Excerpt from A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and Its People, Vol. 1: Illustrated In presenting this volume to the public, the writer begs leave to make the following introductory announcements and explanations. In gathering the data for the history, a vast amount of interesting matter was collected, and had we utilized it all, a book would have been created twice the size of the one offered. It was thought, there fore, that a more condensed history giving a sufficient number of stories in each of the several periods to correctly represent the habits, manners and customs of the people during each of the epochs and the events which helped to mold the destinies of the county, would be most appreciated by the public. It was difficult at times to determine just which facts to include and which to omit, and some events which we desired to mention at length were omitted because we were unable to secure ac curate and complete data for their narration. The matter for the history has been obtained from the following sources: Personal interviews with old-time citizens of the county; replies to letters addressed to different well informed citizens; scrap books saved by lovers of historic information and the newspaper files that were preserved. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.