I know communities in Iowa that went into evil ways, and were blighted through the poison distilled into their veins by a few of the earliest settlers; I know others that began with a few strong, honest, thinking, reading, praying families, and soon began sending out streams of good influence which had a strange power for better things; I knew other settlements in which there was a feud from the beginning between the bad and the good; and in some of them the blight of the bad finally overwhelmed the good, while in others the forces of righteousness at last grappled with the devil’s gang, and, sometimes in violence, redeemed the neighborhood to a place in the light.

In one of these classes Monterey County, and even Vandemark Township, took its place.  Buckner Gowdy and Doctor Bliven, the little girl who fainted away on the wooden bench in the night, and the yellow-haired woman who stole a ride with me across the Dubuque ferry had their part in the building up of our great community—­and others worked with them, some for the good and some for the bad.

Now I come to people whose histories I know by the absorption of a lifetime’s experience.  I know that it was Mrs. Bliven’s husband—­we always called her that, of course—­who expected to arrest the pair of them as they crossed the Dubuque ferry; and that I was made a cat’s-paw in slipping her past her pursuers and saving Bliven from arrest.  I know that Buckner Gowdy was a wild and turbulent rakehell in Kentucky and after many bad scrapes was forced to run away from the state, and was given his huge plantation of “worthless” land—­as he called it—­in Iowa; that he had married his wife, who was a poor girl of good family named Ann Royall, because he couldn’t get her except by marrying her.

I know that her younger sister, Virginia Royall, came with them to Iowa, because she had no other relative or friend in the world except Mrs. Gowdy.  I pretty nearly know that Virginia would have killed herself that night on the prairie by the Old Ridge Road, because of a sudden feeling of terror, at the situation in which she was left, at the prairies and the wild desolate road, at Buck Gowdy, at life in general—­if she had had any means with which to destroy her life.  I know that Buck Gowdy took her into the house and comforted her by telling her that he would care for her, and send her back to Kentucky.

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A funeral by the wayside!  This was my first experience with a kind of tragedy which was not quite so common as you might think.  Buckner Gowdy instead of giving his wife a grave by the road, as many did, sent the man of the house back to Dubuque for a hearse, the women laid out the corpse, and after a whole day of waiting, the hearse came, and went back over the road down the Indian trail through the bluffs to some graveyard in the old town by the river.  Virginia Royall sat in the back seat of the carriage with Buckner Gowdy, and the darky, Pinckney Johnson—­we all knew him afterward—­drove solemnly along wearing white gloves which he had found somewhere.  Virginia shrank away over to her own side of the seat as if trying to get as far from Buckner Gowdy as possible.