If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community.

Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent.

The affair has resulted in some good, however.

In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate of the criminal, known as Vandemark's Folly, and by the use of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob T.Vandemark--whom we hereby salute--we are promised another strawberry festival before the crop is gone.
"In the meantime, it is worthy of mention that the industry of claim-jumping has suffered a sudden slump, and that the splendid pioneers who have opened up this Garden of Eden will not be robbed of the fruits of their enterprise." When I came to run for county supervisor, he rehashed the matter without giving any hint that after all what I did was approved of by the people of the county in 1856 when these things took place or that he himself was in it up to the neck! But enough of that: the historical fact is that Settlers' Clubs did work of this sort all over Iowa in those times, and right or wrong, the pioneers held to the lands they took up when the great tide of the Republic broke over the Mississippi and inundated Iowa.

The history of Vandemark Township was the history of the state..