written--or largely helped to write--General Forrest's autobiography.
He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really
remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My
mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian, her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a
Methodist. The members of the family were practical, strong-willed,
able men and women, but with no bent, that I know of, toward either law
or politics.

And yet, one of the most vivid memories of my childhood in Jackson is
of attending a political rally with my grandfather and hearing a Civil
War veteran declaim against Republicans who "waved the bloody shirt"--a
memory so strong that for years afterward I never saw a Republican
without expecting to see the gory shirt on his back, and wondering
vaguely why he was not in jail. When I came to Denver, where the
Republicans were dominant, I felt myself in the land of the enemy. And
when I "swapped" myself into Mr. Thompson's office, I was surprised to
find that my employer, though a Republican from Pittsburg, was so human
that one of the first things he did was to give me a suit of clothes.
If there is anything more ridiculously dangerous than to blind a
child's mind with such prejudices, I do not know what it is.

However, my own observations of what was going on about me were already
opening my eyes. I had read, in the newspapers, of how the Denver
Republicans won the elections by fraud--by ballot-box stuffing and what
not--and I had followed one "Soapy" Smith on the streets, from precinct
to precinct, with his gang of election thieves, and had seen them vote
not once but five times openly. I had seen a young man, whom I knew,
knocked down and arrested for "raising a disturbance" when he objected
to "Soapy" Smith's proceeding; and the policeman who arrested him did
it with a smile and a wink.

When I came to Mr. Thompson to ask him how he, a Republican, could
countenance such things, he assured me that much of what I had been
reading and hearing of election frauds was a lie--the mere "whine" of
the defeated party--and I saw that he believed what he said. I knew
that he was an honest, upright man; and I was puzzled. What puzzled me
still more was this: although the ministers in the churches and
"prominent citizens" in all walks of life denounced the "election
crooks" with the most laudable fervor, the election returns s