Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories: Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas
John Locke · en
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.