USA > Nebraska > Collection of Nebraska pioneer reminiscences > Part 24
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Among the first settlers who came in 1855 was a young Ger- man who was an orphan and had had a hard life in America up to this time.
He took a claim and worked hard for a few years. He then went back to Quincy and persuaded a number of his own coun- trymen to come out to this new place and take claims, he help- ing them out, but they were to pay him back as they could.
Years passed ; they each and all became very prosperous. But this first pioneer prospered perhaps to the greatest degree. The early settlers moved away one by one; as they left he would buy their homes.
The houses were torn down or moved away, the trees and shrubs were uprooted, until now this one man, or his heirs - for he has gone to his reward - owns almost the whole of the once prosperous little village, and vast fields of grain have taken the place of the homes and streets.
It is hard to stand in the streets of the little village which now has about one hundred fifty inhabitants and believe that at one time it was the county seat of Dodge county, and that it lacked only one vote of becoming the capital of the state. There are left only two or three of the first buildings. A short distance south of this village on a high bluff overlooking the river valley, and covered with oaks and evergreens, these early pioneers started a city which has grown for many years, and which will continue to grow for years to come. In this city of the dead we
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find many of the people who did much for the little village which failed, but who have taken up their abode in this beauti- ful spot, there to remain until the end of time.
This story of Fontenelle has been gathered from my early recollections of the place and what I have learned through grandparents, parents, and other relatives and friends.
My mother was raised in Fontenelle, coming there with her parents in 1856. She received her education in that first college.
My father was the son of one of the first Congregational mis- sionaries to be sent there. I received my first schooling in the little village school.
STUDIO
MRS. WARREN PERRY Eleventh State Regent, Nebraska Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. 1913-1914
THOMAS WILKINSON AND FAMILY
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Wilkinson, early Nebraska settlers, were of English birth, and came to America when very young. They met in Illinois and were married in 1859 at Barrington. They moved to Louisiana, remaining there until the outbreak of the civil war, when they returned to Illinois for a short time, and then emigrated to the West, traveling in a covered wagon and crossing the Missouri river on the ferry. They passed through Omaha, and arrived at Elk City, Nebraska, July 27, 1864, with their two children, Ida and Emma, who at the pres- ent time are married and live in Omaha.
Soon after arriving in Elk City, Mr. Wilkinson lost one of his horses, which at that time was a great misfortune. He pur- chased another from the United States government, which they called "Sam" and which remained in the family for many years.
At one time provisions were so high Mr. Wilkinson traded his watch for a bushel of potatoes.
At that time land was very cheap and could be bought for from two to five dollars per acre. The same land is now being held at two hundred dollars per acre. Labor was scarce, with the excep- tion of that which could be obtained from the Indians. There were a large number of Indians in that part of the country, and the settlers often hired the squaws to shuck corn and cut fire- wood.
Mrs. Wilkinson has often told of the Indians coming to her door and demanding corn meal or beef. They always wanted beef and would not accept pork. They would come at night, look in at the windows, and call for firewater, tobacco, and pro- visions. Their visits were so frequent that Mrs. Wilkinson soon mastered much of their language and was able to talk to them in their own tongue.
Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson first settled about twenty-five miles from Omaha on the old military road. During the early days of their life there, Mrs. Wilkinson made large quantities of butter
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for regular customers in Omaha. They often arose at three o'clock, hitched up the lumber wagon, and started for town, there to dispose of her butter and eggs and return with a supply of provisions.
As a rule the winters were extremely severe and Mrs. Wilkin- son has often told of the terrible snow storms which would fill the chimneys so full of snow it would be impossible to start a fire, and she would have to bundle the children up in the bed- clothes and take them to the nearest house to keep from freezing.
During their second year in Nebraska they went farther west and located at "Timberville," which is now known as Ames. There they kept a "ranch house" and often one hundred teams arrived at one time to remain over night. They would turn their wagons into an immense corral, build their camp fires, and rest their stock. These were the "freighters" of the early days, and generally got their own meals.
