Reminiscences of a. Wayfarer Some of the Important Events of the Pioneer Days of Richardson County and Southeast Nebraska, as remembered by the writer, who has spent fifty one years here. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■MuuMnnraaeeeMaHBaaanBnawBaBaB How Things Were Done "Out in The Wilderness.’’ "A house that is building, does not look like a house that is built.” This old adage,maxim, or what not, a little shelf-worn perhaps, homely as everybody knows, is quite as apt by way of illustration when applied to a state, a community, a character, or even to a human life, as to a house in process of construction; and to the same artificial creation, after the finishing touches have been put up on it. The debris, and the refuse, with the scaffolding and remnants of wood and stone, sand and dust-heaps, mortar beds, and such like, that mar the appearance of the workman's art, must all be removed before the house, in all its structural beauty, can be seen and appreciated. Between his birth in a log cabin, in poverty and in the deepest obscurity of western p, pioneer life, to his election to the office of chief magistrate of the greatest nation on earth, fifty years later, lay\ all those concomitant, back woods experiences for character build-1 ing, of farm hand, flat boat man, rail splitter, store clerk, deputy surveyor and country law student;—thence to a wider field of invincible advocate and leader of the bar,and finally to the acknowledged leadership of a great party, then to the house of power.de vestating war, victory, death by as sassination, and eternal fame. And thus, tlie house of Lincoln in the building, did not look like the house of Lincoln, that was built. The narrow strip of country be tween the Alleghanys and the Atlan tic sea-board, occupied by the col onies that had achieved their inde pendence from English rule, and had formed themselves into the United States, did not look in 1789, when Washington was inaugurated its first president, like the wide spreading na tion of forty-six states, reaching from the lakes to the Gulf and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and thence to the Sandwich Islands and the far away sunset land of the Philippines I in the China seas, as it did on the | 4th of March, 1909, when William II. j t Taft was inaugurated as its twenty-J sixth president. But the house is still a-building and what it .will ulti-! mately look like, when it, has gird led the earth with a cordon of free republics, some other generation in some other day will be privileged to look upon. And so with everything that grows in the wide expanse of| the universe, for growth is history, i \ whether written in hooks, in the j rocks, the rivers, mountains or seas, | and history in its most comprehen sive sense, is God’s Divine Revela tion. The old threadbare, out-at-elbows saw, lias peculiar application to Ne braska, as I, and a few others have seen-it. from the day of its swad dling clothes, a sparse settlement along a narrow strip of country on the right bank of the Missouri to its emergence into a strong command ing position as a leading state in tlie middle west, and all within, and less than the ordinary space of a human life. The building of the moral house of a community or a state, is of quite as much importance,' if not a great deal more, as the building of the physical or national structure. In CPs and succeeding papets I pro pose to givA some attention to the civilizing processes, forces if you please, that enter into the mechanism of the social fabric of every modern state, for they are much alike, es ^ pecially those constructed by Anglo ociAou uuuuuo. a American states for three hundred years have been the thretre of the world’s frontier in the steady march of civili zation westward, from the birth place of tiie human race on the table lands of Eastern Asia—the land of the Par see—till it made the circuit of the globe on the east coast of that con tinent in the closing years of the nineteenth Century. The pioneer » therefore, in all times, lias been the missionary and standard bearer of the world’s redemption from barbar ism and savagry. They were the out posts of the coming millions, and as they laid the architrave, the building was fashioned. The march has not always been uniform. It'has been slow in some places and in certain times, and phen ominally rapid in others. This has often been the result of adverse cir cumstances. All the European col onies in North America, were set tled in the early years of the Seven ^ teenth Century, but little progress westward from the Atlantic seaboard was made till the close of the Eigh teenth Century. There were too many hostile claimants to the territory, and besides these western wilds were used as a convenient battle field for those warring nations in the old world up on which to settle their disputes of every kind, and the annoyauce and hardships thus imposed upon the peo ple who had braved the rigors of the wilderness to make homes and asylums for themselves, became irk some in th*' extreme. Nothing of a substantial character was accomplish ed till after the successful revolt of tlie English Colonies, and then be gan the greatest movement since the Aryan emigration. In the space of one hundred and twenty-five years, thirty-three new