USA > Nebraska > Collection of Nebraska pioneer reminiscences > Part 23
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Jacob Adriance was the first regular Methodist pastor to be assigned to the mission extending from De Soto to Decatur. His first service was held at De Soto on May 3, 1857, at the home of my brother, Jacob Carter, a Baptist. The congregation con- sisted of Jacob Carter, his family of five, Alex Carter, myself and wife.
The winter before Rev. Adriance came Isaac Collins was con- ducting protracted meetings in De Soto and so much interest was being aroused that some of the ruffians decided to break up the meetings. One night they threw a dead dog through a win- dow hitting the minister in the back, knocking over the candles and leaving us in darkness. The minister straightened up and declared, "The devil isn't dead in De Soto yet."
I was present at the Calhoun claim fight at which Mr. Goss was killed and Purple and Smith were wounded.
The first little log school was erected on the townsite of Blair, the patrons cutting and hauling the lumber. I was the first director and Mrs. William Allen nee Emily Bottorff, first teacher.
I served as worthy patriarch of the First Sons of Temperance organization in the county and lived in De Soto long enough to see the last of the whiskey traffic banished from that township.
I have served many years in Washington county as school director, justice of the peace, and member of the county board.
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In October, 1862, I joined the Second Nebraska cavalry for service on the frontier. Our regiment lost a few scalps and buried a number of Indians. We bivouacked on the plains, wrapped in our blankets, while the skies smiled propitiously over us and we dreamed of home and the girls we left behind us, until reveille called to find the drapery of our couch during the night had been reinforced by winding sheets of drifting snow.
FORT CALHOUN IN THE LATER FIFTIES
BY MRS. E. H. CLARK
E. H. Clark came from Indiana in March, 1855, with Judge James Bradley, and was clerk of the district court in Nebraska under him. He became interested in Fort Calhoun, then the county-seat of Washington county. The town company em- ployed him to survey it into town lots, plat the same, and ad- vertise it. New settlers landed here that spring and lots were readily sold. In June, 1855, Mr. Clark contracted with the pro- prietors to put up a building on the townsite for a hotel; said building to be 24x48 feet, two stories high, with a wing of the same dimensions; the structure to be of hewn logs and put up in good style. For this he was to receive one-ninth interest in the town. Immediately he commenced getting out timber, board- ing in the meantime with Major Arnold's family, and laboring under many disadvantages for want of skilled labor and teams, there being but one span of horses and seven yoke of cattle in the entire precinct at this time. What lumber was necessary for the building had to be obtained from Omaha at sixty dollars per thousand and hauled a circuitous route by the old Mormon trail. As an additional incident to his trials, one morning at breakfast Mr. Clark was told by Mrs. Arnold that the last mouth- ful was on the table. Major Arnold was absent for supplies and delayed, supposedly for lack of conveyance; whereupon Mr. Clark procured two yoke of oxen and started at once for Oma- ha for provisions and lumber. Never having driven oxen before he met with many mishaps. By traveling all night through rain and mud he reached sight of home next day at sunrise, when the oxen ran away upsetting the lumber and scattering groceries all over the prairies. Little was recovered except some bacon and a barrel of flour.
Finally the hotel was ready for occupancy and Col. George Stevens with his family took up their residence there. It was the best hostelry in the west. Mr. Stevens was appointed post- master and gave up one room to the office. The Stevens family were very popular everywhere.
Mr. and Mrs. John B. Kuony were married at the Douglas house, Omaha, about 1855 and came to the new hotel as cooks; but soon afterward started a small store which in due time made
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them a fortune. This couple were also popular in business, as well as socially.
In March, 1856, my husband sent to Indiana for me. I went to St. Louis by train, then by boat to Omaha. I was three weeks on the boat, and had my gold watch and chain stolen from my cabin enroute. I brought a set of china dishes which were a family heirloom, clothes and bedding. The boxes containing these things we afterward used for table and lounge. My hus- band had a small log cabin ready on my arrival.
