While teaching my first public school in my log cabin on my claim Nebraska, I was reading in my newspapers of our people organizing companies in the large cities to move out and settle on land, to go to farming, because there was a financial panic in this country. Wages were low and many thousands were out of work in every city. One such company of Bohemians in New York City was organized and had secured reduced rates to go west to settle on land; another in Chicago, Ill.; and each club or colony voted to send committee to explore some western state. Some went to Wisconsin; some to South Dakota and northern Nebraska; some came through Kansas on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad as far as Larned, I believe, but there was trouble in each and every direction. Discord and disagreements followed. It seemed very hard for the exploring parties to find, to the satisfaction, the “Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey”; and still harder to please all the home-seekers. It is no wonder when we consider where these people had been all their lives. In Bohemia, as in most other parts of Europe, all the people live in cities, towns and villages except a few foresters, who, sixty years ago, with some of the millers, lived in remote places as the American farmer does here. Hence they had never seen isolated farm dwellings.
Customs and habits are second nature, and solitude seemed to frighten such people. An American farmer in a well-settled country seemed to them a poor human lost in a wilderness. How then would a pioneer, miles from his nearest and also lonesome neighbor, look thirty to sixty miles from the nearest little station? Horrible! Unbearable! Buried alive!
Hunger is the hardest task-master, and it seemed to be a case of “root hog or die!” So after I decided to locate a Bohemian settlement in and around Wilson, Kan., then called “Bosland” by the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company, I wrote up the location showing everything I could in its favor. The main things were, temperate climate; good soil; free land from Uncle Sam, or cheap relinquishments of improvements by previous settlers; railroad land at from $2.50 to $5.00 per acre; good and plenty of water from never-failing springs and wells at from thirty to sixty feet; plenty of building stone of fine quality, and an accessible railroad station. A paradise for poultry, cattle, horses, sheep, hogs, etc. I kept my pen going, publishing my reports in Bohemian-American papers until I drew the attention of the farm clubs formed in the cities and of all that reading public. Soon letters came pouring in wanting answers, and I had lots of writing to do, but that was all it cost—my time, stationery and postage stamps.
The first homestead entry of government land ever made in the Salina land office by a Bohemian-American was on May 16, 1874, and I made the entry. I bought a breaking-plow, on time, of Mr. S. P. Himes and Albert Jellison, hardware dealers in Bosland; with it I broke prairie, camping by a pond on my newly selected home site. One day, as I was turning over the green sod, I saw a great herd of Texas steers being grazed from Smoky Hill river two or three miles north up to the hills of the divide, and back again to the river, where a camp of herders—“cowboys”—was located. As they came back near noon, while I was out of sight, the cowboys swept down from the hills, with the great herd, right through the ravine over my best hay grass, and by the pond where my covered wagon stood. When I came to take dinner in my prairie schooner I missed my old army six-shooter I had
