That money panic was brought on by the collapse of the Jay Cooke brokerage houses in three eastern cities. Cooke, a nationally known promoter, was financing the building of the Northern Pacific railroad, and had made too many advances.
It may be of interest here, especially in Nemaha and Jackson counties and possibly throughout all Northeast Kansas, to know that, later, through an unprotected brokerage partnership in the National Capitol with that wizard of finance, a former resident of Wetmore township, Green Campbell, who had come into local and national prominence by reason of his sensational rise to affluence as principal owner of the famous Horn Silver mine at Frisco, Utah, dropped a cool million of his mine-made dollars in the aftermath of that failure.
After he had failed, Jay Cooke, still the promoter par-excellence, secured a railroad for Green Campbell’s mine. Later, after he had sold his mine, Campbell went to Washington as delegate to Congress from Utah. Still later Campbell joined Cooke there in the brokerage business. With new money in the firm, Cooke’s old creditors swooped down upon Campbell like a swarm of bees. And they stung him hard. His first check was drawn for nine hundred thousand dollars! However, there was no time after selling the Horn Silver mine that Green Campbell was not a rich man. Green Campbell endowed a college at Holton, Kansas, bearing his name. His old homestead was in the southwest part of Wetmore township. It is now owned and occupied by August Krotzinger.
Then there was the year 1874—a blank year with its train of blighted hopes that socked the whole populace still deeper down into the slough of despond. Following a season of scanty production, the crops that year, in the spring and up to mid-summer, showed signs of fulfillment. Then came the usual anxious period—dry, windy, scorching days, And hope, that had sprung in the tired hearts of the farmers commenced to die as they looked with anxiety on the drooping crops. The people prayed for rain. They watched for clouds. Then, out of the northwest there came a cloud—a black cloud, a menacing cloud, that was to blot out all renaming hope.
It was a rain of pests—a deluge of grasshoppers! Like the plagues of old they descended upon us. And they greedily devoured every growing thing—corn, grass, weeds, foliage of the trees—leaving in their wake a barren waste and a woefully impoverished lot of people. After devouring every edible thing, and gnawing on pitchfork handles and axe handles — for salt deposited by sweaty hands — the hoppers deposited eggs in the ground, and then perished with the coming of cold weather. The young hoppers in the spring of 1875 cleaned up the farmer’s first plantings—but on a day, at noon, late in June they rose up as a cloud blotting out the sun from the earth as they winged their way to greener pastures—where, nobody here knew.
Now we have left the Indian standing there by the side of his pony for a long time. But the Indian doesn’t mind. Not our Kickapoo, anyway. And, as a stickler for the truth, for accuracy of detail, I will admit that my deductions, my fears, did not coincide with the facts as later developed; that, in the language of the street and as my father said of me at the time out there in the wood—literally, I was “all wet.”
That Indian was not an emissary of destruction, rather, he was, after the manner of the wise one of his peoples, a maker of good medicine. My father’s great haste to get away from the Wolfley timber had been halted by a clump of black oak trees. There were two holes in a large limb of the great oak under which the Indian found us standing. The Indian looked up into the tree. “Long time go Indian’s tomahawk make holes,” he said. “Maybe catchum coon,” He shifted his beady black eyes to another part of the tree, and exclaimed, “Seeum squirrel!”
My father had hot noticed the holes in the limb, nor the squirrel which the Indian saw flattened out on a branch high up in the tree. To my father, that tree presented far more interesting possibilities. Before interrupted, his thoughts had, more or less, shifted from the man who had treated him so shabbily and had carried him back to the sunny Southland, to the evergreen hills of his boyhood home. There he had successfully operated a tannery—successfully, until the Civil War put him out of business.
The tree my father was now viewing was a huge black oak. It was surrounded by more of its kind. At any time the sight of a black oak attracted him. Black oak bark was the agency he employed in making leather in his Tennessee tannery. He longed to get back into the business. There were other black oaks in the country; yet he questioned if there were enough to justify the establishment of a tannery here. He was constantly on the lookout for a substitute for making leather.
Pointing to the boots he himself wore, my father told the Indian that his interest in that tree was because the bark of the black oak was used in making leather. Also, noticing that the Indian was wearing moccasins and other deerskin raiment under his blanket, my father asked him what the Indians used for tanning. The Indian became thoughtful and finally said something that sounded like “Sequaw.” But that was worse than Greek to my father.