The following fall a man came to the office who said he was Mat Armstrong, a nephew of Jim. He spent some time telling Mr. Goodrich what a bad character his uncle was, and blaming him severely for what he had done about the logging contract the previous winter, and said he was not that kind of a man and he qanted to take the job and put the timber in. He made such an impression on Mr. Goodrich that he gave Mat a contract and Mat proceeded to get supplies and draw labor orders on the company. After a while a scaler was sent to scale the logs and when he reported the amount that had been put in it was found that the amount paid for labor and supplies greatly exceeded the amount which was due for logging, and on investigation it appeared that the labor orders that had been paid were all made out to friends and relatives of Armstrong's, and that the men who actually did the work had not received their pay and they then filed liens for that labor. The logs were sold by the sheriff, to satisfy the liens, and Holt & Balcom bought them in at something less than the amount of the claims which, however, added to the amount which the company had already paid for supplies and labor. In the spring Mr. Cole sent a crew up on the South Branch to drive these logs, and they found that some one had set fire to them and burned them. We suspected who it was who had set the fire but we had had enough of lawsuits by that time and nothing was done about it.

Perhaps the ablest of the early settlers was A. C. Frost, who located first at Maple Valley and afterwards at Mountain, where he was the king of that territory for some years. One of his principal objects in life was to collect all of the taxes he could to be spent in his Town, and we had a good many controversies with him about that. I used to attend the Board of Review each year and go over the assessment roll with the Town Board. One time we had adjourned for lunch and were standing about talking when Frost said to me, "I understand very well that the authorities cannot confiscate any man's property legally, but the authorities can place a tax on the property and in a few years the owner will have paid in taxes more than the value of the land. I also understand that if we put too high a tax on your land you can let it go for taxes and the County will take a tax deed and then we will get no taxes at all, so what I try to do is to make the tax just as high as you will pay, and no higher, and in that way the people will get more than if they took the land away from you." I told him that was what I had been trying to tell him for a number of years and I was glad to know that he agreed with me. Finally Frost moved to Dania, Florida, where his son had settled and had become a prominent and wealthy man.* He returned several times to visit in Mountain, and he came into my office and visited with me. He invited me to come to Dania to see him and his son when I was in Florida, but he said there was one thing he wanted me to promise him and that was never to say to any one in Florida that he had been a Republican member of the Wisconsin Legislature. He said his son had to be a Democrat in order to get anywhere in Florida, and had been elected Mayor on the Democratic ticket, and of course A. C. Frost had to be a good Democrat too as his friends would have been very much provoked with him if they had learned that he had been a Republican in Wisconsin. 
 
 
 
 

Fifty-four 
 

Mr. Frost told me a story once about the time that Isaac Stephenson was running for office and Frost wrote him that he could get some votes for him in the Town of Armstrong, but that the settlers were so few and far between that it would require considerable time and traveling on his part to round them up but that if Stephenson would send him $100.00 he thought he could get some votes for him. He promptly received a check for $100.00, and he was so surprised at getting it so easily that he was quite disappointed to think he had not set a higher figure on his services, so he finally figured out a way to get scme more money. He wrote Stephenson that he had seen the settlers and they would all vote for Stephenson but that they lived so far from the polls that they would not take the time and trouble to vote unless he went after them, and if he had another $100.00 he would see that the settlers got to the polls and voted. A check for this CdMe back promptly and on election day all of the votes in that Town were cast for Stephenson, but the settlers all lived in the Village of Mountain, or very close by, so that Frost did not have to go after any of them. 

One winter we had a controversy about taxes and we did not pay our tax when it was due, so Frost took a deputy sheriff and went up to one of our camps and stopped the men from working, and put all of the teams in the barns and placed a watchman over them so that no work could be done. After word reached me about this, I took steps to settle the matter and the Camp was released after two or three days tie-up. 

One spring Paul McDonald Wds running the drive, and he found that during the winter the Town of How had built a bridge across the North Branch of the Oconto, in what is now known as the Town of Breed, and they had put the center pier of the bridge in the channel of the river, so McDonald thought it would be impossible to get the logs by the bridge without jamming. I told him to go ahead and try it and if he could not get the logs through the bridge to let me know. After trying it he telephoned me that it was impossible to get the drive by without taking out this bridge, so I consulted lawyer Webster and got a written an opinion to the effect that it was our duty to drive the logs and clear out any obstructions which there might be in the way, as it was a navigable stream and no one had a right to obstruct the passage of the logs. I drove up to the Town of How that afternoon and saw Henry Johnson, who was at that time Chairman of the Town. I served a notice on him to get their obstruction out of the way or we would take it out ourselves. He said they would do nothing about it. Next morning McDonald and I drove up to the