Old Times on the Upper Mississippi
to his chosen field of operations. The newspaper which has already
been located in the new city heralds the coming of Mr. Rothschild,
our new banker, more or less definitely hinting at the great wealth
lying behind the coming financier. A bank building is rented, a sign
hung out, and he begins to loan his money at five per cent per month
on the partially-improved farms of his neighbors, or the house and
lot of his "city" friends. He is a liberal man, and if it is not
convenient for you to pay the interest as it accrues, he will let it
stand--but he does not forget to compound it every month. The result
is inevitable. The debt mounts up with a rapidity that paralyzes the
borrower, and in the end a foreclosure adds farm and improvements
to the growing assets of the banker. Within a very few years he
is the owner of eight or ten of the best farms in the county, and
perhaps half a dozen houses and lots in the village, and all with
the investment of less than a hundred dollars invested in printing,
and an iron box, and without the expenditure of an ounce of energy
or a legitimate day's work. And the victims break up and start anew
for the still farther West, to take new farms, to be engulfed in the
maws of other sharks. One may not greatly pity the men themselves,
for men are born to work and suffer; but the women! God pity them.
Worn, tired, broken-hearted, they must leave that which is dearest
to them in all the world, their homes, and fare forth again into the
wilderness, to toil and suffer, and at last, blessed release, to die.
And the bankers? They were counted honest. If by any chance one
of their bills came to hand and was presented for payment at the
home counter, it was promptly redeemed, sometimes in gold or silver,
but oftener with another bill on some other bank belonging to the
syndicate. I personally knew some of these bankers. Some of them were
freebooters without conscience and without shame. Under color of
law, they robbed the settlers of their lands and improvements, and
defied public opinion. Others put on a cloak of righteousness; they
were leaders in the love-feasts and pillars in the church; and they
also had their neighbors' lands and improvements. Their descendants
are rich and respected to-day in the communities where their fathers
plied their iniquitous trade; and these rule where their fathers
robbed.
As a clerk on the river, I had some experience in handling the
wild-cat money. At Dunleith, before starting on the up-river trip, we
were handed by the secretary of the company, a _Thompson's Bank Note
Detector_, and with it a list of the bills that we might accept in
payment for freight or passage. We were also given a list of those
that we might not accept at all; and still another list upon which we
might speculate, at values running from twenty-five to seventy-five
per cent of their face denominations. Thus equipped we started
upstream, and the trouble started with us. At McGregor we put off a
lot of freight, and were tendered money. We consulted our lists and
cast into outer darkness that which had upon it the anathema of Mr.
Jones, the secretary. We accepted all on the list of the elect, and
compromised upon enough more to balance our freight account. The
agent at McGregor had a list of his own which partly coincided with
ours but in general disagreed. In the meantime another boat of our
line had arrived from up river, and we get from her clerk fifteen or
twenty lists of bills which would be taken or rejected at as many
landings above. This helps somewhat, as we see our way clear to get
rid of some of our twenty-five per cent stuff at par in exchange for
cord wood or stores on the upper river, and we sort our stock out
into packages which are reported current at each landing. We also see
an opportunity to swap at Dunleith some bills which are not current
there at all, but which are taken at par at Prescott or Stillwater,
for other bills which they do not want but which will be taken at the
company's office at Dunleith in settlement of our trip.
It required a long head to figure it out. Mine was long enough, but
unfortunately it had the same dimensions both ways, and was not to
be depended upon in these finer transactions. Mr. Hargus labored
with the problem, studying lists until he came nigh to the point of
insanity, with the result that when we "cashed in" on our return it
was usually found that we had from five hundred to a thousand dollars
that was not acceptable. This we kept, and the boat was debited with
the amount on the company's books. On the next trip we would usually
be able to work off some of this stuff. At the end of one season I
recollect that we had some two thousand dollars, face estimate, of
this paper on hand, which the treasurer would not accept, for the
banks on which the bills were drawn had gone out of existence.
The town-site industry was on the same plane of deception and robbery
as the banking frauds, but it found its victims "back East", instead
of close at hand. Being Easterners, who had been educated to suppose
that integrity and honesty were the basis of all business confidence,
and themselves practiced these old-fashioned virtues, they all too
readily accepted the assurances of the land-sharks, and invested
their money without seeing the property which was so glowingly
described in the prospectuses sent out by the Western promoters. The
result was, that they were "taken in and done for" by the hundreds
of town-site sharks who were operating all along the river, between
Dunleith and St. Paul. I shall refer to but one of which I had
personal knowledge, and to another described to me by Captain Russell
Blakeley.
The city of Nininger, as delineated on the large and
beautifully-engraved and printed maps issued by Ingenuous Doemly, was
a well-built metropolis capable of containing ten thousand people.
