HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                              205

and during this time cleared up five hundred acres of timber land for the
plow and made twenty-five thousand rails with which was built between
five and six miles of fence. During this time, too, he dealt largely in
stock. Having sold his land, in 1887, he went to southwestern Kansas
with the view to investment and speculation, where he became a member
of a company organized to establish county seats in the five corner coun-
ties of the state. Owing to the fact that there were rival companies in
the field building towns in competition, sailing upon this sea was not very
smooth, and the company with which he was identified succeeded in
establishing but two of the five county seats. Out of this rivalry resulted
the numerous vendetta of that day in the history of Kansas, one of which
ended in the killing of Sheriff Cross and a number of others at what was
known as “The Haystack Murder,” in “No Man’s Land,” immediately
south of Stevens county, Kansas. Then the boom was off, and the strenu-
ous life backed on every hand by Winchesters was no longer a paying
proposition. After tarrying a year and a half in southwestern Kansas,
Colorado and New Mexico, Mr. Crist drifted over into Arkansas, where
he spent the fall and winter of 1889, then returned to Indiana, locating at
Indianapolis and engaging in the manufacture of an embossing machine,
having purchased for a nominal sum a patented device for embossing
wood by pressing a heated rotary die deep into the surface of the wood
sought to be ornamented. This device had been pronounced a failure,
owing to a mechanical feature which was thought to be impossible to
remedy. But after a year’s experimentation, including repeated failures,
Mr. Crist succeeded in patenting a number of improvements (some of
them in the name of an assistant who assigned to him) which made the
machine a success and, for the time being, revolutionized the method of
carving and ornamenting wood. For a time, then, the demand for the
device was simply wonderful, when he sold a half interest to H. B.
Hibben, of the firm of Hibben, Holwig and Reese, wholesale dry goods
merchants of Indianapolis, for $25,000, when a $250,000 stock company
was organized, New York parties offering to take over the entire business
at $225,000, which offer was declined. Soon, machines were introduced
in England, France and Germany.
    In speaking of the success achieved along this line Mr. Crist said
to the writer: “I built and placed the first machines that were ever put
into the chair and furniture factories of this country, Canada, Mexico,
England, France and Germany, which are considered indispensable in
certain lines of work. This is about the only thing I have ever done the
accomplishment of which I have felt to be deservedly meritorious.”
    In course of time came competition, as along all other lines, other
devices having, meanwhile, been patented which did the same kind of
work, in a way, so that the large profits realized could be no longer
maintained. After ten years in this business he sold out to the trust and
resumed the pursuits of agriculture and stock-raising on a fine farm of
two hundred and sixty-five acres in Morgan county, twenty miles south
of Indianapolis and two miles east of Monrovia, in a Quaker neighbor-
hood, where he now resides and thinks himself comfortably located for
life.
    The subject of this sketch is a man of energy, industry and intelli-
gence and of agreeable social and conversational qualities, who thinks for
himself, and accepts the dicta of no creed nor cult until weighed in the
balance of reason and common sense.