During their residence at Elk City, two more children were born, Nettie and Will.
They continued to live on the farm until the year 1887, when they moved to Blair, Nebraska, there to rest in their old age.
Mr. Wilkinson died July 18, 1912. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Lucy Wilkinson, a son, Wm. W. Wilkinson, and two daughters, Mrs. J. Fred Smith and Mrs. Herman Shields. Mrs. George B. Dyball, another daughter, died May 13, 1914.
NIKUMI
BY MRS. HARRIET S. MACMURPHY
He glanced from the letter in his hand to the Indian woman sitting in the door of the skin tipi, and the papoose on the ground beside her, then down the river, his eyes moving on, like the waters, and seeing some vision of his brain, far distant. After a time his gaze came back and rested upon the woman and her babe again.
"If I could take the child," he murmured.
The squaw watched him furtively while she drew the deer sinew through the pieces of skin from which she was fashioning a moccasin. She understood, although spoken in English, the words he was scarce conscious of uttering, and, startled out of her Indian instinct of assumed inattention, looked at him with wide-opened eyes, trying to fathom a matter hardly compre- hended but of great moment to her.
"Take the child" - where, and for what? Was he going to leave and sail down the great river to the St. Louis whence came all traders and the soldiers on the boats? Going away again as he had come to her many seasons ago? "Take the child," her child and his? Her mouth closed firmly, her eyes darkened and narrowed, as she stooped suddenly and lifted the child to her lap; and the Indian mother's cunning and watchfulness were aroused and pitted against the white father's love of his child.
Fort Atkinson was the most western post of the line estab- lished by President Monroe in 1819, after the Louisiana Pur- chase, to maintain the authority of the United States against Indian turbulence and British aggression, and had been in ex- istence about four years before our story opens.
Here had been stationed the Sixth U. S. Infantry, who had wearily tramped for two months the banks of the Missouri river and dragged their boats after them, a distance of nearly a thou- sand miles of river travel to reach this post in the wilderness. Not a white man then occupied what is now the state of Iowa, except Julien Dubuque and a score or so of French traders.
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Not a road was to be found nor a vehicle to traverse it. But one or two boats other than keel boats and barges had ever over- come the swift current of the great Missouri thus far.
The Santa Fe trail, that wound over the hills west of the fort, connected them with the Mexican Spanish civilization of the Southwest, and the great rivers with their unsettled land far away on the Atlantic seaboard.
Seventy-five years ago these soldiers dropped the ropes with which they had dragged the barges and keel boats and them- selves thither, and picking up spade and shovel, dug founda- tions, molded and burned brick, cut down trees, and built bar- racks for themselves and the three detachments of artillery who terrified the red-men with the mysterious shells which dropped down amongst them and burst in such a frightful manner.
They numbered about twelve hundred men, and the bricks they molded and the cellars they dug still remain to tell of the Fort Atkinson that was, beside whose ruins now stands the little village of Fort Calhoun, sixteen miles north of Omaha on the Missouri river.
Dr. Gale, whom we have thus seen considering a question of great importance both to himself and to the Indian woman with whom he seems to have some relation, was the surgeon of the Sixth Infantry, an Englishman, short, thick-set, and evidently of good birth, although the marks of his rough life and rather dissolute habits obscured it in some degree.
The point where Fort Atkinson was built was the noted "Council Bluff" at which Lewis and Clark held the Indian council famous in the first annals of western explorations, and it still remains a rendezvous for the various tribes of Indians, the "Ottoes, Pawnees, 'Mahas, Ayeaways, and Sioux," attracted thither by the soldiers and the trading posts, and secure from each others' attacks on this neutral ground.
Shortly after the troops were located here an Ayeaway (Iowa) chief and his band pitched their tents near the fort. The daugh- ter of this chief was named Nikumi; she was young and had not been inured to the hard tasks which usually fell to the squaws, so her figure was straight, her eyes bright, and her manner showed somewhat the dignity of her position.
