USA > Nebraska > Richardson County > History of Richardson County, Nebraska : its people, industries and institutions > Part 67
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HOW A TOWN TOOK A BATH.
Our friends at the falls had their celebrations also, and Judge Dundy made a speech for them, and in that particular outshone ours on the bills: in all other particulars ours was the best and pleased the people most.
There have not been any other celebrations at Nemaha Falls, and for the following reason: About three weeks afterwards there came upon the country one of those sudden rainstorms, with which the people of this region are familiar, and within twelve hours thereafter the whole Nemaha valley, from bluff to bluff, had become an inland sea. I have seen many floods in the valley since, but I have never seen one that I thought equalled that. In that case the settlers were all driven out, many of them running narrow risk of drowning along with their families. Much of their live stock was drowned, and all of their improvements were destroyed.
But what of our rival town at the falls? When the flood had subsided the town was found to have gone with it, and the future manufacturing center of the country had ceased to exist. Most of the people in the valley came
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to Falls City, and never went back. Stumbo foreclosed his mortgage on the townsite, bought the land at sheriff's sale, along with the ghost of the de- parted village, and the story of the once-boasted municipality of the future. was closed forever.
The flood in the Nemaha valley was a revelation to the people. No one appeared to have any idea that the stream was subject to such freshets and the prestige of the bottom land over those on the high ground, suffered materially. There has never been any considerable farming in the valley of the Nemaha east of Salem. About the time this flood occurred, some law- less persons, either the same night, or the night before, relieved several of the people of their horses, and fled with them into Kansas. As soon as the word got about and a party could be organized for pursuit, Wilson M. Maddox, young William Goolsby, son of William G. Goolsby on the Muddy, and some others constructed a raft of some kind, erossed over to the south bank of the Nemaha, and pursued the thieves until they captured four per- sons, they believed to have been engaged in the depredations and returned with them to Archer. No attention was paid to territorial lines or the law of Congress regulating extradition of fugitives from justice, escaping fro :.. one territory or state into another, but regardless of all of these the pur- suing party I have mentioned captured their men and brought them into Nebraska for punishment. To that end word was passed through the neigh- borhood, and nearly all, if not all, the leading citizens in the vicinity assembled at Archer to consider what should be done in the way of ascertaining the guilt of the persons accused and also to take order in the matter of their punishment. There was no criminal code in the Territory at the time.
JUDGE LYNCH HOLDS COURT.
Two of those parties hearing that there was a lawyer at Falls City sent word to mne to come over to Archer. I did so, and listened to their story and became convinced that at least two of the parties were not guilty and so informed Mr. Maddox, and those he had called to his assistance in the neigh- borhood. It is a fact everywhere true in the West at that time, that the people held in greater detestation the offence of horse stealing than they did any other of the whole calendar of crime. I shall give the name of but one of the parties accused, as it is possible the others may have some friends in the country and I have no disposition to wound their feelings by what I here relate of the disagreeable incident in which they were in no way involved. and which may have been a mistake from the beginning. The man whon
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I thought to be guilty, without any doubt, was nanied Sam Thomas. He was a young man of bad repute and had been in the Kansas troubles from their inception, and it seems had graduated in the art of horse stealing. He was certainly an adept. There was no particular organization of a court such as is known to be presided over by his honor, Judge Lynch, or requiring a committee of inquiry like a trial by jury, but the people consulted and talked among themselves and with me very freely, very candidly, and they finally became satisfied that I was right as to two of the party, let them off, but the other two, the one besides Thomas, were condemned to be whipped -fifty lashes for Thomas and twenty lashes for the other one. This was my first appearance in any court in Nebraska, and it was about as revolting an experience as anybody could care to undergo.
I had heard and read of Judge Lynch's court, but had never seen it in operation. I had also heard and read much of the mobs, disorders and unlawful assemblage, the ostensible objects of which were to administer summary punishment for infractions of the law, without waiting for the regularly constituted authorities to take action in the premises; but this was the first of the kind that had come under my observation, and in fact, it was the last of the kind.
