Page 2

And that brings us back around to Hyman Klinkle, the Andrew Carnegie of fertilizer.

Being a classic Gilded Age "robber baron," Hyman hadn't given much thought to the island's caste-like social order, its company-town politics, or the well-being of the guano miners he affectionately called "my little stinkers."

All he was interested in was good guano.

Hyman's detractors say that only Hyman's fear of his devout Lutheran wife kept him from taking an active ownership position in these lucrative if somewhat tainted market niches. Others believe that the constant anxiety over this business opportunity-denied exacerbated Hyman's predisposition to flatulence and led to his premature demise on a St. Paul streetcar in 1881.

Debates such as these, however, are a subject for more serious scholars, not your humble correspondent.

Notwithstanding his pained disinterest in his workers, Hyman had long worried about what would happen to Poco Cabesa (and Klinkleburg) after the guano mines petered out.

Despite the boomtown's rowdy ways, Hyman saw his namesake boomtown as his legacy (when fertilizer is your vocation, even the faintest glimmer of a legacy shines bright indeed -- especially when you're the kind of fellow who keels over on a streetcar because you're too tightfisted to hire a carriage).

But that was all in the future. And, for Hyman, this was his now.

Determined to do right by his little island, starting in 1883 Hyman deducted a small percentage from every guano receipt and deposited it in the "Poco Cabesa Limited Trust," to be administered by his younger brother, Hiram, at the Klinkle Bank & Trust in the Twin Cities. The terms of the Trust stated that it was to be tapped only when the island's guano gauge ultimately reached "E."

One of Klinkle's early biographers, Margaret Celeste Dorsett, theorized that Hyman intended the Poco Cabesa Limited Trust and Klinkleburg to be models of paternalistic authoritarian capitalism, a concept advocated by 19th century Austrian political theorist, Ligg Isleichen. Other historians and biographers who argue over things like this insist that Hyman was simply sending business his little brother Hiram's way.

Whatever the reason, day by day, year by year, the legendary Limited Trust grew in proportion to the shrinking layers of guano upon which it fed.