The Colony project was a glorious and ignominious failure from the very first, with romance and intrigue ever in the ascendancy. Those poor Englishmen were as green as the verdant prairies of springtime that lay all about them. And the inexorable hand of Fate pressed down on them heavily. They were besieged by droughts, grasshoppers, prairie fires, blizzards, rattlesnakes—and, worst of all, an abiding ignorance of all things American. When Llewellyn Castle was torn down in later years, a den of rattlesnakes—twenty two in number—was found under the house.
Tom Fish told me that the snakes were offer heard flopping against the floor, underneath, while the house was occupied.
Those poor misfits had not a chance. And it was little short of criminal to send them over here so empty handed and so illy equipped for the duties imposed upon them. But they were now all a part of the big, sun-filled Golden West. And they were too poor to go back.
Many are the causes advanced for the downfall of the Colony project, but the one cause on which all seem to be unanimous, more or less, is that “They were a bunch of rascals.” This is probably an error—or partly so, at least.
Internal friction with a very shady but treeless background undoubtedly played its part. But I would rather suspect that the main cause was ignorance, or to put it more kindly, a lack of knowledge. Tom Fish, our faithful mixer of British-American juris-prudence—three times Justice of the Peace backs me up in this contention. Says Tommy, “They just didn’t knower anythink about farmin.” Our Tom attended their meetings back in London at the Newman street-Market street headquarters.
But whatever the facts, and admitting that there were among the Colonists no replicas of the man who walked along the Galilean shores two thousands years ago, still I do not subscribe to the general belief that those Colonists were all rascals.
Had they succeeded, handicapped as they were, it would have been a miracle—and only in ancient history do miracles spring fullblown from questionable beginnings. A condition soon developed among the Colonists on section twenty-five where it was “every fellow for himself and may the devil take the hindmost.” True, there was a lot of poor management and some shady, if not to say crooked, transactions. And it appears one man did rather “Lord” it over the others—took the lion’s share of everything.
George Cox, a carpenter—they were practically all tradesmen was sent over to superintend fencing the Colony lands. And, very much to the merriment of the natives, he did that fencing in the dead of winter, when the ground was frozen. The postholes he and his countrymen dug that winter cost the Company one dollar, each. Such frozen assets were, of course, conducive to the downfall of the Company.
But George Cox was not the fool that his ice-bound fence would indicate. The real fault was on the other side of the big pond. The Company sent Cox over here in midwinter to build a fence. He was without funds. The larder at Llewellyn Castle was low—distressingly low. And his brother Englishmen needed immediate succor. There was money for George Cox only when he worked. And he couldn’t afford to put in all his time that blizzardy, snowbound winter hanging onto the coat-tail of one of his brother countrymen while the bunch of them played ring-round-the-stove in that old Colony house to keep from freezing, as he once told me he was compelled to do. So, then, what was really wrong with George’s congealed fence idea?
Like other Englishmen, after coming here, George Cox had a lot to learn, of course. He was the complainant in a lawsuit involving the ownership of a cow. John J. Ingalls was attorney for Theodore