WILLIAM ROCKEFELLER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8351, 24 June 1905, Page 2

WILLIAM ROCKEFELLER.

A MAKER OF WILDERNESS A LITTLE TOWN'S STRUGGLE AGAINST TEE POVER.OF A MH-LIOtfAXaE. Mr William Eockefeller has demolished the houses and evicted the squatters on a tract of 150 square miles in the Adirondack Mountains, which ho intends to use for a hunting reserve. He has been subjected to many threats of murder from those evicted, and also because of his attempts to discover the murderers of William Dexter, a New York lawyer, who some time ago was mysteriously murdered on his estates in the Adirondacks.— New York cable, May 23. (By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS, in " Collier's Weekly.") To buy a wilderness and make a community of it is within the oppor- ! tunity of any moneyed man/ To buy a community and make a wilderness of it may well be beyond the powers of the greatest of millionaires. > William Rockefeller, vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, is making the experiment on the little hamlet of Brandon in the heart of the Adirondacks. By methods that are always within the law — or what his attorneys interpret as the law — ho is patiently striving to dislodge the remnants of the populace that still hold root inside the.circle of his great game preserve. All 'the land about them is hie; he has bought it and paid . for it, thousands upou thousands of acres, more fhan two whole townships, comprising lakes, rivers, forest and mountains. Only Brandon stands in his way; therefore Brandon must go. . Not in any spirit of vindictiveness has Rockefeller reached this determination, but because he wants the land upon which the population now lives for the deer and the foxes, the partridges and the quail of his domain. To that end he hag brought every means in his vast power for several years, from damage suits for trespass in which sterile victory brought him six cents, to making the Government ot the United States, through the Post Office Department, his instrument of persecution. But the town is. still on the map. Five years ago Brandon boasted twelve hundred inhabitants. It had its church, its prosperous hotel, its flourishing school, and its busy mill. To-day it can muster but fourteen families and as many more deserted houses. All the rest is ecrub-grown space. The hotel is burned down, tho mill is razed, the church stands empty, tfre two or three hundred dwellings have vanished. Enemies of Rockefeller name him bitterly as the agent of devastation. This is true only in a physical sense. The disappearance of the buildings is due to the Standard Oil man, but the town's reason for existence had lapsed before he Bet his wish and his will upon Brandon. Had William Rockefeller never entered #ie Adirondacks, Brandon would be to-day a congeries of empty shacks surrounding a summer hotel. With the passing of its timber interests, its local life passed also, and its sturdy, independent, light-hearted lumbermen, packing vp 1 their small household belongings and their largo families, wandered forth to fell new acreages of woodland. Behind them remained a few of the older dwellers, too inert, perhaps, perhaps too obstinate, or possibly too longrooted in habit, to be moved. These conservatives 6at and watched Rockefeller buy land all around; them until they wero completely inclosed. Most of it he bought from one Pat Ducey, who owned twenty-five thousand acres of timber land around and .including Brandon when Rockefeller came to the mountains for the purpose of buying an estate there. Ducey was a practical lumberman of the sort that is fast stripping the forest regions of the United States stark naked. He left no tree that could possibly b© regarded as a log. There are whole sections about Brandon where the face of Nature has been shaved as by a skilful barber. Ducey' s lumber mill practically created the town out of what had been the merest hamlet. When the last tree had fallen Ducey moved, and most of the population moved after him. He left the mill and the land only because he couldn't conveniently take them with him. The only commercial enterprises that survived him were the sportsmen's betel and the country store. .THE BUYING OF BAY POND. To Ducey came Rockefeller's agents. Would he sell his lan/1? Ho Vould — at a price. Would he name the price,? He would, and did. According to rumour it was 100,000dol. As an amendment, tho agent suggested half that amount, aud the sale wa3 eventually concluded on these terms, doubtless to the satisfaction of both parties. Local opinion — and this is by no means friendly to Rockefeller— holds the price a fair one. Rockefeller built himself a superb country place on Bay Pond, one of the fairest little bodies of water in the Adirondacks, some four miles from Brandon. Other purchases followed, until he owned all the land for miles around the town, including both banks of St Regis River and its tributary streams. But Ducey couldn't sell the town of Brandon entire, because he didn't own it all. For instance, Harrison G. Baker owned tho little summer hotel. Being in the centre of a rich fishing and hunting country, it was a paying enterprise. But ti> have a lot of summer and fall fishermen and gunners tramping over his property was no part of Rockefeller's programme. „He undertook to buy the hotel. Baker named a pretty stiff price. Rockefeller's agent laughed at him. "Your hotel isn't worth anything now," said he. " You won't have any guests after