Part 16

I could keep on writing about this kid until the “cows come home”—but I won’t. This paragraph shall suffice. We were coming up from town, hand in hand, when Cloy, fairly bubbling over with good cheer, said to me, “You never did let me see in your rooms.” I said, “Well, come in now and take a good look.” When inside, she said, “Gee, it stinks in here.” Defendant pleads nolo contendere.

These two fine little youngsters have been in my home—separate apartment—since time began for them. And I’ve instilled in their heads the ice cream cone habit. Their mother has told them that they must not ask for the cones—but together we’ve worked out a way around that. Whenever I meet Karen, bright-eyed and smiling, in my path, I say to her, “Well, go in and tell your mother.” I never know how she gets it over to Marjorie—but we are always off at once, usually with a mighty active little trailer not far behind. When brought into my presence in the yard, before she could talk, Karen, doubtless thinking of a cone, would point the way down town and then run ahead for about a rod. When this did not bring the desired results, she would take me by the hand and lead the way, humming like a contented kitten sometimes purrs.

When hardly three years old, Karen’s mother sent her, with an older little girl from across the street, on an errand down to Hart’s store. They both “fetched up” at the restaurant where I get my meals. They found me “in” — but Karen, in the lead, did not give me so much as a single look. They marched on past me, climbed — with much effort — onto the counter stools. Charlie Shaffer asked them a couple of times what they wanted — but they just stared. Charlie then glanced over toward me, laughing, which was equivalent to saying, “You take ‘em, ” and then I had gotten over my laughing spell, I called Karen over to me, and asked her if they would like cones.

Her little head went up and down a couple of times. They got their cones, and went out pleased. And I was pleased, too. When the annual Wetmore Fair was in progress I found Karen, slightly more than four years old, sitting primly on a bench among strangers at the down-town end of the block on which we lived, and I sat down by her. She proudly told me she had on a new dress — a little yellow creation—which I later suspected she had been told to keep clean. I told her she looked nice—and this she accepted with true womanly grace.

It also developed that she had been permitted to go thus far only in advance, to await the coming of her mother and Harry—but she did not take the trouble to tell me this. I asked her to go with me to the drugstore for cones. She hesitated a moment as if she were remembering something—and then declined to go, but she said, “I thank you for asking me.”

On my return from the post office, I observed the little yellow dress was still on the bench—and, as Karen had been so nice about it, I stepped into the drugstore and bought a couple of cones, aiming to pick her up on my way home. Then, too late, I realized my mistake. The children saw me with the cones as they turned the corner with their mother enroute to the program on the Fair grounds in the next block. With apologies, I gave the cones to Marjorie, thinking to make her jointly responsible for messing up her children.

Well, the next day when we were getting cones at the drugstore, I asked Karen if she had gotten her new dress soiled with the cone last evening. Karen laughed—and said, “You know something. Daddy and mamma ate the cones—but mamma gave me one bite.” I did not hear from Harry on this score, but assumed matters had been properly taken care of. The moral is: Never give a kid a messy treat after mama has cleaned it up for public appearance.

ANOTHER BRIGHT LITTLE STAR The little Fresno, California miss was ushered into my presence. My sister then went back outside to continue with the watering of her flowers. Standing off at a reasonable distance, Connie Jean Moser, from across the street at 1010 Ferger, said, “Aunt Nannie told me to come in and get acquainted with Uncle John.” Attracted at once by the little visitor’s proud carriage, pleasant expression of face, and trim little body not burdened with too many clothes, I told her that for me this should be a real pleasure.

Little girls, from three to six, in all their innocence, have always made a hit with me. This is not to say I do not appreciate them when they are older. But in general they lose a lot when they get smart. And here now was beauty and apparently innocence at its best. A little reserved at first, Connie Jean declined my invitation for her to sit with me on the sofa, where I had been writing on a tab. She climbed into a chair, twisted, and got settled with her little bare feet sticking straight out at me. She told me her name, her age, and where She lived—and that she had a boy friend named David.

Not wanting to lose an interrupted thought, I picked up the tab and wrote a few lines. This done, I now found Connie Jean Moser, four years old, sitting close up by my side, on the sofa. She asked me to read what I had written. I said, “Oh, Connie, you wouldn’t understand it.” Then she commanded, peremptorily, “Read it!” I told her I was writing a book, and if she would promise to read every word of it when she got big enough that I would send her the book.

“Oh, a book,” she said, happily, a light breaking in upon her understanding, “I could take it to school like Oralee.” Oralee Johnson, ten years old, is Connie Jean’s next door neighbor. I told Connie that Oralee, when four years old, had paid me several rather affectionate visits when I was in Fresno six years ago—but Oralee was getting too big for that now.

