The rage for land speculation was sweeping over Iowa like a prairie fire, getting things all ready for the great panic of 1857 that I have read of since, but of which I never heard until long after it was over.

All I knew was that there was a great fever for buying and selling land and laying out and booming town-sites--the sites, not the towns--and that afterward times were very hard.

The speculators had bought up a good part of Monterey County by the end of 1856, and had run the price up as high as three dollars and a half an acre.
This made it hard for poor men who came in expecting to get it for a dollar and a quarter; and a number of settlers in the township, as they did all over the state, went on their land relying on the right to buy it when they could get the money--what was called the preemption right.
I could see the houses of William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost from my house; and I knew that Peter and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn, Dunkards from Pennsylvania, had located farther south.

All these settlers were located south of Hell Slew, which was coming to be known now, and was afterward put down on the map, as "Vandemark's Folly Marsh." And now there came into the county and state a class of men called "claim-jumpers," who pushed in on the claims of the first comers, and stood ready to buy their new homes right out from under them.

It was pretty hard on us who had pushed on ahead of the railways, and soaked in the rain and frozen in the blizzards, and lived on moldy bacon and hulled corn, to lose our chance to get title to the lands we had broken up and built on.