this." " Oh, I think they'll stand by me," said Baker, failing to see the point. '• Then they'll have to go a long way for their fun," retorted the agent. " They can't cross our property to get to the St Regis River, and they couldn't fish our stream if they could get there. We'll prosecute if they shoot in our woods. What are they going to do?" In vain the hotel-keeper protested that the river bad been stocked at State expense, and that, as a stream used for years for floating down lumber, it was public water. " You'll have to prove it in every court, right up to the Court of Appeals," said tho agent. " We'll fight jot to a finish on that point." Baker had no money to undertake an expensive legal campaign. He sold his hotel for SOOOdol, went away, and died shortly after. In Brandon one hears that he was " hounded to death by Rockefeller," but such is the local feeling in the matter that had Baker fallen overboard iv mid-Atlantic, or Aioen

gutted to death by a pet goat, some way would be found to lay the responsibility at Rockefeller's door. The next move was upon the local store, owned by Charles Dwigbt, a hard-headed, cool business man. There was no difficulty here. This is Dwight' s version of the proceedings : — ' '' Rockefeller wanted the place and I didn't. The trade was gone. I thought I'd get all I could out of it. So I named a big price. The agent wasn't so easy. He split my price in two. ' You've bought a store,' I says. ' Count the dollars right out, says I. ' You can't do it too quick 1' Fair price? Why, I wouldn't have bought it^ back next day for halt' what I got for it." According to Dwight, who, by the way, has been one of the witnesses against the magnate in. the trespass suits, and can hardly be regarded as a Rockefeller partisan, the owners of property in Brandon got full value for their holdings when they cold oat to the millionaire. Others claim that the price paid was less than the cost of the lumber in the houses. From a- strictly business point of view it is difficult to see how, after the dying out of the local lumber industry, real estate in Brandon possessed anything more than a nominal value. By paying lOOdol, loOdol, 200dol each for the houses, Rockefeller soon owned nearly the whole town. Then came a move which startled the inhabitants— the "letting in the jungle." Like a destructive horde of anta came the moneyking's men, carried away the houses piecemeal, and soon the little cluster of human remnants # looked oat upon the place where their neighbours had once lived to see only the swift-grow-ing brush drawing its mask of warm and kindly green across swept ground and raw excavations. THE MAKING OF WILDERNESS WAS IN PROGRESS. Thus far the pursuance of the Rockefeller ambition was along legitimate lines. Now, however, it encountered the first serious obstacle in the person of Oliver Lamora. Lamora is a French-American ; old, ignorant, poor, obstinate and fearless. A veteran of the Civil War, he has pension enough for a plain subsistence, which he ekes out with trout from the! streams, partridgev and deer from the forest, and berries from the mountainside. When Rockefeller forbade hunting and fishing around Brandon old Lamora was bitter and outspoken against the edict. What did he care that Rockefeller had bought the land; he had always hunted and nshed there, and no interloping millionaire could stop him ! Such was his attitude. • By general consent he became the mouthpiece and leader of the " Old Guard " who dtill stuck to Brandon. Little by little he saw the nnmbers of his compfmio'js dwindle. Fauche, who kept the little grocery store, found his trade so waning that he sold out. Lamora's two cousins got jobs elsewhere and were glad to leave. The family across the street departed and Rockefeller left the house standing for the purpose of putting in it Eugene Flanders, one of his "watchers," as the gamekeepers and forest guards are cal'.rid. To Lamora's mind, Flanders was set there to spy upon him, but Lamora's views must be taken with a liberal allowance for bias. Probably had the old man been less defiant in his attitude from the first the offer which was finally made would have coma sooner. And right here it is well to note that Lamora is no yellow journal " hero " defending his home against the depredations of a heartless millionaire. He was willing to sell out if he could get his price. And he thought that Rockefeller with his vast wealth ousrht to pay roundly. So he asked £300. Now Lamora's house is unusually large for Brandon, and is better built than tho average, but I very much doubt whether as a real estate proposition it is worth £300. Whether it was worth that to Rockefeller to tear down v/as for the maker' of wilderness to determine. The agent asked for two weeks in which to refer the matter. Lamora gave him three. That is the last he neard from the agent. But some weeks later one of the watchers, meeting him. told him that he'd better get out while he could sell his place for something or "they'd law him out," as Lamora quotes the warning. To the ill-paid woodsmen of the Adirondacks, who have had or heard of experiences with suits brought by absentee landlords, involving expensive defence, the law is not a protection, but a threat. In Lamora it served to rouse only wrathful obstinacy. "He don 1 get it for no fifteen huuder' dollarr now. Ole Rockyfellow don'," he said to me, in his quaintly accented English. "He pay me five thousan' dollafr now if he want it." Legitimate methods