The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-12-04

| his wife had saved in forty wears 0f | economy and hard labor-to man whom he had never seen to be loaned
 upon what he knew as improved vest
 ern lands. The customer had never been even west of Buffalo, and he had learned of the western agent only through an advertisement i'll the Alba ny mans denominational newspaper.
 In two weeks the Albany capital was all invested, but the improved farms consisted of wild grazing lands upon which the squatter had built a thirty dollar shanty, and had ploughed four or
 five acres. For year the interest was
 paid by the agent himself from other
 investors money but when the crash
 came the old gentleman came out here
 and saw that all his money had been
 sunk"
 The most conservative estimate of the
 losses to eastern holders of bonds issued
 by western Kansas banks, cities and
 street railroad, electric light, water and
 gas companies is now about twenty
 one million dollars. but the best esti-
 mates are largely guesses because so
 many cities that issued bonds have now
 vanished, and banks and corporations
 have gone away in the hir. So there is
 often nothing to tell what amount of
 bonds were sold or who bought them. The era of spending the money obtained from eastern mortgages, the expendi-
 ture of money by railroad builders and the host of immigrants all bred an era of extravaganza and enthusiasm. Thus the demand for lavish public improve ments came naturally to the mushroom towns on the plains. One improvement led to another in strides toward city importance. When the new towns saw how eagerly their seven per cent. twen- ty-year bonds were snapped up by aStern banks and brokers it was easy to have finely equipped city in short order.
 Dodge City with eight thousand pop ulation, built great three-story gran ite and marble city hall from ninety thousand dollars worth of bonds sold in New York city, and a few months later built water works and sewers with sev- enty-tive thousand dollars more of bonds sold in Boston Ness City, which was entirely gone by 1895, got forty
  thousand dollar city hall, and sixty thousand dollars in water works and sewers from her several bond issues. Garden City, with twenty-five hundred people, had a street railroad that would have been a credit to city of fifteen thousand people when she was two years old, besides a public hall worth thirty-five thousand dollars from sales of her municipal bonds Now Garden City has about three hundred people. Silver Bow, on the Rock Island railroad, waxed from seventeen people to twen- ty-four hundred in exactly nineteen and she put over two hundred thousand dollars in her schoolhouses, city hall, sewers and street railroad be- cause eastern people bought Silver Bow bonds. Silver Bow has not been on the may for seven years. Then there were Rednard, Wilcox Johnson, Richtield and dozens of other little cities that were humming, thriving spots in west arn Kansas in 1888 and 1SS9 They each had their city halls of stone and pressed brick, with polished oak furniture and interior woodwork, their artistic opera houses and public halls with all modern accessories, their water works, and some had street railroads reaching a mile or two out on the buffalo grass prairles. Money from sales of bonds in New York, Buffalo, Boston and Albany built Ill these improvements on the plains. To-day nothing but the abandoned, | and weather beaten build ngs, rusty iron and broken cement | sidewalks and a lot of decayed houses emain to tell the story of towns that | were once the marvel of old and slow growing communities In the east in Seward county, leaped rom cowboy camp to several thou ands of population in two years and vas the wonder of southwestern Kan as in 1SSS Her one hundred and forty housand dollars worth of eight per ent. twentyyear bonds all went like iot cakes in Rochester and Springfield, lass, and an army of contractors and 1orkmen thrived while they construct d at Springfield, Kan, court house nd city buildings that many towns of en thousand people and half century Id never dreamed of. The visitor at he site of Adams in Grove county any ay will see bunch of cattle browsing n the dry grass among the man holes Adams sewer system and the water Jugs of Adams fine waterworks dams dropped from twenty-seven undred population in 1889 to five hun red when the drought and reaction r anne upon western Kansas in 1890. Vhen interest upon mortgage bonds be- ame oppressive in 1891 the town moved way in prairie schooners in a few eeks So many booming towns of 1000 and O0 population of twelve and fifteen ears ago, have so long, since evapor- , ed from western Kansas" said mer- z lant here from Garden City, that I , ave forgotten half the names. It seems , te dream to refer to those wonderful , lys when money fairly rained upon [ ;. We were all fools. We thought we 2 ere going to have cities like Omaha q Id Kansas City out here by the dozen, f Id that We had only begun to make i oney You never saw such crazy peo- 6 e. We just squandered the money ' at came our way. One man oyer at g eade Center had solid mahogany g untcrs and stone mosaic floor put q
 his merchandise store at an expense +
 about $3,500. f Meade Centre had then about 1900 s ople A bank at Ness City had a 0 "A |