informed the readers of his paper that the accumulating data
proved conclusively that the cost of building railroads in the West
was much less per mile than the cost of Eastern roads, and urged

J T. B. Twiford was treasurer of the company and H. L. Edwards, Beecher
Gere's partner, its secretary. Beecher Gere, T. J. Safford, and Charles Wilson were
the other Chatfield directors. On the executive committee were Gere and Safford,
with Twiford as chairman.

THE LOVELY LAND 55

Chatfield people to keep their friends in the East informed on
that and relevant matters. If they would subscribe to the Repub-
lican for their Eastern friends they would do a double service to
humanity: those in the East, authentically informed on the prog-
ress of the Root River Railroad, would be able to put their money
into it as the finest possible investment; and public opinion would
be prepared to insist that Congress grant lands to so Important an
enterprise in behalf of the general welfare.

Chatfield gave a hearty welcome to a meeting early in Decem-
ber of "those friendly to the railroad/' The Baptists threw open
their newly completed church building, and despite miserable
roads and weather it was well filled with delegations from half a
dozen surrounding towns.

The meeting was informed that $50,000 worth of stock had
been sold, and it voted hearty thanks to Colonel T. B. Stoddard,
of La Crosse, "for his untiring energies in the services of the enter-
prise/' Stoddard was then in Washington, working for a land
grant, and the meeting approved committees to select an addi-
tional representative and to raise funds to send him to Colonel
Stoddard's assistance in Washington.

Both Democrat and Republican praised the work of that meet-
ing. The Root River and Southern Minnesota was no mere "two
town affair/' they agreed; it was "an important link in the vast
chain of railroads stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific" and
would open all of southern Minnesota, from the Mississippi to
the Missouri, to the blessings of immigration.

The enthusiasm engendered by the meeting made it easy to
raise a fund of $13,000, and James Cavanaugh, a young lawyer
already known in Washington for a special investigation he had
made for the Land Office the winter before, was chosen to work
with Colonel Stoddard. He set off for the capital with the un-
divided good wishes of every man and woman in town.

Then the snow came.

Out on the prairies some miles west of Chatfield, Timothy Hal-
loran and his brother Ed, who had left Ireland three or four years
before and reached the Chatfield region only that fall, were living

56 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the required month on their eighty-acre claim. The rain had kept
them so short of supplies that for weeks they had only pilot bread
and tea to eat. When it stopped Timothy Halloran set off for
High Forest, the nearest village, to buy groceries. It began to snow
soon after he set off, and when he started back that evening he
was glad for the company of an older man who lived on a neigh-
boring claim.

The way lay six miles through "a six-inch fall of new snow, over
tall grass and hazel brush, breaking our own way/* as Timothy
Halloran wrote forty years later. "After the first two miles Mr.
Hennesey began to play out, and called to me that he could not
see. I went back, took the rest of his load and held him by the arm,
dragging him along for the next four miles until we reached
home. The night was very dark and he would never have reached
home alone/'

That was the beginning of a memorable winter. Within two
weeks the snow lay two and a half feet deep on level ground, and
drifts piled over the eaves of many a little house in the valley.

Timothy Halloran came into Chatfield and hired himself to a
man who wanted help in building a log cabin and cutting wood.
They went out into the timber west of town, where logs were al-
ready cut, and put up the house, ten by twelve feet in size. They
plastered the cracks with mud dug out from under the snow and
laid a roof of brush, which was covered that very night with a
fresh fall of snow. It turned sharply cold after that and Halloran's
employer assured him that there would be no thaw until spring.

More snow fell. It lay four feet deep by Christmas day. The
next day it began to thaw. The roof leaked and the chinking fell
out of the cracks. The two men threw off the brush roofing and
covered the rafters with hay. That night it rained, and the next
day it froze so hard that the snow was covered with a solid glaze
of ice heavy enough to carry a man's full weight. There was no
chance of fresh mud to replaster the little house.

For the rest of the winter Timothy Halloran and his employer,
with another man, his wife and their child, lived in that place,
where two beds, a stove, and a table were all the furnishings. Hal-

THE LOVELY LAND 57

loran wrote that he never took off his boots or his hat the whole
winter through. The plasterless cracks gave "a good view of the
starry heavens, and something to occupy our minds when it was
too cold to sleep."

It was a bitter season, too, for the deer abounding in the Root
River region. Their delicately narrow feet cut through the glaze
and they floundered helplessly in the deep snow beneath. A man
could walk up on the crust and club a deer to death. Every family
in the region had plenty of venison that winter. An ugly glee of
blood lust came on the men and boys of the region, and more deer
were killed than could possibly be eaten, even though wagon loads
of the carcasses were hauled into town for sale. Many animals
perished without human intervention, caught in the unprece-
dented trap of the snow. After that "Winter of the Big Crust" the
Root River region was barren of deer.

There was little travel during those winter months, for the
crust was not heavy enough to support the weight of a team. More
than one sack of flour was carried from a Chatfield store to a
distant cabin on a man's back. Little wheat was hauled to the
River that winter, though hundreds of bushels had been harvested
in the Chatfield province; breaking a road through the crust was
an almost impossible task.

It was a hardship for the farmers who had counted on a little
cash from the wheat they had raised, but the merchants stretched
out their credit and Sam Dickson promised to buy every bushel
of wheat in the country when spring should release the waters of
his millrace.

Dickson had come up from Indiana the fall before, bought a
few acres just below the level of the town, where the West Chat-
field road dropped, had dug the race and enclosed his mill build-
ing before the weather grew severe. All winter he worked there
with Norman Culver, the millwright he had engaged from Galena,
building the machinery that should turn the wheat of the region
into flour for its people. Sam Dickson was a hearty, irascible fel-
low; the mill he was building stood to the people of the region as
a symbol of their coming to terms with the land they had chosen.

58 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The expanding consciousness of an ever firmer social fabric
brought an exuberant gaiety into the pattern of every day. Of all
the gay young men of the town none was more gallant than
Beecher Gere. No young lady was indifferent to his courtly atten-
tions, made doubly flattering by the public responsibilities that
sat so lightly on his twenty-six years. His favorite partner for
dances or headlong rides through the countryside was pretty
Eunice Hawley, the acknowledged belle of the town, and many
a young man envied the grace with which he held his hand for her
tiny foot and lifted her into her side saddle. She was a spirited
young lady, with no malice in the ebullience that sparkled in her
great brown eyes. When she braided her lustrous black hair into
a single plait that hung well below her waist he called her Poca-
hontas. Others took up the name with an affectionate familiarity
that suffused the town with merriment.

The merriest of all were "the Land Office boys," who quickly
established their prescriptive right as Chatfield's chief pranksters.
There were always two, sometimes three or four young bachelors
acting as clerks in the Land Office, and no week lacked its tale of
their doings in the realm of the practical joke.

One night, for instance, they transferred a whole pile of wood
from the alley to the front doorstep of one of Main Street's stores,
and were out before daylight to enjoy their victim's wrathful exer-
tions to clear a way into his place of business. Another night one
of the more pompous of the moneylenders was startled out of his
concentration on account books by a hollow moaning in the cel-
lar beneath him. Investigation revealed no source of the sound,
but when he attempted to resume his work the sepulchral wails
were renewed in hair-raising force which eventually drove him out
of his office. The whole town enjoyed the tale of that 'ghost/
which 'the boys' had raised by thrusting a long pipe through the
cellar window and projecting their awesome wailings through it.

But the loudest laughter was for a daylight prank. Another of
the moneylending gentry, whose rotundity was frequently the ob-
ject of genial jibes, was seen one day going down Main Street with
an armful of shavings to use as kindling for his stove. One of 'the

THE LOVELY LAND 59

boys* sauntered out to intercept him and after a little talk saun-
tered on his way. He had managed, unobserved, to draw a match
across the seat of his pants and touch its spurt of flame to the
lower edge of the shavings his friend was carrying. Hugely satisfy-
ing was that gentleman's yell of astonishment when a tongue of
fire leaped into his face; the most tireless prankster could ask no
better audience than Main Street turned out at the victim's alarm.

These elaborations of the practical joke were wondrously de-
lightful to a frontier community art, but they were the mere adorn-
ments of arduous labors in the Land Office. Almost half the land
in Chatfield township was pre-empted after the Office moved to
Chatfield (47 out of 113 claims) and in Elmira, the next town-
ship north, 72 out of no claims were entered after June 13, 1856,
the day of the Chatfield opening. The more distant the township,
the higher the proportion of land unclaimed on that date. Five
million acres were subject to entry in the Chatfield Land Office,
and a million and a half of them were not yet surveyed. Each entry
called for triple recordings in the system set up by the Commis-
sioner General in Washington, besides monthly, quarterly, and
annual reports to that official and to the Treasurer of the United
States.

Deposits had to be carried to Dubuque or St. Croix by the of-
ficials, and those journeys were no light undertaking. One time
the coach in which one of the men was traveling with Land Of-
fice deposits turned over in the middle of a stream swollen with
the February thaw, and the luckless official had to rescue his
papers and money from the icy flood.

In the face of such difficulties the Chatfield officials sometimes
felt themselves justified in adding one or two hundred miles to
their report of the distances they must travel; Eastern officials
who had no personal knowledge of the frontier could scarcely
conceive accurately either the distances or the difficulties en-
countered by their subordinates.

Many problems rose in the local administration of the land
laws. For instance, many of the settlers flooding into the Terri-
tory could sign their papers only by "his X mark/' and for them

60 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the officials must make out the application papers as well as the
certificate of title. Major Bennett, following the precedent set in
other offices, charged such pre-emptors a fee of $4.00, and then
was called upon to defend himself to Washington when one of his
patrons complained, with the help of a more literate friend, at the
'extortion/

Most difficult were the cases where two men claimed the same
acreage. Two Norwegians were involved in one of the first such
cases brought to the Chatfield office. One had lived for several
months on a piece of land some eight miles east of Chatfield, had
built his cabin and cleared, plowed and planted an ample field,
relying on the protection of his pre-emption certificate. Another,
covetous of the well-begun farm, "borrowed" the certificate, went
to the Land Office and paid cash for the land it represented. He
then tried to evict the actual settler by sheer force but was pre-
vented by neighborly intervention. When the case was brought to
the Land Office for hearing, Major Bennett wrote to Washington
that such claim-jumping must be discouraged, and promptly, "f or
the peace of the country/'

Arrantly annoying was a man named Booth with whom the of-
ficials had repeated unpleasantness. Time and again he brought
a 'settler' into the office, paid the entry fee on a quarter section of
land, then forced the settler, "on the premises/' to sign a deed of
transfer to himself. He acquired hundreds of acres in that manner
and the officials were powerless to act against him. But when
Booth tried to seize the land of "an ignorant but very good man"
who had lived on his claim "for three or four years" and worked
hard to make a home for his family, Bennett and McKenny did
their best to protect the original claimant. The case hung fire for
several months, waiting word from Washington, despite the local
effort to get a decision. Finally the case was settled by Booth
paying the other man for a quitclaim deed a fortunate settle-
ment, Major Bennett wrote, for had the case continued it would
have led to "the loss of human life," though he did not indicate
who would have been the slayer or who the slain.

On the whole, the letters written by the two Chatfield officials

THE LOVELY LAND 6l

seem to express a real concern to afford the pre-emption law its
optimum functioning. Again and again they rendered judgments
against men bearing Yankee names who sought to despoil settlers
of Irish or Norwegian or Bohemian origin, whose unfamiliarity
with American ways made them easy prey to native-born sharpers.
The fact that Chatfield escaped the violence and long-drawn feuds
marking some other land office towns is very likely to be credited
in some part to the just evaluations of J. H. McKenny and J. W.
Bennett

Yet on one occasion those two men acted on the basis of an
attitude which was fast drawing their country into the very ex-
tremities of violence. The story is a curious one, recorded in a
letter answering an inquiry from the Commissioner General, who
had received a complaint from the person chiefly involved.

Late one stormy February evening a man came into the Land
Office so muffled in scarves that his face was not visible in the
candle-punctuated dusk. The officials supposed that he was suf-
fering from toothache and sympathetically gave him every assist-
ance in making out his papers for the pre-emption of a choice
piece of land. He signed the name Leonard J. Cassman and left
the office in a great hurry.

Within an hour the officials were told that Cassman had made
over his claim to one of the sharpers in town. It was the kind of
thing that happened lamentably often but called for no action as it
lay quite outside the jurisdiction of the Land Office. The next day,
however, the man Cassman walked into the Land Office without
his wrappings and revealed the horrifying fact that he was a Negro.

Under Bennett's outraged questioning Cassman claimed that
he was a citizen of Connecticut, but both officials insisted that
"no negro can be a citizen*' and put Cassman out of the office.
They then went together to the sharper who held Cassman's
papers and, jurisdiction or no jurisdiction, forced the return of
Cassman's certificate of pre-emption. Thus they vindicated the
"great principle" that "no negro is on an equal footing with a
white man."

Now Cassman, concealing the fact of his race, had complained

62 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

to the Commissioner General of unjust treatment from the Chat-
field officials. Major Bennett, replying to Washington's inquiry,
ended his letter with the warning that there was "a strong party
among us who would, no doubt, be pleased to inflict these ob-
jects of their love upon us, if they could use this office as a most
effective mode of doing so/'

Thus the passions of that 'irrepressible conflict 7 which was to
divide the nation against itself involved even so remote an issue
as the disposal of the land in the region of the chosen valley.

PART

Three

Tk WkeJs Roll West

I

IT WAS A REGION rich with delights. Between the countless waterways
the hills fanned out in patterns of lovely surprise. Here the bare face
of limestone bluffs towered boldly above the streams, crowned with
clustered pines. There juniper and cedar alternated with maple and
ironwood on gentle terraces. Groves of black walnut grew on southern
slopes and below them stood the water elms and the willows at the
edge of the streams.

There were maples everywhere. In the autumn their flame deepened
into the scarlet of sumac and the white oak, stubbornly green, was
adorned with crimson festoons of woodbine, or bore the weight of
grapes the frost had sweetened. Butternuts and hazelnuts and acorns
were stored by the gray squirrels and their red, and fox, and flying
cousins.

As winter fastened on the land, the ravines choked with snow, and
open places were haunted by the same whirling snow-phantoms that
overpowered the prairies west of the valley. Yet the bison and deer
withstood the winter, along with the wolves and foxes. Mink and otter
and coon, muskrat and beaver, lived along the streams of the region.

When spring routed the snow the valleys grew lush with grass and
starred with cowslips. The white spray of cherry and thorn and plum
blossoms foamed under the gold and rose of maple catkins. Raspberry
and blackberry thickets bloomed on open slopes and in the margins of
the woods the heart-lifting fragrance of rosy crab-apple bloom caught
for an instant the whole glory of May. As summer flooded the land,
bees hummed all day in the honey-sweet of the basswood.

The streams were alive with fish: trout in every spring brook, pike

6 4

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 65

and pickerel and bass in the crystalline river. The air was never empty
of bird song as finches and field sparrows, thrashes and bluebirds and
robins came back to the trees which the cardinals and snowbirds had
shared through the winter with owls and hawks. Then young fawns
stepped delicately down to drink beside the does or lay among anem-
ones and windflowers, their dappled coats safely obscured in the
pattern of branch shadows on last year's leaves. Bare-patched bison
rubbed their manes against meadow-edged trees and the great bucks
shed their antlers in the margins of the forest.

And here the Indians lived. From the Days of the New, their legends
ran, people of Siouan stock had built their half-nomadic villages in the
valleys of the Root River and cultivated their maize with hoes fash-
ioned from the bisons' shoulder blades. Here they shaped their pottery
from river clay tempered with crashed shells, and chipped out their
arrowheads. When rival bands, envious of the region's abundance,
sought to take it for their own use, the arrows fell thick on headlands
and river meadows.

But that was long before Thomas Twiford thought to make himself
rich by drawing into the valley of his choice a part of the great migra-
tion flooding westward.

II

Americans are always moving on.

It's an old Spanish custom gone astray,

A sort of English fever, I believe,

Or just a mere desire to take French leave.

I couldn't say, I couldn't really say.

Western Star, Benet *

THAT MIGRATION meant the opening of incredibly large and pro-
ductive farming operations. Yet it was part of the process by
which American society was being shifted from agrarian to indus-
trial control.

As crossroad hamlets spread out into manufacturing cities they
absorbed increasing numbers of people into labor divorced from
the soil. This breaking of the productive pattern of centuries was
not easily accepted. There was much unrest among the workmen,
part of which fringed off in the migration to the West. That move-
ment alarmed the captains of industry: if the young people of the
East went into the wilderness instead of into the factory how were
factories to produce for their owners?

The transfer of population was by no means universally con-
demned. Though factory managers might inveigh against the loss
of their 'hands/ Henry Ward Beecher saw a quite different mean-
ing in the movement. In 1820, he issued a call for numbers of

* From Western Star, published by Rinehart & Company, Inc. Copyright, 1943,
by Rosemary Carr Benet.

66

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 67

"pious, intelligent, enterprising ministers* 7 to go into the West
and establish schools, academies, and colleges. By inculcating "a
sameness of views, and feelings, and interests" they "would lay the
foundation of our empire on a rock" the rock of Puritan the-
ology.

That pronouncement called forth a storm of protest. Beecher
was charged with attacking America's fundamental principle of
the separation of church and state and aspiring to fasten his par-
ticular brand of theology upon the country. In the face of such
criticism Beecher and those who agreed with him retired for the
moment into discreet silence, but the idea was by no means lost;
it reappeared in various forms in later years. As the motive for
Home Missions it was elaborated in pronouncement after pro-
nouncement.

"When Washington feared Western parties he did not fore-
see Home Missions/' one writer announced in a prominent
church organ of the thirties. Century-long processes would even-
tually bind the swiftly expanding nation into one homogeneous
entity, he agreed, but the tempo of American necessity did not
permit waiting on such leisure when a swifter instrument of in-
tegration was at hand. "Under the ministry of your missionary
the thing is done in the twinkling of an eye."

Nor was the long historical view the only sanction invoked in
behalf of Home Missions. Self-interest was even more emphati-
cally called to witness. The laws, particularly in new states, were
inadequate to protect creditors, the argument ran. Every busi-
nessman knew that he owed his "very wealth ... in some
measure, to the operation of Christian principles diffused
through the community." Ergo, it was better for the "opulent
merchant . . . to give his money, not to say his prayers, to make
people good, than to spend it upon bailiffs to apprehend run-
away creditors." The argument was rounded out with the flat
assertion that "The Gospel is the most economical police on
earth/' Marx himself said it less baldly, and this pronouncement
anticipated the Manifesto by nine years.

But these were the utterances of the high priests. For most

68 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

of the Yankee folks who crowded the roads leading into Minne-
sota, the reasons for making so great a venture were compounded
of more earthy and immediate considerations. Some of them had
heard that Minnesota was a healthier place to live than the
malarial lands of Indiana and Ohio. Others knew the virgin land
was more richly productive than the stony acres of New England.
Many were sure that the exuberant newness of the West could
not help but bring prosperity to their business, be it storekeeping
or moneylending or wagon building.

Many New England people turned to the West to escape that
"yoke of opinion" which New England's Channing called "a
heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment and action/'
Channing praised Western ideals because they were tested by
their direct betterment of the average man, not the exceptional
one; he saw the West as holding "all men in one common broth-
erhood/' Certainly the records of the time make it clear that
men and women alike were moved by the romantic and in-
finitely exciting appeal of distance, of adventure, and by the
stirring sense of sharing in a great social transformation that had
no equal in the whole of human experience.

So they pushed into the West. And as the wagons rolled West-
ward the travelers heartened themselves with a flood of song that
spoke more directly than industrial statistics or theological im-
peratives for the instant and personal motives that impelled them.

I sing you a song of the wondrous West,
Where the life blood pulses with fiery zest,
Where the swift transition of passing years
Proclaim the push of the pioneers.

The songs that rang on the roads were all 'freedom songs/ for
Yankee travelers no less than for those strange wagon loads of
fugitive slaves being helped on their way to Canada.

What the turning of those wagon wheels meant to families
traveling West was well reflected by a diary kept by Lepha Ann
Carter, the daughter of Deacon Guliemus Carter, as the family
journeyed from Tecumseh, Michigan, to the Chatfield region.

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 69

Deacon Carter was born in Massachusetts in 1799; when he was
fourteen he went with his parents into western New York; when
he was thirty-five he took his wife and daughter, Lepha Ann,
to Michigan. Now, in 1853, ^ e anc ^ ^ s f am % were moving to
Minnesota. They were going to a claim which had been picked
out for them by David Allen, a young Michigan neighbor who
had gone West in May and selected land some twelve miles west
of the valley Thomas Twiford was to choose for his town three
months later.

The Carter family set off about three o'clock on the afternoon
of October third, and few eyes were dry at their departure. At
the first crossroads a cousin was waiting to give them, as a final
parting gift, a bunch of flowers from his mother's garden, and
Lepha Ann wept again as she wrapped them in paper to preserve
their seeds for next summer's garden in faraway Minnesota.

They traveled until nine o'clock that night, and they went to
bed supperless, for the family with whom they stopped were too
busy paring apples for drying to get a meal for their guests, and
the Carters were too tired to get it for themselves. However,
breakfast the next morning made up for their missed supper: the
fowl, lamb, potatoes, bread and butter, soda crackers, and coffee
were all good. The whole accommodation cost thirteen shillings
for the four of them.

On the second day, and again on the third, they passed wagon
loads of colored people bound for Canada, singing their 'freedom
songs.' At the house where they ate dinner one day some of their
small possessions were stolen, but when they went back the things
"were restored to us ... by a girl, 12 or 15, who probably
thought she had more need of them than we did."

By Saturday night they reached the Indiana border and spent
Sunday at an inn presided over by a thirteen-year-old girl whose
husband had left her and her baby for California. "The gents
pitched quoits after dinner," but Lepha Ann was "puzzled to
discover any pleasure in the employment/' The only church at
hand was Catholic, where Lepha Ann was "both amused and
disgusted with the performances." Katie, her younger sister,

JO THE CHOSEN VALLEY

walked two miles that evening to attend a Singing School in
Indiana.

It was cold the next morning and the wild geese were over-
head, flying south. On the Indiana and Illinois prairies they
passed "the largest wheat fields I ever saw" and corn "so high I
cannot look over it unless I climb the fence/' The roads were some-
times good, sometimes "so very bad that Mother's hair fairly
stood straight up/' but they saw many loads of "movers" going
to Iowa. On the tenth day out they came to "the commencement
of the Plank Road" into Chicago, and stopped in that city for
a few hours so that Deacon Carter could look about.

The two girls held the teams hitched to the two wagons and
saw nothing of the city "except what we could by peeking out
of our wagons." They "never saw so many carriages and vehicles
of different kinds, and they were constantly in motion." When
their dog wandered away they let him go because "we would not
call or whistle through the streets for a dog that all other dogs
were after." Chicago was very large 60,000 inhabitants, the
Deacon reported and Lepha Ann was glad when they were out
of it

They "camped out" the next few nights and Lepha Ann "was
afraid. Katie laughed at my fears." The country they drove
through was so beautiful that "anyone might be proud to live
in it." Finding no place to stay the second Sunday they kept on
traveling; they reached Freeport, Illinois, where an uncle lived,
just two weeks after leaving Michigan.

Mrs. Carter and her daughters were so worn by the journey
that the Deacon took his brother's advice and went on ahead to
look at the Minnesota claim, leaving his family in Freeport. There
they stayed for three months, and Lepha Ann's diary is full of
the doings of that bustling town. They saw a train for the first
time and when they watched "the engine turned around, we got
some frightened and Uncle Mark laughed. We went inside the
passenger cars. Think it is quite comfortable in them/'

That winter the whole family suffered severely from colds, and
in the low spirits of prolonged ill health Lepha Ann despaired of

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 71

hearing from her father "very soon, if ever/* Then, all unan-
nounced, on January 21, the Deacon returned. Five days later
they set off for Minnesota.

There were many callers the day before they started, and Mrs.
Carter was given "a bundle of currant sprouts" and "some apple
scions" to take into the new country. The first day on the road
they had to stop many times to warm; when the mule they drove
with one of the horses grew stubborn, and the teams had to be
changed in the middle of "the Ocean like prairie/' they almost
"froze to death" in the wind.

In the days that followed they were lost more than once in the
"vast field" that stretched "as far as the eye can reach in either
direction. . . . Not a fence, or a house, or even a tree to give
one clue to tell your course. . . . No one who has never lost
his way on a prairie in a snow storm can describe or even imagine
our feelings."

Yet in all the danger and discomfort Lepha Ann kept an eager
eye for the human beings they encountered. There was the
woman who had been in a train accident and emerged unscathed.
There was the other one who thought Minnesota was in Illinois,
and said "fist" and "onst" for "first" and "once." There were
the Irish shanties where they stopped to warm and were care-
ful not to lay down even a glove lest they collect some of the
lice that were said to abound in such places. In one blessed
stopping place the landlady played an accordion and they all
sang, and "it seemed like old times"; before they left the next
morning Lepha "took a pattern of the Landlady's handsome bed
quilt called California."

The country lying near the Mississippi was even more terrify-
ing than the prairies. On its steep hills choked with snow the
teams sometimes refused to budge farther, sometimes were pushed
down hill by their loads at so perilous a rate that the family ex-
pected to go "to the Old Scratches. . . . Such hilly country
I could not be persuaded to live in," Lepha Ann wrote, and when
they had finally come safe across the river, at McGregor's Land-
ing, she recorded only one comment on the vast panorama from

72 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the top of the bluffs: "Such rocks I never saw. . . . One would
think it a piece of mason work/' She was badly in need of human-
ized reassurance after the weeks' struggle with unmitigated
nature.

Three days later they reached the home of David Allen's
parents, who had settled a few miles south of the Iowa-Minnesota
line. There they spent ten days enjoying hospitality of true
frontier flavor. There were prairie chicken and venison to eat, and
gay sleigh rides to the neighbors and to the schoolhouse for spell-
ing schools.

The Deacon went back to the Landing after the part of a load
he had stored there. He forgot the "side pieces for the lounge"
but bought pork, lard ? and molasses, two tubs and two barrels,
a "Queen of the West" cookstove, pails, half a dozen brooms,
and sash, glass, and nails for the house he and his neighbors had
built on the claim. He also bought six splint-bottomed chairs, a
great luxury, and gave two of them to the Aliens, who had only
"Iowa Stools" in their house lengths of log cut to chair height
and stood on end.

The goods were repacked into three wagons and on February
14 the Carters set off on the last stage of their journey, this time
with young David Allen to drive the team his father loaned for
the trip. Lepha Ann rode with David the remaining three days
of their journey, and with hot stones at her feet found it more
comfortable than she had expected.

Yet even so she wrote again that "no one can form an opinion
of what it is to cross such a prairie in winter who has not tried it."
They crossed the Root River so many times she lost count, and
the country "grew more dreary" as they proceeded. When they
saw the abandoned shack "Like the house our swine used to
dwell in" where "the Crying Family" had lived the summer
before, Lepha Ann did not wonder that all eleven of them had
"united in making the woods ring with vocal music ... it is
enough to make even the wolves howl. I have passed through
grass taller than a man's head and brush thicker than the hair
on a dog."

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 73

But that very day, two hours after they had stopped to warm
and meet the Fraziers, their nearest neighbors on that side, they
came to Elkhorn Prairie where David Allen and another young
man named Hayes had taken claims for themselves and Deacon
Carter. It was, Lepha Ann wrote, "the handsomest prairie I ever
saw. Small groves are scattered here and there which makes it
appear like an ornamental garden, and we are told that in summer
and spring nothing can be more magnificent/'

When she realized that this was the end of the journey,
"Mother was so happy that . . . she commenced singing about
the Promised Land, and, not content with singing the original
verses, she added one of her own composing, the substance of
which was:

'Where, O, where is the Carter family?
Safe now in the Promised Land!' "

The mood of that song was perpetuated in the later choice of
Jordan as the name for the township.

The travelers' exuberance was not belied by the welcome that
waited them. In the snug log cabin of young Mr. Hayes they
found every possible comfort. It was "very convenient" to have
a stove and furniture ready for their use; Mr. Hayes had a "nice
little cellar, an oxteam, a pony, and many other things for his
comfort. ... He is a better housekeeper than I am/' Before the
supper things were cleared away the neighbors from beyond, hear-
ing by some mysterious means of the new arrivals, came for a
visit.

The next day the Carters spent "arranging things" in their
own house. They slept that night beneath their own roof, the
two girls in the "Minnesota Bedstead" their father built for
them. David Allen boarded with them for a time, and he found
three bee-trees the day they settled into their own house; "this
is a great country for Bees and Honey." Even the howling of a
wolf did not disturb them: "He cried very nicely and seemed to
say he would like some of our Pork very much/'

David and Lepha Ann were married just a year later and their

74 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

son was the first child bom in that township. For the Carters
it was indeed the Promised Land: the whole family lived out
their lives in that region, and some of the Deacon's grandchildren
and their offspring are still there.

Nor were they the only family of the sort. A handful of stories
preserved in old letters and oral tradition give glimpses of the
various forms in which the promise of the land drew people onto
the roads leading West

Ill

IN INDIANA, John Murphy and his quiet wife had prospered well
from the day of their wedding, when paying the license fee left
fifty cents in his pocket. Now he owned two tanyards and she
had borne twelve children, all of whom were living, though the
fever and ague plagued them all the time.

When talk of the new Minnesota country drifted into their
hearing what interested them most was the way everybody said
Minnesota was so healthy. No one had chills and fever there,
they heard, and though the winters were cold the air was so
bracing a body didn't mind its being thirty below. When little
Will, the baby of the family, came down bad sick the spring of
1854, John and Mary Murphy began to think seriously of going
West.

It was not the first such move for either of them. He had been
born in Tennessee, of the same Scotch-Irish stock as Andrew
Jackson, though the Murphy folks never thought of claiming
kin with Old Hickory, however faithfully they voted Democrat.
John Murphy's father had died when he was only four. When his
mother married again the family went down from the hills to the
Ohio and drifted along that beautiful river in a flatboat to one
of the openings of the limestone ridges that opened long paths
into Indiana.

John went to work for a farmer when he was twelve; when
he was eighteen he began to learn the tanning trade; when he was

75

76 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

twenty he married Mary Julian, who had come with her folks
from Pennsylvania a few years before. They were Pennsylvania
Dutch but it was so long since they'd come from the Old Country
that none of them remembered about it, just like the Murphys'
folks coming from Ireland.

Now they were turning westward once more. Late in the
summer of 1854 J^ n Murphy went down to the Ohio and took
a steamer to the Mississippi and thence up to Winona. His ab-
sence seemed long to his family and when he came back he was
so full of the wonders he had seen that the winter seemed an end-
less waiting for their start to the West.

He had bought a claim four miles southwest of a new town
called Chatfield. The 'old bach' that took it from the government
had got so lonesome he was glad to take John Murphy's two hun-
dred dollars for the eighty acres he claimed. "I reckon there's
enough of us to keep ourselves company/' John Murphy said
whenever he talked of their going.

The 'old bach' had built a shanty they could live in while they
put up a good log house, and one small field was already cleared
so they could start farming the very first thing. A wide stretch of
bottom land along the creek would make the finest kind of
pasture.

"What's the crick called, Paw?'' little Will always asked at
that point.

"Well, I reckon you can call it anything you want," his father
always answered. "But there's bears in a den up one of them side-
hills. Maybe you better ask them before you start calling names."

"Could we call it Bear Crick?" Eight-year-old Will's eyes shone
at the notion.

"Reckon Bear's as good a name as any," John Murphy agreed.
"They're friendly sorta critters if you don't steal their honey.
Why I saw a bee-tree. ..." The wonders of a country that
needed only a few cows to make it flow with milk and honey did
not grow less in John Murphy's telling.

So infectious was his enthusiasm that his married son and his
son-in-law, with their families, joined the cavalcade that set out

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 77

as soon as spring opened the roads for travel. Four covered wagons
carried the household goods and the elder Murphy's two wagons
were so loaded that two yoke of oxen were hitched to each; the
others were drawn by two horses apiece. Mrs. Murphy and the
younger children rode in a four-seated surrey hitched to a good
team of horses. The four cows they took along kept the pace slow
enough so that little Will could trot beside the surrey when
he got tired of riding. Four young men, neighbors of the Murphys,
went along on horseback to see the country; they got their board
for helping look after the stock.

For Will Murphy that journey was one long and unbelievably
perfect holiday. To the day of his death, eighty years later, it lived
in his memory with the freshness of a beloved fairy tale.

Little things he remembered. Picking flowers for his mother
while he jogged along beside the surrey. The fun of stopping at
night by some farmhouse where they could get hay for their
horses. How delicious the warm milk tasted night and morning.
"It was just one long picnic/' he said, remembering. "I never en-
joyed anything as much in all my life."

When they came to the Mississippi at Galena it took most of
a day to get all their gear across. They swam the horses across,
two at a time, one fastened on either side of the ferry so they
wouldn't drift downstream. The heaviest thing they had to
manage was a breaking plow they'd bought at a factory they
passed in Illinois; that was so big it took three or four men to
lash it up under the high-exed linchpin wagon that the four best
oxen pulled.

The last night they camped in a heavy woods about three miles
south of Chatfield, and from there on they had to cut their way
through the wilderness tangle. That was lonesome work. It took
them all day to travel the three miles between the Territorial
road and their claim. When they got to the little shanty the name
of their creek no longer wore the sound of adventure. The town
was four miles away too far to be anything more than a place
of staring wonder and there were no neighbors between their
place and town.

78 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

They did all get a lot healthier. But the loneliness got so bad
that after a year John Murphy was ready to pack up his family
and take them back to their Hoosier home in spite of the fever
and ague. Luckily, before they got started one of their Hoosier
neighbors brought his family and settled on Bear Creek beside
them; in the next year or two, half a dozen families came, most
of them kin to the Murphys, and that stretch of Bear Creek got
to be called Murphy Street.

At about this time John Murphy went to Chicago and bought
the machinery for a sawmill. When he got that hooked up to the
creek the family rarely sat down to a meal without one or more
men who had brought a load of logs to be cut into lumber. Some-
times they brought one of their children along, sometimes the
whole family; there were plenty of times when Mary Murphy
cooked for a dozen besides her own. It was no longer lonesome on
Murphy Street.

In Lewis County, New York, Western fever overtook Jason
Easton. It was really, though he scarcely suspected it, a return of
the fever that had burned in the Lowville Academy days when
he and Sam Johnson spun enormous schemes for their future.

That had been a curious friendship in the beginning. Sam
was much younger than Jason, and his spectacled slenderness
contrasted oddly with the older boy's stocky energy. It was Sam's
elder sister, Sarah, that Jason liked first, but she so quietly drew
her brother into everything she did that Jason could not help
but include the boy in his thinking of Sarah.

So they grew to be friends, for Jason discovered in Sam a deep-
running intensity that answered some need in Jason's more
exuberant nature. When the Johnsons invited him to spend a
holiday at their father's 'Mansion/ thirty miles from Lowville,
Jason and Sam spent half their time fitting their imaginations
to vast constructive enterprises they would some day set in motion
on 'Uncle Abner's flats/

When Sam went to Yale, Jason went with him. But Jason's

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 79

impatient energies balked at the mastery of scholarly minutiae,
and he was glad when illness gave him the excuse for leaving
after a single year. He must be active and he turned from one
undertaking to another. He finally bought the newspaper in
Lowville, and by farming a forty at the edge of town and trying
his hand at storekeeping he managed to be busy enough almost
to convince himself that he was content. When Sarah Johnson
consented to marry him, in the summer of 1851, her quiet de-
votion lulled his restlessness for the time.

Sam went to Germany a few weeks after his sister and Jason
were married, on the unprecedented adventure of studying
chemistry 'abroad/ It had taken years for him to win that
privilege, for 'Uncle Abner/ as half of Lewis County affection-
ately called the elder Johnson, had been hard to persuade from
his conviction that farming, divinity, and the law were the only
safe and suitable callings for his sons. Sam's steadfast insistence
and patient efforts on his own account, with Sarah's devoted
support, had finally won 'Uncle AbnerY consent and his money.

What Sam wanted to study was the chemistry of agriculture.
That was farming of a sort, after all, the elder Johnson came to
understand, though he could scarcely have conceived that the ex-
periment station his son was to found in Connecticut would
serve to initiate one of the most important and widespread in-
fluences of American agricultural practice.

Jason took a deep pleasure in the younger man's experience.
When, after two years, Sam wrote in distress at the imminent
necessity of returning with so much yet unlearned, Jason wrote
him: "As much as I want to see you, I do not want you to come
home untill you have done all you have intended. I want you
to come out a strong man. I am proud of you as a brother and
I expect to see you one day one of the first scholars in the country.
I wish I was rich, I would send you all the funds you wanted. . . .
If you do lack I will help you to stay there six months or a year.
. . . Write me a few lines I will willingly pay the postage. We
are all so glad to hear from you that we have a little sort of
Jubilee when we get a letter from you/'

80 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

When Uncle Abner found it possible to provide the funds
for Sam's third year of study, Jason rejoiced for his friend but
found himself more and more gnawed by a too familiar rest-
lessness which he had thought was overcome. Sam wrote to him
about possible positions that might be open to the two of them:
there was talk of an experimental farm and school in Penn-
sylvania, where a practical man would be needed to manage a
thousand-acre farm. Would Jason be interested? Or what of
a scheme to set up "a school of Agricultural science in connection
with the Academy at Lowville?" Would Jason talk with the
trustees about that? The old dreams of working together came
again and again into Sam's letters, and they fed the flame of
Jason's unease.

Jason wrote to Sam that he had "fixed no definite course for
the future"; he had thought of ''the western country" and if
money were the only consideration he would not hesitate to go.
But Sarah objected, and he himself hesitated to take a step which
would cut them off from "anything like decent society." What
would Sam advise?

By December of 1854, Jason had decided at least to plan a
trip to look at the West. He would leave the following April and
be back in time for Sam's return in July. "I ... am impatient
to see you, the time seems too long," he wrote. And his own
hunger for enlarging action spoke in the advice he offered: "We
should never cease to be students, yet to be students merely will
not do. Our acquirements should be turned to practical account."

The six weeks Jason Easton spent in the West did not resolve
his conflict. From Chicago to St. Paul he saw and heard of un-
numbered ways in which a man could take his part in the all-
to-be-built life of the West, a part whose scope need be limited
only by a man's own powers. But Sarah remained unconvinced
and Jason hesitated to force the decision. Sam came home soon
after, and the renewal of that old companionship both sharpened
and appeased Jason's hunger for significant action. Perhaps after
all the two of them might work out their future together.

But Sam went to teach at Yale, and Jason was no scholar. As

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 8l

he carried on his weekly paper and tended his forty acres he con-
tinued to ponder on the things he had heard and seen in the West,
and wrote of them in his paper. When Lowville's Congressman,
W. A. Gilbert, whom Easton had supported in the previous
election, came in to talk with the editor about the West, new
possibilities began to stir in Easton's mind.

The biggest thing going in Western business was undoubtedly
land and the lending of money for the purchase of land. A Con-
gressman maintaining discreet connections with the central Land
Office in Washington would be a most advantageous partner
for an enterprising dealer in a Western land office town. As the
idea developed Easton found it difficult to restrain his mounting
excitement.

Though they discussed it only a little, he knew that Sarah did
not want to go West, and he felt some resentment, though more
at her older brother Lucian than at Sarah herself. Lucian had
gone along on the spring's trip of investigation and his shrewd,
often sardonic, watchfulness had added much to Easton's knowl-
edge of the country. But Lucian did not hesitate to use the least
savory details to tease Sarah.

He was a confirmed bachelor and had never been quite sub-
dued to the decorum of Lowville society. Easton himself admitted
a secret enjoyment of Lucian's half -bawdy irrelevancies, but they
did the West no good in Sarah's eyes. It was no good telling
Lucian to watch his tongue: that would only double his enjoy-
ment of sly teasing. Sarah simply grew more silent and refused
to offer any opinion on her husband's tentative suggestion of
possible plans.

The unspoken conflict was still unresolved when Easton sold
his paper and entered into a real-estate partnership with Congress-
man Gilbert. Easton was to furnish a thousand dollars and all
his time; Gilbert would put in twice the amount of money and
such time as he could give in Washington or during the long re-
cess of Congress. Easton was to draw a salary of $30 a month
from January i, 1856, and for the first three months would work
at getting York State men to invest with the new firm; early in

82 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the spring he would go out to a land office town in Minnesota to
set up a land agent and moneylending office.

It was here that the particular beauty of the partnership
emerged. The Minnesota land offices were due to be moved west
from the River towns where they had been first established, and
Gilbert would have advance knowledge of the new locations,
might even bring some influence to bear on their choice.

Easton preferred Chatfield as the place for the office then in
Brownsville. There was something about the place that he liked
it might be the way its river bottoms reminded him of Uncle
Abner's fiats. It was new enough that a man could have a hand
in making it what he wanted. It was not too far from the River
yet was sufficiently distant from St. Paul to avoid being over-
shadowed by the political big guns that gathered there. If Gil-
bert could make Chatfield the town. . . . The news came
through in April, a month in advance of its official announcement,
and Easton set off at once. Sarah went to stay with her father.

The letters she had from her husband were unlike any he had
ever written her before. Even his praise of the beautiful valley
in which he was living had a different kind of vigor from the
properly turned periods of his editorials. He wrote, too, of the
fine tone of society there: he had never seen more dignity and
decorum, together with unusual friendliness, than prevailed at
a donation party for the Reverend Mr, Clark who came from a
near-by village for occasional preaching. When the Land Office
was moved to Chatfield it brought with it a large number of
able and cultivated gentlemen, he reported, many of them college-
bred. Among them was C. G. Ripley, a cousin of the distinguished
Mr. Emerson whose lectures and essays were so fine an ornament
to American literature. ... All that he wrote, whether of busi-
ness or of pleasure, pulsed with an assurance and a freedom which
had long been missing from her knowledge of him.

Her father did not entirely approve of his son-in-law's new
venture, Abner Johnson had lived so long in his vast patriarchal
'Mansion' that he had forgotten the grave disapproval expressed
by Connecticut elders when he left Kingsboro, thirty years be-

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 83

fore, for the York State country that was then considered the
West.

Late in the summer Uncle Abner wrote to Sam that Jason was
coming home to look after the harvesting of his Lowville forty
and expected Sarah to return with him. "How Sarah will like
this arrangement I can't tell. I think not very well, but I shall
advise her to go. It seems unnecessary to break up and leave their
pleasant residence fitted up in good style amidst a respect-
able circle of friends, in a good society with excellent religious
and educational privileges, . . . What privations will not men
endure for the sake of Earth's treasures!"

But Sarah's decision was made without her father's assistance.
If Minnesota meant the end of her husband's discontent, she
would go with him whatever pangs it might cost her. He had en-
gaged a house for their residence, he wrote in a letter giving di-
rections for disposing of their furniture. Her favorite things could
be boxed and shipped, by rail to the River, thence by steamer and
wagon to Chatfield. The new house was small but beautifully
situated at the foot of Winona Hill, a landmark and boundary
of the town, and water from a spring was carried past the house
in hollowed logs; she would have all the convenience of a pump
at her doorstep, without its labor. He was sure she would find her
health improved in the new country.

That he held out such a hope made her decision the easier.
They had been married for five years, and they had no child. In
darker moments she had searched that fact for a clue to her hus-
band's unrest. If the Western country could give them a child.
. . . Her hopes flamed more intimately when she saw him on
his return. His face and his bearing, his very voice, carried the
vigorous assurance of a man who had found his proper sphere.
She could go gladly with him in such a mood.

In Vermont the Union Store idea a kind of consumed co-
operative venture was making trouble for a lot of merchants.
William Pease was one of them. For nearly seven years he had

84 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

ran a store in Weston and had done as well as a man could ask
who had begun by driving a peddler's wagon over half the Green
Mountain state. He'd liked peddling; it gave him a chance to
see a lot more of the world than ever passed his father's farm up
in Greeley's Gore. But when he fell in love with Harriet Wheeler
he knew peddling wasn't good enough for her. So he set up store,
and when Harriet stopped teaching school and married him he
thought he had everything a man could want.

Then the Union Store came along. It was hard on him partly
because he wouldn't talk mealymouthed enough to suit some
folks. A man had a right to say what he thought even if he did
keep store. He was tired of having to depend on the public for a
living. His father always said what he thought.

Not that William Pease wanted to go back to the hard-scrabble
farm where he was bom and brought up. But there was land
out in the West where a man could make a farm that any woman
would be proud to live on. Harriet's folks couldn't object to that
when her Uncle Sherwin had already gone out to Minnesota,
to a new town they called Chatfield. Now if Harriet could just
make up her mind she wanted to go. ...

All winter William Pease collected stories about the doings of
folks they knew who'd gone, some to Illinois, some to Chicago,
a good many to Iowa. He never said a word about their going,
but he talked a good deal about the Union Store and the way
there wasn't enough business in Weston for two stores. Then
Uncle Sherwin sent them a map that showed Minnesota Terri-
tory plainly. William Pease couldn't keep his eyes off it, day or
Bight.

"Therell be a big town right there some day/' he said one
evening, putting his finger on the bend of the Minnesota River.
''Folks will settle along that river, and on the two smaller rivers
that run into it from the south, and it'll be the biggest town south
of St. Paul/' He drew his finger over the path of the Minnesota,
from its rise in Big Stone Lake to its confluence with the
Mississippi In his absorption he forgot the strategy that had

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 85

guarded his tongue for so long. "I'd sure like to see that country/*

The candle flame flickered backward as Harriet leaned over the
table to look at the map. "You'd better go out this spring/' she
said quietly. "With the way business is you might as well take a
look at the new country."

William Pease turned startled eyes on his wife then looked
away to hide his mounting elation. She'd said it, and without
his urging! "It's a long way from your folks," he said slowly. "We
couldn't eat Thanksgiving dinner there any more if it turned out
we liked the new country/' He drew his finger across the map
from Minnesota to Vermont.

But she put her hand on his shoulder and smiled at him. "They
likely can raise turkeys in Minnesota/' she said, "and I was a
pretty good hand with the fowl at Mother's."

So it was settled. Early in April, 1857, William took Harriet
to Ascutneyville to stay with her folks while he took the cars
for the West. It was four days' travel from Vermont to Dubuque,
and he wasn't in bed four hours the whole time, he wrote to
Harriet from Dubuque. But he'd seen two people from Weston
since he got to Iowa, besides the doctor the Peases always went
to. People were pouring into Iowa that spring at the rate of eight
or ten hundred on each day's train.

He saw Uncle Sherwin in Dubuque, but that gentleman
went on to a land sale with the other Weston fellows, and
William Pease had not yet made up his mind to follow them.
He liked the country as well as he had expected, he wrote, but
it cost high to live, and he should have to spend considerable
money. He wanted to look around a little before deciding what
to do.

The next week he wrote from Winona, describing that town,
and a week later wrote again, from Chatfield where he had ar-
rived ahead of Uncle Sherwin. Chatfield was a fast-growing place;
the lady of the house where he stayed told him there was only
one frame house there two years ago. Now it had as many in-
habitants as Ludlow or Chester in Vermont. Every house was

86 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

crowded; whole families sometimes lived in a single room. "Wes-
ton village would fetch more rent in this country in one year
than it would sell for where it is/' he wrote.

There was good land around Chatfield, with plenty of wood
and water, but it had all been taken up on pre-emption and was
held at high prices. He could buy rich prairie land a few miles
out for five dollars an acre but he doubted Harriet would "want
to go that price" for prairie. Most of the money he had was hers,
a few hundred she'd saved from her teaching and as much more
from a little legacy. He had insisted on giving her his note for
the whole amount.

Much as he would like to start a business in a new town that
he "could feel satisfied would grow like Chatfield/' he feared
there were "so many thousands on the same errand" that his
chance was small. He heard plenty about how you could make
25 per cent on your money, even more if you knew the ropes, but
he was determined to take no "such headlong plunges as some
are making here every day/' he reassured his wife.

The country itself was fine. He had been for a walk along the
river the day he wrote and saw some ducks and a bald eagle. He
had picked up an elk's horn to bring home, but he had not seen
a snake or shot a gun since he left Vermont. The ravines were
still choked with snow, and it had snowed that very day but melted
as fast as it fell and farmers kept on plowing in the snow
storm.

When Uncle Sherwin did not appear William Pease set off
on foot for the bend of the Minnesota. It was thick wilderness
most of the way and very few folks on the trail. The fifth day
he saw not a soul from sun-up to dark. He was beginning to think
he'd have to climb a tree if he was to get any sleep, when he spied
a glimmer of light back a way from the trail and found the cabin
it came from.

He was glad to have a door to knock at, but the woman who
answered his knock opened the door only a narrow crack. She
looked so worried he spoke his very politest when he told her he
was traveling to the Minnesota and would like to find a place to

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 87

spend the night. She looked still more worried and said her hus-
band was gone to mill, and they didn't have a very good way to
keep a-body, and started to shut the door.

William Pease had been studying her, what little he could
see, and he said quickly, "Wasn't your folks from Vermont, up
Ludlow way?" and began to call the names of her family. He'd
peddled to their place twice a year for seven years, when she was
just a growing girl.

The door came wide open at that, and William Pease shared
the best there was in the little cabin that night. In return he drew
out of his memory every scrap of news from the whole state of
Vermont. They talked a good part of the night.

The next day he started on, but when noon came and he hadn't
seen a living soul he decided he'd had enough wilderness and
started back to Chatfield.

Uncle Sherwin was there when he got back and while they
visited around the country William Pease heard more tall talk
about all the money a person could make if he knew the ropes.
But the more he heard, the more his Yankee caution asserted
itself. His money was still in his breeches.

Then one Sunday, when he and Uncle Sherwin came across
the river on the Territorial road from the south, they stopped
to take a drink at a big spring where Uncle Sherwin said the man
that started the town had stopped on his way to the valley. It was
as sightly a place as he had ever seen, William Pease thought,
and the spring lay between a kind of bench and a piece of river
bottom that would make good pasture for a bunch of Short-
horns.

Then he heard the partridges drumming in the woods on the
steep sidehill across the river, and he wished he had a gun. When
he was a boy his folks were such strict Methodists they wouldn't
let him shoot a gun on Sunday, and all the other days of the
week there was too much work to leave time for hunting, except
when it rained. He never did get to shoot all the partridges he
wanted.

"Who owns this place?" he asked.

88 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

"Fellow named Sawyer, He bought it from a Frenchman named
Tribeau, that pre-empted it from the gov'ment"

''Do you s'pose Sawyer'd sell it?" William Pease asked.

"Hell yes. Old Sawyer'd sell his wife if the price was right/*

The price for the quarter section was eighteen hundred dollars.
William Pease paid down what money he had, gave a note for
the rest at 2 per cent per month, and hurried back to Vermont
to close out his store and raise all the money he could where
interest was only 6 per cent per year. Within six weeks he and
Harriet were settled on their own farm in Minnesota.

They lived that summer in the shack Tribeau had built on the
bench. The first entry William Pease made in the account book
that recorded every expenditure for the next five years was $2.75
for two windows, and $32.50 for a stove. That same day he also
bought two rakes, twenty-five pounds of nails, two quarts of
molasses, and 70 cents' worth of postage stamps.

Harriet Pease wrote a good many letters that summer, for
her husband was seldom within sight of the house and it was
hard to keep from getting lonely without any neighbors to drop
in of an afternoon. Once in awhile someone going by on the
Territorial road stopped to ask directions, or to bargain for some
of the goods her husband had brought from the unsold remnant
of his Weston stock, but those occasions were rare. She pieced a
fine quilt for company, and one day when she sat sewing, a little
woods mouse ventured over the sill of the open door. She sat
still as a stone so as not to scare him. The next day she spread
some crumbs beside the door. Before long she had coaxed him
clear to the side of her chair. He was a lot of company for her
that summer.

In Boston, Augustus Haven was increasingly drawn to the idea
of exchanging his salaried position as head clerk in a wholesale
dry-goods firm for the independence of his own business in the
West. Several of his friends and relatives had already established

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 89

their prosperity as Western merchants, and Augustus Haven
was more and more inclined to follow them.

It was not as though he lacked experience running his own
business. As early as 1834 he shared a partnership in a general
store in his native Vermont. Each year he took a train of wagons
to Boston, loaded with Vermont wool to be woven into cassimere
cloth for his trade, and cheese, and furs to be traded for the goods
he needed. Boston was often "dull for cash" in those years, and
in 1838 it seemed better to close his partnership and assume
management of the agency of Tyson's Furnace.

Tyson's was one of the oldest iron mines and smelters in
Vermont. Augustus Haven prospered there and built a fine new
house for his school-teacher bride, Barbara Hall so fine that her
brother carried the same plans West and used them to build one
of the best houses in Perrysburg, Ohio. By 1843, however, the
competition of Pittsburgh smelters had brought evil days to
Tyson's Furnace, and Augustus Haven was compelled to close
his agency and look about for a new venture. A Boston friend
advised against opening another store: 'Trade as far as we can
judge is not very flattering either in city or country/' he wrote,
"and were I out of business I would be in no haste about locating
myself again."

Haven ignored the advice, but his experience in the next
ten years confirmed its soundness. A new business begun in
Montpelier collapsed within a year, and Boston wholesalers for
whom he later worked had their own violent ups and downs. At
one time Augustus Haven was so hard pressed that he appealed
to a brother who had gone to Chicago. Aaron Haven's answer-
ing farrago was a remarkable mixture of windy boasting of
Chicago's "very flattering prospects," with whining enumeration
of personal misfortunes; he ended by denying his brother's ap-
peal with the remark that "I started from Boston. Can you be
poorer than I am?"

Somehow Augustus Haven weathered the crisis. Late in 1853
the wholesale house where he was head clerk sent him on a trip

90 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

intended to reach as far West as Chicago. His business prospects
had not been so fair in years.

Perhaps it was the release from long tension of anxiety for him-
self and his family that induced the collapse which overtook him
in Montreal He managed to get back to the house of an old
friend in upper New York, but there he lapsed into utter delirium.
His wife and his employer went to care for him and after a few
days were able to take him home, but once there his condition
became so serious that it seemed to Barbara Haven that the "suf-
fering and agony of a lifetime*' was compressed into those ten
days. The doctor said that the breakdown was "no uncommon
case but such as they have every day . . . induced by the press-
ing cares of business/' The process of establishing our industrial
economy took its toll in strange forms and places.

That was in November of 1853. By the following February,
Augustus Haven was so well recovered as to set off once more on
his delayed trip into the West. It was a momentous journey, but
though he went as far as Chicago he wrote home nothing of his
impressions of the country, save that he would have much to tell
his wife when he returned.

Back in Boston one of his first acts was to see to the shipment
of eleven cases of boots and shoes to his brother's new firm in
Galena. The old lead-mining town was bustling with fresh vigor
as the entrepot for the newly opening upper Mississippi country.
Aaron had offered Augustus the chance to go into the Galena
Erm, and Augustus was all impatience to make the new start.

Barbara Haven was less ready than her husband to leave the
advantages of Boston: its excellent religious privileges, its lectures,
md its music, were wholly delightful, especially since Augustus
vas prosperous enough to permit her to engage an Irish immigrant
;irl to help with the housework and the care of little Emily.

It was particularly admirable that their son, George Henry,
vhose serious devotion to study was so like her own, should have
:he opportunity of attending Boston's excellent English High
School. He had even won the Franklin Medal for superior ex-
cellence in his studies. Augustus, indeed, held that the boy's ab-

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 91

sorption in books was too great, even to the point of imperiling
his health, and it was true the boy's eyes were distressingly poor.
When George Henry called a cow he saw on the Common "a
big hog/' Augustus declared it was time for his son to get some
solid country sense to balance his book learning. In the summer
of 1854, he sent his son to visit old family friends in Vermont,
with strict limitations on the time he was to spend in reading.

Barbara Haven had to admit that her husband was right in
thinking the boy needed more practical and robust experience.
Perhaps she had confined him too closely from playmates of
his own age. When he was only ten he had seemed to prefer
reading an article in the Harper's Magazine to joining the noisy
play of other children of the neighborhood. She had dreamed of
making him a true scholar like her father, Jairus Hall, who had
been graduated from Brown University, or his father, Percival
Hall, who was a surgeon with Washington's army all through
the Revolution. If they went West all such hopes must be put
aside.

There was the loss of church privileges to be considered, also.
Even in Perrysburg, Ohio, where her sister Amanda had gone when
their parents died a year or two before, there was preaching only
once in three weeks, and then for a mere half day. Augustus
wanted to go even farther West, where the preaching would in-
evitably be less adequate. How were her children to know the
true religion if they were cut off from Gospel privileges?

Then there was the cholera to fear. Within three months of
Augustus' return from Galena they had word of death by cholera
taking first Augustus' one-time partner, and then Barbara's sister,
Amanda.

But Augustus' heart was set on Galena. He was certain that
there he could build a business that would free them all from
anxiety. And when Barbara Haven remembered those anguished
ten days when she had not known whether her husband would
ever recover, she could hold out no longer. By the end of the
summer he had gone.

He wrote back with boundless enthusiasm. In Galena he was

gz THE CHOSEN VALLEY

selling more goods in a week than he had ever sold in a month
in Boston. Galena was a wonderful place for children there
were many more in proportion to the population than in Boston,
and they were healthier and better looking than Boston children.
In short, he voiced the heresy that the Western town made
Boston look "slow."

When he wrote that he had engaged a house on Ridge Street,
far above the Fever River on which the boats came up from the
Mississippi, she resigned herself to taking the children and going
to join him. George Henry was being troubled with his eyes once
more, now that he was in school again; perhaps the Western air
would give him fresh strength. Little Emily was big enough to
be manageable on the long train trip to Galena.

Barbara Haven sold the beds and bureaus and plain tables in
her house Augustus wrote they would buy new ones from the
joiners in Galena and had her treasures packed for their long
journey by packet to New Orleans and thence up the Mississippi.
There was the heavy carved walnut bed her father had given her
when she was married and the chest of drawers Augustus had
ordered to match it. There were the mulberry dishes, and the
linen, and the silver she polished each Thursday with such loving
care. There were all the furnishings of the parlor, even the shells
on the walnut what-not, and the painted vases for the mantel.
However strange the new town might be, she would have the
comfort of familiar and beautiful objects about her.

She found Galena both more and less than her hopes. The town
really was beautiful, with its streets rising stairlike one above the
other, and the tall-pillared houses crowning the higher streets.
They were beautiful houses, but the gardens and the coaches of
their owners were tended by black-skinned slaves whose presence
upon the streets of the town was an hourly reminder of the wicked-
ness of the South,

For Galena was half Southern in its make-up. There was some-
thing deeply disturbing to Barbara Haven's staunch Presbyterian
soul in living in a place where the richest and most important
people kept slaves and spent all their time giving parties that

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 93

could be nothing but downright sinful, with the dancing and the
drinking that went on there. The most important church in the
town was Episcopalian, more popish than Protestant.

But Augustus was happy and was making more money than
he had ever made in his life. The children, too, took on an
exuberance that sometimes alarmed their mother. George Henry
did not attend the Academy it was inferior to the Boston
English High School, and the weakness of his eyes gave support
to Augustus' urgency that the boy spend a year working in the
store, away from his books. His mother grieved at the boy's will-
ingness to give up his studies. When she found little Emily play-
ing 'Southern Belle/ in a fantastic array of shawls and chicken
feathers, she was certain that godliness had forsaken her house-
hold.

When Augustus began to talk of leaving Galena to establish
a business of his own, perhaps in one of the new towns starting up
in Minnesota, she was far less reluctant than when he first spoke
of leaving Boston. Galena was a godless place, full of trials for
the New England soul. More northern towns were settled chiefly
by New England people, who would respect rather than laugh at
a decent sobriety of thought and manner.

Word began to come down the river of the new Land Office
town called Chatfield, and Barbara Haven liked what she heard
of it It was forty miles from the river, and she would not be
sorry to have George Henry spared the beguilements of the River
packets whose flaunting luxury could mean no good to an im-
pressionable young mind. When Augustus talked of going to
Chatfield she encouraged him. He would be among the first
merchants to establish himself there, and in such a town a family
from Boston could take its rightful place among the leaders of
community life.

In June, 1856, Augustus Haven took his son up the river to
Winona and thence overland to Chatfield. He liked what he
found there so well that he bought two lots on the westerly corner
of Main and Third Streets, with a small building already upon
one of them. He paid a small part of its price ($1,500) in cash

94 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and gave his notes for the rest at 20 per cent per year.
The interest was high, but prospects were so good that
the new business would undoubtedly cover it in a year's time.
The next day he went back to Winona and arranged to have his
small stock of goods hauled inland from the River. He also bought
$6.88 worth of nails for building shelves and counters in the
new store and then returned to Chatfield. When the goods were
unpacked and properly displayed, and a responsible man hired
to help George Henry look after the business, Augustus Haven
went back to Galena, to close his affairs there and bring his family
and household goods to the new town.