states have been added to the family of the original thirteen, each an empire in Itself,and all together form ing the strongest, freest, richest, hap piest nation of people to be found any where on the foot stool. When all this was done, how it was done, and by whom it was done, are matters of familiar history, and may be known by all. I have been privileged to witness, and in a humble way contribute to the building of the moral and politi cal house of one of those new states, but only in this wise, that whoever forms a unit in the aggregate of a community, digs a post hole and sets a post therein, nails a board to it. to fence a garden, builds a shack or a house, or in any way adds a dollar to the material wealth of the common wealth, has done something for the common purpose, and to that extent, infinitessimal though it be, like a single drop of water in the uncount able mass that make up the mighty i seas, I have, like all my co-workers in the past generation, had a part in making the waste places of an un inhabited region, to blossom as the rose. Whoever will look about him anil take note of the conditions surround ing, can, with little effort of the im agination, determine from what small and rude beginnings they all sprang; and what he finds true of tilings and persons in his immediate vicinity, he can readily know were true of every other subdivision of the state. And especially is this true If he happened to have helped to make the conditions what they are. With the opening of the Nineteen th Century, the frontier in this coun try had feached and taken possession of the Mississippi Valiev. The sol diers of the wilderness have always been of the adventurous kind, and, that it was fraught with dang'-r and hardship at every step, >■> emed to make the enterprise all the mon al luring to them. There w, < a certain unrestrained riotous fr • dem among them, that set at dcfiiianc all con ventional rules and refinements of polite society, but in no sc a ry wre the rights of persons and property more rigorously safeguarded than in those wild and appaientlv reckless communities. They had brought something with them besides their guns and axes. In tie composition of each, was a sprinkling of another and ft better order, something of the old home, not very well defined per haps, nor often heeded, bv still there to be one day brought to the surface to do its office in the betterment of the Individual, when ton. her) again by that wizard influence that lips sown the world anew with the frag ranee of the garden. In this same hoodlum aggregation from Tennessee to northern Illinois, one man became locally famous as a preacher of the gospel. His name was Peter Cortwright. Without otic r ed ucaHon than that afforded by the backwoods common school, he espous ed the profession of theology and preached it after his o' t fashion, and according to his nndi standing of the letter and spirit of tie gospel of Christ, as its author had himself preacheed it, in his hie t' sojourn on earth. A giant in size and bodily strength, coupled with a court.--.' that knew no such thing as f . .-, be could preach, and fight rowdies, with equal facility and equal success, it was a common practice in those rod- tine s for the lawless element to g“t drunk and break up a camp-meeting as a mere matter of riotous pa-time. But when Cartwright came upon the scene, the experiment vas never tried a second time. He was physi cally able to thrash a dozen rioters, either in detail or all at once,and hav ing performed thatserviv- to the satisfaction of everybody but the dis turbers of the meeting themselves on one or two occasions.the disturbances ceased and (be man of the -hurch militant was allowed to preach in peace. I have seen and h»nrc him preach many times when 1 was u ■ - ry young man, but he was old then, and very near the end of his labors in lb-' vinyard. His home- v „s about twen ty miles from where I wa.- born and brought up, and about ter: mib-s west of Springfield, the hoi:.• if Abraham Lincoln,against wi! .' . - .--It'.be was a candidate for ■ Lincoln was elected, and it was probably just as well, for Courtwright was certain ly a force as a preacher, ami il was not entirely certain that he would have done the people, or himself any good in congress, and it might have interfered with the great career that fate had in store for his opponent, in the years to come. They were two originals of the first class diamonds in the rough, and though dissimilar as antitheses possibly can be, physi cally and mentally, they were both nevertheless eminently representa tive of those moral and political forc es, that in a later time enabled our nation to throw off the slough of a darker age, and become what its projectors intended it to be,—a re public in which all power resides in its people, and all rule the emanation of an enlightened Christian public sentiment. The eminent German phy losopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was never so right than when lie said— “You will not be surprised if here again we revert to Christianity as the principle of all public morality in modern times." I use the word Christianity in precisely the same sense—that strong sinuous, unbreak able thread, that runs all through the warp and woof of nineteen hundred years of world history, the miracle of all the miracles. Iii llic> course of iuy life it lias fall en to inj* lot to witness the acts of others of the Cortwright order, that is, in his and their missionary capaci ties on tile out-skirts of civilization. Right here In Richardson county, fif ty years ago, was to - be seen a re-en actment of similar scenes tlint, obtain ed in the vanguard of that break over the Alleghanios at the close of the eighteenth, and the beginning of the Nineteenth centuries, and thence has spread itself onward to the shores of the far Pacific in I lie west. Our pioneers were no worse, and probably no better, than others sim ilarly situated, hut that they needed tlie help of tin' missionary goes with out saying. 