USA > Minnesota > Otter Tail County > History of Otter Tail County, Minnesota: Its People, Industries and Institutions, Volume I > Part 63
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The friendships formed in those days have borne fruit in the intermar- riages of the pretty "Norsk jenters" to their neighbor's Yankee "Bill," the German "Hans." the Irish "Pat" or to anyone of a half dozen other national- ities. A few generations will produce a strong and virile type of men and
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women in this county-men and women whose blood will have the best char- acteristics of all these many peoples. The Norwegian, the Swede, the Dane, the Irish, the German, the Pole, the Finn, the French, the English, and native American will have mingled their blood to make a race of people who will carry the torch of civilization forward to future generations-and all loyal citizens of the Stars and Stripes. Truly, Otter Tail county well exemplifies the oft-repeated statement that America is the "melting pot" of the world.
I may be pardoned for saying a word regarding myself in this connec- tion, since I take it, I know more about myself than any other person. I have lived in Otter Tail county all the time since 1870, and in Fergus Falls since it was the county seat, and during all of these years have been a prac- titioner before the local bar. I was county attorney from 1870 to 1875, and from 1879 to 1887, but since that time have not been in politics for myself. However I have helped my friends in ways politically as the occasion arose and have no regrets on this score. I was on the committee which located the state hospital at Fergus Falls and contributed my share to the fixing of the site at our home city. I was also in Washington, D. C., in time to get the postoffice changed from Hoyt's corner to the Nangle corner, and later made a second trip with John W. Mason to Washington for the purpose of preventing Congressman Frank Eddy and Elmer E. Adams from getting it relocated at the Hoyt corner. While they did not succeed in having their way, yet, by a masterly stroke of diplomacy, they got the assistant secretary of the treasury, Horace Taylor, to go back on his pledge and compromise on the "Johnny Schei chicken lot.". I never quite forgave either of them for this move until I saw the completed building. I think I prefer the coffin store on the Nangle corner to the present location, but, of course, opinions may differ. I am simply stating iny own.
I have lived in Otter Tail county long enough to see it change from the inost beautiful country by nature to a wonderful county of well cultivated farms, comfortable homes everywhere, with scores of flourishing villages and cities, with fine highways threading the county; I have seen the broad prairie of wild grass give way to equally extensive fields of waving grain. The few hundreds of settlers in 1870 have grown to fifty thousand and the county has plenty of room for that many more within its limits. Today we travel in our automobiles over the same roads on which our fathers drove their patient ox teams. I suppose that fifty more years will see our chil- dren flitting from one corner of the county to the other in their flying machines. Yet, when I think back to that day in July, 1870, I wonder whether future generations will enjoy life any better than we, the pioneers of the seventies.
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A half century will soon have passed away since the first permanent settlers came to this county. We old settlers are fast leaving for a newer country; day by day our ranks are growing thinner; the old order chang- eth. So it has always been and so will it always be. It is so ordered in this world and we would not change it if we could. It is for you who follow in our footsteps to so conduct yourselves and the affairs of the county that old Otter Tail, the greatest of Minnesota's counties, will con- tinue to be the best place in the world.
EDMUND A. EVERTS.
One of my most intimate friends in Otter Tail county was the late Edmund A. Everts and I want to take this opportunity of setting down for future generations some of the main facts of his life. Born in Carroll county, Illinois, November 12, 1840, he removed with his parents, Rezin and Sophronia (Preston) Everts, to Winona county, Minnesota, in 1855, where he was living when the Civil War opened.
I first met Comrade Everts in 1856 at Fremont, Minnesota, when he was sixteen years of age, and knew him intimately from that time until his death. I knew him as a pioneer boy of the early pioneers of the terri- tory of Minnesota, as a volunteer soldier in the Civil War, as a citizen soldier after the war, as an early pioneer of Otter Tail county, and finally as a business man in the village of Battle Lake. In all this time I never knew him to do a crooked or unmanly act.
