The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer

by Oscar Micheaux

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  After the lot sale Amro still refused to move. It was then ErnestNicholson said the town had to be overcome somehow and he had to do it.The business men of the town continued to hold meetings and passresolutions to stick together. They argued that all they had to do tosave the town was to stick together. This was the slogan of eachmeeting. The county seat no doubt held them more than the meetings, butit was not long before signs of weakening began to appear here and therealong the ranks.

  Victor to the north, in the opinion of the people abroad, would get theroad; lots were being bought up and business people from elsewhere werecontinuing to locate and erect substantial buildings in the new town,and then it was reported that Geo. Roane, who had recently sold hislivery barn in Amro where he had made a bunch of money, had bought fivelots in Victor, paying fancy prices for them but getting a refund offifty per cent if he moved or started his residence hotel by Januaryfirst. This report could not be confirmed as Roane could not be found,but soon conflicting reports filled the air and old Dad Durpee, wholoved his corner lot in Amro like a hog loves corn, made daily trips upand down Main street, railing the boys. The more he talked the moreexcited he became. "My good men!" he would shout, with his armsstretched above his head like Billy Sunday after preaching awhile."Stick together! Stick together! We've got the best town in the bestcounty, in the best state in the best country in the world. What more doyou want?" He would fairly rave, with his old eyes stretched widelyopen, and his shaggy beard flowing in the breeze. He continued thisuntil he bored the people and weakened the already weakening forces.

  Were engaged in ranching and owned great herds in Tippcounty. (Page 180.)]

  There were many good business men in Amro, among them young men ofsterling qualities, college-bred, ambitious and with dreams of greatsuccess and of establishing themselves securely. Many of them hadsweethearts in the east, and desired to make a showing and profit aswell, and how were they to do this in a town in which even outsiders,though they might not admire the Nicholsons, were predicting failure forthose who remained, and declaring they were foolish to stay. This youngblood was getting hard to control, and to hold them something more hadto be done than declaring Ernest Nicholson to be trying to wreck thetown and break up their homes. Poor fools--I would think, as I listenedto them, talking as though Ernest Nicholson had anything to do with therailroad missing the town. It was simply the mistaken location.

  It had been an easy matter for the promotors, whose capital was mostlyin the air, to locate Amro on the allotment of Oliver Amoureaux, becausethey could do so without paying anything, and did not have to payfifty-five dollars an acre for deeded land as Nicholson had done. Beingcentrally located and with enough buildings to encourage the buildingof more, they induced the governor to organize the county when few butilliterate Indians and thieving mixed-bloods could vote, fairly stealingthe county seat before the bona-fide settlers had any chance to expressthemselves on the matter. They had doggedly invested more money incement walks and other improvements, when disinterested persons hadcriticized their actions, loading the township with eleven thousanddollars, seven per cent interest bearing bonds, that sold at a bigdiscount, to build a school house large enough for a town three timesthe size of Amro. This angered the settlers and being dissatisfiedbecause they were disfranchised by the rascals who engineered the plan,Amro began rapidly to lose outside sympathy.

  Ernest Nicholson had a pleasing personality and forceful as well. He wasa king at reasoning and whenever a weak Amroite was in Calias he wasinvited into the townsite company's office which was luxuriouslyfurnished, the walls profusely decorated with the pictures of prominentcapitalists and financiers of the middle west, some of whom werefinancing the schemes of the fine looking young men who were trying toshow these struggling waifs of the prairie the inevitable result.

  All that was needed was to break into the town in some way or other, forit was essential that Amro be absorbed by Victor before the election,ten months away. The town should be entirely broken up. If it stillexisted, with or without the road, it had a good chance of holding thecounty seat. A county seat is a very hard thing to move. In fact,according to the records of western states, few county seats have everbeen moved.

  Megory's county seat was located forty miles from Megory, in the extremeeast end of the county, where the county ran to a point and the river onthe north and the south boundary of the county formed an acute angle;yet the county seat remains at Fairview and the voters keep it there,where no one but a handful of farmers and the few hundred inhabitants ofthe town reside. When trying to remove the county seat every town in thecounty jumps into the race, persisting in the contention that their townis the proper place for the county seat and when election comes, thefarmers who represent from sixty-five to ninety per cent of the vote instates like Dakota, vote for the town nearest their farm, thinking onlyof their own selfish interests and forgetting the county's welfare, asthe victor must have a majority of all votes cast. Another example ofthis condition is near where this story is written, on the east bank ofthe Missouri. It is a place called Keeler, the most God-forsaken placein the world, with only three or four ramshackle buildings and a postoffice, with little or no country trade, yet this is a county seat, thecapital of one of the leading counties of the state; while half a dozengood towns along the line of the C.M. & St. L. road, cart their recordsand hold court in Keeler, twenty miles from the railroad. Every fouryears for thirty years the county seat has been elected to stay atKeeler, as no town can get a majority of all votes cast against Keeler,which doesn't even enter the race.

