s 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.

My land was paid for, such as it was; but when the people who, like me,
had drailed out across the prairies with the last year's rush, came and
asked me to join the Settlers' Club to run these intruders off, it
appeared to me that it was only a man's part in me to stand to it and
take hold and do. I felt the old urge of all landowners to stand
together against the landless, I suppose. What is title to land anyhow,
but the right of those who have it to hold on to it? No man ever made
land--except my ancestors, the Dutch, perhaps. All men do is to get
possession of it, and run everybody else off, either with clubs, guns,
or the sheriff.

I did not look forward to all the doings of the Settlers' Club, but I
joined it, and I have never been ashamed of it, even when Dick McGill
was slangwhanging me about what we did. I never knew, and I don't know
now, just what the law was, but I thought then, and I think now, that
the Settlers' Club had the right of it. I thought so the night we went
over to run the claim-jumper off Absalom Frost's land, within a week of
my joining.

It was over on Section Twenty-seven, that the claim-jumper had built a
hut about where the schoolhouse now is, with a stable in one end of it,
and a den in which to live in the other. He was