I was met at Omaha by Thomas J. Allen with a wagon and ox team. He hauled building material and provisions and I sat on a nail keg all the way out. He drove through prairie grass as high as the oxen's back. I asked him how he ever learned the road. When a boat would come up the river every one would rush to buy furniture and provisions; I got a rocking chair in 1857, the first one in the town. It was loaned out to sick folks and proved a treasure. In 1858 we bought a clock of John Bauman of Omaha, paying $45.00 for it, and it is still a perfect time piece.
My father, Dr. J. P. Andrews, came in the spring of 1857 and was a practicing physician, also a minister for many years here. He was the first Sunday school superintendent here and held that office continually until 1880 when he moved to Blair.
In 1858 the Vanier brothers started a steam grist mill which was a great convenience for early settlers. In 1861 Elam Clark took it on a mortgage and ran it for many years. Mr. Clark also carried on a large fur trade with the Indians, and they would go east to the bottoms to hunt and camp for two or three weeks.
At one time I had planned a dinner party and invited all my lady friends. I prepared the best meal possible for those days, with my china set all in place and was very proud to see it all spread, and when just ready to invite my guests to the table, a big Indian appeared in the doorway and said, "hungry" in broken accents. I said, "Yes I get you some" and started to the stove but he said, "No," and pointed to the table. I brought a generous helping in a plate but he walked out doors, gave a shrill yell which brought several others of his tribe and they at once sat down, ate everything in sight, while the guests looked on in fear and trembling; having finished they left in great glee.
SOME ITEMS FROM WASHINGTON COUNTY BY MRS. MAY ALLEN LAZURE
Alfred D. Jones, the first postmaster of Omaha, tells in the Pioneer Record of the first Fourth of July celebration in Ne- braska.
"On July 4, 1854, I was employed in the work of surveying the townsite of Omaha. At this time there were only two cabins on the townsite, my postoffice building and the company claim house. The latter was used as our boarding house. Inas- much as the Fourth would be a holiday, I concluded it would be a novelty to hold a celebration on Nebraska soil. I therefore announced that we would hold a celebration and invited the people of Council Bluffs, by inserting a notice in the Council Bluffs paper, and requested that those who would participate should prepare a lunch for the occasion.
"We got forked stakes and poles along the river, borrowed bolts of sheeting from the store of James A. Jackson; and thus equipped we erected an awning to shelter from the sun those who attended. Anvils were procured, powder purchased and placed in charge of cautious gunners, to make a noise for the crowd. The celebration was held on the present high school grounds.
"The picnickers came with their baskets, and the gunner dis- charged his duty nobly. A stranger, in our midst, was intro- duced as Mr. Sawyer, an ex-congressman from Ohio."
I had a life-long acquaintance with one of those early pic- nickers, Mrs. Rhoda Craig, a daughter of Thomas Allen, who built the first house in Omaha. Mrs. Craig was the first white girl to live on the site of Omaha. She often told the story of that Fourth of July in Omaha. Their fear of the Indians was so great that as soon as dinner was over, they hurried to their boats and rowed across to Council Bluffs for safety.
Another pioneer woman was Aimee Taggart Kenny, who came to Fontenelle with her parents when a small child. Her father was a Baptist missionary in Nebraska, and his earliest work was
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with the Quincy colony. I have heard her tell the following experience :
"On several occasions we were warned that the Indians were about to attack us. In great fear, we gathered in the school- house and watched all night, the men all well armed. But we were never molested. Another time mother was alone with us children. Seeing the Indians approaching we locked the doors, went into the attic by means of an outside ladder and looked out through a crack. We saw the red men try the door, peep in at the windows, and then busy themselves chewing up mother's home-made hop-yeast, which had been spread out to dry. They made it into balls and tossed it all away."
John T. Bell of Newberg, Oregon, contributed the following: "I have a pleasant recollection of your grandfather Allen. My father's and mother's people were all southerners and there was a kindliness about Mr. and Mrs. Allen that reminded me of our own folks back in Illinois. I often stopped to see them when going to and from the Calhoun mill.
"I was also well acquainted with Mrs. E. H. Clark, and Rev. Mr. Taggart and his family were among the most highly es- teemed residents of our little settlement of Fontenelle. Mr. Taggart was a man of fine humor. It was the custom in those early days for the entire community to get together on New Year's day and have a dinner at 'The College.' There would be speechmaking, and I remember that on one of these occasions Mr. Taggart said that no doubt the time would come when we would all know each others' real names and why we left the states.
