Chapter XXII

_Wild-cat Money and Town-sites_

Both of these specimens of natural history were bred, nurtured, and

let loose in countless numbers to prey upon the people in the early

days that witnessed the opening of the Northwestern territories to

settlement. The wild-cat dollars waxed fat upon the blood and brawn

of the settlers who had already arrived; wild-cat town-sites found

ready victims in the thousands of Eastern people who desired to

better their fortunes, and who lent ready ears to the golden tales of

unscrupulous promoters, that told of wonderful cities in the West,

whose only reality was that blazoned in the prospectuses scattered

broadcast through the East.

The younger generation, whose only acquaintance with the circulating

symbols of wealth that we call "money", is confined to the decades

since the close of the War of Secession, can have no idea of the

laxity of banking laws of the fifties, in the Northwestern states and

territories, nor of the instability of the so-called "money" that

comprised nine-tenths of the medium of exchange then in use in the

West. Nowadays, a bank bill stands for its face value in gold, if it

be a National Bank issue. If a state bank--and bills of this sort

are comparatively few in these days--they are also guaranteed, in a

measure, by the laws of the state in which the bank is situated. In

the days of which I am writing, and especially in the unsettled and

troublesome times just before the war (from 1856 to 1862), the money

that was handled on the river in the prosecution of business, except

of course the small proportion of gold that was still in circulation,

had little or no backing, either by federal or state enactments.

A man went into an embryo city, consisting in that day of two or

three thousand town lots, and from fifty to a hundred inhabitants,

with an iron box costing twenty-five dollars. In this box he

had ten, twenty, or thirty thousand "dollars" in new bank bills

purporting to have been issued from two, three, or four banks doing

business in other equally large, populous, and growing cities,

situated elsewhere in Wisconsin, or preferably in Illinois, Indiana,

or Michigan. How did he become possessed of all this wealth? Was

it the savings of years? The iron box was, perhaps; perhaps he got

trusted for that. The money was not usually the savings of any time

at all; it was simply printed to order.

Five or six persons desirous of benefitting their fellow men by

assisting them in opening their farms and "moving their crops", would

get together in Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, wherever there was

an establishment capable of engraving and printing bank bills--and

not very elegant or artistic printing was required, or desired. These

men propose to start as many banks, in as many "cities" in the West.

They have money enough, each of them, to buy a safe, an iron box into

which any carpenter could bore with an ordinary brace and bit, and

enough over to pay for the printing of twenty thousand dollars' worth

of bills in denominations of one, two, five and ten dollars. The

printing finished, each man would sign his own bills as president,

and one of the others would add the final touch of authenticity by

signing a fictitious name to the same bills as cashier. Then it was

"money".

But it would have been overloading the credulity of even the most

gullible denizens of his adopted city to ask them to accept his own

bills as legal tender; so a swap was made all around, and when the

requisite amount of shuffling was completed, each man had his twenty

thousand dollars in bills on four or five banks, but none of his own

issue. There was a double incentive in this transaction: first, it

inspired the utmost confidence in the minds of the men who were to

borrow this money. How could this banker who had come among them for

their good, have acquired this money by any other than legitimate

transactions? If it were bills on his own bank that he proposed

to put into circulation, there might be some question as to their

guaranty; but he could not get this money by merely going to the

printing office and ordering it, as he might in case of bills on

his own institution. It certainly must be good money. Secondly, by

distributing his bills in as many different localities as possible,

the chances of its never being presented for redemption were greatly

multiplied; it might be burned, or lost overboard, or worn out, in

which case he would be just so much ahead, and no questions asked.

The foregoing may be a somewhat fanciful statement of the way in

which the bankers proceeded, but in essence it is a true picture.

They may not have all met in Chicago, or anywhere else, to perfect

these arrangements, but the arrangements were all perfected

practically as stated: "You put my bills into circulation, and I will

put out yours; and in each case the exchange will greatly assist each

and all of us in hoodwinking our victims into the belief that it is

money, and not merely printed paper which we are offering them".

Equipped with these goods, and with a charter from the state in which

he proposed to operate--a charter granted for the asking, and no

questions raised--the banker transports himself and his box of money

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.

[Illustration: MCGREGOR, IOWA. Looking north, up the river.]