History of Richardson County, Nebraska : its people, industries and institutions, Part 66

Author: Edwards, Lewis C
Publication date: 1917
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1742

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684

RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

MY TRAMP TO FALLS CITY.

The day following my advent into Rulo was Sunday, but nevertheless I must continue my journey to Falls City. For that purpose I went out after breakfast to the Goldsberry store to see about getting a conveyance for the trip. There was none to be had on any terms-in fact there was none to be had at all and there was nothing for it, but that I must do the distance on foot. While at the store I made the acquaintance of several gentlemen. whom I had not met the day before, among them was Felix Fitch, Hugh Boyd, E. H. Johnson and Thomas Tostavin, the young surveyor, who had surveyed and platted the town, and who told me he was about to enter upon the survey of an addition likely to be made to it, by Mr. Kenceleur. They all tried to dissuade me from going to Falls City. They said it was an "abolition hole," "Jim Lane town," and other names of designation, which I thought betrayed an unfriendly disposition toward the town on the prairie. They further stated that it would never amount to anything because it was too far from the river and had no timber about it, and nothing to induce population, etc. I replied that I must go, for I expected to meet a friend - there, at whose instance I had come to Nebraska, and I prepared for the start. The failure to get a conveyance was embarrassing, but all the same I must go, notwithstanding they told me there was no road and only a path here and there, which if followed, would probably take me out of my course, and besides, I would find a dense covering of high grass to walk through that would be both tedious and tiresome. However, one of their number accompanied me to the highest point west of town, from which Falls City could be seen in the distance, and pointed out such landmarks as were visible. and they were few, to guide me.

There was but one house between Rulo and Falls City and that belonged to Joesph Forney, who is still living and a citizen of Falls City. The house was located in the valley west of the Muddy. I was told to keep the Nemaha river on the south in sight and go straight west as much as possible. The Forney house was not visible from that point and the Nemaha, indicated only by a fringe of timber stretching along the valley, was the only reliable landmark and that was not always in sight. I was told. further, that just before I would reach the Muddy, my course would take me into the valley of the Nemaha. This direction was correct and when after laborious walk- ing I reached the Muddy, I found the ruins of a mill that somebody had started. to build and somebody else had tried to burn. I walked across the

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

creek on a few of the charred timbers that still remained and beyond it, to near the residence of Mr. Forney, I encountered a morass of at least half a mile in extent. Splashing through that as best I could, I came to the Forney residence and applied for further information as to my course to Falls City.

MISSED THE WAY.

.At that point the town was invisible and in fact remained so until I got to within a mile or so of it. After I left the Forney place I missed my course and wandered over to the north till I came in sight of a house, that of E. T. Minshall, as I afterwards learned, in the valley of the Muddy, and then I knew I was far out of my course, for I had been told that Falls City was located on the high ground overlooking the valley of the Nemaha river and that stream I already knew was on my left hand and miles away to the south. I also saw from that point. the site and remnants of the old town of Archer, on the north side of the Muddy. From there I turned to the south- west and shortly discovered the place of my destination.

At first on my lonesome tramp that day, it was a positive pleasure to look ont on the wide expanse of prairie, as green as an emerald and arched by a sky as blue as an amethyst, stretching away into the distance, vast, vacant and silent. I was on the edge of the great plains I had heard and read so much about-the land of the Indian and the buffalo. those restless nomads of these solitary wastes, and of the wild deer and the antelope.

There was not a tree or bush in sight, save on the Nemaha and along the smaller streams, and nothing whatever that suggested the presence of man, until I reached the Forney house on the Muddy and that of Mr. Minshall, further up the stream.

After a long and wearisome walk, covering at least twelve miles through a tangled mimic willerness of grass, I arrived. at Falls City some time in the afternoon.

There was a log house standing about where the Maddox block stands now, to the west, opposite from the present site of the court house, in which a man by the name of Van Lew and his good wife kept a kind of a boarding honse. They were formerly of Elmira, New York, and my friend, who had induced me to come to Nebraska, was stopping with them. As they were expecting me some arrangements had been made for my entertainment, for which I was, indeed, thankful. The house was what would be called a story and a half high, but had not a yard of plastering in it. nor a smear of paint on any part of it, nor for that matter was there such in or on any house in town.