“Yes,” she said, “Oralee is big. ”

Connie Jean squirmed and twisted on the sofa, as children will, causing the straps sustaining her little sun-suit to slip off her shoulders, annoying her to the point of alarm. I said, “Don’t let the straps bother you, Connie—you will not lose your suit.” She smiled, and her blue eyes opened wide. “If I would lose ‘em,” she said, “it would be too bad—got nothing under ‘em.”

A very good man once said, “Suffer little children to come unto me.”

LLEWELLYN CASTLE Published in Wetmore Spectator—Seneca Courier- Tribune—Goff Advance—Topeka Daily Capital—October, 1931

By John T. Bristow

A half century ago England got rid of some of her surplus inhabitants by sending them over to this country to “root hog, or die” as the old saying is. They drifted in here “like lost leaves from the annals of men.” Colonies were planted in numerous sections of Kansas. Nemaha County, with her great sweep of vacant rolling prairies, inviting, snared one of those colonies.

The settlement known as the old English colony was on section twenty-five, in Harrison township, five miles northwest of Wetmore. The section was purchased from the Union Pacific railroad company by the Co-operative Colonization Company, of London, about 1870.

The London Colonization Company had about six hundred members. They drew lots to determine who would be the lucky—or unlucky—ones to come over first, expenses paid.

John Fuller, John Mollineaux, George Dutch, John Radford, Charles McCarthy and John Stowell were the original six to enter upon the duties of conquering this land—virgin wild land it was. Except John Stowell, all these men had families, but they did not all bring their families over at first.

An eight-room house was built in the middle of the section and all managed to live in it for a while. It was called Llewellyn Castle. Later, lean-tos were built on two sides of the big house, and finally, some smaller buildings were erected around the original house. The men were supplied, meagerly, with funds to equip the farm.

The idea of the Company at first was to make a town in the center of the section, and cut the land up into 10-acre tracts. They seemed to think that ten acres would make a respectable sized farm. The town of Goff, a mile and a half away, got started and the Colony town project was abandoned. Also the 10-acre farm plan was changed to forty acres. The lumber for the improvements was unloaded at old Sother, a siding on the railroad a mile and a half south of the Colony section. There was a postoffice at old Sother. Nothing else. Not even a station agent.

Later arrivals of the Colonists included the Wessels, Beebys, Perrys, Coxes, Ashtons, Trents, McConwells, G ates, Morden, Hill, May, Conover, Weston, Helsby, Weeks, Mrs. Terbit, and others. Still later, other members of the Colonization Company come over after the local Company had ceased to exist –gone bankrupt, it was charged, because of the extravagant management of the non-producing misfits sent over here to start operations. At this late date it could not be ascertained just what was the text of the contracts between the parent company and the members sent over here. But the impression is that if all had gone well additional lands would have been acquired to accommodate other members. The members, however, kept on coming regardless of the lack of advance preparation.

They scattered out on other lands, mostly around the Colony—usually 40-acre tracts. They were miserably poor. And the privations were many. Mrs. Terbit, having no mode of conveyance, used to walk all the way in from the Colony and carry home on her shoulder a 50-pound sack of flour.

Isaac May settled on the 40-acre tract one mile south of Wetmore, which is now the home of George W. Gill. May lived in a dug-out. John Stowell settled on the north eighty of a quarter five miles southwest of Wetmore—known as the Joe Board place, and still later owned by Charley Krack.

George Cox settled the south eighty, which is still in the Cox family—now owned by George’s son Fred, of Goff.

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 Wolfley, the defendant. The illustrious John J. queried, “What color was your cow, Mr. Cox?”

“Bay,” said George. The court laughed, and told Cox to try again. “Well,” said George, “I ‘ave a bay ‘orse, and my cow’s the same color as my bay ‘orse.”

Then, from over the seas, came the jovial Mr. Murray, clothed in authority and a superabundance of ego—English to the core. He had been sent over here to make an audit of the Company’s estate. Murray stopped first at Wetmore and partook freely of Johnny Clifton’s “alf-and-alf.” He was a free spender and made friends here readily.

In pursuance of his duties, Mr. Murray said to those Colony delinquents, “Wots the jolly old idea of all this reticence? Hits most happallin! I want to see the books, by-jove.” One of those derelicts exclaimed with a little more mirth than was becoming, “I-si, just listen to ‘im, fellow! Wants to see the books, ‘e does! That’s rich! Si, mister we don’t keep henny books!”

Then in unison they shot words at Mr. Murray which were the same as “You get the hell out of here.” Murray demurred, and not having read the storm signals quite right, he bellowed, “Ave a care! Want that I should report you for this hincolence? Hits very hunwise for you to hact this wy!”

