Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler | Page 7

Alcohol for various
crimes and misdemeanors. Father was appointed prosecuting attorney,
and he went at it in earnest, as he always did at anything he undertook.
He sent for every man in the vicinity who ever drank, or who had good
opportunities to observe the effect of drink on others, to appear as a
witness against King Alcohol. The trial lasted three evenings, with
Increasing crowds. Father's adroitness in drawing facts from
witnesses--often against their will--kept the Audience laughing and
applauding. I remember hearing people say that he had mistaken his
calling; that he ought to have been a lawyer. On the last evening, When
he addressed the jury, he became eloquent. He pictured the terrible
effects of intemperance, the ruined homes, the weeping wives, the
ragged children. He denounced King Alcohol as guilty of every known
crime--of stealing the bread from the mouths of children, of robbing
helpless women of everything they valued most, of brutally shedding
the blood of thousands, and of filling the whole earth with violence,
until the cries of widows and orphans reached to high heaven. When he
finished, the house rang with applause. The attorney for the defense
tried to reply, but the boys said Mr. Butler had spoiled his speech. The
jury brought in a verdict of guilty. The election came off soon
afterwards, and people said that it was strongly influenced, in that
township, by father's speech.
The next May, mother, my little brother, and I, went to my uncle
Gorham's, near Canton, Illinois; while father went to Kansas to buy
land, intending, however, to live several years at Mt. Sterling, Illinois,

before moving to Kansas.
MRS. ROSETTA B. HASTINGS.

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS
CHAPTER I.
I came to Kansas in the spring of 1855, having been preaching in that
part of Illinois known as the Military Tract, during the three preceding
years; but my residence was in Cedar County, Iowa, one hundred and
fifty miles from my field of labor, and twenty-six miles to the
northwest of the city of Davenport. I had been employed for one year in
Iowa as a co-laborer with Bro. N. A. McConnell; but the church at
Davenport, which was the strongest and richest church in the
Cooperation, determined to sustain a settled pastor, and this left the
churches too poor to support two preachers, and I was left to find
another field of labor.
When I first came to Cedar County I came simply as a farmer; and
there were but nine families in the township in which we settled. But
when the country came to be settled up the result was not favorable to
the expectation that we should have prosperous churches in that region.
Those who have watched the progress of the temperance reform in
Iowa have noticed that, while the prohibitory law is enforced almost
throughout the State, there are yet exceptions in the cities of Davenport
and Muscatine and the adjacent counties. Here the law is set at defiance.
This is owing to the presence of a German, lager-beer-drinking,
law-defying population, Godless and Christless, and that turn the Lord's
day into a holiday. This tendency had begun to be apparent before I left
Iowa.
When it became manifest that I could not any longer find a field of
labor in Southeastern Iowa, I was recommended to the churches in the
counties of Schuyler and Brown, in the Military Tract, Illinois.

My first introduction among them was dramatic, if, indeed, we could
give to an incident almost frivolous and laughable, the dignity of a
dramatic incident; and yet the matter had a serious side to it. I had been
commended by Bro. Bates, editor of the Iowa Christian Evangelist, to
the church at Rushville, where I held a meeting of days. The meetings
grew in interest, there were some important additions, and the church
was greatly revived. Twelve miles from Rushville was the town of
Ripley, a small village, where the people were engaged in the business
of manufacturing pottery ware. Here two Second Adventist preachers, a
Mr. Chapman and his wife, were holding forth. This Mr. Chapman was
a devout, pious, and earnest man, and a good exhorter, and had an
unfaltering faith that the Lord was immediately to appear. But his wife
was the smartest one in the family. She was fluent and voluble. She had
an unabashed forehead and a bitter and defiant tongue. It was her hobby
to declaim against the popular idea of the existence of the human spirit
apart from the body. With her this was equivalent to a witch riding on a
broomstick or going to heaven on a moonbeam. Spirit is breath--so she
dogmatically affirmed--and when a man breathes out his last breath his
spirit leaves his body. But it was her especial delight to declaim against