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

In speaking of Rulo I have said that everything appeared to be new, but in Falls City everything appeared to be okl, except the people. Most of the houses were built of second-hand humber, brought over from the wreck of old Archer and Yankton, and made into six or eight shacks, or excuses for houses, and this was Falls City as I saw it that day in the long past.

IN PHILOSOPHIC MOOD.

The influences that silently control the movements and destinies of peo- ple are not always palpable to the senses, nor exist as facts confessed in consciousness, but permeate the social fabric in all its multitudinous ramifi- cations, felt everywhere and seen nowhere, like the wind that bloweth where it listeth.

I know why I came to Falls City, but I do not know why I stayed, any more than I know who will be President of the United States a hundred years hence. Somebody must stay in the little hamlet, or it would cease to exist, and why not I as well as others.

Falls City was not much to look at that quiet Sunday afternoon. There were four houses on the west side of Stone street and one small carpenter shop located where the Gehling Opera House now stands. On the other side, diagonally across the street, where the Richardson County Bank building is located, I saw a pile of newly-sawed walnut lumber, which I was tokl Jesse Crook, who lived on a pre-emption claim north of town, was intending to put into a hotel; and below that was a double-logged house, veneered with boards. In one of these, John A. Burbank had a kind of general store. and the other was used as a dwelling for his family, consisting of his wife and little girl, less than two years old. That same little girl is now the wife of Judge Kibby, the present governor of the Territory of Arizona, while the wife and mother, as brave and true a Christian woman and refined lady as the good God ever sent into this sin-bedeviled world to bless it, has been at rest, these many, many years.

South of the Burbank building, on the corner of the same block --- where Jenne's shoe store now is (lot 13, block No. 70)-there was another boarding house kept by one .Alexander Rickard. He and his family had come up from Kansas with Gen. Jim Lane, together with several unmarried young men, all of whom had been retainers and followers of that famous Free State leader down there, to help him build a town in Nebraska. About midway in the next block south ( west side of block No. 91), a man named W. W. Buchanan had put a one-story house, probably twelve by sixteen feet in diameter, and was occupying it with his family, consisting of his wife and three or four

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

children. His brother, James Buchanan (not the President), was living on the quarter section directly east of the townsite, to wit, the southwest quarter of section II, township No. I north, of range No. 16, east of the sixth principal meridian, and later in the season built the house now owned by Benjamin Poteet. It was built of walnut lumber, and is just as good after the wear and tear of half a century, as it was on the day it was finished for occupation. It is standing today and is occupied. Still further to the south (in block No. 134 on lot 13), Isaac L. Hamby had his residence. It was a shade better than the other residences in the town. He was one of the town proprietors as well as proprietor of one of the largest families in the town, and a saw-mill at the lower end of the town, near the present Missouri Pacific station and city electric light plant. There were two or three other houses in process of construction, east of Stone street, and one on the street west, in block No. 153. that had just been built by Wingate King, long a resi- dent here, and at that time the owner of a pre-emption clain, on the north- west quarter of section No. 15-1-16, originally part of the land selected for the site of Falls City, but was dropped when the town company came to enter the land and pay for it under the laws of Congress providing for the location of towns on the public lands. In another of the houses west of Stone street, Squire Dorrington and his family resided, lot 12, block No. 71. An- other building was standing on the west side of Stone street in block No. 90, south of the carpenter shop above referred to; it was a boarded veneered structure and in which one William M. Brooks had a store of general mer- chandise, and which Fred Dorrington, a young fellow of about twenty, was managing for him. Just across the street below it in block No. 103, was a hole in the ground perhaps fifty feet square, and walled up with cobble stones. upon which Mr. Hamby had told me he intended to erect a hotel that would rival the best west of the Mississippi. It was another of his impossible schemes. This unsightly scar on the surface of the earth remained a mont- ment to the folly of its projector for four years. Afterwards Doctor Hanana built a residence thereon and later it became the site for the fine store building of Samuel Wahl.