On June 26, 1861, he enlisted in Company A, Second Minnesota Vol- unteer Infantry, for a period of three years; re-enlisted as a veteran on December 15, 1863; discharged as a sergeant on July 11, 1865. During the summer of 1861 he was stationed at Ft. Ripley with his company guard- ing our frontier forts. In October. 1861, he left Ft. Snelling with his regiment for Washington, D. C. At Pittsburg orders were countermanded and the regiment sent direct to Louisville, Kentucky.
He was in the campaign to Mill Springs, then back to Louisville, thence via Nashville to Pittsburg Landing. Thence he went to Corinth, thence east to Tuscumbia, and from there back north into Tennessee and down into Georgia. From there he was transferred back to Louisville, following Bragg's rail toward that city. He was at the battles of Perryville, Nash- ville, Murfreesborough and Tallahoma. Later he went through Alabama and Tennessee to Chickamauga. He was in the famous march through Georgia to the sea with Sherman, and then north through the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington, D. C.
I never knew him to be sick or on detached duty a single day, or miss a battle or a duty in all this long service. Few, indeed, have such a record. He was in more than twenty battles, and this does not take into considera-
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tion the scores of skirmishes in which the old Second regiment was engaged during its march to the sea. In none of these battles or skirmishes did he receive a scratch; I always thought he had a charmed life.
Mr. Everts was one of the first to enlist and he stayed until the last Rebel threw down his gun against the government, was present at the sur- render of Lee and proudly marched up the broad streets of Washington with his great commander on that grand and glorious day in May, 1855. On that memorable occasion he was the same modest, painstaking soldier, as he ever was a citizen. He was a brave soldier, a true friend, and abso- lutely an honorable man in all his dealings and actions from the cradle to the grave.
I learned to know him as a messmate and chum, where the cant, hypo- crisy and restraint of society were unknown; where men were known for what they really were. It was there I learned to know, admire and trust one of the noblest, truest, and most unselfish men I have ever known. I am proud to have always been his friend; he had no enemies. In fact, his fully rounded life was a success, but the greatest asset he has left his fam- ily and friends is his honorable life.
Mr. Everts settled in Otter Tail county in the spring of 1871 with his wife, Rosella, and settled on a homestead in section 27, in the town of Everts, lying between the northwest end of Battle lake and Silver lake. In this immediate vicinity he finally acquired nearly a section of land. He farmed for ten years with great success, but after the building of the Fer- gus Falls branch of the Northern Pacfic railroad he rented his farm and moved to Battle Lake, where he lived the rest of his life.
He went into the lumber, flour and feed business in Battle Lake and carried it on very successfully until his death, on March 9, 1915. He was interested in the old Winslow bank in Battle Lake, and never failed to lend a helping hand to all worthy enterprises in the village. Shortly before his death he took his son, Frederick, into business with him. He left his widow, one daughter, Maie, the wife of W. J. Sernblad, the clerk of the district court of Douglas county.
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CHAPTER XXXII.
. REMINISCENCES BY JOHN W. MASON.
JOHN WINTERMUTE MASON. By Ernest V. Shockley.
In every community there are certain men who are looked upon as leaders in their profession and it is surprising how accurate an estimate is placed upon them by their fellowmen. Go into the average city of less than ten thousand and ask anyone of a score of men who the best physician is and they will nearly all agree on the best one of the dozen or more the city happens to have; the same unanimity of choice may be found in any one of several professions. There is probably no profession where the attainments of its members vary so widely as in the members of the bar. Every city in the state of Minnesota has its full quota of lawyers and Fergus Falls is no exception to this rule. This appreciative study concerns the career of the oldest member of the bar of this city-a man who has ranked at the top of his profession for forty years.
