HE best hunting and the best fishing in the Big Woods was up the creek from Seaberry Settlement on what is known as the Fiddlebutt Patent. This patent, or land grant, had been made by the State to a late comer at the wilderness crib, back in 1835 or thereabouts, but Timothy Butt had widely advertised his land grant as "agricultural lands," with the result that he had sold many thousands of the original sixty thousand acres. The price he received from the purchasers more than paid him for the time, trouble, and five hundred dollars which he had put into the task of persuading the State legislature and the governor to reward his political and financial sagacity and faithfulness by giving him the three score thousand acres of what were at that time virgin timberlands, and in the selling of which he had reserved spruce and pine rights.
Butt established a sawmill at the settlement where he cut up all the timber he could find up the creek, and in due course he moved down to the State capital, where his wealth, his beautiful daughter, and his political sagacity established his family so well in society that his son afterward became congressman and his grandson president of the light and power company of sixty years later.
In the meanwhile, the Fiddlebutt Patent, after many changes and adventures, finally fell, as cut-over lands, on account of unpaid taxes, into the hands of the State as part of the Mountain Park, and there it remained till James Cobbleman discovered Purling Stream and the Rippling Ponds, away up in the heart of the Big Woods, and far within Fiddlebutt Patent.
James Cobbleman had invested in Light and Power when he was an innocent grist miller's son, just arrived in the metropolis, with his fortune of twenty dollars in his leather wallet, and looking for a job in Wall Street. He had landed as messenger boy in a bucket shop on New Street, Wall Street's black-sheep brother, and there learned his business.
His knowledge of toll bins, yellow corn, buckwheat, and other commonplaces in a little ten-horse-power grist mill was to the great advantage of James Cobbleman, for he was adaptable within limits. For instance, he speculated in wheat, corn, and oats, and thus he obtained, while still a very callow youth in appearance, several thousand dollars. Then, with his knowledge of water power acquired while listening to the clink-clank of the big overshot wheel in his father's mill, he plunged on Light and Power when stock was selling all the way from three-eighths to three-fourths, and acquired ten thousand shares of a par value of one hundred dollars, which even insiders regarded as the joke of the day.
But the election of Butt to the presidency of Light and Power was, in fact, a masterpiece of finance. No one had ever forgotten the tradition that Congressman Butt was a pretty shrewd politician. James Cobblerhan saw his Light and Power go to eleven, and he sold out. Ten thousand shares dumped on the market all at once alarmed a number of people, and James Cobbleman bought in thirty thousand shares and had nearly two thousand dollars left for investment purposes.
There was a streak of poetry in the soul of James Cobbleman. He had loved the sound of the overshot and the whirring burs. Light and Power, meaning water power and electric light, had come to mean more than mere stock gambling to him. The problem of water power was for him a great joy, a great opportunity, and thus, before any one knew it, James Cobbleman owned fifty-three per cent of the outstanding stock of Light and Power.
That happened when the State legislature was listening to the pleas of Timothy Butt, third, who pictured the great future for industry in the State if the legislature would only see the great opportunity they had for developing the latent water powers.
Overnight the legislature dreamed a dream of lasting fame for commercial statesmanship, like that enjoyed by the signers of the Declaration, and James Cobbleman awakened to the discovery that his sentiment and speculation had become a pampered public enterprise of such proportions as he had not dreamed.