killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a
surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of
four men, among whom was 'Rowdy' Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of
Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has
taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for
supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are
Balderson's schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch
people out of business, as they have no title to the land on which they
are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson
took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the
Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came
forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people
recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek
to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had
the party covered, Balderson yelled, 'Watch out--back of you!' and, as
all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from
the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson
party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the
surveyors' three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair
they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after
passing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town
of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars
apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they
are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each
cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective
Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to
arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob
property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it
in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any
coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn't get out of his way fast enough,
not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."
They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is
certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam
and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in
gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed
this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in
his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back
and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved
his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is
all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the
little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a
plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military
moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once
adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of
Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the
corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly
oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous
word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience
spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the
Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's
company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when
they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown,
appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.
Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe
Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in
1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day
went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the
stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who
pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white
hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go
through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat
Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed
with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when
the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months
later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a
gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat
mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the
little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was
Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the
strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone
through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion button went into the
jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and
Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney
for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."
After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their
arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.
"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the
Union Army, weren't you?"
Balderson looked at the floor and said:
"Yes; but don't say anything about it."
The lawyer, who knew Balderson's record, was astonished. He had made his
whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would
appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed
Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and
finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:
"Lookee here, Baldy; you're too old to get coy. I'm going to make my
speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've
taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by
this time."
The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back.
"Don't do it; for God's sake, don't do it! There's a fellow on that jury
that's a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away
back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on God's green
earth, but don't talk soldier. That man would wade through hell for me
neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson's voice was
quivering. He added: "But don't talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with
his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:
"Weren't you a soldier?"
"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.
"Didn't you go up Look Out Mountain?"
"Oh, yes--that, too."
There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well,
what then?"
"Well--well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was
almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the
lawyer's--"after that I got in the commissary department--and--and--was
dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment
and then grinned foxily: "Ain't that enough?"
Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning
paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no
society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie
Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a
few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months'
snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their
food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals
"without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the
canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth
sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance
hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago,
when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a
land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found
Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair;
he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his
once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the
dealer's chair, running the game.
The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he
nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two
men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat
in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and
reminiscent.
"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I
do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the
rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my
belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble
thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary
appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone
else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or
vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my
conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery
eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted
abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I've lost
everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of
contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them
copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a'
stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some
religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed
again, and then leered up: "But, you know--I'm so damned skeptic!"
Last spring, according to the Boise, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson
and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They
got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows
where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the
highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were
elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of
wildcat mines in the mountains assembled, "Governor" Balderson told
eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who
read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact
stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried
the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.
We also read in the Boise papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt
they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison
explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man
is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said
that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied
mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by
compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department
store.
It was from the Boise papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles
away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a
dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every
southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared
to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but
filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice
in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out
over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin
in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from
Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before
the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly,
but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body
was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.
They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a
candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in
the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once
a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise
_Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_
came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the
editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."
XIV
The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop
What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest
social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
the hope of a social heaven.
In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
listening to the language used in the temple.
Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
a Kansas town.
The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his
office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to
dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office
before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were
no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a
high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of
the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed
about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
went out.
Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away
on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner
crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the
martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but
it's only American-dyed, you know."
No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned
from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up
the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand
store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and
hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist
Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and
ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages;
but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the
faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when
Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston
rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with
prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the
house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their
stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of
the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came;
then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish
was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory.
The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
sacred scrolls of the sect.
All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town
allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the
kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
Conklin horse, as "Francois, the man," or to call the girl who did the
cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.