4
Monterey County, like all the eastern counties of Iowa, all the counties along the Missouri, and every other county which was crossed by a considerable river, was dotted with paper towns. We passed many of these staked-out sites on the Old Ridge Road; and we heard of them from buyers of and dealers in their lots.
Lithopolis was laid out by Judge Horace Stone, the great outsider in the affairs of the county until he died. He platted a town in Howard County when the town-lot fever first broke out, at a place called Stone's Ferry, and named it Lithopolis, because his name was Stone, and for the additional reason that there was a stone quarry there. I've been told that the word means Stone City. The people insisted upon calling it Stone's Ferry and would not have the name Lithopolis. Judge Stone raved and tore, but he was voted down, and pulled up stakes in disgust, sold out his interests and went on to Monterey County, where he could establish a new city and name it Lithopolis. He seemed to care more for the name than anything else, and never seemed to see how funny it was that he felt it possible to make a city wherever he decreed. This was a part of the spirit of the time. The prairies were infested with Romuluses and Remuses, flourishing, not on the milk of the wolves, but seemingly on their howls, of which they often gave a pretty fair imitation.
"But Monterey Centre is the county-seat," I suggested.
"It just thinks it's going to be," said N.V. "The fact is that Monterey County is not organized, but is attached to the county south of it for judicial purposes. Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but Lithopolis--that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius--it reeks of greatness! Monterey Centre--ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken, semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of dreaming Nimshies?"
"No," said I; "have you?"
"No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a dreaming Nimshi."
The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were in no sense towns, or even villages. There was a future county-seat fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis--and not only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City, Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick trip to Lithopolis.
"Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck. I am sorry not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless speed. And take the advice of your man of the law in parting: in your voyages over the inland waterways of life, look not upon the flush when it is red--not even the straight one; for had I not done that on a damned steamboat coming up from St. Louis I should not have been thus in my old age forsaken. And let me tell you, one day my coachman will pull up at the door of your farm-house and take you and your wife and children in my coach and four for a drive--perhaps to see the laying of the corner-stone of the United States court-house in Lithopolis. I go from your ken, but I shall return--good-by."
I was sorry to see him go. It was lonesome without him; and I was troubled by my live stock. I soon saw that I was getting so many cattle that without help in driving them I should be obliged to leave and come back for some of them. I found a farmer named Westervelt who lived by the roadside, and had come to Iowa from Herkimer County, in York State. He even knew some of the relatives of Captain Sproule; so in view of the fact that he seemed honest, I left my cattle with him, all but four cows, and promised to return for them not later than the middle of July. I made him give me a receipt for them, setting forth just what the bargain was, and I paid him then and there for looking out for them--and N.V. Creede said afterward that the thing was a perfectly good legal document, though badly spelled.
"It calls," said he, "for an application of the doctrine of idem sonans--but it will serve, it will serve."
I marveled that the Gowdy carriage still was astern of me after all this time; and speculated as to whether there was not some other road between Dyersville and Independence, by which they had passed me; but a few miles east of Independence they came up behind me as I lay bogged down in a slew, and drove by on the green tough sod by the roadside. I had just hitched the cows to the end of the tongue, by means of the chain, when they trotted by, and sweeping down near me halted. Virginia still sat as if she had never moved, her hand gripping the iron support of the carriage top, her foot outside the box as if she was ready to spring out. Buck Gowdy leaped out and came down to me.
"In trouble, Mr. Vandemark?" he inquired. "Can we be of any assistance?"
"I guess I can make it," I said, scraping the mud off my trousers and boots. "Gee-up there, Liney!"
My cows settled slowly into the yoke, and standing, as they did now, on firm ground, they deliberately snaked the wagon, hub-deep as it was, out of the mire, and stopped at the word on the western side of the mud-hole.
"Good work, Mr. Vandemark!" he said. "Those knowledgy folk back along the road who said you were trading yourself out of your patrimony ought to see you put the thing through. If you ever need work, come to my place out in the new Earthly Eden."
"I'll have plenty of work of my own," I said; "but maybe, sometime, I may need to earn a little money. I'll remember."
I stopped at Independence that night; and so did the Gowdy party. I was on the road before them in the morning, but they soon passed me, Virginia looking wishfully at me as they went by, and Buck Gowdy waving his hand in a way that made me think he must be a little tight--and then they drove on out of sight, and I pursued my slow way wondering why Virginia Royall had asked me so anxiously if I knew any good people who would take in and shelter a friendless girl--and not only take her in, but fight for her. I could not understand what she had said in any other way.
I had a hard time that day. The road was already cut up and at the crossings of the swales the sod on which we relied to bear up our wheels was destroyed by the host of teams that had gone on before me. That endless stream across the Dubuque ferry was flowing on ahead of me; and the fast-going part of it was passing me every hour like swift schooners outstripping a slow, round-bellied Dutch square-rigger.
The mire-holes were getting deeper and deeper; for the weather was showery. I helped many teams out of their troubles, and was helped by some; though my load was not overly heavy, and I had four true-pulling heavy cows that, when mated with the Alderney bull I had left behind me with Mr. Westervelt, gave me the best stock of cattle--they and my other cows--in Monterey County, until Judge Horace Stone began bringing in his pure-bred Shorthorns; and even then, by grading up with Shorthorn blood I was thought by many to have as good cattle as he had. So I got out of most of my troubles on the Old Ridge Road with my cows, as I did later with them and their descendants when the wheat crop failed us in the 'seventies; but I had a hard time that day. It grew better in the afternoon; and as night drew on I could see the road for miles ahead of me a solitary stretch of highway, without a team; but far off, coming over a hill toward me, I saw a figure that looked strange and mysterious to me, somehow.