There is no angling for profit in this work.
These stories are now printed in book form to preserve them for their historic value. The book is not for sale. It is my gift to the home folks.
The books are costing me about ten dollars a copy—and, naturally, I won’t have enough of them to be passed out promiscuously. I shall place them in the schools, and libraries, and with the newspapers in the county—and with friends here and there, where all the home folks can have the chance to read the book, should they so desire. I am sure that I have more friends than I have copies of the book, and I trust that those who do not receive a copy will not feel that, in my estimation, they do not rate one.
Wetmore
It was not an excess of water, as one might suppose, that gave Wetmore its name. Nor was it, as some have been led to believe, because a certain Captain Wetmore, with a number of soldiers during the Civil War chanced to camp over night at our ever-flowing mineral spring. Art Taylor says his grandmother told him that such was the case.
It has been generally understood all along that the town was named after a New York official of the railroad which came through here in 1867. Confirmed, this would seem to kill the Taylor version of it, by at least two years. The matter, I believe, was settled for all time a couple of summers back when a New York woman, returning by automobile from the Pacific coast, called at the Wetmore post office to mail some letters. She told Postmaster Jim Hanks that the town was named after her father, who was an official of the railroad—and that she had driven a hundred miles out of her way to have her letters bear the Wetmore postmark.
I have seen Wetmore grow—and slip. Compact at the time of my entry seventy-nine years ago, occupying less than a half block, the town spread out through the years to a space of one-half mile by nearly one mile—not quite solid. The town became a City in 1884, with Dr. J. W. Graham as first Mayor—and at its peak had a population 687. The population at this time—1948—is 373.
There is not a person in this City today who was here when I came. Gone, all gone now. And nearly all dead. Something more than a tinge of sadness accompanies this thought. There is not a building of any kind standing that was here when I came—not a tree but what has been planted since that day. In truth, there is nothing, not a thing left, save the eternal hills and the creek which flows through the south edge of the City that antedates the time I came here.
Yet, I do not feel old. And should any of my friends choose to wish me anything, let them wish with me that I never do grow old.