The city of Fergus Falls was conceived in the fall of 1870, born in the spring of 1871 and christened by the Legislature in 1872. Shortly after its birth, and before its name had been officially applied, there came driving into it one hot afternoon in the summer of 1871 a lawyer. The village was still in its swaddling clothes; it would have all the ills and ailments incidents to the toothless stage of human kind; it would, to continue the metaphor, cause its progenitor trouble, as its teeth began to appear; but, like unto the puerile stage of the man who conceived it, there would come days when it would need a strong guiding hand to keep its citizens in the straight and narrow path of civic rectitude ; but it was sure to grow. All this and more flitted through the head of the young man who came driving a heavily- loaded wagon into the village on June 7, 1871. Just such a place-a place where men would not always observe the Ten Commandments of their own free will and accord-was the one for which this young man was seeking. In other words he was a lawyer. His name was John Wintermute Mason.
The years have come and gone since the eventful day: forty-five times has the earth made its annual pilgrimage around the sun in its orbit; the village of a hundred or two has grown to a city of eight thousand; the dreams of its founder have been realized: two generations of men and women have come and gone. And the young man, poor in purse but rich in ambition, who climbed down from his dusty perch on the top of his
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wagon on that hot afternoon in the summer of 1871, has lived to see all this transformation take place.
He has been a part and parcel of its very life from the beginning. The children of the village who learned their alphabet in the first school he helped to organize in the spring of 1872 are now men and women with gray hair-grandfathers and grandmothers, many of them. Of the busi- ness and professional men who saw his tall figure for the first time in 1871. scarcely a one is left to tell the tale. Truly may it be said that the life of the Hon. John W. Mason is coincident with the life of Fergus Falls. Future generations of dwellers in this city on the Red river of the North may read of the men who have helped to make it: they will recall the names of some score of worthy men who helped to guide the struggling village and direct its growth to the end that it has become the city it is today. High on this list of men, occupying a prominent niche in the hall of fame of Fergus Falls, may be read for all time to come the name of John W. Mason.
A century hence, people of this city will be reading the history of the Otter Tail county which bears his name, and will wonder what sort of a man he was and what he did that entitles him to an honored place in its annals. Therefore, it becomes the duty of the chronicler to set forth briefly at this point certain genealogical facts of the man. Although a lawyer, his entry into this world was not unlike that of other men. His natal day. October 6, 1846, found his father and mother, Harley Carpenter and Clar- issa (Hazen) Mason, then living at Lapeer, Michigan.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened to him in his boyhood. He passed through the trials and pleasures of his childish days just as have countless millions of boys; he went to school in the winter, worked on the farm in the summer and played the rest of the time. The opening of the Civil War found him just fourteen years of age and too young to gratify his martial desires. However, as soon as he was old enough to enlist he volunteered and his name may be found as a member of Battery B, First Minnesota Heavy Artillery. The war closed, however, before he saw any active service. Immediately after he was mustered out of the service, he returned to the school room to complete his education. He spent three years in Groveland Seminary, Dodge county, Minnesota, and one year at Carlton College, Northfield, Minnesota. He was twenty-two years of age; his boyhood days were over, and it behooved him to think seriously of finding some vocation in life.
He did not want to be a farmer; he had no desire to enter the ministry or the medical profession. He finally came to the conclusion, after an introspective study of himself. that the legal profession offered the best opportunities for him. To this end he entered the law office of G. B. Cooley,
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of Mantorville, Minnesota, in 1869. to prepare himself for his life work. Being of a studious bent and analytical turn of mind, and having an able preceptor, it was not long before he was ready to be admitted to the bar. Thus the year 1871 found him prepared to engage in the profession to which he has since devoted his entire attention.
The next question to decide was the place where he should locate. Many a man. the lawyer as well as men in every calling in life, has gone to his grave unhonored and unsung for the reason that he failed to locate in the place best suited to his own individuality. Many a lawyer has hung out his shingle in the wrong town. The Bible says that young men have dreams and old men see visions. Whether young Mason was a biblical student the biographer does not undertake to state, but, judging from his future career, history must record that he had both dreams and visions.
