A Ball Players Career | Page 2

like my father,
was of English descent, so you can see how little Swedish blood there
is in my veins, in spite of the nickname of "the Swede" that was often
applied to me during my ball-playing career, and which was, I fancy,
given me more because of my light hair and ruddy complexion than
because of any Swedish characteristics that I possessed.
Early in life my father emigrated from New York State into the wilds
of Michigan, and later, after he was married, and while he was but
nineteen years of age, and his wife two years his junior, he started out
to find a home in the West, traveling in one of the old-fashioned prairie

schooners drawn by horses and making his first stop of any account on
the banks of the Cedar River in Iowa. This was in the high-water days
of 1851, and as the river overflowed its banks and the waters kept
rising higher and higher my father concluded that it was hardly a
desirable place near which to locate a home, and hitching up his team
he saddled a horse and swam the stream, going on to the westward. He
finally homesteaded a tract of land on the site of the present town of
Marshalltown, which he laid out, and to which he gave the name that it
now bears. This, for a time, was known as "Marshall," it being named
after the town of Marshall in Michigan, but when a post-office was
applied for it was discovered that there was already a post-office of that
same name in the State, and so the word "town" was added, and
Marshalltown it became, the names of Anson, Ansontown and
Ansonville having all been thought of and rejected. Had the name of
"Ansonia" occurred at that time to my father's mind, however, I do not
think that either Marshall or Marshalltown would have been its title on
the map.
It was not so very long after the completion of my father's log cabin,
which stood on what is now Marshall-town's main street, that I, the first
white child that was born there, came into the world, the exact date of
my advent being April 17th, 1852. My brother Sturges Ransome, who
is two years my senior, was born at the old home in Michigan, and I
had still another brother Melville who died while I was yet a small boy,
so at the time of which I write there were three babies in the house, all
of them boys, and I the youngest and most troublesome of the lot.
The first real grief that came into my life was the death of my mother,
which occurred when I was but seven years old. I remember her now as
a large, fine-looking woman, who weighed something over two
hundred pounds, and she stood about five feet ten-and-a-half inches in
height. This is about all the recollection that I have of her.
If the statements made by my father and by other of our relatives are to
be relied upon, and I see no reason why they should not be, I was a
natural-born kicker from the very outset of my career, and of very little
account in the world, being bent upon making trouble for others. I had

no particularly bad traits that I am aware of, only that I was possessed
of an instinctive dislike both to study and work, and I shirked them
whenever opportunity offered.
I had a penchant, too, for getting into scrapes, and it was indeed a
happy time for my relatives when a whole day passed without my being
up to some mischief.
Some of my father's people had arrived on the scene before my
mother's death, and, attracting other settlers to the scene, Marshalltown,
or Marshall as it was then called, was making rapid strides in growth
and importance. The Pottawattomies, always friendly to the whites,
were particularly fond of my father and I often remember seeing both
the bucks and the squaws at our cabin, though I fancy that they were
not so fond of us boys as they might have been, for we used to tease
and bother them at every opportunity. Johnny Green was their chief,
and Johnny, in spite of his looks, was a pretty decent sort of a fellow,
though he was as fond of fire-water as any of them and as Iowa was not
a prohibition State in those early days he managed now and then to get
hold of a little. "The fights that he fought and the rows that he made"
were as a rule confined to his own people.
Speaking of the Indians, I remember one little occurrence in which I
was concerned during those early days that impressed itself upon my
memory