Epaphimandas Lee, as a young man, met a strange prophet named Joseph Smith in the Burned-Over District of New York State. Lee was both fascinated with and repelled by Smith and his odd preachings. The fourth son of a failed grain-merchant from
When Smith commanded polygamy, Epaphimandas took four wives, two of them widows with five children between them. Lee settled in Nauvoo, on the Illinois bank of the
Smith inspired hatred and violence across the nation, and in1845, Nauvoo was ravaged by vigilante terrorism and Smith murdered in jail. But Epaphimandas Lee, with shrewd foresight, had in 1843 packed his swelling family into wagons and shifted downriver to the tiny steamboat landing where he founded a town. Lee carried with him an encyclopedia of radical notions to try on a blank wilderness. A few ex-Mormon families followed, and in a decade other westering souls gathered, including the band of Hessian brewers, assorted Moravian craftsmen hankering for ideas more salutary than the stuffy Whiggism of the East and dozens of unaffiliated yeomen abandoning scanty
Refugees from failed communes—Fourierists, Fruitarians, ex-Harmonists, lapsed Shakers—were magnetically drawn to Leeland (as the town was christened by one of Lee's assertive wives). Riverboat traffic brought migrants from the
Leelanders discovered during the boom years after the Civil War that Making Heaven on Earth was not inconsistent with the older American dream of Making Money Hand Over Fist.
The Hessian brew masters kegged and bottled Wurtzheimer Brau as fast as yeast, malt and hops could work.
E.P. Lee Shipping & Transport proliferated wagons, boxcars and steam packets.
A sawmill and tannery poured forth endless board feet of lumber and noxious streams of yellow-green effluents. Bales of bison hides were heaped on the wharves.
Three grain elevators were built, wondrous towers on the flat prairie, dwarfing the church steeples of the town.
A three-storey brick factory, one city block square, housed a weaving enterprise devoted to the manufacture of undergarments, male and female, each after its kind.
A tribe of Amish craftsmen from
The town formed a volunteer fire brigade, a salaried constabulary and a silver cornet band. There was talk of a free militia company and an opera house.
Riverboat sharpers and roustabouts found the three grog shops on the waterfront congenial places in which to lose their money, their virtue (if any) and their senses.
Epaphimandas Lee, having invested over seven decades on earth, looked at his creation and found it not-so-hot. Three of his wives had departed when neighbors protested the heathenish notion of poly-gamy as an evil legacy from the bad old days of the Big Mormon Threat. His children were scattered by war, economic depression and ill luck, although he heard by post of grandchildren arriving in squadrons.
In 1880, Lee decided to close his enterprises, liquidate his assets—capital and spiritual—and find a new Garden of Eden in the West, as Brigham Young and Joseph Smith's other theological heirs had done. The nation was obsessed with expansionism, frontier settlement and genteel piracy. The White House was occupied by a nonentity whose very name citizens could not recall, while pirates and pork-barrel princelings manipulated the nation's money supply and destiny.
As he gathered his harvest, Lee discovered that the Merchants Bank of Leeland (Ebenezer Nathaniel Cosgrove, President) in fact owned most of Lee's worldly chattels. He had signed papers and closed deals without bothering to read contracts. He believed Leeland was a congregation of brothers and sisters with all things held in common, with the Holy Spirit the only power-broker.
Ebenezer Cosgrove was an ambitious young man who held to the letter, not the spirit, of
Cosgrove came by his resonant name as many of his generation did. The children of Leeland's first generation were named for giant figures from Exodus and Genesis, heroes of Yaweh's Golden Age. Snot-nosed schoolchildren in knee-worn knickers or gingham aprons answered to Ezekial and Zebediah and Meshach and Rachel and Ruth and Hagar and Sarah and Elijah and Amos and (even) Jezebel, Uriah or Ahab. Roll-call in Sunday School was like a serious exegetical reading of the begats.
Epaphimandas Lee knew, deep in his heart, that his apparent bankruptcy was a mere misunderstanding, a superficial error of materialist capitalism to be rectified in the fullness of time. But he was nothing if not stubborn, so he harangued Eb Cosgrove, Mayor Zachariah Bates and anyone else handy. He packed essentials into an Amish-built prairie schooner as big as Noah's lifeboat, gathered his remaining wife and two children (Buz and Abednego) to travel west, ignoring the possibilities of rail and river transport.
He went one last time to the Merchants Bank to expend sweet reason on that officious puppy Cosgrove. As a clincher, he carried a .44 caliber Colt's revolver. When the old prophet burst into the bank president's office, white beard a defiant flag (not of truce)and six-shot syllogism in his left hand, a newly-hired bank guard sounded the alarm. He had been reading a dime-novel romance on the road agent Jesse James and his band of untamed, ungalvanized ex-Confederates who lurked in terrible force across the river. He thought he was thwarting a daring daylight bank robbery.
In the melee, Lee's pistol discharged, and Ebenezer Cosgrove, the youngest bank
president in
A volunteer fire-brigadesman heard the commotion and rang the bronze fire-bell recently donated by Ebenezer Cosgrove.
Wamba Bastin, major and organizer of the PawPaw Zouave Rifles, dashed from his home, where he had just sat down to a cold collation, with his Henry rifle in his hand.
Mary Magdalene Breaux, an octoroon prostitute, rolled off her client in the back room above the Two Deuces on the waterfront, hearing shots and recalling the principal reason she left New Orleans one step ahead of the constabulary. She found the four-shot Derringer pistol in her shoe beside the bed and crouched next to her
The town pharmacist, Ivanhoe Bastin (his father was seriously addicted to the Waverly Novels), spilled a mixture of laudanum-based whooping cough nostrum on the floor, as a bullet from his brother's Henry rifle shattered the window.
The shot occurred when Wamba, famously short-sighted, saw a figure running toward the bank, heard a shout of "Help! Robbery! The bloody James gang!" and reacted with myopic but spontaneous conviction.
Three horses broke from Simspon's livery stable and galloped around the bank. The butt-shot blacksmith called weakly after them and collapsed into his quenching trough.
The battle lasted several minutes and involved most of Leeland's citizenry. There were two other casualties besides Cosgrove, Lee and Simpson: one of Simpson's stable boys, kicked by a runaway horse as he tried to snaffle it, and Wamba Bastin, knocked down by Franklin Quinn, owner of the Two Deuces and Leeland's foremost pimp, who was told by Mary Magdalene Breaux that the joint was being robbed. Quinn erupted from his saloon-cum-bagnio and cold-cocked Bastin with a presentation bung-starter left him by the Wurtzheimer Brau salesman.
Lingering a few days in a semi-comatose state, the founder of Leeland finally expired of his head wound. Ebenezer Cosgrove preceded him to that bourne from which no traveler, etc., by a day. Their funerals were elaborate, lengthy and dramatically gloomy. Enduring feuds and hatreds were kindled among the survivors, including second-generation Lees back from the West for the obsequies. ###
Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
.. ....by Willis Quick, writing as Bronco Billy McCoy
Inutility
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