The town company consisted of James H. Lane, John A. Burbank, J. Edward Burbank, a Judge Hunt, of Doniphan, Kansas, and Isaac L. Hamby, I have just been writing about. Lane and Hunt never became citizens of Nebraska : all the others did.

The townsite was selected, surveyed and platted in the summer of 1857. but its articles of incorporation were not made a matter of record until April, 1858, about twenty days before my arrival.

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA

FIRST SUNDAY SCHOOL IN FALLS CITY.

The house I mentioned as built by Mr. Wingate King, in block No. 153. is still standing (in 1917) and in the same place. No alteration in shape or otherwise has been made, and it stands precisely as it was built and it has stood for more than half a century, while every other structure then in town, has long ago disappeared or been remodeled. I like that old house for other reasons than its great age, and particularly for certain associations with it. The house was new but not occupied, and it was suggested by Mrs. Burbank and Mrs. Van Lew that we get all of the children in town to attend there on next Sunday and organize a Sunday school. I think that was in the early days of June, and as anything in the shape of a diversion would relieve the dreary sameness, I readily fell in with the proposal. I have no distinct recol- lection of the number of these little human "mavericks" we rounded up for the occasion, but we got some, probably ten or a dozen, and the function was pulled off, I suppose, in regulation order.

There was no church building in town, and the little house was impro- vised for such public worship as chanced to come our way. Wingate King was something of a preacher and held forth, now and then, and always in the little house, and always with a great deal of fervor. He has been dead for more than thirty years and the good women who organized that Sunday school have faded from the world; while those bright-eyed little urchins who lisped the old story, old with the ages, but as young as eternal spring, under the roof of this meager and neglected habitation, have drifted away to grow old, or die, as God has willed, in other places. But our ancient substitute for a church still remains, solitary in its loneliness and littleness, like some- thing forgotten by the wayside, the last of the old town in the day of its small things.

THE DEATH OF ARCHER.

Falls City was made possible by the death of old Archer, not perhaps by the process the Greeks called metempsychosis, by which it was believed by them, and by Brahmin philosophers in an older age, that the soul of one dying would pass into the body of one about to be born-in other words, in the transmigration of souls, but from the fact that Areher had become un- tenable as a site for a town and the Falls City location afforded better facil- ities for the purpose. Certain it is, there was a pretty large transmigration of souls on foot and otherwise, from the wreck beyond the Muddy to the new town to the sonth.

689

RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

Archer was laid out as a town by a man by that name on what he sup- posed to be public lands of the United States, shortly after the erection of the Territorial government, in the fall of 1854.

The western line of the Half-Breed tract, a body of land between the two Nemahas, that had been reserved for the half-breeds and mixed bloods of certain Indian tribes, as then located, was about one and a half miles east of the site of the proposed town. That line had been surveyed and estab- lished several years before, and was known as the "McCoy line."

After Congress had created the Territory of Nebraska, a move was made to have the treaty of l'rairie du Chien, made in 1830, under the provisions of which, among others, the reservation was made, executed, by allotting the land in severalty among the benficiaries named in the treaty. To that end the Indian officer caused a census to be taken of the half and mixed bloods of the tribe named, which were, as I now recollect without consulting the records of the Yankton and Santee bands of Sioux, the Omahas, Otoes and Iowas.

While this was going on, some enterprising land grabber, or may be several of them, induced the authorities at Washington to cause a resurvey of the boundaries of the reservation, and the mischief was done. By the provisions of the treaty, the boundaries of the reserved tract were to be ascertained by surveying ten miles up each river, from its confluence with the Missouri, to points thereon, and then by a straight line between these points, which would mark the western boundary, while the Missouri would form the eastern. The McCoy survey was made by following the river in its sinuosities, which was the only way a sensible and fair surveyor could execute the calls of the treaty. When thus made, the western initial point on the Great Nemaha was located about the mouth of the Muddy, and a line drawn from that point to a like point ten miles west of the mouth of the Little Nemaha, left Archer about a mile and a half west of it.

