I become managing editor of John W. Forney's _Press_--Warwick the King-
maker--The dead duck--A trip to Kansas in the old buffalo days--Miss
Susan Blow, of St. Louis--The Iron Mountain of Missouri--A strange
dream--Rattlesnakes--Kaw Indians--I am adopted into the tribe--Grand war-
dance and ceremonies--Open-air lodgings--Prairie fires--In a dangerous
country--Indian victims--H. M. Stanley--Lieutenant Hesselberger--I shoot
a buffalo--Wild riding--In a herd--Indian white men--Ringing for the
carriage with a rifle--Brigham the driver--General and Mrs. Custer--Three
thousand miles in a railway car--How "Hans Breitmann's" ballads came to
be published--The publisher thinks that he cannot sell more than a
thousand of the book--I establish a weekly newspaper--Great
success--Election rioting--Oratory and revolvers--How the meek and lowly
Republicans revolvered the Democrats--The dead duck and what befell him
who bore it--I make two thousand German votes by giving Forney a lesson
in their language--_Freiheit und Gleichheit_--The Winnebago Indian
chief--Horace Greeley--Maretzek the Bohemian--Fanny Janauschek and the
Czech language--A narrow escape from death on the Switchback--Death of my
father--Another Western railway excursion--A quaint old darkey--Chicago--I
threaten to raise the rent--General influence of Chicago--St. Paul,
Minnesota--A seven days' journey through the wilderness--The
Canadian--Smudges--Indians--A foot journey through the woods--Indian pack-
bearers--Mayor Stewart--I rifle a grave of silver ornaments--Isle
Royale--My brother, Henry Perry Leland--The press--John Forney carries
Grant's election, and declares that I really did the work--The weekly
press and George Francis Train--Grant's appointments--My sixth
introduction to the General--Garibaldi's dagger.
We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren's more than a week when George Boker,
knowing my need, spoke to Colonel John Forney, who was at that time not
only Secretary of the Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of
the _Chronicle_ newspaper in Washington, of the _Press_ in Philadelphia,
"both daily," as the Colonel once said, which very simple and commonplace
expression became a popular by-word. Colonel Forney wanted a managing
editor for the _Press_, and, as I found in due time, not so much a man of
enterprise and a leader--that _he_ supplied--nor yet one to practically
run the journal--that his son John, a young man of eighteen, supplied--so
much as a steady, trustworthy, honest _pivot_ on which the compass could
turn during his absences--and that _I_ supplied. I must, to explain the
situation, add gently that John, who could not help it considering his
experiences, was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a
steady manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John the
junior was extremely clever as a practical managing editor, remembering
everything, and knowing--what I never did or could--all the little
tricks, games, and wiles of all the reporters and others employed.
Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had such a great
influence for many years in American politics, that as I had a great deal
to do with him--very much more than was generally known--at a time when
he struck his greatest political _coup_, in which, as he said, I greatly
aided him, I will here dwell on him a space. Before I knew him I called
him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally admitted that it was to
his intense hatred of Buchanan, added to his speech-making, editing, and
tremendously vigorous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that
"Ten-cent Jimmy" owed his defeat. At this time, in all presidential
elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John Forney could and did
turn Pennsylvania like a Titan; and he frankly admitted that he owed the
success of his last turn to me, as I shall in time relate.
Forney's antipathies were always remarkably well placed. He hated
Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he hated Simon Cameron; and
finally it came to pass that he hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of
twenty-four carats--an _aquafortis_ detestation--and for a most singular
cause.
One night when this "President by the pistol, and smallest potato in the
American garden of liberty," was making one of his ribald speeches, after
having laid out Horace Greeley, some one in the crowd cried--
"Now give us _John Forney_!"