For George Haven the next few weeks had the heady quality
of a fifteen-year-old boy's first independence from parental re-
straints. To be sure, he grew tired of the salt pork that was served
three times a day in the house where he boarded. Years after-
wards he remembered how his mouth watered when he went
one day on an errand to Dr. TwitchelFs house and saw the family
just sitting down to a fine roast of beef. It took all his Boston
decorum to refrain from asking for a taste. He was too sober and
responsible a lad to be tempted to any excess, but the attractions
of the new life spoke in the letters he wrote to an old school chum,
Charles Metcalf, then working in a bank in Boston.

Charles answered that George seemed "to think very much
of the Western country, and I have no doubt but what there are
reasons enough to create such attachments. I should certainly
like to take a tour of the Western country but will notify you
now not to expect me as there is not the least prospect of my
doing anything of the kind/'

He could not understand that George did not suffer from
loneliness, though he supposed that with so many Eastern people
about "you often see acquaintances, or would were you in Galena,
Chicago, or some of the larger cities." He was concerned over
George's "strong symptoms of western fever" and feared it might
carry him "to 'the sunset shores of our glorious Union/ "

But Chatfield was the end of the Haven questing into the
West. A residence was built at the back of the store building,

THE WHEELS ROLL WEST 95

and when Barbara Haven settled her precious what-not and
walnut table into her new parlor she felt that this at last was
home. There she stayed for more than thirty years. Her husband
died in 1863, but her son carried on the business; when he built
the fine brick house to which he took his bride some years later
he begged his mother to move into the rooms he had prepared
for her there, but she would not go.

It took a fire to move her. When her house burned down all her
treasures were saved, and she settled them afresh in the annex
her son built on his own house. There they stayed until her death
five years later, in 1897. T^ 11 the bed, the what-not, and the
table, the mulberry dishes and the silver, found their places in
the brick house, and there they are today. Her son's children, and
his grandchildren, have listened to the sea-song of the shells that
came from fabulous shores to Boston and thence up the
Mississippi. They still like occasionally to take from the walnut
chest the old leather-bound box in which Augustus Haven carried
his papers and to turn over the old letters and documents that
tell the story of their father's family moving into the West.

The stories of these families are but a sampling of the rich tradi-
tion that gathered in Thomas Twiford's valley as the town with
its surrounding province drew its share of the travelers into the
West. They came from everywhere. Six years after James Mc-
Clellan brought his wife to claim the distinction of being the
first white woman to live in Chatfield, the census-taker reported
that the town had natives of twenty-five different states in its
population, and the great migration was by no means ended.

Not all who stopped in Chatfield found it the end of their
travels. Many a name appears here or there in the old records
and then drops out, sometimes with a newspaper note of transfer
to a farther West. Chatfield had its share of those who felt it
was time to be moving "when the bark started from the fence
rails/' They made a beginning at subduing the wilderness,
easing a little the lot of those who came after them. Some, per-

g6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

haps, made a little money out of their sojourn in Chatfield or
its province, but they left small personal trace in its life.*

Many other families who came in those first years stayed
on and played their various parts in the continuing life of the
valley. Often enough the third, even the fourth generation de-
scended from these early comers remain in the Chatfield com-
munity.

For long years the Yankees were easily the dominant figures
in Chatfield leadership, but they were not the only people who
helped to build the common life. From Ireland and Norway,
from Prussia and Poland, from old Bohemia, and other lands
came men and women and children whose labor and laughter
were woven into the fabric of the life that grew in the valley of
Thomas Twiford's choosing.

* According to the original census schedules, now preserved by the Minnesota
Historical Society, ChatfielcFs native-born population had the following distribu-
tion of nativity:

Adult, 20 and over Children, under 20

New York *. 125 39

Vermont 52 14

Ohio 40 18

Pennsylvania 31 22

Massachusetts 30 10

Indiana 21 22

Kentucky 7 o

New Hampshire 7 i

Illinois 7 10

Maine 6 3

Iowa 6 18

Connecticut 5 , . . . 2

Michigan 5 14

New Jersey 3 o

Virginia 3 o

Rhode Island 2 o

Tennessee i o

Georgia i o

Missouri i i

Mississippi i i

Wisconsin i 30

Dist. of Columbia o i

California o i

Maryland , o 2

' Minnesota o 107

Totals 3^5; "316

PART

Four

Worlds for OU

I

THE PINE-CONE HOUSE was ready for a roof. The child in the blue pina-
Fore sat back to consider. Should it be thatched, like Grandmother's
:ottage in County Cork, or shingled, like their own house? She reached
up to pull a strip of bark from the tree for shingles. The sticky touch of
resin on her fingers made her forget the house and look up along the
stem of the tree till she was dizzy with seeing how far it was to the sky.

Grandmother talked about the blue skies of Ireland, but they
wouldn't be as bright and high and shining a blue as this sky was,
right now. The child's eyes slid down the brown and red-flecked stem
of the pine and flew to Grandmother's face, beyond the spinning
wheel. Grandmother was singing. Her long, narrow eyes were crinkly
with laughter that bubbled up into the song, and wound between the
song of the pine tree and the song of the spinning wheel, as bright as a
summer shower in the sun.

It was no good trying to talk to Grandmother when she was singing
her Irish songs and had that look in her face. She'd only say, "You're
just a little American girl. You couldn't understand." The child turned
to look at the cornfield and the pasture, stretched inside the curve of
the river, and the field of wheat stubble beyond. When the wind blew
on the corn another song came up the hill to meet the song of the pine
tree. A cow splashed into the river and stood there up to her knees,
taking a drink. Across the wheat field a bobwhite whistled.

The little girl lay very still in the center of a world full of singing.

II

IF THE YOKE of opinion was heavy in New England, in the mid-
years of the nineteenth century, a much heavier yoke lay on the
laboring people of Europe. In every country the new industrialism
was wrenching men out of the familiar ways of a land-based
economy. Artisans and peasants alike were sinking into what
seemed hopeless poverty. When America's profit-seeking in-
dustrialists sent out word that they would hire all who would
tend their machines, the laborers of Europe poured through the
gates of the New World. The shipowner's exploitation of Eu-
ropean distress, and the subhuman conditions on ships bring-
ing the new laborers to American ports form a chapter of Ameri-
can history still to be written, though enough is known to hint
at its shame.

Yet it would not be easy to tell that story in terms of living men.
For the miracle of America healed the scars of such bitter days
and nights, and men who found living room in a virgin continent
forgot to tell their children of the hell that bridged the Atlantic.
Those who sank in other hells, of sweatshops and blast furnaces,
were mere ciphers in the statistics of expanding industry.

It was the land that delivered thousands from such loss of
identity. The bolder, more knowing ones of the vast anonymous
migration poured into each successive West, looking for land.
Men and women and children from half a dozen countries found
their ways into the Chatfield province. There as elsewhere their

99

100 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

gifts of personality and labor mixed with the dominant Yankee
strain to shape the kinds of people that are American.

More of them came from Ireland than from any other country,
though never was a land more loved than "Holy" Ireland. When
famine came, and the people died beside the roadways with
the stain of roadside weeds upon their mouths, there rose from
the green isle's shores a keening sorrow. Not for the dead alone
but for the millions of her sons and daughters gone to exile,
... In 1841 Ireland's people numbered more than eight millions
(8,175,000); twenty years later their number had shrunk to less
than six millions (5,875,000). The years of the potato famine
(1846-49) saw nearly two million persons evicted from the little
houses where they had lived. All who could escaped to America.

In the last of those dreadful years the Catholic bishop for Iowa
and Minnesota, traveling in Ireland to persuade young sem-
inarians to join his labors beyond the Mississippi, wrote to a
friend in his native France: "I assure you . . . the scene of
poverty in some quarters was awful. ... I saw many cottages
. . . crumbling in ruins and abandoned by their tenants, who
had emigrated to some more hospitable shores. ... I saw oc-
casionally some of those extensive and princely estates occupied
by rich English lords. . . . The contrast between great opulence
and extreme poverty was truly appalling, and one is at a loss to
understand how this state of things can be tolerated in this age
of light and philanthropy."

Bishop Mathias Loras of Dubuque was so moved by the misery
he saw that he wrote to the Dublin papers urging migration to
the American West. His letters were among many influences
that encouraged Irish emigration. By 1850, nearly a million Irish
persons had settled in the United States, and a half million more
were to come in the decade that followed.

Too many of them huddled in the foul tenements of seaport
cities, where they cheapened an already glutted labor market.
Many city priests opposed further migration of their flocks,
arguing that the scarcity of priests in the West would expose the
faithful to the godless beguilements of the Protestants. But the

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 1O1

Bishop of Dubuque, returned to his diocese, wrote repeatedly to
the Boston Pilot and the New York Freeman s Journal urging
Irish immigrants towards the open lands of the frontier.

There was plenty of work for them to do on the way. As early
as 1817, Irish immigrants had been enticed to the vast labors of
the Erie Canal, and they were the workmen who pushed the
canals westward through Indiana and Illinois. By 1850, a notable
Irish settlement had grown up in Woodstock County, near
Chicago., and when the Illinois Central Railroad began to build,
additional thousands flocked into the region. Thoreau's fancy
that the 'sleepers' carrying Eastern railroads were each of them
an Irishman, was even more applicable to Western roads.

Yet those Irish 'sleepers' were by no means fixed or dumb.
When they had earned a little money and gathered a little knowl-
edge of the land, they strolled out into the virgin continent to
find their fortunes in their own ways. Perhaps no one living today
knows the rhythm and contour of the American land as those
wanderers came to know it. They might ride a stagecoach across
a county or two, take a steamboat down some river or across
some lake, but whole sections of the American terrain came
into their knowledge through the slow sure play of muscles carry-
ing them over hill country and plains. The new land became
intimately their own through the eager curiosity of senses at
leisure to note the unending various detail of woodland and sky.

Stopping here for a day's work, there for a week of harvesting,
yonder to chop wood or tend a sawmill for a month, they learned
the ways of a people coming to terms with the land. Whatever
they saw looked good to them, for hope was in the air and a man's
share in this abundance was limited chiefly by his own will.
Economic laws rode lightly on the currents moving West, and
privation lacked the sting of invidious wealth at its side.

In Norway the revolutionary impulses of 1830 swelled to the
long effort of winning more adequate representation for a
peasantry just beginning to feel its political identity. Their lot

1O2 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

was onescapably hard. A whole family commonly lived in a
cramped room or two half dug into the hillside, often too low
for the menfolks to stand upright anywhere except under the
center ridgepole. And for the privilege of such residence they
worked half their time for the Storbunden, the master of the
estate, besides whatever extra time he demanded in wagework.

Had the wages for extra work been in any proportion to the
luxury of the master's living, that arrangement might not have
been so bad. In reality, they were scarcely enough to buy sugar
and coffee for the family, and leather shoes were an almost un-
known luxury. They raised their food on the tiny garden plot
that was often so steep and stony that even potatoes could not
grow until sacks of earth had been surreptitiously carried from the
master's forest to fill the hollows between the stones. . . . Nor
could they flavor their potatoes with a bit of game or fish from
the woods and streams of the estate. That privilege belonged to
the master, and woe to the lad who defiantly snared so much
as a rabbit to boil in his mother's pot.

It had not always been like that, men began to mutter. Once
the Storbunden had lived and labored with his people, and they
had shared and shared alike. Now he must have boots and
suits from shops in the capital, and a fine carriage from abroad.
Time was when the mistress herself presided over the spinning
and weaving rooms of the manor house, and all the children of
the estate wore clothes cut from the same web; now the mistress
got her dresses from Paris and her manners from the moon.
In their new-fangled luxury, the manor-house folk had come to
imagine they were of different clay from the peasants.

It was near the towns, among craftsmen and tillers who heard
with their own ears of the world beyond Norwegian fjords, that
the word "America" first stirred to meaning. When, in 1836,
a little band of the more daring gathered together money and
wit to elude the heavy hand of official opposition, and sailed to
the vast unknown of America, the story was carried back into
the farther mountains with a note of awed unbelief. When word
returned that the venturers had reached their goal and were find-

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 103

ing land more abundant than the Storbunden himself could
claim, men forgot the trials and uncertainties of the adventure
to marvel over the success of its ending.

Slowly others found the way from Norway to America. By
the mid-forties there was scarcely a parish in Norway that had
not received at least one 'America letter* either from one of its
own sons or from someone of a neighboring parish. Those letters
were worn dim in passing from hand to hand. When word went
about of a Sunday morning that a new letter had come, the air
in the little church grew tense with impatience. The pastor might
speak his opposition plainly, but he could not forbid the gathering
of his flock outside the church to hear every word of report on the
amazing land called "Amerika."

The authorities grew alarmed. Churchmen thundered the
perils of eternal damnation upon those who willfully abandoned
the stations to which God had appointed them. Even some
writers of 'America letters' eventually grew concerned when they
saw so many of their countrymen venturing into the new country
with none of the protections they might readily have provided
for themselves. A series of emigrant guides was published in Nor-
way to give practical assistance to the increasing numbers of
Norwegians who were going to America.

The journey itself had hazards to spare. Sixteen weeks in the
fetid hold of one of the ships that carried those early emigrants
was enough to try the strongest constitution. The decks were so
poorly protected that it was dangerous to venture out in any but
the calmest weather. One family in the Chatfield province still
tells how one of their little girls was almost lost one day when
they crowded on deck for the relief of decent air. A mountainous
wave broke suddenly over the deck, swept the child off her feet
and was carrying her out to sea when a man was lucky enough to
grab her skirts just as she was passing out of reach.

Bread grew moldy and cheese turned rancid in the great ham-
pers of food that the emigrants carried. When storm tossed the
vessels there were days on end when the single stove available for
cooking could not be lighted. Then not so much as a cup of tea

104 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

could be made to comfort the sick. Scarcely a ship arrived at its
American port with the full number of passengers with which it
had sailed.

Yet the Norwegians continued to come. By 1850, substantial
Norwegian communities were established in Illinois and Wis-
consin. In 1853, severa l families moved on into the southeastern
corner of Fillmore County. As each new little settlement got a
foothold it welcomed later comers and helped them find work,
and land, and the means of existence. Most of the Norwegians
who settled in the Chatfield province had spent a week, or a year,
in one or more of their countrymen's centers on the way to their
ultimate West.

In Bohemia the Hapsburgs had come to the throne by legal
enough process, as those things went in 1 526, but they never for-
got that they were the rulers and the Bohemians their subjects,
or that the Hapsburgs were the champions of the Holy Roman
Empire against the heresies of the Hussites. Hapsburg arrogance
was answered by a surly submissiveness which nourished itself on
a stubborn devotion to Hussite doctrine and dogged continuance
of the old Czech language despite repressive edicts. Always there
was the thorough hatred of the Hapsburgs and contempt for the
immorality credited to their royal amours. One man who lived
long in Chatfield remembered how his grandmother would not
permit Maria Theresa to be mentioned in her presence: the em-
press's name was a blot on the purity of all womanhood.

When revolution stirred Europe in 1848, Bohemia too had its
moment of hope. But the Hapsburgs denied all petition for en-
larged rights, and thereafter the reactionary will of the empire
bore down with special heaviness upon the Bohemians. Most bit-
terly resented were the three years of army service required from
every able-bodied man.

When word came of the fabulous land called America, men
were slow to believe what they heard. A man from one village
wrote that he worked in a huge iron smeltery in a place called Pitts-

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

burgh and ate meat every day. From another came the story of
one who had land in a province with the strange name of Wis-
consin. He had it direct from the Government itself, not twenty
acres but a hundred and twenty.

Such things were not lightly to be believed, but when strangers
wearing American clothes and speaking the Bohemian tongue ap-
peared in the villages to tell how magic carpets called steamship
tickets could be bought, and how American 'jobs' could be ob-
tained, belief slowly gained over skepticism. By the early fifties,
Bohemians had begun to settle in each of the northern states, with
specially strong centers in Iowa and Wisconsin. By the end of the
eighties there was scarcely a village in all Bohemia from which
one or more families had not gone to America.

England did not escape the nineteenth century *s distress under
the impact of industrial expansion. As early as 1830, the Chartist
movement demanded relief from both economic and political in-
justice. The slight reform in Parliamentary representation that it
won looked well on the statute books. It did little to relieve the
terrible distress which Friedrich Engels saw and recorded so bit-
terly.

The artisans suffered most. As factory production got under
way, England endured the awful spectacle of masses of artisans
from every craft left without employment for their skill or sale for
their products. So general was the distress that for a few months
the specter of violent revolution stalked the ways of England's
ruling class. When the rulers broke the threat of the Chartists in
1848, thousands of young men, trained in one or another trade
and seeing no prospect of adequate employment, turned towards
America.

The English had less need than most emigrants to gather in little
groups for mutual assistance. Their speech was basically the same
as American speech, however outlandish one accent might sound
to the other ear. Their political heritage of parliamentary proce-
dure was the matrix from which American practice had been

106 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

molded. They found their religious consolation in familiar Meth-
odist, Baptist, or Presbyterian churches, for most English emi-
grants were 'chapeF rather than 'church/ Even Episcopal ritual
was more acceptably 'American' than that of the Roman church.

So it came about that the English moved through the American
West with less measurable effect than that of many other groups.
Almost any community might be graced for a longer or shorter
season by an exiled lordling or remittance man. As long as he was
content not to arrogate undue importance to himself he was
accepted with that mixture of romantic deference and cheerful
raillery that has often baffled the foreign observer. For the most
part the English artisans slipped unobtrusively into some small
niche and did their share of the common work with no special
mark of nationalistic distinction.

Often enough they became a permanent part of the first com-
munity in which they stopped, though many of them tried two
or three, or many different localities before they ended their
journeying. In Chatfield, for instance, fourteen English-born
men, most of them with English wives and families, were listed
in the census of 1857; in 1860 all but two of those men had dis-
appeared

There were a few Germans, also, among those who came to
Chatfield in its early years, propelled from their homeland by
those forces of famine and reaction which sent tens of thousands
from Germany to the United States after 1848. From 1850 to
1 860 they entered this country at the rate of 90,000 a year. A few
individuals a brewer, a butcher, a merchant, a harness maker
came into Chatfield by 1860, but the bulk of German migration
to Minnesota settled elsewhere. Their chief center was a hun-
dred miles west and north of Chatfield so far beyond Chat-
field's province that no trace of its Germanic culture was felt in
Thomas Twiford's valley.

It was from these national strains under Yankee hegemony

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

that the Chatfield community was chieiy wrought.* As in-
dividuals they differed as widely within each group as the groups
differed among themselves. Though in the first years the Yankee
banker might enter in his ledgers a payment made to "Norwegian
John" or "Bohemian Joe," some of the foreign-bom children of
those same anonymous newcomers became bankers and members
of the legislature within the span of their parents 7 lives. Less am-
bitious ones owned farms and built houses, joined lodges and were
elected to office there, wrote letters to the editor of the Democrat
in the unchallenged freedom of an American to say what he
thinks.

* The census of 1860 showed the following numbers of persons of foreign birth
in Chatfield itself: there were more in the surrounding country.

Country Adults, 20 and over Children, under 20

Ireland 64 9

England 18 4

Germany 14 4

Canada 10 12

Poland 9 6

Norway 6 2

Scotland 6 2

Bohemia 4 j

Nova Scotia 2 o

Switzerland i^ __o_

Totals 134 46

Grand total iSo

The listing of Polish nativity affords an interesting comment on nativistic attitudes
of the period. Every one of the individuals so designated was born in Bohemia.
They named the other country on the advice of earlier arrivals who thought Ameri-
cans were particularly friendly to Polish immigrants because of admiration for the
Revolutionary hero, Kosciusko, who had recently revisited the country.

Ill

IN JUNE OF 1850, Nicholas Crawley said his sorrowful adieus
to parents, and brothers, and sister in Carrickmacross, County
Monaghan, and left to try his fortunes in the new land. It was a
weary crossing. He barely made his way to a family from his own
village, then living in New York, when he succumbed to illness
so severe that it was weeks before he was able to write to his family.
The answer which his father wrote tells much of both sides of
the Irish migration.

October 8th, 1850
Dear Son

I received your welcome letter which give us all the greatest consola-
tion to hear of you being in good health as the same leaves us all at
present thanks be to god for all his mercies towards us. Dear son it
grieved us all very much to hear of the hardships you went through
going to that Country and then your Sickness for so long a time but
we thank God after all that you are perfectly recovered at the Present
time . . . the day your letter was received was a day of great rejoicing
with us for many a long and weary walk we had for it these four months
Past ... we never heard any thing Since you left us give us such Joy
as to hear from you . . . your mother in particular was very uneasy
night and day saying that Something Come across you when you did
not rite us for so long. But she is quite happy now and there is nothing
in the world she requests of you so much as to rite often to us for it is
a great pleasure for A person to hear from you when We Cannot see

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 109

you our dearly Beloved Son ... it was a happy news to your Brother
Edward to hear that you would send for him for he says he would give
all ever seen to see one Sight of you and thinks it longer nor his life
untill spring ... we hope in your next letter you will let us no what
is best fitted for that Country the way we will have the Pleasure of
sending them to you . . . you will be pleased to let us know Is it
good place for girls and we will send your Sister with Edward If you
encourage them to go there For Ireland is getting so bad that young-
sters have no settlement in it only Striving and asking to go to America
for it is not the Potatoes Alone has failed this year but wheat and all
sorts of Cora . . . We hope you will not think it is sending you bad
news we are; it is only letting you know the State of the Country
we are ... we are very glad to let you no that our Landlord's Brother
was with us the day that this letter was tote and got the directions of
you and Said that he would Call to See you and get a high Situation
for you which one he intends to be there in the Course of a month and
do all he can for you ... he advises every one to go there . . . you
may let Catherine Casey no that her mother was very glad to hear from
her and was present when this letter was tote and we are very glad you
are along with them . . . John Manon Requests of you to make all the
Enquiry you Could for his brother Edward he is in Carter Street New
York No 210 . . . Mrs. Daly requests of you to tell her daughter to
rite to her ... we all join in one and send you our blessing and hope
never to be so long again without hearing from you No more at present
but we remain your loving Parents untill Death

Patrick & Ann Crawley

The "Landlord's Brother" and the "high Situation" he
promised never found Nicholas Crowley. (He changed the spell-
ing of his name early to fit American tongues.) He worked at all
sorts of jobs, in Michigan and then in Illinois, brought two broth-
ers to America, and early in 1855 found his way to Chatfield.
There he took a claim on the Root River just above Parsley's ford,
registering it in the Brownsville Land Office.

He had evidently prospered in the new country, for six months
later he paid the Brownsville office the full price of his quarter
section two hundred dollars with no pressure of an impending
auction to force his action. Both times he covered the whole

11O THE CHOSEN VALLEY

distance to Brownsville and back thirty-five miles each way
on his feet. Perhaps a hundred and forty miles of walking seemed
a mere stroll after the journey which had brought him across an
ocean and half a continent. . . .

His sister never saw America, but years afterward her grown
children came at their uncles' invitation and settled in the Chat-
field province, where many of the Crowley descendants still re-
main.

In the same year that Nicholas Crowley left his native Ireland
another family began its long journey to America. Mary Burns
O'Halloran, of County Cork, had borne ten sons and a daughter
before her husband died early in 1850. The eldest son, intended
for the priesthood, had died a year or two before, just as he was
ready to enter the seminary; he and two brothers lay beside their
father in the parish burying ground, and Mary O'Halloran was
left with little more than her own hands and a shrewd in-
domitable will that accepted no defeat.

Somehow she contrived to pinch together enough money to
send her two eldest living sons, Edward and Andrew, to America
a few months after their father's death, and they in turn, two
years later, sent money for the next two brothers, Timothy and
Dennis, to come to America,

Half a century later the Chatfield News published "The History
of Chatfield; Written from Memory by Mr. Timothy Halloran."
There he reported his arrival in this country:

When I landed in Boston, in October '52, 1 was then 17 years old and
pretty green I tell you; but I got along very well and never tramped but
two days. I earned $5 the first month, $4 the second and managed to
make out $2 the third. The next two months I got $5 per month; I had
a good time and did not suffer at all. In the spring of '55 I got the
western fever and emigrated west, coming to Chicago. From there I
went to Milwaukee. I started out one day, walked 10 miles, and hired
out to C. D. Parker for $14 per month for the season. Mr. Parker was
a very intelligent man and gave me my first information in regard to
the affairs of this country. [Parker was later elected to the Wisconsin

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 111

legislature.] He advised me to go to school, I did so, attending school
six weeks. I learned the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, and that
constituted my education. ... In October, '56, I came to Chatfield.
... I came from Galena by stage across Grant county to where
Boscobel now is. My brother Ed. and I started on foot from there to
Chatfield. We pre-empted six miles west of High Forest in the town of
Pleasant Valley. . . .

It was to that claim he returned through the memorable storm
already described, and from that claim that he went to ind work
in the Chatfield woods, the "Winter of the Big Crust"

Eventually the seven O'Halloran brothers, their mother, and
their sister all lived in the Chatfield province. When the mother,
with her daughter and two youngest sons, arrived, a railroad had
been built to the north of Chatfield and the four O'Hallorans
walked the eight or ten miles from the nearest station, marveling
at the narrow dusty track pointed out to them as the road to
Chatfield. In Ireland such a poor boreen would never be found
leading to the fine town the sons had written about.

Their walk down that road was the last stage of a hegira which
was to make the name of that family one of the most pervasive in
the Chatfield community. They early dropped the O 7 , feeling
that sign of noble birth unsuited to the large equalities of their
new home. The mother of those seven sons lived to see nineteen
grandsons who bore her name, besides the five sons of her daugh-
ter (who married Nicholas Crowley), and fifteen granddaughters.

Joe Manahan was another Irish boy who found his future in
Chatfield. He was even younger than Timothy Halloran when
he landed in America, and a man for whom he worked in Wood-
stock County grew so fond of the lad that he offered food and
clothing and such schooling as the district afforded, with forty
acres of land when the boy should be twenty-one, if he would
only stay. But Joe Manahan wanted no land at the price of his
freedom. And why should he, when a hundred and sixty acres
would be his for the claiming?

112 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

When lie was ready to settle down he made his way to Chat-
field and chose a piece of land not far northeast of town. The
first night he slept in his claim shanty he was visited by the 'Black
Dolans' of whom he had been warned, who boasted they would
own the whole township, and had brought in assorted relatives
to take the claims they coveted. The lot of them half a dozen
huge beetling bullies bore down on Manahan's shanty at dusk
and warned him profanely that if he was still there by morning
he could expect nothing but murder as his end. Joe Manahan had
held his own in too many railroad camp brawls to be scared by
that kind of talk. He gave them as good as they sent, and the
Dolans showed their bullying natures by letting him completely
alone thereafter.

When he had made his Improvements' and entered his claim
in due form, Joe Manahan went back to Illinois to work through
the winter. He returned in the spring with a fine span of horses
he had earned one of the first to be brought into the province.
His brother John came a little later, and the two Manahans had
so many sons that their name came to pervade the community
as largely as did the name of Halloran.

That summer of 1856 when Joe Manahan went back to Chat-
field to stay, Ed Tuohy, born in County Galway, set off from
Illinois in search of land. He had known Joe Manahan in Wood-
stock County but he took a different route from the one that
led to Chatfield. When he crossed the river at Galena he walked
straight across Iowa for a hundred miles before he turned north
to Minnesota. In the lake-and-prairie region some sixty miles
west of Chatfield he staked his claim and then set off for the
Land Office town to enter his pre-emption. There he found Joe
Manahan, who gave him so hearty a welcome that he was per-
suaded to take a claim near Manahan's land.

When he went to the Land Office to look at the plats, Mr.
McKenny, the Receiver, offered him a job as 'hired man'
and Ed Tuohy stayed in Chatfield. The decision held more of

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

his fate than the young man guessed at the moment, for one of
the two 'hired girls' working for the McKennys was Margaret
Towey, whom a few months later he married.

She had come from County Mayo by a different route from
most of the Irish immigrants. The sailing vessel in which she left
Ireland had been blown far out of its course by storms and after
three months at sea made port in New Orleans. It meant for
those wind-driven immigrants an even stranger country than they
had anticipated: the heat, the Creole speech, and the great
number of black laborers made it utterly foreign to them despite
the presence of many Roman Catholic churches. Most of the
Irish people who disembarked in New Orleans made their way
up the River as fast as they could. ... If the letters they wrote
about their encounters with Southern ways could be found in
old chests stored in Irish cottages they might unfold as fascinating
a chapter as that of Norway's 'America letters/

Margaret Towey and Ed Tuohy worked together that fall
and winter as the McKennys' 'hired help/ There were no
'servants' in Chatfield, except when the census-taker followed
official instructions. Even then only the 'hired girls' were listed
as 'servants'; the men were laborers/ A society that was all in
the making had no use for the hard-and-fast categories of servant
and master. A girl might 'work out' for a while, but shortly she
married and had a family of her own, and as her husband pros-
pered she hired help for herself.

It was that way with Ed Tuohy and his wife. The pair of them
took the stagecoach one spring day to Winona, where the nearest
priest lived and came back the next day with his blessing. They
called on the McKennys before setting off to their land and
Mrs. McKenny gave the bride a beautiful tortoise shell cat to
keep her company in the little cabin. They carried the cat in a
basket, up over Winona Hill and four miles eastward, and eighty
years later their son remembered the comfort Margaret Tuohy
had from that gift.

"Your borders were closer in those days," he sometimes says,
"and you paid more attention to little things. A cat was lots of

114 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

company, and when you had a cow you were rich. It was a great
thing to carry a pat of butter or a dozen eggs to a neighbor for
Christmas, when your borders were close like those days."

Sometimes the borders pressed close as prison walls, but mostly
the hope that swelled in the opening country made any privation
or difficulty endurable, because these people knew it would not
last. It is not the nearness of borders but their fixity that goads
men to bitterness, and the memories that have come down from
those early years are shaped by that intuition. In a time and place
where people felt their borders continually enlarging, a deeper
wisdom than mere economics released vast unspent stores of
love and laughter.

In Chatfield itself the Irish people greatly outnumbered the
Norwegians, for when the Norwegians came into the Chat-
field province they settled at once on the land. Of the 113 original
pre-emptions in Chatfield Township, sixteen were taken by Nor-
wegians; in townships east and south the proportion was larger.
All through the region many parcels of land came into Nor-
wegian hands later, as Yankee speculators sold out for such profit
as they could make.

Among the original Norwegian pre-emptors south of Chat-
field was Ole J. Tangen, who left Norway with all his family in
1853. Their first stop was in Chicago, where the men worked
at breaking land outside the city. The two married daughters
and their husbands settled there, but late in 1855 Ole Tangen,
his wife, and their eighteen-year-old son, also named Ole, went
out to Minnesota. They made for the little log house which Even
Anderson (later Spelhaug) had built south of Chatfield, and
stayed there until they had taken land of their own near by and
built their own log hut.

During the winter the father girdled the trees near the cabin
peeled off a strip of bark around each tree, so the top would die
and let the sun come through and young Ole 'worked out' for
more prosperous settlers in the neighborhood. In the spring the

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 115

boy brought home his wages: a steer calf, an unsheared sheep,
and potatoes enough to plant the ground which his father had
laboriously spaded under the girdled trees.

The potatoes prospered, which was fortunate. The following
winter the Tangens seldom had anything to eat but boiled
potatoes served with salt. They wore socks and mittens and caps
that Mrs. Tangen knitted from the wool she had cut from the
sheep and spun on her wheel. The steer calf grew so well that
two years later, when they acquired a second steer, they had a
fine yoke of oxen to hitch to the plow to turn the field that had
finally been cleared. Their first wheat crop was so good that they
bought a cow the third fall, and then they lived in luxury. With
flour ground from their own wheat, with milk, and cheese, even
butter, from their own cow, no family could ask for more.

The son Ole was by that time twenty-one, so he pre-empted
eighty acres of his own and built a cabin on it. On the ship coin-
ing from Norway he had met the girl who, despite all the misery
of the passage, remained in his heart as the girl he would marry.
She had stayed in Chicago, 'working out' for a rich family there.
Now young Ole went to find her and a few weeks later brought
his bride to his little cabin. They were to live there until her death,
twenty years later.

His second wife (younger than his eldest daughter) lived out
her life in turn in that same log house though it had been en-
larged by several log additions. Nineteen children begotten by
Ole Tangen were born in that cabin. When his youngest son
inherited the place he built his fine frame house around the
original cabin, where it still remains, still owned by a son of Ole
Tangen.

A later arrival from Norway was Asle Sundet, a tailor so pros-
perous that he had eight hundred silver dollars when he ar-
rived in the new country. He was the last one of his family left
to care for his grandmother, and it was not easy to persuade her
to such a change. When she finally consented he set off with

Il6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

her, his wife, and their tiny baby for the week's cart-ride from
their inland village to the port.

Their baby died on the way and they carried the little body
in their arms for a whole day so that they might lay it in con-
secrated ground. But when they came to the port, their ship was
so near sailing they could do no better than leave their first-born
to kind strangers who promised to give it Christian burial. It
was a sad departure, and a more sad arrival, for the grandmother
died the day before they reached their new-world port. Because
they were so near to land they were permitted to keep her body
for burial there. That double loss made fit symbol for thousands
making that journey the future dying as they left their old
world, the past, as they reached the new.

In the New World Asle Sundet turned his back on the pattern
of his past and refused opportunities to settle as tailor in the Nor-
wegian communities of Wisconsin. Instead he took land south
of Chatfield, built a cabin, and settled his wife and their new-
world baby in it. Then Asle Sundet went off to work all winter
in 'the pineries/ those northern forests which were being slashed
down to the great profit of a few lumber barons. Each winter
for years Asle Sundet worked there, and with his wages he bought
tools and livestock and land until he owned two hundred and
forty acres, as prosperous and well-kept a farm as could be found
in the whole Chatfield province.

A dozen such stories could be told, each with some twist of
circumstance making it the story of one family rather than an-
other. One more must suffice: it illustrates the kind of social
freedom which brought even prosperous people under the lure
of the New World.

The second son of a moderately wealthy Storbunden fell in
love with the daughter of the poorest tenant on his father's
estate. The father was outraged and decided to send the boy to
America as the lesser evil. This the son agreed to, but before
his departure he persuaded the pastor of a distant parish to pub-

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

lish the bans and read the marriage lines for him and his peas-
ant sweetheart. When faced with the accomplished fact the
father was forced for shame to buy two passages instead of one.

The young pair settled some distance south of Chatfield and
prospered, but so deep was the son's resentment that he never
wrote to his father. Word did eventually reach the father of his
son's location and after some years he grew so anxious that he
sent his eldest son to see how the younger brother was faring.
The elder son found his brother independent, as no man was
in Norway, and rich beyond all dreaming. Forthwith the eldest
son wrote back to his wife instructing her to dispose of all their
property, hire two men and two maids, and come with all haste
to America. She did his bidding and the father never saw either
of his sons again.

Few Norwegian migrants made so dramatic a severance of
old loyalties, but the New World so absorbed their energies and
realized their hopes that there was little grieving for the Old.
Now and then a man (more rarely a woman) would return to
Norway, but they stayed for no more than a visit. After the heady
wine of new-world freedom, there was little in the old to hold
them, though now and then one felt himself, as the years grew
heavy on his head, an exile suspended between two worlds,
neither of which was truly his own. But for the children of the
immigrants there was no question of divided loyalty.

Captain McKenny was impatient to be home after his trip
to Winona on official business. He decided he could save a little
time if he cut down from the ridge a mile east of town instead
of following the road over Winona Hill. His horse was as eager
as the Captain to be home and went readily enough over the
trail toward the level of the bench. They would get safely into
town before it grew really dark.

But something unexpected caught McKenny's eye on the
other side of the bench just above the Big Bend. Wagons and
they appeared to be coming out of the town. That called for

Il8 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

investigation. The Captain pricked his reluctant horse into a
trot tangential to the way home.

There were half a dozen wagons in the group and they were
evidently preparing to camp above the Bend for the night.
Foreigners, he knew by the outlandish sounds he heard; as he
came nearer he saw some of them were still in their old-country
clothes. The men wore scarlet-dyed coats, made of sheepskin,
fleece turned inward. They looked a decent, self-respecting lot,
but he got no intelligible response to the voyageur French he
had picked up in his years as sutler at Fort Ripley.

The excited calls that rose about his inquiries finally brought
forth a man in American clothes who spoke to the Captain in
reasonably clear English. The others, he explained, were all
Bohemians from the same village, who had been in Wisconsin for
nearly a year and had started out several weeks ago intending to
go to Kansas to look for land. But after struggling halfway across
Iowa over trails filled with bottomless mudholes, they had given
up the effort to reach Kansas and turned northward into the lake-
and-prairie region of Minnesota. They had seen nothing they
liked as well as the hills of Wisconsin and now were on their
way back to the Bohemian settlements there. They had meant
to spend that night in the town in the valley, but when they saw
Indians camped in the Bend of the river they were afraid and
turned back. They would camp here for the night, and hoped they
would not be molested.

Captain McKenny laughed at the idea of the Indians hurt-
ing anybody. They would steal anything that lay within their
reach but they were as harmless as children.

As for the town in the valley there wasn't a better town any-
where in the whole country than Chatfield. They would really
see something when they saw that. The richest soil in the world
lay in the valleys around the town. He, Captain McKenny,
head man in the government office that disposed of the land,
would see that these folks got their full share of that land. They
should ride down into town now, and the very first thing in the
morning he would pick out their farms for them.

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 119

The Captain's eloquence was translated in the oddest fashion
he had ever encountered. The man with whom he spoke called
his wife and asked the Captain to repeat what he had said about
the Indians, the town, and the land. When the Captain had
finished, the woman turned to another man in the group and
spoke in what McKenny recognized as German. This person in
his turn addressed the men in old-country clothes in the odd-
sounding gibberish that was evidently Bohemian.

What he said was hard to recognize as a version of the Cap-
tain's original eloquence, but it provoked a storm of chatter-
ing discussion. When the decision was finally re-translated back
into English, it was for the band to spend the night where they
were. They would come into the town first thing in the morning.

They did according to their word. When they went down
the hill the next morning they were so surrounded by Indian
outlandishness that they might have been afraid had Captain
McKenny not ridden up to escort them. He laughed heartily
at the assault of Indian curiosity, especially when the squaws
went into rapturous delight over a two-year toddler, youngest
of the Bohemian children. They passed him from one to another,
and rubbed his apple cheeks so lovingly against their own that
the child was daubed with paint from ear to ear. But he never
cried at all, and his crowing readiness to laugh at each new diver-
sion captured them all.

The upshot was that the five Bohemian families all settled in
or near Chatfield. Their names were in time simplified to Under-
leak, Jelineck, Teska, Pavelka, and Chermack, and they were
the first of forty or more Bohemian families that came into the
Chatfield province. Their ways seemed strange to their neighbors,
and many of the older folks worked so endlessly that they never
learned much of the new country's ways. But they made farms
out of their wild acres, and they prospered, and their sons and
daughters reached out in many directions to share in the common
life.

By no means all of the immigrants settling in the Chatfield
province came during the first few years after Thomas Twif ord

120 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

chose that valley for his town. The story of one man who left
Bohemia in the early eighties is eloquent of the forces that con-
tinued to propel men out of their native countries into the
American West.

Adolph Pavlish was a big fellow and strong for his seventeen
years, but no thanks to the millers for whom he had worked ever
since he was twelve. They had fed him a flour-and-water slop
they called soup, and potatoes too scabby for the master's table.
If his folks had not owned a cow when he was getting his growth
he might have been as skinny and scared as the little man who
worked in the miller's barns.

One fine April Sunday the miller sat long over his roast meat
and pasteries, so long that when the boy was finally allowed to
go eat he found the 'soup' stiff and cdld, and the potatoes dumped
contemptuously on the bare table for him had been so picked
over by the other servants that there was nothing fit to put in a
man's mouth. In a sudden fury the boy flung out of the kitchen
without eating a bite.

The brilliant spring sun made him uncommonly bold. He
seized the barnman, just shuffling up to the door, and urged him
across the road to the little beer garden before the other quite
knew what terrible liberty they were taking. With a fine air of
bravado Adolph ordered two beers and sat talking loudly of what
a fine country America was, where his sister had gone two years
before. A gendarme came in and the barnman nudged Adolph
into silence; yet the boy was full of hatred for the fear that
pinched him.

"Here comes the master," the barnman whispered, and Adolph
was furious that his heart began to beat faster. What if the boss
called the gendarme to beat them back to the mill? But the miller
smiled at them and ordered bologna and beer for the boys and
sat down with them while they waited for the uneasy largesse.

That was really something to have happen. Like the day, a year
before, when Adolph had complained about the food and the

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 121

master had brought him a little tray with a thin slice of veal, a
piece of black bread, and even a cup of tea. It hadn't been enough
to stop the constant gnawing of his hunger but it helped. Maybe
the boss wasn't such a bad fellow, really.

But when the waiter came back with four inches of bologna
and a liter of beer for each of the three, and Adolph saw how
smoothly the master devoured the meat after gorging himself
at dinner, all his anger rose up again in him. Then, when he had
wiped the last bit of foam from his mustache the master said,
"Well, boys, I guess you'd better get back and load up that lum-
ber for tomorrow morning/'

While he checked and counted the lumber Adolph PavHsh
made up his mind. He was going to America.

It took six weeks of pestering the miller to get his signature of
honorable discharge on the passbook without which the boy
could be picked up and clapped into jail by any gendarme in
all Austria. When a journeyman miller came by late in May,
the master released the boy in sheer weariness at his importunity.
Adolph walked the thirty miles to Sadek, his family's village in
the easternmost part of Bohemia. There he found that his
mother was sick. When he told her his decision she cried and
grew so much worse they sent for the doctor. Adolph tried to
get the doctor to sign an exemption from military duty, but he
refused. The boy knew he must try another way.

The next day he walked to the county seat to ask for a pass-
port to America. The officer to whom he applied thrust a book
at him, thundered, "Can you read?" and left the boy standing
a long time before he spoke again. No passport could be issued
to any boy sixteen or older who had not served his military time.
Adolph was never too easy to take things, and as he walked out
of the office he muttered something under his breath. The clerk
heard and thundered again, "Be careful! You will be watched!
Don't try to sneak away!" The boy forced the civil answer that
he had only asked legally for his pass. But he knew that he was
going, pass or no.

That was Tuesday, the thirtieth day of May, 1882. As he

122 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

walked home he laid his plans. The nearest railway lay twenty-
five miles north of the county seat but since that was the
chief emigrant route it would be closely watched. The next near-
est, to the northeast, would take him too far out of his way. He
would take the third, though it necessitated a stagecoach from
the county seat, and every hour he remained in the country in-
creased the danger of being caught.

When he told his parents, and an aunt and her grandson who
lived in Sadek, they all cried and begged him not to try. If he was
caught he would be pressed at once into the army, and after his
three years of service they would put him into the guardhouse
for four years more. To risk seven years for freedom. . . .

But the boy left as he had planned.

He got safely to the railroad and bought his ticket to a town
near the Prussian border. When he got there Thursday afternoon
he threw his small handbag out of sight behind the station and
walked down the track to get a look at the border. Flagpoles were
set up at irregular intervals, farther apart where the ground was
clear of obstructions, and the guards walked between those poles.
They met each other halfway from one to another, saluted, then
each turned back on the way he had come. Adolph Pavlish
watched, hidden in the long grass, until he knew thoroughly how
they moved, then went back to the station and got his bag.

It was getting on toward evening, and he had eaten nothing in
the two days since he left home except some little rolls and
bologna he'd bought from a woman peddling in one of the sta-
tions. He knew it was horse meat in the bologna, and his stomach
had refused it as fast as he swallowed. But he was afraid to go to
an inn for proper food. As soon as it was dusk he went back to
the border and hid himself again in the place he had chosen.

He was scared. "I tell you/' he said, recalling the moment, after
sixty years in America, "if you'd cut me with a knife I wouldn'ta
bled, I was that scared." Finally, when it was almost dark and
the guards came together, saluted, then turned and moved apart,
he cut up across the bank, over the rise, and ran like a rabbit.
When he was safely across the fatal line he dropped down into

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 123

the grass to listen. They had not heard him. After a while he
knew he was free.

He was in a strange country but he found his way back to the
railroad and walked into the next town. The officials there asked
no questions about his passport, but they examined his bag. The
officer who did it poked everything out of the bag onto a table
with a little short sword he carried.

The most precious thing in the bag was a razor young Pavlish
had found in an old trunk of his father's. It had been through the
Napoleonic wars with his grandfather, and the boy had honed
it to a fine cutting edge. He had shaved with it seven or eight
times before he left Sadek, but the officer barked sneeringly,
"What's that for?" When the boy answered, "To use/'
the officer swept the razor onto the floor and broke a nick in the
blade. Young Pavlish was so mad that if he'd dared he'd have
busted that officer one, right then and there. That was the way
they were in the Old Country: if a man had a little power he
took no thought for anyone else in his use of it.

He took the train to Dresden, thence to Leipsig, and from
there to Bremen. When he got off the train, in the biggest crowd
that he had ever seen, he was scared. But a man came up to him
and asked in German if he would come to his boardinghouse.
Pavlish had learned German in the school where his father had
sent him for three years. Because the stranger looked honest
Pavlish went along, saying, "All right, if you don't put me in
some kind of a dungeon." He slept that night in a tiny room by
himself under the eaves, and the man was very kind.

When the boy went next day to Brennerhaven to buy his
ticket he was asked whether he wanted to go on the Sunday boat
or on one sailing Tuesday, which was faster. The boy said he'd
take the Sunday boat. The ticket seller waved his hand and said,
"All right, all right, I understand." By ten o'clock Sunday morn-
ing the Bohemian boy was safely beyond reach of pursuit.

By the twentieth of June he had arrived on the Southern Minne-
sota Railroad at Fountain, the station nearest to Chatfield He
went to the stone hotel to eat, not knowing a word of the language

124 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

he heard around him. When he had finished and gone outside,
a man whom he had seen in the dining room came out and spoke
to him in German, asking where he was going, and where he
had come from. Pavlish told him, and admitted he had very
little money left. The stranger told him the stage would not leave
until five o'clock, but he could have a free ride if he would wait
there till a man on a hayrack beckoned him to climb on. Pavlish
did as he was bid. He made out from the driver that he had
hauled a load of fleeces from J. C. Easton's farm at Chatfield
to ship on Easton's railroad. The man seemed so poor and un-
lucky, for all that he worked for such a rich man, that Pavlish
felt sorry for him and gave him the forty cents change he had
left in his pocket.

When he got to Chatfield, the driver pointed out the house
where the boy's sister lived. She was working in the garden and
was overcome with astonishment at her brother's arrival. When
the brother-in-law came home his first question was whether
the traveler had any money. Pavlish showed the single silver
dollar he had left, and the husband said he'd take care of it until
the first of the month. Pavlish never saw that dollar again.

He felt bad, in a strange country where he didn't know a word
of the language, and had no job and no money. The first Sunday
he was there four fashionably dressed young ladies came to his
sister's house to "look at the greenhorn," and that did not make
him any happier. But the very first day, when he was riding up
from Fountain, the country looked kind to him, almost like
Bohemia, and he knew, no matter what happened, that was the
place where he would stay.

On the twentieth of June, 1932, Adolph Pavlish celebrated
the golden anniversary of his arrival in Chatfield. His twelve
children and their families, and relatives and friends from other
places to the number of sixty, spent a long and festive week end
together. A whole string of cars joined the procession on Sunday
afternoon, and they drove up and down every street in town,
past the forty-odd houses that Adolph Pavlish had built. A
nephew, who was a successful doctor in Chicago, wanted to take

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

his uncle on a trip to Bohemia that summer. But Adolph
Pavlish said no. The best part of his life belonged to Cliatield.
There was nothing in Bohemia that he wanted.

In Horncastle, a village of Lincolnshire, James Marsar Cussons,
son and grandson of millers and with uncles and cousins beyond
number in the trade, saw so little prospect before him that when
he was eighteen he went, with his father's blessing, to America.
He arrived in June, 1852.

His first job was in a mill at Oswego, New York, where he
worked eighteen hours a day at a wage of $26 a month. Board
cost $2.50 a week, and there was fishing in the millpond when an
idle moment came, so he made out very well. As the summer
waned, however, he realized the mill would be closed when the
millstream froze, so he set off westward along the Erie Canal to
see what he could see.

It was a fine way to travel, strolling along canal banks astir
with a nation's movement west. Half a dozen mills on the way
gave him brief employment. In one he spent forty-eight hours
instructing the young 'cub' in the art of dressing his millstones
and was gratefully rewarded with a silver watch and a shaving
set. In another he "was not mealy-mouthed" in telling the head
miller what he thought of 'Iris donkey methods" of running
the mill and found a better job two hours later in the next
mill up the Niagara River.

On the last boat out of Buffalo that season he started for
Cleveland, but a storm blew the boat out of its way so he landed
in Toledo instead. Thence he tramped to Akron, then a great
flouring center, and found abundant work in the big steam mills
there. But when he realized that "the chills kept most millers
in bed about four days in seven" he went on, until he came by
chance to Canal Dover and the mill of one John Colton, seven
years before migrated from Cussons' own village. There he spent
the winter, dressing stones for the mill and losing his heart to
the miller's lovely daughter.

126 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

With the opening of spring he set off toward the Ohio River
to seek his fortune. All that summer he made his way from one
mill to another, in the unhurried, neighborly fashion of the land.
At one place he stopped work and went to school to learn arith-
metic in dollars and cents instead of pounds and shillings. Several
of the pupils were older than he, and he had the "new and
pleasant experience" of sharing the neighborhood frolics in de-
bating society, and corn huskings, singing school, and barn
raisings, spelling school, and neighborhood hunts. It was an open
way of living, where a man's own quality won him a welcome,
with no thought of class distinctions.

When the autumn playtime came to an end he took a boat down
the Ohio to St. Louis, but there was no job there, so James
Cussons took his gun and his dog and set off on foot, still west-
ward. He lived "chiefly on squirrel and quail . . . cooked on
the point of a stick over some coals from a fire of wood" and slept
most nights in a haystack. Illinois and Iowa were good country
for tramping, but he found little work until Christmas day, when
he settled with a miller of Rock Island County, Illinois.

The mill's equipment was so crude that the owner made no
attempt to compete with bigger mills. He ground such grists as
the neighbors brought in and between times used the water-
wheel for log sawing or wool carding. But James Cussons did not
accept such limitations. He bought a hundred bushels of wheat
at his own cost and turned out such excellent flour that near-by
markets absorbed all he could make thereafter.

The winter was a busy time. Besides the milling itself he had
his first experience of drawing logs from the woods. His ox team
was so clumsily hitched that they got caught astraddle a tree and
the mill owner had to get out of a sickbed to untangle them. The
hunting was wonderful seven deer walked across the frozen
millpond one morning, and a flock of fifty-six wild turkeys settled
beside it another time. There was dancing in the little log houses
of the neighborhood at night, even though the neighborhood had
no fiddler; the dancers sang or whistled to keep the time.

When the mill owner offered that spring to rent house and

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 127

mill together on very advantageous terms James Cussons would
have taken it had the location not been "'too lonely ... for a
young lady who had been raised in town/' Once more he set
off for St. Louis.

In June he found employment at Cape Girardeau, some miles
below St. Louis, where fishing excursions on the Mississippi with
his Negro fellow-workers were his chief recreation. By the follow-
ing February he had saved enough money to go back to John Col-
ton's mill and marry the "genial, energetic" black-eyed girl to
whom he had been bound all the intervening months by "an in-
visible silken cord/' He took his bride to England to celebrate his
coming of age on March 13, 1855.

In three months they were back in Canal Dover. But failure
of the wheat crop in the Western Reserve meant "famine years"
for millers and the Cussons tried their luck in another part of
Ohio, then in Michigan, then Kentucky. Often James Cussons
felt he would have given way to "the burden accumulated by
the continual grind of business and the mill" had it not been
for "the relish I still have in innocent recreation by the streams
and in the woods/'

Not until 1858 did they find a place where they could settle
in something like permanence. Godfrey, Illinois, where he took
charge of a mill, was "a community without class distinctions"
and so congenial they "were very loath to leave/' But in 1861
"trouble in the South" cut off the market for Godfrey flour, which
was shipped down the river to Memphis and New Orleans. So
the mill was closed.

It was perhaps as well, for milling had brought James Cussons
a serious tuberculous condition and he was advised to go to Minne-
sota to regain his health. So the furniture was sold and Ann
Colton Cussons took their two children back to her father's
house in Ohio. Her husband borrowed fifty dollars from a farmer
friend and set off afoot for Minnesota.

"In March, 1861, 1 called at every flour mill on the Chicago,
Alton, and St. Louis Railway, walked through Northern Illinois
and across Wisconsin to La Crosse, thence up into Minnesota,

128 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

occasionally finding a job at stone dressing/' he wrote thirty
years later. He traveled much as he had eight years before, with
gun and dog, living by his hunting, but with the added burden
of concern for his family. On April first he came to Chatfield
and took employment in Sam Dickson's mill. After a month's
trial he concluded a three-year partnership that was the beginning
of a long association with the town in Thomas Twiford's valley.

It was a long and devious way that led him there, but the story
reveals so much of the fluent creative mood of the land through
which it moves that it is worth while to tell and to ponder.

It speaks first of the friendliness of the land itself. Whatever
loneliness or discouragement he might know, James Cussons
found comfort in the innocent diversions of woods and streams.
It was a rare traveler in that Western land who was untouched by
the beauty of the earth he moved upon, though few could express
their feelings as well as James Cussons did. Then there was the
kindliness of the people who lived in that land. Over and over
those wanderers from older countries were helped, not merely by
their own kinfolk or neighbors, but even by petty officials whose
European counterparts found in their office the excuse for
arrogance. Many a man and woman found "the new and pleasant
experience" of "a classless society/'

For where the land was so kind the people had kindness too.
The new-found goodness of the earth almost outweighed the
disintegrative forces of industrial gigantism. In each new little
settlement men felt themselves equal sharers in the fruits of the
land they lived on. The shoemaker made boots for his neighbors,
from hides that had been raised and tanned by those same neigh-
bors. The miller made flour from wheat raised by men that he
knew, and their wives turned it into daily nourishment

But that homely self-sufficiency was being broken apart by
the new industrialism that levied tribute on each local center
of production. James Cussons himself was later to be caught by
the new imperialism, and in the encounter he made a shrewd
guess at the nature of that Manifest Destiny which was to pursue

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 129

its course into a universal blood bath that left no continent or
island undismayed.

But neither James Cussons, nor Adolph Pavlish, nor Mary
Halloran, nor any of their Yankee neighbors guessed at those
shapes in the future. For the new imperialism still rode lightly
on the currents moving West

PART

Five

Everyman: Speculator

I

THE STORM BEGAN at nightfall. All day the steely cold had been spitted
with little bursts of snow that slanted across the windows and lashed
at your face when you went outside. Father came home early and
stacked wood clear to the ceiling behind the stove. "If we get a bliz-
zard well keep warm/ 7 he said, and Mother moved baby's crib to the
corner between the stove and the cupboard.

When bedtime came, the wind leaped at the house and shook it
till the little girl felt it pushing at her bed. Father made a sudden
noise and ran to slam shut the door. The child raised her head and
saw him drag the big table and shove it hard against the door. Then
he said, "I guess the Rocky Mountains and Hudson Bay sent their big-
gest winds down here for a convention." Mother didn't laugh but the
little girl had to giggle, though she knew she was supposed to be
asleep.

The storm shook the little house all the next day, and no one ven-
tured out into the snow that blocked every window and door. When
daylight came the second day the blizzard was over, and Father dug all
morning to get to the barn. When he brought a pail full of milk to the
house Mother drank some of it and said she had never tasted anything
so good. She would take some of it to the sick boy down the street as
soon as the path was shoveled.

When the sun came up there was never such a beautiful world.
Every man and boy and girl was out shoveling paths from one house
to another. By supper time everybody knew they were all going sliding,
and Sister could hardly eat for excitement.

A big fire was making a signal at the top of Winona Hill when she

132

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 133

started up with Father. She tumbled about in the snow with the other
children until Father took her for a ride on the bobsled, with half a
dozen other grown-ups. They went flying from the top of the hill almost
to the edge of the bench. There was a scared feeling in her stomach
when they started, but when they stopped she wished the}' could go
on forever. It was like being a bird.

Then Father showed her the Northern Lights that flashed long
streamers of red and blue among the stars. 'They were never so bright
in York State/' someone said, "or in Vermont/' said another, "or in
Ohio." Everybody was laughing and throwing snowballs and making
jokes while they waded through the drifts back to the top of the hill

Father took her home after that. She went to sleep inside a dream of
the vast soft glitter of the valley, pear-shaped and sheltering in its star-
pricked snow.

II

IMPERIALISM was not new, even to the newest West. From
Columbus on, the rulers of Europe thought the American land
was important chiefly as it might help one European king grow
richer than his rivals. A case could be made for the theory that
European nationalism has owed a good deal of its intensity to
the competition for "ownership* of pieces of America.

Some of the forms of that competition take on an air of opera
bouffe absurdity when looked at in strict literality. Take for
example LaSalle's performance when he reached the mouth of
the Mississippi. He planted a cross in the virgin earth and pro-
claimed to the four winds of heaven that all the lands drained by
that river and all its tributaries belonged to His Most Christian
Majesty, Louis the Fourteenth of France. The most willing
imagination is staggered at the effort to see the Sun King of
Versailles exercising anything like effective ownership over that
enormous piece of the earth's surface. Yet three centuries later a
scholar solemnly asserted: "On the 'proces-verbal' of that trans-
action rests every land title in Minnesota/'

Several other verbal solemnities were to intervene between
LaSalle's magniloquent gesture and Thomas Twif ord's claim up-
on the valley he had chosen. In 1762, when the French king had
sound military reason to fear that the English were going to take
his new-world empire away from him, he kept what he could out
of English reach by signing a treaty with one of his Bourbon kins-

134

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 135

men ceding the land west of the Mississippi to Spain, As a
consequence, when England was convinced that the game of
holding the thirteen colonies was not worth the candle, the treaty
recognizing American sovereignty set its western boundary at the
Mississippi. The Americans had enough to worry about on the
near side of the Mississippi. They were quite content to agree
that America should never go west of that River.

But 'never' didn't last very long. By the time Thomas Jefferson
was elected President, Daniel Boone had already found Kentucky
too crowded and had gone across the River looking for elbowroom.
Tennessee was already a state and its roystering frontiersmen took
good long looks at the west bank of the River as they floated their
flatboats full of tobacco and corn and lumber down to New
Orleans. The Bishop of Louisiana was shortly lamenting the
corrupting example of that "restless and ambitious temper"
which had already carried those Americans "over the country
almost as far as Texas."

Then the port of New Orleans was closed to American trade
and the rumor went around that Napoleon was going to set up
a new-world empire next door to America. That was too much
for the frontiersmen. They talked of invasion, even of a western
nation of their own, if the government did not act Jefferson did
act, and the result, to Jefferson's own immense surprise, was the
purchase of the whole western half of the continent for a mere
fifteen million dollars. On April 30, 1803, fact and ritual were
brought together once more in another high ceremonial called
the Louisiana Purchase.

The last act in Minnesota's classic drama of sovereignties was
played out fifty years later when the Indians signed over their
claim at the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. There the conventions
of history's romantic tradition were fulfilled in a Western ap-
proximation of the grand manner. After that there was only the
march of the common people.

Those people wanted farms, where Europe's kings had jockeyed
for continents. And since American law provided that land could
be had in exchange for money, they wanted money. Before the

136 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Revolution most of the day-to-day exchange of goods was carried
on without the intervention of money. So little was needed that
in 1789 there were only three banks in the whole United States.
By 181 5 two hundred banks had been established, most of them
in the East. Western resentment against the scarcity of money,
and its concentration in the East, w r as a large part of the reason for
Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency: his policies so
effectively changed the situation that by 1837 the country had
788 banks and double the amount of paper money that circulated
in 1827. Western people had their way.

The only trouble was that too few people agreed on what
'really' was money, and what money was 'worth.' By the time
Minnesota had a Territorial government, practically anyone
could issue bank notes and circulate them just as far and as long
as he could convince anyone of their 'worth/ The practice was
perfectly illustrated in Minnesota itself.