"The experiences of the Bell family in the early Nebraska days were ones of privation. We came to Nebraska in 1856 quite well equipped with stock, four good horses, and four young cows which we had driven behind the wagon from western Il- inois. The previous winter had been very mild and none of the settlers were prepared for the dreadful snow storm which came on the last day of November and continued for three days and nights. Our horses and cows were in a stable made by squaring up the head of a small gulch and covering the structure with slough grass. At the end of the storm when father could get out to look after the stock there was no sign of the stable. The low ground it occupied was levelled off by many feet of snow. He
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finally located the roof and found the stock alive and that was about all. The animals suffered greatly that winter and when spring came we had left only one horse and no cows. That lone horse was picking the early grass when he was bitten in the nose by a rattlesnake and died from the effects. One of those horses, 'Old Fox,' was a noble character. We had owned him as long as I could remember, and when he died we children all cried. I have since owned a good many horses but not one equalled Old Fox in the qualities that go to make up a perfect creature.
"After the civil war my brother Will and I were the only members of our family left in Nebraska. We served with Grant and Sherman and then went back to Fontenelle, soon afterward beginning the improvement of our farm on Bell creek in the western part of the county. By that time conditions had so im- proved in Nebraska that hardships were not so common. I was interested in tree planting even as a boy and one of the distinct recollections of our first summer in Nebraska was getting so se- verely poisoned in the woods on the Elkhorn when digging up young sprouts, that I was entirely blind. A colored man living in Fontenelle told father that white paint would cure me and so I was painted wherever there was a breaking out, with satisfac- tory results.
"Later the planting of cottonwood, box elder, maple, and other trees became a general industry in Nebraska and I am confident that I planted twenty thousand trees, chiefly cotton- wood. To J. Sterling Morton, one of Nebraska's earliest and most useful citizens, Nebraska owes a debt of gratitude. He was persistent in advocating the planting of trees. In his office hung a picture of an oak tree; on his personal cards was a pic- ture of an oak tree with the legend 'Plant Trees'; on his letter- heads, on his envelopes was borne the same injunction and the picture of an oak tree. On the marble doorstep of his home was cut a picture of an oak tree and the words 'Plant Trees'; on the ground-glass of the entrance door was the same emblem. I went to a theater he had built and on the drop curtain was a picture of an oak tree and the words 'Plant Trees.' Today the body of this useful citizen lies buried under the trees he planted in Wyuka cemetery, near Nebraska City."
COUNTY SEAT OF WASHINGTON COUNTY BY FRANK MCNEELY
In 1855 an act was passed by the territorial legislature reor- ganizing Washington county and designating Fort Calhoun as the county-seat.
De Soto, a small village five miles north of Fort Calhoun, wished the county-seat to be moved there. In the winter of 1858 a crowd of De Soto citizens organized and with arms went to Fort Calhoun to take the county-seat by force. Fort Calhoun citizens barricaded themselves in the log courthouse and held off the De Soto band until the afternoon of the second day, when by compromise, the county-seat was turned over to De Soto. One man was killed in this contest, in which I was a participant.
The county-seat remained in De Soto until an election in the fall of 1866 when the vote of the people relocated it at Fort Calhoun, where it remained until 1869. An election in the lat- ter year made Blair the county seat.
A courthouse was built in Blair, the present county-seat of Washington county, in 1889, at a cost of $50,000.
NOTE - In the early days every new town, and they were all new, was ambitious to become the county-seat and many of them hopefully sought the honor of becoming the capital of the terri- tory. Washington county had its full share of aspiring towns and most of them really got beyond the paper stage. There were De Soto, Fort Calhoun, Rockport, Cuming City, and last but not least - Fontenelle, then in Washington county, now a "de- serted village" in Dodge county. Of these only Fort Calhoun remains more than a memory. De Soto was founded by Potter C. Sullivan and others in 1854, and in 1857 had about five hun- dred population. It began to go down in 1859, and when the city of Blair was started its decline was rapid. Rockport, which was in the vicinity of the fur trading establishments of early days, was a steamboat landing of some importance and had at one time a population of half a hundred or more. Now only the beautiful landscape remains. Cuming City, like De Soto, re- ceived its death blow when Blair was founded, and now the townsite is given over to agricultural purposes.
