WILLIAM THAYER
ATTORNEY

NOTARY

On the other:

MAYOR'S OFFICE

The office stood not above two hundred feet from the railroad station,
at the end of Main Street, where the buildings blended out into the
prairie, unfenced, unprofaned by spade or plow. Beyond Judge Thayer's
office were a coal yard and a livery barn; behind him the lots which he
had charted off for sale, their bounds marked by white stakes.

Ascalon, in those early days of its history, was not very large in
either the territory covered or the inhabitants numbered, but it was a
town of national notoriety in spite of its size. People who did not live
there believed it to be an exceedingly wicked place, and the farther one
traveled from Ascalon, in any direction whatever, the faster this ill
fame increased. It was said, no farther off than Kansas City, that
Ascalon was the wickedest place in the United States. So, one can image
what character the town had in St. Louis, and guess at the extent of its
notoriety in Pittsburg and Buffalo.

Porters on trains had a holy fear of Ascalon. They announced the train's
approach to it with suppressed breath, with eyes rolling white in fear
that some citizen of the proscribed town might overhear and defend the
reputation of his abiding-place in the one swift and incontrovertible
argument then in vogue in that part of the earth. Passengers of
adventurous nature flocked to the station platform during the brief
pause the train made at Ascalon, prickling with admiration of their own
temerity, so they might return home and tell of having set foot in the
wickedest town in the world.

And that was the fame of Ascalon, new and raw, for the greater part of
it, as it lay beside the railroad on that hot afternoon when Judge
Thayer stood in the shade of his little catalpa tree watching the Texans
drive their cattle into the loading pens.

Before the railroad reached out across the Great Plains, Ascalon was
there as a fort, under another name. The railroad brought new
consequence, new activities, and made it the most important loading
place for Texas cattle, driven over the long route on their slow way to
market.

It was a cattle town, living and fattening on the herds which grazed the
vast prairie lands surrounding it, and on the countless thousands which
came northward to its portal over the Chisholm Trail. As will have been
gathered from the scene already passed, agriculture had tried and failed
in that lan