The new survey was made on an entirely different basis of operation. Instead of following the meanderings of the river, the surveyor, whoever he was, started at the mouth (or somewhere thereabouts) and ran a straight line up the valley, to a point ten miles west, which moved the initial point on the Great Nemaha for the line to a corresponding point northwest on the Little Nemaha, about four miles further west; and when the line was run it located Archer on the Half-Breed tract. That gave the half-breeds a slice out of the public domain, four sections wide and some thirty miles long. Not a bad land grab.

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

SURVEY A FRAUD.

Of course, that survey was a fraud and a wicked one, and though it failed of success in the end, it nevertheless ruined Archer, and wrecked the hopes and plans, as well as the fortunes, of many worthy people.

This occurred some time in the latter part of 1856, and at the session of the Legislature that convened shortly thereafter in 1857, the final death- blow was given Archer by the removal of the county seat, located there by an act of the first Territorial Legislature in 1855, to Salem, seven or eight miles further west.

Charles MacDonald, a citizen of Salem, and a member of the Legislature. introduced a bill providing, with apparent delicacy, that if the commissioners of the country should ascertain that Archer was in fact located on the Half- Breed tract, they would at once move the county offices to the town of Salem; and immediately afterwards, without awaiting developments under the first bill, he introduced another, removing the county seat bodily, and at once, from Archer to Salem. Both bills were probably passed the same day, as the record shows that they were both approved on the same day. That was "the most unkindest cut of all," as those people of Archer were largely instrumental in electing MacDonald to the office, the powers of which he used for the destruction of their town. From that hour Archer was lost.

The most prominent of the men living there at that time were John C. Miller, Ambrose Shelly, William Level, W. W. Maddox, John Welty, A. D. Kirk, Frank Goldsberry, William P. Loan, and a greater number of other persons than I have space to name here. They were all involved in the wreck and injured correspondingly.

Kirk and Goldsberry went to Rulo, which had been started the year before; Loan went to St. Stephens, another town on the Missouri, some miles above Rulo, but as I recollect, he passed most of his time at the house of William R. Cain, his brother-in-law, who was then engaged in opening a farm in the near vicinity. William R. Cain was long a leading citizen in this part of the country. The others wandered off in one direction or an- other, and to one place or another, but most of them to that land starward. It was a cruel thing to destroy that young community, and especially when no substantial benefit accrued to anybody or to any locality.

Three years afterward, that same Legislature, by the same arbitrary power, passed another act to take effect in the same month of the year and almost on the same day of the month, removing the county seat from Salem, and locating it at Falls City.

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

Judge Miller was probably the hardest hit of them all. He was among the first settlers, and had invested his all in the town and expected to reap the reward of a frugal and economic life in the anticipated prosperity of the town and the country. He had his family about him; was the first probate judge of the county, with every prospect of holding it as long as he desired it. But in an evil hour everything was swept away, and he was a ruined man in his old age. It broke his spirit and probably shortened his life. He died in 1860, and is buried with others of his family in the cemetery near where. the old town stood. One of his daughters, Mrs. W. M. Maddox, is still a citizen of Falls City. She was married to Captain Maddox from her father's house at Archer in the year 1855.

In a previous place I mentioned the rivalry between the town at the falls and' Falls City, and will now tell what came of it. The Hamilton brothers and their associate, Sackett, were young men and natives of Ohio, and full of energy and the enthusiasm of youth, but wholly unacquainted with the West, and especially the climatic conditions of Nebraska. They associated the water fall in the Nemaha with the idea they had of what such a power would be worth in their old state, and without hesitation concluded that it would be the very place to found the future manufacturing town of the country. The surroundings were certainly pretty to look at, and the conditions appeared favorable to the success of the schemes conjured up in the minds of those boys, but who, before the summer waned, were to learn, like all the children in the family of man, that there is a great lie out in the world and things are not always what they seem to be.

They naturally argued that there being an abundance of water in the river, flowing over a bed of solid rock, and then pitching down between five and six feet, a permanent foundation was thus furnished for mills or other establishments for manufacturing purposes.

FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATION.

