Vandemark's Folly Part 27

"Shall I go, Jake?" she asked, looking up into my face.

"It looks like a good chance for all of you," I answered.

"I don't want to," said she, "I couldn't stay here, could I? ... No, of course not!"

So away went the Fewkeses with Buck Gowdy. That is, Rowena went away with him in his buggy, and the rest of the family followed in a day or so with the cross old horse--now refreshed by my hay and grain, and the rest we had given him,--in their rickety one-horse wagon. I remember how Rowena looked back at us, her hair blowing about her face which looked, just a thought, pale and big-eyed, as the Gowdy buggy went off like the wind, with Buck's arm behind the girl to keep her from bouncing out.

This day's work was not to cease in its influence on Iowa affairs for half a century, if ever. State politics, the very government of the commonwealth, the history of Monterey County and of Vandemark Township, were all changed when Buck Gowdy went off over the prairie that day, holding Rowena Fewkes in the buggy seat with that big brawny arm of his.

Ma Fewkes seemed delighted to see Mr. Gowdy holding her daughter in the buggy.

"n.o.body can tell what great things may come of this!" she cried, as they went out of sight over a knoll.

She never said a truer thing. To be sure, it was only the hiring by a very rich man, as rich men went in those days, of three worthless hands and a hired girl; but it tore the state's affairs in pieces. Whenever I think of it I remember some verses in the _Fifth Reader_ that my children used in school:

"Somewhere yet that atom's force Moves the light-poised universe[11]."

[11] See _Gowdy vs. Buckner_, et al, Ia. Rep. Also accounts of relations of the so-called Gowdy Estate litigation to "The Inside of Iowa Politics" by the editor of these MSS.--in press.--G.v.d.M.

It was a great deal more important then, though, that on that afternoon I was arrested for a great many things--a.s.sault with intent to commit great bodily injury, a.s.sault with intent to kill, just simple a.s.sault, unlawful a.s.sembly, rioting, and I don't know but treason. d.i.c.k McGill, I am sure it was, told the first claim-jumper we visited that I was at the head of the mob, and he had me arrested. I was taken to Monterey Centre by Jim Boyd, the blacksmith, who was deputy sheriff; but he did the fair thing and allowed me to get Magnus Thorkelson to attend to my stock while I was gone.

I think that that pa.s.sage in the Scriptures which tells us to visit those who are in prison as well as the sick, is a thing that shows the Bible to be an inspired work; but, this belief has come to me through my remembrance of my sufferings when I was arrested. Not that I went to prison. In fact, I do not believe there was anything like a jail nearer than Iowa City or Dubuque; but Jim told me that he understood that I was a terrible ruffian and would have to be looked after very closely. He made me help him about the blacksmith shop, and I learned so much about blacksmithing that I finally set up a nice little forge on the farm and did a good deal of my own work. At last Jim said I was stealing his trade, and when Virginia Royall came down to the post-office the day the mail came in, which was a Friday in those days, and came to the shop to see me, he told her what a fearful criminal I was. She laughed and told Jim to stop his fooling, not knowing what a very serious thing it was for me.

When she asked me to come up to see the Elder and Grandma Thornd.y.k.e, and I told her I was a prisoner, Jim paroled me to her, and made her give him a receipt for me which he wrote out on the anvil on the leaf of his pa.s.s-book, and had her sign it. He said he was glad to get rid of me for two reasons: one was that I was stealing his trade, and the other that I was likely to bu'st forth at any time and kill some one, especially a claim-jumper if there were any left in the county, which he doubted.

So I went with Virginia and spent the night at the elder's. Grandma Thornd.y.k.e took my part, though she made a great many inquiries about Rowena Fewkes; but the elder warned me solemnly against lawlessness, though when we were alone together he made me tell him all about the affair, and seemed to enjoy the more violent parts of it as if it had been a novel; but when he asked me who were in the "mob" I refused to tell him, and he said maybe I was right--that my honor might be involved. Grandma Thornd.y.k.e seemed to have entirely got over her fear of having me and Virginia together, and let us talk alone as much as we pleased.

I told them about the quant.i.ty of wild strawberries I had out in Vandemark's Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and his wife and herself might go out there with me for a strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it inc.u.mbent upon him to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the sugar if I would pony up the cream--of which I had a plenty. So we had quite a banquet out on the farm. Once in a while I would forget about the a.s.saults and the treason and be quite jolly--and then it would all come back upon me, and I would break out in a cold sweat. Out of this grew the first strawberry and cream festival ever held in any church in Monterey Centre, the fruit being furnished, according to the next issue of the _Journal_ "by the malefactors confined in the county Bastille"--in other words by me.

