Hired
writers called these men great, and there was no maturity of mind in the
people with which to combat the force of the statement, often repeated.
Like children the people believed what they were told.
While the new factory was being built with the carefully saved dollars
of the people, young men from Bidwell went out to work in other places.
After oil and gas were discovered in neighboring states, they went to the
fast-growing towns and came home telling wonder tales. In the boom towns
men earned four, five and even six dollars a day. In secret and when none
of the older people were about, they told of adventures on which they had
gone in the new places; of how, attracted by the flood of money, women came
from the cities; and the times they had been with these women. Young Harley
Parsons, whose father was a shoemaker and who had learned the blacksmith
trade, went to work in one of the new oil fields. He came home wearing a
fancy silk vest and astonished his fellows by buying and smoking ten-cent
cigars. His pockets were bulging with money. "I'm not going to stay long
in this town, you can bet on that," he declared one evening as he stood,
surrounded by a group of admirers before Fanny Twist's Millinery Shop on
lower Main Street. "I have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and
with one from South America." He took a puff of his cigar and spat on the
sidewalk.
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