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Show las Been Grinding WTTS Z7ZZ, THIS road dips down a steep hill Just before you reach Indian Creek and shuts from sight the big stone house that cost $4,-000, $4,-000, the last southern outpost of Kansas City that is sprawling out and engulfing all this rolling prairie. You look for the old bee tree and there is a catch in your throat when you miss it but no that clump of walnut trees hit it for a moment. The ax of the real estate speculator has not come quite that far yet. Those bees flitting far up among the dead brances against a background of gray sky are the oldest settlers of this county. The colony was there in that same tree long years before a white man set foot in Missouri. There are men living who knew that tree and Its wild bees sixty years ago. Turn to the right after you cross Indian In-dian Creek and go about two hundred yards to where the stream pours In a broad white waterfall over a low ledge of rock and drifts lazily in a wide pool with a streak of silver bubbles down Its center. The banks here are rock, with hollows gouged in them and overhanging overhang-ing shelves that cast black shadows upon the stream. Watts's mill Bquats low upon the opposite op-posite bank. The weathered gray of its sides and roof Is the exact shade of the limestone beneath and all around it and the old mill seems to merge with it and is a part of It. You look In vain for any line of cleavage between be-tween mill and rock. The years have blended them Into one somber gray. An Atmosphere of Gray. The naturalists tell of birds and lesser creatures of the wood who take on the color of the bark or the grasses upon which they live. You think of this as you see the miller in the doorway. door-way. His "clothing, even to his cloth slippers, his long beard, his soft felt hat, sprinkled with flour, are a uniform uni-form gray, the gray of rocks and mill. Stubbins Watts, great-great-grandson of Daniel Boone, is 75 years old But the old water mill is older than he. It was built in 1831 and for eighty-two eighty-two years has been grinding corn and wheat within ten miles of Kansas City. The hands that hewed its walnut beams and fashioned the hickory pins that keep its weathered boarding In place moldered into dust a half century cen-tury ago, but the old mill grinds on Just as patiently, as fatihfully, as unmindful un-mindful of passing time and generations genera-tions as It did long years before this city was dreamed of. You pass your hand over the surface sur-face of a walnut beam, hewed out by the ax of John Fitzhugh, eighty-two years ago, and lay your fingers in a gaping notch Just as his ax blade left It, and think of the changes that have some to Western Missouri since then. Westport Landing grew out along the old wood road until It bridged with paved Btreets the miles between It and Westport and overflowed southward south-ward and yet the old mill wheel turned turn-ed and the corn was ground to meal between the homemade Btones of rock quarried on the bank of Indian Creek. i Since this mill was built the commerce com-merce of the Santa Fe Trail came, flourished for a time and died; and then the rush of forty-niners to California Cali-fornia flowed past it, and after them the railroads came and passed on to the Pacific, and with them the legions of pioneers like the clouds of locusts overspreading all the land beyond to the westward. The Mormons of Independence, Inde-pendence, who brought their grist to this mill, departed to found a new empire em-pire beside the dead sea in the unknown un-known desert. Past this old mill. Just two hundred yards to the east, where the big elm leans out over the creek, armies of the Civil War hurried, splashing wildly through the ford, the Southern amy in flight from the defeat at Westport, the Northern forces hot in pursuit. Indian Creek Has Never Hurried. A great city of tall buildings and all things modern has made th country coun-try to the north like a teeming ant hill, where all is hurry, hurry, hurry, but Indian Creek has never hurried; Its stream has flowed placidly, basking lngthesun, pausing in the shadows of its trees; and just as placidly the old mill wheels have turned, their slow creakings attuned to the liquid mur-murings mur-murings of the waterfall. Placidly has Stubbins Watts gone In and out among the turning shafts for sixty-two years, barring those four years of strife when he fought in the Southern army. In those years he was aroused and filled with a fervor that got him honorable mention more than once for deeds on the battle front. But when It was over he returned to Indian In-dian Creek and the old mill and the gurgling of the water as ft ran under the floor soothed him into a calm philosophy and he talks but little. "Yes," he says, "it's pretty here; they say there's no prettier bit of scenery In Missouri. I like to hang out the window here and watch the bubbles and the shadows, and listen to the. water and the wheels, well I just couldn't live without them." The old man with the flour dusted clothing and beard has a distinguished ancestry, and in the family Bible are the documents to prove it. His grandfather, Samuel Watts, was a vounteer soldier In the army of General Gen-eral Lafayette which came from France and fought with Washington in the Revolutionary War. The records rec-ords show that he was wounded seven times, that he was captured by the British in Charleston and that after the war he settled in Shelby County, Kentucky, and that he was a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition that went up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowston. He married Sallie Dodson, a great-granddaughter of Daniel Boone, and settled In St. Charles County, Missouri. In 1S50 Ar.thony B. Y'atts. ' ' son, camo to Indian Creek and bought the water mill. He brought bis family with him. Stubbins was one of the children. To look at the old man, stooping at his bins and gathering a deposit of white flour as a bee gathers poller from the flowers Into which it dips one would not Imagine he had been a fighting man, but, as he says: "The gurgle of the water through sc many years sort of lulls you to sleep." There is no modern machinery in this mill except the turbine wheel." Years ago the old wooden wheel was taken out and the turbine put in. At else is as it was eighty-two years ago, even to the wooden pegs in the flooring, floor-ing, the wooden hinges oh the doors and the wooden cogs in the wheels. |