There was nothing violent in the conduct of the men assembled on this occasion, and those of the men present whom I remember, I knew to be then and for the rest of their lives afterwards, as good citizens as any orderly members of the community to be found anywhere. They talked the matter over very seriously and in the light of the circumstances surrounding then and their property. At that time there was no law or code, nor other public protection for life or property in the commonwealth of the Territory, and they were left without any protection from depredations of this character. Up to that time there had never been but one court held in the county, and there was not another one until in March, 1859. It looked like a cruel piece of business, and it was dissociated from the idea of punishment for lawless- ness. The victims were bared from the waist up, their feet tied together, and their hands securely tied to the wheel of a wagon, with their bodies slightly bent over while receiving punishment. In the case of Thomas it was arranged for five men to give him ten lashes apiece, and in the administration of the punishment I had an excellent opportunity to judge of the nature of the men who inflicted the punishment. The instrument of torture was a green hickory withe, probably four feet in length and a half an inch in diameter at its thickest part. This terrible weapon, in the hands of a strong man, applied with his full force to the naked back of a human body, was a sight I hope
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never to see again while I remain in the world. 1 refrain from giving a particular description of the strokes as they were applied to those unfortu- nate men. The remembrance is too horrible to put on paper.
Some of the accounts I had read of man's inhumanity to man in the darker ages of the world, came vividly before my imagination. The instru- ments of torture that man's cruelty to his fellows have invented-the thumb- screw, the boot, the breaking on the wheel, suggested themselves to me while this terrible ordeal was in progress of enactment before my eyes.
Among the five who administered punishment to Thomas, one of them whose name I will not mention, touched the poor, writhing, quivering, tor- tured body so lightly that a fly would not have been destroyed by any of the strokes. This man was not loud in his profession of religion, if, indeed, he made any profession of the kind at all, nor was he demonstrative in any way touching the comfort and well being of those about him, but the whole nature of the man was laid bare to me in the mode in which he pretended to whip that outcast. The criminal was a lawless man and all that, but at the same time he was a human being with the image of his Creator stamped upon him, and it was consideration for the Being Who bore that image, and not the horse thief, that controlled the strokes of the whip in the hands of the man I refer to. The next man to the fore and the last of the detail, was a certain Mr. Wright, whom I had seen about Falls City during my brief residence there, and whom I had frequently observed at public religious services, where he was prominent in all that went forward, and withal rather loud in his devotions, so loud, indeed, that I became possessed of some doubt of the sincerity of his professions. He was one of a specific "kingdom-come" class that are to be found wherever men are found on the earth, who arrogate to themselves the whole authority of reforming the world, without taking into account the probable unimportant fact that they themselves need about as much reformation as anybody else.
At the call of the master of the ceremonies he stepped forward, took the instrument of torture, and with his whole force laid it across the back of the already bleeding and maimed victim, each stroke being harder, if possible. than the one preceding, until Uncle William Goolsby, his eyes flashing with uncontrollable anger and indignation, caught the hand of the murderous monster and wrenched the whip from his grasp, saying, "Stop, you brute. there is enough of this," and throwing it on the ground ordered the man untied. In the hush that fell upon the infuriated company, concerned for the safety of their property rights, and for the good order and well being of the community at large, at this sudden assertion of that feeling of mercy that
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distinguishes the civilized from the savage, that one "touch of nature that makes the whole world kin," there was produced among them a strange commotion, confused and undefinable, but as potent as though each had heard "the voice that once declared and is always declaring, "Blessed are the mer- ciful, for they shall obtain mercy." The feeling produced in me has never passed away. The balance of that gruesome function was performed in a kind of a perfunctory way, and all departed feeling, I little doubt as I felt. that the less of such exhibitions among the people the better it would be for the general public morality. From that day to this, mob law has but once been resorted to in this county.
