“I’ve run for county office and got beat,” said Wilbur:  “and that takes you in, too, don’t it, Jake?” he asked, turning to me.

Wilbur, like most of our older people, has a good memory.  Most of the folks hereabouts had already forgotten that I was a candidate on Judge Stone’s Reform and Anti-Monopoly ticket, for County Supervisor, in 1874, and that I was defeated with the rest.  This was the only time I ever had anything to do with politics, more than to be a delegate to the county convention two or three times.  I mention it here, because of the chance it gave Dick McGill to rake me over the coals in his scurrilous paper, the Monterey Centre Journal, that most people have always said was never fit to enter a decent home, but which they always subscribed for and read as quick as it came.

Within fifteen minutes after McGill got his paper to Monterey Centre he and what he had called the County Ring were as thick as thieves, and always stayed so as long as Dick had the county printing.  So when I was put on the independent ticket to turn this ring out of office, Dick went after me as if I had been a horse-thief, and made a great to-do about what he called “Cow Vandemark’s criminal record.”  Now that I have a chance to put the matter before the world in print, I shall take advantage of it; for that “criminal record” is a part of this history of Vandemark Township.

The story grew out of my joining the Settlers’ Club in 1856.  The rage for land speculation was sweeping over Iowa like a prairie fire, getting things all ready for the great panic of 1857 that I have read of since, but of which I never heard until long after it was over.  All I knew was that there was a great fever for buying and selling land and laying out and booming town-sites—­the sites, not the towns—­and that afterward times were very hard.  The speculators had bought up a good part of Monterey County by the end of 1856, and had run the price up as high as three dollars and a half an acre.

This made it hard for poor men who came in expecting to get it for a dollar and a quarter; and a number of settlers in the township, as they did all over the state, went on their land relying on the right to buy it when they could get the money—­what was called the preemption right.  I could see the houses of William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost from my house; and I knew that Peter and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn, Dunkards from Pennsylvania, had located farther south.  All these settlers were located south of Hell Slew, which was coming to be known now, and was afterward put down on the map, as “Vandemark’s Folly Marsh.”

And now there came into the county and state a class of men called “claim-jumpers,” who pushed in on the claims of the first comers, and stood ready to buy their new homes right out from under them.  It was pretty hard on us who had pushed on ahead of the railways, and soaked in the rain and frozen in the blizzards, and lived on moldy bacon and hulled corn, to lose our chance to get title to the lands we had broken up and built on.  It did not take long for a settler to see in his land a home for him and his dear ones, and the generations to follow; and we felt a great bitterness toward these claim-jumpers, who were no better off than we were.