Early in June we concluded to hold a Fourth of July celebration, and our friends at Nemaha Falls heard of it and determined to have one, also. They strove to outdo us at every point and in everything.

There was no shade of any kind in town, no grove, nor tree, nor any object that would cast a shadow of sufficient extent to cover twenty people. So we made one on the court house square, by setting posts in the ground with poles across, upon which we put boughs of trees cut in the Nemaha timber and hauled up for this purpose. In that way we made an arbor shady

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RICHARDSON COUNTY, NEBRASKA.

and snug, under which a company of three or four hundred strong coukl sit and escape the glare of a fierce July sun blazing above theni.

A beef, as they called a slaughtered specimen of the bovine tribe, was provided to be roasted for the refreshment of the people, and other pro- visions were made for the entertainment and comfort of the crowd that was expected to attend, but where it was to come from was a mystery to me. It. turned out, however, that there were more people in the country that I - thought for. They came from all over the county and we had a crowd of several hundred people. A band of Indians in full native costume were secured to perform their traditional war-dance, under the auspices of their chief headsman, Po-to-ko-mah. He was a fine specimen of physical manhood.

Another and quite an unexpected one in that brand new community. was a kind of mixed band of music under the leadership of Jim Dye, con- sisting of five or six persons and as many horns and fiddles, who played all the staple patriotic tunes, and then some, and furnished music for the dance that night at Jesse Crook's new hotel building on the Richardson County Bank corner, lots 23-24, of block No. 70, then enclosed and nearing com- pletion. They enlivened the scene greatly and added to the general festivity in a way possible only through the instrumentality of music, that wizard of the soul, the soother of the sorrowful, parent of poetry and religion, the charm of which has lingered on earth since the dawn of the eternal morning when the stars sang together the "Te Deum of the spheres, in glad acclaim of creation finished."

And now a word about the people who came that day to help us cele- brate the annual recurrence of the day dear to all Americans. They are before me now as I saw them then, brave men and women, some of whom had crossed wide rivers and wider states, to come to this new and virgin land to subdue the wilderness, to work hard and live harder, to build comfortable homes for themselves and families, to open farms, to rear churches and school houses. They came in all shapes and manners of transportation: Some on horseback, some in wagons, drawn by horses; some by a single horse, and I remember one family, consisting of paterfamilias, his wife and two dangh- ters, in a wagon drawn by a yoke of cattle, with a strapping young fellow on foot driving them.

The old people were seated on chairs smoking their pipes, and seemed to enjoy themselves, while the girls were smarted up in new calico frocks and ribbons in profusion, with bunches of elderberries stuck in their hair as especial ornaments. The costumes of the people were just as grotesque and varied as their means of transportation. Nobody seemed to have on any-

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thing new, except the dresses of the younger females of the party and they were in most part of calico. No two men had coats, vests and pantaloons of the same cut, fashion or material, and all appeared to have been in service a long time, nor were there any two hats of the same fashion or any fashion. Nevertheless, their meeting with each other and their families were of the most friendly character. It is sufficient for the matter in hand, that we executed the common intention and celebrated in the usual way. Someone read the old Declaration of Independence, and I made them a sophomoric speech, in which I have little doubt, a great deal of spread-eagle nonsense abounded, but it was a boy's effort, delivered in perfect recognition of the solemn occasion and, whether well or ill performed, did its office, and that was enough. The Indian war-dance followed, and then the public dinner consisting mostly of beef and bread: but the interesting part of it to me was to watch the Indians take their refreshment. Have any of the readers seen an Indian-I mean a regular blanket Indian, fresh from the wild- from the plains-eat? Well, if they have not, they have missed something. A native Indian, and they are all alike, as I know from actual observation, never eats but one thing at a time. Give him meat and bread, and he will eat the meat first, and then perform the same office with the bread. They never eat these two articles at the same time. It was a new and amusing experience to me, and I watched the process with close attention.

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History of Richardson County, Nebraska : its people, industries and institutions, Part 66

Author: Edwards, Lewis C Publication date: 1917 Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen Number of Pages: 1742

Author: Edwards, Lewis C
Publication date: 1917
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1742