Macon beacon. [volume] (Macon, Miss.) 1859-1995, 1915-07-09
"HTTCHRD HIS WAGON TO A STAR

OOIu u CISOIL W uo oAN oA AN"NA bN
fAssion.
His death occurred April 10, 1915; and when he
closed his eyes in dreamless sleep, never again to
be called to earthly duty, there went out OF the
world one Of its choicest spirits.
He was a gentleman in the best sense of the
term. .
Being well-bred. and possessing to the highes'
degree moral excellence, William R. Nelson OBJ
served political and social ethics. and responded
always and d~ecisively to the hiRh-souled prompt
ings Of gentlemanhood.
He kept his faith in himself unsullied, and his
hcpe for the Righteousness Of his country was i'm
perishable.
To those splendid traits of character was
added an Astounding charity for his fellow.mortals,
and he never tired in actual endeavors for their
advancement along every line Of healthy progress.
And vet, despite the kindness of heart and
the genuine human sympathy for which he was
particularly distinguished. he was answering in
the pursuit Of what he believed to be right, no
matter what others thought.
Inhexible Of purpose. he was unfagging in
energetic, persistent effort to bring to the bar of
Justice the high and mighty transgressors of the
law and other evifdoers and trespassers against
the public veal.
With such characteristics, and being combat
i've by nature, to boot, necessarily he quickly be-
came a power who had to be reckoned with in his
adopted home town and state.
In other words. he was daring. determined,
upright, in action as In speech, and when he en-.
tered upon the publication of his Kansas Cit.
paper, he came as nearly '~hitching his wagon t.
a STAR as did ever any man who labored in the
field of journalism to exploit the press in promo.
ton Of the public good.
He aimed to spread the doctrine of Civic Right.
e~ousness, and succeeded, through precepting the
community to virtue and ~valiantlv practising in
his own person that which he taught others was
the right, and, therefore, the only thing for peo-
pie to do.
$50 s ane ~ s" "a ..p ssf va Jays sol Of the towns growth
suddenly became "a live wire" for burning up
and MISUNDERSTANDING and vice in the
municipality.
The task which he voluntarily set himself to
accomplish, proved, as was to have been %anticipat-
ed. a yeritable Augean Stable job; for, at that
date, the embryo river city on the far shore of the
muddy Missouri j" with which he purposed to
grow up, although even then (the first year of the
eighth decade of the 10Th century, a railroad CEN
tor of considerable Importance, was somewhat of
a typical, wide-open, border town, in which the
reckless, devil-may-care revels of the cowboy, the
cut-throat talk and swash-bucking air Of the
would-be bad man from the wild and woody
West 1.-THE do-as-I-say or shut-up-shop dictation of
the saloon proprietor, who, perhaps. has killed his
man, and, like the young lion, having licked his
first blood, posed as ready for the next victim the
open, impudent defiance Of law and decency on the
part of un-horn gamblers. operators of roulette
tables and faro banks, together with the keepers
of bawdy houses, low dives and dance halls, had
created q turbulent rule-or-die spirit among a dis
reputable class well calculated to overawe the
better element, and to make the timid and time
serving shrink from ~antagonizing it and the pru.
dent business man to covet its good will.
But the conditions were not to the liking of
Colonel Nelson, owner and controller of The Star.
They stirred the rich. red, patriotic, Irish
blood flowing in his veins-for one of his forbears
was of that Emerald Isle stock which has done so
much for the independence and freedom of other
lands, however little they have accomplished for
themselves in that direction against great odds in
their own.
With ~unerring prophetic vision he saw the
menace to the domestic peace and permanent
prosperity that was in the conditions saw the evil
to the community that would live after the doors
of it were under the sod saw the wreck and ruin
to morals the destruction of the happiness of
homes ; the dissipation of honest earnings in dis
solute ways. and the humiliation of every promise
for content or even comfort at fresides around
which patient wives and suffering mothers and
neglected children satin a word, saw the Hades-
on-earth lives men and women must lead in the
rapidly-growing borough unless it was checked in