Will Leverett

I don't know his years, or I'd put them in the title. He was born soon after the Civil War, when his father came back from serving, and lived in Warren, Ill. for a short stretch before moving to Wisconsin for twelve years. He would say that he grew up, most of that time, on a farm in Garden Valley, Wisconsin, where the family was relatively isolated and his older brothers kind of competitively and aggressively learned farm skills especially using technology as it arrived on the scene and became available to farmers. They would walk to town for their mail or for supplies but that was a huge endeavor, and even riding the horses there would be no small deal but would be possible; they were in Jackson County, in the middle of the state.

His parents were talked into moving to South Dakota and settling in the new town of Sioux Falls, which had only a couple thousand residents but was likely to expand and become a hub for the entire region. A pretty place with a waterfall in the middle of it, it was full of the kind of hope that new towns had, boom towns, places where everyone wanted to build and get in on the boom. Dad started a lumber business, bought trees from Wisconsin and Minnesota, lumbered them up and sold them to homesteaders and housebuilders in town; he did this in partnership with the wealthy guy who had talked them into moving out there, and that guy knew what he was doing; they made money hand over fist for ten or twelve years. The guy got out of the business, sold his share to his son, went on to build a city block and become a founder of Sioux Falls, but Will's father hung on, until a huge panic/crash came along in the winter of 1893. The railroads crashed and many of them went bankrupt. Their promises to build new lines out into the prairie of eastern South Dakota went under as did most of the lines they'd already established; thousands of farmers were left stranded. Prices of farmed goods crashed too so that even if they could get their food to market they'd lose money. Most of them gave up and came back east where they could at least eat. Dreams of a boom in the prairie disappeared; the lumber business dried up.

Will went to Hillsdale College, married, and moved out to Council Bluffs to accept a job at her brother-in-law's bank. That bank was his main form of sustenance for years, but he also ran a magazine, became a historian, and raised a child, along with his wife Julia Reynolds, who would become my grandfather. This book will go as far as that grandfather, and even my dad, but it's already so full I have to figure out ways to cut back, or perhaps turn it into two books. I'm roughly at the Trans-Mississippian Exhibition now, but lots more happens, and soon it turns into the Great War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Depression. They live through a lot. Council Bluffs is no more or less than any other small midwestern town, but it's the center of the universe for them.

Will died in the fifties; my brother says he remembers him vaguely, though we would have been very small when they met. I don't remember a thing. And I have a hard time writing about people I do remember, since I can't show it to them to verify it, or attribute feelings to them. So this will be the end, this book.

I'm thinking of calling it Bluffs Leveretts: An American Tragedy. I'll explain what the tragedy is, by the end.