deep. Morrison contributed
this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in
his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back
and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved
his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is
all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the
little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a
plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military
moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once
adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of
Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the
corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly
oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous
word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience
spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the
Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's
company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when
they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown,
appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.

Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe
Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in
1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day
went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the
stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who
pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white
hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go
through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat
Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed
with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when
the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months
later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a
gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat
mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the
little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was
Balderson. He seeme