One fine summer day in 1849 a man came into St. Paul with
a lot of "handsomely engraved pieces of paper" appearing to be
the notes of a new bank in St. Croix, some twenty miles from the
capital. One way or another he induced a St. Paul man to sign
his name to some of them, then took the boat for St. Louis. There
he managed to pass several hundred dollars' worth of his 'money'
before he was overtaken by the news that there was no bank in
St. Croix. He quietly disappeared and was never heard of in
Minnesota again.

But he was remembered. It was years before the legislature per-
mitted any Minnesota bank to issue currency. Minnesota tried
hard to be a sound-money state, but the pressure for local issues
was very heavy. There simply was not enough money in circula-
tion. More than once the Land Office men had to count out a
literal grain-sack-full of pennies and nickels and dimes every
coin a whole family had got its fingers on through years of pain-
ful economy. The money needs of those people were very real.

But as the amount of money increased, it seemed to breed an
appetite for more of itself. Increasing numbers of people came to

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 137

think of the land in a new way: they forgot it as the source of
human existence, to be served with labor and devotion, and came
to regard it as simply a means of getting rich. A fever of specula-
tion swept the country. People wanted more money so they could
buy more land on the outer fringes of settlement and hold it
until the arrival of more people made it possible to sell the land
for still more money and start the process all over again.
Plenty of actual settlers played that game, but often the man
who 'made' the money never laid eyes on the land he bought
and sold.

This speculative fever was greatly helped on by the develop-
ment of what became almost a secondary medium of exchange,
whose history reveals a good deal about the ways in which govern-
mental policy can be manipulated to the advantage of a deter-
mined group. The new pieces of paper were called land warrants,
and after 1852 they contributed notably to the mad speculation
in land.

The first land warrants had been issued in 1796 to veterans of
the Revolution; the next were issued to those who fought in the
War of 1812. These early warrants could be exchanged for
specified amounts of public land, and they could be used only
by the veteran to whom they were issued. They were not trans-
ferable.

With the Mexican War, land warrants were issued as induce-
ments for recruiting: any man who would serve as much as four-
teen days was entitled to a warrant for forty acres. Tremendous
amounts of land were signed away on that basis, and the war
was barely over when a vast cry was raised in Congress to make
those warrants transferable.

The noblest sentiments were invoked on behalf of the pro-
posal. If land warrants could be sold, the soldier could enjoy the
gratitude of his country without having to endure the hardships
of the frontier. When someone suggested that this laudable
purpose could be realized by having the government itself buy
in the warrants at their face value, outraged patriotism refuted

138 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the notion. Raid the public treasury in such fashion? Deprive
grateful citizens of the opportunity to give their money to their
country's defenders?

Nobility won the day. In 1852, Congress passed a law per-
mitting the sale of any land warrant for whatever price the
holder could get and requiring all land offices to accept such
warrants at face value from whoever might present them.

It sounded fine, but Horace Greeley warned: "A little money
has been secured to the discharged soldiers and a great deal more
to claim agents, warrant speculators, brokers, etc., all at the ex-
pense of the future pioneers of the states." One of Minnesota's
early papers called the law an "infamous scheme of Eastern
speculators" and predicted that a mere third or fourth part of the
warrants would be used for actual settlement. The moderation of
those predictions is attested by a later estimate of the General
Land Office that "not i in 600" of the warrants presented to
local land offices had actually been used by a discharged soldier.

Even those figures told only part of the story. The New York
warrant market, developed very promptly after the 1852 act,
quoted prices ranging from sixty cents to a dollar per acre on a
face value of $1.25 per acre. Those prices represented from one
to half a dozen profits over the price received by the veteran,
yet actual settlers seldom paid less than the face value of the
warrants. One contemporary estimated that the settlers paid
four or five times as much for the warrants as the original holders
got, and there is reason to suppose that estimate is low.

The heyday of speculation in land warrants came in the very
years of Chatfield's beginnings, and there was probably not a
trick of the trade that was not tried out in Chatfield. An 1857
account in an Iowa paper reported that Chatfield whose total
population was something less than a thousand had three sur-
veyors, six law offices, and twelve land agencies, all of them getting
rich in the boom. Other evidence suggests that practically every
merchant, doctor, innkeeper, craftsman, and plenty of farmers,
not to mention mere travelers, tried his hand, as far as his re-

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 139

sources or his daring permitted, at the same game of get-rich-
quick.

Chatfield's most notable player in that game was }. C. Eastern,
whom the town likes to remember as Minnesota's first millionaire.
There seems no way to decide the accuracy of that title, but the
fact is clear that Easton piled up a notable fortune. What he did,
and how he did it, can be seen very clearly through examination
of literally tons of his records which his son deposited with the
Minnesota Historical Society, and which this study has only
skimmed.

Ill

EASTON ARRIVED in Chatfield in mid-April, 1856. Hazel brush
still grew down the middle of Main Street but the saw-
mill sang its way through logs all day long and the town was
filled with the bustle of building. Even though official word of
the Land Office removal from Brownsville had not yet come, the
people of Chatfield were sure they were going to get it soon.
Easton had to pay five hundred dollars for the lot he bought at
the corner of Second and Main, but in the dizzy rush of prices
when the word did arrive he could have sold it for twice or three
times that sum before he had finished the office he built there.

As the roads dried out, a continuous stream of travelers moved
through the town. It was a poor evening that saw only one wagon-
load camped out by the Big Spring, and sunset each day brought
the ringing trumpet call that announced the arrival of the coach
from Winona. Every newcomer was welcome, and as the summer
advanced the seventy-five new houses were hardly enough to
shelter all the travelers. Some nights even stores and offices had
strangers sleeping on their floors.

Lucian Johnson, who had come out with Easton, his brother-
in-law, was thoroughly at home in the tall talk of the future that
filled the town. His drawling deliberation was disarmingly guile-
less but his shrewd comments on all that he saw and heard went
a long way to fill in Easton's knowledge of the country and its

140

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 141

people. Johnson was lending out some money of his own but

he apparently worked with Easton. The office of

GILBERT AND EASTON

LAND AGENTS

became one of the centers for the talk of big doings ahead.

By the time the Land Office actually opened in Chatfield there
was neither a settler nor a parcel of land within ten miles that
Easton did not know pretty well. He poured his enormous
energies into the single-minded determination to know the
country so thoroughly that no one could pull the wool over his
eyes. He made it a rule to lend no money except on land that
could be sold for at least twice the amount of the loan. With
prices leaping upward week by week such a rule was bound to
assure solid profits.

He discovered another way of increasing his money. A lot of
travelers carried drafts on Eastern banks but found they could
make better deals with gold. Easton used the few hundred dol-
lars of gold coins he had to cash those drafts, and charged 8 per
cent on the transaction. In turn, he sent the drafts back East to
pay for land warrants a neat way of doubling the returns on his
money.

But the process of getting the drafts delivered proved difficult.
Direct mail could not be relied on so he sent his drafts to money-
lenders in St. Paul, or lower River towns, who had more or less
regular bank clearance in the East. That cost both time and
money, and Easton made up his mind he would have an Eastern
banking or broker connection of his own.

Lucian Johnson returned to York State early in the summer
and arranged for Easton's brother to go out to Chatfield a few
weeks later. On his brother's arrival, }. C. Easton went back to
New York to get his wife and household goods and work out
the arrangements he had decided his business needed.

It was November before he returned to Chatfield and settled
his household in the little house he had bought on Winona
Street, two lots south of John Luark's house. It took him a few

142 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

days to gather up the details of the weeks he had been away, but
by November 25 he was ready for the formal opening of the Root
River Bank, Gilbert and Easton, Proprietors.

The first ledger entry for the bank credited W. A. Gilbert
with $2,758 Cash, a New York Draft for $91, and a land warrant
for $151, "making the am't $3000." Easton himself was credited
with $1948.90 cash and $137.94 already spent in behalf of the
bank. The items in that expense account included his trip to
New York City and return, and subscriptions to the Chatfield
Republican, Greeley's New York Tribune, and Thompson's Bank
Reporter and Currency Detector, the latter indispensable to any-
one who had to decide how much various kinds of bank notes
were worth. There were small sums for a table, a stove, carmine
ink, and two chairs, besides thirty-five dollars for "Safe Iron/'

The Republican that week carried the announcement that the
new bank was prepared to handle "all Eastern exchange*' through
its New York brokers. It was the only such service available in
Chatfield.

In its first four days the new bank received deposits of more
than $1,500, handled fourteen land warrants, collected $50 in
fees for such services as making sales and time entries for distant
clients, and took in nearly $500 in repayment of loans made dur-
ing the summer. That first week set the pattern for a business that
began small but moved briskly and with increasing profits.

Day by day Easton wrote letters to people back East who
had money to invest to neighbors, acquaintances, friends, and
friends of friends. Most of them were men who had a few hundred
dollars gathered through a lifetime of work and saving, and the
appeal he made was to their confirmed habits of personal dealings.
Some of them had a little gold coin gathered through the years.
Many turned their savings into the currency of some near-by
bank of issue. Still others bought up warrants from men in their
own neighborhoods who had fought in the Mexican War or
the War of 1812, or whose fathers had fought in the Revolution.

To all of them Easton set forth the unparalleled advantages of

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 143

Minnesota investments. The letters he wrote were solidly factual
in tone but the facts with which they dealt were of dizzy in-
credibility.

Warrants he placed on mortgages that brought 40 per cent
interest per year on the face value of the warrant. (Of course no
one would ever pay that much to the original holder.) During
early December the demand for warrants was small, for bad roads
cut the Land Office business to a mere ten or twelve entries a
day. But Easton assured his correspondents that the demand
would pick up as soon as the first snow improved traveling con-
ditions.

Cash was loaned chiefly in small amounts, under $100, for
periods of less than six months. Such loans brought interest at
5 per cent per month. Most of them were made to persons who
bought up pre-emptors' titles and sold them again at an advance
in price great enough to cover the interest and leave an additional
profit. This sort of deal was the sheerest speculation; pre-emptor's
title had been intended to belong to the actual settler and no one
else, but thousands of men 'pre-empted' in one West after an-
other and held their titles just long enough to sell out at the first
wave of speculation. Easton loaned money for many such deals.

Larger loans, with a year to pay, brought 50 per cent interest
per year. Easton wrote to an Illinois man, who had visited Chat-
field the summer before, that he could use all the Illinois currency
the other would send for such loans. To a pair of New York City
bankers he wrote, "in fulfillment of the promise I made you/'
that he could take "as much currency of your Bank as you see
fit to send/'

To a York State friend he wrote that he was getting "more
than double the rates I should have charged on the same kind
of risk East/' Three loans he had made for a mutual friend were
bringing in 70 per cent per year. "These would be considered
ruinous rates of interest in the state of New York/' he com-
mented, "but strange as you may consider it the borrower
frequently makes the most on these loans/'

144 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Yet all the loans he had made during the summer were being
repaid promptly, and "on the whole I find it quite as pleasant
doing business here as East/'

Easton made two chief types of agreement with his Eastern
clients. Cash he loaned on land securities and promised the client
a minimum return of 10 per cent per year; whatever was made
beyond that was divided equally between the client and Easton.

Warrants he handled somewhat differently. Some he used to
"enter 77 land ''on joint account" of Easton and client. Such land
was held until he could sell it at a good price, out of which the
client got his guaranteed dollar an acre, and the "remaining
avails' 7 were divided between Easton and client.

Another use of warrants was to 'sell 7 them to actual settlers in
return for a mortgage for the face value of the land warrant. Such
a mortgage carried at least 40 per cent interest per year. As Easton
explained to his brother, there was "no regulation on entry fees 7 '
(amounting to five dollars) and "if the preemptor is sharp he
can get his land entered and have these expenses paid, but in
half or more of the cases the preemptor pays them. 77 There is no
record of any pre-emptor's being "sharp 77 enough to get his fees
paid by Easton.

The summer of 1857, Easton got all the Chatfield dealers
to agree "upon a uniformity of rates 77 for handling warrants. A
warrant for 160 acres, face value $200, was 'worth 7 $280, with a
year to pay. Any part of either principal or interest left unpaid at
maturity could be renewed, on the whole mortgage, with interest
at 5 per cent per month until paid. Such mortgages could, often
did, run on so long that the interest paid amounted to more than
the original loan, yet in the end the entire parcel of land might
revert to the lender.

To read the old letter books in which Easton kept copies of
his letters is to marvel at the man's capacity for detail. He
evidently knew scores, even hundreds of people who had a little
money, and no lead was too insignificant to follow up. He appears
to have put just as careful thought on the investment of a single
forty-acre warrant as on the $3,000 his brother borrowed at low

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 145

interest and sent. And that detailed concern carried through all
the stages of an investment

Easton's activity was undoubtedly an important element in
making Chatfield a 'rich' community. He drew out of scattered
Eastern places many sums of money that would not otherwise
have found their way into the Chatfield province. And that, every-
one in Chatfield would have agreed, was the best thing that could
happen to the town.

He made it worth while for his clients t<? send their money
to him. Three instances, summarized from letters written over
a period of years, illustrate the way that he 'made' money for his
clients.

In the spring of 1857 he made a number of loans for one client.
One loan of $100 was repaid a year later, with interest at 50 per
cent. Various small loans amounting to $330 brought 5 per cent
per month and were duly paid up. A year's loan of $200, at 40
per cent; brought $160 interest in two years, then the mortgage
was foreclosed. Five years later the farm was sold for $1,000,
after having brought in enough rent to cover all cost to the in-
vestor for Easton's handling of the affair.

Another client sent Easton a warrant whose New York price
was $96, though the client had bought it for less. Easton sold it,
partly for a note that was repaid in nineteen days, (That was
one of the 'quick turnovers' that characterized the period's head-
long speculation.) The total returns amounted to $136.90, of
which Easton got $8.45. The client's profit was $32.45. As
Easton wrote, "We think you can hardly complain of this al-
though it is not anything extra as it was paid so soon the interest
amounts to little."

Still a third. In July, 1857, Easton reported the repayment of
four loans he had made for one client. Their total was $640; in
six months that sum brought in $320 interest returns at the
rate of 100 per cent per year.

As success piled up, Easton's letters became increasingly
peremptory in tone. He continued to be meticulously careful
in reporting to his investors, but to borrowers his letters were

14.6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

quite different. One instance may speak for many. An actual
settler was unable to repay his loan when due because a long
sickness had kept him from cutting the wood that he had ex-
pected to sell during the summer. He wrote asking an extension
of time. Easton replied that he was willing not to foreclose the
mortgage which carried 40 per cent interest if the man would
come in and make out a new note, covering interest as well as
the original loan, at 5 per cent per month. "All I am interested
in," he wrote, "is getting the market value of my money/'
Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that to clients he in-
variably used the plural, "we''; to borrowers he wrote in the
singular, "I."

The "market value" was high enough so that early in 1857
Easton hired young Henry Griswold, whom he had known in
York State, as his clerk. He paid Griswold $40 a month more
than the job was worth in the winter, he wrote, but a sum he
could afford for the sake of trained help when the summer rush
began. He was certain that Griswold would "always thank me
for inducing you to come . . . You can do more business, make
more money, in one year than in three, even in 10,000 in Lewis
County/'

Apparently more money was being 'made' in Chatfield than
in the capital of the Territory. St. Paul's interest rates, the summer
of 1857, were distinctly lower than Chatfield's. Loans running
for six months or less brought 3% to 4 per cent per month in
St. Paul, as against 5 per cent in Chatfield. On loans running
six to twelve months the St. Paul rate was 36 per cent as against
40 to 50 per cent in Chatfield.

Chatfield rates were also higher than those of other land office
towns. The Chatfield agreement on warrants eventually broke
down and the best Easton could get at home for a i6o-acre
warrant was $180 at 50 per cent per year. Even then he had
more warrants than he could sell, so offered some to a dealer in
one of the other knd office towns. He would sell them for $165
at 48 per cent, he wrote, adding, ". . . rates are lower in your
district we bring ours down to suit/'

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 147

All this time he was buying all the warrants he could pay for,
from his New York brokers, Le Huray & Co. T of q^g Wall Street.
His orders ranged from 120 to 3,000 acres at a time. When travel-
ers were few and exchange was hard to get, Easton was ought
with more warrants than he could take care of. In the middle of
December, 1856, he wrote to ask the brokers for "the arrange-
ment we talked of in New York" by which Le Huray would carry
occasional overdrafts if Easton paid interest on the sum involved.

ChatfiekPs lack of regular express service and the difficulty of
finding reliable persons with whom to send currency or gold
East were described as Easton's reasons for needing the "arrange-
ment." "We expect never to ask large credits," he wrote. Yet
six weeks later he was asking $2,000 credit when he had sent
only $805 from Chatfield. At the same time he was appealing
urgently to his father-in-law for a $1,000 loan to be deposited to
his credit with Le Huray. He also sent back, with a great show
of indignation, a half dozen warrants the broker had sent "with-
out our authorization."

The crisis eased shortly and he ordered warrants for another
3,000 acres. But the pattern was to be repeated more than once.

About the same time Easton overdrew his account in a
Chicago bank and had several of his drafts refused payment. He
was furious. He insisted that his deposits were ample to cover
all his drafts, and in the next sentence reminded the office that
their senior member had

urged us to 'draw and then remit/ a privilege we have never used. . . .
It would have been honorable for you to terminate the account if you
wished, or to have paid our possible overdraft of a few hundreds, but
this odd conduct requires explanation. . . . We are not doing a Bank-
ing business as you perhaps suppose on credit.

The "miserable business" of his dishonored drafts plagued him
for months before he overtook all of them. When he heard that
the Chicago firm had failed he wrote to a friend that it was no
more than they deserved. Apparently he never guessed that the
Chicago failure might be the prelude to a general collapse of

148 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the mad speculation that was inflating land prices beyond all
reason.

Indeed, no one in all the region admitted any such dreadful
possibility. How could they, when a railroad was all but
whistling through the countryside?

At least the campaign for a land grant had been successful.
ChatfiekTs own special representative, "Our Jim" Cavanaugh,
and the other lobbyists for the Root River and Southern Minne-
sota Railroad had toiled manfully through the winter, joining
forces with the lobbyists of three other companies. They managed
to keep sufficiently within bounds that the grant Congress
finally gave them was not recalled. The four roads, all of them
to run south from St. Paul, were given four million acres one-
ninth of all the arable land in Minnesota. The Root River and
Southern Minnesota got approximately one million of those
acres.

The great news reached Chatfield March 7, 1857, and both
papers published it with the biggest headlines they could manage.
The Republican even went so far, under the caption LOOK OUT
FOR THE CARS, as to pray "God bless Franklin Pierce in considera-
tion of his signature on this bill" an astonishing modification of
political animosities.

Every land office in southern Minnesota was closed to give
the railroads time to survey and file their plats. The grant was
on the basis of alternate sections to a depth of six miles on either
side of the road. For land already pre-empted within that area,
the railroad was allowed to take equivalent acreage at the nearest
available point.

If speculation had been feverish before, it now grew fairly
delirious. Until the plats were filed no one knew exactly where
the railroads were to run, so any given quarter section might lie
on the route of one road or the other. Rumors multiplied and
men traded land with fantastic disregard of the complete lack of
any real information. As Easton wrote a couple of weeks after the
announcement of the grant, "The rage for speculation since the
news of the railroad grant has been great If the office had re-

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 149

mained open a few days more every- 40 of those lands on the Root
River, in market, would have been entered/'

He insisted again and again that he was not a speculator. But
the closing of the Land Office caught him with warrants for
6,000 acres and a badly overdrawn New York account. He played
for time by telling Le Huray that "our Mr. Gilbert" was collect-
ing funds "in Washington and elsewhere" subtle reminder of
Congressional importance and was supposed to deposit $3,000
by the first of April. He made much of his claim that thirty days
was the least time in which he could get an answer to any In-
quiry East. The most casual comparison of dates in his letters
makes clear the exaggeration of that claim, but he evidently
hoped it would get him time enough to realize on his warrants.

The Land Office reopened April 15. A horde of "outside
sharpers" descended on the town and hawked their land warrants
on the street corners at prices far below New York quotations. A
week of that was too much for Easton. He scraped together every
dollar he could get, in gold or currency, and hurried off for the
East.

Exactly what happened there is not recorded, but in less than
two months he was back in Chatfield, as exuberantly confident
as ever, to judge from his letters. He had stopped at a land sale
in Iowa and bought up thousands of acres for the firm. For the
time being warrants were a drug on the Chatfield market but
money was in enormous demand. Wild lands were selling for
four or five times the government price. The sky was the limit
on the profits a shrewd trader could take. 'Tack up your duds,"
he wrote one old friend, "and be sure to bring plenty of rocks."

There were doings in St. Paul as well. A special session of the
legislature had been called to accept the Congressional grant, and
strange rumors of bribery came out of the capital. Byron Kilbourne
was said to be boasting that the charter for the Root River was
cut exactly to his measure. He was the 'boss' of the Wisconsin
road with which the Root River road was to connect at La
Crosse. The story was that he had given half a million dollars'
worth of railroad bonds to the legislators to get what he wanted

1^0 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

There was plenty of talk and newspaper writing about it The
Winona Argus stormed that the Root River and Southern
Minnesota was being sold out to "reckless foreign sharpers"
whose sole purpose was to build up Wisconsin at the expense of
Minnesota. The Chatfield Republican answered that the Argus
was simply a mouthpiece for the Transit Railroad, and the
Transit was jealous of the speed of the Root River's development.

Years later one witness to that year's legislative doings set it
down as his considered judgment that no state was ever blessed
with "a more shamelessly avaricious" set of legislators than
Minnesota had in 1857, There must have been plenty of people
who knew the facts behind that judgment. Yet no one seemed
more shocked than amused by the knowledge. After all, the
'big bugs' were building the railroads, and they had to 'get along'
while they did it. Minnesota was big enough to spare a million
one way or another, whether in acres or in dollars. Anyway, how
many was a million? Nobody could count that far, so mostly
they just forgot about it.

Then a meeting of the Root River and Southern Minnesota
stockholders was held, and the Transit charges came perilously
near the proof.

All the old directors resigned. Of the eighteen new directors
only three were from the Root River region where the whole
project had originated, and Beecher Gere was the only Chatfield
man among them. Ten of the directors were Wisconsin men.
Holley, editor of the Republican, lost his job as chief engineer
of the road.

When he reported the reorganization he added certain rumors
that were circulating about the affair. One claimed that the
original directors had been bought out by the Wisconsin interests.
Another had it that the resignations were forced by the threat
that the Wisconsin men would build their road to Winona in-
stead of La Crosse unless they were given control of the Root
River road. ... A week later the Republican published the
report that "the city of Milwaukee" was supposed to have put
no a million dollars in railroad stock to get control of the Root

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 151

River and Southern Minnesota. The Republican demanded that
the directors be made to "tell who got the million* the Terri-
tory, the stockholders, or the officers.

But no answer was forthcoming. The Democrat praised the
new organization as Chatfield's best assurance for the speedy
completion of its railroad, AB the Republicans talk of bribery
it dismissed as the mere sour-grapes babbling of "the little, kicked-
out engineer/' who was editor of the Republican, The offensive
phrase was repeated week after week.

Holley retorted in furious kind. All the corruption of the
wicked Democrats was clear in the evil doings of the Wisconsin
"interests/ 7 he thundered. The argument generated more heat
than light

Oddly enough, after a few weeks the Republican shifted into
rather lame hopes that all would yet be well. Perhaps Holley
was given to understand how right the Democrat was in threaten-
ing that unfriendly criticism was a sure way to keep the railroad
from building to Chatfield. Whatever the reason, the Republican
shortly gave up its effort to find out "what in thunder has hap-
pened."

But the most bitterly bewildered of Chatfield's railroad men
was Thomas Twiford. He had gone to the June meeting of the
directors but the whole affair moved in dimensions with which
he could not grapple. There was money in the air, he sensed,
big money, but who had it, or who was getting it, or what it was
being given for, somehow eluded his grasp.

Only one thing was clear to him that Byron Kilbourne was
running the show. His round face, with the thin mobile mouth
framed in muttonchop whiskers, touched Thomas Twiford with
something he would have called fear if he had understood how
a man could be afraid of a city slicker who hadn't a gun and was
too soft to fight with his fists.

Kilbourne's words were soft, too, but somehow they sounded
so loud that Thomas Twiford found himself no longer a part of
the railroad he had been one of the first to conceive. Smarting
under these strange chances, Thomas Twiford was touched with

1J2 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

a hunger for far and silent places, beyond aH this talking . . ,
out West, where a man could go it alone.

But J. C. Easton suffered none of Twiford's frustrations. As far
as his books show, he had no stake in the railroad. He was having
the time of his life and making more money than he had ever
dreamed of. How much money it is impossible to estimate, for
his system of bookkeeping does not yield reliable returns to
twentieth-century analysis. Moreover, his letters hint now and
again at "tall transactions" deliberately omitted from the records
he kept in the semi-publicity of his bank.

Gilbert was still a partner and apparently visited Chatfield late
that summer, but the business was almost wholly under Easton's
management When a Bohemian or Norwegian or Yankee
farmer trudged the ten or twenty miles from his farm to count
out on Easton's counter the precious sack of coins that would
redeem the mortgage on his land, Easton's were the hands that
most often raked the coins into the till and wrote the liberating
receipt.

But Easton seldom remembered that other part of the ritual,
whose observance helped give I. F. OTerrall, for instance, a
place in the local legend so different from Easton's. Easton never
took his customer into the nearest saloon for the glass of beer
or the 'snort' of whiskey that would have re-established the human
bond, strained by the rnoneylending relationship. That it was
not prohibitionist sentiment that deterred him, his occasional
orders for fine liquors would suggest

Once in a while Henry Griswold signaled such a farmer to
hang around till the bank closed, then bought him the drink
the farmer felt was his due. If Easton noticed the implied criticism
it did not trouble him. His clerk tended to business and was a
good listener when Easton felt an expansive need for talking. Be-
sides, Griswold was piling up some tidy investments of his'own
under Easton's advice, and he was smart enough to know which
side his bread was buttered 00*

Anyhow, Easton was too busy to fret himself with what any-
one thought of his manners. Though land investments continued

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 153

his primary concern, a host of other affairs filled his days and
his ledgers. He wrote fire insurance for the Aetna Company of
Cincinnati, whom he had represented in Lowville, and he had
sub-agents working for him in "several thriving towns around."
To one such agent he wrote warning him not to insure at too
high a figure, "particularly in this country where men are low
in morals and might be tempted to burn theii property for the

income/'

He also collected bills for Eastern creditors and transmitted
money between the East and the West. By 1859, he had estab-
lished banking connections not only in New York and Chicago
but in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Memphis, and half a dozen other
growing cities.

Bankers had not then developed a nation-wide clearing system.
It was not yet possible for a man to write his personal check and
have it accepted as money half across the continent. Easton's
business of transferring money between East and West was part
of the process by which the expanding capitalist economy made
banking papers acceptable everywhere.

Of course Easton made his commission on those bank trans-
actions. It ranged from ^ per cent to 8 per cent according to the
demand of the moment. When the money market grew tight
and the rate of interest on loans fell to a mere 36 per cent the
summer of 1857, he was not alarmed. **We have no doubt but
the demand for money will be as brisk as ever in the autumn/*
he wrote to one after another of his Eastern clients.

Then on August 24 the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust
Company closed its doors, forcing several other large financial
houses of New York to close. The word reached St Paul, by
telegram and river packet, four days later, and within a week the
whole Territory felt the effects. The buying and selling of land
came to a dead stop, and payments on notes and mortgages were
almost equally affected. Gold and Eastern exchange almost dis-
appeared from circulation. St Paul banks stopped paying out
coin of every kind, shipping East all they could gather to cover
their threatened accounts.

154 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Easton was caught with the rest. On August 24, the date of
the general collapse, Le Huray wrote him that his firm's account
was seriously overdrawn. Easton answered that letter on Septem-
ber 2 a curious commentary on his April claim that it took
thirty days for a letter from Chatfield to receive a reply from New
York.

His letter is a study in the balance between the arrogance of
success and the obsequious truckling of threatened failure. Easton
wrote that his Washington partner had assured him that Le
Huray r s account would

be arranged within a few days. We have no doubt but it will have been
done before this reaches you. But whether it is or not we shall certainly
do so from here within 10 or 15 days. We think that when remittances
reach you which we have made within a few days, there will not be
quite so large a lot against us as you mention, [Easton & Standring, an
Iowa firm in which }. C. Easton's brother was a partner, were to send
$2000 to the Gilbert and Easton account.] and the balance will come
from here immediately. In the meantime do not give yourselves the
least uneasiness. Help us out this time and charge us all the interest
and inconvenience to you. We certainly should not have allowed this
to occur but upon the certainty, as we wrote you, that our Mr. G. would
do the needful for you, on his arrival East. You sent us 6-i6o r s that we
did not order. This gave us rather larger stock of warrants for the time
being than we have needed, and helped to over-draw our acct. We
did not return them as we thought they would be needed, but cer-
tainly would have done so if we had supposed that our account was
getting so far behind hand. If Mr. G. does anything for you, so much
the better. Whether he does or not you can rely upon our doing it
from here in the time specified and we think sooner. And as soon as
our acct. is made good please send us 2 @ 3000 acres more of Land
Warrants as we shall be getting pretty low do not send them however
until our acct. is all right for it. We gave a Chatfield merchant a $2000
draft on you day before yesterday but he promised not to present it till
he leaves the city. We sincerely hope you will not throw out our drafts
for a short time . . . when we shall be all right and ahead of you and
be assured we shall not allow this to again occur at least without your
official permission.

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 155

The next day Easton wrote again* answering Le Huray's "favor
of the i6th ? n repeating his assurances to make the account
from Chatfield "within 10 @ 15 days" and ending, **Bear with
us a little longer and all mil be right!"

Easton wrote no more such letters at that time; by September
seventh he had left for New York. That same day his clerk wrote
three letters to Le Huray. The first transmitted $750 in New York
exchange and promised to "send $2500 to $3000 currency and
gold tomorrow/' The second reported that he had already shipped
by express "$2500 American Gold and $2999.50 Eastern Bank
Notes/' The third enclosed a Pennsylvania bank draft for $199.

One would give much for a glimpse of the precise means by
which those sums were collected, for Minnesota was drained of
its monetary resources with amazing speed after the Eastern
crash. But nowhere did Easton record those details, nor leave
a hint of the size of the balance he owed his broker. That can
only be guessed by the fact that the seven thousand dollars Gris-
wold sent Le Huray in the two months of Easton's absence were
evidently not enough to cover the situation.

That it was eventually dealt with, and successfully, can be
glimpsed in the cool assurance of a letter written by Griswold on
December seventh. The Chatfield firm needed no more warrants
for the present, he informed Le Huray, though they might in
the spring, "and possibly on credit. If so we shall be happy to avail
ourselves of the proposal you make to furnish us on time/*

The necessity for currying favor was past and Easton was not
slow to assert his independence. By June, 1858, he wrote Le
Huray: "I wish you would be a little more punctual in sending
statements of my account on the ist of each month/' A little
later he found Le Huray *$ "ill-natured duns . . . neither pleasant
or satisfactory to me." The same letter inquired sharply how they
came to send warrants "@ 85, when the New York Evangelist
quotes them at 80 that same day." The next week he demanded
interest on his balance.

Somewhat later, Le Huray himself was in difficulties. A
Winona banker sent Easton his first word of the broker's closing.

156 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Eastern replied that he expected to be "out not more than $500,"
but would put his next New York account "with some bank. I
have trusted brokers long enough. . . "

The same day he wrote Le Huray asking why they had not
paid the draft returned to him by the Winona bank: "be good
enough to frankly give me the reason of your suspicions or what-
ever is the reason of not cashing my draft/' Four days later,
Easton replied to Le Huray's announcement of closing with a
strong accent of surprise at the "very unexpected news to me and
a source of regret to me as I had counted on a continuance with
your house perhaps for years/ 7 He asserted his "fullest confidence"
in Le Huray and declared "I would rather have sacrificed a larger
amount than to have had your house suspended. . . . I have done
business with you ever since I have been in the West/ 7

This disdainful indifference of Easton's to any need for con-
sistency between his statements to a given person and those about
the same person grew more evident with the years. The tendency
is illustrated in the letters concerned with the breaking up of his
partnership with Gilbert.

The actual break occurred when Gilbert went to Chatfield after
Congress adjourned in April, 1858, so there is no record of its
details in Easton's letter books. However, he wrote a long series of
letters to his clients announcing that the firm had been dissolved
on May 3, "by mutual consent/ 7 and that Easton would there-
after carry on the business by himself.

Not all the differences were resolved when the partnership was
ended. In July, Easton wrote to Gilbert:

Several of your recent letters to me have been abusive without any
cause whatever. If you have determined to follow up this course in all
your future correspondence ... it will receive no notice from me.
On the other hand if you are disposed to trust me ... I shall
endeavor to act fairly and on the D with everything ... in which you
are interested.

It is interesting to note his invocation of the Masonic D to con-
firm statements that his correspondent might incline to question.

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 157

A few days later he wrote that he did not see how Gilbert could

with any reason ask me to advance you on the strength of the deposits
assumed by me at the dissolution . . . Besides the inconsistency of
your requests I am in no shape to advance a single dollar ... I have
all I can swing at present running just as close to the weather as I dare.

Yet within a week he was writing to a client from whom he hoped
for fresh investments:

Since dissolving partnership I have repaired my office, attached a wood
shed and nearly doubled the value of the property ... I was never so
well satisfied or . . making so much money as I am at present,

"Times were rather tight" and collections were difficult but
Easton got "a part if possible and additional security, our object
being not to oppress but to keep abundantly secured/' To one
of his heaviest investors he admitted (in the royal plural, after
the dissolution of partnership) that "we may not be able to col-
lect your notes when due but do not know of any in which your
security is not ample if the times ease up within a reasonable
time. If some of the land should come into your hands I think the
cost to you so low it will do to keep/ 7

As the months passed "times" continued "extremely dull/*
whole weeks passing without a single entry in the Land Office. He
was "getting a great deal of land on securities I am obliged to
take and consequently am anxious to sell/' In March he wrote
a client that

property is now about as low as it can ever possibly get here. ... I
would guess that your securities would not exceed 4 @ 6 shillings on
the acre ... a good share of it improved land. ... It is a good time
to loan now as there is a large demand should you send more funds
they will not lie idle long.

In the closing months of 1857 and on through most of 1860
the Republican carried long lists of foreclosure notices, frequently
six columns, the equivalent of a full page, in one issue. A con-
siderable number of them were Easton's.

One box of his papers, including a series of mortgages drawn

158 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

between June, 1857, and the end of 1861, gives suggestive clues
to his dealings. Of the 58 mortgages, 19 were paid in full and 39
were foreclosed. A total of 2,540 acres was covered by the mort-
gages repaid, with an average loan of $1.32 per acre; the loans on
the 4,236 acres foreclosed averaged $1.51 per acre. It is not to be
assumed that the foreclosures represented complete losses, even
of the original investments, for they had paid heavy interest, in
some cases for two or three years, before foreclosure. Several
pieces of land accrued to the lender after he had collected interest
equivalent to the entire principal. In 1869, Easton himself paid
taxes on 6,000 acres in Fillmore County alone.

His letters betray no tendency to modify his transactions by
any considerations outside "the market value" of his money. One
single time he remarked that one of his clients was "a little hard"
on "the ignorant Norwegian" to whom he had made a loan.

This Aaron Oleson came into Easton's office one day in Sep-
tember, 1858, with $237.50 to pay his note, but he refused to
turn over the money until the mortgage was actually put into
his hands. Since the Eastern client held the mortgage, some six
weeks passed before the papers were properly 'satisfied/ The
mortgage holder insisted that $13.70 of additional interest must
be paid for that six weeks. Oleson refused and two months more
were involved in correspondence, for which the lender demanded
still further interest. Thereupon Oleson hired a lawyer but he
eventually paid the whole sum demanded.

In another case Easton wrote his client that he had told the
borrower his note carried a certain penalty clause. Easton added:

If I am right, send me a strong statement; if I am wrong, you need not
mention the matter. He will pay the penalty, I think.

Then there was the case of one Kelly, who borrowed $139 in
April, 1859, giving his note for $182 which included interest
for one year. At the end of that year Kelly came in with $43 and
wanted to pay it as interest and let the note run for another year.
Easton consented to "receive the amount not as interest but as
consideration for f orebearance and the extension" and Kelly had

EVERYMAN; SPECULATOR 159

to pay 4 per cent per month on the entire $182 until he repaid it.

By these and similar means Easton continued to "make' money
even through the depths of the hard times. Once, to be sure, he
himself was well taken in when a stranger sold him a lot of
ginseng roots at prices far above the market. Getting rid of 4< the
confounded stuff" cost Easton a pretty penny.

His business fell off so much that there was not enough work
in his office to keep two people busy. So he managed to have his
clerk, Henry Griswold, elected county treasurer. There were ad-
vantages in having a friend in that office. From January, 1859, to
late in 1860, Easton did all his own work even to making fires
and sweeping out the office. He collected bills and foreclosed
mortgages for Eastern creditors. At least one bankrupt merchant's
stock he took over and resold as advantage offered; others he
auctioned off and on one occasion reported gleefully that "the
dry peaches were wholly worthless but brought 5 cents per pound."

He got into trouble with his new brokers, Van Valkenburgh,
Slawson & Co. Despite his hard words about brokers, at the time
of Le Huray's failure, he had not put his New York account with
a bank. His dealings with the new firm grew more and more in-
volved. By the spring of 1860 his account there was so badly over-
drawn that an "attachment of funds" was served against it.

Easton resorted to every means of protection, short of going
to New York. He begged Van Valkenburgh not to let his drafts
go to protest. He offered to pay "any amt. of interest you like on
the overdrafts." He wrote to an Eastern friend: "I beg of you
to let me have even $100 in gold." He appealed to Beecher Gere,
then in the legislature at St. Paul:

. . . some things have occurred during the last 4 weeks rendering it
necessary for me to use 3 @ $4000 cash which I had not anticipated
... I have to call on all my reliable friends to make up for the emer-
gency. This will on the D be all I need explain to you to know you ap-
preciate my /ix. . . . your father is writing to tell you the sincerity of
my case.

But Gere's answer was "a serious disappointment"
There came a day when "an officer from St. Paul" arrived in

l6o THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Ghatfield to serve Eastern with a summons to make good on one
of his dishonored papers. That cost him $18.39 besides the face
of the paper "and that was less than his legal demand/' Easton
wrote indignantly to the New York office. "A nice credit your
protests are giving me/'

A Milwaukee firm wrote him about one of his drafts they had
been unable to cash. Easton replied:

... It will be paid, whether the miserable house who have kept my
acct. do so or not. ... If Van Valkenburgh Slawson & Co. have failed
I will remit via Chicago or currency. . . .

That letter rings oddly against other letters Easton wrote within
the month concerned with frantic efforts to cover his account
with Van Valkenburgh's office.

Eventually he did clear the account, and closed it out. His
choice of another New York connection was made in character-
istically ambiguous fashion. After correspondence with two dif-
ferent banks he wrote a third asking for "terms and regulations"
for an account with "an average balance of $2,000." Four days
later, when he knew he could not possibly have had a reply from
New York, he sent that bank $2,200

... in the absence of your advice on keeping my acct. Presume you
will do so temporarily . . .

His monthly balance with that bank for the following nine months
averaged slightly higher than $700. It never was greater than
$1,000, and reached that point only twice in nine months.

But from that time on Easton never again ran so close to the
wind that he had to cajole an officer of the law into reducing his
collection of fees. His apprenticeship was completed by 1861.

One of his accomplishments in that five years can be measured
only indirectly. Two or three references to attending Republican
meetings occur in his letters, and during the Lincoln campaign
he several times mentioned "the great Republican heart of Fill-
more County." But the place he held in party councils can hardly
be judged from his letters of those earliest years. Something of

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 261

its importance can be guessed from his getting Griswold elected
to county office. The Democrat fulminated: <4 We know who is
behind this nomination and in what picayune note shaver's
the county funds will be kept if Griswold is elected." (Later It
quoted Griswold as saying he expected to clear $3,000 his first
year in office; "the legal emoluments are only $i,ooo/*)

Easton's influence in the young Republican party was more
clearly apparent when the Land Office was ordered, in 1861, to
move from Chatfield to Winnebago City. That town was little
more than a piece of prairie with a couple of buildings on it. But
every foot of it belonged to Easton. He wrote to one of his friends:
". . . for once I am in luck/'

Most of the summer of 1861 Easton spent in Winnebago,
making the most of his "luck." From that time on he spent rather
less time in Chatfield than out of it, though till the mid-eighties
his family continued to live there, and he called Chatfield his
home.

He had a son, born not quite two years after the move to Chat-
field. His letters during the months before and just after the
child's birth carried frequent reports of his wife's health and then
of his own vast pride in his son. A few years later, when his brother
and Mrs. Easton's sister both died, the Chatfield Eastons adopted
the boy and girl born of that marriage. The three children grew
up together without distinction between 'own* and 'adopted/

Easton always maintained a lively sense of family loyalties.
When his father-in-law, 'Uncle Abner' Johnson, died, some years
after the Civil War, Easton promptly arranged for his wife's twin
sisters to make their home in Chatfield. His letters at that time
were full of careful thought for the comfort of the two young
girls. One of the innumerable 'additions' to his house was built
to make room for them. They were part of the Easton household
until their marriages Abby's to a clergyman from the East,
Anna's to G. H. Haven, of Chatfield.

Yet there was one direful passage when Easton, deep in a
cut-throat fight for the wheat markets of the state, refused to go
to his mother, who had begged him to come in her serious ill-

162 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

ness. His letter to his brother, who had written for the mother,
said: ". . . the demands of my business are just now so great
that it is impossible for me to leave. My comfort must be in know-
ing that you are giving our mother every care/' He enclosed ten
dollars and urged his brother to "call on me freely if anything
more is required/'

As the years went on his letters became more and more the
autocratic delivery of orders to inferiors. The old note of equal
comradeship, so warm in his letters to Sam Johnson and almost
equally appealing to various friends in his first Chatfield months,
entirely disappeared. He was hotly Republican in the party's early
years, and found time later to push his candidates for various ap-
pointments. (Most of them were successful.) But his letters
sounded more and more the cry of the lone wolf.

Other evidence supports that impression. Many of his neigh-
bors carried their share of the necessary political labors of their
community. They served on the village council and the school
board, did the thousand little jobs that helped to build the town.
But not Easton. He had, it appears, no time for the kind of im-
mediate civic responsibility in which his country's best traditions
had been fostered.

It is too easy simply to damn such a man for 'selfishness/ It
is harder to inquire why that tradition permitted a man of
Easton's uncommon powers to believe that he could go his way
along and take, from the earth and from other human beings,
whatever his cunning and his force could command.

In a very real sense, Easton was a victim of the culture in which
he was bred. His remarkable energies found no better channel
for their expenditure than the ruthless process of accumulating
wealth,

He was not the only such man, even in Chatfield. At least a
dozen others in the community piled up exceptional amounts
of wealth by the very same methods that Easton used. And they
were remembered in the same terms of fear and dislike.

There were fortunate exceptions to that pattern. The town
could not have nourished the life it did nourish had it not in-

EVERYMAN: SPECULATOR 163

eluded men and women with a sense of their own responsibilities
for "life in the concrete, in regions and cities and villages, in
wheatland and cornland/' Yet even their vision was limited.
They failed, in a hundred years, to create a society in which even
one creative artist, one genuine maker, could grow strong enough
to transmute the beauty of the valley into cultural forms as satis-
fying as the forms of the landscape.

Easton himself never grew altogether insensible to the beauty
of the land. The Chatfield farm that he kept to the end of his
life was a place of real solace for him. He made it into a model
homestead, though he never lived on it. In the mid-seventies he
begged an old York State friend to take it in charge. To that
friend he wrote:

You will have the full run of the place yourself. All I ask is that you
let me come out sometimes and putter around and look at the stock.

The old friend did not take it, and no other letter of Easton's
comes so near to speaking of his hunger for some deeper tie with
the land than he found in his financial success.

It is hard to believe that he was wholly unaware of the way
men thought of him. A generation after his death the legend
remained that there wasn't a man in Chatfield, outside his own
family connections, who would call J. C. Easton a friend*

PART

Six

The Law Made Visillt

I

NIGHT FEIX QUICKLY in November. The man working in the clearing
pushed back the darkness a little way by setting fire to a pile of brush
as the last sullen red stained the sky. No use to waste good daylight on
brush-burning. Besides, the fire would keep his wife company while he
went after the cows.

He tucked the gnarly butts deeper into the flames and laid his axe
and cant hook in the shelter of a pile of logs before he looked up the
slope toward the little house, so nearly swallowed in the night. A point
of light starred the darkness. She had set a candle in the window. He
stepped beyond the circle of the fire's snap and crackle and stood for a
moment listening.

He heard the bark of a fox, the faraway hoot of an owl above the dry
whisper of wind. But no tinkle of a cow bell. Drat the pesky critters!
They'd grazed till midafternoon within earshot: he should have turned
them back when he heard them splash through the river, but he'd
grudged the time from his felling. There was no help but to go after
them.

The river grew louder in his ears and his feet felt out the uneven line
of safety across the ford. Some day there'd be a bridge over that river,
and the quicker the better. Every traveler from the south had to cross
the river there, and some of them had a bad time of it. He'd taken his
ox team and pulled out more than one.

The man moved with a canny Verrnonter's ease wrought deep in his
sinews through a boyhood of walking through Greeley's Gore at every
hour of the year.

At the top of the bluff he listened again and heard, far across the

166

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE l6j

valley, a faint tinkle of metal on metal. The cows had got clear over on
Bear Creek. He had a good two miles to go. He'd be late for supper
if he didn't hurry.

His hands tightened about the cudgel he carried. He'd make a farm
out here that would make her folks' place in Vermont look like a berry
patch. The quarter section he had now was only a beginning: he'd have
another, and another, and another. ... A man could own half as
much as the state of Vermont out here and never make a dent in Min-
nesota's acres. He'd be one of the county commissioners, maybe even
help make the laws up in the capital. It was a new country and one
man was as good as another if he showed himself right.

He heard a cow bell close at hand and called softly, "Soo-boss, come
boss." The cattle thrashed obediently through the brush toward him.

He ran a hand over old Sukie's invisible flank and thought, "It's that
dark a black cow looks white!"

"Come boss/' he said again and turned the two cows and the yearling
bull back toward the river.

He'd have a pasture fenced in for them come spring and buy an-
other two or three fresh heifers. The butter she made brought the best
price on the market. If there was too much work for her to do alone
he'd get her a hired girl.

"Soo-boss," he called, and smacked a hearty hand against the year-
ling's flank to hurry them home.

The fire was a beacon as they came to the river's edge, and while the
cows picked their way through the ford he started figuring in his head
how a bridge could be built at that place. A plan would be a help con-
vincing the rest of the commissioners when he got elected.

II

THERE OUGHT to be a law!

Americans have said that so often they laugh a little when they
say it, especially since Prohibition rubbed some of the bloom off
their innocent faith in the power of 'the law/ Yet most Americans
still agree to the set of symbols that make up the law, and they
generally think the most important job of those symbols is to
protect the 'rights' of the 'people/

Such an idea is really quite new, as world history goes. It cer-
tainly had little standing in the European countries from which
America got its early settlers. Even the small farmers and shop-
keepers who left Old England for New hardly went that far.
They were good faithful obeyers of the rules set up for them by
their religious leaders.

But something began to change in the long hard years of build-
ing a civilization in the wilderness. By the time people began to
think of themselves as 'Americans' they had come to believe that
the laws they made for themselves were more important than
the laws handed down by the king or even those that were
said to have come from the Almighty. It was a bold idea to begin
weaving into the web of human relations.

By the time Minnesota was settled, the pattern was so well
fixed that the chief Western questions about the law were ques-
tions of when, and under what leadership, its forms should
be established. Its operations were taken for granted, though

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 169

different people valued it for different reasons, and political
parties grew out of coniicting notions of what interests the law
should protect. The trick, for political leadership, was to bring to-
gether a sufficient number of divergent interests, and a good re-
sounding slogan was recognized as one of the most effective in-
struments for such rallying of the hosts. It did not matter too
much if the structure of the slogan was a good deal different from
the structure of the realities it was supposed to represent. If a
political party had enough slogans that people liked, it would
probably win the election.

So in ChatfiekTs early years the leaders of the new Republican
party made the" most of certain slogans that fitted their purposes,

"Protect our infant industries" was more effective In the East
than in the West. It took a while to convince Western people
that they were better off with a high tariff. As late as 1883 Chat-
field's own Congressman, Milo White, elected as a Republican,
voted for a reduction of tariff rates.

"Sound money" had a good deal more appeal for Western
voters in the decade before the Civil War. Times had changed
since the West sent Andrew Jackson to the White House to
break the 'money power' of the East. Now it had got so bad, the
people said to each other, that a man never knew whether the
money in his jeans would buy a year's supply of clothes for his
family, or only a pinch of snuff, by the time he'd walked across
the street from the bank to the store. They began to think the
Republicans were right when they said all currency should be
issued by the United States Treasury.

"Vote yourself a farm" was the most popular slogan, both
East and West. The Government had millions of acres, the
argument ran; anyone that wanted to farm ought to be able to
get himself a quarter section without cost or trouble. Farmers and
factory workers agreed about that, and it had bobbed up in Con-
gress time and again for thirty years or more, though probably few
recognized the proposal as a form of agrariamsm that had been
used since Roman days to quiet the unrest of the plebs.

It took some time for America's newly powerful industrialists

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

to see that 'free land' was a way to stop the dangerous radicalism
of their workers. They feared at first that they would lose their
'hands' if land were too easily accessible. But laborers grew more
and more demanding: they had the effrontery to talk of cutting
the f ourteen-hour working day to a paltry ten hours, and muttered
that a man should be paid enough that his wife and children
would not have to work. The worst of it was that those men could
vote in the public elections; their clamor for free schools and
other nonsense was heading the country straight for the hell of
socialism.

Then someone got the idea that the 'radicals' could be silenced
by offering them free land in the West, and filling their places in
the factories with workers from foreign countries. Foreigners
could not vote. ... It was a handsome scheme all the way
around. So the industrialists agreed with the Westerners, and
the Republicans came into power.

As for the issue of slavery the Republicans had no slogan
on that in the beginning. A few 'fanatics' like Garrison tried to
make emancipation the new party's central issue, but the party
managers avoided it for a long time.

Minnesota had its own crusader on that subject. Jane Grey
Swisshelm ran a paper in St. Cloud (some distance north of St.
Paul) with the avowed purpose of convincing Minnesota that
slavery must be abolished. Besides editing her paper she lectured
all over the Territory. When she came to Chatfield most of her
hearers agreed with the Republican that Mrs. Swisshelm was
"some distance ahead of us on the slavery question/'

Yet they felt uneasy when they thought about the Negroes.
It had been right, they agreed, for the Land Office men to take
back the claim papers of that Negro who tried to trick them
into thinking he was white; he only wanted a little money from
the sharpers. But if he had settled down and farmed it now, some
said. . * .

There was Black Henry Barr, whose folks had been freed before
he was born, back in Ohio. His wife came from Canada, and
they were as decent hard-working a pair as you'd find. When you

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE

thought about them it didn't seem right that anyone could make
slaves out of them just because their skins were a little darker
than most. And not so much darker, at that. Henry must have
had a white grandfather at least, maybe a white father.

When the Dred Scott decision was announced that slave-
holders could take their human chattels into every part of the
Union, and the Federal government had no right to exclude
slavery from any part of its domain the whole matter began to
look different. The decision meant that slavery could be brought
into Minnesota. Indeed, it was in Minnesota that Dred Scott
had lived for a time as a free man. Though he scarcely existed
as a living individual to the thoughts of Minnesota people, his
name became an oriflamme against a half -understood fear.

What would happen if the Southerners could take their slaves
wherever they went? In Chatfield they spoke of John Bennett,
who had come from Mississippi to the Land Office. What if
he had brought slaves with him? He hired three or four people
all the time, and many a smart young couple got a start for a farm
of their own, working for Bennett. Where would a poor man get
his chance if slaves were brought into the region?

These were some of the questions men asked each other as
they crunched down the cheese and crackers the merchants set
out for their customers.

Those same thoughts helped on the growth of the new-
fledged Republican party. Its Minnesota branch was organized the
summer of 1855, and the following year it elected a majority of
the lower house of the legislature. Democrats were incredulous.
Minnesota offices had always belonged to them and always
would. . . .

Yet both parties united to ask Congress to pass an act per-
mitting Minnesotans to establish a full-fledged state government.
The House passed such an act readily, but the Senate debated
long: an additional state would threaten the "equilibrium of
the Senate/' The bill was finally passed, but twenty-two Southern
senators voted against it.

Minnesota's constitutional convention, called after that Con-

1^2 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

gressional action, was a fantastic affair. A leading Democratic
paper proclaimed that u the only issue" was "White Supremacy
versus Nigger Equality/' But the Republicans denied it. The
Democrats said they won the election, and the Republicans
denied that, too. So two conventions met, in two different St.
Paul buildings. That turned out to be a pretty good idea, because
the two parties did not have to spend so much time outtalking
each other. Some Republican moved that Negroes be allowed to
vote there were not more than a hundred in Minnesota but
the rest of the Republicans voted the idea down. That was about
the only mention of the "only issue/'

The two conventions finally got together on a constitution.
The really hard-fought battle was over the boundaries of the
new state. Most of the Republicans came from southern Min-
nesota, and they wanted a strictly agricultural state, extending
west to the Missouri River and cutting off everything north of
St. Paul. The "Moccasin Democrats/ 7 whose interests for many
years had lain in the fur trade of the northern region, opposed
such a division; they wanted the present boundaries, which were
finally approved by a margin of only three votes. Holley, Chat-
field's Republican editor, was a leader in the fight for the west-
ward extension and was greatly disgusted by the inclusion of the
area holding the then-unguessed wealth of the iron range. He
thought it was nothing but a place for Indians to skulk in.

The constitution was submitted to *ke voters in October,
1858, along with a slate of candidates for both parties. Fillmore
County went Republican, but the Democrats got the governor-
ship, the Congressional representatives, and a majority in the
state legislature. The constitution was almost unanimously ap-
proved, and all that remained was for Congress to accept the
new state.

But Congress was in no hurry. For six months, the elected
governor said, Minnesota hung like Mohammed's coffin mid-
way between heaven and earth. The real reason for the delay
was blurted out by one of the Southern senators: "Mark my

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 173

words: if you do it, another slave state will never be formed out
of the territories of this Union.**

What finally jogged the Senate into action was the broad hint
that if this constitution and set of representatives were not ap-
proved, a new election would be even less favorable to the Demo*
crats. Statehood could not be permanently denied to Minnesota,
and in six months the Republicans there had grown so strong
that they would have welcomed a new deal of the political cards.
So Minnesota was formally admitted to the Union on May iz 9
1858.

All these things were turned over and over in the slow talk
that went on wherever men came together. The issues were made
articulate at national and state levels of discussion, but the
ultimate political decisions were shaped, however uncertainly,, in
every crossroads meeting, in every gathering in store and saloon
and office.

So high were the stakes in those fateful years before the Civil
War that every available resource of pageantry and ritual was
called into play. Much more than political alignments was in-
volved, and the people seem to have sensed it. All the ways of
their living were being changed by the decision which was to
make industrialism the dominant power of the nation. The
torchlight parades and the gusty drama of Wide Awakes parading
for Lincoln created allegiances that lasted well beyond their
flaring hour. Seventy years later, a woman who as a child had
seen those torches flare in Chatfield streets remembered with
passion that she "never could abide the very name of a Demo-
crat/'

Ill

CHATFIELD had plenty of partisan drama in the decade that saw
the shift of American power from agricultural to industrial con-
trol. But in shaping the legal framework for its own local identity
it largely ignored national partisan issues.

A United States marshal came in with the Land Office, but
his duties took him far beyond the limits of Mr. Twiford's town.
In the first four years of that town's existence the majesty of local
law rested in the hands of a justice of the peace who had been
given his commission before Chatfield had even been thought of.
Squire Gere carried on the long back-East tradition of the farmer
or artisan who read his law books, and judged his neighbors'
affairs, in the homely light of sound neighborhood knowledge.
In his log house on Winona Street he "made boots for the boot-
less," according to an early diarist, "and dealt out justice to those
affected."

When the Squire's son, Beecher Gere, was elected to the legis-
lature in 1856 he moved to get a village charter for the valley town,
and on April i, 1857, Chatfield's first village election was held.
The 131 votes cast in that election were so narrowly divided that
no partisan victory could be claimed.

The president of the village council, and the recorder were
Democrats; the three village trustees were sound Republicans.
One of the first official acts of the council was to direct the
recorder to "furnish the proceedings of Council to the Editor

174

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 175

of the Republican newspaper ie Chatfield." Then that partisan-
ship was balanced by the appointment of I. F. O'Ferrali loyal
Democrat, as village treasurer. Certainly no partisan bias can
be detected in the seventeen ordinances that council adopted and
published within ten days of the election.

Their provisions indicate most of the areas in which Chat-
field has ever felt it necessary to invoke the support of the law
for its corporate housekeeping. First came the provisions for
protection from fire. "The occupant of any house or building"
was required to provide himself with 'Two Buckets and a ladder
of sufficient length to go upon the roof." Fire Wardens were ap-
pointed to examine all buildings and see "whether the stoves and
stove pipes, flues are in a safe condition, and if necessary to have
them made so." Ashes were not to be kept "in wooden vessels";
gunpowder must be stored in metal canisters and no more than
25 pounds could be kept in any building.

The second group of ordinances set up a series of license fees
the only source of revenue the Charter allowed the village. Selling
liquor "for consumption on the place" required a license cost-
ing fifty dollars. Licenses costing from five to twenty-five dol-
lars, at Council's discretion, were required for the exhibition of
"natural or artificial curiosities, caravans, circuses, Theatrical
Performances or public shows/' Dog licenses were set at one
dollar a year, but that provision outraged so many people it was
revoked within a few weeks.

All "merchants, traders, Hotel Keepers" were required to pay
annual fees fixed by Council; they ranged from $5.00 to $50.
In return the local businessmen were protected by prohibiting
all "Itinerant merchants, hawkers, or peddlers" from plying their
trade within the village limits, on penalty of fines that might
run as high as $100, at Council's discretion.

The Republican scoffed at the license system: "We might as
well put up a board fence around the village and charge a fee of
one to five dollars to get in. It would provide handsomely for
the councilmen's salary."

The third group of ordinances was designed to protect the

iy6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

health and the appearance of the village. "Nauseous or unwhole-
some substances'* were to be removed from the vicinity of "any
grocery, barn, stable, privy, or other building" and persons neg-
lecting such care of their premises could be fined up to $50. The
village marshal was authorized to remove any "Carriages, Carts,
Wagons, Sleds, firewood, Lumber or any other material What-
ever*' that encumbered the "Streets, alleys, and public grounds,"
if the owner failed to remove them after due warning, and to
collect "suitable fees."

Ordinance Ten provided "That any person neglecting or re-
fusing to restrain his swine and allowing them to ran at Large
shall forfeit and pay a fine not exceeding Fifty Dollars for Each
and Every offense." It was the first round of a half -century struggle
to keep the pigs out of Chatfield streets.

The town was so close to its rural base that practically every
family kept a litter of pigs, besides a few chickens and perhaps a
cow and a horse or two. No one minded a horse or cow graz-
ing the wide grassy strips on either side of the street. But pigs were
different. They rooted under the neatest fences, and played havoc
in gardens (though they did serve remarkably well as scavengers) .
Even worse than the damage they did to gardens was the out-
rage they offered to delicate sensibilities. A lady might be embar-
rassed any time by the sight of an old sow waddling down the
middle of the street, stopping as like as not in front of the church
itself to suckle her squealing pigs. Good care was taken that the
husbands on the village council were made aware of these
offenses, and of the need for ending them.

Of course no woman voted in Chatfield. In all likelihood few
or none, in that year of our Lord, would have thought such an
act becoming. Yet it was not for nothing that Queen Victoria
sat on the throne of England. Godey's Lady's Book pointed
the American moral of her reign. 'The sex' need never sit help-
less before conditions offending their modesty.

