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