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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
CHAPTER VIII - REMINISCENCES OF THE PIONEERS (CONT'D)
[Hon. A. G. Wolfenbarger is now a prominent lawyer in Lincoln, Nebraska. He has been one of the most distinguished members of the national Prohibition party, chairman of one of its national conventions, one of its most eloquent campaigners, and highly honored by it. In writing to this author, he says, referring to his sketch: “I mean every word I say when I instruct you to use the enclosed contribution as sparingly, or not at all, as may suit your purpose. It is not what I would like to have written, for I would like to mention some of the old landmarks among the great and good men I met and who were so kind to me when I was a struggling young man in that community. They treated me as a prince; I honor and revere their memory as though they were of my own flesh and blood.” –EDITOR.]
In the midst of wheat harvest in 1876, with fifteen cents in my pocket as my sole possessions, I walked from Shelby, Iowa, to the farm of McLaughlin, four miles north of that village, and climbed into the harvest field and began binding wheat, without any authority from the farmer or any of this help, but because I was determined not to spend that last fifteen cents, which at that time looked good to me, although I was hungry and had missed one meal. I had been a tramp for about an hour. The owner of the field, whom I shall never forget, took a fancy to my athletic build and gave me full credit for what I had done till the first meal, and continued to look with favor on my labors for just one month, when he handed me a twenty-dollar gold piece and, with all my accumulated property of the month tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, I started on a twelve-mile walk across the waving prairie to Harlan, which was then a thriving little village and fully as popular to the sparsely settled county as it is now, in proportion to the number of population. I had come west from Lee county, Iowa, with a second-grade teacher’s certificate in my pocket, which had been recognized by Giles C. Miller, superintendent of Guthrie county, who gave me another just as good that I might teach a summer term in that county the previous year. These two second grades looked bigger to me at that time than the Magna Charta must have appeared to the twenty-three barons at Runnymede or the Declaration of Independence did to Franklin and old John Hancock. But they were discarded meal tickets compared to the magnificent first-grade certificate that was handed to me at the close of the teachers’ institute in Harlan a little over two weeks later by Superintendent Aaron Buckman. From 1876 to 1880 I taught school in Clay and Jackson townships, with one term in Mills county near Glenwood and one summer term in York county, Nebraska. My last school was in Jackson township, and when I left that community there was not a man in the United States could have beaten me for President. It was one of those country homes the pictures of which can never be blotted from memory. My boarding place was with George McQueen, who had been a soldier in the War of the Rebellion, was a successful farmer and business man, and a critic whose chastisement always did me good. He was helpful in encouraging me to elevate and broaden my ambitions. One of the most studious winters of my life was in his home when I had the erroneous impression that I might become a physician and surgeon. My preceptor was Dr. J. C. Dunlavy, of Harlan, but my financial resources were insufficient to enable me to take the lectures in a distant medical college, and I fell into journalism, where I stirred up enough trouble to earn my bread for seven years, after which I entered the law as my final profession. Looking back for bright spots, the Country Lyceum, with those lurid debates, and the quaint dramatic stunts of the farmers and their sons, frequently arrayed on opposite sides of the question, and about as often assigned to the side of the question in which they did not believe, loom up with lively interest. But the spelling school, where two or more school districts took part in verbal spelling contests, with the teacher of the district always thrown in, sometimes as a handicap, and others as the only salvation for his school, held the center of the stage against all other favorites. In that age, which now seems centuries in the past, the bob-sled, with its crowded load of happy human freight, flying over the snowy roads in the crisp night air, while the songs of the lads and lasses who loved them best echoed along the highways as they passed, or other less convenient but none the less happy parties huddled in straw-carpeted wagon beds on the heavy farm wagons, all vied to make that country worth living in, and it surely was. You need not tell me that the educational system of that day was crude, wasteful, extravagant or useless compared to the present high, stilted, scientifically adjusted curriculums of college and graded schools. That was a wonderful day and period in the educational development of the United States; for be it remembered that Clay and Jackson townships, and, for that matter, all those wonderful prairie counties of western Iowa were the forerunners and foundation stones of the best we have in educational, social and political life today. At the teachers’ institute, above referred to I met my future wife, then a bright young school-ma’am, Miss Capitola Williams. We were married about four years later and are still journeying together. Before I close this jack-rabbit sketch for it is written as I run, let me say that I had the honor to serve Shelby county for a time as deputy recorder under Finley E. Benson, and unless the records have been destroyed by some calamity, a hand-writing expert might still read some of the deeds and mortgages which I spread upon those records, when I was very proud to earn a dollar and a half a day.v Another thing the passing of which marks the relentless and cruel footsteps of civilization in its war on the natural world, is this: in those early days the “boom-boom!” of uncounted hundreds of thousands of wild prairie chickens could be heard in the spring of the year, and from August until March the hunters killed them without hindrance or protest, for domestic food and for market, but they are a rare bird now. Far in western Nebraska a few choice flocks may yet be found, but that most beautiful bird, except the quail, among all the food fowls of the West, is disappearing even more rapidly than the American Indian. Pioneers and old settlers of Shelby county, greeting! Hail and farewell. You have done your part in contributing your share toward the improvement and establishment of a mighty empire, not is a military sense nor in the sense of kingly sovereignty, but an empire of wealth, which means property, patriotism, lofty ideals, far-reaching intelligence and enduring virtue.
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