Certainly some things were not to be tolerated in a Christian
community. When the clerk of a respectable store could strip
himself stark naked and dance in the middle of a public street,

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 177

then it was time for virtuous women to out in of

chastity. That the man came of good Yankee only

vated the offense he had no excuse for not knowing better.
When foreigners got drank a lady could simply turn her
and ignore them. But for a man of sound American stock to
behave so was unforgivable. The fact that his frenzy happened at
midnight, when decent people were abed, was no defense. It was
the duty of Council to see that decency prevailed at every hour,

Six of the seventeen ordinances promulgated that April were
concerned with the decencies. "The playing of Cards, Dice, or
other games of Chance for the purpose of Gaming" was pro-
hibited in "any House of entertainment, Hotel, grocery or
saloon/' on pain of fines up to $50. Equal penalties were laid
against all persons engaged in "riot, disorderly assemblage, or
in keeping a disorderly House or Saloon," and on "any person
who shall be guilty of Horse racing or immoderate driving in
the Streets/* Five-dollar fines were levied against any person
found guilty of "playing pitching quoits or other amusement In
the public grounds or streets or performing unnecessary labor on
the Sabbath day," No longer would the ring of horseshoes on an
iron stake, or the sound of an impious axe 7 disturb devout wor-
shippers. A like fine could be laid on any person guilty of "habitual
drunkenness" a term left conveniently undefined.

As for the moon-struck male was it possible that the village
fathers felt a secret sympathy with his shamelessness? Ordinance
Twelve made a curious coupling of offenses: fifty-dollar fines
could be levied on all persons guilty of "gross Obscenity or of
mutilating shade trees or ornamental shrubs or fences." How
well that contented the ladies is not a matter of record. They
might well have swooned could they have guessed that three
generations later the town marshal would be called one Sunday
afternoon to break up a brazenly erotic embrace in the public
park.

This first list of ordinances, together with provisions for side-
walks set up a few weeks later, afford a surprisingly complete
summary of the subjects of civic enactment through Chatfield's

iy8 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

whole history. Emphasis shifted and attitudes changed, but
the basic preoccupations were the same. Fire protection eventually
meant zoning and building regulations, and fire-fighting equip-
ment for the volunteer department. Licenses for legitimate' busi-
nesses were dropped when the legislature gave Chatfield the
right of taxation in its city charter of 1887, but traveling amuse-
ments continue to pay for the privilege of showing in Chat-
field. Police functions were discharged by an appointed mar-
shal, but it was a long time before major importance was at-
tached to that office.

The problem of liquor licenses provided the chief issue in
village politics from the founding of a W.C.T.U. in the late
seventies until the town voted 'dry' in 1904; it was to recur in
altered form after the Second World War. A health department
was set up in the eighties, following provisions laid down by state
law, but that might be regarded as an extension of the original
provisions against "nauseous and unwholesome substances." The
municipal water system was begun primarily as a protection
against fire; its rapid extension as a household convenience
paralleled the granting of franchises for electric and telephone
services which was the distinctively new feature of civic life at
the turn of the century.

But village government did not meet the needs of people living
outside the village. Hence the legislature provided for the organ-
ization of every township having fifty or more people.

Townships were uniform six-mile squares laid out by the
federal surveyors; all land titles were drawn in terms of section,
township, and surveyor's range. Names are easier to remember
than numbers, so the settlers agreed among themselves on what
their townships should be called. Chatfield township naturally
took the name of the village which lay chiefly within its borders;
the adjoining township, in which the northerly part of the
village lay, was called Elmira, probably after York State's Elmira.

The first township elections were called by the Territorial leg-
islature for May 11, 1857. r ^ ie c ^ ose relationship between village
and countryside speaks in the fact that Chatfield township chose

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE

Augustus Haven as chairman of its board of supervisory and
Elmira named Milo White to that post.

Elmira's official activities are recorded in the painstaking bill*
submitted to the supervisors. The week after election Milo White
drove his own team twenty miles to Rochester, the of
Olmsted County offices, and borrowed the assessment rolls for
Elmira. It took him all day to make the trip, two days to copy the
names, and a fourth day to return the list to Rochester. For these
services he was paid $4.00. The elected assessor then spent seven
days driving over the township to examine each piece of property
and list the values at which each should be taxed. For this be
was paid $7.00. The supervisors were paid 6 to 25 cents for copy-
ing and filing official papers, 75 cents for posting election notices
"in the three most prominent places in the town/' Time spent
Viewing' a road or supervising a piece of road building was paid
for at the rate of a dollar a day. All these fees were fixed by law;
the most active township official collected a maximum of $30
in one year; most were paid a minor fraction of that.

The most important function of a township was the making
of roads. In Elmira seven new roads were laid out in the first six
months of its organization, all of them on petition. The town-
ship was divided into five "road districts' and a 'pathinaster' ap-
pointed for each district. Every voter in the township was assessed
a 'poll tax* of two days' work on the roads, under the direction of
the "pathmaster/ In addition, all property was assessed at 2.5 milk
for a road-building fund. This tax in Elmira amounted the first
year to nearly $300 but, thanks to absentee or 'unknown' owner-
ship, less than half that amount was collected. The money was
apportioned to the road districts by the supervisors and spent
by the 'paymasters' for road work beyond that provided by the
'poll tax/ That system of road building continued till well past
the turn of the century.

Bridges also were built by the township, on individual contract,
One such in Elmira cost a total of $46.64, and that sum was di-
vided among ten Elmira landholders for 'Tiewing stringer 25
feet long/' for hauling lumber with "self, team and boy," for

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

"putting up buttrncnts," for "raising bridge" (four men got 25
cents apiece for this job), for "framing bridge/* and for "one
thousand five hundred and Seventy four feet of plank" cut in the
farmer's own wood lot and sawed in }. R. Jones's mill.

An interesting sequence emerges in those records of neigh-
borly co-operation in service of local government. Not until 1862
was an Irish farmer hired for any of that work, though a consider-
able number of Elmira farms were Irish-owned. Six years later
the second Irish name appears, with notation of payment for
"ditching highway/' In 1870, Dan Moriarity was appointed path-
master in one district, the first such recognition for any Irishman;
some years later the Democrat was referring to Timothy Halloran
as "one of the best road builders in this section/ 7

The county government also had considerable jurisdiction over
road building. William Pease, who was elected county com-
missioner year after year, had more to do with laying out Fill-
more County than any other one man in the province. He was
known as the storyteller of the board. Whether at board meeting
or talking with his neighbors, he always had a story of some kind
to tell, that made his point so a body could remember it.

People felt they could trust William Pease. He always paid
for the crackers and cheese, or sugar lumps, or dried apples, that
he ate from the supplies every storekeeper set out for his custom-
ers. Folks might laugh at a man who was persnickety enough to
pay for what he could have for nothing, but afterwards they
told each other they could trust a man like that. So they chose
him to look after the common business, first in the county, and
later in the state legislature. The 'aristocrats' might laugh at
William Pease and his long 'Granger beard/ but he was just
about the best farmer in the county, and he took as good care of
the people's business as he did of his own.

There was, for instance, the time when the legislature was con-
sidering a bill to give any millowner the right of free flowage on
land adjacent to his mill, regardless of who owned the land.
William Pease remembered the argument his neighbor, John
Murphy, was having with J. C. Easton over flowage rights for

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE l8l

Eastern's mUL Pease got op in the legislature and if this law
was passed he'd have all the suckers in the Root River
up in his barn and milking his cows, and he figured he wouldn't
like that much. Everyone laughed so hard that the bill never did
get to be a law. That was the kind of politics that country
Eked and understood.

They understood the township justice courts, too, though they
didn't always like the way those courts were used. Now and then
the constable brought in someone accused as a disturber of the
peace, but most of the riot-and-disorder cases seem to have hap-
pened in town, when country and village and hard liquor came
together. The justice courts of the townships were largely used
as the means of collecting debts, many of them for "outside*
creditors such as sewing-machine and farm-implement dealers.
Gathered resentments against that type of legal procedure was to
help on the growth of the Grange, with its antirnonopoly pro-
gram, during the seventies.

About law enforcement in Chatfield itself little can be said,
for early justice-court records were lost in the fire that burned
down almost a block of buildings in 1877. ^ ie newspapers in
early years had more urgent business than reporting local law-
breaking, though when the McKennys relinquished the Demo-
crat their successors put on many a campaign for stricter law en-
forcement. (Once the editor, ending a story with "as usual no
arrests," added that he was going to cast those words in permanent
type,) Something of the general state of affairs is perhaps hinted
in a story that has come down about the horse thieves of the
fifties. They grew so bold in the western part of the county that in
1855 five solid citizens "determined to reassert their right of
self-government/' and drew up articles of agreement as a
"vigilance committee."

Signing that covenant was felt to be a serious matter, but the
movement spread rapidly through the entire county. Strange
events followed. At first suspects were "arrested," given a trial
in vigilante court, and "cautiously fined a small amount." In
return they burned barns and hay stacks, stole more livestock,

l8l THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and even beat up some of the vigilantes. One of the original
signers of the covenant, reconnoitering in Iowa where he had
heard the stolen goods were taken, saw a wagon and a saddle that
had been stolen from one of his neighbors. He returned the next
night with twenty-five men and captured two of the three men
in the hangout. The culprits were brought back to Fillmore
County for trial in the district court, and one of them was com-
mitted to the state prison.

In Jordan township the vigilantes heard that one of the thieves
was at the house of the justice of the peace. They surrounded the
house and found the culprit in bed with the justice's wife. He
was hustled into the woods and "whipped, choked, kicked, and
cuffed to the very edge of the river Styx" until he confessed the
names of his associates, whereupon he was released.

One of the men implicated in that confession had taken a fire
insurance policy with a company that J. C. Easton represented,
and when Easton heard of the accusation he terminated the
policy, as he reported in a letter to the company. At one time the
county sheriff himself was suspected of being in league with the
thieves, but two or three years of vigilante justice scared the gang
out. When another wave of thievery swept the county twenty
years later it was checked rapidly when the word passed around
that a new "vigilance committee" was being formed.

Of all this no word was reported in the Chatfield papers. The
story was first put into print in a History of Fillmore County pub-
lished in 1882. Vigilantes, however they might adorn the local
legend, were not good advertising for a new town that wanted
more settlers, and they offered no partisan advantage to either
Democrats or Republicans, for members of both parties were
equally implicated on both sides of the unsavory affair.

"Hard times' made equally poor advertising, hence the news-
papers made as little mention as possible of hardships resulting
from the panic of 1857. A few weeks after the August collapse
the Republican remarked that it was a good thing that "the bub-
ble of speculation" had burst: "the very thing the country needed
... for now we know what it was worth. . . . With careful

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 183

management we shall come through sounder than before.*
In those first months no question was raised of political re-
sponsibilities for the 'hard times. 9 Instead, Democrats and Repub-
licans joined forces for an advertising campaign in behalf of the
town. The businessmen put up the money, in return for advex-
tising space, and Judson Wade Bishop wrote the text of a History
of FUlmore County which was circulated all through the East.

**We write of Fillmore County simply because she is our own/
the Preface announced, *\ . . we would derogate nothing from
our neighbors." However, the little booklet contrived to indicate
that both state and county derived their importance largely from
their position as background for the incomparable advantages of
Chatfield. A good fourth of the pages were devoted, one way or
another, to Thomas Twiford's town though Twiford was no-
where mentioned.
The history opened with a poetic invocation:

To the West, to the West, to the land of the Free,
Where mighty Missouri rolls down to the Sea,

Where a man is a man, if he's willing to toil,
And the poorest may gather the fruits of the soil*

Prose made the invitation explicit: *To the young man; to the
man of wealth; to the man unfortunate in business; to the manu-
facturers; to the working men of the crowded cities; and to the
poor man of the agricultural districts ... to all good citizens we
say ... Come to the West."

Minnesota, the History went on, with its "green prairies . .
gushing springs . . . crystal lakes . . . unthinned forests" was
''capable of sustaining a denser population than perhaps any other
in the world." Beyond its boundless natural beauties it offered

a society but recently formed, where every one stands on his own feet
a tablet^ as it were in a plastic state, on which he now may easier write
his name with a finger's end, than carve it with hardened steel, on the
indurated surface of old, established social communities. ... He is
credited at once for whatever of talent, of energy, or of worth he dis-
plays and a lifetime is not required to win the confidence of his neigh-
bors.

184 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The man who wrote that panegyric to the shining symbol that
the West had become was uttering the fullness of his own spirit.
Jndson Wade Bishop was born in 1831 in Jefferson County, New
York, one of ten children in a clergyman's household. At Fredonia
and Union academies he learned something of the classics, but
at sixteen he began to earn his own living, first as clerk in a store,
then as bookkeeper, teacher, and farmer in turn. When he was
twenty he had gathered enough money for a year at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in New York City, With that training in
civil engineering he got a job as assistant engineer for the Grand
Trunk Railway of Ontario, Canada.

Early in 1857, he went to Minnesota as chief engineer for the
Winona and St Peter Railroad; when J. W, Holley lost his place
with the Southern Minnesota, young Bishop succeeded him.
When financial troubles put an end to railroad building, Bishop
went to Chatfield to see what he could find to do. Publishing the
History was his first recorded contribution to Chatfield's develop-
ment

His next appearance on the Chatfield scene was his appoint-
ment as principal of Chatfield Academy for its first session. Per-
haps the enforced pause in speculative profit-taking helped the
townsfolk to remember the charter they had held unused for two
years. It was obviously out of the question to levy a tax for a
public school when times were so hard. But all through the early
months of 1858 both papers urged the opening of the Academy,
and by September a faculty had been assembled, a building rented,
and a student body attracted. The first Catalogue of Chatfield
Academy listed thirty-nine Ladies and thirty-six Gentlemen in
that company. The addresses recorded with those names were
impressively varied, but most of the students lived with parents
or relatives .within the valley itself.

The faculty and curriculum described in that Catalogue were
also quite impressive. There were five faculty members besides
the principal. The Baptist preacher, Reverend G. W. Fuller, A.B.,
was 'lecturer and Instructor in Greek Language"; Dr. Cole and
Dr* Miller were "Lecturers on Anatomy, Physiology, & Hygiene."

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 185

An Englishwoman, Miss Sarah Knight, was "Preceptress of the
Young Ladies" and taught "English Branches, Ornamental Work,
&c"; she was assisted by Miss Mary Gilman, who taught Music
and German. The principal himself taught "French, Latin,
Mathematics, and Engineering," and all who studied under Mm
remembered the high quality of his teaching.

The figures reporting enrollment in various classes showed a
total disregard for the classical delights the faculty offered; "use-
ful 1 ' subjects were the rule, with a smattering of "accomplish-
ments" for the Young Ladies. Academy exercises were described
as "practical" above aU else, with first emphasis upon punctuality
as the sovereign virtue. Mr. Bishop's class in Civil Engineering
was highly regarded, and of four Young Gentlemen enrolled in
that class, three were later to make substantial careers for them-
selves in railroad engineering and management.

George Henry Haven spent two years in the Chatfield Academy,
and judging from sundry papers that have survived from his stu-
dent days, all was not solemn within Academy walls. Discussions
in its Irving Literary Society ranged from the question "Resolved,
That more misery has been caused by pride and ambition than by
ignorance and superstition" to such erudition as "If a scolding
wife with a broom four feet long can raise a breeze in two minutes,
how long will it take the citizens of Chatfield to raise a bell weigh-
ing 1 50 pounds for the Academy?"

No hint appears in these schoolboy papers of the tightening
political divisions that were to lead some of those same young
men to fight on opposite sides of the Civil War. A friend of
George Haven went South in 1860 and some months later broke
off his correspondence with young Haven on a note of protest
against Haven's "abolitionist" sentiments. A cousin of Haven's
who spent one term in the Academy was later to die in the Union
blue, while the friend fought in Rebel gray.

J. W. Bishop himself was drawn from his academic career by
partisan politics, after only one year as principal He was suc-
ceeded by Thomas P. Thickstun whom Bishop praised, in the
columns of the Democrat which Bishop took over, for "constitu-

l86 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

tional fullness . . . mature preparation . . . earnest devotion/*
Mr. Thickstun left Chatfield after two years, to open a Baptist
college in one of the River towns; the young man engaged to take
his place enlisted in the Union army before the term opened.
That was the last effort of the Academy trustees to carry on the
school; a few weeks later they rented the building to a young
couple from Vermont who opened a private school. They were
editorially approved as "ripe scholars" but by spring it was ap-
parent that a different basis must be found for Chatfield's schools.

The temper of the townsfolk had changed since its first years.
The sobering effects of 'hard times' very likely played their part
in bringing the recognition that a good school for the town was
important. Whatever the reasons, Chatfield got legislative sanc-
tion for setting up an enlarged Consolidated School District, and
elected a notable school board.

C. G. Ripley, with two Harvard degrees, was its chairman, and
two clergymen with university degrees also served. Milo White
and a moneylender named Swinburn completed the board. The
'Old Academy' was rented, three teachers were hired, and the pub-
lic was informed that every person in the district, between the
ages of five and twenty-one, was eligible to be a free pupil in the
school Children living outside the district might be admitted on
the payment of a small tuition fee.

The principal of Chatfield consolidated public school during
its first five years was E. J. Thompson, "late principal of Newton
Academy, Shoreham, Vermont." His ability is suggested by the
fact that he went from Chatfield to teach at the University of
Minnesota. Thirty years after he left Chatfield he was invited
back for a reunion dinner for which his one-time students gathered
from many places.

It would be delightful to record that all of the men responsible
for Chatfield's schools were of equally high quality, and that the
town's most able and cultivated citizens were always on its school
board. Unfortunately, they weren't. There were times when the
penny-pinching and Pecksniffian attitudes of the board merited
no better word than mean-spirited, and there was one interlude

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 167

when five principals came and went In the space of two
leaving vaguely scandalous echoes In their Chatfield

school salaries were never high, even by comparison with
boring and similar towns, and 'advanced" ideas were not given a
very warm welcome. One time the board saved a lot of money
by hiring a woman a graduate of Wellcsley College as
of the school, but her attempts at progressive reorganization of
the school were tinder frequent criticism. On one occasion the
Democrat objected stridently against "a special course ... in
female suffrage" that Miss Dunlap was supposed to be "forcing"
on her pupils; the board decided that a public debate on the sub-
ject might be held as scheduled, but admonished Miss Dunlap to
see to it that she never again let school exercises be involved in
"politics."

"Politics" was a term of convenient vagueness. It was oppro-
briously attached to an academic debate on "female suffrage" but
never appears in connection with the long and sordid bickering
over the provision of adequate housing for the public school,
though nothing could have been more clearly a matter of public
policy.

Funds for a new building were voted In 1 863, but the contractor
took two and a half years to finish it, and the board had again
and again to force him to undo some flagrantly poor workman-
ship. Yet official friends of the contractor prevented his being dis-
missed, or even penalized. The school was too big for the build-
ing by the time it was finished, but the annual school meeting
would not entertain any suggestion for enlargement. The fight
over the building was long and bitter, but it was never officially
dignified as "politics."

Necessity drove the electors to authorize the building of two
one-room shacks to hold part of the overflow during the seventies,
but they turned down every suggestion for an adequate new build-
ing. An architect was called in to examine the old shell; he found
it five inches out of plumb and so shaky a high wind might easily
push it over. "Were I a member of your School Board I certainly
should not like the responsibility of continuing the schools in it

l88 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

for a longer period than it would take to erect a new building/*
his report ended.

Still the annual meeting refused to budge. It voted to hold the
school board "responsible" for the safety of the building, but it
turned down one proposal after another aimed at getting a new
building under way. Special meetings were held, with the same re-
sults. Whenever the issue came up, William Pease took his hired
men to town to vote against any money for a new school. It was
1886 before a building program was approved.

A good part of the credit for the belated achievement belonged
to G. H. Haven. From 1864 to 1904 he was clerk of the school
board. {He did a variety of additional public jobs during all those
years the jobs that nobody gets paid for but that help to de-
termine "the theory and practice of public policy/* as Webster
defines "politics.") His patient, repeated persuasion had a good
deal to do with the election of a new board the year the building
was decided on. When the building was finished, the fall of 1887,
the board inspected it, then adjourned to Mr. Haven's office and
officially received the keys from the contractor. That small, right
touch of ceremony, together with the dedication exercises, and
the pupils' official moving into the building, speak character-
istically of the part G. H. Haven played in his community. What-
ever he was responsible for was done decently and in order.

Not so much could be said, however, of the partisan altercations
of pre-Civil War years. The Republican made heavy use of re-
sentments roused by the 'hard times 7 of 1858, and the Democrat
fought hard to preserve the favored status of 'the Land Office
gentry/

No rogue e'er felt the halter draw
That held a good opinion of the law,

the Democrat cried, and promised the editor of "that negro-loving
sheet" an encounter with the halter if he continued "his personal,
vulgar and abusive sheet/'

When the 1858 election was over, and a Democratic victory
was announced, Chatfield Republicans protested loudly. The bal-

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 189

lot box had been kept overnight in the office of Dexter Rip-
ley, Democrats, and the Republicans swore that the 'Land Office
boys* had had illegal access to it: no other hypothesis would ac-
count for so small a Republican count as that officially announced.

A group of earnest Republicans set out to get affidavits from Re-
publican voters and laid them before the county Board of Can-
vassers. The number of sworn Republican votes exceeded the of-
ficial count by thirty, and the Board of Canvassers threw out the
entire vote of Chatfield township. This was enough to turn the
Fillmore County vote into a Republican victory, though It did
not change the state results.

The Democrat raged: "289 votes disfranchised!!! 17 It quoted
the Land Office men's protests against the blame being laid on
them by Republicans all over the state; the election judges were
not connected with the Land Office, they plaintively insisted, nor
was the ballot box ever in the Land Office. They appealed to the
district court for justification and McKenny wrote to Beecher
Gere (then in Washington making sure of his appointment as
United States Marshal): "The blacks are playing . . . high-
handed villainy . . . political rascality." McKenny assured Gere
that "the law and the facts" were "all on Democracy's side." J.
C. Easton reported the matter to Griswold, then visiting in the
East, somewhat differently: the Republicans "found they had
been cheated" by thirty votes.

The court decision hung fire for a long time, but on January 8,
1859, the Democrat announced:

THE DIE IS CAST

the long agony is over! 1 !

REPUBLICANS EFFECTIVELY GONE UP! ! !

The court had restored the original count and the Democrats were
triumphant in Fillmore County.

Still the 'hard times' persisted, and since no election was pos-
sible for another two years the popular quest for a panacea cen-
tered on the railroads. AH their building had been stopped by
the 1857 collapse and people convinced themselves that the way

190 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

to get 'good times' back again was to get the companies once more
on the job of building their projected lines. Then men would have
employment and their wages would put money into circulation.
Once the railroads were running they would bring thousands of
new settlers into Minnesota, thereby raising prices to the fine
speculative level of pre-crash days. Democrats and Republicans
were at one in that faith.

Unfortunately the railroad companies had no more money than
anyone else. With thousands of acres let go for delinquent taxes,
railroad lands were a drag on the market. And the new state con-
stitution forbade the state government to lend money to any
private business. Political action was called for, and an amend-
ment to the constitution was supported without regard to partisan
division. In Winona only one vote was cast against that amend-
ment, and 1,102 for. Chatfield was more conservative, but it still
gave the amendment a three-to-one majority.

The new constitutional provision was a wonderful scheme for
icing the railroad cake, eating it to the last crumb, and keeping it
intact on the state's pantry shelf.

The plan went like this: for every ten miles that any railroad
graded ready for tracks, the company ' 'as to receive (in addition
to the 76,800 acres previously provid d) special state bonds in
the amount of $100,000. When ten miles were complete with
rolling stock the company was to ge; an additional $100,000 in
state bonds and 76,800 more acres of land.

In return the companies were to give the state equivalent
amounts of railroad bonds, with which the state would eventually
redeem its own bonds. The state, the phrase ran, was lending not
its money but merely its credit. The leaders in the scheme gave
solemn assurances that the state would never have to pay for the
bonds it issued to the railroads. The idea was that Minnesota state
bonds would sell more easily than company bonds, thereby af-
fording ready cash for construction costs. Of course, once the
trains were running, there would be such a boom that paying back
five million dollars would be a mere trifle from any point of view.

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 191

Eastoe voted against the amendment but shortly after wrote
to a New York friend:

The work of grading on our Land Grant Railroad has com-

menced and is progressing finely. There are icoo men at work on our
Root River and the Transit Road. . . . We hear the whistle of
can in Chatfield long enough before you can think of it at Lowville.
They are doing things 'away out West. 1

But unfortunately Minnesota state bonds sold little better
than railroad bonds, despite the governor's personal assurances
to Wall Street. Bonds amounting to $2,275,000 were issued to
the railroad companies, but all the state had to show for that sum
was about two hundred and forty miles of slovenly roadbed. Not
a rail was laid, not an iron horse snorted, but the bonds were to
plague the state for long years before they were finally retired.
The Democratic governor attributed the impossibility of selling
the bonds to "factious interference" by Republicans.

Inevitably the Chatfield papers got involved in the partisan as-
pects of the problem. The Democrat railed against Holley, "the
little kicked-out engineer/' whose "secret malicious opposition"
to the Southern Minnesota was hurting Ghatfield's chances for
getting the road at all. "It is generally supposed that the 'magnif-
icent favors' offered the editor of the Republican of this place . .
for his support of the loan bill, were not quite 'magnificent*
enough, hence his failure to accept."

The argument went from bad to worse. In April, 1859, for in-
stance, the Democrat said: ". . , Republican editor ... has
been caught in so many political lies heretofore and shamefully
exposed, that there is no danger of his being believed now under
any circumstances." On July 2 ? refuting the Republican's charge
of "publishing the proceedings of the Democratic caucus . . .
before the meeting was held/' the editor of the Democrat ad-
monished his fellow partisans to avoid "the editor of the Repub-
lican" lest he "sell them as he did Southern Minnesota lands,
without having the semblance of a title or claim."

192 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

It seems a pity that the following issue of the Republican has
not survived: it would be interesting to know what, in such an
atmosphere, Holley wrote to call forth the Democrat's reply of
July 9:

The last Chatfield Republican contains a most willful, malicious, and
libelous charge against us, and which we here pronounce false in every
particular. We do not desire to take any further notice of the article
in question, further than to here state, that he will be held to answer to
a jury ... for the slanderous charge.

The case was tried in November, and the jury awarded $100
damages to Hemphill, then editor of the Democrat. (McKenny
hired him to run the paper for some years, though it is probable
that McKenny wrote as many of the editorial blasts as Hemphill
did.) Nothing daunted, the Republican blazoned the news thus:

OUTRAGED INNOCENCE VINDICATED
FATHER HEMPHUX'S MARKET VALUE ESTABLISHED! !

WHAT AN EDITOR'S CHARACTER is WORTH
We mean such an editor as he! !

The verdict was explained, the story said, by the fact that the jury
included ten Democrats and only two Republicans.

A month kter "an arrest of judgment" was granted, "so the
'father' stands just exactly where he begun. . . . None but a parti-
san jury would have given him over ten cents, an amount twice
as great as his injury."

These personal conflicts tended to vObscure the real issues of
the national parties. The Democrats themselves were divided be-
tween Douglas moderates and Southern fire-eaters, and Judson
Wade Bishop decided to throw his lot with the Douglas faction.
He bought out the Hemphill-McKenny Chatfield Democrat. "I
mean to try it for a year," he wrote to a friend, and in that year
his editorials showed considerable grasp of the realities in the
gathering conflict

The Republicans were on the march. In September, 1860,
Easton wrote warmly of "the illustrious Honorables from abroad"
who visited Chatfield; Carl Schurz aiki his fellow campaigners

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE

had no more enthusiastic welcome anywhere than in the
valley. Chatfield people read approvingly the doctrine enunciated
by Scward in his campaign speech in St. Paul: ". . . power is not
permanently to reside on the eastern slope of the Alleghany moun-
tains, nor in the seaports. * . . the power that shall commuaicate
and express the will of men on this continent is to be located In
the Mississippi Valley. . . . the ultimate, last of government
on this great continent will be found somewhere within a drch
or radius not very far from the spot on which I stand, at the head
of navigation on the Mississippi river/" What Minnesotan could
refuse to vote for a party whose leaders thought so soundly?

Easton was active in the 1860 campaign. How far he had pene-
trated the inner councils of his party appears in his letter books.
When a man whom he disliked maneuvered for a federal appoint-
ment Easton instructed the newly elected Congressman from
Chatfield's district "to agree to no such thing/* and sent letters
to be delivered to "Honest Abe" in support of Easton's candidate.

It was the last time that Easton's political activities were so
permanently recorded. Thereafter, apparently, he made his wishes
known in personal meetings with effective officials. An intermit-
tent diary of later years contains many items such as these:
'Talked with the Governor . . . Saw Thompson after his oath
as state senator. . . . Spent the morning in government offices/*
The spoils were gathered in many places.

There is no evidence that Easton had yet made any direct con-
nection with railroad affairs. ChatfiekTs hopes were still tied to
the Southern Minnesota Railroad, but that company, like the
others holding state bonds, went bankrupt and had its assets taken
over by the new Republican governor early in 1861. In the re-
shuffling that followed, a Chatfield man, Dr. Luke Miller, was
chosen as vice president of the reorganized company. Largely
because of that prestige, Miller was sent to the state legislature
as Chatfield's representative. The network of interrelationships
between 'business' and 'politics 7 was already drawing tighter; the
law was no longer a simple affair of such justice as vigilantes could,
at need, provide.

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Even with sturdy political support, the Southern Minnesota
Railroad had its difficulties. T. B. Stoddard, its new president;
spent the winter of 1863 in New York trying to raise money but
found men there still wary of Western schemes: "They prefer
6 per cent with certainty to any income from . . . the West/' he
wrote a Minnesota associate. Later he wondered if Philadelphia
or Boston would not have been a better place than New York to
get money: "Money does abound but schemes do much more
abound." At one time he asked his correspondent for a hundred
dollars: he was "completely flat" but thought it '"unwise to show
it just now/' (Another man, on the same errand for another rail-
road, turned to Europe that same winter and secured the invest-
ment of Dutch money in what was to become the Northern Pa-
cific.)

Stoddard finally had to give up the struggle. The state once
more intervened in the name of the law, and still a different fac-
tion took over the management of the Southern Minnesota Rail-
road. In the reorganization of 1864, H. W. Holley once more
took an important place in the company; the business-political
wheel had come full circle and the "little kickedout engineer/'
editor of the Chatfield Republican, had his laugh at his Democrat
rival but Chatfield still had no railroad.

It did have a "railroad bank" which was little consolation to
anyone in Chatfield, though its functioning affords an interesting
instance of the increasing interrelationship between business and
politics.

The state bonds in aid of railroad building, for which Chatfield
had voted so enthusiastically, had proved no more salable than
railroad bonds. So the holders of the state bonds got another law
passed, in the hurried closing days of the 1858 legislature. This
law permitted the holders of state railroad bonds to organize
"banks of issue" authorized to circulate currency in amounts
equivalent to the amounts of bonds deposited with the state
auditor. United States government bonds were mentioned in the
law, along with the Minnesota state railroad bonds, but subse-
quent reports of those banks show clearly that the law served the

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 195

one purpose of enabling holders of the to turn

quite literally, into money.

One provision of the law did serve as partial of the

people of Minnesota against this flagrantly wild-cat currency. All
such bills had to be redeemed in gold whenever they were pre-
sented to the bank that issued it. This provision meant that
of the new money was circulated well beyond reach of the
themselves: the banks were carefully located in the interior of the
state in order to make them as inaccessible as possible to travelers
from other states, who might inconsiderately demand their gold.

Chateld y s "railroad bank" was set up late in 1858. The Demo-
crat reported one week that "The President and Cashier of the
Bank of Chatfield" were stopping at the Medary House and were
busy "getting ready their Banking House and a large stock of
Dry Goods, Groceries etc." It seems a queer combination for a
bank president and cashier to be involved in, but the Democrat
did not offer any explanation. That can be guessed from items in
the reports of the state auditor from 1859 to 1867, the life of the
Bank of Chatfield.

Practically all its fifty-thousand-dollar capital was in Minnesota
railroad bonds, owned by one Selah Chamberlain. Chamberlain
was a Cleveland contractor who had been in charge of the grading
for the Root River and Southern Minnesota road; he had ac-
quired large amounts of the bonds, partly in payment for his work,
partly in other notorious dealings. His use of those bonds proved
repeatedly embarrassing to the state, long after the Bank of Chat-
field had been closed. He simply hired the "President and Cashier"
and let them earn their salaries by running a store. The real busi-
ness of the bank was handled far outside Chatfield. The state
auditor showed the bank to have about $30,000 worth of
currency in circulation, but the gold held by the bank never went
as high as $2,000.

When the federal government provided federal charters for
banks of issue, in 1863, Chamberlain sold the Bank of Chat-
field to two Milwaukee men, who withdrew "the State Rail-
road Bonds and the Currency based thereon" and issued

196 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

$39,575 in new currency "upon undoubted securities" most
of them federal bonds. When Congress put a 10 per cent tax
on all state banks of issue, the Bank of Chatfield made its last
report, with only $1,683 currency outstanding.

All this is recorded in state reports, but in Chatfield itself there
seems to have been no mention of the railroad bank after the
first notice, even in the diaries and letters that mention so many
things. Perhaps the silence was part of the general disapproval
felt for the railroad banks. Other moneylenders opposed them.
Six men in Chatfield, including I. F. O'Ferrall and C. G. Ripley,
made public announcement that they would receive "No
Minnesota money." Easton did not join that boycott, having
decided that "4 or 5 founded upon other bonds" were good; how-
ever, he agreed that "Our Banks in this state founded upon the
railroad state j% bonds are no go. 9 '

Perhaps Chatfield people ignored the bank because it was
part of a complex situation that was not very well understood.
The intricate process of shifting from an agricultural to an in-
dustrial economy, of making 'the law' an instrument of 'busi-
ness/ was not as clear to those agrarian-minded people as it be-
comes in the perspective of a century.

But time's passing does not help to explain how it was that
Thomas Twiford could drop out of the life of the valley he had
chosen and never, apparently, be missed.

The last public mention of his name was in 1857, when he
was nominated by the Democratic caucus as Fillmore County's
representative to the legislature. A week later the Democrat said
he had withdrawn his name "in consequence of some local
prejudice that seemed to exist in some parts of the county against
him/'

The only knowledge of his doings after that comes from a letter
he wrote to Beecher Gere near the end of 1858. The letter was
written from "Village Creek near Strait River/' but whether that
place was in Minnesota or farther west no available atlas reveals.

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 197

The letter complained bitterly against "the people of Southern
Minnesota" who were "willing to see the two men who first
opened the country . . . trampled down and abused/' (Twiford
coupled Gere with himself, but Gere was doing pretty well. When
Gere's term in the legislature was over he got an appointment
as United States Marshal That kept him busy until the Civil
War, and in 1865 he came home a colonel, then shortly returned
to a plantation he had acquired in Alabama.) Twiford said that
everything he and Gere did had "benefitted Southern Minne-
sota more than us/' and was especially bitter against one
"henrey" who had "swindled me out of every dollar I entrusted
to him/'

Yet that letter of Twiford's ended with vague boastings of
"tall arrangements . . . bound to ride out the largest swells
. . . when times change."

It was the last Chatfield heard of Thomas Twiford for thirty
years. Then one week the Democrat, under an editor who had
never before heard of the man, printed a dozen lines about a
visit from "Mr. Twiford, now living at Eagle Creek near Madelia,"
who "first platted the site of Chatfield/' He must have been an
old man by that time.

Sixty years later an old woman living in Madelia remembered
that when she was a little girl a man called Mr. Twiford had
been hired to build the district schoolhouse on a corner of her
father's farm near Madelia. She had seen him working there with
"a big boy" that her elders said was his grandson. Mr. Twiford
was a thin man, she remembered, and stooped, and the work
he was doing seemed too hard for him.

To that end had come the man who was so intent on 'making his
pile' that he had no time to be bothered with things like schools
in his own town. Yet the money economy he sought to master
proved too complex for him, whether he approached it as busi-
ness or as law and politics and he was all but lost among the name-
less unremembered ones whose passing forged a nation and its
law.

How consciously those nameless thousands participated in the

IQO THE CHOSEN VALLEY

tradition that was shaping their nation can scarcely be measured.
But what 'the law' meant to the people of Chatfield and to
how many Chatfields can never be rightly understood without
taking into account the rowdy, bumptious hilarity of The
Glorious Fourth. The very homeliness of those celebrations
symbolized the impious American wresting of 'the law' out of
the hands of old tyranny and Yankee Doodle was its quintessen-
tial tune.

Chatfield people loved a celebration. They still do, for that
matter. They've had them on every possible scale, but they never
had a better one than in 1876.

Because it was the centennial year, plans were begun as early
as March. Milo White was President of the Day; I. F. O'Ferrall,
chairman of the committee on organization. Nine farmers joined
the six townsmen on the committee and every businessman in
town contributed to the fund for preparations. In the interests of
safety the village council prohibited the sale and possession of
firecrackers and fireworks, but that limitation on noise-making
was compensated for by the purchase of a cannon that was fired
from the top of Winona Hill at sunrise and at intervals all day
long.

The day itself was one of Minnesota's best hot in the sun,
with a thread of coolness in the breeze and by ten o'clock in the
morning there were four or five thousand people in town. The
procession was half a mile long, and J. R. Jones and his six as-
sistants marshaled it grandly on its way.

First came the cornet band, in their brand new wagon bought
for the occasion, then the carriage with the President of the Day,
the Speaker, and the Reader. Thirteen boys representing the
thirteen colonies followed, with Washington and his guards rid-
ing behind them. Then followed the Car of Liberty with thirty-
seven young ladies for the thirty-seven states, and the Goddess of
Liberty crowning all. It was "a grand display," the Democrat
said, "equal to the best in the state."

The "boys in blue" marched after the Car of Liberty, buttons
gleaming and muskets on shoulder, and the Grangers followed

THE LAW MADE VISIBLE 199

in full regalia. Every business in town was represented by some
kind of exhibit or tableau-on-wheels. Last of all came the
Fusileers, a set of gay blades who had wracked their wits and
their families' attics for mirth-provoking costumes; their antics
set the crowd roaring.

It took a good hour for the procession to get to Big Springs,
where the crowd settled down for the program. There was music
by the band and by the young ladies, prayer, and the reading
of the Declaration of Independence. No Fourth would be com-
plete without that reading.

At last it was time for lunch and what a lunch! Great
hampers of the heartiest and richest food, with families and
friends getting together as they hadn't done in months, perhaps
since the last Glorious Fourth. The hours of visiting were all
too short but no one wanted to miss the races. There were horse
races and bicycle races, sack races and barrel races, boys' and
fat men's and old men's races, and a hilarious tub race on the
millpond. There was a greased pole to clirnb and a greased pig
to catch.

Two boweries platforms built in the open air and roofed
over with fresh green boughs provided places for dancing all
afternoon and evening; after supper the Grange hall had three
hundred dancers, and the Medary House ball was a scene of
elegance and chivalry. An hour of fireworks interrupted the danc-
ing near midnight, but the music went on until morning. It was
"a happy, well-behaved crowd with not a single incident to mar
the peace and rejoicing of the day," the Democrat reported.

John Glissman carried the part of Washington that year.
Through many later years he was Grand Marshal of the Fourth
processions. That too was part of the tradition. John Glissman
was a cavalry officer from Schleswig-Holstein and had come to
America when Germany annexed the province where he was
bom. He took great delight in his role as Marshal of the Day:
his white horse and red sash and gleaming sword gave a splendid
air to any celebration. The children loved to hear him say, "You
look mit my face, you see Chorge Fashington."

200 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Over an evening glass of beer the next day he would say to a
crony, "You know, it iss f onny. In the Old Country it vass Captain
Glissman. In New York it vass Mister Glissman. Here itss yust
Old Yohn." A long meditative draught would follow, and as
the mug came down and his eyes wandered along the street, he
always ended, "I like it here/'

PART

Seven

Be It Ever So Humble

MAY HAD COME to the valley. As it threaded its way into the attic room
before dawn grew gray at the windows, the sleeping girl stirred on her
cornhusk mattress, half-aware that wonder was abroad. As the light
grew stronger she roused herself from dreaming and wound her braided
hair about her head, crownwise. ... In the kitchen she found a fire
burning briskly in the cookstove, and the teakettle was already boiling.
Three trout gleamed on the table, ready to be cooked for breakfast.
The lad had waked early to go fishing in the creek before time to be
milking the cow.

The kitchen sang with May magic that morning. Before the sun was
well above the trees the girl had scrubbed her tables with sand and
hung the dishcloth on the bush by the door to dry. She poured a saucer
of cream for the tortoise cat that rubbed purring against her ankles and
set it on the stone that made the back doorstep. Then she picked up
two water pails and set off for the tannery spring.

It was as good as a fair in County Cork to walk to the spring that
morning. Every chicken and cow and horse and young calf and colt
was out in the sun. Every man and woman and child had a word for
the Irish girl. Gardens were being planted in every yard. Here and
there a row of pale green points already thrust through the dark loam
with prodigious promise of peas or lettuce to come.

Four blocks east and south from the house where she worked she left
the wooden walks bordering the street and turned up the short Winona
Road that bent steeply toward the top of the hill. Her brimming pails
were no weight at all when she finally took them from the hands of
the teasing gossoons at the tannery and set off down the path, a last

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 203

jest flung over her shoulder. When a thrust of hill cut them off from
her view she set down her pails and stood for a moment with her face
lifted full to the sun.

Below the point where she stood was a scraggly gray willow, all
wound about with grapevine. A cardinal flew into the bushes at its
foot and the girl turned to watch him.

He was gorgeous a color to stir the blood, a crest as arrogant as
the sun's. He hopped from bush to vine and up its zigzag ladder,
whistling at each fresh level a tentative, half-muted note.

As he went higher his voice grew more urgent. Before he reached
the top of the tree he was calling, "Pret-tee-ee, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty/'
with a ringing sweetness that would have drawn an answer from a stone.

But his Pretty was no stone. She sat out of sight somewhere at the
top of the hill, answering. When he reached the topmost branch and
was like to burst his throat for joy, she flashed into sight, a swift gray
body with only a hint of rose to answer his splendor.

He swooped down from his place, over the low bushes where she
had hidden herself, into the tree beyond. There he called again. She an-
swered him once, then flew to him, and they disappeared into the
sunlight, together.

The girl lifted her pails and went on. Her laughter was stilled
and she walked in a dream of her lover's coming . . . together. * . .

II

THE GIANT INDUSTRIES that grew up in the mid-nineteenth century
were something new to American life. New, indeed, to the world's
life. They brought together increasingly automatic machinery
that carried out in one continuous process what had been a whole
series of processes. This was a radical change in the organization
of production.

The change itself held the possibilities of freeing humanity
from the age-old drudgeries of its existence. What prevented in-
dustry from realizing those possibilities was the pressure of money
capitalism, with its doctrine that the highest achievement of men
was to 'make' more and more money.

'Making money' was a new way to measure human worth and
it shifted the whole scale of human values. Pride in workman-
ship and in meeting the needs of the neighborhood had once
been strong and satisfying reasons for making things. In expanding
new industries such motives and satisfactions almost disappeared.
Factories made things to 'sell' at prices to give the owners the
largest possible money profits.

Before the industrial age, Americans had made things primarily
to meet the immediate needs of themselves and their neighbors.
From 1640 on, the colonial governments gave practical encourage-
ment to household spinners and weavers. When England's tax
policy roused colonial resentment, the making and the wearing
of homespun swept the country so widely that imports of woolen

204

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 205

cloth fell 95 per cent in the three years before the fighting at
Concord and Lexington. For years afterwards most American
households produced virtually all their own cloth for every use.

Small local factories, run with water power, were set up very
early in many communities to perform some part of the cloth-
making process fulling, dyeing, carding, or the like. The first
complete power-driven textile mill in America was built at
Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1815. Fifteen years later cloth that
had cost forty-two cents was selling for seven and a half cents a
yard. After that women began to give up their homespun. Girls
whose older sisters had made the sheets for their trousseaus out
of flax from the family garden went to work in the factories and
bought factory sheets for their marriage beds.

The states lying West of New England never did as much
home manufacturing as the older settlements did. In Vermont,
for instance, the household manufactures were valued at $2.31
per capita in 1840, while those of Michigan for the same year
were worth 54^. There was even a difference between 'old 7 and
'new' Wests. Indiana and Illinois, which were settled before
American factories got started, did almost three times as much
home manufacturing in 1860 as Michigan and Iowa, settled
after factory goods were available. People who lived out their
lives in the neighborhood where they were born kept up the old
ways longer than their kinfolk who went farther west.

To read early-day accounts of what making things at home
felt like to living human beings, is to understand at least one
reason why home industries went on even when they were no
longer strictly necessary. It was fun to make things at home.

Men came together to match their skill in fitting logs to make
a house. Women had day-long spinning bees. Young people
husked corn in company. In all those gatherings there was laugh-
ter and singing and the warm sense of enlargement that comes of
doing things 'together/ Quite usually the 'bee* ended with a
dance, and the dancing was no less fun for the work that went
before it.

Those people won their daily living by making for themselves

206 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the things they needed. They ate because their patience and
strength had dealt with the fruits of the earth, not because they
laid down a piece of officially printed paper and were given a
plate of food in return. They dealt with the world on its own
concrete terms, not at some fifth or fiftieth remove of symbolism.
There was health in such direct dealings.

In such an economy labor yielded some of the intimate, un-
verbalized satisfactions that come only from direct mastery of
earth and its resources. Household industry, wrote a man who
had been nurtured in its ways, was

based on virtue cheerfulness is its companion, happiness is its fruit,
and independence is its result. Women thus reared will not give suck
to a breed of slaves: but teach their offspring a knowledge of their
own powers, having furnished them strength to maintain their rights.

It is perfectly true that the society based on household in-
dustry was crammed full of imperfections. People had to work
too hard and had too little of the leisure that is necessary to the
creation of any really splendid way of life. They were provincial
in their thinking, and they cherished too many of those irrational
attitudes that we call superstition.

But unfortunately superstition did not disappear with the
arrival of industrialism. As a matter of fact a new kind of supersti-
tion grew up that was as full of mischief as any of the old ones.
Hardly anyone seems to have realized what nonsense it is to
talk about modern industry as if it were 'private property/

One loom in one family's house, with one woman weaving on
it, was private property. But when several men together owned
a thousand looms, and gathered a thousand weavers to operate
them, a situation was created that was considerably more 'public'
than a town meeting in Chatfield. The people who raised the
wool and cotton that was used on those looms, and the organiza-
tions through which those materials were shipped, made the
public involvement of the process even larger. When the nation's
law-making power was invoked to levy tariffs to support the price
of the cloth produced on those looms, the public interest in the

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 2OJ

whole procedure would have been inescapably evident were it
not for the superstitious awe attached to the term "private prop-
erty' that had been so violently wrenched out of its proper
setting.

Yet despite the altering character of the nation's industrial
and political organization, the generation that first settled the
chosen valley knew, in endless intimate ways, the personal mean-
ing of genuinely private enterprise, as they spent their labor and
ingenuity upon the immediately available fruits of the earth from
which they must satisfy their daily needs.

Ill

THE PRAIRIES that lay just north of the Chatfield woods were
so rich that the folks who settled in one neighborhood there
called it Little Egypt. They were six or eight miles from Chat-
field and nearer by that much to Winona. When James Price
married Mary Crandall in June of 1859, there were few but 'old
Americans' in Little Egypt.

James Price himself had come to Wisconsin with his family
from Wales not many years before, and had gone to Minnesota
late in 1858 to look after a mortgage his father had bought
through one of Chatfield's moneylenders. When the mortgage
was foreclosed he stayed to live on the place. Mary Crandall with
her gay competence was a good part of his reason for staying;
when the spring planting was done they were married.

The house where they lived was tucked into a fold of the
prairies where a spring bubbled up from the limestone to feed a
creek and nourish a handful of cottonwoods and elders. Before
he took his bride there, James Price added a log lean-to at the
back of the house to provide her the unusual luxury of two bed-
rooms apart from the main room that served as kitchen, dining
room, parlor, and workroom.

There Mary Crandall Price settled into the arduous life of a
pioneer housekeeper. There her son and her daughter were born.
That daughter, after her eightieth year, set down a lively account

208

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 209

of the ways of that pioneer household. It was typical of the
province and the time.

The Price cabin was well chinked and wanner than many a
frame house of the decade. Its floors were of boards hauled from
a Chatfield sawmill, though many a cabin in Little Egypt had
floors of pounded dirt.

"Always I can see our old log house/' the daughter wrote, "the
floor scrubbed with sand, the black dots where a live coal had
popped out of the open grate" of the "greyhound stove/'

The room seemed large to childish eyes, but in after years "one
wondered how the wife had managed to move among her necessary
household articles/' There was a window in each of the two long
walls. Two doors at one end opened into the family bedroom and
the tiny guest room for whatever stranger, or friend, or kinfolk
might be visiting for a day or a year. The hired men slept in the
loft overhead.

At the other end the "front" door opened into another lean-to.
That one held the "overflow from the barn until the granary
was built with soft-soap barrels and men's clothes in it/'

The stove stood against the long wall on one side. It burned
wood or chips or corncobs, and the top of its large firebox lifted
up to take the fuel. The stove had only two "holes" for cooking
"and the oven rose from the back of this flat, shallow top. The
back legs were long, slender, and gracefully made; there was lots
of room under that stove for children to play or a sick man to lie/'

Behind the front door there were "pegs and more pegs"
driven into the logs to make a place "on which to hang caps and
wamuses" the jackets that men and children wore outdoors.
Near the coat corner stood a wash bench half a log planed
smooth, with lengths of sapling driven into the rounded
underside with pail and dipper, and a granite wash basin where
every member of the family in turn washed hands and face. The
long roller towel hung above the wash bench.

On the other side of the window stood the tall cupboard, reach-
ing nearly to the low log ceiling. It held the dishes and the pots
and pans (except for those that hung on pegs near the stove)

21O THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and precious stores of cinnamon and sage and vanilla flavoring,
the tea and coffee and rare bag of sugar brought on infrequent
trips to Chatfield or Winona.

The cupboard had an upper door and a lower door, and a little
girl could sometimes open the lower door, push back the kettles
and bowls, and crawl into the snug corner with a well-battered
book while her mother scrubbed the floor. So much was crowded
into the room that "there was no place for a child save under
foot."

There was the "milk safe/' another, smaller cupboard with
tin doors perforated with countless tiny ventilation holes in an
elaborate pattern that was marked out with bright paint. The
Prices were blessed with a springhouse, where the milk crocks
or 'pancheons' sat on stone ledges let down into the water itself
always cold, seldom freezing. For them the "milk safe" was a
storage place for other food the pies Mary Price baked and
served at every meal, the jug of molasses or "long sweeting" used
even for coffee, the corn meal mush set aside to be fried for break-
fast, the dozen odds and ends of family cookery.

Nor were these all the things that found a place in that room.
There was a bin for corn meal, and a flour bin big enough to hold
five hundred pounds at a time; James Price filled it with flour made
from his own wheat when he came back from the Chatfield mill.

Then there was a drop-leaf table (that the Crandalls had
brought from the East) "which was used as work table and to
eat on/' There were two real chairs that had come from 'back
East' and enough chair-height lengths of log to seat all the
household at mealtime. The mop and the broom stood behind
the stove, and in winter the swill pail stood beside it for frozen
swill was impossible hog-feed.

In that room all 'company* was entertained. Whatever work
on harness or farm tools needed to be done on winter days was
done there. There Mary Price cooked and served the endless
hearty meals her household devoured, and there she sewed by
the light of candles she herself had made.

The sewing in itself was enough to keep a woman busy, for she

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 211

made "all the underwear, dresses, aprons, men's smoclcs and
overalls" for the three or four hired men as well as for her own
family. Overalls and wamuses were made of "bought" blue
denim, so stiff that each separate stitch almost called for an awl.
The little boy must have panty waists and roundabouts besides
overalls and wamuses.

The little girl and her mother needed many flannel petticoats
and at least one quilted petticoat apiece. These were double
garments, filled with sheet-wadding from waist to hem and
quilted in small diamonds not merely for fashion but for
warmth, in that house with a single small stove to heat it. Fashion
demanded hoop skirts; Mary Price's daughter had her first when
she was three and a half years old. A woman's dress required
eleven or twelve yards of calico, with no small number of stitches
set by hand in the uncertain light of a candle.

Mary Price had the first sewing machine in Little Egypt, and
women came for miles around to see the marvel: often she sewed
up a set of seams for them, in a pair of pants or the many-gored
skirts they all wore. It was a tiny bit of machinery, with a wheel
that had to be turned by hand a fine job for a little girl who
wanted to "help mother/

Mary Price not only sewed but spun as well. She kept her
wheel in the family bedroom, where the children's trundle bed
was pushed out of sight under the big bed during the day. Hers
was

the large wheel, where you walked back and forth, for an hour or more
if you had that much leisure time at once. . . . There back and
forth, back and forth, Mother trudged, singing and spinning. Blessed
was the family that had sheep, when in 1858 a woolen mill was started
in Chatfield. People could get their wool carded, made into bats or
rolls for spinning, and those without spinning wheels could have their
yarn spun and take home what they wanted for sox and mittens and
wristers and scarves, and have the rest made into blankets or yardage
for heavy shirts and drawers. That was still the era of red flannel! . . .

Yarn had to be knitted into things to keep the family
including the hired men comfortable in the bitter cold. . .

212 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The young women of the region often bought white cotton yam
to knit their lacy summer stockings, but men, women and chil-
dren all wore home-knit woolen stockings in winter.

All through Chatfield's province there were women who spun.
The older women from Ireland made the yarn for their family's
knitting, though not many of their daughters practiced the art.
The Norwegian women, living chiefly south and east of Chat-
field, not only spun but wove as well.

Every Norwegian chest of a carved-and-painted sturdiness
that too often disappeared in kindling before the third genera-
tion came to prize its meaning and beauty carried in its depths
a spinning wheel, a set of 'shif for a loom, and 'cards' for comb-
ing the wool. Those 'cards' were oblong pieces of wood or heavy
leather set with rows of metal teeth; they were used, one in either
hand, to comb the wool until its fibers lay parallel and well
separated, ready to be twisted into a roll for the wheel.

The 'shii' that came in those chests were metal bars fitted with
wire loops through which to thread the warp for weaving. As
soon as a farmer had a sheep or two, he built a wooden loom frame
and set the 'shif in place at top and bottom of the frame. Then
his wife wove cloth for the family's needs.

Flax, too, was universally raised and used by Norwegian
families. Many men and women now living remember wearing
underwear and shirts, and sleeping between sheets, that their
families had made from the first planting of the flaxseed, through
the retting, swingling, and spinning, to the final stitch set into
the garment.

Another common fabric from the looms of those Norwegian
families was linsey-woolsey, linen thread for the warp, wool for
the woof. It made fine-wearing shirts and dresses.

Of course all those fabrics, woven or knitted, were better liked
if they were colored. Hazel nuts, sumac bark, and walnut husk
made brown dyes of various shades; yellow could be extracted
from butternut husks, and a somewhat ambiguous red from
pokeberries. All these were the wild fruits of the land.

The one 'foreign' dye used was indigo and "the old blue

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 213

dye tub" had "such an odor as never was on land or sea/* Mary
Price's daughter was "too modest to tell you what was used to
dissolve the indigo/' but when the pot was working the visitor
needed only his nose to tell him of the 'chamber lye 7 or urine
that served that purpose.

Those fabric-crafts have disappeared so completely that few
Chatfield youngsters today have ever so much as heard that
spinning and weaving were once counted important skills for
Chatfield women. Knitting survives, but as a fashionable accom-
plishment rather than a necessary routine.

Most Chatfield youngsters would be equally at a loss if asked
about any of a thousand details of a pioneer household's food.
Today their mothers buy meat at the butcher's even the
farmers, for their threshing crews. In the sixties a fanner often
hired a hunter to provide meat for his harvest table, to avoid
killing a 'critter/ and to give his neighbors a welcome change
from the too familiar pork that was their fare, whether fresh or
salted. As for bread here and there a woman bakes every week,
but most families eat 'store bread' except when Mother gets a
cake of compressed yeast and makes a pan of rolls for a special
treat

But Mary Price and her neighbors made bread or they had
none. They also made and preserved their yeast, and there was
no truer proof of neighborliness than to lend a 'start' of yeast
to one who had the bad luck of losing her own. Most gardens
included a few hop vines: when yeast was made a handful of dried
hops was steeped in water for a start. Dry yeast was made by
thickening the hop water with cornmeal, leavening it with a bit
of old yeast, and leaving it to 'raise/ The mass was then turned out
on a well-floured bread board, rolled, cut into squares, and dried.

In making bread, hops liquor or potato water was used, thick-
ened with flour to a soft batter, a cake of yeast added, and the
whole left to stand two or three hours in a warm place till it had
doubled its size. Additional liquid was then added, and salt and
flour kneaded in until the right consistency had been attained a
fine point of 'telling by the fed/ This dough was left to 'raise' over-

214 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

night y kneaded and 'raised' a second time, shaped into loaves,
'raised' again, and finally baked.

Another form of bread was the salt-risin' bread. Though most
New Englanders regarded it as inferior, it was the staple of many
Hoosier families, who had inherited it from Southern origins.
No yeast was used for salt-risin' bread; it had a large amount of
molasses in it, whose fermentation created the gases which
leavened the dough. Such dough had to be kept very warm in
its overnight rising; some folks were believed to take their bread
to bed with them a practice frowned upon by such housekeepers
as Mary Price.

Biscuits, too, were frequently made: "well browned and, I
must admit, rather yellow soda biscuit waiting our supper table/'
"Riz" pancakes (made with yeast, the batter held over from
day to day) were a great favorite in most families. "Even if one
did grease them with bacon drippings and sweeten them with
black strap, they were tasty (when you knew nothing better)."
Nearly every farmer raised a patch of buckwheat for the flour
that went into those cakes.

For a while Norwegian women solved the bread problem more
simply. They continued to make the flatte brodt (flat bread)
of their heritage. This was nothing more than a paste made with
water, salt, and ground grain barley, oats, ground hulls and all,
corn meal, or the 'shorts' or coarse particles of wheat screened
out of the white flour at the mills. The paste was spread very thin
on the clean, hot stove-top, and baked in a large crisp sheet. For
a delicacy, such paste was mixed with an almost equal amount
of mashed potatoes and rolled paper thin before baking on the
stove. This form was know as lefsa.

It was habit, born of sheer necessity, that brought these breads
into the Chatfield province. As the Norwegian people became
more prosperous they began to make the luxurious white bread of
America's common people as fine as the bread of the aristo-
crats in the Old Country. But still the flatte brodt persisted,
especially for festival days.

But man does not live by bread alone. He wants meat, and

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 21J

vegetables, and fruit besides and Mary Price had plenty to do
in providing those things for her family.

From the first, gardens were the pride and the necessity of
every family in the whole region, in country and in town. Most
of the common vegetables could be grown, and newcomers de-
lighted in adding new varieties to the list.

Letters and diaries written by people in Chatfield were full
of the details of their gardens. They often asked friends 'back
East' for seeds. Harriet Pease, during her first winter in Minne-
sota, asked for dandelion seeds to plant in her garden for early
greens; there were no dandelions, she wrote, west of the
Mississippi. In his early Chatfield years, J. C. Easton apologized
more than once for delay in answering letters by explaining that
he had been busy putting in his garden.

When Ed Tuohy worked for McKenny, one of his first jobs
was to clear the hazel brush out of the public square that Mc-
Kenny had rented from the village council, and plant it to
potatoes. He got such a crop as had never been seen in Ireland.

In the fall the county fair always had displays of vegetables
and fruits. Melons, berries, apples, celery, beets, onions, sweet
potatoes, cabbage, squash, turnips, rutabagas, carrots all these
were listed for prizes, in a region which in 1848 was described in
Congress as "a hyperborean region'' where no man would ever
be so poor as to be forced to dwell.

Nearly every house had a root cellar to keep vegetables through
the winter. This was a sizable pit dug in the ground, roofed over
with logs or planks, then covered with a layer of straw and a layer
of earth. There were stored the root crops potatoes, beets,
carrots, rutabagas, and onions together with pumpkins, squashes,
and sometimes cabbages. Cabbages were often buried separately
in a barrel sunk well below the frost line.

Vegetables throve in such storage. Cabbage in particular came
out crisp and literally bursting with goodness, a special treat for
appetites craving the taste of fresh green things.

Sometimes a barrel or two of apples were stored in the root
cellar, though they were the happiest of luxuries. Each fall the

2l6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Chatfield stores advertised the arrival of Eastern apples. Twice
during his first fall in Minnesota William Pease paid ten cents for
five apples. That same fall J. C. Easton sent careful directions
for packing a barrel of apples that a New York friend was sending
him: they should be placed between layers of well dried straw
so they would not 'shuck' in the barrel.