Not a white woman was there within a radius of five hundred miles except a few married ones belonging to the fort; was it
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strange that Dr. Gale, the younger son of an English family who had left civilization for a life of adventure in the New World, and who seemed destined to dwell away from all women of his own race, should woo this Indian princess and make her his wife? He had chosen the best of her race, for all who re- member her in after years speak of her dignified carriage, her well-formed profile, and her strength of will and purpose, so remarkable among Indian women.
For four years she had been his wife, and the child she had just seized and held in her arms as if she would never let her go, was their child, little Mary, as her father named her, perhaps from his own name, Marion.
But now this union, which her unknowing mind had never surmised might not be for all time, and his, alas, too knowing one had carelessly assumed while it should be his pleasure, was about to be severed.
A boat had come up the river and brought mail from Chariton or La Charette, as the Frenchmen originally named it, several hundred miles below, and the point to which mail for this fort was sent.
These uncertain arrivals of news from the outside world made important epochs in the life of the past. The few papers and letters were handled as if they had been gold, and the contents were read and reread until almost worn out. For Dr. Gale came a bulky letter or package of letters tied together and sealed over the string with a circle of red wax. There was no envelope, as we have now, but each letter was written so as to leave a blank space after folding for the superscription, and the postage was at least twenty-five cents on the three letters so tied to- gether. The postmark of the outer one was New York City; it was from a law firm and informed Dr. Marion F. Gale, sur- geon of the Sixth Infantry, stationed at Fort Atkinson, the "camp on the Missouri river," that the accompanying letters had been received by them from a firm of London solicitors, and begging to call his attention to the same. His attention being most effectually called thereto elicited first that Messrs. Shadwell & Fitch of London desired them to ascertain the where- abouts of Marion F. Gale, late of Ipswich, England, and now supposed to be serving in the U. S. army in the capacity of surgeon, and convey to him the accompanying information, being
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still further to the effect that by a sudden death of James Bur- ton Gale, who died without male issue, he, Marion F. Gale, being next of kin, was heir to the estate of Burton Towers, Ipswich, England. Last came a letter from the widow of his brother, telling him the particulars of his brother's death.
Ten years before he had left home with a hundred pounds in his pocket and his profession, to make himself a career in the new country.
There were two brothers older than he, one of them married, and there seemed little prospect that he would ever become pro- prietor of Burton Towers; but they, who lived apparently in security, were gone, and he who had traversed the riverway of an unknown and unsettled country, among Indians and wild animals, was alive and well to take their place.
He thought of the change, back to the quiet life of an English country squire, after these ten years of the free life of the plains, and the soldiers and the Indians. The hunting of the buffalo, the hear, and the elk exchanged for the tame brush after a wild fox, or the shooting of a few partridges.
But the family instinct was strong, after all, and his eye gleamed as he saw the old stone house, with its gables and tow- ers, its glorious lawns and broad driveway with the elms meeting overhead. Oh, it would satisfy that part of his nature well to go back as its master. This vision it was that had filled his eyes as they looked so far away. But then they came back again and rested on Nikumi and the child.
A certain kind of love had been begotten in his heart for the Indian maiden by her devotion to him, although he had taken her without a scruple at the thought of leaving her when cir- cumstances called him away. But now he felt a faint twinge of the heart as he realized that the time had come, and a stronger one when he thought that he must part with the child. "But why need I do it?" he soliloquized. "I can take the child with me and have her educated in a manner to fit her for my daugh- ter; if she is as bright as her mother, education and environment will fit her to fill any position in life, but with Nikumi it is too late to begin, and she has no white blood to temper the wildness of the Indian. I will take the child."
Not a care for the mother love and rights. "Only a squaw." What rights had she compared with this English gentleman who
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had taken her from her tribe, and now would cast her back again and take away her child? But ah, my English gentleman, you reckoned without your ordinary sagacity when you settled that point without taking into consideration the mother love and the Indian cunning and watchfulness, their heritage from genera- tions of warfare with each other.
"What have you got?" she asked in the flowing syllables of the Indian tongue, for like the majority of Indians, though she understood much English she never, to the end of her days, deigned to speak it.
