James Rawles - Founders

That day they took a long horseback ride from the ranch to the ghost town of Hughesville. The town had been abandoned in 1943, but its heyday was in the 1890s, so most of the buildings were very old. Many of them were collapsed or semi-collapsed and not safe to enter. It was the first time that Joshua had been there—and in fact the first time he had been in any ghost town—but Kelly had been there many times. She showed him some interesting buildings that most tourists overlooked. One of them was a cabin that was up in a side canyon. When they walked in the door, Joshua was surprised to see that there were still some rusty pans on the stove and chairs under the table. This cabin was the highlight of the town for Joshua, because its contents were so intact. There were even a few McCall’s, National Geographic , and Saturday Evening Post magazines from the 1930s and early 1940s on a shelf. Their edges had been ravaged by packrats and mice, but the magazines were still largely intact and legible. They left the cabin just as they had found it, carefully wedging the door shut with a twig to keep the weather out.

It was while they were riding home from Hughesville that Joshua first proposed marriage. Kelly rebuffed him, but Joshua was persistent and optimistic. He was falling deeply in love with Kelly, and he hoped that she felt the same. It was the pragmatist in her that triggered her first refusal.

West Branch, Iowa

November, the First Year

As they entered the outskirts of West Branch, Iowa, it was dawn. They had walked slowly all night. Ken began to ask people they met if they knew of anyone looking for someone to hire for security for farms or ranches. Most seemed wary.

As they walked down 280th Street and reached Downey Street, they hailed a young man riding on a bicycle. He stopped and identified himself as a member of the Society of Friends church. In answer to Terry’s queries, he said that he indeed knew of someone who was looking for “security” for a farm. He pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet, and wrote on it: “D. Perkins Farm, North Charles Avenue. 2 mi. north of Main.”

The young man gave them directions to the farm. This required several hundred yards of backtracking. Before riding off, the man said, “I’ll let them know that you’re coming.”

The farmhouse sat just twenty yards back from Charles Avenue. It was far enough out of West Branch that it definitely didn’t feel “in town.” The farmhouses were fairly widely distanced apart, depending on the acreage. Most the farms appeared to be 80 to 160 acres. Many of the farms used traditional windmills. As with the other windmills that the Laytons had seen traversing the plains, their tails were painted with names like Aermotor, Woodmanse, Monitor, and Challenge. Terry mentioned that seeing windmill water pumps in operation was a good sign of self-sufficiency.

Ken sized up the farm as they approached it. It was 120 acres, mostly planted in corn and soybeans, now harvested. There was a large hay barn, grain storage silos, a cattle loafing shed, an Aermotor windmill, a water tower, and a dairy parlor with a low roof. There were about twenty brown cows in the pen adjoining the shed. Ken didn’t recognize the breed but he could see that there were several cow-calf pairs.

The white two-story house looked like it had been built in the 1930s or 1940s. The front porch sagged a bit, but otherwise it looked well maintained and recently painted.

There were both propane and home heating oil tanks on the south side of the house. The modern touches included a DISH TV satellite dish and a CB radio antenna.

An open-sided four-bay tractor shed sat to the east of the house. In addition to a Ford tractor and its implements, the tractor shed also housed a late-model Toyota Tacoma pickup, an older Toyota Corolla sedan, and a muddy ATV. Beyond were some assorted outbuildings, two small Butler brand galvanized steel grain silos, and one forty-foot silo that looked fairly new. They later learned that the silo was more than twenty-five years old, but it was still shiny because it was constructed mostly of stainless steel.

There was a pitifully small kitchen garden plot—now heaped with foot-deep straw mulch for winter—with a five-foot-tall fence that looked incapable of keeping out deer.

Ken and Terry reslung their rifles muzzle down so that they would look less hostile as they approached the house. Ken rapped on the frame of the front porch’s outer door.

A man armed with a scoped Remington Model 760 pump action deer rifle opened the door to the house and asked warily, “Who are you?”

Seeing the rifle pointed at his chest unnerved Ken.

“I’m Ken Layton and this is my wife, Terry.”

“Durward Perkins is my name. My friends call me D. We heard you were coming. Step on in.”

There was an uneasy moment as they appraised each other. Perkins lowered the rifle muzzle, but it was still uncomfortably pointed at Ken’s knees. As he later mentioned to Terry, he still felt like he was being “muzzled.”

Perkins was in his forties, with sandy-brown hair, slightly chubby, and starting to bald.

Ken offered, “We heard that you were looking for someone to provide security.”

Perkins nodded. “That’s right.” He lifted his free hand to his chin and asked, “Are you Christian folk?”

“Yes, we’re Catholic, and we attend Mass regularly.”

Perkins nodded. “We’re Quakers, but we don’t get to church very often.”

Ken said, “We’re trustworthy and we know how to use these guns. I’m also a light truck mechanic with seven years of experience—I’m ASE-certified A5, T6, and E3.”

“That’s all Greek to me. You’ve got no car?”

“We had a car and an older Bronco that I had restored and modified, but we got ambushed on our way out of Chicago. So what you see here is all of our worldly possessions.”

“Do you mean to stay around Iowa City? Long-term?”

“No sir. We plan to continue on out west, next spring. We’re looking for a place to spend the winter. There’s a group of our friends waiting for us in Idaho. We’re what you’d call preppers or survivalists.”

Perkins nodded. “Uh-huh.” Then he pointed to Ken’s HK clone and asked, “So those black space rifles you’ve got—hers looks like a short M16, and what’s that one you’ve got there?”

“It’s a Vector V91—that’s a clone of the German HK91 rifle. It shoots 7.62 NATO, same as .308 Winchester. Terry’s is what’s called an M4gery or what I still call a CAR-15. It shoots 5.56 NATO, like an M16. They’re both semiauto only.” After a pause, he added, “We’ve both put in a lot of trigger time with our rifles. We’ve shot competition and qualification high-power rifle matches—both CMP and Appleseed. We were also both trained by a former Force Recon Marine in our survival group—a staff sergeant named Jeff Trasel. He taught us all the tricks: perimeter security, patrolling, and small unit tactics.”

“So neither of you’re military veterans? Iraq, Afghanistan?”

“No sir.”

Perkins gave a slight groan and said, “Well, that’s what I was hoping for. But beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”