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Updated: June 24, 2025
She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield.
And thereat Saltman and Wild Water became profoundly unpopular. "Now how are we going to do it?" Smoke asked. "Shorty and I ought to keep control. We discovered this town-site." "That's right!" many cried. "A square deal!" "It's only fair!" "Three-fifths to us," Smoke suggested, "and you fellows come in for two-fifths. And you've got to pay for your shares." "Ten cents on the dollar!" was a cry.
"Now coming down square on to the town-site is this eighty-acre lot; lays beautiful to the town, the main street running right up to it. And through that street," continued he, impressively, "must go all the travel to the important places beyond. And by and by, when the immigration gets strong enough, the owner of that piece of land will hev corner lots and sich to sell.
He founded Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri, and everywhere his record was the same.
It is in a valley ten miles long which has always been one of the richest valleys I ever saw; sheltered by the mountains, watered by the springs which create the source of Indian Creek. The climate is like that of the California foothills. And the soil is fertile anything will grow there. I saw that twenty years ago. I knew that the place was made for a town-site and I made the town.
Around it, where teams had been fed and the overflow of water had run, little green forests of oats were springing, testifying to the fecundity of the soil, lighting unbelieving eyes with hope. "Just look what a little water will do!" said the locaters and town-site men, pointing with eloquent gesture. "All this land needs, gentlemen, is a little water to make it a paradise!"
Other sourdoughs, who had struck it rich in excess of all their dreams, shook their heads gloomily, warned him that he would go broke, and declined to invest in so extravagant a venture. But Daylight smiled, and sold out the remainder of his town-site holdings. He sold at the right time, at the height of the placer boom.
There appeared to be no limit to the size of this deposit, and now the old-line operators who had shunned the town-site boom bid feverishly against the promoters and the tenderfeet for acreage. Farms and ranches previously all but worthless were cut up into small tracts and drilling sites, and these were sold for unheard-of prices.
"We don't know what we've got under the ground," Smoke answered. "But we do know we've got a fine town-site on top of it." "Sure," Shorty added. "Grand for scenery an' solitude. Folks lovin' solitude come a-flockin' here by thousands. Most popular solitude on the Yukon." Again the impatient cries arose, and Saltman, who had been talking with the later comers, came to the front.
She made the suggestion with characteristic maladroitness, at a moment when Albert had been holding forth on his favorite hobby of the sinfulness of land-speculation in general, and the peculiar wickedness of misrepresentation and all the other arts pertaining to town-site swindling. Perhaps Albert was too suspicious. He always saw the hand of Plausaby in everything proposed by his mother.
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