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THE STORY OF THE TOWN OF FONTENELLE BY MRS. EDA MEAD
When Nebraska was first organized as a territory, a party of people in Quincy, Illinois, conceived the idea of starting a city in the new territory and thus making their fortune. They ac- cordingly sent out a party of men to select a site.
These men reached Omaha in 1854. There they met Logan Fontenelle, chief of the Omahas, who held the land along the Platte and Elkhorn rivers. He agreed to direct them to a place favorable for a town. Upon reaching the spot, where the pres- ent village is now situated, they were so pleased that they did not look farther, but paid the chief one hundred dollars for the right to claim and locate twenty square miles of land. This con- sisted of land adjoining the Elkhorn river, then ascending a high bluff, a tableland ideal for the location of the town.
These men thought the Elkhorn was navigable and that they could ship their goods from Quincy by way of the Missouri, Platte, and Elkhorn rivers.
Early in the spring of 1855 a number of the colonists, bring- ing their household goods, left Quincy on a small boat, the "Mary Cole," expecting to reach Fontenelle by way of the Elk- horn; and then use the boat as a packet to points on the Platte and Elkhorn rivers.
But the boat struck a snag in the Missouri and, with a part of the cargo, was lost. The colonists then took what was saved overland to Fontenelle.
By the first of May, 1855, there were sufficient colonists on the site to hold the claims. Then each of the fifty members drew by lot for the eighteen lots each one was to hold. The first choice fell to W. H. Davis. He chose the land along the river, fully convinced of its superior situation as a steamboat landing.
The colonists then built houses of cottonwood timber, and a store and hotel were started. Thus the little town of about two hundred inhabitants was started with great hopes of soon be- coming a large city.
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Land on the edge of the bluff had been set aside for a college building. This was called Collegeview. Here a building was begun in 1856 and completed in 1859. This was the first ad- vanced educational institution to be chartered west of the Mis- souri river.
In 1865 this building was burned. Another building was im- mediately erected, but after a few years' struggle for patronage, they found it was doomed to die, so negotiated with the people of Crete, Nebraska, and the Congregational organizations (for it was built by the Congregationalists) in Nebraska. It there- fore became the nucleus of what is now Doane College.
The bell of the old building is still in use in the little village. .
The first religious services were held by the Congregational- ists. The church was first organized by Rev. Reuben Gaylord, who also organized the First Congregational church in Omaha.
In Fontenelle the Congregationalists did not have a building but worshiped in the college. This church has long since ceased to exist, but strange as it may seem after so many years, the last regular pastor was the same man, Rev. Reuben Gaylord, who or- ganized it.
There was a little band of fifteen Methodists; this was called the Fontenelle Mission. In 1857 an evangelist, Jerome Spill- man, was sent to take charge of this little mission. He soon had a membership of about three score people. A church was organized and a building and parsonage completed. This pros- pered with the town, but as the village began to lose ground the church was doomed to die. The building stood vacant for a number of years but was finally moved to Arlington.
The settlers found the first winter of 1855-56 mild and agree- able. They thought that this was a sample of the regular win- ter climate; so when the cold, blizzardy, deep-snow winter of 1856-57 came it found the majority ill prepared. Many were living in log cabins which had been built only for temporary use. The roofs were full of holes and just the dirt for floors.
On awaking in the morning after the first blizzard many found their homes drifted full of snow; even the beds were cov- ered. The snow lay four or five feet deep on the level and the temperature was far below zero.
Most of the settlers lost all of their stock. Food was scarce, but wild game was plentiful. Mr. Sam Francis would take his
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horse and gun and hunt along the river. The settlers say he might be seen many times that winter coming into the village with two deer tied to his horse's tail trailing in the snow. By this means, he saved many of the colonists from starvation.
