THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
After the lot sale Amro still refused to move. It was then Ernest
Nicholson said the town had to be overcome somehow and he had to do it.
The business men of the town continued to hold meetings and pass
resolutions to stick together. They argued that all they had to do to
save the town was to stick together. This was the slogan of each
meeting. The county seat no doubt held them more than the meetings, but
it was not long before signs of weakening began to appear here and there
along the ranks.
Victor to the north, in the opinion of the people abroad, would get the
road; lots were being bought up and business people from elsewhere were
continuing to locate and erect substantial buildings in the new town,
and then it was reported that Geo. Roane, who had recently sold his
livery barn in Amro where he had made a bunch of money, had bought five
lots in Victor, paying fancy prices for them but getting a refund of
fifty per cent if he moved or started his residence hotel by January
first. This report could not be confirmed as Roane could not be found,
but soon conflicting reports filled the air and old Dad Durpee, who
loved his corner lot in Amro like a hog loves corn, made daily trips up
and down Main street, railing the boys. The more he talked the more
excited he became. "My good men!" he would shout, with his arms
stretched above his head like Billy Sunday after preaching awhile.
"Stick together! Stick together! We've got the best town in the best
county, in the best state in the best country in the world. What more do
you want?" He would fairly rave, with his old eyes stretched widely
open, and his shaggy beard flowing in the breeze. He continued this
until he bored the people and weakened the already weakening forces.
[Illustration: Were engaged in ranching and owned great herds in Tipp
county. (Page 180.)]
There were many good business men in Amro, among them young men of
sterling qualities, college-bred, ambitious and with dreams of great
success and of establishing themselves securely. Many of them had
sweethearts in the east, and desired to make a showing and profit as
well, and how were they to do this in a town in which even outsiders,
though they might not admire the Nicholsons, were predicting failure for
those who remained, and declaring they were foolish to stay. This young
blood was getting hard to control, and to hold them something more had
to be done than declaring Ernest Nicholson to be trying to wreck the
town and break up their homes. Poor fools--I would think, as I listened
to them, talking as though Ernest Nicholson had anything to do with the
railroad missing the town. It was simply the mistaken location.
It had been an easy matter for the promotors, whose capital was mostly
in the air, to locate Amro on the allotment of Oliver Amoureaux, because
they could do so without paying anything, and did not have to pay
fifty-five dollars an acre for deeded land as Nicholson had done. Being
centrally located and with enough buildings to encourage the building
of more, they induced the governor to organize the county when few but
illiterate Indians and thieving mixed-bloods could vote, fairly stealing
the county seat before the bona-fide settlers had any chance to express
themselves on the matter. They had doggedly invested more money in
cement walks and other improvements, when disinterested persons had
criticized their actions, loading the township with eleven thousand
dollars, seven per cent interest bearing bonds, that sold at a big
discount, to build a school house large enough for a town three times
the size of Amro. This angered the settlers and being dissatisfied
because they were disfranchised by the rascals who engineered the plan,
Amro began rapidly to lose outside sympathy.
Ernest Nicholson had a pleasing personality and forceful as well. He was
a king at reasoning and whenever a weak Amroite was in Calias he was
invited into the townsite company's office which was luxuriously
furnished, the walls profusely decorated with the pictures of prominent
capitalists and financiers of the middle west, some of whom were
financing the schemes of the fine looking young men who were trying to
show these struggling waifs of the prairie the inevitable result.
All that was needed was to break into the town in some way or other, for
it was essential that Amro be absorbed by Victor before the election,
ten months away. The town should be entirely broken up. If it still
existed, with or without the road, it had a good chance of holding the
county seat. A county seat is a very hard thing to move. In fact,
according to the records of western states, few county seats have ever
been moved.
Megory's county seat was located forty miles from Megory, in the extreme
east end of the county, where the county ran to a point and the river on
the north and the south boundary of the county formed an acute angle;
yet the county seat remains at Fairview and the voters keep it there,
where no one but a handful of farmers and the few hundred inhabitants of
the town reside. When trying to remove the county seat every town in the
county jumps into the race, persisting in the contention that their town
is the proper place for the county seat and when election comes, the
farmers who represent from sixty-five to ninety per cent of the vote in
states like Dakota, vote for the town nearest their farm, thinking only
of their own selfish interests and forgetting the county's welfare, as
the victor must have a majority of all votes cast. Another example of
this condition is near where this story is written, on the east bank of
the Missouri. It is a place called Keeler, the most God-forsaken place
in the world, with only three or four ramshackle buildings and a post
office, with little or no country trade, yet this is a county seat, the
capital of one of the leading counties of the state; while half a dozen
good towns along the line of the C.M. & St. L. road, cart their records
and hold court in Keeler, twenty miles from the railroad. Every four
years for thirty years the county seat has been elected to stay at
Keeler, as no town can get a majority of all votes cast against Keeler,
which doesn't even enter the race.
