American Tewish Archives - American Jewish Archives

and found them all happy excepting [Julius] Cohen and Goldfarb,
who also felt blue after learning the state of affairs.
I then telephoned up to Mr. [A. N.] Sadler [president of the
Kansas City Relief Committee], who came down to me in his
buggy, and we called on [the] propr[ietor]. of [the] Leland Hotel,
who did not wish to keep the people, but he was finally persuaded
to keep them.
Mr. Sadler then drove with me out to the stock yards in West
Kansas [City], where we consulted a number of cowboys and
others, who expressed very unfavorable opinions of the land selected
for agricultural purposes, although it was highly spoken of as a
stock country. But as yet we had no opinion of a single person that
had personally been on the grounds and inspected it. We consulted
many men today who said they heard so and so, but no one said he
had been there. At 5: 30 this evening Leo and Knight returned from
Topeka and brought statistical reports of rainfall throughout Kansas,
and Cimarron was located in [the] western part of the third belt
and on high grounds, and the statistics also showed that the rainfall
was steadily on the increase throughout Kansas every year. On
the whole, we decided not to go as yet. . . .
Saturday, July 29 [I 8821
I awoke at 5 and was out on the street a quarter past five, and I
found none of my men out except Cohen, and he told me that some
of them refused to get up. I then went around and got them all out
on the street at 6: 15, as they were very slow and some of them
may have had scruples about doing any manual [labor] today as it is
(Shabas [Sabbath]) Saturday. . . .
. . . Leo and I went to breakfast with Mr. Knight, and after
that we called on Mr. Gilmour, the Union Pacific R. R. land agent,
whom we found to be a very agreeable gentleman, and told him the
circumstances and also requested him to suggest some of the best
lands that he had for sale for our purposes. Here I must add that it
seems that a strange impression has gained ground that these Russian
refugees are a lot of beggars and paupers whom the Relief Com-
mittee of Cincinnati are trying to get rid of, and we learn[ed] that
the A. T. & S. F. R. R. are under that impression [also] and don't