I grew up along with those bally English and I think I knew them pretty well. They were not all rascals. The Colony section was only five miles away from Wetmore as the crow flies. And as the crow flew then so did I gallop my mustang along the prairie grass lane while carrying mail between Wetmore and Seneca, passing Llewellyn Castle on the way.
There were few fences in the way then. Just prairie grass and wild roses and more prairie grass. And lots of prairie chickens. I have seen acres of them at one time on the hillsides in the vicinity of Llewellyn Castle.
There was no blue-grass then. And no timber along the route anywhere until the Nemaha was reached just this side of Seneca, at the old Hazzard place.
And later, in 1887, when I was a compositor on T. J. Wolfley’s Seneca Tribune, and made drives home with Sandy Sterling’s livery team, practically all of the twenty-six miles of road was still only a winding trail.
Willis J. Coburn, the contractor for that Star mail route, went with me on the first trip. He took me to the home of his old friend, John Radford, who had then left the Colony and was living on the old Scrafford place adjoining Seneca on the south. I put up with “Old Radidad”—as we afterwards called him when he came to live in Wetmore—for about a month, and while they treated me kindly, I didn’t like their English ways.
And when I announced my intentions of throwing up my job Willis Coburn said I should then put up at the old Fairchild Hotel, which was on a side street north from the upper end of the main street. It was a stone building. Besides being immaculately clean, the Fairchilds were related to the Jay Powers family in Wetmore and that made a bond between us that held for the duration of my mail carrying activities. There were two stops on the way—one in the Abbey neighborhood, and one at old Lincoln.
As compensation for my services as mail-carrier, I was paid fifty cents each way, up one day and back the next—twice a week. And I was glad to get that. Our mail-carriers here in Wetmore, covering about equal distance, with only two hours on the road, draw about seven dollars a day.
When Willis Coburn offered me the job I was short of the required age, sixteen, and I was wondering how I would get by without swearing to a lie, when our good old postmaster, Alvin McCreery, solved the problem for me. When he swore me in, he said, “Now, don’t tell me your age.” He shook his head, negatively, and repeated, “Don’t tell me your age.”
At the Radford home in Seneca, I learned enough about the old Colony to make a book, but much of it is now shrouded in a fog of haze. On the occasion of our first trip, Mr. Radford and Mr. Coburn discussed Colony matters freely in my presence. It was July, and it was out on the border of the big orchard which came right up to the back door, under the shade of an early harvest apple tree, where they sat and talked.
I have to admit that at the time I was more interested in the golden fruit hanging on the apple tree than I was in the conversation, but I got enough of it to know that there would be a good story in it, if I could but remember more clearly. Mr. Radford’s agile mind ground out astonishing facts as steadily as a grist mill that afternoon. Whatever else may be said of John Radford, he was an educated man. And he had a wonderful sense of humor.