All I knew was
that there was a great fever for buying and selling land and laying out
and booming town-sites--the sites, not the towns--and that afterward
times were very hard. The speculators had bought up a good part of
Monterey County by the end of 1856, and had run the price up as high as
three dollars and a half an acre.
This made it hard for poor men who came in expecting to get it for a
dollar and a quarter; and a number of settlers in the township, as they
did all over the state, went on their land relying on the right to buy
it when they could get the money--what was called the preemption right.
I could see the houses of William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom
Frost from my house; and I knew that Peter and Amos Bemisdarfer and
Flavius Bohn, Dunkards from Pennsylvania, had located farther south. All
these settlers were located south of Hell Slew, which was coming to be
known now, and was afterward put down on the map, as "Vandemark's
Folly Marsh."
And now there came into the county and state a class of men called
"claim-jumpers," who pushed in on the claims of the first comers, and
stood ready to buy their new homes right out from under them. It was
pretty hard on us who had pushed on ahead of the railways, and soaked in
the rain and frozen in the blizzards, and lived on moldy bacon and
hulled corn, to lose our chance to get title to the lands we had broken
up and built on. It did not take long for a settler to see in his land a
home for him and his dear ones, and the generations to follow; and we
felt a great bitterness toward these claim-jumpers, who were no better
off than we were.
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