All of these facts had their bearing on Ernest Nicholson in his office
at Calias, and had helped to hold Amro together, until Van Neter was
called into Calias and into the private office of "King Ernest" as Amro
had named him. What passed in that office at this interview is a matter
of conjecture, but when Van Neter came out of the office he carried a
check for seven thousand, five hundred dollars and Ernest Nicholson
became the owner of the two-story, fifty by one hundred foot hotel and
lot, Amro's most popular corner. When this news reached Amro pandemonium
reigned, business men passed from one place of business to another
talking in low tones, and shaking their heads significantly, while old
Dad Durpee, nearer maniac than ever before, went the rounds of the town
shouting in a high staccato tone: "What do you think of it? What do you
think of the ornery, low-down rascal's selling out. Selling out to that
band of dirty thieves and town wreckers. By the living gods!" With his
arms folded like a tragedian, eyes rolled to the skies and his form
reared back until his knees stuck forward, then raising his hand he
solemnly swore: "I'll stay in Amro! I'll stay in Amro! I'll stay in
Amro," until his voice rose to a hoarse scream. "I'll stay in Amro until
the town is deserted to the last d--n building and the last dog is
dead." And he did, though I cannot say as to the last dog.
Nicholson had the hotel closed and although the snow was more than
knee-deep on the level, a force of carpenters at once began cutting the
building in two, preparatory to moving it to the new town. Old
Machalacy Finn, a one-armed, hatchet-faced Irishman, with a long sandy
mustache and pop-eyes, who had moved brick buildings in the windy city,
was sent to Amro and declared in Joe Cook's saloon that he'd put that
damned crackerbox in Victor in fifteen days, and armed with a force of
carpenters and laborers, the plaster was soon knocked off the walls of
the largest and best building in Amro and thrown into the streets; while
the new cement walks, only fifty feet in front and one hundred by eight
at the side, were broken into slabs and piled roughly aside, then huge
timbers twenty-four by thirty-two inches and sixty feet long, from the
redwood forests of Washington, followed the jack-screws and blocks under
the building. Two sixty-horse power mounted tractors, with double
boilers and horse power locomotive construction, low wheels and high
cabs, where the engineer perched like a bird, steamed into the town and
prepared to pull the structure from its foundations.
The crowd gathered to watch as the powerful engines began to cough and
roar, with an occasional short puff, like fast passenger engines on the
New York Central, the power being sufficient to tear the building to
splinters. Creaking in every joint, the hotel building began slowly
moving out into the street.
The telephone wires, which belonged to the Nicholsons, had been cut and
thrown aside and the town was temporarily without telephonic
communication. The powerful engines easily pulled the hotel between
banks of snow, which had been shoveled aside to make room for the
passing of the building across the grades and ditches and on toward
Victor. A block and tackle was used whenever the building became stuck
fast and in a few days the hotel was serving the public on a corner lot
in Victor, where it added materially to the appearance of the town.
Following in the footsteps of old Calias, the town, now being broken by
the removal of the hotel, the dark cellar over which it stood gaping
like an open grave, to be gazed into at every turn, became of small
consequence, and in Victor the price of corner lots had advanced from
one thousand, five hundred to two thousand and three thousand dollars,
while inside lots were being offered at from one thousand, two hundred
to one thousand, eight hundred dollars which had formerly priced from
eight hundred to one thousand, two hundred dollars. This did not
discourage those who wanted to move to the new town. All that was
desired by former rock-ribbed Amroites was to get to Victor. They talked
nothing but Victor. The name of Amro was almost forgotten.
Before the hotel building had fairly left the town, other traction
engines were brought to the town. The snow was a great hindrance and to
get coal hauled from Calias cost seventy-five cents a hundred. Labor and
board was high, and in fact all prices for everything were very high. It
was in the middle of one of the cold winters of the plains, but money
had been made in Amro and was offered freely in payment for moving to
the new town. It was bitter cold and the snow was light and drifting,
the ground frozen under the snow two feet deep, but the frozen ground
would hold up the buildings better than it would when the warm weather
came and started a thaw. The soil being underlaid with sand it would be
impossible to move buildings over it, if rain should come, as it would
be likely to do in the spring, and with the melted snow to hinder, it
would then be very difficult to move the buildings. It was small wonder
that they were anxious to get away from the disrupted town at this time,
and the road between Amro and Victor became a much used thoroughfare.
The traction engines pounding from early morning until late at night
filled the air with a noise as of railroad yards, while the happy faces
of the owners of the buildings arriving in Victor, and the anxious ones
waiting to be moved, gave material for interesting study of human
nature.
George Roane had built a new barn in Victor and was much pleased over
having sold the old one in Amro before the town went to pieces, thereby
saving the expense of removal and getting a refund of fifty per cent of
the purchase price of the lots he purchased in Victor. Many buildings
continued to arrive from Amro, and new ones being erected did credit to
the name of the new town by growing faster than any of the towns on the
reservation, including Calias or Megory.