As delineated, it had a magnificent court house, this city being
the county seat of Dakota County, Minnesota. Four or five church
spires sprang a hundred feet each into the atmosphere. It had stores
and warehouses, crowded with merchandise, and scores of drays and
draymen were working with feverish energy to keep the levee clear
of the freight being landed from half a dozen well-known steamboats
belonging to the Minnesota Packet Company or the St. Louis & St. Paul
Packet Company. An imposing brick structure with cut stone trimmings,
four stories high, housed the plant of the Nininger _Daily Bugle_.
This last-mentioned feature of the prospectus was the only one that
had the remotest semblance of foundation in fact. There certainly
was a _Daily Bugle_, issued once a week, or once in two or three
weeks, depending upon the energy of the printer and his "devil", who
jointly set the type, and the assiduity of the editors who furnished
them with copy. This paper was printed upon the first power press
that ever threw off a printed sheet in the Territory of Minnesota.
It was a good press, and the paper printed upon it was a monument
to the shrewdness and ingenuity of the honorable proprietor of the
Nininger town-site. The sheet was filled with a wealth of local
advertising--drygoods, groceries, hardware, millinery, shoe stores,
blacksmith shops--every class of business found in a large and
prosperous city, was represented in those columns. But every name and
every business was fictitious, coined in the fertile brain of this
chief of all promoters. It was enough to deceive the very elect--and
it did. When the Eastern man read that there were six or eight lots,
lying just west of Smith & Jones's drygoods store, on West Prairie
Street, that could be had at a thousand dollars per lot if taken
quickly, and that they were well worth twice that money on account
of the advantageous situation, they were snapped up as a toad snaps
flies on a summer day.
The paper was filled with local reading matter, describing the rush
at the opening of the latest emporium; that Brown had gone East to
purchase his spring stock; that Mrs. Newbody entertained at her
beautiful new residence on Park Avenue, and gave the names of fifty
of her guests. The whole thing was the plan of a Napoleonic mind,
being carried out to the minutest detail with painstaking care by
a staff of able workers, with the result that the whole prairie
for two miles back from the river was sold out at the rate of ten
thousand dollars an acre or upwards, and that before the proprietor
had himself perfected his legal rights to the land which he was thus
retailing.
Henry Lindergreen, the printer who did the mechanical work on the
Nininger paper, was a chum of mine, we having set type in the same
"alley" elsewhere, and that winter I went up to Nininger to help
him out. The four-story brick block of the wood-cuts shrunk into a
little frame building, the sides of which were made of inch boards
set up on end and battened on the outside. Inside, it was further
reinforced with tarred paper; and while I was there a pail of water
ten feet from a red-hot stove, froze solid in a night, and the three
printers had all they could do to feed the fire fast enough to keep
themselves from freezing also, with the mercury down to forty degrees
below zero. The editor who, in the absence of the promoter himself,
in the East disposing of lots, was hired to improvise facts for the
columns of this veracious sheet, lived in St. Paul, and sent his copy
down to Hastings, as there was no postoffice at Nininger. If the
editor or the proprietor had been found at Nininger in the following
spring when the dupes began to appear, one or two of the jack oaks
with which the city lots were plentifully clothed, would have borne
a larger fruit than acorns. Even the printer who set the type, was
forced to flee for his life.
One of the boldest-faced swindles I ever heard of, was the so-called
Rolling Stone colony. In the spring of 1852, some three or four
hundred people, chiefly from New York city, came to seek their
purchased lands in Rolling Stone. They brought with them beautiful
maps and bird's-eye views of the place, showing a large greenhouse,
lecture hall, and library. Each colonist was to have a house lot
in town and a farm in the neighboring country. The colony had been
formed by one William Haddock, and none of the members had the
faintest shadow of experience in farming. Boarding steamers at
Galena, they expected to be put off at the Rolling Stone levee, for
the views represented large houses, a hotel, a big warehouse, and
a fine dock. But the steamboat officers had never heard of such a
place. Careful questioning, however, seemed to locate the site three
miles above Wabasha Prairie, on land then belonging to the Sioux
Indians. As they insisted on landing, they were put off at the log
cabin of one John Johnson, the only white man within ten miles.
They made sod houses for themselves, or dug shelter burrows in the
river banks; sickness came; many died during the summer and autumn;
and when winter set in the place was abandoned. The people suffered
severely, and the story of Rolling Stone makes a sad chapter in the
early history of Minnesota.
While the craze was on, some made fortunes, while thousands of
trusting men and women lost the savings of years. After the fever
of speculation had burned itself out, the actual builders of the
commonwealth came in and subdued the land. Nininger and Rolling Stone
are still on the map, and that is about all there is of them--a name.
La Crosse, Winona, St. Paul and Minneapolis have superseded them, and
the population, wealth, and commerce of these are greater in reality
than were the airy figments of the brain which they have supplanted.
Chapter XXIII
_A Pioneer Steamboatman_