"Some words from my friends in the far-away country over the waters, Nikumi," he answered. "My brother is dead."
"Ah, and you are sad. You will go there to that land ?" she said.
"I don't know, Nikumi; I may have to go over, for there is much land and houses and fields to be cared for. I am going down to see Sarpy, now. He came up on the boat today."
She watched him as he strode off down past the cattle station towards the fort. In the summer time her love of her native life asserted itself, and she left the log quarters which Dr. Gale pro- vided for her, and occupied a tipi, or tent of skins, down among the cottonwoods and willows of the bottom lands where portions of her tribe were generally to be found. When he passed out of sight she took her baby and went to a tipi a short distance from hers, where a stalwart buck lay on a shaggy buffalo robe on the shady side, smoking a pipe of kinnikinick, and playing with some young dogs. She spoke with him a few minutes. He ceased playing with the dogs, sat up and listened, and finally with a nod of assent to some request of hers started off towards the fort. She followed shortly after and glided about from the post store to the laundresses' quarters, stopping here and there where groups of soldiers were gathered, and listening attentively to their talk about the news that had come by the boats.
She learned that these boats were to be loaded with furs from Sarpy's trading post and go back to St. Louis in a few days. In the meantime the young buck, who was her brother, had gone by her directions to Sarpy's trading post, just below the fort. She had told him what she knew and surmised; that the "pale- faced medicine man," as the Indians called him, had received a paper from his friends across the great waters towards the
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rising sun which told his brother was dead, and that he might have to go there to care for the houses and lands his brother had left; that she had heard him say "If I could take the child," and she feared he might take her papoose away; "and he shall not," she said passionately. "I must know what he will do. Go you and listen if the medicine man talks with Sarpy; watch him closely and find out all."
He had followed the Indian trail which skirted along the edge of the high bluffs on the eastern boundary of the fort, and reached the trading post from the north. Going in he uttered the single word "tobac," and while the clerk was handing it out to him he glanced around in the aimless, stolid Indian manner, as if looking over the blankets and skins hung against the logs. Back at the further, or southwest, corner of the store, near a window, and partially screened by a rude desk made of a box set upon a table and partitioned into piegon-holes, sat two men. One of them was Dr. Gale, the other, Peter A. Sarpy.
To the ears of most readers the name will convey no particu- lar impression ; if a resident of Nebraska it would call to mind the fact that a county in that state was named Sarpy, and the reader might have a hazy consciousness that an early settler had borne that name; but in the days of this story and for thirty years later it meant power and fame. The agent of the Ameri- can Fur Company in that section, Peter A. Sarpy's word was law; to him belonged the trading posts, or so it was believed; he commanded the voyageurs who cordelled the boats and they obeyed. Every winter he went down the great river before it was frozen over, to St. Louis, and every spring his boats came up after the ice had broken up, and before the great mountain rise came on in June, with new goods that were anxiously looked for, and eagerly seized in exchange for the buffalo robes, the beaver, mink, otter, and deer skins that had been collected through the winter. He was of French parentage, a small man, with the nervous activity of his race; the brightest of black eyes; careful of his dress, even in the wilds; the polish of the gentleman al- ways apparent in his punctilious greeting to everyone; but mak- ing the air blue with his ejaculations if his orders were dis- obeyed or his ire aroused. Famous the length of the river for his bravery and determination, he was a man well fitted to push
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actively the interests of the company of which he was the agent as well as a member.
The Indian passed noiselessly out and going around to the side of the building seated himself upon the ground, and pulling his long pipe from the folds of his blanket, filled it with the "tobac," rested it on the ground, and leisurely began to smoke. It was no unusual thing for the Indians thus to sit round the post, and no one took any notice of him, nor in fact that he was very near the open window, just out of the range of vision of the two men sitting within.
"So upon me devolves the succession of the estate of Burton Towers," Gale was saying to Sarpy, "and my sister-in-law writes that some one is imperatively needed to look after the estate as there is no male member of the family left in Eng- land."