Considerable effort was made to develop local orchards. As
early as 1856 two brothers named Sauer started to raise apple
trees on their farm near Parsley's Ford. Dr. Twitchell put almost
as much time into his nursery, on a few acres just above Dickson's
mill, as into his medical practice.

When Bishop published his History of Fillmore County he
reported 100,000 grafted trees under cultivation, "all grown here
from the seed, and which can hardly fail to thrive/' His ''partial
list of varieties which may be confidently expected to succeed
here" is a roll of orchardists' delights.

There were pears in Chatfield's nurseries, too. "Most varieties"
of cherries and plums were likewise available, as were Clinton,
Concord, Isabella, and Catawba grapes. The only fruit that could
not be grown in the Minnesota country, Bishop declared, was*
the peach, and that was too delicate even to be shipped so far.
A young man, who had gone to Memphis after a couple years in
Chatfield, wrote back to George Haven about the fruit there:
"I had not seen a peach in so long a time that the sight of one
made my eyes stick out like watches."

Bishop's lists were heartening to Easterners hesitating to leave
their orchards, but fruit trees do not come into bearing in a
single season. Most farmers did plant at least two or three trees,
and a number of larger orchards were established. But their sur-
vival was always hazardous.

As late as 1882, the Democrat carried on an extended cam-
paign in behalf of more attention to apple orchards. A good
many varieties might bear abundantly for several years, then
be killed by an unusually severe or prolonged winter.

Many farmers had good orchards for a few decades, but since
the first World War most of the apple trees have been left un-

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 217

sprayed and unpruned. Orchards take too much time, the farm-
ers say, and the number of pests has increased. Farmers quite
generally figure that it is 'cheaper' to buy apples shipped from
the state of Washington than to raise them on their own land.

In the early years a good deal of pride was attached to the
natural bounty of the region. There were wild strawberries on
the open uplands and both black and red raspberries on the sunny
hillsides. Gooseberries were abundant, often in the tangled growth
of river bottoms, along with blackberries.

High-bush cranberries were so abundant they were shipped to
Eastern markets by the barrel; some of the merchants took them
in trade from whoever gathered and brought them in. Low-bush
huckleberries grew on a few riverside bluffs, and elderberries had
a way of springing up at the edge of every road and clearing. Red
and black currants made good preserves, and were frequent along
prairie watercourses. Barberries and black haws were gathered
"to eat fresh, out of the hand." Wild grapes hung heavy from
the trees in every woodland. Red cherries and black grew freely,
and so did crab apples and wild plums.

Of course those fruits were eaten most abundantly in their
season, for methods of home canning had not been developed.
Yet with ingenuity and patience a good deal could be preserved
for winter use. Blackberries were dried and used for pies "terribly
seedy dried blackberries/' Mary Price's daughter remembered
them. Crab apples were cooked "in a brass kettle with a pinch
of soda to take away the acid, poured off after a short time, then
added some sugar, molasses, or sorghum, and cooked/' and stored
thus in a four- or five-gallon jar, with a clean white cloth tied over
its top.

Grapes were sometimes dried and used like raisins; a few people
made wine from them, though that process took more time than
most housewives could afford. Out along Bear Creek wild yellow
plums grew half as big as a teacup, and deliciously sweet. Mary
Murphy stored them in half-barrels filled with clear spring water.
Her grandchildren still remember dipping into those barrels,
ranged along the earthen wall of the cellar that was dug into the

2l8 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

hillside beyond the kitchen. They kept their precious summer
fragrance to the last individual plum, and sometimes a fruit or
two could be found in the barrels as late as March. The water
from those plums, left standing open for twelve or fourteen
months, made vinegar.

The wild red plums were made into butter, usually with apples,
if any were available. Making fruit butter was a gala, all-day
occasion. The fruit was gathered and sorted the evening before,
and some of the neighbors were likely to come in to help. In the
morning the menfolks hung the big brass caldron kettle on a
stout pole between two sawhorses set up a convenient distance
from the house, started the fire beneath the kettle, and piled
wood near by to keep it going. As the fruit cooked smooth and
thick it was sweetened with molasses (sugar was too expensive)
and stirred with the long maple paddle one of the men had
whittled the winter before.

There was always a dish of the fresh butter for supper that
evening, and if it was particularly fine a bowl might be sent to
a neighbor's. If one of the neighborhood women was sick at apple-
butter time, a four- or five-gallon jar was sure to be set aside for
her family.

Farther out on the prairies, where fruit was harder to get, a
kind of substitute was made from the pumpkins that grew lush
in prairie gardens. When the weather grew cold, pumpkins were
cut into pieces and boiled over an open fire, several kettles in
succession. The boiled pumpkin was put through a barrel-press
and the resultant pulp put back over the fire with molasses and
spices. That was boiled, like the apple butter, till it was properly
stiffened, and the jars in which it was poured were stored in a
snowdrift.

It was served frozen, and Henry Silsbee, who grew up on a
prairie farm northeast of Chatfield, remembered to his ninety-
fifth year how delicious that 'punkin butter' was, spread on bread
with its ice crystals sparkling in its rich brown. "You don't taste
anything like that now," he said.

Pumpkin was also peeled, boiled, dried, and stored for pies.

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE

Cucumbers were salted down. When they were used the rule
was to "Soak all day in cold water, pour off water at night, put
on fresh water, and they were ready to use with vinegar or not
. . . They were not one bit saltier than the much prized olives
of today." Corn was cut from its cob at the right stage of milki-
ness and dried for winter use.

Sauerkraut was made most commonly by the barrel. The
cabbage was shredded with a sharp, well-scoured spade, then
packed down with alternate layers of salt. In Bohemian families,
barefooted children got into the barrel to tramp down the cab-
bage; sometimes the mother helped. Both Yankee and Norwegian
households made kraut, but the Irish were slow to adopt that
particular custom.

Another job for sharp autumn days was butchering. Every
farmer raised at least a few hogs, and most town families had
one or two, at least. Even Mrs. Easton was not above taking an
orphaned litter of pigs into her kitchen to care for till they were
strong enough to thrive alone.

When the porkers were well fattened the men killed and
scalded the animals, and carved out the hams, shoulders, bacon,
and side pork. The rest was pretty much a woman's job*

Most farmers had a 'smokehouse' where they cured the hams
and bacon. First the ham or bacon was rubbed thoroughly with
a mixture of salt, sugar, and saltpeter, and allowed to 'cure' for
a period of time (though not for the two years prescribed for
Virginia hams). Then it was hung in the smokehouse above a
low fire of corncobs, or sometimes hickory wood, that filled the
little building with its smoke. Meat well permeated with such
smoke would keep indefinitely, and the fire was occasionally re-
newed to discourage spoilage.

A good deal of the pork consumed in those early years, before
refrigeration was easily available, was put down in brine. Nor-
wegians liked to slice salt pork, especially its fat, and eat it raw
on flat bread. The knowledge of trichina put an end to that
practice in the eighties.

There was also sausage to be made. All the pork 'trimmings*

22O THE CHOSEN VALLEY

were ground together and seasoned with salt, sage, perhaps other
spices, according to the family taste, sometimes with a little
cereal added for binding. Most of the sausage was made into
little patties, packed down in jars, and covered with melted lard.
Occasionally the gut casings were cleaned and stuffed with
sausage, then hung in the smokehouse beside the hams and bacon
and kept for summer use.

A delicacy peculiar to butchering time was 'head cheese/ The
skull and other bony parts were boiled until the meat fell off
the bones; the resultant meat-filled broth was seasoned and
simmered until thick enough to jell when it cooled. It was poured
into pans and sliced cold, sometimes eaten on bread, sometimes
dipped in flour and fried. A variant of this dish was made by
thickening the broth with corn meal; this was later sliced and
fried and served with molasses. Such 'scrapple* was a mouth-
watering dish to the initiate.

Butchering was a hard, messy job. One animal could rarely
be entirely disposed of in a single day's work, and most farmers
butchered several times a year sometimes as many as a dozen
for market, besides what their families required. Scrubbing out
the grease afterwards meant another day of hard work. No wonder
Mary Price's daughter exclaimed, "Oh, what an easy time the
Pioneer Woman had! In later years how the men loved to tell
about their hard times! . . . Oh, do not get me wound up!"

Occasionally a lamb or a sheep was butchered, but rarely a
'beef-critter/ except by the butchers of Chatfield for their town
customers. A cow was more valuable for her milk, and her pos-
sible calves, than for her flesh. When a farm beef was killed it
was usually divided among three or four neighbors who in their
turn repaid the gift. A small amount of beef was salted and
smoked and eaten as dried beef, but mostly it had to be eaten
fresh, and so was never butchered except in cold weather.

Milk was really scarce in the early years. People who came from
Wisconsin could bring a cow or two tied to the back of their
wagons, and John Murphy brought three from Indiana. But
most came without cattle, and it was a long time before every

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 221

farmer had his own supply of milk. In the first years that Ed
Tuohy and his young wife lived in their little cabin beyond the
top of Winona Hill, it was a great thing to carry a bucket of
milk to a neighbor's for Christmas, say, or as a treat for a sick
child, or a woman with a new-born baby. And a pat of butter
was the wealth of the Indies.

Mary Price had milk almost from the first of her housekeeping.
Like many another farm wife, she was frugal with the butter she
made in her stone churn, for it brought a good price in town, and
the money from the butter and eggs was her own, to use as she
would. So she stored a good deal of her butter in the springhouse,
between trips to Chatfield or Winona. But the labor of making
it remained and the pride of maintaining a fine quality.

Those frontier housewives made cheese also. The simplest and
most common variety was 'Dutch' or "cottage' cheese. Cream
cheese was made by curdling a large amount of milk with rennet
from the lining of a calf's stomach. The whey was then squeezed
out and the curd pressed into shape and set away to age.

Much of the cheese marketed in Chatfield was made in copper
cheese vats brought from Norway. They were huge hand-wrought
bowls, four or five feet across and nearly three feet deep, with a
hand-riveted seam across the center and graceful handles at each
end of the seam. Most of them had started for America packed
with food stuff for the family's voyage; in the first years on Minne-
sota farms they were apt to serve as watering troughs as well as
cheese vats. Norwegian women sold cheese and lefsa and flat
bread from door to door in Chatfield and it was generally well
liked. Primost, however, was too strong for most tastes. It was a
triumph of thrift, being made from whey drained off the cream
cheese, boiled to thickness, and ripened into a dark cake, with
a semi-liquid center. It was very strong; the Norwegians ate most
of it themselves.

Another rather important source of food in the early years
was the game found in the country. Few deer were left after the
"Winter of the Big Snow/' but prairie chickens, quail, and ruffed
grouse were plentiful for years and wild ducks still linger along

222 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the river each fall. Easton invited several of his York State friends
out for a season of hunting, and in 1863 the McCormicks from
Chicago makers of the thrilling new grain reapers camped for
two or three weeks near the Big Spring north of Chatfield, for the
hunting.

Many of the Yankee families, with their long frontiersman's
tradition of hunting, ate a lot of game. The Bohemians, the Irish,
and Norwegians did little hunting, though their American-born
sons soon discovered they could make money by setting traps
for the mink and muskrat and other small creatures of the water-
ways. Norwegians also caught a great many fish and put them
down in brine as substitute for the salt-water fish to which they
were accustomed.

But variety of native tradition made little difference in one
orgy of game-taking that swept Chatfield and its province. Every
spring, from the first settlement to the late sixties, the Chatfield
Woods were visited by huge flocks of passenger pigeons, those
strange and beautiful birds whose incredible numbers had been
a marvel ever since Captain John Smith's report on Virginia.

They nested in the Chatfield Woods. They came in such num-
bers that their flight literally darkened the sky. They settled on
trees so thickly that the stoutest branches broke under their
weight. If they chanced to light on a field where grain had been
sown but not yet harrowed under, they picked it so clean that
not a blade would grow without resowing. And they were amaz-
ingly undisturbed by the presence of human beings among
them.

Taking the pigeons became an annual excursion for all sorts
of people in and about Chatfield. It couldn't really be called
hunting. Whole families, even whole neighborhoods, would
drive to the woods of an afternoon and camp for the night. At
the first finger of dawn they would scatter into the woods. The
men climbed trees to poke the young squabs out of their nests
while the women and children picked them up and thrust them,
into bags and baskets. Pigeons made as good eating as you could
find, if you got a young one, though the old ones that had done a

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 223

lot of traveling were pretty tough. Sometimes the larger ernes were
killed, plucked, and drawn there in the woods, and sold to a
Chatfield merchant on the way home.

When the young birds grew large enough to roost on the limbs
outside their nests the young fellows from town would go out
with torches to dazzle the birds and poke them down with long
poles. It grew into a delirium of exploitation. Some of them were
eaten by the people who took them; some were sold on the local
market to people too busy or too squeamish to take part in the
hunt. And barrels and barrels of plucked and drawn squabs were
shipped East. They brought a good price in Eastern cities.

Then one spring, in the late sixties, there were no pigeons.
Everyone was astonished, even aggrieved, at their failure to ap-
pear. What could have happened to them?

Elaborate theories were spun: they had been caught in a storm
and swept out to sea on their annual flight south; a mysterious
disease had attacked and killed them; a more mysterious 'natural
enemy' had overtaken them. Papers and magazines debated the
grave problem for a decade and more.

It occurred to no one that the people of Chatfield, and of a
thousand similar places, had any part in that disappearance. The
pigeons were 'inexhaustible' just like the soil.

They still thought that way years later, when boys who had
hunted pigeons were old men. They could not believe the care-
ful collation of reports that showed how holocausts like Chat-
field's had wiped out the pigeons. They were just as blind to the
evidence, in their own fields, that the soil was being worn out.
Three generations of experience were not enough to teach them
that their own headlong exploitation was making the earth
steadily poorer.

They thought the Chatfield Woods were 'inexhaustible* too.
Many townsmen and most prairie farmers bought from five to
fifty acres in 'the woods/ and worked all winter at cutting down
the trees. When sleighing was good the road into Chatfield had
a string of teams on it all day long, loaded wagons headed into
town, empty ones going out. It took immense amounts of wood

224 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

to carry a family through a Minnesota winter, and most of the
buildings in the province were of wood.

When the local demand for wood grew less, outside markets
appeared. Thirty carloads of firewood were shipped to treeless
Dakota in one single winter during the seventies. In 1882, a
hundred thousand hickory poles were shipped out of Chatfield
for use as barrel staves, and the Democrat praised the thrift and
enterprise which put Chatfield products so importantly on the
market.

That same year coal was first advertised for sale in Chatfield.
The 'inexhaustible' woods were beginning to dwindle. By the
time of the 'great depression' too many hillsides about the lovely
valley stood bare. The ugly marks of erosion were so grave that
Chatfield was given a CCC camp to build check dams and pro-
tect the waterways of the province.

Even the lesson of those years of labor was not enough. When
the destruction of a second World War created a voracious de-
mand for wood and more wood, a sawmill was brought into Chat-
field again. Its crew of high-speed workmen ripped the remaining
woods of the province off the hills and left them bare to the
weather. Already those hillsides are gullied and torn. But Chat-
field people 'made money" selling their wood. What happened
to their soil was nobody's business not even theirs.

Such problems as these were undreamed of in the days when
Mary Price was sustaining the life of her family in the log house
out in Little Egypt. The mess and the work of wood piled be-
hind the stove and ashes to be carried out twice a day were un-
questioned details in the endless duties of her household. Some
of the ashes were put in a barrel with holes drilled in its bottom
and sides; when spring came that barrel was set up on a trough
and water poured into the barrel to leach the lye from the ashes.
It was time to make soap again.

In Little Egypt, as in every neighborhood, one woman was
known as a 'master hand' at soap making. She came to the Price's
one fine spring day and the big iron kettle was hung over a fire

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE

out in the back yard. There the winter's accumulation of grease
was put into it, with the approved proportions of water and lye.
Then the mixture was boiled for several hours, stirred all the
time with the long wooden paddle kept for the soap making.

When it began to look nearly "done/ the 'master hand' took a
little out in a saucer to cool, and examined it for color and con-
sistency, even took a gingerly taste to decide whether more lye,
or grease, or water was required. When her skilled judgment called
it 'done/ the kettle was lifted from the fire, left to cool a little,
and emptied into the soft-soap barrel.

Fearful and wonderful was the smell of that soap. It was not
ready for use until it had stood for a few weeks to "allow its
ingredients to incorporate/' It was used to clean everything, from
faces to floors, and it was certainly no delicacy. Once in awhile
Mary Price would have a small amount of specially clear grease
to use for making a batch of hard soap, perfumed with bergamot
leaves from the creek bottom; such soap was used very sparingly,
"for nice."

She made candles, too. That was a fall job. Because there
were sheep on the Price farm, she had tallow for her candles,
though beef fat could be used. The Price candle mold made six
candles at once; some made as many as twelve at a time. While
the fat melted she fitted the molds with wicking, looping it over
the rod at the top of the mold and drawing it down through the
hole at the bottom and knotting it there. Then the molds were
filled with tallow and set outside in the cold. When the tallow
had hardened, the knot at the bottom was clipped off, the mold
dipped lightly in warm water, and the candles taken out. It took
a long time to make the five hundred candles that were the
minimum requirement for the family.

An easier form of lighting was called the 'slut/ 'Sluts' were
lamps of a pattern as ancient as those of the Egyptians: a trefoil-
shaped iron box whose center compartment held a wick fed by
sperm oil or melted fat in the two outer compartments. A sharp
spike on one side of the contraption could be driven into the

226 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

log wall wherever the light was wanted. An even simpler lamp was
sometimes made by cutting a strip of underwear, coiling it in
the center of a saucer with one end pointing up, and filling the
saucer with melted grease.

The exciting new lighting fluid* known as kerosene was known
in Chatfield as early as 1858, but it cost a dollar and a half a gallon
and it was apt to explode at any moment. After the Civil War
it went down to twenty-five cents a gallon, and then to fifteen
cents, but it still exploded too often. A Yankee peddler, more
ingenious than forthright, went through the province selling an
'improved' kerosene whose bright red color was supposed to
guarantee its non-explosive quality. He collected his high price
and went his way, but the kerosene he left behind him exploded
as merrily as mere 'store' goods.

A variety of peddlers added much to the Chatfield scene in
early years. They couldn't peddle in town because of the fines
set by the council. But their jingling carts went over all the re-
mote byways to the little houses tucked away in the woods and
the prairies.

The peddler's coming was as good as a party, especially where
he stayed all night. He traded dishes, and dress lengths, and
ribbons for whatever the farmer's wife had. Eggs, or maple sugar,
or a calf's hide would buy a new kettle, or crimping irons, or
needles. The gayest of all was the tin peddler's cart, hung inside
and out with milk pails, and cream pans, and water dippers. It
glittered and rang as it went

By no means the least valued item in the peddler's load was
a washboard. Keeping the clothes clean for the family was a con-
tinuous chore for Mary Price and her neighbors. Many women
kept a hogshead filled with spring water beside the house, with
enough of the lye from the wood ashes to 'break' the water and
make the lime settle to the bottom. In winter, often enough, the
only source of water was snow, carried into the house and melted.

Dresses and shirts had to be ironed, and so did the many petti-
coats required for the proper feminine silhouette. It was a long
time before someone discovered that a padded board laid be-

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 22J

tween two chair backs was a better place to iron than an old sheet
folded on the table.

For a good many years Mary Price used a 'salamander' a
hollow iron with a solid core that was heated in the fire, then
slipped into the iron to heat it for pressing. When the core had
cooled it was put back into the coals until it had heated again, and
the process repeated.

When she got her "sad iron" it seemed a great improvement.
It also was hollow; its interior served as a firebox, with a chimney,
and a draft. She filled the firebox with charcoal she had made
herself, then picked up a live coal from the stove and put it into
the charcoal to kindle it. She ironed with the draft closed; when
the iron grew cool she opened the draft and fanned the smolder-
ing charcoal into renewed life with the turkey wing she kept to
sweep the hearth.

The family's beds, too, required an amount of labor beyond
the knowledge of modern housewives. Bedsteads were fitted
with wooden pegs set at ten-inch intervals all around the frame
and strung with bed cord to make a coarse net. (The Chatfield
stores frequently advertised the merits of their bed cord.) This
cording took the place of springs. It had to be restrung often if
the bed was to be even approximately straight.

The mattress that rested on the cording was usually a home-
made tick filled with straw. The tick must be emptied, washed,
and refilled once a year. "Wheat straw was too stiff," Mary Price's
daughter remembered, "and barley straw had beards in it. Some-
times, and best of all, shredded cornhusks were used but it
took piles and piles of husks and time without end to make one."

Families who had sheep often laid wool pads over the straw
ticks; others used old blankets. Most luxurious of all was a feather
bed on top of the straw tick; they too were made at home, from
feathers plucked from the barnyard geese that most thrifty
families kept as soon as they were able, town and country alike.

The houses were as close to the fruits of the local earth as the
food was. In their simplest forms they were built of logs, cut
from the land on which the house was to stand, and chinked

228 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

with mud dug from the earth itself. Log houses might be of any
size up to sixteen by eighteen feet, though the average was prob-
ably smaller than that.

One of the most ingenious building materials was known as
"grout" a kind of earthen mixture not unlike adobe, whose
principal ingredient was a yellow clay, the residue of volcanic
ash, which is found in abundance through the Root River region.
This clay, mixed with varying proportions of water, sand, and
gravel, was sometimes poured directly into rough frames out-
lining the house. Sometimes it was pressed into large blocks that
were dried in the sun and laid up like ordinary bricks. In either
case the walls were given a final coating of clay-sand-and-lime
on the outside and plaster on the inside.

Grout houses gave undeniably better shelter from weather
extremes than any other type of structure of the period, but for
some reason they were never much used. Perhaps they were too
rawly earthen for a people bent upon subduing the land to
patterns expressing mastery rather than adaptation.

A certain amount of limestone was quarried from the hillsides
and dressed by the Irish stonecutters who came into the region,
but it was too costly for general use. Less expensive and almost
equally impressive was the brick made m the yard established in
1857 ^7 an English brickmaker, a mile northwest of town. A brick
building was erected across from the Medary House that same
fall and has housed a drug store ever since.

One by one the log and frame buildings of Main Street gave
way to brick structures, until a zoning ordinance in the eighties
prohibited wooden buildings within the area defined as the busi-
ness district. I. F. OTerrall built one of the first brick houses in
town, and as prosperity became more general a good many of
the more impressive houses were of brick.

But by far the greatest number of houses were built of lumber.
For a good fifty years a kind of standard design was used: an
'upright' or story-and-a-half section sixteen by twenty-four feet,
and a lean-to' ten by sixteen feet at one side. The frame was set
directly upon the ground, with only a small unventilated pit

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 22Q

under the 'upright' for storage purposes: a full cellar was sup-
posed to make a house colder than it would otherwise be.

The foundation was nothing but rough boards nailed over
the lower part of the framing. It was banked each fall with earth
or manure, but the cold that blew under and across the single floors
was reason enough for multiplied petticoats and for the chil-
blains that were an almost universal affliction.

The walls of such a house had little more insulation than the
floors. Rough siding was nailed onto the framing, then a layer
of clapboards; a layer of building paper between the two was
a luxury. On the inside a single layer of lathe-and-plaster fin-
ished the walls. The lean-to' was commonly divided into two
rooms; one served as the 'master bedroom' and the family that
could spare the other for a store room was counted lucky. The
lower floor of the 'upright' was a single room that served the
same general purposes as the main room of a log cabin. Upstairs,
the low-ceiled space was divided, usually by a calico curtain, into
two rooms; men and boys slept in one, women and girls in the
other. Such a house might have a window in either end of the
upstairs, and as many as four windows downstairs. Its whole
cost was about five hundred dollars. A good many of those first
frame houses still stand in Chatfield, though they have been so
altered and enlarged that few of their builders would recognize
them. For the early builders, a house must first of all shut up a
safe place against the violence of the weather. Windows were
small and many of the finest houses were built with halls and stair-
ways on the sunny side of the house, their living rooms scarcely
touched by the sun. Despite the happy accident of streets so
angled as to give each house its maximum exposure to the sun,
scarcely a house in the town has been built to take full advantage
of that sunlight.

As for building around a view. . . . I. F. OTerrall built his
brick house on River Street, overlooking the whole sweep of the
lower valley and its westward hills. One small window in the
kitchen and another in a back chamber were its only concession
to the view. When his wife remodeled the house after his death,

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

making it, according to the Democrat, "the finest mansion in
Chatfidd," she opened several new windows to the street, and
two to the south, but she set only one facing the valley.

Every house along that street commands as lovely a stretch
of landscape as the region affords, but not even the porches face
it. Not until 1940 was a house built with the glory of that view
as the focal point for its living room. Three generations have
scarcely convinced Chatfield people that they can safely pen
their houses to a direct relationship with the land about them.

The first really fine house that was ever built in Chatfield re-
mains one of its landmarks. It was built in 1857 by Beecher Gere,
for his father's family and his own enlarging dignity. As the house
neared completion the Democrat proudly quoted "a gentleman
from the East" who had inspected it and pronounced it the
equal in workmanship, design, and materials to anything to be
found "at the East."

The new Gere house stood on the rise of land just behind the
log cabin where Squire and his family had lived for three years.
Not only was it larger than any other residence then in Chat-
field; it had a piazza across its whole forty-foot front, and a railed-
in balcony above the piazza. Many windows, as large as doors,
opened onto both piazza and balcony; and when Beecher gave
a party the windows gleamed with the light of unbelievably
lavish candles, and ladies walked to and fro there beside their
cavaliers. It was as good as a play to stand in the road, and stare,
and listen; the 'common folks' talked endlessly of the fine
doings of such 'aristocrats/

From the very first, Chatfield women concerned themselves
with creating the forms of what they thought of as Society. In
June of 1860, both the Democrat and the Republican celebrated
the "notable Pic Nic" that marked "the progress from the rude-
ness inseparable from the pioneer life toward a more elegant and
social civilization." On June 1 3, four hundred and eighteen Chat-
field people gathered for an idyllic festival. "The ladies" brought
mouth-watering delicacies: "strawberry pie, lemon pie, cake, and
all the fixins." And there were around a hundred-and-twenty

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 231

ladies to grace the occasion, forty-five of them still unmarried.
There could be no better assurance of ChatfiekFs growth as a
center of elegance.

One of the leaders in that fostering of social graces was L F.
OTerralFs wife. Amelia Harris was born in Mississippi, but when
her father established his steamboat run from Galena to St. Paul
he moved his motherless daughter to Galena, Illinois, in so many
respects a transplanted Southern community. There she grew
into a reigning belle, and there Mr. OTerrall met her and fell
so headlong in love that he forgot the young woman in Chat-
field to whom he was all but formally engaged.

He married Amelia Harris in December of 1857 an ^ *k ^ er
south for their honeymoon. As they returned up the Mississippi
the next spring, the boat on which they were passengers raced a
rival until the boiler burst and the steamer sank The OTerralls
were the only passengers to be rescued from that tragic wreckage.
It was a dramatic beginning of their life together.

Returned to Chatfield, Mr. OTerrall built for his bride a brick
mansion that rivaled even the Gere house. There Mrs. OTerrall
gave parties that were the talk of Chatfield, and there, the first
summer of her marriage, she entertained her friends from Galena
and Mississippi. Her father's steamboat discharged a gay party at
Winona, complete with carriages, horses, and servants, and their
travel across the deliciously untamed miles from Winona to Chat-
field was high adventure. The weeks they spent in Chatfield
passed in a whirl of gaiety that even the dourest blue-nose could
not ignore. The Civil War, however, prevented a second junket
from Galena.

In those first years Mr. OTerrall rather enjoyed his wife's ex-
travagance of social achievement, but in time the townsfolk be-
came aware that he would have liked less of "that society busi-
ness/' Yet he continued to play host to such diverse groups as the
Bishop and vestry of the Episcopal Church, and the Cornet Band
which won honors for Chatfield the winter before his death.

When her year of widow's mourning was past Mrs. OTerrall
enlarged and beautified her house and continued the entertaining

232 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

which gave her name the luster of legend. There were summer
lawn parties, with a band from Winona and guests from as far as
St. Paul and Chicago. There were winter parties where she taught
the young married people of Chatfield the fascinating new game
of whist.

Most wonder-touched of all were the Christmas parties that she
gave year after year for the children of the Episcopal Sunday
school; they still shine in memory as the very stuff of fairyland.
The envious said that Mrs. O'Ferrall was stuck-up, and no better
than she should be with all the wine and the goings-on in her
house. But out of whatever hungers in her own nature whether
a haunting sense of exile, or a need to play the great lady, or some
simpler feeling of obligation to the community which was her
home Amelia Harris O'Ferrall was one of those who infused the
amorphous flux of frontier society with the cohesive power of
created form.

Another woman whose influence was widely felt in Chatfield's
social patterns was the wife that C. G. Ripley brought to Chat-
field in 1861. Early that year Fanny Houghton Gage married her
daughter to a gentleman in the train of Queen Victoria's heir
apparent. Within a few weeks her son-in-law one of the Vickers
family that makes Great Britain's munitions acted as best man
when she married Mr. Ripley. The two bridal pairs sailed together
for England, and it was full summer before Mr. Ripley returned
to Chatfield.

He came alone, and he told no one of his marriage until he had
completed a handsome brick residence on his land just west of
the village. Then he went East again to bring his bride, and the
new house became at once a center for a sedate but delightful so-
cial life.

The O'Ferralls left Chatfield to spend a few years in Nevada
about that time, and the departure of the Land Office removed
some of the more 'worldly' social leaders to other fields. Mrs.
Ripley introduced some of the literary' forms of social enjoy-
ment familiar to Boston society, besides taking over the Episcopal
Sunday school that Mrs. OTerrall had directed. Each summer

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 233

there was a Sunday-school picnic on the grounds of the Ripley
house, where an arborvitae hedge divided the garden from the
carefully tended 'park' that surrounded it. Those occasions are no
less eagerly recalled than Mrs, O'Ferrall's Christmas parties.

Mrs. Ripley made several trips to visit her daughter in England
during the nearly twenty years of her life in Chatfield. When her
husband was appointed chief justice of Minnesota's supreme
court she went with him to St. Paul for the periods of the court's
sessions. On his retirement from that responsibility the Ripleys
went back to Concord her early home as well as his parents'
and spent the rest of his life in the Old Manse. Later she went to
her daughter's in England.

Mrs. Ripley was "not tall, but always very erect, with a round
pretty figure . . . charming manners, a humorous look at times
in her large grey eyes mingled with intense sympathy and tender-
ness . . ." She was blessed "with a picturesque facility of lan-
guage" and she "simply adored her husband/' Her departure
from Chatfield left a long vacancy that even Mrs. O'FerralFs re-
turn did not fill.

It is not to be imagined that these two women were the only
hostesses in Chatfield. Twenty or more could be named who in
varying degrees did their share, building in the new town the
decorum of older societies, despite limitations imposed by the
West. Not many could command the resources of the two leaders,
either in money or in imaginative wit, but a common though
rarely articulated sense of obligation animated their efforts to
create a society fit for cultivated living.

That obligation was partly expressed by the wife of an early
businessman, left widowed with the narrowest financial resources.
She always gave a formal dinner for the Bishop when he came to
Chatfield. When a friend suggested that she spare herself the bur-
den of that affair, she answered: "I can't afford to send my chil-
dren away to school, but I can teach them to behave in Society.
Entertaining the Bishop is my best opportunity for giving them
that kind of education." Her daughters learned their mother's les-
sons well; they were included in every 'important* social event of

234 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the town. One of them, later, was a leader in the club which did
much to give Chatfield a public library.

As early as 1858, the town took pride in its literary culture. The
History of Fillmore County published that year assured prospec-
tive settlers that Chatfield people were "decidedly a reading and
a writing people" over three hundred magazines and newspapers
were received in the Chatfield post office each month. A little later
the students of the Academy organized the Washington Irving
Literary Society, which collected a small library and regaled the
community with literary programs through the brief life of the
Academy.

What books and how many the Society owned has not been
discovered, though one gap in the list was humorously recalled
thirty years after the Academy closed. In a paper written for the
"Attic Bee" literary society, G. H. Haven poked gentle fun at the
youthful presumption with which he had offered America's most
popular author the honor of giving "a complete set of his works"
to the Chatfield society that carried his name. "No doubt my let-
ter never reached him," Mr. Haven concluded, "or perhaps the
books were lost in being shipped to Minnesota."

Somewhat later, Chatfield people organized an Atheneum,
which for an undefined period bought and circulated books for its
membership. At least part of the time the Atheneum books were
kept in Mr. Haven's store, as a place convenient to all the mem-
bers.

But by 1879 a Chatfield Library Association had succeeded the
Atheneum. Its membership was probably more inclusive than the
Atheneum's had been. In that year it spent $95 for new books, $13
for the services of a librarian, and $2.60 for bookcases. The library
was housed in the millinery shop of Miss Anna Darrah, one of
Chatfield's most respected business women. The members and
subscribers of the Association drew 2,049 books in 1879, and
brought a lecturer to town for the benefit of the library.

That year's book list is probably representative of the collec-
tion: Jules Verne, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and William Dean
Howelk were each represented by two or 'more titles, along with

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 235

the works of Artemus Ward, and General Sherman's memoirs.
Three travel books and M cReady's Reviews balanced the gentle
sentiment of Bitter Sweet, Barriers Burned Away and What Can
She Do?

From 1892 to 1895 a Young Men's Christian Association seems
to have carried on the function of providing a library for the town.
In that group the dominance of exclusively Yankee leadership was
broken: the president of the Y.MC.A. was the son of Bohemian
parents; its secretary was a young man who had come from
Sweden a few years before. When the Y broke up, it turned its
books over to the high-school library, which apparently loaned all
books to whoever wanted them. That was the status of Chat-
field's library service until 1917, when a Carnegie grant supple-
mented local funds to build a public library.

A common interest in reading drew many different groups to-
gether at various times. Reading and discussing new books con-
tinued as a social diversion for some years after Mrs. Ripley left
Chatfield, and an ambitious hostess frequently planned a dinner
or evening party around the life and works of such a writer as
Burns or Shakespeare. Not until after the turn of the century did
literary pleasures take on the air of an exclusively feminine pre-
rogative, though for some time before that Chatfield's most
highly visible exponent of culture was a woman.

Elizabeth Barnard was an Englishwoman who brought with
her a considerable range of learning and a rather unusual library*
Calf -bound volumes of Cicero, Vergil, Voltaire, Cowper, Milton,
and Addison, and an early edition of Shakespeare's Venus and
Adonis graced her book shelves, along with Owen Meredith's
Lucile and the Poems of Eliza Cook. As she and her goldsmith-
druggist husband established their place in Chatfield life, Mrs.
Barnard was increasingly active as a teacher of history, of French,
of music, and other areas of culture. The remembrances of those
who knew her indicate that she made a strong impression on the
women who joined her 'classes.' So serious was her dedication to
learning that she felt, the legend persists, that it was unseemly for
her ever to smile. Certain irreverent masculine snortings tempt

236 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

one to speculate on how much She may have helped the local ac-
ceptance of the spreading attitude that culture was the business of
women, not of men.

Mrs. Barnard was a poet in her own right. Innumerable elegiac
verses appeared "by request" in the Democrat. Their quality is
fairly represented in the verse "On the Death of Jennie Mills":

A prayer went up to the courts above
That thy young life God would spare;
It rose from hearts full of hope and love,
Up to Him who answereth prayer.
An answer of blessing came instead,
And 'grace sufficient* was given,
A glorious light shown round thy head
Which merged in the light of heaven.

This appeared in 1883, just after the publication, "By the
Author" of Mrs. Barnard's volume entitled Heart Offerings. The
Democrat took duly respectful notice of "the little gem" and as-
sured its readers that the book was "quite elegantly bound."

There was plenty of verse, not much worse than Mrs. Barnard's,
in the columns of the Democrat during the last two or three dec-
ades of the century. It has a certain interest as evidence that mid-
western people were still sufficiently unself-conscious to make
such fumbling gestures toward the public expression of inchoate
personal feelings, but it scarcely enriches the total of American
literature.

Some of the vigorous topical verse that turned up in the Demo-
crat from time to time looks to today's reader rather better than
the elegiac outpourings that were most frequent. An amusing
drawing of street-corner loafers accompanied a sixty-line satire on
the

. . . crowd of idle Loafers . . .
Standing 'round upon the door-step,
Sitting down upon the railing, . . .
Filling every vacant space up.
After supper every loafer,

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE

Every ragged, homely loafer,

Every dandy, 'biled shirt" loafer,

With his pipe and his tobacco,

With both hands stuck in his pockets,

Nightly stands around the doorway, . . .

Smokes, and chews, and spits tobacco,

Knocks off hats, and swears, and wrestles . . .

And the people of our village

Just the people, not the loafers

Wonder why this dispensation,

Why this thundering scourge of loafers . . .

Gathers nightly 'round the office . .

And some men, with souls irreverent,

Wonder if Almighty Wisdom

Could discover why the loafers . . .

Line the corners of the office

Every evening after supper

Every evening until bed-time.

Another bit caught a familiar mood of springtime exasperation:

Unpack the hairy buffalo,
Hang up the summer hat-
Poke up the fire, make it go,
Tuck up the squealing brat
The extra quilts produce,
Stuff up the broken pane.
Jump into bed,
Cover your head
May has caught cold again.

One Chatfield poet achieved national publication. EL W. Hoi-
ley found time between newspapers and railroads to get four
volumes issued by established Eastern publishers, including
Harper's. Most of his verse was vigorously satiric, about figures
familiar to any Western scene. A good many Chatfield persons
can be detected behind the thin disguise of Holley's verse, but its
fashion is outmoded. One passage is interesting for its doggerel
expression of the idea which Emerson had argued so eloquently
twenty-odd years before in "The American Scholar":

238 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Wanted! A Poet! one that can go o'er

Some other track than that well trod before;

An independent thinker, who dares look

With eyes wide open into Nature's book;

Who is no willing slave to foreign rules;

Who apes no custom of established schools;

Who studies not so much the standard books,

As his own country's mountains, lakes, and brooks;

Whose song is not an echo, but a peal

Fresh, clear and ringing, which men's hearts can feel.

Many who never saw a line of their writing in print knew the
solace of putting words together to impose the semblance of fixity
on the flux of their days. Keeping a journal was a resource in both
town and country. One invalid recorded the daily weather, and
details of family and neighborhood doings that she knew chiefly
by report Another woman set down all the new babies and the
sick and the dying that she helped to care for. A young husband
wondered over the inner miracles of early manhood, and in later
years made weekly summaries of Chatfield's growth and political
tensions. Even J. C. Easton jotted down his business travels
through two or three years. His brother-in-law, Lucian Johnson,
kept track for almost twenty years of the "bargains" he made and
the "snorts" he shared with his cronies.

Few of those early diaries were as self-revealing as the one kept
from November, 1862, to the following July by Mary Caroline
Price. She was a sister-in-law of Mary Price, whose housekeeping
was so vividly recorded by her daughter. Mary Caroline was only
nineteen, and much of her diary is in the approved manner of
Fanny Fern annuals and Mrs. Sedgewick's rose-leaf sentimental-
ities. Yet something deeper than an outmoded fashion speaks oc-
casionally in the girl's attempt to interpret for herself the world
that she knew.

An unstaled passion for "these grand Minnesota prairies" runs
all through her pages. She found them "exhilerating, inspiring,"
and was never in "such good spirits as when riding over those
prairies." Morning and evening she looked with fresh delight on

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 239

the world around her, and wrote of its sights and sounds and
fragrances.

Besides her delight in the summer land, her diary recorded a
constant flow of visiting through the neighborhood. From mid-
April to early July she paid thirty-eight separate visits (not count-
ing her morning music practice at a neighbor's) and mentioned
sixty-two callers either at school or at the house where she hap-
pened to be, besides four group-trips to church and town-meeting.
Winter somewhat limited that social exchange; yet from kte No-
vember to early February she went visiting a round dozen times,
besides weekly singing schools and almost as frequent "sleigh-rides
and social parties,"

In the privacy of her journal she practiced a part of the doc-
trine that Emerson pleaded, but she failed to find either the indi-
vidual power to carry her farther, or the full social integration that
might have satisfied her needs. She was just articulate enough to
leave a dim report of a hunger she was never able to define.

It was, of course, the continuous hunger of human beings to
find or create a form through which they can interpret the
seeming-chaotic movement of their world. From Mary Price's
housekeeping to the preachers' reporting of heavenly courts, the
same drive for creating order was at work

One expression of that quest for an ordered tradition was the
increasingly elaborate observances of Christmas. Lavish festivities
at that season were by no means universal in the Yankee com-
munities from which Chatfield settlers had come. J. C. Eastern's
brother-in-law, S. W. Johnson, had been fascinated by the "great
amount of amusement furnished to children" by the families he
knew during his years of study in Germany. He wrote to his York
State family a long account of the toys and sweetmeats, and "the
Christmas tree, a pine branch 5 or 6 feet high, set upright in a
wooden pedestal, having little candles made of various colored ma-
terial burning at the ends of twigs, and hung with ribbons, colored
papers, a lot of nuts, raisins, little cakes, etc/'

The strong influence of the Irish tradition of midnight mass,
with its lights and pageantry and Christ-child images, may have

240 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

played a part in accentuating the Christmas observances in Chat-
field, but some families had the tradition of a tree firmly fixed
when they went to the West. One such household, too far out on
the prairies to have a real Christmas tree, cut a wild plum tree
from the creek thicket and bound every twig with green paper to
satisfy their longing for a Christmas tree. In another, the hired
man drove fifteen miles to cut a cedar for the children, and was
almost lost in a blizzard bringing it home. Many of those trees
were poorly enough decked, but Christmas was kept in some
fashion from the first, in nearly every family, and after the Civil
War the Chatfield stores advertised increasing riches of things
to be bought and given for Christmas.

Most of the children's toys were homemade, even so. Henry
Silsbee remembered some really exciting playthings he had. His
father killed and stuffed a badger that made a wonderful toy, and
there was a homemade sled another year, on which he slid from
the ridgepole of the house clear across the yard when the January
blizzard piled the snow solid against the eaves of the house. A
blacksmith uncle, who lived a mile down the road, made a wagon
for his boy and Henry to play with, and the two youngsters
hacked out a road from Henry's house clear to the top of the bluff,
a good half mile distant. They built themselves a stone house
at the top of the bluff, using their wagon to "haul in supplies."
When they could "cop a few eggs" or a handful of potatoes they
would stop at the pond to wrap them in mud, then roast them
in their fireplace under their roof of bundled grass.

When Henry and his cousin were eight they made a threshing
machine, complete with cylinder, spout, fan, straw-carrier every-
thing the big machine had but an elevator. When the wheat
was ripe they put their machine onto the wagon and took it out
to the field, cut off the heads of some of the wheat, and threshed
it in their miniature machine that turned with a hand crank.
They even made themselves tiny sacks to hold their grain. People
came for miles around to see the small-scale wonder. "That was
our kind of play, mostly," Mr. Silsbee remembered in his ninety-
third year, " tinkering."

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 24!

Other boys cared more for playing ball, though not many could
afford to buy one. It was a poor father who couldn't take his
cobbler's kit and make a ball out of leather sections cut from an
old boot top, sewed over a sphere of hard-twisted rags the mother
supplied. One pair of brothers were more ambitious. They caught
a woodchuck when they wanted a new baseball, skinned it, "put
down" the hide in a pan of wood ashes and creek water, and
scraped the hide clean when it had "cured." The hair came off
"just as smooth and even as your hand," and when the hide had
soaked for two or three weeks in their mother's soap barrel it was
as white as any buckskin. The balls they made out of that sort of
leather were the envy of all their friends.

Little girls, of course, wanted dolls. One little girl remembered
all her life how heartbroken she was when the china head was
smashed from the rag body of her precious dolly. No new doll
was to be had, so she dressed an old hammer in the dead dolFs
clothes, and cuddled it as well as she could when she and her
sister tended their 'babies' in the playhouse they had contrived
in the straw shed. The ache of that difficult make-believe came
back to her when she dressed dolls for her grandchildren. An-
other recalled how furious she always was, no matter how often it
happened, when her big brother strung up her doll to "hang by
the neck until she is dead/' as he loved to intone. Yet she and
that same brother never failed to hang around their mother when
apples were being peeled, begging for an unbroken peel to toss
over a shoulder and see by the way it fell whether their wish would
come true. They loved, too, to 'steal' raisins, and sugar lumps,
when their mother was not looking. And it was hard for a little
girl to stifle her laughter when a big brother "took just one little
diggle" at the most solemn moment of family prayers.

That home was a happy one, but there were other children who
lived in less happy places. One man, now full of years and honors,
still remembers the time he found a knife that had been dropped
on the circus grounds. It was a wonderful knife four blades
and a shining haft such a possession as he had never dared even
dream of having, in his barren and loveless days. Then a lordly

242 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

young buck claimed he had seen the knife first, and demanded
its surrender. When the boy stoutly refused, the young man pre-
tended to change his mind and asked for a look at the knife. The
boy, trusting and proud, handed it over, only to see it thrust into
that grown man's pocket At the boy's wail of protest the man
said, "111 make you a give-or-take offer: you give me a quarter
and take the knife, or the other way round/' . . . "He knew I
never had a quarter to my name/' the boy-grown-man remembers.
" What I should have done was make him go before a Justice and
make him give it up, but I didn't know enough then/'

There were other unhappy stories of children. Early in January,
1890, a twelve-year-old girl was arrested for having stolen a book
from one of the stores actually arrested by the marshal, and her
story printed in the paper. She had given the book to a teacher;
it was the only present she could find when all the other children
were bringing things their mothers had made. The marshal held
her in jail for four days until she pled guilty, then let her go, even
though she was "suspected of other thefts. ... she is thought
to be scared out of a career as a thief/' Thus the Democrat with-
held the child's name, but in a town as small as Chatfield there
could scarcely have been a person who did not know exactly who
she was.

That was half a century ago. But only the other year the city
fathers decided the way to enforce proper respect for elders was
to refuse the petition of high-school youngsters for a youth can-
teen, even though the youngsters begged to do the work of getting
it ready for themselves. . . . There have been wide differences
in the experience of children in Chatfield. The man who
found-and-lost the wonderful knife has been known to say,
"If I had to take my choice of living through my childhood again,
and going to hell, I'd take hell/' But a woman of nearly his own
age rocks as she retells the things she remembers; "If heaven is
any better than my childhood . . . ," she smiles and is silent
a little, " . . . it'll be all right"

PART

Eight

The War Drums Throb

"COMPANY HALT!" forty-odd ill-assorted pairs of boots scuffed
into line.

"Present anus!" The guns swung awkwardly forward were of
forty-odd different styles, gathered from all over the Chatfield
province. One of them had been to the War of 1812, another
had gone through the Cumberland Gap with Boone. Some
couldn't be fired for love or money, others had brought down
prairie chickens for the dinners eaten that very day by the boys
who carried them.

"Company at easel" The muskets clattered irregularly to the
floor and Captain Bishop turned to Colonel Jones in low-toned
colloquy. The colonel's grandfather had gone with Boone to
Kentucky, and the Company had invited him to be present at
their drill.

Lincoln had not yet reached the White House, but the military
spirit raged in Chatfield. With the Douglas defeat, J. W. Bishop
had joined the Republicans in organizing the company, and
even Major Bennett of the Land Office had nothing to say against
it. Bennett was pale and distraught those trying days, despite the
bustle of the Land Sale: old allegiances pulled hard against each
other. Easton was convinced that nine-tenths of the sentiment
of Minnesota was with Lincoln. ''If there is any fighting necessary
to be done to preserve this Glorious Union/' he wrote his New
York brokers, "we are ready for it this winter."

244

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 245

Then the Rebs fired on Fort Sumter, and the governor of Min-
nesota ordered the Chatfield Guards to report to St. Paul for
induction into the First Minnesota. Recruits flocked to the
Company and three times a day the throb of drums and the shrill-
ing of a fife filled the valley.

Suddenly an order came for the Company to disband. Captain
Bishop and the Republican governor had had a misunderstanding,
Easton wrote his father-in-law. But Bishop started in right away
to raise a new company, this time with some of the leading men
in town as its officers. Bishop was chosen captain once more, but
all the other officers were well-known Republicans, including
J. C. Easton as second lieutenant.

When orders came for the Chatfield Guards to muster in as
Company A of the Second Minnesota, they marched off bravely
enough. The flags flew, the fife shrilled, and the drums rolled
heartily to the cheers of the townsfolk gathered to see the company
off. They began their march at the park, went down Main Street
to the Medary House, then turned eastward toward the hill.
Easton and Holley and Griswold cheered them, as did a dozen
others who had petitioned the governor for the Company's ac-
ceptance; they had hired substitutes to go in their places.

As the Company came to Winona Hill they found it hard to
keep up their swaggering pride, for there the mothers watched
with brimming eyes. Only the drum and the moving feet were
heard as Captain Bishop led his men up the flank of Winona Hill,
and a woman's smothered sobs threatened the touch of panic.

Then one of the boys broke out of his place in the ranks. "Wait
a minute!" he yelled in startled dismay. "I forgot my gun!"

The crowd roared with grateful laughter. That boy was never
known to remember anything! "You'd forget your head if it
wasn't fastened on!" someone yelled, and another shouted huzzas
for Captain Bishop's good-natured order to halt. The grip of
tragedy was broken, and the hill hummed with cheers when the
Company finally marched out of sight.

The town seemed empty when they had gone. But not many
weeks passed before Major Bennett of the Land Office began

246 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

recruiting. He applied for a colonel's commission, on the strength
of his experience in the Mexican War, but when that was re-
fused he and Beecher Gere raised a second Chatfield company
with Bennett as captain.

Holley had been appointed to take over the Land Office by
that time, and had sold his newspaper to a man who moved it
down to the county seat and renamed it the Preston Republican.
In October, Holley and the Land Office moved to Easton's town
of Winnebago, and Bennett marched his company over the hill.
Chatfield was empty indeed as winter closed in.

Before Christmas a third company was being raised. Norman
Culver, the millwright, did most of the recruiting. When the
farm boys marched up and down in the streets with Culver at
their head his twelve-year-old son Charlie was so excited he didn't
care whether school kept or not. He got old Mr. Denny, out west
of town, to teach him how to drum, and when his mother finally
gave up trying to make him go to school he spent all his time
marching behind the men thumping his drum.

Somehow he managed to go along when the company reported
to Fort Smelling. Maybe because he was too much of a handful
for his mother to manage alone. At Fort Snelling, Dr. Mayo who
examined the men for the army said he was altogether too little
to enlist. But when he heard the boy would be with his father
he let him stretch up tall on his tiptoes and so passed him as
drummer boy for Company B of the Fifth Minnesota.

After a month at Fort Snelling most of the Fifth was ordered
South, but Company B was sent to Fort Ridgely, two days' travel
down in the Indian country, just below the Sioux Agency on the
Minnesota River.

That was where twelve-year-old Charlie Culver learned what
the Army was like. He beat all the calls for his Company, from
reveille to taps. He stood guard in his turn. He lived in the barracks
among the men. One of the first days he went up to headquarters
to see his father but was so roundly disciplined that he never
tried that again. If the boy sometimes wished he were back in
Chatfield with his schoolmates he never admitted it

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 247

So the long spring idled into summer, and Charlie Culver
whiled away some of the hours talking with the young Sioux
braves who lounged in friendly fashion about the Fort. The
days were dull enough and the boy talked as eagerly as any of
how much livelier things would be when they got on active duty
in the South.

One hot August morning he got up half an hour early and
went out on the parade grounds, where he found the sergeant of
the Regular Army who had charge of the ordinance of the Fort.
"Hello, youngster/' he said. "You're out pretty early/' They
walked across the parade grounds together and saw the sun come
up, as big as a wagon wheel, and just as red. . . .

In the slanting light they saw a man coming across the prairie
north of the Fort and went to meet him.

The man was staring-wild. "The Injuns has broke out," he
gasped. "They're killin' people. I stepped over a dead man's body
to get out of the Agency. I seen two since I left there. I been all
night on the road to tell you."

That was the beginning. In half an hour the first wagon came
a man bringing a neighbor that was wounded. He went back to
get his own family, but they never came. The Indians got them.

Men and women and children poured into the Fort and they
babbled of the terror they had seen. As the confusion mounted,
the drummer boy from Chatfield lost count of the terrible things
he saw and heard.

Late in the afternoon someone let him look through a spy
glass. Out on the prairies a string of Indians a mile long was
cavorting around, showing off their dexterity with their horses.
They were so exalted with all their victories they couldn't think
of a thing but celebrating.

That was lucky for the Fort, because half the soldiers had gone
off the day before, led by Charlie Culver's father, to fetch lumber
for a hospital. A man rode off to warn them back in a hurry but
no one knew whether he would get through alive. And they
hadn't even breastworks around the Fort.

A detachment set off to relieve the Agency, twenty-odd miles

248 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

up the river. The captain and half of his men were killed before
they got half way, and a seventeen-year-old Chatfield boy, Tom
Gere, led the remnant back to the Fort. They were all Chatfield
men. Charlie Culver saw the wounded come crawling back to
the Fort, and counted the ones who were missing.

The Indians came nearer after that, and the boy saw men
killed when they went down the dugway to the river for water.
Flaming arrows were shot into the Fort, and men and women
scrambled to cover the roofs with earth. The women in the Fort
melted lead and molded bullets for the harried garrison.

The second night Lieutenant Culver brought his men safely
back into the Fort, but they were still too few to make a sally
against the Sioux. For nine days they kept caution before troops
came down from Fort Snelling and drove the Indians north.
The drummer boy could not remember having slept that whole
time.

The tale of terror blazed across the state. It came to Easton's
town of Winnebago, where Easton was making more money
than ever out of the Land Office business. So horrifying were the
tales of massacre that the town was emptied in a panic of flight.

Easton himself drove the hundred miles to Chatfield in less
than twenty-four hours, goaded by fears for his wife and their baby
son. When he had assured himself that Chatfield was in no im-
mediate danger he rode off for the county seat, twelve miles south,
and his wife wrote to her father in York State that Jason was
raising a company to march against the Indians. Her house, she
reported, was full of people who had fled from the Indians.

The story outraced Easton's speed. Along all the roads families
were hurrying to the greater safety they thought the towns would
provide. The word flew from farm to farm.

A frightened boy brought it to one Norwegian cabin south
of Chatfield, where the men were scything grain beside the river,
and two neighbor women with their children were helping get
dinner for the harvesters. One of the women rushed down to
tell the men and begged the others to go with her and hide in
the woods. But the other woman was a Yankee, with the re-

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 249

membrance of Yankee forebears who had known such terrors
in older Wests. She filled a kettle with ashes and set it to heat
on the coals. Let the murdering redskins come! They wouldn't
get far with their scalping when she threw red-hot ashes in their
eyes.

Even her intrepidity was at length persuaded that safety lay
in numbers. The men went off to a Yankee neighbor whose cabin
stood on a hilltop, and under his direction they stationed them-
selves to watch from every vantage point. The women took the
dinner off the stove and all the food they could find in a hurry and
piled it into the wagon with the children.

At the meeting place there was some comfort in being together.
But there was also a terrible fear. Only the two Yankees had guns.
The rest were armed with clubs and scythes and axes. What could
they do against the Indians? All day they stayed together, and
well into the next day, before the thought of overripe grain sent
them back to their cabins and fields.

Out on Bear Creek, John Murphy was working at his sawmill
when his two hired men went racing into the house and out again.
He stepped out to stop them. "Well, boys, what's the trouble?"
he asked. "Are you going to jump the job?"

'We're going to fight the Injuns/ 7 they said and panted out
the story they had heard from a passer-by, nowise diminishing
it in the telling. They asked for the horses, but John Murphy
said no. When they were gone he led his team deep into the woods
and hid them. There might be Indians around, but when a scare
like that was on, a lot of white men didn't act any better than
Indians when it came to another man's horses.

Many a farmer heard the news in his fields and unhitched his
horses from the wagon, or the new-fangled harvester, he was
driving, and went off to fight the redskins. Most all the young
fellows went, and they took half the horses, and most of the guns
in the country, often enough without so much as a by-your-leave.
Little groups came together in Chatfield, and Milo White gave
blankets and provisions from his shelves to equip the militia. Some
of the married men brought their families to town and rode away.

250 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Every house in Chatfield was crowded with refugees; some of
them had come from as far west as Winnebago.

For a week each day's rumors were worse than those of the
day before. The frightened townsfolk burned with indignation
when McKenny expressed the opinion in his paper that there
weren't any Indians within a hundred miles. The event proved
he was right

A company of militia, waiting to make up its mind about
where to march, eased the torments of resentment and whiskey,
with mighty blusterings about what they would do to the dirty
copperhead that called himself an editor. McKenny and his
friends spent the night on guard in the printing shop.

But Chatfield suffered no attack, either from militia or from
Indians, and the frenzy slowly subsided as news came that the
Sioux were driven north and defeated by militia under the com-
mand of General Sibley.

No one remembered that years before Sibley's plea in Congress
for "terms 6f conciliation and real friendship" to the tribes was
also a plea to protect the country from "an awful retribution of
Providence." The only providence most people perceived in the
Sioux revolt of 1862 spoke in apocalyptic thunders from the
pulpits, commanding the righteous to thrust in their sharp sickles
and cast the redskin devils into the winepress of God's wrath.

And who, the hotheads clamored, could fail to see the mark
of the beast on such a man as Sibley, who still flaunted the
daughter of his dead squaw, even now that he was decently
married to a white woman? When McKenny praised Sibley's
campaign the ugly whisper of squaw man went about Chatfield,
reviving the rumor that McKenny's own wife was half squaw.
. . . There were ugly days that summer in Chatfield, and in
later years people were glad to forget some of the things done
then.

There were no draft riots in Chatfield or its province, but here
and there a man disappeared from his farm and made his way
to Canada to avoid being pressed for the army. The Democrat

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 251

charged that the Norwegians were learning the perfidy of
Republican promises. Conscription officers, the Democrat said,
were forcing more Norwegians than anyone else, despite promises
of exemption that had beguiled the Norwegians into voting
Republican.

The drafting of men for the army was less scientifically
totalitarian in the Civil War than in World War II. If a given
locality could raise its full quota by enlistment, it was exempt
from the operation of the draft machinery. Chatfield, like many
another community, went to considerable lengths to gain such
exemption, both for practical advantages involved and from local
pride. When recruiting fell off, in the summer of 1862, several
of Chatfield's leading Republicans went to Winona to consult
with Senator Windom on means for encouraging enlistments.

Immediately thereafter a Loyal National League was organ-
ized and a Chatfield War Meeting called, which passed resolu-
tions calling for a big army and for a uniform county bounty of at
least twenty-five dollars for every man who enlisted. At the same
time the League was raising a fund for local payments to recruits.
Milo White led off the subscription list with forty dollars, and
that sum was later matched by Ripley, Haven, and Easton.

Over three hundred dollars was raised, mostly in five-dollar
amounts, and within a week sixty-five volunteers were paid five
dollars apiece from that fund. Shortly afterwards the county com-
missioners voted a bounty of twenty-five dollars to each single
man, fifty to each married man, who enlisted.

When Lincoln called for a half million men early in 1863,
the townships took over the bounty problem. Elmira township
paid fifty dollars to each of its thirteen volunteers that April.
The following February the township voted "to pay bounties of
one hundred dollars to so many volunteers as should be required
to fill the quotas of said Town."

Seven months later the township bounty was raised to three
hundred dollars in order to get the one volunteer still required
by the quota, and that larger sum was paid to each of the eight

252 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

volunteers to answer the last call issued in the war. The cost of
Volunteers 7 came higher as men heard of their neighbors dying
in the long bloody struggle.

Charlie Culver was the first of Chatfield's soldiers to come
home from the war. He had gone south with his father's com-
pany when the Indians were beaten, and from Vicksburg Cap-
tain Culver got his son discharged and put him on a steamer going
north. From Winona to Chatfield the boy 'staged it', and when he
got home he went to bed and slept.

Twenty-four hours later his mother tried to rouse him enough
to eat, but the boy shook his head and slept on. For three whole
days and nights his family waited for him to waken. He was all
worn out from his soldiering. He was willing enough to go back
to school, but playing hero to his schoolmates wasn't as much fun
as he had thought it would be.

Feeling intensified as the war dragged out its tragic length. In
1862, Easton had boasted that Minnesota had "wiped out the
so-called Democracy"; yet two years later the election returns in
Chatfield were within measurable distance of a Democratic
majority, though the county and state were safely Republican.

A good share of Chatfield's 'opposition vote' could be credited
to Editor McKenny, who maintained a running criticism of all
things Republican.

