country, in prospective, abundantly supplied with building rock of the finest description, beautifully watered, and possessing very fine indications of lead, iron, coal, and salt in great abundance." In my opinion we felt richer, better, more millionairish than any poor deluded mortals ever did before, on the same amount of moonshine and pluck.

But the seasons were prompt in their returns, and the autumn winds came then as they are coming now, and the ripening sunbeams descended upon the earth as they do today; but the fields of grain that they wandered and glistened among were neither as many nor as well tilled as they should have been.

The fall of 1856 came and passed, and not enough had been raised to half supply our home wants. Town lots we could neither eat nor export; they were at once too expensive for food and too delicate for a foreign market. All that we had in the world to forward to the Eastern marts was a general assortment of town shares, ferry charters, and propositions for receiving money and land warrants to invest or locate on time. The balance of trade was largely against us.

We were now, more than ever, a nation of boarders, eating everything eatable, buying everything consumable, but producing absolutely nothing.

The winter of 1856 and '57 came, and the first and second days of December were most admonitory and fearful harbingers of suffering; they came like messengers of wrath to rebuke the people for the folly, the thriftlessness, and extravagance of the summer that had passed unheeded and unimproved. The storm that lashed those two days through and ushered in the terrible life-taking winter of that year, will never be forgotten by those of us who were here and experienced it.

The legislative assembly commenced in January, 1857, and again were the wisdom and sagacity of Solon and Lycurgus called into active service. A grand rally was had for the purpose of raising more means and more money by legislative legerdemain. New towns were incorporated and new shares issued; insurance companies were chartered with nothing to insure and nothing to insure with; and, finally, another nest of wild cat banks was set for hatching, it having been deliberately decided that the easiest way to make money was through the agency of paper mills, engravers, and the autographs of fancy financiers. Not less than fifteen new banks were contemplated and projected. Preparations were thus coolly and deliberately made for issuing evidence of debt, amounting, in the aggregate,

to millions of dollars, and a confiding and generous public were expected to receive them as money. Fortunately for you, for the Territory, for your reputation for sanity, the great infliction was escaped, and out of the entire number, De Soto, and the never to be forgotten Tekama, were all that ever saw the light; thus this second attempt to legislate prosperity into the country by the manufacture of an irresponsible and worthless currency failed most signally. Its only fruits have been seen in the thousands of worthless pictures which have the impress of the Tekama bank, and have finally exploded in the pockets of the merchants, mechanics, and farmers of this territory, and thereby defrauded them of some hundred thousands of dollars worth of capital and labor.

In the mid-summer of 1857, while credulous men were buying town lots at enormous prices, and sapient speculators were anxiously looking up enough unoccupied prairie land to uphold a few more unnamed cities, while the very shrewd and crafty operators in real estate were counting themselves worth as many thousand dollars as they owned town lots-while enthusiastic seers observed with prophetic eye city upon city arise, and peopled with teeming thousands, while the public pulse was at fever heat-when the old fogies themselves were beginning to believe in the new way of making money without labor, the financial horizon began to darken. At once hope whispered that it was only a passing cloud, but judgment predicted a full grown storm. And one pleasant day, when lots were high and town shares numerous and marketable, the news came that one Thompson, John Thompson, had failed, and also that the hitherto invulnerable Ohio Life & Trust Company had departed its pecunious and opulent existence.

The streets in cities thereabout were occupied by knots and groups of wise and anxious men; the matter was fully and thoroughly discussed and it was generally conceded that, though it did sprinkle some, it probably would rain very little, if any. But again and again came the thunderbolts, and the crash of banks, and the wreck of merchants, and the fall of insurance companies, the decline of railroad stocks, the depreciation of even state stocks, and finally the depletion of the National Treasury. The quaking of the credit of all the monied institutions, in fact, of the governments themselves, of both the old and the new world, demonstrated beyond a doubt, that the storm had indeed begun, and furthermore, that it was a searching and testing storm.

Just as in your own farm yards, when a sudden storm of

rain, lightning and tempest has broken out from a sky almost all sunshine, you have seen the denizens of the pig-sty, the stables and the poultry coops, run, jump, squeal, cackle, neigh, and bellow in their stampede for shelter; so vamosed the city builders, speculators, bank directors and patent cash makers of Nebraska, while the terrible financial tornado of 1857 swept over the world of commerce. The last day of the summer of 1857 had died out and was numbered upon the dial plate of the irrevocable past. The September sun had come, glittered, warmed and ripened and the time of harvest had gone by. November, cold, cheerless and stormy, came on apace and whispered in chilling accents of the approach of winter.

It became the duty of every man to look to his pecuniary condition and to prepare well for the season of cold; and the examinations then made by you and all of us, proved this: they proved that the season of planting in 1857, like that of the year previous, had slipped by almost unnoticed, and unimproved by a great many of the people of Nebraska. We had not raised enough even to eat; and as for clothing, it looked as though nakedness itself would stalk abroad in the land.

If the great states of Illinois and Wisconsin found themselves, that fall, in an almost hopeless bankruptcy, what then must have been our condition?