"And you will leave your wild life of the prairies to go back to the tame existence of rural English life? Egad, I don't be- lieve I could stand it even to be master of the beautiful de- mesnes which belong to my family. Power is sweet, but Mon Dieu, the narrowness, the conventionalities, the tameness of ex- istence !"
"No worse than the tameness of this cursed fort for the last year or two. It was very well at first when the country was new to us and the Indians showed some fight that gave us a little excitement, but now we've exhausted all the resources, and an English squire, even, will be a great improvement. You've some change, you know. St. Louis in winter gives you a variety."
"What are you going to do with Nikumi and Mary ?"
"That's what I want to talk to you about. I find I'm fonder of the child than I thought, and indeed it gives my heartstrings a bit of a wrench to leave Nikumi behind; but to take her is out of the question. Mary, however, I can educate; she is bright enough to profit by it, and young enough to make an English woman of. I believe I shall try to get her away quietly, and take her with me."
"You ought to have lived here long enough to have some knowledge of the Indians, but I'm damned if I think you are smart enough to get that child away from its mother," said Sarpy.
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"Well, I'll try it, anyway. The worst trouble I apprehend is getting away myself at so short notice. When do your boats go down again?"
"In about a week."
"To leave the troops without any surgeon is rather risky, but they're pretty healthy at this season, and young Carver has been studying with me considerably, and can take my place for a short time. If I succeed in getting leave of absence to go on to Washington, Atkinson will probably send some one up from St. Louis as soon as possible. I shall have to get leave of absence from Leavenworth here, and then again from Atkinson at St. Louis. Then I can send in my resignation after I arrive at . Philadelphia. All this beside the intermediate hardships and delays in reaching there."
To the Indian outside much of this was unintelligible, but he heard and understood perfectly "I think I shall try to get her away from her mother and take her with me," and later the reply that the boats would go down in about a week.
That was sufficient for him, and he arose, gathered up his blanket that had dropped down from his shoulders, slipped the pipe into his belt which held it around his waist, and then his moccasined feet trod the narrow trail, one over the other, the great toe straight in a line with the instep, giving the peculiar gait for which the Indian is famous.
He found Nikumi back at her tipi; the kettle was hung from the tripod of three sticks over the fire, and a savory smell arose which he sniffed with pleasure as he approached, for Nikumi was favored above her tribe in the supplies which she received from the camp, and which included great luxuries to the In- dians. Nikumi was very generous to her relatives and friends, and often shared with them the pot which she had varied from the original Indian dish of similar origin by diligently ob- serving the methods of the camp cooks.
She had learned to use dishes, too, and bringing forth two bowls, some spoons, and a tin cup, ladled some of the savory mixture into them, for she had evidently learned the same lesson as her white sisters: when you would get the best service from a man, feed him well.
On the present site of Fort Atkinson may be found, wherever the ground is plowed over or the piles of bricks and depressions
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that mark the cellars of the buildings are overhauled, a pro- fusion of old buttons, fragments of firearms, cannon balls and shells, and many pieces of delf. A quaint old antiquarian who lives there has a large collection of them which he shows with delight.
Who knows but that some of the fragments are pieces of Nikumi's bowl, for as her brother told her of Gale's words to Sarpy, her face added to its bronze hue an indescribable grayish tinge, and starting suddenly, the bowl fell from her hand, strik- ing the stones which formed a circle for the fire, and broke into fragments. She forgot to eat, and a rapid flow of words from her lips was accompanied by gestures that almost spoke. They should keep strict watch of the loading of the boats, she said, and of the voyageurs in charge of them, and when they saw signs of departure of them, she would take the child and go - and she pointed, but spoke no word. He must make a little cave in the hillside, and cover it with trees and boughs, and she would provide food. When the white medicine man had gone he could tell her by a strip of red tied in the branch of a tree like a bird, which could be seen down the ravine from her hiding place, and she would be found again in her tipi as if she had never been absent. He grunted assent at well as satisfaction at the innu- merable bowls of soup, and then stretched himself comfortably and pulled out his pipe.
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