failing to oust Lamora, Rockefeller now resorted to measures not so clearly defensible. In March, 1902, he caused tho old man's arrest for fishing in a branch of the St Regis River, which the millionaire claims to own. His lawyer, who is also his partner in several land enterprises, withdrew the case, after two adjournments made at his own request, and brought civil action in a distant part of the county for 65d0l damages with costs, charging violation of the PrivatePark law. The withdrawn oas© had already cost Lamora some money, and now ho was hard put to it to appear in tho distant court, but his neighbours, ill-off as they were, contributed toward his expenses, and the firm of Willard and Leslie Saunders, of Dickinson Centre, volunteered to undertake his defence. Afterward " Rockefellerism " was the principal issue, in a very lively, though unsuccessful, pdlitical campaign which they conducted. The defence was that, as the waters on Rockefeller's property had been stocked by the State, at public expense, no could not establish private park rights and could claim only actual damages. Lamora won. On cjarrying the case to the County Court Rockefeller was nonsuited. He went to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial. The ground was then traversed again exactly as before; the jury finding no cause of action, the County Court nonsuiting Rockefeller, and the Appellate Division, invoked a second time, again ordering a new trial. This was held last December, and the judge, on the ground that he was compelled to do so by the two opinions already handed down from the Appellate Division, directed the jury to find in favour of the plaintiff for a sum not to exceed 25d0l for each of the three offences. The jury brought in a verdict for eighteen cents damage. 1 ; — six cents for each trespass — and costs. From this sentence Lamora is now appealing. Meantime a temporary injunction had, been obtained, cutting off Lamora's fishing, which he had been steadily prosecuting. v *t)n a motion to make the in junction permanent, both sides agreed to await a' final decision in the Private Park casa. This is not all. The Standard Oil magnate had also brought suit against Lamora under the common law for 76d0l for trespass. He got six cents. This was followed by another suit, thi3 time for exemplary damages, which was soon withdrawn. Rockefeller has been making legal action pretty expensive in time, money, and worry for the obstinate fisherman. CLOSING ROADS AND BLOCKING HIGHWAYS. The campaign against Brandon now began to broaden. Sigr.3 warning off trespassers were put up on all theroad3 leading out from the town. Many of #.eso are high-rpads, but the Rbokefeller attorneys assume that they . are private property. " Let the other fellows prove 'that they are highways," say tho lawyers. Old trails were clos-

e.l and barred against the passage of the Brandonites. Residents of the little settlement, who had obtained employment in a lumber company conti oiled by William Rockefeller, were discharged at the behest of the Bay Pond estate watchers. The word went forth that no Brandon man could get a job in that country. Children going out from the hamlet to pick berries on the mountain sides were driven home by the watchers and threatened with harm if they repeated the offence. Undeniably the berries belonged to Rockefeller, but in view of the- fact that they were never marketed, and that ninety-nine per cent of them were left' to wither on the bushes, the inhibition is regarded by those^most concerned as harsh, though legal enough. But the Rockefeller employees have not always kept within the law, and herein, presumably, they have gone beyond their instructions. A* Brandon man named Barcumb, while fishing in the St Regis, had his pole shot in two by a watcher who is a crack marksman. At the same time he was struck by a rock, from the hand of the watcher's companion. Both assailants were arrested, but before the case came up for trial Barcumb (without any procurement on the part of the Rockefeller influences, it is but fair to say) had gone to the poorhouse. Other charges of violence are made against the gamekeepers, bat most of them lack substantiation. Naturally, methods such as these made William Rockefeller unpopular, but what followed was a sorer exasperation to the thinning population of Brandon. ROCKEFELLER TAKES BRANDON'S POST OFFICE AWAY. Since 1887 the little place has had a poßt office of its own. It was in the middle of the village, convenient for all, and the nearest available point, moreover, for several lumber camps in tho vicinity. Late in April of last year William Rockefeller wrote a letter to Henry C. Payne, then Postmaster-Gen-eral, about the post office at Brandon. Persons who declare that they have seen this document quote from it this passage ; — ■' ' Heretofore you have granted us many favours. We have still one more to ask of you, that you remove the T>ost office from Brandon to Bay Pond/ Mr Payne is dead; suffice it to say of him that he was a man peculiarly amenable to such influences as Mr Rockefeller could bring to bear. Instead of referring the matter to the Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General, Mr Bristow (an official reputed to be disobliging in delicate matters of this sort), as is customary in the affairs of fourth-class post-offices, Mr Payne himself sent an inspector to investigate. Before the inspector's report came in, Mr Payne, by what urgency it is impossible to state, took