Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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After ten years absence from his old haunts and the business he loved so well, the fire in my father’s blood had cooled. Now he felt the old flame leap. The black oaks and the sumacs beckoned. And to his eager nostrils rose the odor of a tanyard.

Almost at once after that meeting with the Indian, still nosing a tannery, my father was hot on the trail. With the characteristics of a thoroughbred, he doggedly followed his lead, picking up new hope as he went at almost every jump, into the woods of three counties. In a particularly fine stand of wood over in Jackson county, he “treed” his quarry. Looking up into the trees, his senses all aflame with eagerness, and I might say standing on his hind legs — upright anyhow — he barked, “Eureka!”

Then, having gone there on invitation of the owner to view those fine black oaks, standing tall, with their big boles close together, he said more rationally, but still with considerable enthusiasm, “It ’ s enough! By God I’ll have that tannery now!”

My father had now declared quite emphatically, though perhaps a bit inelegantly, that he would establish a tannery here in Wetmore. It was not idle talk. He experimented, and in due time the tannery was a going concern. Not immediately, however. Capital had to be provided, and it took time to bring materials. The tannery was an “open” yard in the bend of the creek just west of where the town bridge is now—a sort of makeshift affair, operated only in the summer months. But in one respect it was regular. It had the tanyard smell.