Again and again McKenny warned that the nation's "sec-
tional pilot" was letting "black Abolitionists" drive the country to
"the shores of everlasting ruin." When the Emancipation Procla-
mation was issued the Democrat prophesied that the soldiers
would refuse to fight when they learned they were being sent out
to die so that "niggers should be the equal of white men."

One of his bitterest outcries was against the performance of
"a very silly young lady" at a promenade following a "donation
for the Baptist minister . . . Egged on by older heads" the girl
insisted on taking as her partner the Negro boy who had recently
been hired by Easton "Black George, also known as Easton's
Nigger." The girl had paraded shamelessly through the promenade
on the Negro's arm, and the next day had her justly humiliating

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 253

reward when "the nigger presented her with a Efty cent pair of
white cotton gloves/* The whole affair was an infamous attempt
to "cram the doctrine of miscegenation" down people assembled
for "a charitable function/' and McKenny quoted Othello
against such

. . . judgment maimed and most imperfect
Against all rules of nature.

The type for that outburst was set by young Will Mur-
phy, who had come in from his father's farm to live with
the McKennys and work in the printing office. He had learned
typesetting quickly, and his country senses were quickened by the
unfamiliar excitements of living in town. Every happening of
the whole countryside sifted through the endless talk he heard
in Chatfield's stores and saloons and streets. The best listening
post of all was the Democrat office, though much of what was
said there never was set in type.

When smallpox broke out, the Democrat warned its readers
to stay away from the victims of the disease but did not report
how two who had died in Chatfield were buried. All Chatfield
repeated that story, half shamefaced at the fears which had left
only one man in all Chatfield with courage enough to help a
neighbor. The mother and the daughter of one family, who lived
a block above the Medary House, had both died; their bodies
were lowered from an upstairs window in the night, and taken
away by a friend who waited outside and gave them such burial
as he could manage alone.

The good friend was unscathed by the dread disease, though
another man, who rode past the house a few days later when the
blankets and clothing of the dead were being burned, caught
the smallpox, he swore, from the smoke that blew upon him. He
never lost his grudge at the family whose sickness caused him
to be pock-marked.

Out on Bear Creek one of the families got the smallpox from
using blankets their boy had sent home from the army. The
whole family came down at one time, and the neighbors were

254 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

all scared to go Into the house, though they took care of the live-
stock and left dishes of hot food on the doorstep where one of
the sick folks could crawl out and take it into the house.

The Democrat reported the Thanksgiving dinner that Isaac
Day served to the wives and children of twenty of Chatfield's
soldiers. It was a wonderful feast he even gave them oysters,
that prime treat of the frontier and one of the ladies offered
a touching prayer for the success of the Union armies and the
safe return of absent loved ones. The Democrat congratulated
Mr. Day on his generosity and patriotism, but as he set the type
for that story Will Murphy remembered the talk he'd heard
about how Old Ike must be trying to buy off his conscience the
way he'd bought off the conscription officers who were going to
take him to the army the year before.

Nearly two hundred men from Chatfield itself went into the
army, and more than that number enlisted from its province.
From time to time one of the men came home wounded, and
there were many who would never return. Early in 1864 the sur-
vivors of Chatfield's first Company came home, the term of their
enlistment completed. The town went wild with rejoicing and
gave the returning heroes such a banquet as the Medary House
had never seen before.

Captain Bishop had come home a Colonel and he announced
at the banquet that he would re-enlist for the duration of the
war. A good many of the others did likewise and new enlistments
took a great spurt from their example. Within three weeks
Colonel Bishop went back to Fort Snelling with a full company,
and not long afterwards Chatfield heard that Judson Wade
Bishop was made a Brigadier General. (He was later to write the
official history of the Second Minnesota with which he served.)

When the call was issued six months later for another half
million men, Easton and other staunch Republicans voiced bitter
resentment at "some of our sourheaded democracy" who argued
that a peace should be made before more men were sacrificed.

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 255

Recruiting efforts in the province were redoubled and a hundred
and fifty men marched out of Chatfield that August. The long
anxious vigil stretched through the winter.

Then came the news of Richmond's fall, and Chatfield re-
joiced that the war was almost over. McKenny arranged for a
special courier to bring the expected news of Lee's surrender from
Winona, the nearest telegraph station. . . . The rejoicing at
that news had scarcely spent itself when another dispatch brought
more dreadful news. Lincoln was assassinated.

The news came to McKenny in the late afternoon and after
the first stunned moment he set his presses to work on a broad-
sheet announcing the catastrophe. He kept the courier in his
office lest the effect of the "scoop" should be lost.

A kind of hush fell on the town as the broadsheets passed from
hand to hand. But before Will Murphy got back to the print-
ing office the ugly rnurmurings had begun. One loafer tore his
broadsheet into bits and swore he'd "larn McKenny to make
money out-a killin' Honest Abe." Another "reckoned he'd enjoy
to make pye out-a McKenny's type/' The notion grew that the
Democrat office would make "right smart of a bonfire."

McKenny's friends carried sober warnings to the editor that
there might be trouble ahead. He was neither surprised nor
daunted, and in the midst of his planning he found time to send
Will Murphy out to Bear Creek to warn his father. The word
would spread through the countryside like wildfire, and like wild-
fire no man could foresee what it might consume. John Murphy
had been too staunch a Democrat to rest secure from danger.

The boy set off across the hills with a handful of broadsheets
to leave at the farms he passed. Twilight was gathering, and men
were leading their oxen home after the long day's plowing. They
took the sheets and read them wonderingly, but the boy was
gone before they could frame their questions. In one house where
he knew the woman could not read he stopped long enough to
tell her the news. She threw up her apron and cried, "Glory be!
Now Tim'll come home from Canada!"

When he got home his father had just finished a job of sawing

256 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and stood outside the mill talking with two or three neighbors.
The boy gave the paper to his father. John Murphy read it with-
out a word, then nailed it up on the side of his mill "I reckon
you'll all want to read the news/ 7 he said, and went off into the
house with his son.

All the Murphys on Bear Creek kept watch that night, but
nothing happened. A few of the hotheads in the neighborhood
tried to stir up trouble and passed around the story that John
Murphy had shouted "Hooray!" when he heard that Lincoln was
dead. But others remembered how often John Murphy helped
out his neighbors, and the mob never got under way.

Trouble came nearer to happening in Chatfield. McKenny
took his family down to the Democrat building where some of his
friends helped him stand guard that night. Others kept watch on
the streets. Some of Chatfield's chief Republicans helped break
up little knots of men who swore they would fix the damned
copperhead.

It was far past midnight when the last drunken mobster had left
the streets, but even then McKenny did not relax his guard. For
two more nights he kept watch. Then the anger faded out, and
the people of Chatfield were thinking of the return of their
soldiers.

They came by ones and twos and dozens. From Fort Snelling
and from Winona they struck across the country, carrying the
memories of long miles of distant land where they had marched.
As they came into the Root River country their eyes leaped to each
familiar landmark, measured every new field that had been made
while they were gone. They walked over hills and through rivers,
cutting straight through the country to their homes with the
sure instinct of a generation that was walking across a continent.

One little girl, out gathering berries on the point of land be-
tween two branches of the river on her father's farm, saw fifteen
of them coming through the woods, shouting at each other as
they came. She hid herself in the bushes as they waded through
one river and plunged across to the next They passed so near

THE WAR DRUMS THROB 2$J

that she could have touched them, but she was shy of the bearded
men in the funny peaked caps.

They splashed through the second river and on towards town
never knowing they were watched. They had been in country
as strange as a foreign land, and they were returning to their own
places with a pride and a humility that swelled beyond their
own understanding.

But of these things they had no words to speak when they
came to their families and friends. They stood between noise
and silence, and none of the things they had felt could ever be
said.

Perhaps they never were said, even when "the boys in blue"
gathered for long evenings in their new organization, the Grand
Army of the Republic. But something of the nature of those
things found expression in the story of General Zollicoffer's trunk.

Chatfield's first company had part in the battle of Mill Springs
where that general was defeated and killed. When the fighting
was over some of the men found the general's trunk. They packed
it with other 'relics' and sent it home for safekeeping. It was on
display in one of the stores for a while and brought out for Com-
pany A's homecoming banquet, then put away in somebody's
attic and forgotten.

Then, near the turn of the century, a strange letter came from
the South. It was addressed to 'The Men of Company A, Second
Minnesota Regiment, Chatfield, Minnesota/' and when it was
opened it told a touching story.

The writer was engaged to marry a granddaughter of the lost
General Zollicoffer. The one thing the young lady wanted for a
wedding present was the trunk that her grandfather had used.
The young man had searched the records and had come to the
guess that the trunk might possibly be in Chatfield. He offered
to pay any sum that was asked for its safe delivery to his fiancee.

The story went all over town and its quality of wonder and
romantic faithfulness filled everybody's thoughts. The old trunk
was pulled out of its dusty corner and put on display again in one

258 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

of the store windows. The town's best blacksmith made a metal
plate with an inscription that told how the trunk had been f ound,
and the names of the men who were giving it to the General's
granddaughter.

Then it was shipped south, at the Chatfield men's expense.
The letter of thanks that came back was almost worn out passing
from hand to hand. There was still much that could not be put
into words, but perhaps no one in Chatfield was left entirely un-
touched by the sense of something like gratitude for the oppor-
tunity of such a gesture of amends for old and unintended wrongs.

PART

Chunks Are Goo I jar a Taim

I

THE MAN straightened stiffly above the block of salt fixed to the stake
and looked at the young cattle ringed about him. The pasture was
holding out well and the stock was looking good. This bunch would
be ready to sell in another month, maybe sooner if the market was
right.

A stir among the cattle down near the river brought him round to
face the swinging bridge he'd built years before. Someone was coming
toward him from the bridge. Someone in breeches, but it didn't look
like a man, somehow. What was a woman doing in his pasture this
time of night?

He bent over the salt again; maybe if he paid her no heed she'd go
on past and let him mind his own business. He heard her footsteps
come nearer and stop. "Good evening," she said.

Her voice was smooth with book learning but friendlier than most,
and somehow almost shy. When he made no answer she went on, "I've
been sitting on your swinging bridge ... I thought Fd like to say
thank-you. . . ." Her voice stumbled a little, then she tried once more.

"You are Mr. " His name sounded strange in her voice, but she

went on to tell her own.

"That's what they've called me the last sixty-eight years," he said,
looking past her face to the hills fast darkening under a single star. "I
reckon the woods are free for those that like to walk there."

The unfamiliar voice laughed a little. "That's what Emerson said:
the grove belongs to the man who walks in it with an open heart. . . .
On that basis I guess I've owned part of your woods for a good many

260

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 261

years. . . /' She made a final effort. "I've always wanted to thank
you. . . r

Something deeply hidden stirred in him. 'There's a stump up there,
in the notch of the woods/' he said slowly, "that before the timber grew
so tall you could stand on it and see all over this country."

He kept still a minute, remembering, then, "I used to stand up there
an' look at things, an' wonder how they come to be like they was, an'
how the hills was created, an' all the things in Nature. ... I told my
wife I guessed all the religion I ever had I got standin' on that old
stump, a-wonderin'. ..." He turned his face away from her.

She helped him out. "I know about that, a little. This afternoon I
saw. . . " Her account of a thing she had really taken time to look at
eased him, and he answered with telling of the badger den at the foot
of the swinging bridge.

When she had gone he turned to watch her. After a moment she
stood clear and unmoving against the sky. You could hear the sounds
of the river where she stood. She was one that could stand still long
enough, he thought, really to hear what a body was saying, or a river.

Then she walked down the farther side of the slope and was gone.

II

EVERY SOCIETY has created in its early stages a legendry that bor-
ders on the mythical tales of things done in a free and ample
fashion felt to be unacceptable in stories of one's contemporaries
but delightful as interpretations of the past The telling of such
tales affords an invigorating sense of release from the hard-pressing
limits of the actual, and their content often yields significant
indications of the values on which the society has been based.

Such a story is told in Chatfield, Minnesota, as the 'history' of
founding the town's first church. I. F. O'Ferrall, the story goes,
was one day shaken out of his concentration on business by a
tremendous racket going on in the Land Office next door. He
went over to see what was up and found the two chief officials
dancing about in hilarious glee and chanting, "We're going to
start a church! We're going to start a church! Whoo-oop-ee-eel"
Mr. O'Ferrall joined the hilarity, and when breath was exhausted
the three men sat down to consider what kind of church they
should start.

This was more difficult, for while they agreed heartily that a
church would be 'good for' Chatfield there were such wide dis-
crepancies in their personal church relations that common ground
was hard to find. One of the men was a Unitarian, one was an
Atheist, and Mr. O'Ferrall had been bred in the Catholic faith.
None of the three seemed a practicable basis for their purpose,

262

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 263

but finally Mr. O'Ferrall suggested an Episcopal church: his new
bride was an Episcopalian and she would like having her own
kind of church in town. The others gallantly accepted the sug-
gestion and proceeded to act upon it.

Within a short while they organized a parish, fitted out a
chapel in a room that Mr. OTerrall added to his office building,
engaged a clergyman, and invited Bishop Whipple to visit Chat-
field and dispense his blessing upon the pious fait accompli that
gave Chatfield its first church. . . Thus the town still retells
the story.

Its legendary character emerges clearly enough when set be-
side available documentation. To take the most obvious point:
Mr. OTerrall did not reach Chatfield until 1856, the year after
the Methodist church was organized there, and it was two years
later that he brought his southern bride to the valley. The
diocesan records of 1858 report that a missionary from one of
the River towns held Chatfield's "First Service of the Episcopal
Church" in a log schoolhouse that spring. On July 8 following, the
Republican reported, "the Strawberry Festival . . , got up by
the Ladies of the Protestant Episcopal Society . . . was very
well attended." Three days later Bishop Kemper of Iowa and
Minnesota, noted in his diary that he had held a service that day
in Chatfield's "Baptist Chapel" and that Chatfield was "a place
which with several others demands our earliest attention/' On
July 14, legal papers for the organization of St. Matthew's
Episcopal church were signed by I. F. OTerrall and several others,
including a number of "land office gentlemen" who were not com-
municants of the Episcopal church. The articles of incorporation
for the parish were dated August 25, 1858, and were recorded with
the Clerk of Fillrnore County on September 2 following. But
it was three years later 1861 that the diocesan Journal re-
ported that the Chatfield Parish had "fitted up and suitably
furnished a vacant land office as a chapel." (Mr. OTerrall took
his family to California that year, for a three-year sojourn.) Six
years later Bishop Whipple "consecrated to the worship and
service of Almighty God a beautiful chapel ... the generous

264 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

offering of noble-hearted friends in the East/' * and St. Matthew's
parish received its first resident rector. It had been served up to
that time by visiting mission clergy from near-by towns. Yet
Chatfield poeple still love to repeat the legend of how the Land
Office boys started the town's first church. It is a satisfyingly
dramatic statement of the persistent belief that churches are
'good for a town/

That belief rose partly from the assurance of stability that
churches added to a frontier settlement. And there was a feeling
that a variety of churches would attract a wider variety of settlers.
As it happened, the denominations represented in Chatfield and
its province reflect the widest possible gamut from the strictly
hierarchic absolutism of the Roman Catholic church to the
ultimate individualism of Quaker Inward Light. The Quaker
group in Jordan township scarcely survived the first generation of
the region's settlement, while today Chatfield's largest church
is Catholic St. Mary's.

Such an outcome could scarcely have been foreseen in the years
when Bishop Loras was recruiting French and Irish seminarians
to serve in the untamed wilderness of his diocese, now compris-
ing Iowa and Minnesota. His appeal was uncompromising: "No
Salary; No Recompense; No Holidays; No pension. But: Much
Hard Work; A Poor Dwelling; Few Consolations; Many Dis-
appointments; Frequent Sickness; A Violent or Lonely Death;
An Unknown Grave/'

Reports of his early missioners bore out that promise. One
wrote: " . . . our poor house is a complete ruin, open to the
wind ... as in a field." Another knew "great joy" in coming
to a settlement for "I was thinking that I would eat bread there."
And when Minnesota reached the point, in 1854, ^ requiring a
bishop of its own, Father Cretin consented very reluctantly to
being "affixed to the cross of St. Paul" in "so distant an exile in
frozen lands."

* That building, which was enlarged and refurnished in 1894, contains tablets
to Reverend Leonard J. Mills, Henry K. Horton, and Josiah Bardwell, Esq., all of
Boston, memorializing their gifts to the original building. The tradition is that they
were friends of the Ripleys.

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 265

The first Episcopal missionaries appear to have suffered less
extreme privations, perhaps because they were later in entering
the Minnesota region. A "quality of 'upper-classishness' " in that
church, which one of its historians deplores as having "handi-
capped its work in this country" since colonial days, was perhaps
an element in delaying the sending of missionaries. Benjamin
Whipple's ordination as Bishop of Minnesota in 1859 was al-
most the beginning of substantial efforts to carry the Episcopal
church into the West.

The Methodist church had been a frontiersman's church from
the first American preaching of John and Charles Wesley. Their
proclamation of Free Grace, opening to every man "the pardon-
ing love of God," was intimately satisfying to the people of each
successive West Methodist acceptance of any man with "the
Call of the Spirit" to be a preacher, without regard to institutional
training, proved a great organizational advantage in the west-
ward advance. The small local groups, or 'classes/ of the Method-
ist organization, supervised by circuit-riding preachers, proved
an ideal instrument for following the frontier, and the Methodist
Discipline was set forth in terms so intensely practical that the
barest literacy could follow them. It kid out in minute detail
the "methods" by which each individual member and preacher
could share the Grace of God and "give the world no occasion
to say that Methodists are no better than other people." John
Wesley's admonition to "Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give
all you can," fitted admirably into the get-rich-quick philosophy
of the frontier.

Baptist organization was even more flexible. Although the
church maintained colleges for the education of Baptist ministers,
any congregation could ordain any one of its members who satis-
fied the elders of his fitness to preach the gospel in Baptist terms.
The Baptist practice of complete local autonomy for each con-
gregation fitted well into the frontier period, but it was appar-
ently less effective as agrarian self-sufficiency gave way to central-
ized industrialism. In 1867, the Southern Minnesota Baptist As*
sociation, meeting in Chatfidd, issued a circukr letter mourning

266 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the fact that in a state population of sixty thousand the Baptists
numbered less than one thousand. The weakness of the church
was explained by reference to "currents of business and popula-
tion, as well as in the nationality of our people. . . . We live
in a fast age. Steam and electricity are producing mental activity
everywhere."

Presbyterians were somewhat less disturbed by evidence of
mental activity, though Western elements in the communion had
twice broken with Eastern leadership in controversies over how
much university education should be required of the clergy. Yet
the official Presbyterian creed was a masterpiece of defining the
bounds beyond which change could not go: "By the decree of
God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels
are predestined unto everlasting life . . . and others fore-ordained
to everlasting death. . . . These angels and men ... are par-
ticularly and unchangeably designated; and their number is so
certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or dimin-
ished/ 7 No man could know, the creed asserted, who are of the
elect, but unofficial opinion gave weighty preference to Presby-
terians.

Despite the creed, Presbyterians like every other Western
church group were swept by those mighty tides of feeling known as
'revivals/ which did so much to change the polity and the practice
of American churches as they developed.

How could it be otherwise? Men whose own brawn and brains
were changing a wilderness into a home simply could not accept
a damnation "so certain and definite that it cannot be increased or
diminished." They knew, in every powerful use of their muscles,
in each patient obdurate exertion to subdue the wilderness, that
a man's wit and will could alter the constitution of life. The hot
immediacy of change in a revival, where "sinners' were being
'saved', was a kind of heightened emotional sanction to the con- ,
viction born of daily labors.

Perhaps something deeper than the dictates of convenience set
those 'protracted meetings' for the long cold evenings of winter.
In that northern season the sun stood far off in the heavens, and

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 267

the tides of life ran low. As the brief days closed the frozen earth
to darkness, it was good to crowd into the tight little building that
stood as the symbol of grace from Eternal Powers. Good to stand
shoulder to shoulder with neighbors and sing the lusty hymns of
threat and exaltation. The promise of salvation in this breathing
hour touched levels of human need far older than the theological
terms in which it spoke.

And as the need leaped to lay hold on the promise, the persons
gathered within those walls transcended their separateness and
became, for a moment, or a winter's season perhaps even for a
lifetime members of one another in a mystical union that healed
the scars of separation. To enter thus into the beloved community
of man's long seeking was an experience both humbling and re-
leasing, and set loose such power as even the uninitiate must re-
spect, however little they might understand it

Ill

ON JUNE 21, 1857, a handful of men and women gathered in
Chatfield's Baptist chapel to consider the feasibility of organiz-
ing a congregation more congenial to their concepts of theologi-
cal decorum than the existing Methodist or Baptist organiza-
tions. 'Father' Clark, who had preached Chatfield's first sermon
two years before, acted as moderator, and the group was so evenly
divided between Presbyterian and Congregationalists that it took
the moderator's vote to decide the question of denominational
affiliation. Thereupon J. C. Easton rose and moved that the
decision to organize as a Presbyterian congregation be made
unanimous. The action was so recorded on the first page of the
little calf -bound volume that is still the official minute book of
Chatfield's Presbyterian church. It was further voted that the
congregation should join the New School synod, which had
broken with the conservative East on the question of slavery.

Barbara Haven was one of the group that June evening, though
her husband preferred to continue his Baptist affiliation; her
daughter, "little Emma/' was the only child at the meeting. Her
son was not then much interested in church affairs, but by the
time the Chatfield Presbyterian church celebrated its seventy-
fifth anniversary many would have agreed that one of the best
achievements of that church was its part in nurturing the growth
of a man who is still remembered as one of Chatfield's most
honored citizens.

268

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 269

George Henry Haven was an able lad, liked and accepted as a
leader in all the goings-on of Chatfield Academy. In the spring
of 1860, the little group of his school cronies scattered and George
Henry went seriously to work in his father's store. The following
winter the Presbyterians held a 'revival' as a kind of dedication of
their new church building, and G. H. Haven was 'converted' in
that revival. That experience, it was felt in the community, was
a determining factor in a life that is remembered without reproach
by his fellow citizens. Some have smiled at certain rigorous scruples
in his behavior, and many have stood a little more in awe of him
than they found quite comfortable. But to this day the opinion
stands: "He was a good man, and he was always thinking about
the town/'

It would be hard to find any other person who, after a lifetime
of active leadership, called forth such unexcepted trust from
Chatfield people. Even his close family ties with J. C. Easton
(Mrs. Easton and Mrs. Haven were sisters) and the fact that he
took over Easton's bank in the '8o's evoked no feeling that Mr.
Haven shared in 'Millionaire EastonY ruthless self-interest. To
the time of his death in 1926 every creative activity of the com-
munity was strengthened by his patient and painstaking help-
fulness. Withal he seems never to have forgotten that "he who
is greatest is the servant of all," and his integrity was as unmis-
takable as that of the hill that towered above his house.

One of the most revealing memorials of the man's spirit lies
hidden in the yellowing pages of the Village Recorder's minutes.
G. H. Haven himself was Village Recorder for several years, and
his records there, as in the minutes of the School Board, are full,
orderly, impeccable. After a year's absence from the village coun-
cil he was elected mayor. Immediately the minutes, which the
year before were the confused efforts of a man more at home with
a carpenter's tools than with a pen, took on the clarity and co-
herence of all Mr. Haven's records, though still written in the
same journeyman's hand. It is clear that George H. Haven, banker
and civic leader, found ways to give to George Frey, German im-
migrant and working man, something of the ordered understand-

2JO THE CHOSEN VALLEY

ing that informed all Mr. Haven's services to his community.

Such leadership did not spring full-blown from the fervors of a
revival There is something at once touching and a bit ludicrous
to modern notions in the record of the young convert's first high-
pitched act of allegiance to his new-found faith. He wrote letters
to several of his Academy classmates reporting his conversion and
urging each of them to a like decision. His letters have not been
preserved but the replies they evoked yield a vivid sense of how
difficult, yet exalted, his task had been.

One wrote to "Dear George" that his letter was "an epistle so
different from any that I have been in the habit of receiving" that
it was "hard to answer. . . . The subject you write to me about I
have paid little or no attention to, but hope to some day. I may
put it off (as you say) until too late. If I do I am only to blame
and no one else will suffer from my neglect." A second of his cor-
respondents expressed pleasure that George had "chosen the right
path of happiness for now and hereafter" although he himself
made "no pretension of being a Christian," and could "not claim
to be free of fear for the future."

A third unregenerate youth professed his ignorance of "the re-
ligion you write about," though he assured young Haven that he
did "not hate those who join the church." In best debating-club
style he proceeded to set forth the propositions that he knew he
did "not serve God," that common sense shows "there is no neu-
tral ground," that therefore he "must be serving the Devil." He
hoped he might sometime change his "way of life" and then
asked, more urgently, for "a long letter in reply. ... I am dis-
cussing grammar questions with three of my correspondents not
very interesting, but we want something to do in these long win-
ter evenings."

"Something to do . . /'It was the cry of an immature and spir-
itually impoverished society, cut off by winter cold from the ex-
penditure of its energies on the physical remaking of the earth.
Lacking other channels of expenditure, those energies spoke out
in one form or another of that discontent which was the oft-
described malaise of American life. Rare indeed was the person

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 2J1

who could so spend himself that the passing yeais bronght
tolerance and true wisdom. Only in unwearied identification of
the self with those other selves which together create the beloved
community of all men's dreaming, could a man become a com-
plete personality. Nor did church membership guarantee such
identification. That it grew in G. H. Haven's life was the conse-
quence of more factors than any are competent to assess with
finality. What is unmistakable is that the identification with both
church and community did grow in that man.

His apprenticeship was commonplace enough. Even while he
was writing to his schoolmates, he took around the town a sub-
scription list for a melodeon for the new church. The buIMing
itself had cost $2,500, Easton wrote to a friend back East, and a
melodeon was more than the congregation could manage alone.
Augustus Haven led off his son's list with five dollars, which
Easton and one other man each matched; within a few days $58
had been raised. Less than half of the 34 subscribers were Presby-
terians: such community support was a common expression of the
prevailing belief that churches were 'good for a town/

Yet despite that belief, Chatfield's Presbyterian Church, until
1875, was financially dependent on its denomination's central
mission board in the East. No one worked more faithfully to make
the church self-supporting than G. H. Haven. He kept the church
records year after year. A casual inspection of those records, and
of his astonishingly complete personal ledgers, suggests that he
probably paid from his own pocket, year after year, to the end of
his life, a considerably larger share of the funds for his church's
support than any other person.

There were able men among the ministers serving that church.
Father Clark presided over its first two years. Perhaps the most
widely loved of the Presbyterian ministers was Reverend Samuel
H. Murphy, whose twelve-year pastorate was broken midway by
a mission to the Gabons of Africa, during which he left his wife
and family in Chatfield. He was followed by the Reverend George
S. Hayes, newly returned from a mission in China. Still another
minister directed the building of the fine new church that 'tibe

272 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Presbyterians dedicated on New Year's Day, 1898. It was com-
plete with "parlors" and a kitchen in the basement, and a Sunday
School room with folding doors opening into the auditorium. The
dedication services crowded both auditorium and Sunday School
room, morning and evening, and a dinner and reception gave
everyone in town a chance to admire the wonderful innovation in
church building. The auditorium was filled with flowers coaxed
into bloom by the Chatfield ladies themselves. Scarlet begonias,
white Chinese primroses, vinca, green and white myrtle, with calla
lilies and white Roman hyacinths banked the platform. From a
Chicago florist had come white, red, and pink carnations, with
roses, marguerites and smilax to dress the organ. Even the pulpit
was wreathed with smilax.

All these details Mrs. Haven reported to a Chatfield friend who
was wintering in Florida. "You may be sure George Haven is a
happy man these days," she wrote, and admitted that she herself
had wakened, that eventful day, long before daybreak and "stared
with wide-awake eyes into the darkness of the early morning,"
filled with thankfulness for the wonderful achievement. The day
came to its climax in the evening service, when one of the visiting
clergymen "helped raise the debt ... he said it was so small a
debt it was not worth keeping . . . there were tears of joy in
everybody's eyes," Mrs. Haven reported.

Methodists were not the people to sit by and let the Presby-
terians outdo them. Ten months after the Presbyterian festival,
the new Methodist church was dedicated, complete from base-
ment to steeple. They had bishops at their ceremony, and Chat-
field's Congressman to entertain the bishops. Milo White and
his church had gone a long way in the forty years since the Sunday
morning when he and the other worshippers had been called out
of their little one-room building to fight the forest fire that raged
on Winona Hill and threatened to engulf the town.

They had their own pride, these Methodists. If they couldn't
pay their preachers very much salary, at least they had paid that
salary out of their own pockets from the very first, and every
Methodist family shared what it had with the preacher's family

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 273

pork at butchering time, apples when the orchard came into
bearing and only the stingy told the preacher that the sack of
potatoes or the 'boiling hen' delivered to the parsonage door
should "apply on the salary/' "Donation Visits' to the preacher
sometimes at his house, sometimes at a hall on Main Street loaned
for the occasion were only a just and acceptable opportunity for
people who didn't belong to the church to help its good work
along. The Democrat carried as many notices of 'donations' for
Presbyterian and Baptist preachers as for Methodists, and Easton
and Haven and White set down in their ledgers five-dollar con-
tributions for each one, irrespective of denomination.

Of course the Methodists were glad when they could add the
assurance, "No part of this donation will apply on the preacher's
salary." They were proud, too, when the Democrat could report
the fine returns of $78 from one such donation, and they never
quite understood why the preacher put his notice of thanks the
way he did: "The above is a word too much. But please allow me
to add my grateful acknowledgement of the very gratifying con-
tribution to my comfort from the people of Chatfield, in this
donation." There was no telling about preachers. . . .

Methodists had a lot of experience with them. In its first forty-
five years the Chatfield church had thirty-one different preachers.
That was the way Methodists did things. And they got along all
right, even if sometimes a family of Methodists did join the Pres-
byterians because they thought they were high-toned and rich.
Take the Cussons family. They'd been brought up Methodist in
England; some of their relatives there were well-known Wesleyan
preachers. But they turned Presbyterian in Chatfield, because
they thought Presbyterians were more high-toned. Not that it
mattered. Chatfield's Congressman, Milo White, belonged to the
Methodist Episcopal church, and was proud of it, and the man-
sion he built out in North Chatfield was the finest house in town.
Besides, one of the most famous preachers in the whole Methodist
church was a Chatfield boy.

Henry C. Jennings was born in his father's parsonage back in
Illinois in 1850, and his mother was a preacher's daughter. They

274 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

came to Minnesota when Henry was just a little boy and took a
piece of land out southeast of Chatfield. The father died not long
afterwards, and the mother had a hard time making ends meet
with a houseful of children. The summer Henry was nineteen he
was converted out at the Fillmore Camp-Meeting, and that fall
he walked into Chatfield to get himself some education so he
could be ordained a preacher. He worked as janitor at the school-
house, and he swept out stores to pay for the crackers and cheese
he practically lived on, except when some Methodist family asked
him to, Sunday dinner. After a winter in Chatfield, he taught
school; and the year he turned twenty-one he was ordained a
Methodist preacher. He married Charlie Culver's sister that same
year, and not long afterwards he was appointed to the Chatfield
charge.

He was a good preacher, even though some of his ideas were
almost too advanced for his hearers; he talked from the pulpit
about higher wages and an eight-hour day. But in less than twenty
years from the time he was ordained, he had one of the largest
churches in St. Paul, and in 1896 the General Conference elected
him Publishing Agent for the Western Methodist Book Concern
in Cincinnati. He spent the rest of his life making that the best
church publishing house- in the country, but he was always proud
of being from Chatfield. He visited there whenever he could and
when he died he was buried in the Chatfield cemetery. Chatfield
Methodists, proud of him, could hold up their heads with anyone,
especially when they got their new building.

Orrin Thurber never liked that kind of talk, even though he'd
been a Methodist all his life. A lot of people thought it was he
who wrote letters to the Democrat every once in a while urging
that if people were really Christians they would all work together
in one big church. It angered him to hear anyone run down any
kind of church. He even reproached a lot of preachers one day
for that kind of talk.

It happened during a Methodist conference held in Chatfield:
the Thurbers asked a tableful for dinner, and while Uncle Orrin

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 275

was serving fried chicken and fixings, the preachers got started
lambasting the Christian Science church. Uncle Orrin listened till
he'd served a plate for each one, then he said, "Brethren, 111 have
to ask you to change the subject. This is the first time that anyone
at my table has ever spoken a word against any Christian church,
and I don't know as it's the privilege even of preachers to break
that rule/ 7 Then he picked up a dish of Aunt Eunice's spiced
peaches and passed it down the table and went on talking about
the weather and the crops just as if nothing had happened. Those
preachers were startled but one of them thought it was such a
good lesson that he told it at the meeting that afternoon, and it
went all over town. Folks said that was what started Uncle Orrin
studying Christian Science. Anyhow, he and Aunt Eunice turned
Scientist not long after, though they kept on going to the Method-
ist church, and supporting it, because there wasn't any Science
church in Chatfield.

Uncle Orrin was quite a character, but he and Aunt Eunice
were the first ones anybody thought of when they had sickness or
death in the house and needed someone to 'sit up' and look after
things. Nobody ever counted how many babies Aunt Eunice
helped into the world, or the number of people that died easier be-
cause she was there. Uncle Orrin always went with her and helped
out with the family.

He bought the old Presbyterian building when the new one was
finished, and had it hauled all the way down Winona Street and
set up in his back yard. He didn't use it for much of anything, and
folks wondered why he had bought it. Then the Methodists built,
and he bought their old building too, hauled it down Winona
Street and set it up right beside the other one. After that there
was nothing he liked better than to take people out to see the two
churches. "They get along all right in my back yard," he'd say. "I
don't know as I've ever heard any good reason why the folks that
built them can't do as well/'

By that time the Baptist church had dropped out of the com-
petition for Chatfield leadership. While the Reverend Mr. Fuller

2j6 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

was their pastor he lent a note of high intellectuality to the serv-
ices. His sermons were not always approved: O. S. Armstrong, a
convinced Calvinist, noted in his diary that he was "not satisfied
by Mr. Fuller's exposition of Free Will/' But his lectures each
winter were hailed by the Democrat as brilliant additions to the
series set up to fill "the long winter evenings." When he returned
East, after the death of his wife in 1 865, the Chatfield Baptists got
on as they could with local lay preachers.

Dissension seems to have developed in the congregation there-
after. Dr. Trow, who first organized the congregation, was read
out of it, reputedly on account of his persistent profanity. "He was
a good man/' one of his friends remembered, "but it just seemed
like he couldn't help himself swearing at the critters." No record
remains to indicate how far that act of excommunication affected
the unity of the Baptist congregation, but in 1867 its report to the
regional association lamented "no religious interest . . , we
mourn our coldness." For years, except for a brief season following
a 'revival' in 1885, the Chatfield society had only Sunday School
activities to report, and in 1902 the congregation was formally dis-
banded.

Such weakening of Baptist congregations was not unique, the
records of regional and state associations indicate. The circular
letter that deplored the effects of "mental activity" affords a
naively revealing view of the confusion generated by the impact
of industrialism upon a faith generated in an agrarian society.
Baptists, like most Americans, believed in progress, but they could
not escape the recognition that progress was somehow breaking
down their cherished traditions. The solution worked out by the
Southern Minnesota Baptists was a plea for renewed individual
consecration to local church activities, curiously coupled with an
appeal to support a mission enterprise that had recently been
planted, with conscious daring, in Italy, "under the eyes of the
Pope of Rome."

The mission to Rome as a cure for local failure was a character-
istic expression of the common human tendency to project imme-
diate frustrations upon distant whipping boys. Yet in that projec-

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 277

tion the dim and unanalyzed instinct of plain people touched
closely, though confusedly, upon substantial fact.

Probably none of those Minnesota Baptists knew of Bishop
Loras's earlier appeals for Irish immigrants to make Iowa "a
Catholic commonwealth/' or of Bishop Cretin's later denuncia-
tion of Eastern priests whose opposition to the westward move-
ment of their congregations lost him the chance of creating such
a commonwealth in Minnesota. It is unlikely that they had heard
of Bishop Cretin's appeal to European supporters for schools to
"save the children" from "the propaganda of protestants." These,
like the jurisdictional feuds between priests of different national
origins (recorded by the Catholic historian of the region) were
strictly intramural matters. What was obvious to all was the im-
mediately European source and character of Catholic missions
and missioners to the opening West a fact not to be overlooked
in evaluating the anti-Catholic feeling exhibited here and there
by western nativism.

Tradition has it that the first Mass in Chatfield's province was
said in Hugh Parsley's house, at the fording place on Middle
Branch, in 1854. The priest came westward from Winona, and
his coming was heralded a day or two in advance by a messenger
sent from a neighborhood where the priest had already been.

The first thing to do after getting such word was to let the
neighbors know of the priest's coming and to send word to the
next place on his itinerary. 'They was regular Paul Reveres," a
son of one of those early families remembered, in imagery incon-
gruously derived from those public-school dens of "propaganda
for the protestants" lamented by Bishop Cretin.

It was on the women that the chief weight of both delight and
responsibility fell. Food must be made ready for all who came a
feast for a multitude, however the family might have to skimp
thereafter. If the visit fell on a fast day the boys were sent to the
nearest stream to catch fish for the dinner. The house must be
cleaned, and a bed prepared for the priest, with perhaps a precious
pair of homespun linen sheets brought from Ireland to be
bleached afresh^ for His Reverence. An altar must be improvised

278 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and dressed with flowers and greenery, and perhaps a bit of Irish
damask. These were the offices of love, the prelude to release from
long-gathered pressure of borders that were too close.

The men could afford to take the priest's visit more lightly: the
most remote farmer saw other people than his family when he
took wheat to the mill for grinding or hauled it to one of the
River towns for sale. Their sons remembered that "the men didn't
think much about it except when they went. They had plenty else
to occupy their minds." But for the women, with tasks that were
never done, with children too young to take into winter cold for
the long trip into town, the coming of the priest meant both the
immediate delight of day-long visiting and the more exalted con-
sciousness of renewed communion with the saints, who were
blessedly the same in Ireland and in Minnesota.

The missioner not only heard confession and celebrated the
Mass, he also baptized the children born since the last priest had
been there, read marriage lines, blessed the graves of those who
had been kid to rest without such blessing. And always he kept
before both women and men their responsibility for establishing
a parish of their own, and erecting a suitable building.

It took twenty-four years to pay for that church. Migration had
given Irish peasants not only new prosperity but a new independ-
ence as well. When Father Riordan, in 1875, pressed for collec-
tion of notes he claimed to hold from members of his parish, Ed
Tuohy and four other men of the parish published in the Demo-
crat a call for a Catholic community meeting to inquire into
parish finances. Father Riordan retorted, in the next issue of the
paper, with a public notice accusing his accusers of assuming "an
office which lies within the province of the Bishop of St. Paul . . .
to question the integrity of my financial administration." The
priest was apparently sustained by his bishop and remained sev-
eral years longer in charge of the Chatfield parish. If there were
parish squabbles thereafter, they did not break into public print.

Only once did anti-Catholicism come even briefly into the
Democrat's columns, and then it was in some degree an out-
growth of other doctrinal disputes. In February of 1890 someone

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 279

arranged for a public disputation between two Universalists, one
Baptist, and an apostate Catholic, who apparently was more
against Catholicism than for anything else. The Democrat re-
ported the affair but briefly, with the comment that religious
leaders might better spend their efforts in promoting Christian
fraternity than in displaying such sectarian animosities. Three
weeks later the one-time Catholic spoke again, and the hall was
crowded. After the meeting a little group of Protestants, includ-
ing several women, waited to escort the speaker to the house
where he was a guest When they came into the street they were
peppered with eggs thrown by a bunch of hot-headed Irish lads
who had heard the lecture. A frenzied free-for-all was well on the
way when C. L. Thurber (a nephew of Uncle Orrin) hastily exer-
cised his authority as City Recorder to swear in several solid citi-
zens as special police. The mob was dispersed and the speaker and
his friends proceeded on their way.

The Democrat, reporting the affair, deplored equally the "das-
tardly attack'' on women, and the uncalled-for violence of the
speaker's words. Yet free speech was involved, the editor insisted,
and "older, more staid Catholics" did not countenance the attack.
Letters to the editor carried on the controversy for two or three
weeks and several Irish subscribers "stopped the paper." Finally
the editor called a halt to further discussion of the affair in the
same issue that reported the success of the St. Patrick's Day cele-
bration: its lottery had raised $300, and the day had passed with
only one fight!

Anti-Catholicism never again came to such public discussion in
Chatfield, though from time to time dark Protestant fears were
whispered that the current priest was using the horrendous secrecy
of the confessional to advise his young men to 'get Protestant girls
in trouble' so they would have to marry Catholics and produce
children to the glory of the Pope. In the twenties, when the Ku
Klux Klan was rampant in the state, a handful of hare-brained
youngsters were reputed to have stolen sheets from their mothers'
clothesbaskets with the notion of burning a fiery cross on top of
Winona Hill, but sober elders put a stop to the project The Klan

280 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

got no such foothold in Chatfield as in some of the neighboring
towns, though not until the mid-thirties was the first Catholic
elected to Chatfield's school board. In general, Thomas Twif ord's
town has acted on the assumption voiced one time by the Demo-
crat as the moral of a gleeful tale about a family argument in
which "She" burned "His" spiritualist papers, and "He" tore up
"Her" fifteen-dollar Bible: 'This is a free country and every man
and woman has an indisputable right to travel his or her own road
to heaven."

That everyone was trying to get to Heaven was assumed as self-
evident even among the "atheists" who throve on the febrile ex-
citement precipitated throughout America's midwest by Bob In-
gersoll. "We [atheists] are as concerned about our future as any-
one is," one of them wrote to the Democrat in 1 883 during a spate
of theological controversy. "Our God never yet pronounced a
curse upon any human being he has made and in our opinion he
never will." The writer further asserted that atheists were engaged
in "the necessary work of . . . licking the sores of total depravity,
of infant damnation, of predestination ... of a personal Devil"
so that "charity, good works, good will . . . shall be considered
more to be desired than a forced attempt at faith in the atone-
ment . . . that no human being can explain." Such brash ques-
tioning of the established order of faith had all the charm of con-
spicuous defiance, and it is interesting to note that it did not ap-
pear openly in Chatfield until the frontier stage was past and the
social fabric firmly established.

In the early years many country neighborhoods that could not
maintain churches carried on Sunday Schools as partial substi-
tutes for the "church privileges" that were not within reach. Many
families felt acutely the lack of those "privileges," as Mary Caro-
line Price called them. "Deliver me from Sunday in Minnesota,"
she wrote one time in exasperation. "It is the most wearisome of
the seven, no meeting of any kind, nor anything interesting to
read! The usual programme is to lay abed late in the morning, get
breakfast and wash the dishes, gape and stretch around a little
while, or write letters, then get dinner and wash dishes and clear

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 281

up litter after the boys, then get supper and wash dishes, then to
bed."

It was better in summer, when a load of young people could
make a Sunday trip to camp meeting, but even that proved a little
disappointing to Mary Caroline. "A good sermon/' she wrote,
"but . . . folks acted more like a crowd at a fair or a Fourth of
July Celebration than like an assembly come together to worship
God, I thought/' And she recorded the variety of foods as an im-
portant part of the day's experience.

Indeed food played a major role in the history of all Chatfield
churches, and many a Chatfield woman found "her symphonies
in fresh-baked bread, her drama in a chicken pie," as one daughter
of pioneers later wrote. The ritualistic overtones of breaking bread
together carried far beyond the ceremonials of the Lord's Supper,
practiced in some form by all the churches. Church people, a
Chatfield wag once remarked, had to eat their way to heaven.
Serving food to the townsfolk was an approved method of raising
money for church purposes, and the act of eating together gen-
erated a glow of good feeling that tended to modify the sectarian
divisions within the community.

Church programs and entertainments of all kinds played their
part in strengthening the sense of community. When the Pres-
byterians hung Japanese lanterns in the trees of Mr. Haven's yard
against the curving shelter of the hill, or Episcopalians spread
their tables in view of the river behind Mrs. O'Ferrall's house, any-
body in town who could pay his ten or fifteen cents for homemade
ice cream and cake, or strawberries and cream, was welcome. It
was good for people to dress in their best and practice their com-
pany manners with those whom they saw every day in working
mood.

The young people who practiced together for weeks to prepare
a concert or a "pageant of tableaux" found "something to do' of
a kind that satisfied both creative and social impulses. Real in-
genuity went into those affairs: a Library Entertainment pre-
sented twenty-three characters, ranging from Sweet Maud Muller
and Minnehaha to Little Lord Fauntleroy and Hamlet. The lad

282 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

who played the role of Chivalry in a Court of Honor pageant fell
so in love with the Queen of the Court that he married her a few
months later. A Japanese Social to raise money for the missionaries
sanctioned the daring naughtiness of wearing kimonos right out in
public, and a Soap Bubble Social was a deliciously hilarious return
to childhood pleasures. 'Everybody' went to those socials; they
came away feeling closer to each other and somehow committed
anew to an entity larger than even the sum of their separate selves.

If there were those who had no part in these churchly doings,
that was rarely charged to the churches. If people were too wicked,
or too lazy, or even too poor, to do their share of church work, that
was their responsibility. There were plenty of women who were so
poor they "worked out' to raise their families, who were yet a part
of church life.

Not until near the turn of the century did any group take con-
certed action to carry the blessings of religion to those on the
outer fringes of the community. Townsfolk were more than a little
skeptical when three or four Salvation Army lassies' began to hold
their tambourine-thumping sessions on Main Street. But no one
bothered them. And some of the folks from Sandtown, as the
poorer section of North Chatfield was beginning to be called, and
the "swamp angels' from 'out Jerdan-way' actually pulled them-
selves up into respectability under the proddings of the Salvation
Army.

The Army lassies' left after a while, in a vague aroma of scandal,
but the needs to which they had ministered did not entirely dis-
appear. From time to time thereafter one or another obscure, emo-
tionally persuasive sect gathered followers among the people who
one way or another found themselves outside the centrum of the
Chatfield community. In their own terms they too gave evidence
that churches are "good for a town/

But that churches had any responsibility for the ways in which
America's new industrialism was beginning to penetrate the
world, was a notion only vaguely apprehended in Chatfield.
Church people raised money to send missionaries to teach Japan
the Christian virtues of justice, and mercy, and humility. They

CHURCHES ARE GOOD FOR A TOWN 283

largely regarded the American Navy's exploit in for cing Japanese
ports as God's way of opening the way for the spread of the Gos-
pel, and some may have been pleased by the coincidence that the
exploit had fallen in the same year that saw the first settlement
in the Chatfield valley.

A generation later Chatfield people were immensely interested
in a letter received by the local Board of Trade asking foe local
contributions to "a display of American industries'* that the Navy
was going to send around the world in America's biggest battle-
ships. It was a pity, people felt, that the plow factory had moved
away from Chatfield: it would have been fine to set up a trade in
plows between Chatfield and Japan.

Nobody dreamed then that in Chatfield's third generation the
churches were to display gold stars for young men of their mem-
bership who had been killed by Japanese shells. Shells made, as
like as not, from plows that had been scrapped by Chatfield
farmers. Whether they knew it or not, Chatfield people and
churches were being increasingly involved in the problems of a
world made amazingly one.

PART

Ten

Wheat Is King

I

THE AUGUST SUN climbed strongly up the morning sky. It poured in-
sistent power upon the fields. It beat upon the backs of men bent
parallel to the earth as they worked. It picked out the scarlet pride of the
contraption whose clattering blades drowned the hum of crickets. It
pulled into the air the warm and infinitely exciting smell of ripened
wheat.

The clatter of the ungainly machine stopped short and the hush
pulled upright the man who worked at one end of the field alone. He
had been so intent on the great golden sheaves he was handling that he
had not noticed how far the others had moved. Now he looked at the
sturdy shocks he had made and gave himself to the swelling pride of the
harvest.

This was better than working in the store, he thought. His mind
gave him a picture of the way the deserted town would be looking. Not
a team on the streets, nor a puff of dust coming down from Winona
Hill. No one but a few women and children in the stores, and a few old
men to wait on them. Every one of the young fellows had been out in
the fields for three weeks, and it would be another week before they re-
turned. Yet the stir and tingle of harvest was the biggest thing in the
town. Even the womenfolk felt it; the wife of the richest man in town
went out every day to this farm to help get the harvest dinner. She liked
to help, she said and she made the best apple pies in the county.
Funny about people. You couldn't like her husband even at harvest
time, but she was always friendly, and just as common . . .

This upland field was a good place to work, the man thought, shred-
ding out a handful of kernels from the shock he had just built, and

286

WHEAT IS KING 287

chewing deliberately on the half-sticky sweetness. It was open to all
wind there was, and high enough that you could see the country while
you worked. A hundred acres in this one field, and a hundred more
across the road. A dozen such fields making golden patches in the land
that swelled greenly upward to bring earth and sky together.

A thin shout from the half dozen figures clustered about the reaper
drew him down the field toward them. He saw the familiar gesture of
head thrown back and elbow lifted as one of the men raised the jug of
'the critter* to his lips, and thought how good the cool-fiery stuff would
feel sliding down his own throat in his turn. He took off his hat to let
the wind dry his hair and kicked at a shock he was passing. He liked the
feel, and the little crunching noise, of the stubble under his feet, and
the wind was cool against the shirt he had drenched with his sweat.
These were days when a man knew where he belonged.

II

EVEN WHEN THEY were selling thousands of bushels of wheat on
the world market, Chatfield people had little awareness of the
world-meanings in what they did. They raised wheat first because
they and their neighbors needed it. When Milo White carried his
load of flour through threatening torrents, he knew that wheat
was essential to make life in the Chatfield valley secure. Two short
years later a St. Paul newspaper reported that a steamer had taken
a load of Minnesota wheat and flour eastward. The following year
the wheat shipped out of Minnesota was worth more than the
furs. Those events were marked by no bells or bonfires, but they
held potentially more meaning than the noisy celebrations of
Minnesota's statehood.

Minnesotans were already feeling concern over markets for the
swiftly increasing flood of Minnesota wheat. The state's first Re-
publican governor had so little understanding of the economic
forces from which his party had sprung that he announced in
1 860: "For many years to come immigration [into the state] ought
to make our best market, consuming whatever surplus of flour,
meal, wheat, corn, oats, beef, pork we may raise and have to sell/'
J. W. Bishop's History of Fillmore County had already touched
on the theme when it urged manufacturers to move to Chatfield:
a factory population would afford a steady market for the produce
of the county's farms.

But immigrants turned farmers rather than factory workers,

WHEAT IS KING 289

and by 1861 the expansion of Minnesota wheat fields had shown
the inadequacy of an immigrant market The State Commissioner
of Statistics that year quoted "an English gazette" as saying:
"One fact is clear, that it is North America that we must look to
in the future for the largest amount of our cereal produce/' The
Minnesota official pointed out the moral of that expectation for
Minnesota farmers. A St. Paul paper set forth an apocalyptic
vision of St. Paul receiving tribute from all parts of the earth: cot-
ton from the South, spices from the Orient, money from the East,
all in payment for Minnesota wheat.

The Winona Republican that fall praised the Almighty for His
aid "in putting down this unnatural rebellion" by so ordering the
seasons that the West had produced "the most bounteous crop
ever known in the history of the world. The scepter of power
passes from King Cotton of the South to King Wheat of the
West/ 7 and the new king's power was buttressed by Europe's need
for wheat to feed her industrial population.

The Chatfield province was indeed fortunate in the timing of
its great wheat production. In the second year of Minnesota's
wheat export, the New York price climbed to $1.16. In 1867, it
reached the unprecedented figure of $2.47. Before the world price
plummeted in 1882, repeated failures of the crop in Chatfield's
province had forced farmers there, however unwillingly, to di-
versify their economy, and so they escaped the worst consequences
of slavery to the one-crop system.

Chatfield's timing was fortunate in still another way. The
farmers could never have produced such large amounts of wheat
without the mechanical reapers that Cyrus McCormick was manu-
facturing in Chicago. Those reapers were crude enough at first,
little more than mowers, that a man walked beside to rake off the
grain when enough had accumulated for a 'bundle/ Adding a plat-
form to carry the man with a rake was a great improvement, and
the invention of a 'self-rake' device seemed like the last word in
mechanical perfection, though the 'bundles' still had to be bound
by hand. Not until 1873 did the machines begin to bind as well
as crat the grain. Yet even the crudest of those reapers cut astonish-

290 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

ing multiples of the grain a man could reap with primitive scythe
and cradle. As mechanical seeders and other devices came into
use they increased enormously the amounts of land that one man
could farm.

Tales of how the farmers learned to use that machinery sound
oddly like later reports of Russian peasant's mechanical inepti-
tudes. One man forgot to put twine in his new binder, and when
he saw the grain falling loose he unhitched his horses and rode
one of them into town in a rage at the unspeakable so-and-so who
had cheated him by selling such a "consarned worthless contrap-
tion." Another filled the bin of his new seeder with seed-wheat
and drove it all morning without opening the valve between the
bin and the drill. When he looked at the bin at noon he was de-
lighted to see how saving it was of seed! Only the chance call of a
neighbor, stopping to admire the new machine, saved its owner
from unseeded fields.

Stories like these went all through the province and did much
to help people learn the ways of mechanical devices. Yet farmers
were very slow to master one essential to the economical use of
machinery. They treated those costly objects with the same care-
lessness with which they treated their land. The reaper was left
out in every weather, from harvest to harvest, and the plow stood
rusting at the end of the season's last furrow. The cost of that
carelessness is reflected in such records as those of Elmira town-
ship, showing the increasing foreclosure of chattel mortgages by
implement dealers during the seventies and eighties. From the
Chatfield Democrat to Harper's Magazine editors admonished
fanners to take better care of their machinery, but the lesson was
hard to enforce.

It was even harder to learn how to make railroads serve the pub-
lic interest, despite their battening on gifts of public lands and
funds. By the end of the Civil War the skeleton of America's
railroad system was sufficiently articulated to make possible the
pouring of American wheat into the world market. But complet-
ing that transportation system was a devious process that did not
produce the uniformly happy results claimed by the prophets of

WHEAT IS KING 291

laissez faire. Some of the operations of that process can be seen
in ChatfielcT s continued efforts to get a railroad

After its 1 864 reorganization, in which H. W. Holley regained
his position as Chief Engineer, the Southern Minnesota Railroad
began actual building from the west bank of the Mississippi. By
1867, it had reached the town of Rushford, thirty-odd miles south-
east of Chatfield. To Chatfield inquiries about running the Kne
from that point up the Root River to Thomas TwiforcTs valley,
company officials replied with a demand for $60,000 in municipal
bonds 'in aid' of the railroad, Chatfield people turned unex-
pectedly stubborn and voted against those bonds. The company
went through another reorganization the following year and a
Chatfield group petitioned the new set of officials to build to Chat-
field. They were told the ante had been raised to $100,000. Dr.
Luke Miller was elected to the state senate on the basis of his
promise to get a law authorizing the four townships surrounding
Chatfield to join in raising the railroad fund, by issuing township
bonds in various sums. The law was passed and a spirited cam-
paign was begun among the country people to get them to vote
approval of the proposed bond issue; a surveyor's crew working
on the Chatfield end of the route gave visible encouragement to
the campaign. But before the vote could be taken, the survey was
withdrawn and Chatfield heard that its own state senator was
involved in building a completely new town, christened Lanes-
boro, to which the railroad was being built instead of to Chat-
field.

Rage was the chief emotion at that denouement, but by No-
vember sober calculation had convinced many people of the truth
of the threat in a letter that I. F. OTerrall had from one of the
railroad officials: "If the bonds [still $100,000] are issued soon,
your people have no reason to fear, but they will get their Rail-
road. . . . Chatfield will quickly decay without the Railroad.**

So the campaign began again (it was hard to convince the coun-
try people), the bonds were approved, issued and deposited in
escrow against the completion of the road, and the surveyors once
more appeared for the fifth time since 1856.

292 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The same comedy was played through twice more without giv-
ing Chatfidd a railroad. In 1871, the work of grading was actually
begun at Parsley's Ford, south of town, and the Democrat was
jubilant. But after three months of work, in which the workmen
were paid almost none of the wages due them, work on the Chat-
field line stopped again. The governor of the state had vetoed a
bill to divide among the railroads a half million acres of so-called
'swamp land' that the federal government had conveyed to the
state, and the railroads went on strike against such "dangerous
grangerism," as the Democrat called the governor's action. There
was a rumor that J. C. Easton had gone to New York to raise
money to continue the work on the Chatfield branch, but
whether he went or not, the work was not resumed.

The Democrat was right in tracing the veto to the influence of
the Grange. Although that organization officially called the
Patrons of Husbandry was non-political in its original purposes,
it served very rapidly to focus the confusion and discontent of
the fanners upon political issues.

The Grange came into being as the result of a government
clerk's trip through the South early in 1866 to gather information
for the federal bureau of agriculture. Oliver Hudson Kelley came
-back from that trip oppressed by the dull fatalism with which the
farm people he had seen accepted the crude and barren patterns
of their lives. Being himself half-Western he was a New Eng-
lander who had taken land near the headwaters of the Mississippi
and a man of creative imagination, he could not rest in the face
of such acceptance. Out of his unrest he conceived in fresh terms
the too widely forgotten fact that no person can be fully human
except as a conscious part of the web of relatedness which is the
essence of humanity. For two years he pondered on that intuitive
response to experience, and with a half dozen Washington friends
evolved the framework of the secret order of Patrons of Hus-
bandry. Then he resigned his safe government clerkship and set
off Westward to persuade farmers that in the Grange they could
find the means of working together to help themselves to fuller
Eves. Besides his faith, he had just two and a half dollars to carry

WHEAT IS KING 293

him beyond the Pennsylvania town that was Ms first stopping
point

The act of persuasion was not as easy as he had dreamed, but
five years of dogged labor, partly from his farm in northern Min-
nesota, began to create the substance of things hoped for. By May
of 1873, Minnesota had 358 Granges and there were 3,360
Granges scattered through twenty-eight states. Two years later
the Grange had nearly seven times as many local organizations,
spread through every state and territory of the Union.

Each local Grange met at least once a month, usually twice,
and its ritual gave a place to young people and to women as well
as to men. Its stated purposes included the increase of comfort
and beauty in farm homes, and the overcoming of personal and
sectional prejudice, as well as the economic betterment of farmers.
It seems to have done an amazingly successful job of stirring the
minds of many farm people to the effort of understanding the
complex relations between the new industrialism and the prob-
lems of agriculture. And it left bright images of enjoyment in the
memories of those who knew it in their childhood. "We'd take
our baskets when we went to town Saturdays/' one woman re-
called sixty years after the Chatfield Grange had died, "and we'd
all eat together, and sing, and hear the news. The men-folks
talked about prices and such. We had a good time together." And
a man remembered: "It was a good thing, I guess. They had wide
sashes they wore over their shoulders, with red ribbons on the
edge. We got some of them upstairs yet/' There was so little, in
the chosen valley, of that "evocation by ritual of the spiritual ex-
periences necessary to man."

Even so shallow a ritual as that of the Grange released a new
sense of dignity, that turned in an amazingly short time upon one
of the central problems of the economy. The talk "about prices
and such" set in motion forces which eventually established a
legal principle that is now recognized as an essential bulwark of
human freedoms in an industrial society the principle that a
privately owned business may be so "clothed in the public inter-
est" that it is rightly subject to governmental regulation.

294 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The principle did not spring full blown from the talk of the
Grangers. Its first fumbling statements were made as early as 1866
when an Anti-Monopoly Convention in St. Paul let loose much
cloudy rhetoric on the evils of collaboration between wheat
buyers, railroads, and railroad warehouses. The same people who
ten years before had clamored that railroads would solve the eco-
nomic problems of the frontier, now complained that railroads
were the cause of those ills. 'Monopoly' was the scapegoat of the
period, and indignation at its evils brought inward easement to
men harassed by fears of the moneylenders to whom they were in-
debted as often as not for land bought in the hope of speculative
profits. The individual incidence of new fiscal and industrial forces
created a vast confusion in the minds of the people.

By 1871, that confusion had been clarified, largely through
Granger discussion, enough to be focused in a demand for state
regulation of railroads and warehouses. Minnesota was one of
four states (Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois were the others) to pass
kws that year creating the authority for such regulation.