matters into his own hands and ordered the Brandon 1 Post Office to be closed. The effects were removed to Bay Pond, a settlement exclusively made up of the Rockefeller menage, four miles distant in the heart of the estate. The personal request of a private citizen had sufficed to move a post office from a point where it was needed to a point where it was not. Bay Pond already had a post office of its own. To Brandon people this seemed an injustice.' Some of them even went so far as to say that the Government had been influenced by Mr Rockefeller's position and riches. They got up a petition for the return of their post office. Seventy-four people signed it — a. number, by the way, considerably in excess of the' Bay Pond population. The petition went to Washington and was pigeon-holed. Brandon came to understand that it could tramp to Bay Pond for its mail, or it could go without. It tramped. And it tramped over roads lined with signs announcing that this was William Rockefeller's private- park, and warning trespassers away under penalty of the law. That is, the. United States was maintaining a post office to which Mr Rockefeller might, if his claims were made good, deny access to any person distasteful to him. That he did not deny such access perhaps speaks well for his wisdom. On the whole, the Rockefeller employees were not disobliging to the Brandon people in the matter of mail. .The postmaster at Bay Pond even went beyond the requirements of his office, often sending mail down to Brandon by one or other of £he railroad hands. But the rape of their post office rankled in the minds of tho Brandon folk. One day last fall, Oliver Lamora sent his son to Bay Pond after a newspaper which he expected. The son returned empty handed. Thereupon the old man shouldered his rifle and set out himself. At the post office he found William Rockefeller and Flanders, the watcher. Lamora declares with glee j that Rockefeller immediately stepped behind his employee, and maintained that strategic position throughout the proceedings. Not that there was any danger, says the old man, for he only brought the weapon to prisfcect himself against Mr Rockefeller's wild deer. Lamora demanded his "paper. The postmaster instituted a search, found it in a corner where it had been mislaid, and delivered it with an apology. Early last winter, inquiries were set afoot in Washington, by "Collier's,". as to the reason for the removal of the' Brandon post office. Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General Bristow knew nothing of the case. Ho instituted a search, and found the petition with the seventy-four names. An inspector was despatched to Brandon. He reported, and early in the year, on recommendation of Mr Conrad, who had taken Bristow' s place, the office was re-estab-lished. Just at present, Brandon seems to be A LITTLE AHEAD IN THE GAME WITH ROCKEFELLER. William Rockefeller does not seem to be an object o$ personal hatred, as was, for instance, his neighbour, Orlando P. Dexter, who met so tragic and mysterious an end in 1903. Dexter was a millionaire owner who had not only prosecuted relentlessly, but persecuted with all the powers of the law, those who attempted to maintain what they considered their rights against him Openly announcing his intent to ruin certain resident owners, he set about hib ends through _ process of law v by which he did not Hye to benefit.' They found him dead on the roadway which he had made private, thereby compelling a neighbouring lumberman to make a circuit so long that his timber becamo practically unmarketable, shot ficm ambush by a murderer who left no clue. William Rockefeller left his place the day after the murder, and left in haste, it is said. Since then, so Brandon people tell me, several bullets have been shot into the Rockefeller buildings during the owner's absence. Even if this be true, and it is denied it might well be • accidental in a regioii where there is much hunting with rifles which carry several miles; People there are in that neighbourhood who would be glad to have Rockefeller believe himB l lf i? d f Ug f r^, f fate; But the Standard Oil millionaire, unless he should employ methods as ruthless' as Dexter's (which he has not yet done) is not likely to arouse the quality of vindictiyencss which speeds the assassin's bullet. Anyway, his own people who seem devoted to. Jug -interest*, are a constant safeguard. When I visited Brandon I f O u n d among the nafcyes of the locality no more radical, a feeling in this matter than a half-derisive determination to disregard the Rockefeller placards and [■the Rockefeller law. There is consider-

able unpermitted hunting in progress o;i the "Private Park." I have no doubt that the surrounded Brandonites get fresh fish occasionally without goinc beyond the two-mile limit. On my way down the track from Bay Pond to Brandon I met a hunter with a rifle over his shoulder and asked him if he had seen anything. "Nary hide ncr hoof," said he. "Are you one or the watchers?" I inquired. "No, sir!" he replied with emphasis. " I belong here." " Are you allowed to hunt on the Rockefeller preserve?" "Well," he said slowly, "I've been down a couple o' miles— beyond his line. At the same time, if a buck should come jumpin' over yonder ' Private Park ' sign and try to bite me on the ear, I wouldn't guarantee but what he might get hurt." That, I take it, is the feeling which will continue to exist in Brandon as long as the town withstands the maker of wilderness. v