Buckner Gowdy, Doctor Bliven, their associates, and others not yet
mentioned will be found helping to make or mar the story all through the
future; for an Iowa community was like a growing child in this, that its
character in maturity was fixed by its beginnings.
I know communities in Iowa that went into evil ways, and were blighted
through the poison distilled into their veins by a few of the earliest
settlers; I know others that began with a few strong, honest, thinking,
reading, praying families, and soon began sending out streams of good
influence which had a strange power for better things; I knew other
settlements in which there was a feud from the beginning between the bad
and the good; and in some of them the blight of the bad finally
overwhelmed the good, while in others the forces of righteousness at
last grappled with the devil's gang, and, sometimes in violence,
redeemed the neighborhood to a place in the light.
In one of these classes Monterey County, and even Vandemark Township,
took its place. Buckner Gowdy and Doctor Bliven, the little girl who
fainted away on the wooden bench in the night, and the yellow-haired
woman who stole a ride with me across the Dubuque ferry had their part
in the building up of our great community--and others worked with them,
some for the good and some for the bad.
Now I come to people whose histories I know by the absorption of a
lifetime's experience. I know that it was Mrs. Bliven's husband--we
always called her that, of course--who expected to arrest the pair of
them as they crossed the Dubuque ferry; and that I was made a cat's-paw
in slipping her past her pursuers and saving Bliven from arrest.
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