In the early spring of 1871 he started to Independence, Kansas, a boom town of eighteen hundred at the time, with a friend, George Smith, a brother lawyer. Young Mason had nearly one hundred dollars when he left home, but so high was the cost of living in Independence that within ten days he saw that he had just enough left to pay his fare home. Since there were already twenty-seven lawyers in Independence, he decided that he would not be the twenty-eighth-and left the city. On his return home to Minnesota, he met Major Whallon, stepfather of the Lowry brothers, later residents of Fergus Falls, who suggested to him that he go to Roches- ter, Minnesota, to see one George Head, who was on the point of settling in a new town in the northern part of the state by the name of Fergus Falls. This was the first time Mr. Mason had ever heard of the "coming city," but he decided, after hearing the glowing account of Head, that he would investigate the possibilities of the place. The fact that Head offered him free transportation to the town if he would drive one of his teams, was another fact which induced him to make the prospecting trip. Accordingly he helped Head pack his household goods, mounted one of the wagons, and headed his team in the direction of the county and city whose history he was to write forty-five years later.
And so it came to pass that John W. Mason drove into Fergus Falls on June 7. 1871. It must have taken a man with an unusually keen insight into the future to foretell the future possibilities of Fergus Falls in 1871. It was not a county seat town, and at that time there was small prospect that it ever would be such. Certainly it promised little in 1871 when the first settlers were rearing their rude log cabins here and there on lots donated by the owners of the townsite. It may be supposed that young Mason did some serious thinking during the first few days after he arrived.
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Should he remain awhile and see whether the place promised a livelihood or should he return home and look for a more favorable location. It is given to some men to forecast the future with an almost uncanny prophetic vision, and it must be admitted that young Mason either did this, or else, to use a Hoosier expression, he was "all-fired lucky." He had to do some- thing, and at once. He had but two dollars in his pocket when he landed and that amount would not last long, even in Fergus Falls in 1871. The story of how he lived for the first year is told by Mr. Mason in his Remin- iscences. Suffice it to say that he decided to stay, to cast his lot with the "coming city."
Forty-five years have passed since that June day of 1871 and during all of this time Mr. Mason has been an intimate part of the city's career. From the spring of 1872, when he was elected clerk of the first school dis- trict of the village, he has taken an active part in the advancement of every phase of the growth of the city. He was the first mayor of the city in 1881. He drew its first city charter in that year, drafted the second one two years later, and, as president of the charter commission in 1902, for- mulated the charter under which the city is now governed. Other public offices have come to him. He was mayor a second time in 1893-94; the youngest member of the lower house of the state Legislature in 1874; a member of the board of trustees of the Fergus Falls state hospital for the insane from 1891 to 1901; a member of the first board of education of Fergus Falls for four years and its first president. Thus it may be seen that Mr. Mason has taken an active part in the civic life of his community, a part which has brought him no pecuniary reward, but which allowed him to use his ability for the welfare of his fellowmen and the betterment of the life of which he was such an intimate part.
All of his work as a public servant of the people, however, has not interfered with his career as a member of the bar, but, on the other hand, has undoubtedly been of benefit to him. Man does not live unto himself in these latter days. If he measures up to the best that is in him he must bear his full share of the problems which confront the community in which he lives. This Mr. Mason has done, not from selfish motives or personal aggrandizement, but that Fergus Falls might be a better city and able to say to all the world-This is the best city in the state. It is to such men that the city owes a debt of gratitude which it can never repay.
But future generations will want to know something of the legal work of this man who has done so much for the city of his adoption. Within a year after he came to the county he was elected county attorney, but cer- tain circumstances, over which he had no control, kept him from entering upon the duties of that office. During the seventies he was gradually build-
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ing up his practice and growing in ability to handle difficult cases of all kinds. His reputation as an orator were early recognized and history records that he was chosen to make the Fourth of July address in 1876 in his home town. But the decade was not all sunshine; he had to struggle as do all young lawyers in frontier towns; there were ups and downs-cases won and cases lost.