But when the old shotgun was brought out from its hiding place an awful doubt of his own wisdom assailed the jovial Mr. Murray. Those true sons of Briton actually chased the auditor away with a shotgun.

In employing the hit-and-miss English words here I am relaying them to you as best I can from memory as I caught them from one, maybe two, of the original six, many, many years ago. The quoted words are not my own. If you could have known the men and could apply either the Stowell or Radford pronunciation and accent you would improve it a lot. And don’t forget to speed up a little.

There are now few of the old-time typical English with us. And the language of those who came over a long time ago has become Americanized to such extent that the younger generation here have no conception of just how delightfully funny was the talk of a fresh Englishman. However, some of those who came over as children and Even some of the American born who had good tutors retain a percentage Of the pronunciation, but the inflection and speed which characterized their ancestors have been lost.

After the collapse of the Colony enterprise the unallotted part of section twenty-five fell into the hands of Captain Wilson, of London.

He was an officer in the Company. Later, Captain Wilson’s interest was acquired by William Fish, also of London, and a member of the Company. In England William Fish was superintendent of the Great Northern railroad. He came over here in 1881. He was a pensioner, and did not renounce his allegiance to the Crown.

Captain Wilson thought a lot of the Colony scheme. He was to have given his fortune at death to the first male child born on the Colony section. That honor fell to Alfred Wilson Mollineaux, first son of John Mollineaux, born 1874. While conversing with Alfred Mollineaux a few days ago, he said to me, “But since I didn’t get me ‘eritage I’ve dropped the Wilson part of it. Wot would be the good to bother with it now?”

The Mollineaux heirs are the only descendents of the originals holding an interest in section twenty-five in recent years. Alfred now owns the south 80 of the northwest quarter. Harry sold the north 80 two years ago to Otto Krack. Otto paid $6,000 for it, including the growing crop. The old house on the place, built more than a half century ago, is the original John Mollineaux home. The other lands in the section have long since passed to new owners.

There are now only two of the old Colonists living. William Wessel, familiarly called “Teddy,” came over in 1873. He is 89, and lives with his daughter, Mrs. John Chase, in Goff. William Conover lives with his son Edward, on a farm adjacent to the old Colony section. He is 89.

I took a drive about the old Colony section a few days ago seeking to refresh my memory and gather additional data for this article. At Goff I found Teddy Wessel in the Sourk drug store. Still living over the broken dreams of the past, Teddy exploded, first-off, “They were a bunch of damned rascals.”

In course of the interview I asked Teddy if he knew anything about a racy romance at Llewellyn Castle many years ago. “I should say I do,” he said. He had a momentary flash of it. That was all. Then his mind began to fag. Laboriously, tantalizingly, the tired feelers of his mind went fumbling into the dark pool of the past, trying desperately to capture the lost details, but the whole works went under—ebbed away like a fadeout in a movie.

George Sourk, who was sitting by and coaching the old fellow a bit, said, “You’ll have to give daddy a little time, John. He’ll remember it all right.”

Daddy swam up out of it all right and sure enough recollections were upon him with a bang. But the main topic was still submerged and in its place was an ugly memory that should have been dead long ago. “They were damned rascals,” is all he said.

It is assumed that my very fine old friend’s poisoned arrow was aimed only at the shades of the original six, or, at most, only those who had the actual management of the Colony affairs.

Teddy Wessel’s run of hard luck started before he left London. It seems he bought something—or thought he paid for something—he didn’t get. But Teddy can thank his stars that there was at least one crooked countryman in his close circle. Teddy trusted a friend to purchase first-class passage for himself and family. The friend bought cheaper tickets on a slower ship, and pocketed the difference. The fast ship passed the slower one in midocean and was lost, together with all on board, when one day out from New York.

A happy—and I believe equitable—solution of the matter would allow the reader who had a friend or relative among them the privilege of exempting such one, and thus still leave Teddy some targets for his arrows. For my own part, I think I should like to exempt that little nineteen-year-old boy, John Stowell. In later years, after he had come to Wetmore and engaged in business, I worked for John Stowell in his lumber yard, and in his brick manufacturing plant, and finally, as type-setter on his newspaper. He was not a crook.

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.

As I remember it, or partly remember it, the high light of the afternoon’s conversation—the thing that tickled the men most—was a racy romance that had budded, bloomed, and died at Llewellyn Castle. The male participants were of course Wetmore men—one artisan, one professional. But somewhere along the time-worn trail between that old apple tree and my present quarters, separated by three and fifty years, the details of that affair are lost. And like the characters who made it, that romance has crumbled into dust—is now a part of the past.