BANDIT AND A TERROR

When General Weaver was running for governor, a Populist worker called
on my friend Wilbur Wheelock, who was then as now a stock buyer at our
little town of Ploverdale, and asked him if he were a Populist.

"No," said Wilbur, "but I have all the qualifications, sir!"

"What do you regard as the qualifications?" asked the organizer.

"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 settler