One man had been hung but a few days before at St. Stephens for the same offense, but it was the last. Some years later some three or four road agents of the kind I have described were hanged by a mob at Table Rock in Pawnee county.
FIRST FUNERAL IN FALLS CITY.
Before the summer waned and the woods along the river to the south took on the russet and golden hues peculiar to the autumnal season, some- thing happened in our little out-of-the-way community -- something that al- ways occurs in the haunts of men all over the world-one of our people died. It was the first visitation of the grim monster, death, to the new town, and it was all the more sad because of the fact that the one to go was a little girl of ten or twelve years af age, who had through all the long summer weather, been a patient sufferer from some lingering disease, which, with no medical assistance at hand-there was no doctor in town nor in the county for that matter-had baffled every effort of loving parents and the kindness of humane neighbors to stay its slow but deadly work of destruction of the frail life in a frailer and wasting body, and on a quiet Sunday morning. when far-off church bells in other lands were calling the people to hear the oft-toll story of another life, another death, and triumphant resurrection. the little one ceased from among the living, and the mysterious purpose of her existence on earth was accomplished.
Death under any circumstances, and at all times, is a very sad and sor- rowful affair, but when we reflect that it is just as natural for persons to die, as it is for them to be born and live, we must conclude that it is quite as necessary in the eternal economy as any other inevitable condition. All the other persons besides myself, William E. Dorrington, then a lad of but eleven years, and John Edward Burbank, who lived in the town or assisted in those humble obsequies of that little child of the wiklerness, have thein-
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selves gone the way whence they, too, will not return. She was the daughter of Isaac L. Hamby, a gentleman whom I have mentioned several times in these memories and who lived in a cheap and illy-constructed house, or rather a shanty, that stood on lots 13 and 14, of block No. 134, at the corner of Ninth and Stone streets, on the corner south of the National hotel. The house was no better, nor for that matter very little worse, than the dwellings of most of the people in the town, but it was anything but a comfortable habitation for people in good health, and certainly no place for a person with a lingering disease, where every hour was an eternity of suffering. It was a mlere shell, with no foundation under it and no plastering, or partitions, except some brown sheeting stretched across, dividing the inside space into two compartments or rooms, and that was all the privacy for the family, afforded by it. The winds, and they were sometimes a gale, and the rain, ran riot about and through the rude structure, with its thin coating of cotton- wood boards that the sun had warped out of shape in many places, leaving ample space for the elements to enter without hindrance. There was no tree or shrub, no front yard, or garden; nothing but the boundless sea of prairie, stretching away in all directions, the distant horizon and the blue arch of heaven overhead. The furniture was in keeping with the poor appointments everywhere, only the commonest for the necessary use and nothing for orna- ment or comfort, for the occupants.
This was poverty, but not the kind of poverty that accompanies squalor, filth, drunkenness, destitution, hunger and dirt, to be seen in the slums of the overcrowded tenement districts of the great cities, but poverty of means to utilize the superabundance of nature, that was everywhere going to waste because of the want of such means. This has been characteristic of the frontier on this continent for three hundred years. The pioneers have always been poor in that sense, but in sober truth, they were the richest people on the globe-teeming with a wealth of courage and hope, stalwart empire builders, who made present conditions possible, including that splendid spirit of intellectual enmilation now rife among good people, many of whom can sport a good automobile.
PEOPLE NOT DIFFERENT THEN.
The people were probably no different from what they are now, but in a way I can hardly explain, they showed their sympathy for the bereaved family by little acts of kindness, so delicately administered, as to make them appear. when recalled at this distant day, totally unlike anything of the kind to come
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under my observation, before or since. The surroundings, no doubt, and the fact that it was the first death to occur in the town, coupled with the further fact that the little child had to be put away in a lonely grave by itself on the wide, silent prairie, had much to do with it, but the impression was pro- duced just the same, and has never been removed. The arrangements for the funeral were very simple and of the most primitive and inexpensive char- acter, as of necessity they had to be. Squire Dorrington, who was a skilled mechanic, made a coffin out of some green walnut boards-there was no seasoned lumber to be had -- and carried it on his shoulder to the house of mourning.
