The destinies of the county and state were in the hands of youth, dreaming of the future: and when the untamed prairie turned and bit us, as it did in frosts and blizzards and floods and locusts and tornadoes, we said to each other, like the boy in the story when the dog bit his father, "Grin and bear it, Dad! It'll be the makin' o' the pup!" Even the older men like Judge Stone and Governor Wade and Elder Thorndyke and heads of families like the Bemisdarfers, were dreamers: and as for such ne'er-do-weels as the Fewkeses, they, with Celebrate's schemes for making money, and Surrager's inventions, and their plans for palaces and estates, were only a little more absurd in their visions than the rest of us. The actual life of to-day is to the dreams of that day as the wheat plant to the lily. It starts to be a lily, but the finger and thumb of destiny--mainly in the form of heredity--turn it into the wheat, and then into the prosaic flour and bran in the bins.
As I came driving into Monterey County, every day had its event, different from that of the day before; but now comes a period when I must count by years, not days, and a lot of time passes without much to record. As for the awful to-do about the county's lost money, I heard nothing of it, except when, once in a while, somebody, nosing into the matter for one reason or another, would come prying around to ask me about it. I began by telling them the whole story whenever they asked, and Henderson L. Burns once took down what I said and made me swear to it. Whenever I came to the jingle of the money in the bag as we put it in the carriage on starting for the Wades', they cross-examined me till I said I sort of seemed to kind of remember that it jingled, and anyhow I recollected that Judge Stone had said "Hear it jingle, Jake!" This proved either that the money was there and jingled, or that it wasn't there and that the judge was, as N.V. said, "As guilty as hell."
Dick McGill didn't know which way the cat would jump, and kept pretty still about it in his paper; but he printed a story on me that made everybody laugh. "There was once a Swede," said the paper, "that was running away from the minions of the law, and took refuge in a cabin where they covered him with a gunny sack. When the Hawkshaws came they asked for the Swede. No information forthcoming. 'What's in that bag?' asked the minions. 'Sleighbells,' replied the accomplices. The minion kicked the bag, and there came forth from under it the cry, 'Yingle! Yingle!' We know a Dutchman who is addicted to the same sort of ventriloquism." (Monterey Journal, September 3, 1857.)
In 1856 we cut our grain with cradles. In 1857 Magnus and I bought a Seymour & Morgan hand-rake reaper. I drove two yoke of cows to this machine, and Magnus raked off. I don't think we gained much over cradling, except that we could work nights with the cows, and bind day-times, or the other way around when the straw in the gavels got dry and harsh so that heads would pull off as we cinched up the sheaves. At that very moment, the Marsh brothers back in De Kalb County, Illinois, were working on the greatest invention ever given to agriculture since the making of the first steel plow, the Marsh Harvester.
Every year we broke some prairie, and our cultivated land increased. By the fall of 1857, my little cottonwood trees showed up in a pretty grove of green for a distance of two or three miles, and were ten to fifteen feet high: so I could lie in the shade of the trees I had planted.
But if the trees flourished, the community did not. The panic of 1857 came on in the summer and fall; but we knew nothing, out in our little cabins, of the excitement in the cities, the throngs on Wall Street and in Philadelphia, the closing banks, the almost universal bankruptcy of the country. It all came from land speculation. According to what they said, there was more land then laid out in town-sites in Kansas than in all the cities and towns of the settled parts of the country. In Iowa there were town-sites along all the streams and scattered all over the prairies. Everybody was in debt, in the business world, and when land stopped growing in value, sales stopped, and then the day of reckoning came. All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent financial panics[14].
[14] The author, when his attention is called to the Mississippi Bubble, insists that it was nothing more nor less than betting on the land development of a great new region. As to the "Tulipomania" which once created a small panic in Holland, he insists that such a fool notion can not often occur, and never can have wide-spread results like a genuine financial panic. In which the editor is inclined to believe the best economists will agree with him.--G.v.d.M.
But, though we knew nothing about this general wreck and ruin back east, we knew that we were miserably poor. In the winter of 1857-8 Magnus and I were beggarly ragged and so short of fuel and bedding that he came over and stayed with me, so that we could get along with one bed and one fire. My buffalo robes were the things that kept us warm, those howling nights, or when it was so still that we could hear the ice crack in the creek eighty rods off. My wife has always said that Magnus and I holed up in our den like wild animals, and sometimes like a certain domestic one. But what with Magnus and the fiddle and his stories of Norway and mine of the canal we amused ourselves pretty well and got along without baths. My cows, and the chickens, and our vegetables and potatoes, and our white and buckwheat flour and the corn-meal mush and johnny-cake kept us fat, and I entirely outgrew my best suit, so that I put it on for every day, and burst it at most of the seams in a week.