Royall, the ward of the Reverend Thorndyke.

"This is a very questionable policy. If followed up it will
result in a saturnalia of crime in this community. Already
several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking
lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this
parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has
resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the
young man under Christian influences, and others, it has
unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest
wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate
of the criminal, known as Vandemark's Folly, and by the use
of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit
of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob T. Vandemark--whom
we hereby salute--we are promised another strawberry festival
before the crop is gone.

"In the meantime, it is worthy of mention that the industry
of claim-jumping has suffered a sudden slump, and that the
splendid pioneers who have opened up this Garden of Eden will
not be robbed of the fruits of their enterprise."

When I came to run for county supervisor, he rehashed the matter without
giving any hint that after all what I did was approved of by the people
of the county in 1856 when these things took place or that he himself
was in it up to the neck! But enough of that: the historical fact is
that Settlers' Clubs did work of this sort all over Iowa in those times,
and right or wrong, the pioneers held to the lands they took up when the
great tide of the Republic broke over the Mississippi and inundated
Iowa. The history of Vandemark Township was the history of the state.

CHAPTER XV.

I SAVE A TREASURE, AND START A FEUD

In the month of May, 1857, I went to a party. This was a new thing for
me; for parties had been something of which I had heard as of many
things outside of the experience of a common fellow like me, but always
had thought about as a thing only to be read of, like _porte cocheres_
and riding to hounds, and butlers and books of poems. Stuff for
story-books, and not for Vandemark Township; though when I saw the
thing, it was not so very different from the dances and "sings" we used
to have on the boats of the Grand Canal, as the Erie Ditch was then
called when you wanted to put on a little style.

The party was at the "great Gothic house" of Governor Wade,