The good women of the town were there in force and among them they constructed an old-fashioned shroud of the best material to be had in the market, and it was like everything else, of the rudest description; and having clothed the worn and wasted little body with that last garment of all living, it was tenderly placed in the coffin upon which a few wild flowers, some friends had gathered on the prairie, were laid, and thus the bier of the first of the dead of this community stood confessed.
We buried the little one on the following afternoon, but with scant ceremonials. There was no minister of the gospel of any persuasion in the town at the time, and therefore, no services of a religious nature was had at the house, but it was decided by some of the good ladies, Mrs. Van Lew and Mrs. Burbank, who were members of the Episcopal church, that the service for the dead prescribed in the prayer book of that denomination, should be read at the grace, and I was asked to perform that duty, which I (lid as best I could. There was no cemetery, but we started one that day on a school section, just west of town, a kind of no-man's land, or Tom Tidler's ground, and it grew from year to year. The land was purchased from the state by authority of an act of the Legislature, and a regular cemetery asso- ciation was formed, and for several years all the dead of our people were buried there. As neither soil nor the location was best suited for the purpose, another site was procured to the north of the old one, and on the highest ground in the neighborhood, which Joseph Steele, the owner, donated under certain conditions, and it has come to be the chief burial ground for the city and one of the most beautiful of all the resting places for the dead in the whole state.
During the half century that has elapsed since that day, I have attended many funerals and witnessed many sorrowful scenes in connection with them, but I have seen none that impressed me as that did. It seemed to me a cruel thing to hury her in the solitary waste, alone in the brooding silence
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of mighty nature, there to remain forever, to be first neglected, and then forgotten. I was younger then and more impressionable, perhaps, on that account, but be that as it may, I shall never live long enough to get away, in thought at least. from that humble funeral procession, formed on foot, fol- lowing the two-horse lumber wagon in which reposed all that was mortal of one of those little ones, whom the Master said was typical of the Kingdom; nor will I ever get away from that strange feeling of sadness, with which I scattered a handful of coldl earth on the coffin below, and pronounced the words of the ritual: "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
THE COUNTY SEAT FIGHT.
The summer of 1858 came to an end as all terrestrial things do, shading itself into the autumn and the autumn into winter, and then the snow and the blizzard, and the storm of a heated-yes, red-hot county-seat fight that lasted for many a year after.
As remarked in a former paper, the removal of the seat of county gov- ernment, by act of the Legislature, from Archer to Salem, was not at all satisfactory to the people, and the demand that the Legislature provide for the submission of the question to a vote of the people, was general throughout the county. It would doubtless have been attended to by the preceding Legis- lature which met at Omaha in the winter before, viz .. 1857 and 1858, but for the fact of the split that occurred in that body, by which one faction moved up to Florence, an old Mormon town, while the other remained in Omaha. I have heretofore mentioned this circumstance, and it is sufficient to say that neither faction was the legal lawmaking power, and no law was made. The one, however, that we elected in 1858, and convened in October following. by proclamation of the governor, passed an act empowering the commis- sioners of the county to call an election for the purpose of choosing a per- manent seat of government, by the vote of the people.
The law provided that in the first election every town in the county could be a candidate for that honor, but if no one of them should receive a majority of all the votes cast. the commissioners should call another election, and only the four towns receiving the highest number of votes at the first election (assuming that there should be more than four contestants for the place ), could be voted for at the next, and if none of them should receive a majority. then the two highest was to be selected as candidates in the third and last election, which would, of necessity, end the contest. By the terms of the act, the elections were to be called in quick succession, and were, in fact, held in
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the month of December. There were several candidates, Rulo, Winnebago, Yankton, St. Stephens, Archer, Falls City, Salem, Geneva, Middleburg, and maybe some other points, but as only the four highest could be voted on at the second election, the others are unimportant. The first battle was to be one of the four, and to win out must be one of the two in the last heat and the highest, in the number of votes: in other words, the winner must take all the tricks. It was Falls City's hour of trial, and though she took all the tricks and came out ahead in the final and last election, she was later deprived of the fruits of her victory by a so-called contest of the election, which by statute, was heard and decided by the county clerk, who proved to be an un fair and dishonest official, who held against Falls City and gave the county seat to Salem, notwithstanding the proofs showed that a clear majority of the votes had been cast for Falls City.