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Virginia and I gathered the berries, and she was as happy as she could be, apparently; but once in a while she would say, "Poor Teunis! Can't a Dutchman see a joke?"

After that, the elder and his wife used to come out to see me, bringing Virginia with them, almost every week, and I prided myself greatly on my fried chicken my nice salt-rising bread, my garden vegetables, my green corn, my b.u.t.ter, milk and cream. I had about forgotten about being arrested, when the grand jury indicted me, and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn went bail for me. When the trial came on I was fined twenty dollars, and before I could produce the money, it was paid by William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost, who told me that they got me into it, and it wasn't fair for a boy to suffer through doing what was necessary for the protection of the settlers, and what a lot of older men had egged him on to do. So I came out of it all straight, and was not much the less thought of. In fact, I seemed to have ten friends after the affair to one before. But d.i.c.k McGill, whose connection with it I have felt justified in exposing, still hounded me through his paper. I have before me the copy of the _Journal_--little four-page sheet yellowed with time, with the account of it which follows:

"A desperado named Vandemark, well known to the annals of local crime as 'Cow Vandemark,' was arrested last Wednesday for leading the riots which have cleaned out those industrious citizens who have been jumping claims in this county. A reporter of the _Journal_, which finds out everything before it happens, attended the ceremonies of giving some of these people a coat of tar and feathers, and can speak from personal observation as to the ferocity of this ruffian Vandemark--also from slight personal contact.

"This hardened wretch is in every feature a villain--except that he has a rosy complexion, downy whiskers, and b.u.t.termilk eyes, instead of the black flashing orbs of fiction. Sheriff Boyd decoyed him into town, skilfully avoiding any rousing of his tigerish disposition, and is now making a blacksmith of him--or was until yesterday, when he paroled him to Miss Virginia Royall, the ward of the Reverend Thornd.y.k.e.

"This is a very questionable policy. If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community. Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate of the criminal, known as Vandemark's Folly, and by the use of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob T. Vandemark--whom we hereby salute--we are promised another strawberry festival before the crop is gone.

"In the meantime, it is worthy of mention that the industry of claim-jumping has suffered a sudden slump, and that the splendid pioneers who have opened up this Garden of Eden will not be robbed of the fruits of their enterprise."

When I came to run for county supervisor, he rehashed the matter without giving any hint that after all what I did was approved of by the people of the county in 1856 when these things took place or that he himself was in it up to the neck! But enough of that: the historical fact is that Settlers' Clubs did work of this sort all over Iowa in those times, and right or wrong, the pioneers held to the lands they took up when the great tide of the Republic broke over the Mississippi and inundated Iowa. The history of Vandemark Township was the history of the state.

CHAPTER XV.

I SAVE A TREASURE, AND START A FEUD

In the month of May, 1857, I went to a party. This was a new thing for me; for parties had been something of which I had heard as of many things outside of the experience of a common fellow like me, but always had thought about as a thing only to be read of, like _porte cocheres_ and riding to hounds, and butlers and books of poems. Stuff for story-books, and not for Vandemark Township; though when I saw the thing, it was not so very different from the dances and "sings" we used to have on the boats of the Grand Ca.n.a.l, as the Erie Ditch was then called when you wanted to put on a little style.

The party was at the "great Gothic house" of Governor Wade, just finished, over in Benton Township. The Governor was not even a citizen of Vandemark Township, but he had some land in it. Buck Gowdy's great estate lapped over on one corner of the township, Governor Wade's on the other, and h.e.l.l Slew, nicknamed Vandemark's Folly Marsh cut it through the middle, and made it hard for us to get out a full vote on anything after we got the township organized.

The control shifted from the north side of the slew to the south side according to the weather; for you couldn't cross Vandemark's Folly in wet weather. Once what was called the Cow Vandemark crowd got control and kept it for years by calling the township meetings always on our own side of the slew; and then Foster Blake sneaked in a full attendance on us when we weren't looking by piling a couple of my haystacks in the trail to drive on, and it was five years before we got it back. But in the meantime we had voted taxes on them to build some schoolhouses and roads. That was local politics in Iowa when Ring was a pup.

