KinSource - Tale of the Week - An Impecunious Lot

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The St. Paul Daily Globe, July 10, 1884, p. 8

AN IMPECUNIOUS LOT.

The City's Workhouse at Como Filled to Overflowing.

Bad Air and Strange Insects - A Medley of Accusations.

Tramptown and Vagrantville - A Dairy Product Trouble.

The fun of cutting up a prank in the streets of St. Paul after the poultry has gone to roost and the suburban dogs have commenced their nocturnal serenades is thoroughly played out as far as the romance of being brought up in the morning to answer for such peccadilloes to his honor before crackers and coffee. Yesterday morning as the GLOBE representative was pursuing his investigations in the spacious court room Clerk Fairchild brought his fist down upon the California mahogany of his desk and made the echoes ring with the stentorian exclamation: "In all my experience in this court, this month caps all periods for the ragged, shiftless, squalid, moneyless, ill-visaged, ill-begotten crowd that has poured in these doors for a hearing. The workhouse has accomodations for only sixty sinners, and during the past two weeks up to Tuesday we have swollen its registry to eighty-four, and to-day sent them a cargo of ten more. When and where this state of things is going to head up the devil only knows."

All this while officer Cloose, armed with a starch box full of bug powder, was running a tin tube insect-slayer over the hemp matting to crucify the Forepaugh menagerie of creeping things which had fallen from the garments of the tramps, and sprinkling camphor gum in spots to sweeten the atmosphere soured by the fetid breaths of the day's squad of impecunious visitants.

Ed Powers, the juvenile trunk viewer, was let off from a term at the reform school on a guarantee that he would go out of the business; Taylor & Craig paid $2 costs for obstructing the King's highway, (these monarchs being the people), having cleaned up their litter; N. Blair paid a ten spot for his Sunday dash on the turnpikes with his best girl and a much abused span of livery horses who couldn't strike back; R. Provler was returned to his solitary cell in jail to see if any of his larceny swag would tumble up against him by Saturday, while the case of I. Redding for larceny was dismissed because the weary copper on the night beat who arrested him failed to leave his couch to appear with his charges.

F. Johnson, scooped in on the telling count of being a drunken vagabond, was hoisted into workhouse bondage for thirty days; John Doherty, a seedy drunk with frizzled hair, caught on to five days in the same institution, while C. Fromm, from nobody knows where, a dead broke tramp armed with a second-hand revolver, was given a similar ticket.

A smile of satisfaction stole over the face of the court when J. Jrubel, a Fort Snelling colored veteran, pointed up a $5 bill for having been too intimate with old Bourbon, but it floated away like an exposed photograph negative uncoated with colledion, when M. Arnson, for the same offense, couldn't find a nickle in his old vest, and was ordered to spend a week at the county work house.

The delegation from Tramptown and Vagrantville were ordered to stand up in a row, and would have scared a hedgehog into an apoplectic fit had they met him a rod away from his hole. S. B. Sherborn, detected in trying to unlock a dwelling house without a night key, was sent up for thirty days, and J. Thompson, A. Scherwin and F. Miller took a similar trip for ten days each.

C. Walton, a wild Sioux from Dakota avenue, was given a job for twenty days at the workhouse for disorderly conduct, he having become a chronic fighter and growler and being as touchy on apartment rights as a Mauch Chunk coal miner.

The case of F. X. Brosseau, who, after letting B. Baker see the amount of lacteal fluid, sweet, sour or butter-mixed he was handling, and how the hens of Ramsey county also matched up to the cows to make profitable his business, sold his "milk depot" to him on Wabashaw near the corner of Seventh street for $2,000, of which amount $500 was in a promisory note, was continued to next Monday. Baker had F. X. arrested on a warrant for obtaining money for his depot under false representations that he sold ten cans of cream, 100 gallons of sweet milk, and three cans of butter milk per diem, and eggs an infinitum. F. X. however will defend by contending that Baker is trying to blackmail him for that part of the purchase money as represented in the note of $500, and both the cream and the yolk of the transaction seems likely to be turned into something not as palatable as ice cream at the hearing.