Peace to her ashes!

5

Now I have reached the point in this history where things get beyond me.
I can't tell the history of Monterey County; and the unsettled matters
like the Wade-Stone controversy, the outcome of the betrayal of Rowena
Fewkes by Buckner Gowdy, and other beginnings of things like the doings
of the Bushyager bandits; for some of them run out into the history of
the state as well as the county. And as for the township history, it is
now approaching the point where there is nothing to it but more
settlers, roads, schools, and the drainage of the slew--of which, so far
as the reader is concerned if he is not posted, he may post himself up
by getting that Excelsior County History, which he can do cheaply from
almost any one who was swindled by their slick agent. What remains to be
told here is a short horse and soon curried. Vandemark Township was set
off as a separate township within six weeks of the day we crawled out of
the strawstack--and on that day we had been married a month, and
Virginia was boarding with me as she predicted. Doctor Bliven as a
member of the County Board voted for the new township just as his wife
said he would after I talked with her about it.

N.V. Creede says that at this time I was threatened with political
ability; but happily recovered. One reason for this joke he finds in the
fact that I was elected justice of the peace in the township at the
first election of officers; and got some reputation out of the fact that
they named the township after me when it was fashionable to name them
after Lincoln, Colfax, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the rest of the
Civil War heroes. The second is the way I handled Dick McGill. N.V. says
this was very subtle. I knew that if he wrote up my dragging Virginia
into a straw-pile and keeping her there two nights and a day, while he
would make folks laugh all over the county, he would make us ashamed;
for he never failed to give everything a tint of his own color. So I
went to him and told him that if he said a word about it, I should maul
him into a slop and feed him to the hogs. This was my way of
being "subtle."

"Why, Jake," he said, "I never would say anything to take the shine off
the greatest thing ever done in these parts. I've got it all written up,
and I'm sending a copy of it to the Chicago _Tribune_. It's an epic of
prairie life. Read it, and if you don't want it printed, why, it's me
for the swine; for it's already gone to Chi