One bright spot in the career of Mr. Mason in the seventies was the beginning of his domestic life. While attending Groveland Academy in the latter part of the sixties he met Fannie S. Safford and this chance acquaintance resulted in the two young people plighting their troth before they left the academy. No doubt, if history were to tell the whole truth, this fact was instrumental in taking young Mason to Independence, Kan- sas, and later bringing him to Fergus Falls. Be that as it may, it was not until 1875 that he felt himself sufficiently well established to ask her to share his joys and troubles. They were married on June 9, 1875, at Red Wing, Minnesota, settled in Fergus Falls at once and here they have con- tinued to live since that day. They have no children.
With the added responsibilities which followed the establishment of a home, Mr. Mason plunged into his legal work with renewed vigor. His reputation as a practitioner before the local court brought him cases from adjoining counties. With the advent of the railroad in the latter part of the seventies he became interested in railroad legislation. He attracted the attention of the railroad officials because of the cases he won against them, and his ability in handling these cases finally resulted in the Great Northern offering him a position on their legal staff.
The career of Mr. Mason as attorney for the Great Northern from 1883 until he resigned from their employ in 1910 tock him into all parts of the state and brought him all the business he could handle. During part of the time he had a partner. It might be mentioned here that his first partner in the seventies was Bert Melville, whose inability to distinguish himself between different kinds of bars, legal and otherwise, finally lead to a dis- solution of the partnership. More of this same Melville is told by Mr. Mason in his Reminiscences. He next associated himself with Edwin M. Wright, under the firm name of Wright & Mason, and this second partner- hip lasted from 1873 to 1875. The next three years he had J. P. Williams as partner. Following the dissolution of this partnership Mr. Mason prac- ticed alone until 1888, when he formed a partnership with C. L. Hilton, and they continued together until Mr. Hilton was elected county attorney, in the fall of 1898. Since that date Mr. Mason has practiced alone.
The twenty-seven years Mr. Mason spent with the Great Northern as one of their attorneys were filled with hundreds of cases which he handled.
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His ability is amply testified to by the fact that the company kept him in their employ as long as they could and parted with his services most reluc- tantly in 1910. Some idea of the amount of business he handled for the company may be seen when it is known that in one year he had no less than seventy-one cases pending. The records will show that he appeared before the supreme court of the state oftener than any other country lawyer in the state. He was frequently called to St. Paul to try cases when the other attorneys of the company were very busy. From 1904 until his resignation, six years later, Mr. Mason handled all the company's cases north and west of St. Cloud; in fact, the work became so onerous that he gave up his private practice and devoted all of his time to the business of the company. Since 1910 Mr. Mason has done very little legal work and has not sought cases of any kind. His long service has brought him a sufficient com- petency so that he is able to live the remainder of his days in peace and quiet. He is now devoting himself to literary and automobile pursuits. It is hoped by his friends that he will leave for posterity some of his reminis- cences which he has felt would not be exactly appropriate for this volume. He has intimated that he intends to characterize certain phases of his county's history for future publication. It is needless to say that future generations will read this product of his pen with the same avidity with which his writings in this volume will be scanned.
One more phase of the life of Mr. Mason remains to be noticed, namely, his literary ability, as shown by his written and delivered addresses. For more than forty years he has been before the people of the county as a platform speaker on all sorts of occasions and on all kinds of subjects. He seems equally at home when pleading before a jury in the court room or when appearing before a woman's club with a dissertation on their duties as members of society. He has been frequently called upon to assist in political campaigns and in the presidential campaigns of 1896 and 1900 he was employed by the Republican state committee as one of their special speakers, delivering speeches in all parts of the state during the progress of the campaign. His experience in these two campaigns may account for his antipathy toward Bryanism, free silver and kindred men and measures. He has been a wide reader of the best literature and is able to illustrate his speeches with extracts from the writers of all ages. His anecdotes, with which he adorns his speeches, have a peculiar aptness that always gives what he has to say a pleasing piquancy of expression. As a raconteur he has few equals in his home city, while his quick repartee makes him a delight- ful conversationalist.
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