With the refurbished Sen. William Joel Stone memorial due to be rededicated on October 11, perhaps it's time for another look at the man himself. As a longtime fixture of the courthouse yard the monument tends to lead modern Nevada folk to fancy Stone's link to the community was more intimate than it really was. It's reason for us to remember that America's always been a land of instability and rapid change. Pioneer communities seldom had time to become truly "settled." Families and individuals were forever moving on to greener pastures, not staying to put down taproots anywhere. William Joel Stone, for one, was born in Kentucky, and came to Missouri only because a sister had already settled in Boone County, which just happened to be the home of the University of Missouri. To date merely a farmer, young Stone put in three years at the University, following it up with a commercial course in St. Louis. He returned to Columbia, entered the law offices of his brother-in-law, and was admitted to the bar in 1867. In those pioneering days it was usual for a young lawyer to look around for some up-and-coming community in which to get in on the ground floor and make his fortune in law or politics. After a two-year try in Indiana, Stone came and hung out his shingle in Nevada. His career was similar to that of many another early attorney. He was chosen prosecuting attorney for 1872-74. Among the cases he prosecuted was that against James A. "Dick" Liddil, a member of Jesse James's gang whose father happened to be a prominent and respected Nevadan. Young Liddil got ten years in the penitentiary for horse theft, but served only two years, emerging to play a murky, controversial part in both the killing of Jesse James and the trial of Frank James. Stone also was one of the leading Missouri men striving to get pardons for the Younger brothers, imprisoned in Minnesota after the abortive Northfield bank holdup. Democratic partisanship accounts for Stone's interest in the ex-outlaws. Democrats were generally pro-Confederate, in contrast to the pro-Union Republicans, and Democrats saw the ex-outlaws as victims of the late Civil War, "more sinned against than sinning." Stone also showed his party loyalty by becoming editor of the Vernon County "Democrat" in 1877. The party rewarded him. In 1884 he was the winning Democratic candidate for Congress, and two years later was reelected by "a handsome majority." In 1887 "The History of Vernon County" wrote of the Congressman, prophetically: "The brilliant record which he has made assures him future promotion by his fellow-citizens. Still less than forty years of age, he has achieved a prominence rarely found in one so young." In 1874 Stone had married Miss Louise Winston, of Cole County, and two years later he began work on the yellow-brick house at 527 S. Cedar, perhaps Nevada's oldest surviving house. The story is, it was first intended to face on Washington Street because Stone had had a political disagreement with State Senator S. A. Wight, whose house (no longer standing) faced on Cedar Street. Stone hoped to make Washington the main street to the square, so the Wight home would be on a back street. The plan didn't work out, so later a front was added on the Cedar Street side. The stairs, however, still come down as if onto Washington Street! Ironically, the house was soon bought by the Wight family, and was associated with it for years longer than with Stone. The house is now the home of Sam Foursha, who plans a reception on the premises in connection with the Oct. 11 memorial rededication. Stone's concentration on state and national political offices meant he spent ever less time in Nevada. A cynic might say the town was merely a stepping-stone in his career. In 1890, from the House of Representatives, he moved into the governor's mansion for two terms. Somewhere along the way he picked up the puzzling nickname "Gumshoe Bill." In those days senators were still chosen by state legislatures, and in 1902 Missouri's legislators sent Stone to the United States Senate for the first of three terms. His career in that body climaxed in his prominence as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the critical days leading up to America's 1917 entry into World War I. Anyone who's ever troubled to go over and actually read the bronze tablet on the back of the memorial (its gold-leaf newly, beautifully restored) likely was surprised and puzzled by what he found. "I shall vote against this monstrous mistake," reads that excerpt from perhaps Stone's most critical Senate speech, "this resolution for the declaration of war." As Foreign Relations Committee chairman Stone was the chief senatorial negotiator with Pres. Woodrow Wilson over Wilson's call for a declaration of war against Germany. There had been a strong peace party in the country, but when the time came the war fever swept all before it. For all his efforts, William Joel Stone was able to carry only five fellow senators with him, on April 4, 1917, in voting against the "monstrous mistake." For his lonely, principled stand he was widely vilified. In the chauvinistic hysteria of the times, he was even accused of being "pro-German"! But it wasn't long after the war before people began to think Stone might have been right after all, that the country ought to have stayed out. For war, Stone had warned, is the best excuse for bigger, costlier government, which as a classical liberal he dreaded. Of course we'll win, he said; but "we'll never have the same sort of country that we had before." Ironically, it was that "bigger, costlier government" that gave Stone his memorial. There was no hometown groundswell to memorialize the late senator. It was a typical New Deal makework, Depression-fighting boondoggle, clouded with corruption. Still, Stone deserved the honor. At the monument's dedication in 1935, Senator Bennett C. Clark recalled Stone's lonely stand against the war and his prophecy. "And across the years," he concluded, "I feel that the voice of prophecy has been fulfilled."