bought of Uncle Sam when discharged from service. My pocketbook showed signs of inspection, too. But my surveying instruments were not molested. As my exploration trips had cost me about all the money I had with me, the boys did not get a very big haul.
After breaking eighteen acres of sod—buffalo-grass sod—which, owing to lack of rain, got so hard it was with some difficulty that I finished about the middle of June, I did some surveying for Mr. Van Orden, who kept the hotel at Wilson, and Mr. Hutchinson, on section 28, township 14, range 10, where they planned to start a sheep ranch. On June 17, 1874, I started back to my log cabin in Nebraska, where I had left my dear wife and the three children we raised there, Klara, Mary and Victor. Leaving my breaking-plow with the men I bought it of, I struck out north by way of Wolf Creek on the Saline river, a shack of a country store they called Pottersburg, Cawker City, past Jewell Center to Hebron in Nebraska, arriving home in Saline county, Nebraska, on the longest day of the year. As I had written to my wife that I had made a new start, and we would sell out all we could n’t carry away in our schooner, she had a buyer there ready waiting for me, Mr. Josef Freof, from Iowa. The sale was made in a short time, without any dickering, at $12 per acre. I thought I had done well; I had bought eighty acres from the B. & M. R. Rly. Company at $6 per acre only two summers before, and the other eighty was a preëmption. Especially did I think so a short time after the sale was closed, and about half of the purchase money paid, for I could then square up and get myself and family photographed.
In August, 1874, a great calamity happened to both Kansas and Nebraska—the greatest invasion the new states ever experienced in their history. How many thousands of families could write the darkest chapter of their lives commencing on that date! I think there are very few Kansans who see the date 1874 but will know of what invaion or calamity I write. It was an invasion of cavalry—flying cavalry! I will introduce here a little play of words that may be interesting to a student of languages. The word cavalry is derived, as you know, from the Latin word caballus, a horse. Now in the Bohemian or Czech language a horse is kǔñ (the ñ having sound as in cañyon). Horses—Koñě; diminutive, Koñici—little horses or ponies. Now Koñici is also the name of locusts or grasshoppers in our Bohemian vernacular. When this grand arm of flying cavalry lit on our luxurious cornfield, it was riddled in a few hours. The corn prospect had been very good, the ears filling out and in the milk stage. Gardens and orchards went just as fast as the cornfields; even forest trees were defoliated in a day or two. This great host of locusts reminded me of my first experience with them in Dakota territory, when I was with General Sully’s command fighting the hostile Sioux Indians up in the “bad lands,” and building Fort Rice. It was our last of the three years of Indian hunting, 1865. The country was invaded that year by the above-mentioned cavalry, outnumbering us a million to one. But we had no crops to be devoured by them, and as we were in the enemy’s country we egarded them as our allies rather than a plague. And this word plague in that connection reminds me of the olden times when this kind of cavalry was sent by the Great Jehovah as a reinforcement to Moses in Egypt. So much for the flying cavalry. We still have them with us at this writing—July 22, 1913. Many thousands of dollars have been expended by different counties of the state this summer for the purpose of exterminating them.