The irrepealable law of commerce which declares that, "whenever the supply of any article is greater than the demand, that article must decline in market value," was most clearly proven in Nebraska. The supply of town lots, after the monstrous monetary panic of 1857, was as large as ever. There was at least one million of town lots, in towns along the Missouri River, between the Kansas line and the L'Eau-qui-Court; but where was the demand? It had ceased! It had blown away in the great storm, or been crushed out in the great pressure. We had nothing else to offer for sale, except real estate, and even that of very doubtful character. We were yet a colony of consumers; we were worse off than ever; we were a nation of boarders, and had nothing to pay board with, and very little valuable baggage to pawn for the same. The greater number of our banks had exploded, and the individual liability of stockholders, as marked on each bill, proved to mean that the bill holders themselves were individually responsible for whatever amount they might find on hand after the crisis.

I think we were the poorest community the sun ever looked down upon; that the history of new countries can

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furnish no parallel for utter and abject poverty. I believe on the first day of January, 1858, there was not, upon an average, two dollars and fifty cents in cash to each inhabitant of the Territory. Hard times were the theme of each and every class of society, and all departments of industry. Merchants, mechanics, speculators and bankers were continually lamenting their departed fortunes, and their many failures and losses.

There was one class of individuals who, although they may have been sadly pinched by the pressure of times, noted no failures in their ranks, and who, when winter set in, were comparatively well off, in fact, relatively opulent and luxurious in their circumstances. They were the very few farmers who had passed through the era of speculation untempted by the allurements thereof, they who had followed the plow steadily, and planted their crops carefully. They, and they alone, of all the people of Nebraska could board themselves. There is no doubt but that poverty induces thought. It may paralyze the physical energies for a time, but it will induce reason and reflection in the thoughtless and judgment and discretion in the reckless, after all other arguments have failed. I believe that owing to our extreme poverty, we were led to more thinking and reasoning during the winter of 1857 and 1858, than up to that time had ever been accomplished in the Territory. As you have seen your grandfathers, during the long winter evenings, sit down by the large fire place when the huge back log and big blaze burned so brightly, away back east, somewhere, at your old homesteads, as when the old man, after reading his newspaper, would wipe his spectacles, put them up by the clock on the mantle piece, and seating himself there in the genial fire light, place his head between his hands, and his elbows on his knees, and have a good “long think"; just so with us all in Nebraska that winter. We had a "think," a long, solemn, gloomy think, and among us all, we thought out these facts: that the new way of making money by chartering wild cat banks, had proved a most unprofitable delusion and an unmitigated humbug. We thought that building large cities without any inhabitants therefor, was a singularly crack-brained specimen of enterprise; and furthermore, that everybody could not live in town who lived in the Territory unless the towns were laid off in 80 acre or quarter section lots. We thought, to sum up all hurriedly, that it was useless to attempt to legislate prosperity into that country; that it was impossible to decoy wealth into our laps by legal enactment; that we had, in fact, been a very fast, very reckless, very hopeful,

enthusiastic, and self-deceived people; that while we had assumed to play the part of Dives, we were really better fitted for the performance of the character of Lazarus. The scheme for obtaining wealth without labor, prosperity without industry, and growing into a community of opulence and ease without effort had been a complete failure.

The spring of 1858 dawned upon us, and the icy hand of winter relaxed its hold upon the earth, and the prairies were once more clothed in sunshine and emerald. The result of our thinking during the long dreary winter, was now about to be embodied in active efforts to enhance our real prosperity and substantial wealth. It had been fully and justly determined that the true grandeur and prosperity of the people was concealed in their capacity for industry, honesty and patient endurance. If there were fortunes to be made in Nebraska, they were to be acquired by frugality and persevering exertion alone. The soil was to be tilled and taxed for the support of the dwellers thereon; and out of it and it alone was all true and substantial independence to be derived. For the first time during our political existence, we realized our true condition, and comprehended the proper method of ameliorating and improving it. The numerous signs marked "banker, broker, real estate dealer," etc., began one by one to disappear, and the shrewd and hopeful gentlemen who had adopted them were seen either departing for their old homes in the east, or buckling on the panoply of industry, and following quietly the more honorable and certainly paying pursuit of prairie-breaking and corn-planting. The gloom of the long night of poverty was about passing away forever. The clouds were breaking, the effulgence of a better and brighter day sent its first glad beams to reanimate and rejoice the dispirited and encourage the strong and hopeful. Labor at once began and its hundred voices made the air resonant with its homely music. All about us, on every side, the prairie plow was at work, turning over, as it were, the first page in the great volumes of our prosperity. Everywhere were brawny arms lifted up to strike the earth, that a stream of plenty and contentment might flow forth and bless the country, even as the rock itself sent up sweet waters to quench the thirst of Israel's children when smote by the strength of Aaron. Everywhere these rich and rolling prairies which had lain for unnumbered centuries as blank leaves in the history of the world's progress were being written upon by the hand of toil, snatched from the obscurity of uselessness, and forever dedicated to the support of the Anglo-Saxon race. The sunshine seemed