Those laws were very soon brought to the courts to test their
constitutionality. The first Minnesota case originated in the Olm-
stead County District Court, just north of Chatfield, in a suit
against the Winona and St. Peter Railroad to recover freight
charges in excess of those established by the 1871 law. The rail-
road defense claimed that the law was invalid because it infringed
on "the sacred right of contract" established by the railroad's char-
ter. The District Court upheld the railroad contention, and the
case was appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

There it was heard, and the decision written by a citizen of Chat-
field. C. G. Ripley was elected chief justice of the state's highest
court in 1870, and his four years of service in that office (before
ill-health led him to retire) produced a series, of decisions that
leads one to wonder why his name is so little remembered in the
town that was his home for nearly twenty years. Perhaps the
answer is to be found in the attitude expressed by a poem in one
of H. W. Holley's volumes:

WHEAT IS KING 295

JUDGE BUNKUM

He was a worker, ah! to spy him

With many books of reference nigh him;

And hear him talk of statutes hid

By Osiris in the Pyramid;

Which he'd dug out, sifted and sorted

And would in due time have reported,

One's soul with admiration burning

Stood paralyzed at so much learning! . . .

There was not then in force a law

But in it Bunkum found some flaw;

Such fearful cracks he found to rnend,

His work seemed like to have no end; . . .

Ah happy state, which never lacks

These volunteers for closing cracks!

Judge Ripley's learning, no matter what scoffing it evoked in
Chatfield, shone brilliantly in various decisions that he wrote. He
was no doctrinaire opponent to railroads, but out of his learning
he drew precedent and justification for a new concept of legal
right that might well have been a source of pride to his
philosopher-kinsman, the great Emerson. That his patient, lucid,
and practical examination of both law and fact commanded the
respect of his professional peers is attested by the circumstance
that much of Judge Ripley's point of view and mode of reasoning
were later embodied in the famous 'Granger decisions' (1876) of
the Supreme Court of the United States.

Those decisions established the right of the people to use their
governments, both state and federal, as protection against abuses
by the swelling aggregations of economic power.

There were still too few who understood the connection be-
tween those hated 'monopolies' and the world markets on which
they were dependent. When financial 'panic' struck the country
in 1872 great numbers of farmers drew back from their brief ad-
venture with the Grange, and in the backwash of reaction Min-

296 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

nesota repealed its "Granger laws/ But a beginning had been made,
and the nature of its origins permitted a hope, had an Olympian
considered the matter, that "the people, yes" were capable of
creating solutions for the problems that beset them.

Ill

"WHEAT, WHEAT, WHEAT! That was all you could see around here.
A man had a quarter section, he'd put it all in wheat except for
oats enough to feed his horses. All you had to do was sow it right
on top of the ground! Why, I remember one time our folks sowed
a ten-acre patch and a big rain came along before they could drag
it. Before it got dry enough to work, that wheat just sprouted and
come right up. Had a good crop out of it, too."

Thus William Murphy, not long before his death in his nine-
tieth year, remembered the years of his youth. Through all the
stories of those early years the same golden thread is woven: it
was wheat that 'made' the country.

The rich virgin soil of the prairies north of the valley, "black
as ink, and rich almost to glutinousness," had only to be turned
over during the summer and fall, left open to the weather until
spring, then dragged, and it was ready for planting. Mary Caroline
Price was fascinated by "teams on the prairie, quite a sight, four
breaking teams in one field ... It looked like business; the long
strings of oxen and horses [farmers often drove as many as six
animals to one breaking plow] and the drivers shouting and crack-
ing their long whips." The clearing of woodland cost much more
labor. William Pease's son and a hired man spent 165 man-days
of labor cutting and grubbing a ten-acre patch to the point where
it was ready for the plow. Newly cleared woodland would raise
only turnips or potatoes its first year or two, but when it was

297

298 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

planted to wheat it, like the prairie, produced double the yield of
older land; twenty to thirty bushels an acre was the average for the
first two or three crops and thereafter sixteen to twenty bushels
could be expected. One Bohemian family who bought an eighty-
acre farm in the early sixties made the whole $1600 of its price out
of the first year's crop.

Such fabulous crops called for fabulous labor in its harvesting.
Ripened grain permitted no delay, and every man and boy in the
region turned out to help with the harvest. Even clergymen laid
aside their professional dignities. Chatfield's first resident Episco-
palian rector, the Reverend F. G. S. Schatzel, wrote a vivid de-
scription for Harper's Magazine on the basis of his own experience
in binding wheat after a self-rake reaper.

He urged "all, no matter how small and fragile/' to try it the
corning season. After two days of "toughening out/' he reported,
"A feeling of physical endurance and power came over me which
struck me as being peculiarly noble. . . . My mind seemed to ex-
pand in its strength and assume a serener, because more powerful,
empire over my body. . . . Farewell now to old weaknesses and
despondencies/' All sorts of men shared in the experience:
"a tailor, a shoemaker, a harness-maker . . . lawyers, doctors,
preachers . . ." and all returned from the harvesting with "their
frames knit and toughened with toil . . . their health invigor-
ated, and their brains clear and powerful/' feeling "they were in
these things more fully paid than in the fifty or seventy-five dol-
lars with which their pockets were lined."

Even with these reinforcements the local labor supply was not
enough, and the Schatzel article described the arrival of " 'field
hands' from below." They were "a rough-looking set of fellows,
each . . . with a bundle or valise . . . looked like a detachment
of Goths or Vandals. . . . They want a regular Thanksgiving
dinner every day, and a breakfast and supper to match. . . . The
boys offset the burdens of the day with fun and song," and their
swearing was something fearful to hear: "very common in the
Northwest. An oath at every ten words is perhaps a fair average."
The farm wife seemed to Reverend Mr. Schatzel to bear the

WHEAT IS KING 299

heaviest burden of the season. Every day for three weelcs she had
to cook for a dozen men, "ravenous as wolves/' She was "nearly
worked to death . . . but she keeps up her spirits . . . always
has a smile of courage and strength . . . perhaps contributes her
small quota to the running repartee and laughter of her boisterous
'family' as she loves to call her guests ... so patient, and will-
ing, and obliging, that you hardly suspect how great the strain of
that harvest month must be to her system/'

After harvesting came threshing, and until well into the seven-
ties that continued to be done largely in the ancient, primitive
way. Those so fortunate as to have a barn floor large enough, spread
the sheaves there and drove the oxen over it, or beat out the grain
with a flail. More often a piece of earth was scraped bare and
tramped smooth to serve as threshing floor. The women some-
times helped with the flail; it was a pair of sticks of uneven length,
bound loosely together by strips of leather. The thresher knelt at
the edge of the floor and twirled the shorter stick over her head,
then brought it down on the heads of the grain. Afterwards the
chaff was winnowed out by tossing the loose grain in broad
wooden scoops and letting it fall again so the wind would blow
through it.

By 1867, a threshing machine of sorts had been brought into
the Chatfield province, a great clumsy contrivance powered by a
dozen horses or oxen hitched to a long pole and driven round and
round. Such a machine cost seven or eight hundred dollars, but it
threshed three or four hundred bushels a day, and the man who
bought it was busy from first harvest till mid-November, thresh-
ing for the farmers of the province. By 1876, steam threshing ma-
chines had come into use but one of them exploded and killed
three men instantly, besides injuring several others. The flail took
no such toll; some farmers preferred for years afterward to stick to
the old way.

When the grain was threshed it still had to be taken to market.
In the first years it all went to the River, The dust never settled on
the road to Winonar in the weeks just after harvest. William Mur-
phy stopped on the top of a hill one day to count 65 teams going

300 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

down through Burns's Valley to the river, and the editor of the
Democrat reported another day that he had met no loads of
wheat as he drove home from Winona.

It was a good two-day journey to Winona from Chatfield, and
there were wheat fields many miles to the west of Chatfield whose
harvest had to be hauled to the river. Some of the men who did
that hauling slept under their wagons and ate food they carried
from home, but those who could afford it stopped at wayside inns.
Henry Silsbee remembered how he used to hurry each evening
to his uncle's inn on the Winona road to listen to the talk of the
men staying there. One man told of sleeping under his wagon
the night before and waking in the dawn to look straight into the
eye of a copperhead coiled on the 'ex* above him. He vowed then
he'd never sleep out again.

Prices were always lowest at harvest time, so every farmer who
could wait for his crop money hauled his wheat after snowfall.
Few could wait for peak prices in May or June, or could spare
their teams at that season when the fields had to be planted. No
winter passed without some luckless traveler being lost on the
long, tortuous trails, and each spring there were freshly whitened
bones along the way, both beasts' and men's. Henry Silsbee re-
membered the winter night when the talk at his uncle's inn was
pitched in lower key as the men told of a poor Norwegian they
had found frozen to death, pinned under his load where it had
tipped over in one of the pitch-holes in the snow.

Every farmer kept enough of his wheat to make his year's supply
of flour, and the local mills bought a certain amount of wheat.
Merchants, too, would take wheat in payment for the bolts of
calico and the sugar, the coffee and other goods that a farm family
had to buy. But both those markets together could absorb only
a small part of the region's production, and it was seldom that
either could pay in cash. Farmers had to have cash to pay their
taxes, and to keep up with their obligations to the moneylenders.
Anyone who could devise the means for a cash wheat market in
Chatfield was meeting a real need.

WHEAT IS KING 301

J. C. Easton saw that need very early. On July 23, 1859, he
wrote to an Eastern friend:

I propose this fall to ship wheat and perhaps other grain to Chi-
cago, Milwaukee, or St. Louis. Our harvest promises to be very abun-
dant and there will be a large surplus.

I think % of the farms in Minnesota are encoumberd [sic] from
$100 @ $500 at high rates of interest. I hold a large amt. of mortgages
and can see no way of making the money but to devise some plan for
our surplus wheat.

I do not engage in this from any desire to speculate, as I have plenty
to do in my legitimate business but as there seems to be no one else
here to take it up I propose to see what I can do.

He went on to inquire after the possibilities of raising money
among his friends in the East for the venture and planned to de-
liver such wheat as he might buy to Winona till the River closed,
then to La Crosse which already had a railroad connection to Chi-
cago.

Apparently nothing came of that plan, for a year later he wrote
to another friend that "last year buyers from St. Louis, Milwaukee
and Chicago went all through the country and bought every
bushel" at 70 cents to 80 cents, approximately Winona prices,
though some 17 cents to 42 cents below Milwaukee prices for that
season. He thought there should be "plenty of buyers" for the
1860 crop. Milo White had built a 20,000 bushel granary in Chat-
field, and Easton was providing Augustus Haven with credit up to
$1,000 at a time for Haven's dealings in wheat and flour. Since
the Chatfield market was so well covered, Easton was looking
afield. During the winter of 1 8 59-60 he had bought some ten thou-
sand bushels in territory well to the west of Chatfield's province,
had it hauled to Winona, and sold it in May at an advance of
20 cents a bushel "as nice a thing on a short run as I have made
in the West."

Yet by the following year he decided the grain business on the
whole was "too uncertain . . . I think hereafter I will not dabble

302 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

with it ... but stick to my legitimate dealings in land and
money/' He found plenty to do in his own new Land Office town,
Winnebago.

But by 1867, he had pretty well skimmed the cream off that
'legitimate business/' and conditions of the wheat market had
stabilized considerably with the extension of railroads. The Wi-
nona and St. Peter line had come within eight or ten miles of
Chatfield in 1864, and the Southern Minnesota, at Lanesboro,
was only twelve miles from Chatfield. That year Easton borrowed
"all the money I can to buy wheat" at Chatfield and Lanesboro.
Two years later he tried his hand at a flyer in futures on the Chi-
cago market. The venture started small: he and three tested Chat-
field associates * put up $250 apiece, so the risk was divided,
though the manipulations were in Easton's hands. They were so
successful that Easton set up a commission house in Chicago in
the name of Easton and Holley, and started buying wheat and
other produce at most of the stations along the Southern Min-
nesota.

By 1870, Easton had agreements for the purchase and storage
of wheat in towns scattered from the River westward for nearly
two hundred miles, on both the Winona and St. Peter and the
Southern Minnesota railroads. The following year he was deep
in both the Milwaukee and the Chicago markets, then neck-and-
neck competitors for control of the American wheat and flour
markets.

That year he noted in a pocket diary the places where he was
each day, and the record is instructive. He made 14 different trips
to Chicago and Milwaukee and spent a total of 96 days in those
two cities, often going from one to the other and back again in
one day. From March 7 to April 4, he spent all his time "on
'change" in those two cities. He also made two trips to New York
City and other eastern points, two to St. Paul, and one to Duluth,
which was then competing with Milwaukee and Chicago for the
lake trade in wheat shipments. By January of 1872, Easton could

* They were Easton's brother-in-law, L. A. Johnson, a friend of Johnson's named
Shaw, and H. W. Holley, chief engineer of the Southern Minnesota.

WHEAT IS KING 303

write to his Chicago house that he handled **% of all Minnesota
flour/'

Easton was no longer a small-town operator. He had by that
time built warehouses at every station on the Southern Minnesota
and established banks in half a dozen towns in the southeastern
quarter of the state; most of the towns were larger than Chatfield
The grasp of those banks on the towns is suggested by a ktter lie
wrote to his representative in the Winnebago bank: "I expect yon
to get all the business in your town, as my other banks do. w

That same letter hints also at Easton's relations to the Southern
Minnesota. H. W. Holley, then general manager of the road, had
complained to Easton that his representative was "talking against
the railroad." Easton reminded his employee that "the railroad is
what makes the town. . . . The policy for . . . you and every
citizen is to stand by your road and conceal its faults and above all
never to advertise its faults. . . . Railroad men like all men want
to be treated courteously/ 7 He then gave "a form of a letter" for
his employee to write to Holley, saying it would be "ok if it has
plenty of nonsense in it of the right kind"

The "nonsense" that Easton recommended is of a curious va-
riety. The Winnebago altercation had apparently grown out of
some question of collecting certain notes that the bank held from
Holley's church. After smoothing over the details of that transac-
tion the letter concluded: "And now dear Friend let me ask an
interest in your daily prayers (and all the business you can send
me, which I hope to do to your entire satisfaction hereafter) . You
have mine now, particularly that Bro. Reynolds may early con-
vert you . . . back to the true faith." Churches were evidently
'good for' business, too, when treated to the right kind of "non-
sense."

There was no nonsense in the single-mindedness with which
Easton went after the wheat business along the Southern Min-
nesota. He evidently had a special agreement on shipping rates in
1871, and perhaps before that, though it apparently was not put
into writing. Even with the advantage of preferential rates, he
had a hard fight that year, with a man named Voss 7 for the con-

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

trol of the wheat-buying business. In May, 1872, he proposed to
Holley that "we pool the whole road" with Voss. "He and I could
close all the rest of the buyers ... I am not weak-kneed in this
suggestion but think it might be best for the road. ... He pro-
posed it last fall and would probably welcome it now. ... In
doing so I think we can still run our contract (inside) 7 retain
peace, and make perhaps as much all round/'

But Voss evidently did not welcome the proposal. In the en-
suing fight Easton squeezed every resource he had to gather the
funds required. It was a bitter fight. Several times Easton's letters
speak of "more trouble than is convenient/' and expressed regret
that he had so little time at home "only once in three weeks."
When a Chicago business associate suggested that his son would
like a job with Easton he was advised that the boy would not like
wheat buying, for it was "rough business." He accused one of his
own agents of joining "those who think I am such a low scamp/'
and warned him to change his tune if he wanted to keep his job.
And it was during that fight that Easton wrote that he could not
visit his mother in her serious illness, because "things here are so

tight."

By June 8 (a month before the current crop was ripe) , he could
write: "The fight on our road is over ... I am buying all the
grain on the S.M. Road." About that same time he ordered his
Chicago office to "shift $4,000 from the wheat act. to my personal
account via the Rushford office . . . say nothing to anyone about
this rebate." A few days later he wrote to Holley that he was "glad
Col. Thompson [president of the road] was not here during the
fight; it could not have gone better thanks to your plucky general-
ship."

But the peace so won was not enough, Easton, with 40,000
bushels of wheat for which he could get no cars, began looking
about for "a commission house arrangement that can control
more than the S.M. Road." In July, he wrote the manager of the
Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad, which ran from St. Paul
to Duluth, asking his rates to Duluth: "rates on the S.M. Road

WHEAT IS KING 305

are too high." A little later he advised his Chicago office that he
might "give up wheat on the SMRR."

He did not "give up wheat/' As the new crop ripened he went
into the fields of a dozen Chatfield farms to examine the prospec-
tive yield, and laid plans to finance even bigger operations. To
one bank in which he had an interest he wrote suggesting that
they put their "surplus" into his business; he was putting $50,000
out of his Chatfield bank's operating capital into wheat buying
not precisely orthodox banking methods. He wrote that he was
further assured of "up to $100,000 or $200,000" from one Camp,
apparently known to his correspondent.

On August 15, 1872, he signed a contract with Clark Thomp-
son, president of the Southern Minnesota, covering his operations
along that road. That agreement was, apparently, the first time
that Easton's dealings with the road were put into writing. The
contract was a clear and unmistakable violation of the law that
the state legislature had passed the year before, though the con-
tract made no reference to the law. Here, as in earlier dealings in
land, Easton and his associates evidently did "not care a fig for
the law." Why he should have taken the risk of putting such a
contract into writing, when he had operated on what was evi-
dently a similar though unwritten agreement for at least two years
before, is nowhere made explicit; circumstances that developed
later suggest it may have been a move in the interminable jockey-
ing of one group against another for the control of a profitable rail-
road.

By that contract Easton agreed to provide all facilities and per-
sonnel necessary for the buying of wheat at every station on the
road, "at prices dictated by the SMRR." He was in turn to be paid
all expenses of such purchase, plus 10 per cent on all money used
in the transaction, plus a commission of % cents per bushel. The
wheat was to be sold, each day, 'to arrive' on the Milwaukee mar-
ket Whatever the sale yielded, over and above the payments to
Easton, was to be kept by the company as payment of freight
ofiarges. According to the contract itself, its purpose was "to en-

306 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

able the Railroad to regulate and sustain rates of freight/' It com-
pletely ignored the state law that set up a system of freight
rates.

The obvious effect of this contract was to cut Easton's freight
charges to the point where he could pay prices nearer to the Mil-
waukee market than would otherwise be possible. His competitors,
forced to meet his prices while paying the higher freight rates,
simply could not stay in business.

Another, and hidden, advantage accrued to Easton. Although
the contract said he was to buy "at prices dictated by the SMRR"
his letters make it clear that he himself largely decided his prices.
While he was freezing out competition he ordered his Milwaukee
office to send both highest and lowest prices each day, and he
bought on the basis of the highest price. When most of his com-
petitors had been forced out, and the Milwaukee market went up,
he ordered only the average price sent, making his local prices
lower. Still later, when he was selling wheat to four Minnesota
mills, he ordered the "taking price" so he could "get the maxi-
mum" out of his sales. As the prices he ordered were sent over the
railroad telegraph wires, and were the only daily market informa-
tion available along the Southern Minnesota, other dealers could
do nothing but act on the basis of those quotations, whatever dis-
crepancies might appear when later weekly reports were issued in
market publications. It all made for a nice manipulation of the
sacred laws' of supply and demand.

Yet it is clear that Easton was not the only one to benefit by
that contract. Rival buyers suffered, but for the whole period of
Easton's operations on the Southern Minnesota the prices paid to
farmers were from three to five cents nearer Milwaukee prices
than they had been before. There is nothing to show that Easton
understood the social implication of the world market on which
he dealt, but there can be no question that he was one of the
men who did much to create the techniques by which that market
could operate. And the prices he paid during the life of his illegal
contract meant substantial increases in the money that circulated
in that section of the state. For one ten-month period for which

WHEAT IS KING 307

figures are available, from $50,000 to $80,000 was added to the
money in the pocket of farmers in southeastern Minnesota, a sum
that made a real difference in their economic well-being, in that
particular period.

The process of getting that money into the hands of the fann-
ers themselves involved a host of lesser fry called 'wheat buyers*
who were "in a class by themselves," according to Reverend Mr.
SchatzeFs article in Harper's. Chatfield usually had about a dozen
in operation one for each of the local merchants, plus those
hired by Easton and outside dealers. Most of them were local
men, familiar figures among the loungers on street corners and
barrooms, galvanized at harvest time into the activity they
sedulously avoided through most of the year.

The wheat buyers took their stations each morning at
strategic points along Main Street, disputing loudly among them-
selves for particularly coveted posts. Each was armed with
a 'wheat tester* a copper quart measure on a long rod scaled
for use as a balance. When a wagonload of wheat appeared they
rushed into the street brandishing their testers and shout-
ing their prices and the names of their principals, each
striving to outshout his rivals. As the unpaved street filled
with creaking wagons and the hot afternoon air grew heavy
with dust, the hubbub mounted to pandemonium. C. M. Lovell,
a merchant who liked to do his own buying, was particularly
given to high excitement: as the day wore on and the bidding
grew frenzied he often climbed onto a moving wagon he had
marked for his own and whipped the horses past the other buyers
to his warehouse. Sometimes the buyers stationed themselves
outside of town on one of the roads leading in from a section where
the crop was known to be particularly good.

When a farmer accepted a bid the buyer climbed onto the
wagon, plunged his tester into the golden grain, and weighed a
rneasureful to determine its grade. Then he filled out a printed
ticket, with the name of the farmer, the grade, and the price.
The farmer thereupon drove to the warehouse to which the buyer
was attached, had his load weighed and the amount entered on

308 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

his ticket. If a man hauled his wheat on to the railroad he was
paid two or three cents a bushel more than if he unloaded it in
Chatfield. The tickets were sometimes cashed at the warehouse
(Easton used that method ), sometimes credited against the
farmer's account with the merchant to whom he sold, some-
times taken to some local bank or merchant for cashing. G. H.
Haven did not buy wheat for himself, but he cashed the tickets
issued by buyers for Van Dusen, a Rochester merchant turned
wheat buyer, who came to control an extensive and very profit-
able line of elevators across the southern half of Minnesota.

The fever of speculation was almost as widespread in the wheat
boom as in the earlier land boom. Almost everybody who could
scrape together a little money tried a flyer in wheat at one time or
another. Lucian Johnson was one small speculator whose in-
termittent diaries afford amusing instances. Besides his successive
and variously patterned partnerships with his brother-in-law,
Easton, he was continuously engaged in "deals" of his own. On
September 15, 1871, for instance, he recorded: "John O'Leary
and I have made a bargain like this. I am to pay him for 200
bushels of wheat delivered in good order in Chatfield and if wheat
does not reach 1.25 here or St. Charles I am to have the wheat
for 80$ per bush, within 3 months from this date." The sporting
excitement could be heightened by a variety of devices. On a
February day, Johnson "went to Dover and St. Charles with a
load of stump-tail wheat could not sell to either got it ground at
Troy 3^ a bushel/' Twenty-five miles by team in a Minnesota
February seems a high price for the slim chance of passing off
worthless wheat at the market price of $1.05.

That sort of petty speculation went on with dozens of persons,
but all added together they were small-time stuff compared with
Easton's operations. Besides his contract with the Southern Min-
nesota he was buying wheat in at least seven major towns on
other railroads, and was carrying on large-scale operations in oats,
pork, salt, and other commodities. At this point he also took on
large-scale operations in railroad stock.

Early in 1892, Easton wrote to a Vermont associate that he

WHEAT IS KING 309

had been "invited to form a syndicate to buy huge amounts of
Southern Minnesota Stock" and suggested that his correspondent
invest from $25,000 to $100,000 in the venture. No further refer-
ence to the deal is found in Easton's extant letters, but in Novem-
ber of that year the Southern Minnesota was forced into bank-
ruptcy by a group of New York men, including Russell Sage, who
had just acquired a heavy interest in the Milwaukee road, to
which the Southern Minnesota was attached. The petitioners
described themselves as "trustees" for holders of Southern Min-
nesota bonds whose interest had been defaulted ninety days
earlier.

Clark Thompson, president of the Southern Minnesota, tried
frantically to prove that the company was not bankrupt; the
court before which the issue was drawn characterized his affadavit
as "very long . . . filled with an account of the machinations of
enemies . . . many matters not necessary to be considered at
this time/' The petition of the bondholders was granted and a
receiver was appointed.

Easton's name appears nowhere in these proceedings, but the
choice of Charles Mcllrath as receiver makes it clear that Easton
was of the winning party. He and Mcllrath had accumulated a
long list of mutual favors since the days when they both operated
in Chatfield, just after the Land Office went there. As state
auditor for some years thereafter Mcllrath had been in a position
to be useful to his friends.

Easton's contract with the Southern Minnesota was renewed on
May 6, 1873, and the next month Mcllrath asked the court for
instructions on rates under the Minnesota Railroad act of 1871.
At the same time Easton petitioned for permission to sue the
company under that act for having charged him excessive freight
on salt shipments. Easton's wheat-buying contract was not men-
tioned, but affidavits were presented showing that "none of the
railroads of the state have obeyed the statute" because it was an
"unconstitutional invasion of charter rights." Moreover, Mcllrath
argued, the Southern Minnesota could not make enough for
running expenses if it obeyed the kw.

31O THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The Court professed itself "embarrassed" because the "con-
stitutional aspect 7 ' of the law was still to be determined: "We
decline to order the receiver to disregard the state law," the
decision read, "but we do not at present make any more peremp-
tory order."

That was in June, 1873. The Southern Minnesota bankruptcy
dragged on for another four years, while the various interested
parties jockeyed for advantage. In the meantime Minnesota
Grangers had rallied their strength and elected a substantial num-
ber of antiinonopoly legislators and other state officials. They
repealed the clumsy law of 1871, which had proved unworkable
without regard to its constitutionality. A new, much milder,
regulatory law was passed, and an investigation was ordered to
determine whether Easton's wheat buying had been, in fact as in
rumor, monopolistic. Quantities of evidence were taken, includ-
ing Easton's 1872 contract with the SMRR, and the story was
not very hard to make out.

No use was made of the evidence collected by the legislative
investigation until after the United States Supreme Court had
approved the right of the states to regulate the railroads. There-
upon "Greiser and, others" sued Mcllrath, receiver for the South-
ern Minnesota, for having discriminated against them in the
matter of freight rates, "contrary to the provisions of the act of
Minnesota Legislature," and cited Easton's contract with the
railroad in evidence. The Federal Court, District of Minnesota,
found, in 1877, *^at ^ e plaintiffs were entitled "to equal rates,
or to the refund of the amount of the discrimination" in Easton's
favor. A "special master" was appointed to "collect data, examine
books and witnesses in addition to proofs already taken." Either
the "special master" was very thorough, or the Southern Minne-
sota was very successful in stalling off the decision: his report was
not ratified until 1882. The railroad was then ordered to pay
the complainants $69,399, or 3.97 cents per bushel they had
shipped. Whether or not those payments were made, or what
part of them was met by Easton, does not appear in the records.

WHEAT IS KING

In the meantime the control of the Southern Minnesota had
been determined for that generation. Early in 1877, a 'new'
company was organized by the holders of the second mortgage,
and the holders of other bonds were forced into what might be
characterized as a junior partnership. The president, vice presi-
dent, treasurer, and four of the directors of the 'new' company
were from New York and Connecticut; the one Westerner on the
board of directors was J. C. Easton. For three years he acted as
general manager of the road, giving Lanesboro as his address in
the company's reports to the state railroad and warehouse com-
mission, though he continued to live' in ChatfiekL

In 1879, Easton, with two New York men, formed the com-
mittee which prepared the final absorption of the Southern Min-
nesota by the Milwaukee Railroad. He was mentioned, a year or
two later, as likely to be the next president of the Milwaukee, but
that position never devolved upon him. Whether that was his
choice or his defeat is not recorded; the temper of much of his
record gives leave to suppose that he was quite content to leave
others the public show of power so long as he held its substance.
He continued as a director of the Milwaukee until his retire-
ment from active business in 1896.

In 1883, he built himself a baronial haH above the River out-
side La Crosse, and lived there until his death. The farm he kept
in Chatfield's province and the show place he developed at La
Crosse he spent a lot of money breeding race horses there
seem to have absorbed most of his interest in later years. He was
reputed, in Chatfield, to have been Minnesota's first millionaire,
and he left a substantial fortune on his death. But now the show
place above the River is an empty shell.

That the countryside where Easton began the gathering of
his fortune is not likewise an empty shell might, in a hasty judg-
ment, be called no fault of his. But to judge thus would be to
judge partially. The Root River valley remains a region more
than commonly blest in the soil it was given in the long sum of
geological time. If its hillsides begin to wear thin and its streams

312 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

are choked each spring with living soil, the fault lies no more
with Easton than with the men who resented his power, and
joined the Grange to make laws to limit it.

For even the Grangers, for the most part, thought that Min-
nesota soil was "inexhaustible/ 7 and went blindly ahead gutting
their land with crop after crop of wheat. They understood the
nature of their knd little better than they understood the nature
of the world markets that absorbed the wheat from that land.
Perhaps the best of the region's 'luck" was an event that in its
happening called down men's curses on the land. In 1878, the
wheat crop failed almost utterly, struck by a disease that withered
it stock and ear. Do what they would thereafter, farmers could
not grow wheat enough to keep them alive. They were forced to
diversify their farming, and thus, unwittingly, to preserve them-
selves from the ruthless exploitation of a one-crop system.

PART

Eleven

Is the Miller

I

A SICK OLD MAN fumbled with the latch of the oaken lattice that barred
him inside the little bedroom behind the parlor. His attendant had
gone for an hour and he was lonely for the sun that shone on the new
grass outside his window. When the latch suddenly gave way and the
latticed door swung open, his loose-jointed length swayed with excite-
ment as he shuffled into the other room. If he went out the front way
'they' would see him and talk him into such confusion that he would
find himself locked in again. He felt his way to the back of the house.

Outside the kitchen door he stood sheltered by a clump of lilac
bushes and blinked in the clean light, groping after memories of the
years when he had driven a spanking team through such light as this.
He had followed every road out of the valley in those days. He had
bought wheat and swapped horses and bargained with farmers for
everything they raised or needed, and men had laughed with his joking
even when he took away the best of their cows or the most of their
money.

The roads all ran together in his mind and a dizziness came over him.
He looked at the grass under his feet. A mole was working there, and
the old man followed its trail. From the first mound of black earth
pushed up through the grass it was four paces to an open hole with
earth thrown out beside it. He counted eleven such exits in the eighty-
seven paces of its length before the trail stopped at the foot of the
maple, but nowhere had the mole made good an escape from his dark-
ness. The man stood bowed beside the tree, fumbling dimly with the
pattern of peace-and-unpeace in the earth at his feet. It was so like the
pattern of his days since his team and his bargaining and the old jocose
ways were gone from him.

3*4

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 315

Swaying a little, he felt the nearness of the tree. A twig brushed his
face, and he reached a hand to break it off. He counted five clusters of
buds on the twig. They were the color of wine, and each bud opened
to let five threads of white spray out. There would be five seeds from
every bud, he figured . . and suddenly emerged from dimness into
the memory of a day when he had watched the man on his farm open
the furrows of black earth, and helped with the planting of thousands
on thousands of maple seeds. They had come up thick, he remembered,
and maple trees had been planted all over the town from that field.
This very tree . . .

He lifted his head and looked at the tree dressed in April radiance.
He had planted it there, with his own hands, when it was a sapling so
slender that he could have broken it as he broke this twig. Now its
trunk was thicker than his own and it stood adorned in light. But
he ...

His hands fell slack at his side. Unpeace closed in upon him and he
stumbled slowly back to the house, where someone was calling his
name.

318 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

silk, to remove the bran and other coarse particles, the flour was
complete.

With Minnesota's hard spring wheat, however, this process
heated the grain and clogged the stones. A French miller solved
the problem. Perrigault, of Paris, bought Minnesota wheat be-
cause it was cheap and his customers were poor. But possessing a
craftsman's integrity he experimented with its grinding and discov-
ered that rather simple alterations obtained from hard wheat a
flour whose excellence was soon known beyond his own neighbor-
hood.

What he did was to set his first run of stones the maximum
distance that would crack the wheat berries, and run them at
about half the usual speed. After one such grinding the mash
was sent through a series of sieves and fans that drew off the
troublesome bran. The resultant 'middlings' were then sent back
through one or more pairs of stones, this time set closer, and
ground into "the finest flour any miller could produce." There
was little waste in such milling; the flour was faintly dark in color,
but it made white bread of a quality exceeding that of any other
flour. As other millers learned the process the demand for Min-
nesota wheat went up, and so did the price.

By 1865, three brothers named LaCroix were teaching the
French method to millers in Montreal. Alexander Faribault,
whose father had left Canada for the Minnesota fur trade in
1796, heard of their skill and persuaded them to set up the new
process in his mill on the Cannon River. Within five years there
were forty mills on that river, some sixty to eighty miles northwest
of the Root River, and all were making flour by the French proc-
ess. The LaCroix brothers were kept busy building their 'mid-
dlings purifiers' for millers throughout the state.

Millers throve on the Root River as well. The state geologist
in 1874 reported thirty-two flour mills on the Root and its
affluents, sixteen of them within twenty miles of Chatfield.

One of those mills stood at the point where the West Chat-
field road dropped from the bench to the river bottom. Another,
the most famous, stood a mile and a half northwest of town, on

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 319

the site of Chatfield's first sawmill. A third was about the same dis-
tance south of town, just below the point where Thomas Twiford
had forded the river for the last time when he Erst came to the
valley. The story of those three mills, of their meaning for village
and wheatland, and of the forces that eventually dismantled
them, is yet another chapter in the story of America's transforma-
tion from a local to a world economy.

Ill

WHEN SAM DICKSON arrived in Chatfield he had seen the Ameri-
can land from Sangamon County to California. What brought
him to Chatfield, a year ahead of the Land Office, no one remem-
bers, but he had with him a couple of thousand dollars that he
turned to good account in the bustling speculation in land. By
the time Milo White made his memorable journey to bring
flour to Chatfield, Sam Dickson had already built the shell of a
flouring mill.

It stood below the westerly edge of the bench, and its wheels
were turned by water brought from the creek in a 'race' half a mile
long. The walls of the lower floor were of stone cut from Winona
Hill on the opposite side of town; the upper part was built of
lumber from the sawmill a mile up the creek. The race was dug
and thfe building enclosed before the cold came, so that Dickson
and the millwright he brought up from Galena were able to work
through the winter building the elaborate system of 'chests' and
'elevators' and 'chutes' on which the operation of the mill de-
pended.

Norman K. Culver, the millwright, came with his family on
the stage from Winona a day or two after Milo White got home
with his flour. (His wife never forgot the God-forsaken look of
the town that day, and never ceased to long for the York State
home she had left.) When the storage bins were ready, Dickson

320

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 321

went through the countryside persuading farmers to sell their
wheat to him instead of hauling it to Winona. With the first rush
of water after the ice went out, the millwheel began turning,
and Chatfield produced its own flour.

The mill was a center of interest, partly from the immemorial
fascination of the milling process itself, partly from the salt and
eccentric character of the miller whom Dickson had engaged.

John Kaercher came from Alsace-Lorraine and his broad
Alsatian speech was itself an entertainment. Honest John was
one miller whom the farmers trusted. He attended no church, but
on Sundays he "invited his hands and others to hear him expound
the gospel from his viewpoint/' which was that of "an extreme
optimist." His first wife died, and Chatfield folks were vastly
edified when they heard that 'Honest John' had advertised for
another: 'Time was too precious for courting/' he told them.
He got one "a fine-looking, well educated woman" who wasn't
afraid of work: she'd get up on a farmer's wagon and throw off
the sacks of wheat as quick as a man. And she always had a cheer-
ful word for everyone. But she wore bloomers! It was the first
pair ever seen in Chatfield or in Minnesota, for that matter
and they were perhaps a sign of the independent spirit which
after a few months brought John Kaercher to agree to a separation
and her return to the East.

'Honest John' left Chatfield not long after to run a mill he
had bought at Troy, a few miles down the road to Winona; in all
he owned and operated four different mills within twelve miles
of Chatfield, and was reputed to have made and lost as many
fortunes. In 1861, his place at Dickson's mill was taken by James
Cussons, the English miller whose nine-year stroll across the con-
tinent was so engagingly set down a half century later in his
own reminiscences.

Cussons immediately recognized Chatfield's need of an addi-
tional and year-round cash market for wheat. He stopped grind-
ing grists and paid for all wheat either in cash or with flour at a
fixed ratio. A Winona firm advanced the money for this opera-
tion and marketed the flour, and the Nonpareil mill was soon

322 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

turning out eighty barrels of flour every day. A steam engine
was installed to run the mill when the creek was frozen.

The miller's life was not an easy one. He worked from six in
the morning to twelve at night, with only a half-grown boy to
help him, and the air he breathed was filled with impalpable dust
of the flour he made. Three years in Dickson's mill left James
Cussons seriously ill with the old tubercular complaint that had
set him walking northward three years before, and he gave up
the mill for a summer of hunting and fishing on the Root River.
In the fall he undertook to 'keep store' as a theoretically easier
way of earning a living for his family, but by spring he was con-
vinced that "not all burdens are carried by millers." His health
was worse rather than better: a doctor told him he could not hope
to live through another winter.

But James Cussons thought otherwise. For the second time
he sent his wife and children to her father's home and betook
himself to the open air. This time he went into the pine woods
of Wisconsin, with "a noted pioneer and trapper" from their
borders. Two Chatfield men went along for the summer, and
James Cussons fished and kept the camp while the others hunted
deer and bee-trees. The Chatfield men went back in the fall, with
two barrels of honey and a quantity of 'jerked' venison, but Cus-
sons and the trapper stayed on, pushing up the Menominee even
still farther into the wilderness. Flour for biscuits was their only
'civilized' food, and Cussons grew steadily stronger on his diet of
"catfish and yearling coon/' with venison and honey. By mid-
December he was ready to return so the two men built a pair of
boats out of boards they hewed from basswood trees, and loaded
them with the camping equipment and the furs they had taken.
(The furs later sold for several hundred dollars, and Cussons took
the three finest beaver skins to his wife.)

The river was filmed with ice in the quiet shallows near the
banks when the two started for the Mississippi and home. A few
miles above Winona they were caught on an island and had to
stay there through two days of a blizzard. Then the ice was firm
enough that Cussons, the lighter of the two men, could venture

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 323

across to the Minnesota shore for help. At the first house he
reached he found a woman alone, frantic with fear that her hus-
band had been lost in the blizzard on his way to mill, which was
two days' journey distant. She had no flour, nor any other food
but a little salt pork. Cussons found a bag of 'shorts'
a milling waste used for cattle feed in the barn and showed
the woman how to make cakes from it. When he had eaten, he
went on to the next house to borrow a team. By that time it was
thirty degrees below zero, and the next settler would not venture
out for fear he would freeze. He did let Cussons take the team,
however, and when he got back to the River the ice was so thick
that he drove easily to the island after his partner and their furs.
That night they slept in a house, "the first time in four months/'
. . . When Cussons reached Ohio, a week or two later his
wife received him "as one from the grave/' Interestingly enough,
he never suffered again from tuberculosis.

Two years later Sam Dickson again offered Cussons a three-
year partnership in the Nonpareil mill. Cussons had picked up
enough of the new technique of flouring that he did considerable
rebuilding of the mill, and his flour soon commanded premium
prices in New York, where he shipped by way of Duluth. By
the terms of the contract Cussons was to pay half of the expenses
and take a third of the profits from the mill. At the end of the
three-year period his share of profit was $30,000. Dickson was
outraged by the figure despite his own $6o,ooo-dollar profit and
refused to renew the contract. To all Cussons' offers to buy or
rent the mill Dickson's answer was: "You're crazy if you think
Fll part with a mill that pays as this does/ 7 He could hire a miller
for $50 a month and keep all the profits. So for the second time
James Cussons left Chatfield not knowing that he would ever
return.

Dickson's mill went on with a succession of hired millers, who
could scarcely avoid "making money' for their employer in those
particular years. But the flour lost the pre-eminent quality that
had commanded premium prices, and the mill on the West Chat-
field road was just one of the sixteen operating in the province.

324 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

The little sawmill up the creek had long since been turned into
a gristmill; its title was held jointly by Dickson and Cussons, but
during the early seventies it lay idle most of the time. Cussons
was too far away to attend to it himself, and Dickson had bigger
fish to fry.

He had gone into partnership with J. C. Easton and Lucian
Johnson in a new milling project, down on the North Branch of
the Root River, a mile or two south of town. The land had come to
Easton in a mortgage foreclosure some years before. Dickson held
a half interest in the undertaking, and Easton and Johnson di-
vided the other half between them. The building was done in the
summer of 1873, and Lucian Johnson took general charge of
the construction.

It was exactly the kind of job Johnson liked best. For thirty
weeks he had from three to a dozen men working for him, with
enough shift in the actual persons to give him a continuously
fresh audience for his stories and sly humor. He had enough
authority to accord with his standing as a "top buggy farmer/' and
enough division of responsibility to make it somebody else's busi-
ness if the deal didn't turn out well.

It held, too, the chance for the kind of personal dickering and
management of shifting details which delighted Johnson. Ex-
cept for parts of the actual machinery, the mill was entirely
fabricated from local materials. The stone for its foundations
was cut on John Murphy's land by one of the Halloran boys, and
the heavy beams were hewed by two farmers in the neighborhood
from their own trees. Lath and flooring came from one sawmill
and siding from another. The hundred bushels of lime used for
plaster and whitewashing were burned by Orrin Thurber in a
limekiln up Cumminsville way, and the plastering hair was pro-
vided by one of the local butchers. Assembling those materials
must have given Lucian Johnson endless delight: he set down
every least detail in the pocket diary of that year.

North Branch Mill went into production early in 1874, turning
out a hundred and fifty barrels of flour each twenty-four hours.

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 325

A little hamlet grew up around the mill to house the workers
in the mill and cooper shop. After three years it showed so large
a profit that its capacity was doubled at a cost of $50,000, the
local legend says, though in light of the original cost of $30,000,
set down in Johnson's diary, that figure seems unlikely. The
first harvest after the enlargement was almost a total failure, and
the legend remains that Easton himself lost the whole sum of
$50,000. That too seems unlikely; though no complete account
can be put together, occasional items from Easton's books sug-
gest a different story. In 1883, for instance, Easton's ledger
recorded the expenditure of $99,571.67 for wheat at North
Branch Mill, over a period of slightly more than twelve months.
It is unlikely that such spending would have continued with-
out commensurate profit.

Four years later, however, the mill had lain idle long enough
for Sam Dickson to decide he wanted to wind up the partnership.
Early in March one of the clerks in Easton's bank wrote to
Easton in New York that Dickson had come into the bank and
made "a give or take offer" with the mill on one side and the
land-plus-a-thousand-dollars on the other. The clerk thought the
mill was the better bargain, and enclosed an itemized estimate of
the value of its equipment, amounting to $8,285. He wrote that
he had "been advised that these prices are low, and that firms
in Minneapolis make a business of buying such machinery/' (A
millwright who had worked in that mill saw the inventory half
a century later and said the prices were about double the actual
worth of the equipment.) The clerk felt that Dickson should
make a better offer if he did not "want the mill torn down/' and
complained that Dickson was saying around town that he would
apply for a court order if there was no other way to get a settle-
ment.

Easton took his time about answering. His reply, on Milwaukee
Railroad stationery, said: "I can't see the need of so much haste
on Sam's part. I won't be hurried but will go to Chatfield as soon
as convenient If ... he wants to go into court, all right in

326 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

fact, am not sure but that is best . . . Confidentially I am in-
clined to say take the $1000 and land, but don't tell anyone that
When I see you we will decide."

It was full summer when Easton got back to Chatfield, and he
had other things to attend to before he settled the matter of the
mill. He transferred the ownership of the Root River Bank to G.
H. Haven that summer, and began preparations for moving his
family to La Crosse, where he was building his big estate on
the banks of the River. He had blooded horses to buy, and to race
against other noted trotters in the region. But eventually he got
around to making a settlement of the mill matter.

The scene of that discussion is not hard to imagine. Sam Dick-
son by that time was a white-bearded patriarch who enjoyed the
nickname of Uncle Sam, and was as little inclined as his proto-
type to be "put upon/' even by the richest man in Minnesota*
The years of financial success had hardened Easton's impatient
energies into authoritative crispness yet he never lost his enjoy-
ment of country bargaining with the men he had known through
his thirty years in Chatfield. The two men, with Lucian Johnson,
met in the office of the bank, and Johnson's long loose figure
and sly ribaldry made a curious foil for the other two. G. H. Haven
very likely served as a quiet moderator for the wider extremities
of the argument when Dickson renewed his give-or-take offer.

The legend says that Lucian Johnson suggested they flip
a coin to decide which way the bargain should go, and that G. H.
Haven demurred against such an approach to gambling in the
office where he had assumed responsibility for his depositors'
funds. The three principals, respecting the integrity of a man
whose scruples were beyond them, stepped outside and flipped a
half dollar on the sidewalk in front of the bank. Years afterward
there were Chatfield men who loved to tell how mystified they
had been by the spectacle of that flip-of-a-coin, and by Easton's
peering through a crack of the board walk to see which way the
coin had fallen.

Whatever the truth of the story, the mill became Dickson's
property in 1887. It was operated only intermittently after that,

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 327

for flour prices had fallen so low, and the huge Minneapolis mills
so dominated the flour market that the local mill was no longer
a source of easy profits.

Something comparable was happening to a dozen lesser
manufacturing enterprises in Chatfield, and the Democrat's com-
ments on the circumstances that led to the town's loss of one
small shop after another add up to an impression that after the
Civil War the national philosophy of 'rugged individualism' went
far towards destroying those elements of community planning
which had contributed so much to both the flavor and the
substance of Chatfield's earlier years.

In 1859, Bishop's History of Fillmore County had offered a
prophecy that was nine parts invitation. 'The rapidly increasing
demand for manufactured articles in a new and growing settle-
ment, with the high prices of transportation, must soon add
largely to the present investments in manufacturing here/' Less
than a year later a new sawmill was built (at the rapids where
the West Chatfield road crossed the Root River) and a set of
wool-carding machinery was installed alongside the saw. A few
years later that mill was completely equipped for spinning and
weaving woolen cloth- In 1868, the Democrat reported the woolen
mill was "going full blast . . . doing as good work as is done in
the West, if not in any other part oif the country," and selling
more than twelve thousand yards of cloth a year. In 1 880, that
mill was completely refitted, and sold "10,000 yards of cassimere,
doeskins, and flannels, about as many miles of yarn, besides stock-
ings for the million"; it gave steady employment to twenty-five
persons, besides fifteen more hired during the busy season.

The mill burned down in 1896, and when the owner asked
City Council to provide a "bonus" of $2,000 to enable him to
rebuild, the Democrat supported the request saying that "two
of the best Twin City firms" wanted to contract for the next sea-
son's output, assuring the success of the mill. But City Council
refused and the owner of the woolen mill took his skills to another
town that offered the inducements Chatfield refused.

The same kind of story was reported of a number of enter-

328 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

prises. A foundry was built by a joint-stock company in 1878, and
for five years made fence posts and other equally simple objects;
then it was sold to a man who made a new type of platform scales,
that sold "as fast as he can manufacture them." He would em-
ploy twenty-five men as soon as he could expand the foundry.
But fire took the foundry, too, and all of the owner's appeals were
not effective in raising enough Chatfield capital to rebuild his
shop. An Iowa town made him an offer and he built a very
successful business there.

The Democrat, under a succession of editors, tried repeatedly
to encourage greater support for the achievements of local crafts-
men who developed various promising processes. Samuel Critten-
den, a millwright, developed a flour 'purifier' that eventually was
bought up by one of the big mills in Minneapolis under monoply
rights; the Democrat called it "a pity he can't get capital to manu-
facture them here/' The same man later patented a butter package
that La Crosse men backed very profitably when no money was
forthcoming in Chatfield. A cigar factory, growing from one man's
work to the employment of half a dozen workers, developed so
large a market that its owner foresaw employment for fifty per-
sons, if he could raise the capital necessary for expansion. When
no one in Chatfield would invest he moved to Winona and pros-
pered as he had foreseen. The same thing happened with a tailor
shop. It was after those two episodes that the Democrat ex-
claimed: "If Chatfield genius and capital could get together this
would be the best manufacturing center in Southern Minnesota."

It was not lack of money that obstructed those enterprises.
More than a dozen Chatfield men left money enough at their
deaths to make it clear they, or their heirs, could easily have
backed those modest factories that contributed to the prosperity
of other towns; but what those men had gotten by exploitation
they did not invest for co-operative advances*

And yet ...

It was concerted action that finally achieved a railroad for the
town. Although Chatfield had not "decayed" as summarily as
Southern Minnesota officials had predicted, the need for a rail-

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 329

road grew more urgent each year. When the Southern Minnesota
went into bankruptcy for the last time before its absorption into
the Milwaukee system, the Democrat argued that Chatfield
should give up hope for help from that quarter and look to the
Winona and St. Peter that ran some miles to the north: "We must
have a railroad or Chatfield has seen her best days/' Proposals
for a road to run from St. Paul to the Iowa line led to talk of a
Chatfield company to co-operate with a St. Paul group in 1877,
and almost at once the Southern Minnesota made counter pro-
posals. The Democrat reported that J. C. Easton, "the richest
man in Minnesota" and owner of ''over one-fourth interest in
the Southern Minnesota Railroad" had promised that if the Chat-
field company would build to connect with the Southern Minne-
sota he personally would see that "the cars" were operated over
the line. A week later Colonel Thompson was reported as having
made "good propositions" for the disposal of the grading he had
done a few years before (without paying his workers) and offered
to finish the job "if Chatfield wishes it." Railroad hopes once
more ran high. Even the youngsters felt it, the Democrat re-
ported: a small boy was asking fifty cents for a ten-cent string of
fish "Railroad talk has begun; prices are going up."

Then the familiar pattern repeated itself delay, impatience,
explanations, and nothing done. In December, a long letter to
the Democrat argued that the Southern Minnesota would never
build as long as Chatfield's freight was hauled to its stations
anyhow; Chatfield was "one of the richest towns in the state"
but its money was "all in the hands of a few moneylenders" and
they in turn were tied to the Southern Minnesota. The town's
only hope lay in breaking away from that unholy combination
and looking to Winona for outside connections. As more weeks
passed without action, letters appeared announcing plans for
immediate emigration westward, "to the former grasshopper
country ... if we do not get a railroad."

So the winter passed, filled with rumors and planning. Finally,
on May 4, 1878, the Democrat published the legal notice of
incorporation of the Chatfield Railroad Company, which was

330 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

authorized to build from a point within the village to connections
with both the Southern Minnesota and the Winona and St.
Peter. I. F. OTerrall was the new company's president, Milo
White, vice president, and G. H. Haven, treasurer, with HL S.
Griswold (Easton's one-time clerk and currently state senator)
on the board along with Sam Dickson. Easton again made "a
proposition" on behalf of his road, but the matter of which way
to build the Chatfield road was still left open when the issuing of
bonds was voted on. Jordan Township was hard to convince,
but it finally voted $5,000, Elmira voted $10,000, and Chatfield
voted $35,000; the bonds were to be delivered to the local com-
pany only if it had trains running by September i, 1879, either
north or south.

The decision was finally made. After years of involvement
with the fortunes of the Southern Minnesota, Chatfield built
its own railroad northward to connect with the Winona and
St. Peter which was well on the way to absorption into the
Chicago and Northwestern company. Exactly why, nobody knows
any more. The "inside history" of Chatfield's relations with the
Southern Minnesota "would make remarkably rich reading, if
faithfully portrayed/' a county history of 1884 remarked. "But
in view of "other hearts that would bleed' the story perhaps better
be left untold in this volume." And that is as near as anyone came
to leaving a coherent account of the affair.

The first train ran into Chatfield on November 28, 1878.
The Democrat reported the occasion thus:

THE GREAT EVENT

Just at 5 o'clock Tuesday afternoon the shrill crowing whistle of the
locomotive announced its arrival at the depot grounds at the foot of
Spring Street. The effect was electrical and hundreds of our citizens,
many of whom had waited twenty years for that cheering sound,
flocked to the scene. There was no mistake this time the iron horse
stood there, puffing and crowing like a thing of life, while our people
were running over with enthusiasm, the citizens of Chatfield, Elmira
and Jordan had done their duty; through the untiring energy of the

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 331

contractors and laborers the promises of the Northwestern Company
were fulfilled and the RAILROAD WAS COMPLETED.

After the usual preliminaries; a delegation of our citizens informed
the employees of the company, seventy-five in number, that Chatfield,
fully appreciating their good work, had prepared for them a repast
which awaited their presence. The 'boys' were agreeably surprised at
this announcement and after three rousing cheers for Chatfield formed
in line and marched to the hall where they did justice to the good
things before them. Supper over, the party thanked the citizens for
the manner in which they had been received and after a parting song
returned to their quarters, happy as lords.

Bon-fires lit up Main street during the evening, while the prolonged
ringing of bells and the incessant firing of the big gun told that 'great
tribulations' were over and the time for rejoicing had come.

(A few days kter the village fathers voted $37.35 to pay for that
"entertainment.")

The Chatfield Railroad Company lasted just long enough to
get the road built and turn it over to the Chicago and North-
western. By 1881, the name of the Chatfield Railroad Company
had disappeared from the reports of the Minnesota Railroad
Commission. The trains ran into the chosen valley on 'the branch/

But they ran. That was the all-important fact. They were not
always satisfactory: the mail was often late, and the coaches were
second-best or worse. Connections with the Twin Cities were
never very good the Chicago and Northwestern was oriented to
Chicago as the Southern Minnesota had been to Milwaukee.

Now and again protests were loud, as when Francis Drebert,
editor of the Democrat since 1889, voiced his displeasure in 1894.
He was tired of having the mail from the Twin Cities delayed time
and again, and, after weeks of complaining, he told the world just
what he thought of the railroad company:

In 1878 Chatfield and the adjoining townships . . . turned over to
the Northwestern railroad the Chatfield branch as a free gift and the
Northwestern kid the track with old iron rails. As a return for this
magnificent bounty the people of this vicinity are allowed to travel in
a mean . . . emigrant car at the highest rate of fare. If they want to

532 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

visit Chicago they pay a much higher fare than it would cost them to
reach that city from St. Paul. Obstacles are thrown against their traffic
with St. Paul and Minneapolis, and connections are frequently broken
between those cities and this place. The road squeezes the orange with
the firmest and most relentless grip and gets all the juice there is in it,
notwithstanding all the railroad laws and railroad commissioners.

Drebert had no political aspirations, and he wore, he was fond
of saying, no man's collar. But a few weeks after that outburst
a curious passage appeared in the Democrat Its criticisms of
the railroad had

unfortunately . . . made a harsher impression than was intended
... no road has more gentlemanly, obliging and courteous officers
than the Northwestern, and we believe they feel a special friendship
for Chatfield and will do all they can to render their relations with
her business men and citizens pleasant.

Not long after that, the editor reported enthusiastically on the
delights of a trip to Chicago a trip made possible, he told the
world, through the generosity of the Chicago and Northwestern
in providing him with a pass. Corporations, it seemed, had their
own means of gaining their ends.

Yet one man in Chatfield remained, to the end of his life,
amazingly independent, in both act and understanding, of the
growing concentrations of economic power that were changing
the folkways of America. James Cussons, so far as can be judged
by the records that survive, understood those changes more clearly
than any other Chatfield person.

He came back to the chosen valley in 1876, a man who had
faced the temptations of despair, and in rising above them he
seemed to have attained uncommon insight into the nature of
the forces at work in his adopted country.

His first venture on leaving Chatfield in 1870 was a partnership
in Wisconsin, fifty miles west of Milwaukee, where he planned
to supply his mill with wheat bought at stations on the Southern
Minnesota. There he ran head-on into the power of the railroads.
The Southern Minnesota was dominated by the Milwaukee

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 333

policy of channeling all of Minnesota's hard wheat into
Milwaukee markets. Consequently the only freight rates that
Cussons could get for the wheat he proposed to ship were 'local'
rates the sum of separate rates from station to station, amount-
ing to nearly twice as much as the long-distance rate to
Milwaukee. Such rates were ruinous, so Cussons and his partner
took the remedy that still functioned as a cure for the economic
dislocations of individuals caught between competing forces of
the new industrialism. They packed up their milling equipment
and went West.

The West they chose was Easton's town of Winnebago, then
just entering the upsurge of the wheat boom. The new mill's
first season established Cussons' flour once more at the top of
the New York market and James Cussons thought that at last
he had found his El Dorado.

Then the grasshoppers came. For three years they stripped
every living leaf from the prairies beyond the Root River region.
The Cussons mill stood idle so long that its creditors forced a
bankruptcy. After twenty years of labor James Cussons was left
with nothing to provide for himself and his family.

It was a bitter time. "I had a real longing to get away/' he wrote
years afterwards, remembering, "and were it not that my family
needed all the aid and sympathy I could bestow on them, I should
have been, as were the pioneers, looking up something farther
west, where I could live a quiet life." When the sorry business
was over he went for a week to find "comfort in adversity by
getting close to nature, courting solitude, isolating myself from
my fellows." Then he came back nerved for another beginning.

There is temptation to read into the decision he made then a
prescience that the "quiet life" of a farther West would not out-
last his need, that one way or another he would have to meet,
on its own grounds, the growing industrial challenge to all in-
dividual craftsmen. More probably his action was based on the
fact that his only remaining property resource was a half interest
in the property that included the little mill up the creek from
Chatfield. Sam Dickson consented to take the Cussons' Winne-

334 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

bago house, plus a mortgage, for his half of the Elmira mill and
its ninety acres, and the Cussons family moved into the "small
unfinished house" that stood on the property.

James Cussons put the mill into such order as was possible
without any money to spend, set his eldest son, then seventeen,
to run it ? and set himself to work with axe and grub hoe to hack
a farm out of the uncleared land around the mill. Anne Colton
Cussons managed to infuse the whole situation with such gaiety
that her children afterwards remembered those years as the best
of their lives. They all worked, but they made friends everywhere,
and they felt no sting in their poverty.

Little by little the old patrons of Cussons' earlier years began
to find their way to his mill, asking for flour as well as grists of
feed. After a year so many townsfolk were asking for Cussons
flour that L F. O'Ferrall offered to advance credit so Cussons
could buy wheat and make flour for the local stores. Dickson and
other millers in the neighborhood, annoyed at Cussons' emerging
prosperity, cut their charge for feed grinding; Cussons matched
them three times, then stood on his own price, for his limited
capacity was crowded with flour, and losing the "small amounts
of feed grists was an advantage."

It was the beginning of a prosperity that really endured. Ten
years after he had taken over the Elmira mill, Cussons had paid
off his mortgage, doubled the capacity of his mill, and was sell-
ing all the flour he could produce in year-round operation.
Farmers drove their teams as much as forty miles to exchange
their wheat for his New Style flour. "I am doing a strictly home
trade/' he wrote in 1882, " . . . and it does me good to hear
our neighbors' wives declare that [our flour's] . . . sweetness
and moist bread producing qualities make it preferable to all
others." With the enlarged capacity there was sometimes a sur-
plus to be shipped to New York, where it commanded premium
prices. There might have been more money in marketing ex-
clusively in New York, but James Cussons took his satisfactions
otherwise.

It is a heartening story to follow. Here was a man who never

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 335

lost his sense of responsible relationship with the community
in which he lived. When the wheat crop failed he set himself
to find a way around the failure. At that distance from Milwaukee
he could have shipped wheat in from areas farther west: other
mills flourished on such a basis and Chatfield got its railroad
in the year of the wheat failure. But such a solution did not satisfy
Cussons' feeling that a miller should first of all provide bread
for the people among whom he lived. So year after year he ex-
perimented with different varieties of seed, and when Saskatch-
ewan Fife seemed to meet his requirements he put on a shrewd
and energetic campaign to induce his farmer-patrons to plant
the seed that he arranged to distribute. It answered well for a
time, but chinch bugs made new inroads and he tried a fresh
line of attack. By one means and another he managed to keep
his mill going on local wheat year after year.

The crowning recognition of his skill came from the Columbian
Exposition in 1893. There his New Style flour was awarded a
bronze medal and "diploma" certifying its excellence in "color,
strength, purity, and granulation/' The Chatfield Democrat re-
ported that the "diploma" had been framed and hung in the
post office, "that all may know the merits of his flour." With
expansive local pride the Democrat declared the award was given
for "the best specimen of flour exhibited from Minnesota . , .
When the large milling interests of the state is considered, to-
gether with the high reputation of Minnesota flour, it is a great
honor to Mr. Cussons to carry off such prizes for his modest mill
in Chatfield."