But Governor Wade's party was not local politics, or so N.V. Creede tells me. He says that this was one of the moves by which the governor made Monterey County Republican. It had always been Democratic. The governor had always been a Democrat, and had named his township after Thomas H. Benton; but now he was the big gun of the new Republican Party in our neck of the woods, and he invited all the people who he thought would be good wheel-horses.

You will wonder how I came to be invited. Well, it was this way. I called on Judge Stone at the new court-house, the building of which created such a scandal. He was county treasurer. He had been elected the fall before. I wanted to see him about a cattle deal. He was talking with Henderson L. Burns when I went in.

"I don't see how I can go," said he. "I've got to watch the county's money. If there was a safe in this county-seat any stronger than a cheese box, I'd lock it up and go; but I guess my bondsmen are sitting up nights worrying about their responsibility now. I'll have to decline, I reckon."

"Oh, darn the money!" said Henderson L. "You can't be expected to set up with it like it had typhoid fever, can you? Take it with you, and put it in Wade's big safe."

"I might do that," said Judge Stone, "if I had a body-guard."

"I'd make a good guard," said Henderson L. "Let me take care of it."

"I'd have to win it back in a euchre game if I ever saw it again," said the judge. "I hate to miss that party. There'll be some medicine made there. I might go with a body-guard, eh?"

"So if the Bunker gang gets after you," suggested H. L., "there'd be somebody paid to take the load of buckshot. Well, here's Jake. He's our local desperado. Ask d.i.c.k McGill, eh, Jake? He dared the shotgun the night they run that claim-jumper off. I know a feller that was there, and seen it--when he wa'n't seared blind. Take Jake."

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The Bunker gang was a group of bandits that had their headquarters in the timber along the Iowa River near Eldora. They were afterward caught--some of them--and treated very badly by the officers who started to Iowa City with them. The officers, making quite a little posse, stopped at a tavern down in Tama County, I think it was at Fifteen Mile Grove, and took a drink or two too much. They had Old Man Bunker and one of the boys in the wagon tied or handcuffed, I never knew which; and while the posse was in the tavern getting their drinks the boy worked himself loose, and lay there under the buffalo robe when the men came back to take them on their journey to jail.

When they had got well started again, it was decided by the sheriff or deputy in charge that they would make Old Man Bunker tell who the other members were of their gang. So they took him out of the wagon and hung him to a tree to make him confess. When they let him down he stuck it out and refused. They strung him up again, and just as they got him hauled up they noticed that the boy--he wasn't over my age--was running away. They ran after the boy and, numbed as he was lying in the wagon in the winter's cold, he could not run fast, and they caught him. Then they remembered that they had left Old Man Bunker hanging when they chased off after the boy; and when they cut him down he was dead.

They were scared, drunk as they were, and after holding a council of war, they decided that they would make a clean sweep and hang the boy too--I forgot this boy's name. This they did, and came back telling the story that the prisoners had escaped, or been shot while escaping. I do not recall which. It was kind of pitiful; but nothing was ever done about it, though the story leaked out--being too horrible to stay a secret.

There was a great deal of sympathy with the Bunkers all over the country, I know where one of the men who did the deed lives now, out in Western Iowa, near Cherokee. He was always looked upon as a murderer here--and so, of course, he was, if he consented.

At the time when this conversation took place in Judge Stone's office, the Bunkers were in the heyday of their bad eminence, and while they were operating a good way off, there was some terror at the mention of their name. The judge looked me over for a minute when Henderson L.

suggested me for the second time as a good man for his body-guard.

"Will you go, Jake?" he asked. "Or are you scared of the Bunkers?"

Now, as a general rule, I should have had to take half an hour or so to decide a thing like that; but when he asked me if I was scared of the Bunkers, it nettled me; and after looking from him to Henderson L. for about five minutes, I said I'd go. I was not invited to the party, of course; for it was an affair of the big bugs; but I never thought that an invitation was called for. I felt just as good as any one, but I was a little wamble-cropped when I thought that I shouldn't know how to behave.

"How you going, Judge?" asked Henderson L.

"In my family carriage," said the judge.

"The only family carriage I ever saw you have," said Henderson L., "is that old buckboard."

"I traded that off," answered the judge, "to a fellow driving through to the Fort Dodge country. I got a two-seated covered carriage. When it was new it was about such a rig as Buck Gowdy's."

"That's style," said Burns. "Who's going with you--of course there's you and your wife and now you have Jake; but you've got room for one more."