  All of these facts had their bearing on Ernest Nicholson in his officeat Calias, and had helped to hold Amro together, until Van Neter wascalled into Calias and into the private office of "King Ernest" as Amrohad named him. What passed in that office at this interview is a matterof conjecture, but when Van Neter came out of the office he carried acheck for seven thousand, five hundred dollars and Ernest Nicholsonbecame the owner of the two-story, fifty by one hundred foot hotel andlot, Amro's most popular corner. When this news reached Amro pandemoniumreigned, business men passed from one place of business to anothertalking in low tones, and shaking their heads significantly, while oldDad Durpee, nearer maniac than ever before, went the rounds of the townshouting in a high staccato tone: "What do you think of it? What do youthink of the ornery, low-down rascal's selling out. Selling out to thatband of dirty thieves and town wreckers. By the living gods!" With hisarms folded like a tragedian, eyes rolled to the skies and his formreared back until his knees stuck forward, then raising his hand hesolemnly swore: "I'll stay in Amro! I'll stay in Amro! I'll stay inAmro," until his voice rose to a hoarse scream. "I'll stay in Amro untilthe town is deserted to the last d--n building and the last dog isdead." And he did, though I cannot say as to the last dog.

  Nicholson had the hotel closed and although the snow was more thanknee-deep on the level, a force of carpenters at once began cutting thebuilding in two, preparatory to moving it to the new town. OldMachalacy Finn, a one-armed, hatchet-faced Irishman, with a long sandymustache and pop-eyes, who had moved brick buildings in the windy city,was sent to Amro and declared in Joe Cook's saloon that he'd put thatdamned crackerbox in Victor in fifteen days, and armed with a force ofcarpenters and laborers, the plaster was soon knocked off the walls ofthe largest and best building in Amro and thrown into the streets; whilethe new cement walks, only fifty feet in front and one hundred by eightat the side, were broken into slabs and piled roughly aside, then hugetimbers twenty-four by thirty-two inches and sixty feet long, from theredwood forests of Washington, followed the jack-screws and blocks underthe building. Two sixty-horse power mounted tractors, with doubleboilers and horse power locomotive construction, low wheels and highcabs, where the engineer perched like a bird, steamed into the town andprepared to pull the structure from its foundations.

  The crowd gathered to watch as the powerful engines began to c
ough androar, with an occasional short puff, like fast passenger engines on theNew York Central, the power being sufficient to tear the building tosplinters. Creaking in every joint, the hotel building began slowlymoving out into the street.

  The telephone wires, which belonged to the Nicholsons, had been cut andthrown aside and the town was temporarily without telephoniccommunication. The powerful engines easily pulled the hotel betweenbanks of snow, which had been shoveled aside to make room for thepassing of the building across the grades and ditches and on towardVictor. A block and tackle was used whenever the building became stuckfast and in a few days the hotel was serving the public on a corner lotin Victor, where it added materially to the appearance of the town.

  Following in the footsteps of old Calias, the town, now being broken bythe removal of the hotel, the dark cellar over which it stood gapinglike an open grave, to be gazed into at every turn, became of smallconsequence, and in Victor the price of corner lots had advanced fromone thousand, five hundred to two thousand and three thousand dollars,while inside lots were being offered at from one thousand, two hundredto one thousand, eight hundred dollars which had formerly priced fromeight hundred to one thousand, two hundred dollars. This did notdiscourage those who wanted to move to the new town. All that wasdesired by former rock-ribbed Amroites was to get to Victor. They talkednothing but Victor. The name of Amro was almost forgotten.

  Before the hotel building had fairly left the town, other tractionengines were brought to the town. The snow was a great hindrance and toget coal hauled from Calias cost seventy-five cents a hundred. Labor andboard was high, and in fact all prices for everything were very high. Itwas in the middle of one of the cold winters of the plains, but moneyhad been made in Amro and was offered freely in payment for moving tothe new town. It was bitter cold and the snow was light and drifting,the ground frozen under the snow two feet deep, but the frozen groundwould hold up the buildings better than it would when the warm weathercame and started a thaw. The soil being underlaid with sand it would beimpossible to move buildings over it, if rain should come, as it wouldbe likely to do in the spring, and with the melted snow to hinder, itwould then be very difficult to move the buildings. It was small wonderthat they were anxious to get away from the disrupted town at this time,and the road between Amro and Victor became a much used thoroughfare.

  The traction engines pounding from early morning until late at nightfilled the air with a noise as of railroad yards, while the happy facesof the owners of the buildings arriving in Victor, and the anxious oneswaiting to be moved, gave material for interesting study of humannature.

  George Roane had built a new barn in Victor and was much pleased overhaving sold the old one in Amro before the town went to pieces, therebysaving the expense of removal and getting a refund of fifty per cent ofthe purchase price of the lots he purchased in Victor. Many buildingscontinued to arrive from Amro, and new ones being erected did credit tothe name of the new town by growing faster than any of the towns on thereservation, including Calias or Megory.