WILLIAM WARREN. 321 



not a promising place for a town, but when my father 

 offered to send me his double fowling-piece I traded the 

 revolver for a block of lots in Emporia. 



Warren said: "Betcher your revolver is gone, lost, 

 vanished, an' vamoosed. Why, that place will never 

 amount to a hill o' beans, but if you'd invested in Chi- 

 cago you'd have been O. K. They've dug over one hun- 

 dred feet for water there in Emporia, and didn't get it. 

 Whatter they goin' to do without water? Just dry up, 

 that's all. Betcher'll wish that revolver back 'fore long, 

 for that was worth something." 



There was a big push behind Emporia. A lot of 

 Eastern capitalists spent money to find water, and they 

 found it. As soon as it was struck I was offered $150 for 

 my lots, and I shook the money under my friend's nose. 

 That find of water after nearly a year's digging made a 

 great railroad centre, and the neighboring "p e g" towns 

 were heard of no more. 



Meanwhile I had located a claim, and filed it at the 

 land office. This gave me the privilege, as an actual 

 settler, of pre-empting or buying the quarter-section of 

 160 acres at the Government price of $1.25 per acre be- 

 fore the tract in which it was situated was offered at pub- 

 lic sale. That spring there had been discoveries of great 

 deposits of lead in the Ozark Mountains, and among the 

 miners of Potosi, Wis., there was much excitement and 

 considerable emigration. I had written father that I 

 would go to the mines in Missouri. That shirt of Nessus 

 which causes the restlessness of border life impelled me to 

 go somewhere. I had tired of life as it was lived in 

 the mines and woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and 

 a new field of adventure was opened. With the average 

 miner, who is a born gambler, there was the prospect of 

 gain. I was not an average miner, nor a born gambler, 