The Democrat's definition of that award still passes current
in Chatfield, but here again local pride and attested fact do not
wholly agree. The Cussons award was one of seventy-four identi-
cal awards to the flour of seventy-four Minnesota mills. Yet even
so it was no mean distinction for the little mill that ran with only
a 12-foot head of water. The flour exhibited at the Exposition
came from a dozen foreign countries as well as from most of the
American states. That Minnesota should capture one-half of the
total awards was indicative of the state's relative importance in

336 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

flour production. Eleven of the awards went to Minneapolis
mills, but the small mills were still, in 1893, important produc-
ers of Minnesota's famous floor.

They were not to remain so for long. The spring after the Co-
lumbian Exposition, James Cussons received a letter from Charles
Pillsbury, president of one of the big milling companies in Min-
neapolis, warning the local miller against violating an injunction
the company had taken out to prohibit anyone from "selling
flour . . . under a brand which is a 'colorable imitation' of Pills-
bury's Best." James Cussons was outraged by the letter and sent,
a spirited reply:

I trust you will be honorable enough not to copy my 'New Style'
brand or sell any flour under a resemblance of it. ... I have neither
copyrighted it or have I seen cause to notify other millers against in-
fringing on my property until I received your very courteous notice.
. . . You may feel justified in advertising your flour in this unique
manner but I am proud to inform you that it has not been necessary
for me to build up a home trade by such questionable methods. I
would rather treat my competitors as honest upright men until I had
cause to give them notice not to counterfeit my brand. I have plenty
to eat and wear, and am rich in honor.

Pillsbury replied impersonally that the letter which so aroused
Cussons had been sent "to every miller in the Northwest whose
name we could obtain/' And there the episode might be said to
have ended.

Yet a curious thing happened some time afterwards. Milo
White began to sell Pillsbury's Best at a price well below the mar-
ket. Milo White was a rule-or-ruin kind of man, people said, and
he'd hated Cussons ever since the miller told that story about how
White bought a load of 'shorts' and never knew the difference;
he'd be glad for the chance to help the big mills ruin his rival.

Whether or not the Minneapolis mill was directly involved in
the local price war, Cussons managed to outlast it without dis-
aster. And the experience seems to have been an element in the
thinking that found its fullest expression in a letter he wrote to

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 337

a near-by paper on Christmas Eve, 1900. He thanked the editor
"for the stand you take in behalf of the principles on which this
government was founded/' Cussons had formed his opinion of
those principles from a study he had made of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution, before taking out his first
citizenship papers, and he was strongly moved by what he saw, in
1900, as

the impending danger menacing our free institutions. . . . This plea
for acquiring colonies [after the Spanish War] from a commercial
standpoint is a fallacy. . . . Shall we endanger our liberties for the
pottage of commercialism that a few multi-millionaires may be the
better enabled to rivet the chains of power over us and thus entail on
our posterity an inheritance not a whit better than slavery or serfdom?
... I am unalterably opposed to trusts, combines, colonizations, and
a large standing army . . .

A few years after writing that letter Cussons left Chatfield for
the last time driven out by local jealousies, so he felt. The
Democrat characterized the situation as an instance of the town's
"prevailing policy . . . everybody for himself, and the devil take
the hindmost ... a sure way to have all fall into the hands of
his black majesty in the end."

The story had its beginning when Cussons bought a lot op-
posite the town square and announced he would build a large
steam mill there. Work had begun on the basement when five
men (including Milo White) got out an injunction to prevent
the building of a mill on that location, on the grounds that it
would be a nuisance and an eyesore. Cussons' friends urged him
to fight the injunction, but he would not. "If they don't want me
here I can go somewhere else," he said rather sadly to one of the
men working for him. But he was persuaded to continue in his
Elmira Mill, and the Democrat deplored the local "jealousy of
the individual that his neighbor will prosper a little more than
himself."

When the old Dickson mill was sold at auction a year or two
later, Cussons bought it and called in Adolph Pavlish to rebuild

338 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the interior. The new machinery had scarcely settled into working
order, and the bins were full of wheat, when fire broke out at the
mill in the dead of night. It burned to the ground, and the Cus-
sons family always believed the fire had been set. The wheat
stored in the bins was alone worth twice the amount of the in-
surance on the mill. Within a few weeks the entire family had
moved to Stewartville, some thirty miles distant, where the two
eldest Cussons sons were already established in a mill their father
had built for them.

The Democrat quoted an editorial from the Stewartville paper
gloating over the Cussons move and calling Chatfield "Sleepy
Hollow/' The jibe, the Democrat said, was "ill-natured but justi-
fiable/' Chatfield had grown conservative, and jealousy and
cliques were well on the way to destroying its prosperity. What
was needed was "a united effort to build everybody up rather than
an attempt to pull somebody down."

That move marked the end of Chatfield's flouring industry,
though not the end of warm and frequent social exchange be-
tween the Cussons family and their many Chatfield friends.
Thirty-odd people went from Chatfield to join Stewartville friends
in celebrating the Cussons golden wedding. The Democrat, re-
porting the occasion in lengthy detail, said Chatfield had never
had citizens more loved and honored than James Cussons and his
wife.

He enjoyed the leisure of those later years, when "the boys let
me tend the dam," as he wrote in one of his many letters to the
American Miller, his favorite trade journal. Its editor called Cus-
sons' "Reminiscences of a Half Century of Milling in America/'
published during 1904-05, one of its most interesting features.
"He himself wrote us he was loath to leave a world in which there
was so much to interest the inquiring mind, and ... so much
to love." But on April 5, 1911, death overtook him.

By curious chance it happened in Chatfield, when he was at-
tending the Masonic Lodge where he had been so long a member.
As an infrequent guest he was called upon to speak, but had ut-
tered only a few sentences when "he moved toward his seat, with

HAPPY IS THE MILLER 339

a hand pressed upon his breast and saying, 'Excuse me, gentle-
men/ sank lifeless to the chair/'

It would not be difficult to see in that moment the passing of
more than one man's life. James Marsar Cussons was of that elder
craftsman's tradition which knew, in the skill of hands and the
alert flexibility of thought, how it is that men subdue obdurate
matter to human purposes. The excellence of his flour stemmed
from that tradition rather than from any aggregation of powerful
machinery and scientifically trained technicians such as made
Minneapolis the flouring capital of the world. The excellence of
his life, if one may venture to judge, sprang equally from his
conscious and unbroken commitment of those skills to the needs
of the community of which he was a part.

PART

Twdvc

The ]\[eif Gospel: Diversify

I

THE SCREEN DOOR slammed shut and the red cocker sleeping in the sun
behind the little house opened an eye to see if this was the signal she'd
been waiting for. A small boy scuffed across the grass to the well house
and slammed a pail down on its stones while he unhooked the windlass
and waited for the water to smack against the wooden bucket. When
the bucket had filled he heaved his nine-year strength against the bent
handle of the windlass till the bucket careened into sight, dripping and
heavy. He splashed the water into the metal pail and carried it into the
house. When the screen door slammed for the third time the dog
stood quivering beside it, and the boy leaned over to rub her ears before
he picked up the bamboo pole leaning beside the door. "C'mon, Curly,
we're goin' fishinV

They trudged soberly across the town. Where the West Chatfield
road left the old mill behind, he pushed back his hat and shifted the
long pole on his shoulder. "C'mon, Curly," he said. "Rabbits 1"

The dog let out a joyful yip and the pair zigzagged down the dusty
road, weaving their own pattern of joyous escape. A team clattered
across the little bridge over the creek and the town urchin and the
farmer shouted cheerful obscenities at each other. The dust settled
again, except for quick spurts between the toes each time a bare foot
patted down onto the road. At the big bridge the boy ducked under the
strand of barbed wire into moist shadow where the black muck of the
river bank gave cool cushioning to his feet. Now he carried his pole
carefully parallel to the ground.

A muskrat plopped into the water ahead of him and he stopped
long to see just the angle of its hole beneath the cottonwood root He'd

342

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 343

put a trap there, come winter. Pa said he could get some traps if he
had the money to buy them. He stopped to untangle his line, frowning
that he'd let it get caught in the old scrub elder that leaned over the
water.

A little farther on he laid down his pole and scratched in a rotten
log for hellgramixiites while Curly barked at a squirrel she'd treed. Time
for squirrels when he'd caught some fish. Next summer he'd have a
gun. Maybe that dandy one he saw in the catalogue, or maybe the one
Uncle Mel said he might sell. If he had a gun . . .

The ripples of his planning ran one with the ripples of the water
where he dropped his hook, and he sank deep into the morning stillness.
The bluffs rose green and steep across the river and a mile upstream he
heard the faint clatter of a team going over the Cummingsville bridge.
A kingfisher swooped above the river and a killdeer cried from the shal-
lows. School was over and the long summer paradise of fishing every
day settled upon him.

II

'THE MERE FACT of a man settling on a prairie, putting up a
house, raising wheat until his farm was skimmed then selling out
and going West was not to be considered making a home," an
Irish fanner wrote to the Democrat in 1884, quoting from a
speech by Senator Wilkinson. "Home ... to be loved and re-
spected by children ought to be surrounded by shade, fruit, and
ornamental trees and shrubs . . , supplied with good wholesome
literature ... to keep the young people out of the saloons/'
Raising livestock, the farmer went on, encouraged farmers to plant
more trees and build more barns, thus changing the very look of
the landscape and making the country "more like a home than
where grain raising is the staple/'

That letter was part of a long campaign carried on in the Demo-
crat for the raising of more livestock in Chatfield's province. The
Old Editor, }. H. McKenny, was one of the first to recognize the
need for diversified farming. He argued the cause with humor and
resourcefulness, and when the wheat crop suffered partial failure
in 1869, McKenny pointed the moral: "Tor years we have been
preaching the new gospel, diversify, but no one paid any attention.
... If farmers learn the folly of depending on a single crop, this
year's failure will be worth all the misery it is costing."

Ten years were to pass before that lesson was at all generally
learned. Yet from the first settlement of the province there had
been a few farmers who took pride as well as profit in raising live-

344

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 345

stock. Out on Elkhorn Prairie, H. S. H. Hayes already had a few
head of Shorthorns when the Carter family first arrived in 1854.
Four years later William Pease was buying up all the calves he
could feed. By 1861, there was enough beef stock in the country
to make it worth while for J. Q Easton to send a man sixty miles
south to Decorah, Iowa, to investigate the possibilities of market-
ing it there, though no record remains of what, if anything, he did
about it

Yet for a long time one of the real problems of the province was
to get enough livestock for local breeding needs. Not many of the
westward migrants could afford such an array as the eight oxeir;
six horses, and four cows included in John Murphy's cavalcade.
And in those years there was no established market to which an
entrepreneur could wire his order for so-many-head to be delivered
on-such-a-date. If a man wanted livestock to sell, he had to go
where livestock was, and take his purchases West himself. What
that process involved is well set forth in Lucian Johnson's diaries
of a series of horse-buying expeditions that he undertook in 1866-
68.

He apparently got the idea from a man named Unthank who
brought a string of horses from Indiana to Chatfield late in 1865.
They sold so well that Johnson and one of his cronies named Shaw
undertook a joint flyer in horse-trading.

They set off on January 3, 1866, by stagecoach to La Crosse,
where they took a train for Chicago. Two days later they were in
Oberlin, Ohio, where they spent eleven days buying up thirteen
mares and a stallion, at an average price of slightly more than
eighty dollars a head. Shipping those horses back by train was a
wearing business. It took five days to reach La Crosse, and twice
Johnson thought two or three of the mares might not survive. He
gave them twelve hours rest in the barns at La Crosse while he
bought saddles and bridles for himself and Shaw. Each of the
men rode one horse and led a string of six as they made their way
back to Chatfield by easy stages. The horses were in pretty good
condition when they got there the third day out of La Crosse.

Then the fun began. For a full month Johnson's diary is am-

346 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

cerned with the details of the marvelously complicated 'bargains'
that he made and unmade with the farmers who wanted his
fourteen horses. This was no mere merchandising operation; this
was a homely epitome of the confusions that beset a society in
painful transition from production-for-use to production-for-
profit. In a final reckoning Johnson figured his profit at $1,415 on
a total investment of $1,200. That profit had cost him just two
months of obviously enjoyed activity.

In May, he set off again, this time alone, and went into Indiana
where Unthank helped him buy up six good mares. He found the
"last two near "North Manchester, on the Eal River/' and set off
from that point to return home. He spent seventeen days on the
road. The June weather was fine, and his way went through some
of "the finest country I ever saw all fenced up and dotted with
farm buildings, some fine ones." In Chatfield he sold one team,
turned the rest out to pasture, and set off almost immediately on
a third trip, once again with Shaw.

Altogether Lucian Johnson made seven horse-buying trips, two
to Ohio, two to Indiana, and three to Iowa, which had been set-
tled long enough to function in some particulars as an East for
Chatfield. In the same month with Johnson's final trip, Easton
imported a pedigreed breeding stallion from New York State.
Thereafter Johnson's interest in horses, so far as his diaries reveal,
was chiefly centered in breeding and training his own colts. By
1882, the cycle had been completed. On February 4 of that year
Johnson recorded: "Horse buyers are around." Chatfield itself
had become an East

No such detailed story can be told for the bringing of cattle into
the province, though a few landmarks emerge. Late in 1866, John-
son's friend, Shaw, bought up sixty-two head of cattle in the prov-
ince and drove them to La Crosse for sale; the next spring he and
Johnson took a somewhat larger herd from the province to graze
on the open prairies some miles to the west How they disposed of
their herd is not recorded but Chatfield already had at least one
man, D. D. Farrell, whose whole business was the buying and sell-
ing of farm animals, That fact is an indication of the growing im-

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 347

portance of livestock in the economy of Chatfield and its prov-
ince; another is in the report in 1869 that one Chatfield merchant
shipped East four tons of butter in a single week. In 1875, the first
carload of fat cattle was shipped to Chicago by a Chatfield stock
buyer. By 1880, the census showed that Fillmore County had
many more dairy cattle than any other county in the state and ran
a close second in the number of beef cattle. Four years later 1 50
head of breeding cattle were shipped from Chatfield to Montana.
Chatfield was indeed becoming an East.

Hog raising had been a part of the local scene from the earliest
years, and in 1880 Fillmore County was far ahead of the rest of
the state in hog production. Two or three years later the Democrat
was reporting pridefully the frequent sales of pedigreed and
'grade' hogs of the Poland China, Jersey Red, and Chester White
breeds.

Sheep also came into the province very early. The cold Min-
nesota winters were supposed to cause an increase in the amount
of wool produced, and sheep were moved westward on their own
power more easily than horses or cattle. In 1864, the Democrat
reported that a flock of 2,200 sheep had been driven through town
on their way to farms beyond. "Bring on your wool bearers," the
editor added. "We have room for several thousand more/' Easton,
in that same year, was reported as having 6,000 sheep on his farms,
and he arranged with an Illinois breeder to exchange a pedigreed
Southdown buck for one of Leicestershire strain, as a means of
introducing fresh blood into both flocks.

Easton's interest in fine farm animals continued all his life, and
he was among the first to bring pedigreed breeding stock of every
species into the region. In 1882, when he took his family on the
Grand Tour of Europe, he found time in Scotland to buy a flock
of Galloways and hire a Scottish shepherd to take them to his
farm near Chatfield. The flock proved an excellent investment. A
few years later Easton's farm manager was reported in the Demo-
crat to have shipped 3,500 fat sheep in the St. Paul market, besides
625 head of breeding stock that went to Dakota. All this was in
addition to the heavy sales of wool each spring.

348 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

Easton's Scottish shepherd, Robert MacMoran, was a great
boon to his sensation-hungry neighbors. His kilts, and skirling bag-
pipes, and the way he bought oatmeal by the barrel "to feed the
bairns," were wonderful topics for Chatfield's cracker-barrel sages.
'Mac' was a good shepherd but a poor businessman when he came
up against the free-and-easy American way of doing things. Easton
was continuously involved in keeping 'Mac' and his sons out of
the trouble they made for themselves; his letters on that subject
sketch a vastly appealing side of Easton's later years.

Almost equally appealing was his outspoken glee whenever one
of his farm animals took a prize at the Olmsted or the Fillmore
County Fair, By the mid-eighties those fairs had long lists of prizes
for a great variety of purebred animals, and advertisements of pedi-
greed stock from Illinois and Iowa as well as Minnesota appeared
frequently in the Democrat.

In 1875, the Old Editor died, but his successors continued the
campaign for better livestock. In 1883, the editor attended a three-
day meeting of the Northwestern Dairy Association in Mankato
(the city that William Pease had foreseen on the bend of the
Minnesota) and reported its discussions in a series of practical
and helpfully detailed articles. Two years later the Democrat car-
ried a long account of a sale of imported cattle held on the State
Fair Grounds in St. Paul and expressed much satisfaction that
Eastern dealers were at last aware that they could not palm off
their culls on Minnesota farmers. The sale proved, he wrote, that
"we of the northwest want the best and most profitable stock, be-
lieving the best is the cheapest in the long run." The report par-
ticularly praised the University Farm for buying some of the im-
ported Friesian-Holsteins for testing in comparison with other
breeds under Minnesota farm conditions.

All this and more the Democrat, under a succession of editors,
put before the people of Chatfield and its province, in a sustained
and remarkably effective campaign of public education. Week
after week the paper reported the achievements of both producers
and marketers of livestock and its products, and showed no prefer-
ence between farmers and townsmen in the reporting. Weekly

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 349

market reports were given, the farmers who raised the stock were as
warmly and individually praised as the townsmen who marketed
it, and townsfolk were encouraged to produce their own milk and
butter and meat.

There was, for instance, a series of stories boasting the rival
merits of individual cows kept by families living in town. One
woman had "a very tasty bookcase filled with complete sets of the
standard authors . . . the whole costing not less than $60,"
which she had bought with the profits from her cow after making
"liberal provision for the family/' James Cussons reported that his
seven-eighths Durham cow provided "all the milk for ten children
and all the grandchildren" plus all the butter the family could
use, plus skim milk to fatten pork, turkeys, ducks, and chickens for
the family table. The most idyllic of those stories was the report
of the Hon. Milo White's "favorite Jersey cow, which he looks
after himself . . . She unexpectedly threw her head around . . .
while he was attending her one evening . . . and struck him on
the nose with her horn, making quite a severe wound/' A much
later editor, reading that item, thought it "pretty tough that the
congressman had to milk his own cow," but the episode speaks
eloquently of that elder American tradition of intimate and con-
scious interdependence between farmland and village.

Some of that tradition was to persist locally for a long time,
despite the accelerating shift from self-sufficiency to an export-
import economy, and the accompanying growth of city influences.
Chatfield and its province were more fortunate than many areas
of the American midland: all but 14 per cent of the farms in Fill-
more County were owner-operated in 1880, and very few fore-
closure notices appeared in the Democrat in the subsequent and
recurrent periods of 'hard times/ The adoption of diversified
farming was to shield the valley from the most painful conse-
quences of agricultural practices that in other regions despoiled
the American earth. When continental winds scooped up the soil
of the Great Plains to hang it in palls of dust about the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, only the bold juttings of limestone
gulches spoke to Chatfield people of the peril to their soil The

350 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

young men of the CCC camp built dams and waterways about
those picturesque alterations in the landscape, but few people in
either town or province saw any relationship between those marks
of erosion and the 'forced sales' that by 1934 found more than 40
per cent of Filhnore County land in the hands of tenant farmers.
All that was undreamed of as Chatfield moved towards the
turn of the century. In the mid-eighties the village, by act of the
state legislature, became a city, and its new dignities and powers
comported well with the mood of a period that some still remem-
ber as "The Reign of the Belles." The fourteen to sixteen hundred
people of Chatfield no longer felt any great urgency to make their
town any bigger. What was good in the life of large cities it would
have on its own terms; what was bad was happily remote. Its 'So-
ciety* was as brilliant as anyone could wish, and its business was
sound. The editor who recorded its news of both business and $o->
ciety summed up the local complacency in his comment on the
1894 f a il ure of the wheat crop in western Minnesota: "Let them
diversify. We did 10 years ago and we have not suffered a failure

since/'

The prosperity on which Chatfield's new elegance throve owed
much to a man who was doubly an alien. As early as 1875 the
Democrat said that Chatfield's reputation as southern Minne-
sota's best market for meat was improving now that Mr. Bauer
had convinced the farmers it paid them "to fatten their cattle to
the top notch/' That same year Bauer shipped the first carload of
live cattle from Chatfield's province, and in 1883 the Democrat
gave him credit for inducing the Chicago and Northwestern to
build in Chatfield "the largest and most complete" stockyards in
southern Minnesota. Between January i and November 3 of that
year Bauer shipped 171 carloads of stock, and the Democrat com-
mented: "There is probably not another shipper on the line that
has shipped the half of that."

Levi Bauer had arrived, with wife and child, in Chatfield in
1868, from his birthplace in the ghetto of Baden, Germany. He
knew no English, and the townspeople gaped to see that grown
man sit patiently day after day among the little children in the

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 351

public school Within one school term he leaped through all eight
grades and could read and write his new country's language,
though his tongue always retained some trace of the Yiddish in
which he was nurtured. For two years he clerked in a store, and
he and his family lived in bitter poverty while they saved capital
to start, in 1870, a meager trade in fur, wool, and hides. Three
years later he opened a butcher shop, which soon commanded a
fine retail trade. By 1875, he was well started as a wholesale dealer
in livestock, and his business acumen was evidently joined to ap-
pealing personal qualities, for in 1884 he was elected mayor of
the town, an office that he held for two terms. His daughters are
still remembered as among the prettiest and most charming
young ladies of the town, and after the family moved to Chicago,
in the early nineties, they often exchanged visits with the
'best' families in Chatfield. The Chatfield-born son, Aleck Bauer,
helped to found a pharmaceutical firm of national proportions,
and he and his sisters contributed generously to the support of
the Chatfield library, long years after they had left the town of
their birth.

There are still many persons living in Chatfield who remember
the Bauer family with such pleasure and affection that later-day
sneering at 'Jews' carries a strange note of faithlessness to the val-
ley's heritage. Perhaps few realize how their casual mouthings of
stock phrases about 'what a Jew does to a town' betray not only
the American dream of human brotherhood, but betray as well
their own community's experience with a Jewish family that made
rich contributions to Chatfield living. That note of betrayal takes
on added stridency when set against the fact that, except for a
few brief experiences with poverty-ridden junk dealers who have
come and gone through the town, the Bauers were the only Jewish
people ever to live in Chatfield.

If the farmers owed much to Levi Bauer for an adequate live-
stock market, they were equally enriched by a market of their own
devising. In 1880, Fillmore County reported three thousand more
dairy cattle than beef cattle, and the problem of marketing the
produce from such herds had not been satisfactorily solved. A

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

cheese factory flourished for two or three years in the seventies,
,but when it burned down it was not rebuilt for several years.
Finally a joint-stock company of local men built another cheese
factory and soon added butter-making to its activities. Within a
year it was sending out fifteen teams every day to collect the
farmers' milk, and the Democrat was exuberant in its praise of
the wonderfully progressive undertaking. It reported that the new
creamery paid out $80,000 for cream in its first year, and urged
farmers to report the amounts of their monthly cream checks "so
we can show the poor wheat counties what we are doing in this
flourishing district/'

But when trouble developed, the Democrat was more reticent
and the story can only be guessed at. Somehow C. M. Lovell came
into sole ownership of the creamery, and he apparently did not in-
spire confidence in the farmers. Whatever the reason, the cream-
ery closed down in 1887, and dairy farmers were left without a
market for their unprocessed milk.

Then Chatfield saw the fruits of the embryonic attempts at co-
operative organization with which some of the farmers had fum-
bled in earlier years, first in the Grange, then in the name of the
Knights of Labor. Timothy Halloran had publicly laughed at him-
self for his zeal in the Knights of Labor "folly," but out of folly
a new kind of wisdom emerged. In 1889, ^ e farmers themselves
organized a Co-operative Creamery Association that marked a
new level of co-operative action in Chatfield's province. F. L.
Tesca, the president, was of Bohemian parentage; William Bren-
nan, vice-president, was of Irish birth; Forest Henry and C. L.
Case, the secretary and the treasurer, were Yankees. All were hard-
working, dirt farmers. The Association rented the Lovell property,
hired a buttermaker, and set to work to persuade other farmers to
join in the venture.

There was skepticism in both town and countryside: What did
farmers know about running a business, and whoever heard of a
business with dozens of bosses? In 1891, only $8,000 worth of
cream was brought to the Coop, but it was building a name for
quality produce: Mrs. G. H. Haven wrote to the Democrat from

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 353

Kingston, Jamaica, where she traveled with the Eastons that win-
ter, that Kingston's leading hotel served only Chatfield butter.
From that year forward the Chatfield Co-operative Creamery
grew steadily, as did the dairy herds in its province; by the middle
of the second World War the Co-operative Creamery was paying
its patrons almost a quarter of a million dollars a year for the
cream they produced.

The success of that experience was to suggest solutions for later
problems that confronted the farmers. When resentment against
St. Paul commission houses came to a head in 1912, a group of
Irish farmers set about organizing a Chatfield Co-operative Live-
stock Marketing Association, with Anthony Sharp as its manager
and zealous prophet. The Livestock Co-op, as it is affectionately
called, reached the quarter-million-dollar mark before the Co-op
Creamery did, and its members believed that their efforts brought
better prices even for those who sold to private stock buyers. Then
when automobiles and tractors made gasoline a farm necessity,
the lesson of co-operation was carried into a third area.

Many townspeople came to feel it a point of honor never to
buy a gallon of gas from the Co-op, though they ate Co-op butter
without question perhaps because there was no 'private' com-
petition in that field, perhaps because the Co-op Creamery had
been a bulwark of Chatfield economy for so many years. During
the direful thirties many a farmer had nothing with which to pay
the doctor, or the grocer, or the shoemaker except his Co-op
Creamery check.

Something more than raw economics worked through the
framework of those farmer organizations. Their annual picnics
brought together farm families from all parts of the province, and
though few townspeople attended them they were reported in the
Democrat, and they often had Chatfield leaders as their speakers.

Milo White was a favorite on such occasions, even when he no
longer represented Minnesota's First Congressional District. As
'Friend of the Farmer' he had made an appealing candidate in a
hiatus between two eras of stalwart Republican organization, and
his successful sponsorship of federal restrictions on the marketing

354 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

of oleomargarine endeared him to his farm constituents. No local
notice was taken of his equally successful support for tariff-free
importation of foreign publications, nor of his repeated and ig-
nored presentation of petitions for a constitutional amendment
to give women the right of suffrage. But when, in his second term,
he voted against the Republican high tariff, on the well-argued
grounds that the tariff was injurious to the interests of his con-
stituents, he was retired (in 1888) by the customary contrivances
of a rejuvenated Republican machine.

Something of the esteem in which he was held by Chatfield
people appears in the fact that the local legend accepts without
question White's own statement that his fine brick mansion was
paid for out of his savings from four years of Congressional salary.
(The same legend includes a story as dramatic as the tale of
Chatfield's 'first' church, and no more amenable to proof of
another local representative whose 'right' vote on a critical oc-
casion was richly rewarded by Jim Hill, builder of railroad em-
pires and boss of the Minnesota legislature.) Although Milo
White had walked for four years with the 'great' of the nation's
capital, the farmers still trusted him as one of their own.

Not all who left Chatfield returned to it as Milo White re-
turned. From the first there were numbers of people who stopped
in Chatfield long enough to function as an integral part of the
valley's life then suddenly felt the lure of a farther Wesrt and dis-
appeared. When the Dakota country opened up, considerable
numbers of the younger Chatfield men, some of them with wives
and children, turned to that West to seek their fortunes. One of
the Old Editor's last paragraphs, argued against the current "epi-
demic" of departures for "the howling wilderness of Dakota" in
terms curiously reminiscent of those with which J. C. Easton's
father-in-law objected to Easton's removal to Minnesota. There
is no evidence that any were deterred by the argument.

A few years later the Democrat conducted a running survey of
where "Chatfield boys" had gone: "We have reared and educated
them and they are gone from among us to help other communities

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 355

by the contribution of their energy and business enterprise/' Of
the fifty-nine "boys" reported, fourteen were in the western and
northern sections of Minnesota, fourteen in Dakota, and eleven
in states farther west. City life had claimed only eight three in
Chicago and five in Minnesota's Twin Cities. None had ventured
farther east than Ohio, but fifty years later there were to be
graduates of Chatfield High School in the cities of both East and
West coasts. In 1889, the Democrat made no mention of femi-
nine emigrants, but when a Chatfield girl attained the glamour of
playing small parts in Hollywood the town was quick to claim the
new distinction as its own.

Nearly half of the fifty-nine "boys" listed in 1889 were "in busi-
ness/' besides five in banks and six working for railroads; at least
three of those six rose to positions of considerable importance in
their railroad careers. Newspaper editing and legal practice
claimed five each, and three held political office in their localities;
three preachers and three doctors completed the list.

Perhaps the most distinguished person in that list was A. J.
Sawyer, then a struggling young lawyer, later to be mayor of Lin-
coln, Nebraska, member of Congress, and trusted lieutenant of
Bryan, the Great Commoner. He was remembered in Chatfield as
the lame boy who often trudged the three miles from his father's
farm to sell in town a string of fish he had caught in the dogged
endeavor to save money for an education. When he revisited
Chatfield in his later years he found in all that beautiful country-
side only the bitterness of an unhappy childhood. Yet from bit-
terness he brought forth honey. After his death there came from
Lincoln many stories of young persons to whom A. J. Sawyer had
given the lift that his own youth had so painfully lacked.

Most of the young men on that 1889 list of Chatfield emigrants
bore Yankee names. But a few years later an impressive roster
could have been drawn of Irish, Norwegian, and Bohemian lads
who had made their way from Chatfield farms into the learned
professions. Most of them had little enough encouragement from
their immigrant fathers: college didn't teach you to handle an

356 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

axe or drive a straight furrow. But somehow they made their way.
An Irish storekeeper gave one lad a suit of clothes fit for the Uni-
versity, a sympathetic Norwegian uncle loaned money to another.
The first law class graduated from the University of Minnesota
included Chatfield-born James Manahan, who was to support the
Bryan campaign against monopolies and win election as Minne-
sota's Congressman-at-large in 1912 because of the wide admira-
tion his liberal leadership had evoked. Duluth, the third largest
city in the state, was enriched by a medical clinic one of whose
founders was a son of an Irish immigrant to Chatfield; a grand-
son of the same immigrant was later to serve on the medical
faculty of Harvard University. Another of Chatfield's Irish fam-
ilies was to produce a political commentator known throughout
Minnesota and its neighboring states. . . . The chosen valley
was as good a place as any in America for a boy or girl of energy
and purpose to be born.

The people who stayed in the valley sometimes talked as
though the ones who had left it lived chiefly for the time when
they could return. They enjoyed the poem that a "Chatfield boy/ 7
Herbert Twitchell, sent to the Democrat in 1880; it was reprinted
at least three times thereafter.

Dear old Chatfield how I love theel
How I love thy very name
How thy image comes before me
Pictured out within my brain:

There's the mill and there's the meadow,
There's the creek and there's the pond;
There is dear old Root River
With the woodland just beyond.

Now I'm wandering o'er the hilltops,
Viewing all the village o'er
Recognizing every building
As I used to do of yore. . . .

Now far removed from those fond scenes,
A shade will gather on my brow,

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 357

As I sit and think and wonder
Where are all my schoolmates now?

Dear old Chatfield! How I love thee!
Though far away my lot is cast,
How I hope in years that follow
To return to thee at last!

If few of the yearning exiles ever actually came back to settle in
the valley, enough dropped in from time to time to keep alive the
comfortable legend that "Anyone who's ever lived here always
wants to come back/'

For the most part, however, the people who lived in Chatfield
were too busy with their own affairs to think very much about the
people who had left the valley. There was not only business to
attend to, but a considerable variety of social pleasures to enjoy.
As the population became relatively stable, and the excitement of
change and conquest was lost, new ways were found for satisfying
the individual's sense of his own worth. Fraternal orders were one
means to that great end, and before the turn of the century Chat-
field had its full complement of 'lodges/

The oldest of these was the Masonic Blue Lodge, organized in
1857. One of }. C. Eastern's early letters East requested a demit
from the Lowville chapter to the one in Chatfield. True to their
democratic tradition the Masons included not only lawyers and
moneylenders but the harness maker and the barber as well as
storekeepers and blacksmiths. And the brotherhood was more
than merely ritualistic. When one of the members was sick the
others took nightly turns in nursing him, and one man was sup-
ported by his lodge for years when tragic circumstances had
driven him to the disintegrative refuge of opium dreams, destroy-
ing his competence as physician and citizen.

Being a Mason was an exclusively masculine prerogative and
the ladies were not altogether pleased. A feminine strategem
against such division was reported by the Democrat in the mid-
eighties. It was customary for the men to adjourn to the Medary
House for supper when the 'work* of the monthly chapter meeting

358 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

was over. On one of those evenings in a season that had been
singularly scant of 'social' enjoyments the Masons found their
table twice its expected length and "a bewitching feminine form"
behind each alternate chair. The men succumbed gracefully
enough to that grand assault on their 'naughty secrets/ and before
many years the ladies had their own, somewhat dilute, version of
Masonry in the Order of the Eastern Star.

Even before that happy event, the annual Masonic supper and
ball were a cherished part of each winter's festivities. The grandest
of those occasions was in 1872, when the lodges in fourteen
near-by villages helped Chatfield Masons stage a huge 'benefit' for
the debt they had incurred in building a hall above the brick store
that C. M. Lovell had put up on Main Street. To judge by the
phrases of the Democrat, New York itself never made more lavish
display of beauty and chivalry than that occasion afforded.

Much later on the scene was the Independent Order of Odd
Fellows, organized in 1890. A special train brought one hundred
fifty Odd Fellows from Rochester and ten other places for the first
initiation. The 'work' lasted all night and was crowned with a
banquet in the Medary House's best style. Four years later the
seventy-fifth anniversary of Odd Fellowship was celebrated by the
Chatfield lodge and the Democrat gave two full columns to re-
porting the affair. The Opera House (the favorite euphemism for
the hall that had been built by the city officials a few years before)
was the scene of the festivities. Exactly seventy-five guests were
seated at a diamond-shaped table and served an epicurean supper
by ''the ladies," who were given "especial credit ... for the
quiet, orderly manner . . . with no crowding" in which they
managed the affair. Besides the "social intermingling" there were
songs by the town's most talented and beautiful young ladies,
orchestral music, and a recitation by one of the belles.

The pastor of the Methodist church was the "orator of the eve-
ning"; he traced the growth of the Order, from five men in Balti-
more to nearly a million scattered "over the entire world," and
praised its principles, "as old as mankind . , . the common
brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God." Not content

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 359

with the evening's scope of praise the Reverend Mr. Williams
wrote a letter to the Democrat thanking the Lodge "for this con-
tribution to the social life of our town/' and the "wisdom they dis-
played in giving us an entertainment which ministered to the
aesthetic part of our nature." The letter ended on a note provoca-
tive of curious musings on the role of the Protestant churches in
the American life of the times: "As a preacher of righteousness I
am trying to help men to be better and happier, and I assure you
I am glad of any social outside aid."

The official attitude of the Catholic church was rather different.
It regarded Masonry and apostasy as virtually synonymous, and
Odd Fellowship was but little better. However, the joys of fra-
ternal association were not denied to the faithful: two younger
orders, the Workmen, and the Woodmen, acceptable to Roman
orthodoxy, were organized in Chatfield during the nineties, and
included considerable numbers of Catholics in their membership.
Their mingling of 'the Irish' with people of Yankee heritage
marked a definite advance in the integration of the community.

The new lodges combined ritualistic observances with lif e-and-
health insurance programs on a co-operative cash basis. That type
of organization-f or-security marked a kind of penultimate recogni-
tion of the new production-for-profit economy. In the old econ-
omy of exchange-in-kind an individual or a family found its
security in the mutual readiness of neighbors to share what they
had in times of distress. The new basis of security was money:
one paid monthly 'dues' into a common fund, and in time of
sickness or death that fund provided the money to buy what was
needed.

Not that the old neighborly exchange was entirely lost. Nor
was financial security the whole purpose of the younger lodges.
Like Masons and Odd Fellows, the Workmen and Woodmen
had their gala occasions and their share of good fellowship. At the
turn of the century each of the lodges numbered well toward two
hundred members, besides their 'women's auxiliaries/ Fifty years
later the men's lodges had dwindled to minor lists of insurance
holders, but many women continued to find in lodge membership

360 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the paradoxical pleasures of association and exclusiveness. They
played bingo where other groups played bridge, but it would be
brash indeed to assume that one game yielded more satisfaction
to its players than the other. Something very like 'class' lines of
social division could be discerned, there and elsewhere, but how-
ever clear that class-consciousness might be, especially to groups re-
garding themselves as 'upper/ perhaps no one accepted for himself
any binding notion of basic inferiority.

The first explicit local statement of class-consciousness was con-
tained in an outburst of Francis Drebert, editor of the Democrat
from 1889 to 1898. He reported one year, with considerable gusto,
the activities of the high-school graduating class, praising the
beauty and the accomplishments of the "sweet girl graduates"
appearing in various "exhibitions" by the school. But somewhere
in the course of that spring another idea took hold of him and he
wrote a violent denunciation of the "misplaced pride" which led
hard-working mothers to spend long hours over the washtub in
order to support their daughters' "pretensions" to accomplish-
ments "beyond their station." Such encouragement, with all the
tinsel flutter of commencement and party dresses, could lead to
"nothing but misery" through making the daughters of "working
families . . . dissatisfied with their lot in life" and unwilling to
settle into the marriages they would make with "poor but deserv-
ing young men of their own class."

It was a startling outburst from one whose own daughters were
then graduating from high school. Had they suffered from the
rivalry of some "poor" classmate? The story which might explain
it has been lost in the years, but it was a shadow perhaps insepa-
rable from the increasing urbanization of the chosen valley. There
was not even a letter to the editor to protest such open discrimina-
tion.

A more proudly visible evidence that Chatfield was no mere
country village was its fine Silver Cornet Band. Henry Silsbee and
a group of music-making friends had become so important in
Chatfield's life that in 1885 the town council appropriated $50
towards a fund subscribed to pay for a series of summer concerts

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 361

in the town park. The custom of such concerts was to be main-
tained virtually unbroken through the following years, and when
state 'tournaments' began to pit high-school bands against each
other for competitive ratings, Chatfield made an enviable record
of winning first place year after year.

Chatfield people have always been fond of music. In the earliest
years it was a poor winter that did not have at least one Singing
School, sometimes with a local leader, more often with a teacher
from outside who took on a circuit of half a dozen towns and coun-
try communities for a series of six to twelve meetings in each. The
town even boasted a number of composers, one of whom, Harry
D. Jones, had several compositions published by Oliver Ditson
and other Eastern houses. For a few years Jones operated a music
press of his own in Chatfield, and it was not uncommon for local
church choirs to regale their congregations with anthems com-
posed and printed in Chatfield.

When spring came round each year serenades filled the evening
air. Henry Silsbee liked nothing better than to gather three or
four young musicians and make the rounds of the belles of the
town, serenading each one in turn through the winsome May eve-
nings. Always the young men were invited in and feasted with the
best the house afforded. Occasionally the young ladies themselves
ventured forth, in bands of three or four to a dozen, to wander
singing through the streets. Only a few weeks before his death the
Old Editor wrote a paragraph of touching thanks for the serenade
he had been given: the "sweet lady voices and melodious guitar/'
he wrote, sounded "like angels singing."

Professional musicians and entertainers from the western cir-
cuit visited Chatfield, from the earliest years to the advent of
movies and radios. Each year the Democrat appealed for someone
to provide "intellectual refreshment for the long winter evenings
ahead," and each year someone responded usually some church
group concerned both with edifying the community and with re-
plenishing its own treasury. White's Hall, a large room above
Milo White's store, was the favorite place for such programs until
the town council built a City Hall, that soon came to be known as

362 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the Opera House. There everything was presented, from amateur
tableaux and home-talent musicals to Donivan's Original Ten-
nesseeans, whose dark skins and unfamiliar songs were doubly
thrilling because the singers had been slaves not many years be-
fore. Belva Lockwood, the notorious campaigner for female suf-
frage, sounded her bizarre gospel there; and at least once a year
a wandering company gave Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Opera
House the one play that good Methodists could attend with-
out violating the collective conscience of their church. And there,
in 1884, Edwin Stuart and his company gave a full month of such
theatrical delights as really stretched the Democrat's vocabulary
of praise to the limit, week after week.

Edwin Stuart had married a Chatfield girl, and he brought his
company to her home town year after year. Mrs. Stuart played op-
posite her husband, and that notable season of 1884 the Demo-
crat reported that she had made "remarkable strides in a short
career/ 7 But it was Mr. Stuart who called forth the mounting su-
perlatives of both the editor and various letter writers. He was "a
polished actor" such as was "rarely met in country halls." "We
have seen good actors, and in large cities, too, which were not his
equal for versatility/' one admirer wrote, and his repertoire of that
season was indeed a varied one. It included Rip Van Winkle, The
Streets of New York, Driven from Home, The Villain Still Pur-
sued Her, The Phoenix or Risen from the Ashes, Lost in London,
Kathleen Mavourneen, Over the Hills to the Poorhouse, Uncle
Solomon Isaacs, and Oliver Twist. On the final evening of the
season; when he repeated his performance of Oliver Twist by re-
quest, Mrs. OTerrall presented the actor with "a handsome bas-
ket of elegant greenhouse flowers from Chicago" such a gesture
as Chatfield had never before seen. When the actors had gone the
Democrat reflected the mood of emptiness that fell on the town.

Not, however, for long. There were always the meetings of local
groups to attend, with their varied pleasures and duties. With the
extension of urban influences Chatfield people turned increas-
ingly to formal organization for the accomplishment of purposes

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 363

that earlier simplicities either had ignored or had carried out on
the spontaneous impulse of neighborly concern.

There was, for instance, the matter of fire-fighting. Except for
occasional revisions of town ordinances which seem to have
been more impressive on paper than in practice no concerted ef-
fort was made in early years to provide fire protection. When a
building caught fire everybody within reach joined the bucket
brigade, but there was no particular system to the effort. From
time to time there was talk of organizing a fire company, but
nothing was done even after the famous Saturday night fire of
1877, th a t t> urne d everything on one side of Main Street for nearly
a block. Not until 1891 was the Chatfield Fire Hose Hook and
Ladder Company organized, with the full panoply of officers and
constitution.

That constitution is an interesting reflection of the kinds of
problems that had to be worked out when people undertook the
unfamiliar task of organizing themselves on their own responsi-
bility, to accomplish ends of their own determination. Most of
the men in the Fire Company had no previous experience in or-
ganizational procedure and their constitution clearly was drawn to
enforce the rudiments of parliamentary decorum.

It outlined even more definite duties for members than for of-
ficers. Each meeting was to be called "precisely at the time speci-
fied, a majority of the watches present deciding the time/ 7 Any
member not answering roll call was to be fined 25 cents. No mem-
ber was to leave the room without permission from the chair-
man, again on penalty of a 25-cent fine, and any member "not
obeying the call to order shall, for the first offence, be fined 50^,
and for the second be expelled from the Company, provided two-
thirds of the members present vote therefor/' In the conduct of
the meeting "Any member addressing the chair shall stand in an
erect position. No motion shall be entertained unless the above
is strictly complied with/' A member could be fined 50 cents "for
using profane or indecent language or any personalities toward
any member during a meeting of business/' Unpaid fines could

364 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

themselves be the occasion for expulsion if allowed to accumu-
late, "provided two-thirds of the members present vote there-
for."

The constitution was reworked in various details a number of
times in the first months of the company, but the minutes suggest
that attendance was not very regular after the first flush of or-
ganizational pride, and there is no record of any member's ex-
pulsion.

The Fire Company was to maintain its identity, and its very
real services to the community, from that time forward. Its ac-
tivity was an element in the agitation for a municipal water sup-
ply. From 1859 there had been intermittent campaigns for one
mode or another of fire-fighting water arrangements, but it took
thirty years to make the first start at the process of building a
municipal water system. The first unit consisted of four hydrants
on Main Street, connected with the millpond below the bench; a
few years later water was piped to the houses on Winona Street
from a well at the top of Winona Hill, and through the ensuing
sixty years the system was expanded until city water was within
reach of all the houses inside the city limits.

More immediate pleasure was taken in the planting of hun-
dreds of elm and maple trees. Lucian Johnson raised the seedlings
on one of his farms; he furnished enough to plant the park, when
the town council finally decided to quit renting it for pasture or
garden plots and took down the board fence that had been built
around it. G. H. Haven and I. F. OTerrall planted with their own
hands the trees that still adorn the square beside the schoolhouse,
where succeeding generations of children have played; where the
weekly band concerts entertain strolling crowds; where old men
sit on benches in the sun, remembering; and younglings disport
themselves, in not always decorous ways.

Other trees were planted by householders at the same time.
Some of the fine old oaks and a few elms that must have been at
least sapling-size when Thomas Twiford chose the valley for his
own are still cherished in various parts of the town. But most of

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 365

the maples and elms that arch the streets of Chatfield today were
planted during the seventies and eighties. Chatfield people often
chuckle over the story of one of 'the boys' who went to California
in recent years and talked so much about his 'old home town' that
his friends demanded to see a picture of that fabulous garden city.
He finally showed them a picture of one of the biggest elms; when
they asked, "But where is the town?" he answered, "Chatfield's
right behind that tree."

There were other reasons than trees for Chatfield's expanding
pride in the variety of its new comforts, even though its popula-
tion stayed about the same. In one single year, 1897, the town
saw the beginning of three notable and exceedingly 'modern'
undertakings, that certainly put at rest any question of whether
Chatfield merited the name of a city.

First came the newest magic, electricity. The Bohemian-born
son of one of the valley's earliest immigrants organized the Chat-
field Electric Light & Power Company, bought the property where
Easton, Johnson, and Dickson had built a mill twenty-five years
before, and installed a hydroelectric plant, with a franchise au-
thorizing the company to sell their strange new merchandise to
anyone in the valley. The company was capitalized for $20,000,
and before the end of the first year it had installed 337 separate
electric lights in the town. Tariffs were based on the number of
lights in any given building; and a house with three separate lights
was generally thought to be as well lighted as the average family
had any need for. It was not unknown for a house to be limited to
a single bulb affording the magical enjoyment of getting light by
the simple turning of a little button.

The next great modernity to come to the town, and within a
matter of weeks, was a telephone system. A comparative new-
comer was responsible for that achievement, and there are plenty
of people still living in Chatfield who remember the wonder of
their first telephone conversation. The first instruments were in-
stalled in a doctor's office and his house, and when the system was
so far established as to print its first directory twenty-seven names

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

listed were therein or thereon for the whole thing was printed
on a single sheet of cardboard. That sheet also carried instructions
for using the strange new instruments:

HOW TO TALK Push in slightly but firmly on bell crank, and turn crank
about three times. Take down the receiver and listen for Central, and
when Central "hellos" to you state the NUMBER you wish to talk with.
Listen and wait for a few moments, and you will have the desired party.

When a call comes for you, simply take down the receiver and say
"Hello." If you get no response, repeat again in a few moments*

When done talking, hang up receiver and give bell one ring.

The third new business venture of that year of 1897 was less
dramatic in its impact on the town's immediate life, but it was to
continue, and to grow, until it became one of the valley's largest
enterprises. That was a new type of fire-insurance company, or-
ganized by C. L. Thurber, a nephew of Uncle Orrin Thurber and
of Aunt Eunice Thurber, who had been known as Pocahontas in
the first gay years of the valley's settlement 'Young' Thurber had
been selling fire insurance for Eastern companies for several years,
when the idea came to him that insurance would cost everybody
less if it was organized on a basis of mutual sharing in both losses
and profits. His dogged enthusiasm and repeated explanations
finally won support from a number of other men with rather more
money than Thurber had to put into the business, and by the end
of the year it was agreed to organize the Security Mutual Fire
Insurance Company, with Charlie Thurber as its manager and,
for a while, complete office staff. The formalities were not com-
pleted until January, 1898, and the new company hung on a slen-
der thread of hope and hard work. But before its founder's death
the business had grown till it employed eight or ten persons full
time in Chatfield, besides numerous 'agents' in Minnesota and its
neighboring states. The business was to expand even further in
the years after the first World War; the bulk of its mailing was
great enough to raise the Chatfield Post Office from third-class to
second-class, and the number of its employees more than doubled.

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 367

What none of the three new business groups of 1897 realized
was the way in which their proud local ventures were to be ab-
sorbed into nation-size corporations. The details of those in-
stances of de-localization were to be vastly involved, in local cross-
currents no less than national competitions, but, one after another,
each of the three was absorbed. In 1916, the Chatfield Light and
Power Company was absorbed by the Interstate Power Company,
incorporated in Delaware. A little later the telephone company
became part of the Northwestern Bell system, itself a subsidiary
of American Telephone and Telegraph. The insurance companies
held out rather longer, but in 1929 outside pressures so manipu-
lated internal divisions that the insurance company was com-
pelled to affiliate itself with a company operating on a national
basis.

But none of all those shifts from local to national control were
anticipated in that year of notable beginnings. Indeed, the year
was marked by a function that seemed to put the stamp of final
urban achievement on Chatfield society. "The Reign of the
Belles" had its apotheosis in the wedding of C. M. Lovell's daugh-
ter.

He had died two or three years before, leaving his family still
living in the old frame house that had been both store and resi-
dence in the first years of his marriage. The story was that Mrs.
Lovell had insisted on a better house, when Lovell built his new
store, and work was begun on a fine brick residence catercorner
from the original store. Then, according to the legend, Mr. and
Mrs. Lovell had a quarrel over some detail of the plans, and the
lord and master ordered his workmen to fill in half of the already-
excavated basement, and reduce the whole house in the same
proportion. When the house was finished Mrs. Lovell refused to
move into it. There the matter stood at his death.

After a decent interval of 'mourning/ with some travel in the
East and abroad, Mrs. Lovell returned to Chatfield with a set of
architect's plans for the most elegant residence ever built in Chat-
field. She bought the Winona Street property in which }. C.
Easton had lived until his removal to La Crosse ten years earlier,

368 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

and proceeded with the building of a truly handsome mansion,
surrounded by terraced lawns running up the flank of Winona
Hill.

That house was the talk of the town. It had five fireplaces be-
sides the best furnace to be bought; it boasted three bathrooms,
and the first sun porch ever seen in Chatfield, Its rooms were
finished with curly birch, bird's-eye maple, and the fabulous Cali-
fornia redwood; the plan was to spend a full year in the comple-
tion of its elegant details. The house was named Oakenwald, even
when blueprints were the only evidence of its dignities.

Then Miss Anna Lovell, the only daughter, returned from her
Eastern finishing school and met "a highly esteemed young busi-
ness man of Minneapolis" who wooed her with such ardor that
the wedding was set for February 25, 1897, instead of the June
date that Mrs. Lovell would have preferred. Additional workmen
were imported and the house was rushed to completion. On
February 24, the family moved into the new house; the next day
decorators, caterers, and florists from 'the Cities' took over, and
that evening, at nine-thirty, "the wedding commenced/' accord-
ing to the Democrat's ecstatic report.

"The profusion of cut flowers, English violets, jonquils, tulips,
roses, carnations, and smilax were scattered with a lavish hand in
every available nook and corner, ... A handsomer picture can
hardly be imagined than the march of the bridal party to the back
parlor, to the music of Roweder's orchestra of Winona/'

About half of the "150 admiring friends" present at the wed-
ding had come from Minneapolis "by private Pullman car,
'Cupid/ chartered by Mr. Jenkins [the bridegroom] for the oc-
casion. . . . The car was decorated with cut flowers and the
. . . travelers were entertained enroute by progressive cinch
under the direction of Col. Fahnestock, who has the reputation
of being the champion Minneapolis whist player. . . . Dorsett,
the Minneapolis caterer, furnished refreshments in the car both
going and coming," and Mr. Jenkins had thoughtfully provided
Dresden china and Venetian glass prizes for the winners at cinch.

The pastor of Chatfield's Presbyterian church solemnized the

THE NEW GOSPEL: DIVERSIFY 369

marriage, and immediately afterwards "a delicious collation was
served by colored caterers from Dorsett's, Minneapolis." After
that the guests repaired to the white-draped and canvas-floored
ballroom on the third floor of the mansion, while the bride retired
to change her gown. She soon reappeared in "the exquisite gown
which she is to wear at the inaugural ball in Washington. It is of
heavy brocaded white satin cut decollete, and much more elabo-
rate than the wedding gown, though not en traine. A fragrant
bunch of English violets adorned the front of her gown, and a
pompon of them was placed in her hair, while she carried a bou-
quet of delicately tinted orchids."

As the wedding party danced through the long winter night,
what Chatfield guest could doubt that here were gathered the
elite to set on their town the final seal of urban sophistication?
The chosen valley had exuberantly embraced the idols of Amer-
ica's new industrialism.

PART

Thirteen

"IJYou CouU Eat Scenery 1

THAT THE EMBRACE did not bring the paradisaical perfection of
its promise might have been guessed by the time that the Chat-
field paper reprinted the story of the Lovell wedding in its
"Echoes of the Past Fifty Years Ago/' Travelers noticed Chat-
field as the prettiest town on Route 52, and visitors were charmed
by the ample lawns and ready hospitality of Chatfield houses. Yet
there were sons and daughters of those wedding guests, still living
in the valley of their birth, who found themselves "weary, and
wary, and dull/' for all the comfort of their days. And a detached
observer might sometimes have wondered how it was that an earth-
place so utterly fair as the chosen valley should nourish a life so
meager in those interpretations of experience that create the great
rubrics of a culture.

If, like many in that later generation, he should try to ask ques-
tions that would help to a more functional understanding of his
country, he might have been puzzled to know why the energy re-
leased by Chatfield's 'high standard of living' found so little ex-
pression in the creation of significant form. Why did the musician,
the dramatist, the painter find in those tree-arched streets no
challenge to vigorous originality? Or are well-ordered homes and
friendly neighborhoods the most that society can achieve in a unit
as small as Chatfield? There is leisure in Chatfield; must it forever
be spent in guffaws at radio ventriloquists, or mooning transfer-
ence to Hollywood lovers?

37*

"iF YOU COULD EAT SCENERY*' 373

If he were concerned with the sources of things he saw, he
might ask how far the stifling of the creative impulse in the people
was chargeable to the frontier, that 'ordeal' which has been
credited with distorting such a genius as Mark Twain's. Or what
part had been played by those forces suggested in the terms 'capi-
talism' and 'industrialism/

And had he heard the talk among some Chatfield people of in-
voking political pressure to prevent the publication of "anything
we don't like," he might well have been alarmed Was the poison
of political corruption astir in this friendly place? Were the forces
so shockingly set forth by Lincoln Steffens coiled within America's
country towns as well as its cities? If that poison was everywhere,
what was becoming of America's freedoms? As it happened, the
publication issue was never drawn in Chatfield. Yet the fact that
such use of political pressure could be considered by Chatfield
people was not without its terror for the questioning mind.

But a sharper terror broke over the valley when troops began
moving on the plains of Europe. It touched first the women in
country kitchens, that fateful morning of September i, 1939. Be-
tween setting teakettles over brisk new flames and filling coffee
pots, they paused to snap on their radios for music to get the
children up. Many a farm wife stopped motionless, her hands full
of cups and plates, or lifted the sputtering bacon off the fire the
better to hear, when the professional blandness of the announcer's
voice gave way to dreadful urgency: "We interrupt our program
to bring you dispatches from Berlin and other world capitals . . ."

There was little chatter over that day's breakfast, and the men
were in no hurry to go out to their fall plowing. Little business
was done in Chatfield, and voices on Chatfield streets were
muffled by the screaming of bombs over Warsaw.

The chosen valley, that bright September day, was too remote
to fear the immediate rain of hell. But its people knew they were
in that hell. If not that day, sometime before it was ended; if not
in their own streets, somewhere the flesh of their sons would be
torn, the blood of their children turned to foul putrefaction. As
twilight dosed, the streets were empty except for the sound that

374 THE CHOSEN VALLEY

poured from the radios in every house. And as day followed day,
mothers looked at their sons, and counted the months, or years,
until they should be as old as the boys that England and France
and Russia were sending into the war.

When school began, the fifth day of the war, and the streets
filled with lounging lads in bright sweaters and girls with shining
untrammeled hair, the people of Chatfield almost dared to hope
that the defending hills did actually shut out the war. Had not
the President said, the third night of the war, that "this nation will
remain a neutral nation"? His voice had carried the warming
assurance of a good father's voice.

As farm prices mounted and this one and that one left to work
in 'defense plants/ the 'times' were good, and the war seemed far
away. Voices grew jocose again, and even when the boys were
called away to the camps hastily thrown up across the continent,
it seemed somehow something other than war that called them.
Mothers thought of the travel their sons were getting, and sisters
and sweethearts had a new interest in going for the mail each day.
By the time that bombs were dropped on American ships, the life
of the valley had been so largely geared into the demands of war
that its actual beginning came almost as a relief. Now Chatfield
boys would be squandered over the globe, instead of merely the
continent, but once they were in it they would finish up the dread-
ful business. Writing letters and packing boxes became doubly
urgent when they were addressed in care of the Postmaster, San
Francisco, or New York.

As month followed month the talk of Chatfield people was
filled with names that geography classes had never taught. Private
allusions in travel-stained letters were pondered in the search for
some clue to where the letter had been written, some estimate of
the degree of danger from which it had come. Now and then the
dreaded telegram arrived 'The War Department regrets to in-
form you . . /'but astonishingly few boys of the valley or the
province were wounded in ways that spelled an end to fighting.
What hidden wounds they might carry no one could say.

Whatever far places they saw, they wrote home again and again,

"iF YOU COULD EAT SCENERY** 375

"I haven't seen anything that looks as good to me as Winona
Hill," or "Main Street/' or, most often, "Nothing as good as Chat-
field/' While endless, aimless lines of displaced persons crawled
over the shattered continents, rootless and rejected people with
neither place nor hope, the men from Chatfield and its province
held fast to their memories of the earth-place where they were at
home.

There was no sudden proof that those men, or their families at
home, had come to understand the ways in which their valley's life
was part of the forces that now were shaking a civilization. In the
war, as in the long years of peaceful growth, the people of the val-
ley were more intent upon fulfilling the day's demands than in
asking why such demands were laid upon them. They listened a
few more than usual to the interpretations their preachers of-
fered, and they spoke sometimes of gratitude that there was no
need in this war to talk of hating. They gave their money to help
care for the victims of the war they had not wanted. They read
newspapers and listened to commentators, trying to satisfy such
need as they felt for a Why, but they were too little skilled in the
discipline of interpretation to forge out their own answers to that
Why. They comforted themselves with thinking of the peace that
would come: there would be a United Nations this time, better
than the forgotten League, and they would support its creation.
But there was little probing into the reasons for the old League's
failure, even when they affirmed the new venture's necessary suc-
cess.

It was not surprising, even in so vast a crisis as the war. "For
what is the present, after all," Whitman asks, "but a growth out
of the past?" A people who had always been intent on the future,
believing in their power to shape it as they would, had never seen
the reason for learning how to interpret any past, even their own.

A cause for fear might have been found in that ignoring of the
past, that failure to question the present. For the future, in its
turn, would become the present, and no present can wholly escape
the effects of its past. Where should the people begin the task of
understanding the ftings-that-are, if always they set it aside for

THE CHOSEN VALLEY

the headier wine of things-to-come? While they had a continent,
and a limitless bounty of time, they could perhaps afford such
blithe inebriation. But a vast period was to mushroom in the sky
before that war was over, and the culture of which it was the punc-
tuation afforded little guidance for what came after.

Unless, indeed, it should be created by "the people, yes/'

When the day should come that they recognized their deep
kinship with the earth and found in its beauty a challenge to more
inward making than the building of houses and railroads . . .
when they should turn their unworn energies to the communica-
tion of the fullness of human experience . . , when the long
practice in meeting common problems by doing things together
should be searched for the meanings that stretch between con-
tinents no less than between houses. . . . Then indeed the peo-
ple might utter the vast affirmation that alone can harness the
terrible beauty that hung in the sky above Hiroshima.

That they were beginning to grope for some such inward using
of the beauty of their land might daringly be hoped when one
pondered a casual saying that came from one of Chatfield's
women, on a day while the war still thundered.

She was standing on the station platform, waiting to send a
birthday cable to her Air Force son in Ireland. She would pay for
that cable with money she had earned ironing other people's
clothes. A passer-by paused to look with her across the river bot-
tom to the hills, brilliant with October colors. "It's such a lovely
view/' the passer-by said.

"Yes," the woman answered slowly, her eyes on the westward
hills. "If you could eat scenery a body'd live well in Chatfield."

^

1*

128782