EFFORTS RENEWED.
It was easy to see that the election had settled nothing, and that the whole controversy would have to be submitted to the arbitrament of the ballot again, and under circumstances controlled by safeguards that would not only evoke from the people their untrammeled expression on the subject, but would see to it, that that expression was not thwarted by trickery and dishonest officials. The battle had been a hard one, and though tricked out of our success, we were by no means subdued, and preparations for a renewal of the contest with greater vigor than ever, were at once set on foot.
There are not many in life today who remember that first bout in our county-seat fight. I can call to mind less than half a dozen people who par- ticipated in it, and as some of them will probably see what I here say about it. I will take it as a favor if they will indicate any inaccuracy of statement they may observe in my version of the facts, and rest assured that all proper corrections will be promptly made.
And now let me indulge in something of retrospection. To bring before my mental vision the times, the scenes and the principal actors in that long- past struggle for local political supremacy. I must bring back the vacant country, abolish the court house, the prosperous towns, the railroads, the splendid farms, with their comfortable dwellings, barns and rural improve- ments that mark the intervening years of progress ; think away the fine church lmildings and the school houses, public roads and bridges, of iron and stone : resurrect the dead and reinstate the wild waste and wilderness-things of a day that is dead, for in no other way can I present what I have in memory.
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blurred and faded as they are, by the flight of so many years; that what I write may become intelligible to others. The conditions were very primitive and the surroundings exceedingly poor, but everybody was full of energy, vim and hope, and the coming county-seat scrimmage was something looked for. Falls City, a little hamlet of six or eight hovels that looked like they had run away from somewhere and got lost on the prairie, had some fifty or sixty people living in it that spring, and had something like one hundred and fifty when the fight opened. When it became known that the act had passed anthorizing the people of the county to settle the county-seat question in the mode } have mentioned, a council of war was held, noses counted and our general resources in the way of votes taken into account. We had many friends on the Muddy and its affluents-the McElroy, Goolsby and Sardine branches ; quite a good number on the north and south forks of the Nemaha. and on Long Branch in the northwest part of the county. There was but one voting place west of Salem; it was on the south fork of the Nemaha and not far from the west boundary of the county, at the house of David Speiser. That voting place had always retained the name and the country in the southwest part of the county is now known as Speiser township. It was arranged that some of our people should attend that poll, and as it had no candidate -- and as it was the only subdivision of the county that had not- we expected a good vote for Falls City, as all the people in the west end voted there and the field was a good one to labor in. William Simpkins, who lived on the Nemaha just above the falls and who was the owner of a team of horses and a wagon. Jesse Crook and myself, were detailed to go to Speiser for work on election day.
Simpkins furnished the transportation and our election committee fur- nished all the rest. It was extremely cold weather and we were forced to make the trip by easy stages, and to that end we left Falls City the day before. went by the way of Salem, where we procured a supply of electioneering ammunition, which we carried in a jug, and thence by the way of North Fork. intending to pass the night at the house of John Rothenberger, a well-to-do German settler and a warm friend of our town. Mr. Rothenberger lived on the north side of the river, at a point a few miles west of the present town of Dawson, and I believe his son of the same name, John Rothenberger, is now the owner of the old homestead. From Salem we traveled between the Nemahas, and to get to Mr. Rothenberger's we had to cross the river, which we could not do with the team because the river was hard frozen and the banks were so steep as to make it dangerous to try to take the horses over.
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