Provisions were very high priced. Potatoes brought four and five dollars a bushel; bacon and pork could not be had at any price. One settler is said to have sold a small hog for forty-five dollars; with this he bought eighty acres of land, which is today worth almost one hundred eighty dollars an acre.
A sack of flour cost from ten to fifteen dollars.
At this time many who had come just for speculation left, thus only the homebuilders or those who had spent their all and could not return, remained.
Then came trouble with the Indians. In the year 1859 the Pawnees were not paid by the government, for some reason. They became desperate and began stealing cattle from the set- tlers along the Elkhorn around Fontenelle. The settlers of Fontenelle formed a company known as the "Fontenelle Mount- ed Rangers," and together with a company sent out by Governor Black from Omaha with one piece of light artillery, started after the Pawnees who were traveling west and north.
They captured six prisoners and held them bound. While they were camped for rest, a squaw in some way gave a knife to one of the prisoners. He pretended to kill himself by cutting his breast and mouth so that he bled freely. He then dropped as if dead. Amidst the confusion the other five, whose ropes had been cut, supposedly by this same squaw, escaped.
As the settlers were breaking camp to still pursue the fleeing tribe, they wondered what to do with the dead Indian. Some- one expressed doubt as to his really being dead. Then one of the settlers raised his gun and said he would soon make sure. No sooner had the gun been aimed than the Indian jumped to his feet and said, "Whoof! Me no sick!" They then journeyed on to attack the main tribe. When near their camp the settlers formed a semi-circle on a hill, with the artillery in the center.
As soon as the Indians saw the settlers, they came riding as swiftly as possible to make an attack, but when within a short distance and before the leader of the settlers could call "Fire!" they retreated. They advanced and retreated in this way three times. The settlers were at a loss to understand just what the
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Indians intended to do; but decided that they did not know of the artillery until near enough to see it, then were afraid to make the attack, so tried to scare the settlers, but failing to do this they finally advanced with a white rag tied to a stick.
The Indians agreed to be peaceable and stop the thieving if the settlers would pay for a pony which had been accidentally killed, and give them medicine for the sick and wounded.
Some of the men who took part in this fight say that if the leader had ordered the settlers to fire on the first advance of the Indians every settler would have been killed. There were twice as many Indians in the first place and the settlers afterwards found that not more than one-third of their guns would work; . and after they had fired once, while they were reloading, the Indians with their bows and arrows would have exterminated them. They consider it was the one piece of light artillery that saved them, as the Indians were very much afraid of a cannon. This ended any serious Indian trouble, but the housewives had to be ever on the alert for many years.
Each spring either the Omahas or Pawnees passed through the village on their way to visit some other tribe, and then returned in the fall. Then through the winter stray bands would appear who had been hunting or fishing along the river.
As they were seen approaching everything that could be was put under lock, and the doors of the houses were securely fas- tened. The Indians would wash and comb their hair at the water troughs, then gather everything about the yard that took their fancy. If by any chance they got into a house they would help themselves to eatables and if they could not find enough they would demand more. They made a queer procession as they passed along the street. The bucks on the horses or ponies led the way, then would follow the pack ponies, with long poles fastened to each side and trailing along behind loaded with the baggage, then came the squaws, with their babies fastened to their backs, trudging along behind.
One early settler tells of her first experience with the Indians. She had just come from the far East, and was all alone in the house, when the door opened and three Indians entered, a buck and two squaws. They closed the door and placed their guns behind it, to show her that they would not harm her. They then went to the stove and seated themselves, making signs to her that
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they wanted more fire. She made a very hot fire in the cook stove.
The old fellow examined the stove until he found the oven door; this he opened and took three frozen fish from under his blanket and placed them upon the grate. While the fish were cooking, he made signs for something to eat. The lady said she only had bread and sorghum in the house. This she gave them, but the Indian was not satisfied; he made a fuss until she finally found that he wanted butter on his bread. She had to show him that the sorghum was all she had. They then took up the fish and went out of doors by the side of the house to eat it. After they were gone she went out to see what they had left. She said they must have eaten every bit of the fish except the hard bone in the head, that was all that was left and that was picked clean.
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