The Conquest: The Story of a Negro PioneerMicheaux, Oscar
General
The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
Micheaux, Oscar
African American pioneers -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; South Dakota -- Fiction; Western stories
It had been an easy matter for the promotors, whose capital was mostly
in the air, to locate Amro on the allotment of Oliver Amoureaux, because
they could do so without paying anything, and did not have to pay
fifty-five dollars an acre for deeded land as Nicholson had done. Being
centrally located and with enough buildings to encourage the building
of more, they induced the governor to organize the county when few but
illiterate Indians and thieving mixed-bloods could vote, fairly stealing
the county seat before the bona-fide settlers had any chance to express
themselves on the matter. They had doggedly invested more money in
cement walks and other improvements, when disinterested persons had
criticized their actions, loading the township with eleven thousand
dollars, seven per cent interest bearing bonds, that sold at a big
discount, to build a school house large enough for a town three times
the size of Amro. This angered the settlers and being dissatisfied
because they were disfranchised by the rascals who engineered the plan,
Amro began rapidly to lose outside sympathy.
Ernest Nicholson had a pleasing personality and forceful as well. He was
a king at reasoning and whenever a weak Amroite was in Calias he was
invited into the townsite company's office which was luxuriously
furnished, the walls profusely decorated with the pictures of prominent
capitalists and financiers of the middle west, some of whom were
financing the schemes of the fine looking young men who were trying to
show these struggling waifs of the prairie the inevitable result.
All that was needed was to break into the town in some way or other, for
it was essential that Amro be absorbed by Victor before the election,
ten months away. The town should be entirely broken up. If it still
existed, with or without the road, it had a good chance of holding the
county seat. A county seat is a very hard thing to move. In fact,
according to the records of western states, few county seats have ever
been moved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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