1 have already said something of the general moral status of the several towns in the county, I and hf our Indian neighbors to the south, and 1 need not enlarge on the j facts, but it comes in my way now to say something of the ways and means employed to better their conditions in that respect. In those days we had two object I lessons sharply defined before us, whether they were understood and ap preciated or not, and it is safe to say they were not, from which prob-j able results might have been easily deduced. Over the river was a peo ple who belonged to the prehistoric ages. They, ami their kind had in habited the wilds of this continent for thousaauds and thousands of years, but had made no more progress to wards civilization, than the birds and squirrels in the trees, or the heav ers or the otters in the streams. As tin* morning of creation beheld them, we saw them then. Contact of tin whites with such a race was beuefi •eial to neither, but meant distinction for one of them, speedy, sure,*and certain'. Where they mingled to any extent, tin' standard of morality of the one was not elevated, while the standard of the other was appreciab ly lowered. This we saw in the ear ly days in the ease of Rulo. In point of moral citizenship, it will now com pare favorably with other towns in the county, but it was far otherwise in the time of its first settlement. From the day 1 first saw it in 1858, when its population was largely made up of mixed blood Indians, male and female, and the consequent nondes cript riff-raff which that order of so ciety almost universally collects about it, to the autumn of 18 met were not really wicked in the worst sense of that term, they hud simply drifted from the moorings of their early home lives, and by as sedation with the careless and the in different. in a wild and unrestrained environment, had lost the talisman of the faith, and were floating with the tide th*it sets always to the breakers and shoals of ultimate ruin and mis ery. In his opinion they could he rescued by one touch of that magic influence, which, in the course of the centuries, lias changed the face of the world and recreated the human race. . ' I The (ask was before him and lie addressed himself to its performance, lie organized the first church Rule ever had, and he established Its first school. In that work he was assisted by such earnest workers as Mr. Jac-| oli Shaff, who located in the town with his family about the time ,\lr. Riicli did, and by many other excel lent people who had cast their lot In the same place. Many of them have gone to their reward, hut the young preacher, now old and venerable,still lingers with us, and though no long er in the active ministry, sometimes occupies the pulpit, which he loves to do, and repeats the old story of the resurrection and the life with some thing of his wonted vigor. Tie* church and lie* school he established still remain, but the house ho wrought up on Is yet n building, find . even it this shall hereafter prove a mere airy illusion, an unsubstantial lig ment of tin* Imagination, it is never theless pleasant to reflect upon that splendid mythical structure, seen through the perspective of the Chris tian's faith, when It shall heroine, in ti.I, “a house that is built." Falls City Roller Mills A Christmas Announcement is hardly necessary for us to make, as the public a I reads know where they can get high-grade, well-screened Christmas Coal with which to give Santa Claus a warm welcome with when he arrives. The Yuletide will be made comfort C op V RlGht able and cheery in your home WHEN YOUR SIOYE AND FURNACE IS SUPPLIED WITH COAL FROM P. S. Heacock & Son * FALLS CITY, NEBRASKA Xmas Headquarters Established It is not long now until Christmas, and we are get ting our Christmas goods out every day. We are confident our toy line cannot be equaled in the county. We have more goods than ever before. Toys ai\d Dolls We have a large and com plete line of leys, Dolls, 1 11 I I 1 ■' ■ n 4t- «• Dun t i uctuo, m luwi. D. erything for children Our prices are very low, and we want you to call and look at our line and get our prices. Books, Postcards Our line of Hooks, Post card Albums and Christ-, mas Cards are all new. the largest assortment in the city. We have books for old and young. Our prices are right. Your patronage solicited. Novelties, Etc. Leather Hand Bags, Card Cases and Wallets, Col lar and Cull Holders, Ci gar Holders, in Leather; Brass Ware, Military Sets Stationery, Toilet Sets, Fancy Goods. Come and look. We are so sure that we have the largest line and the