USA > Nebraska > Furnas County > Pioneer stories of Furnas County, Nebraska > Part 4
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The patrons of the school which I first taught in Cass county urged me to come back and teach the school that I taught in 1872, and I told them that if I had any crop worth while that I could not do so. When I returned home I wrote that I would teach the school.
W. B. Bass and his son, Frank, came back with me from Cass county, as they wanted to do some buffalo hunting. They had an ox team and I took my team. We started up the Beaver and when we came to Cedar Bluffs crossed over to the Republican. and np that stream to Ariekaree and North Fork, where We found some buffalo. We killed thirty-five, dried a wagon load of meat. and Mr. Bass pickled a barrel of the meat. We dried the hides and had a wagon load of them, which we sold near MeCook for nearly $100.
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After digging our potatoes, which were about the size of walnuts, and burying them, and getting up some wood for our nse when we returned, we started back east in our prairie schooner, taking a lot of the dried buffalo meat to chew at and to trade at the stores on the way for groceries and other things.
I must now relate an incident that happened in the summer, that I had forgotten. I had occasion to go to Mr. Bass' place on an errand. Mr. Bass said to Mrs. S. that he was hungry for some fresh meat, and she said that we were, too. He gave me his needle gun and told me to look out for an antelope. I went home and went to breaking prairie near the house, and I noticed the mules priek up their ears as they did when they scented any kind of a wild animal. I looked around in the south about a mile away I saw an antelope. I tied the mules to the wagon, got the gun, and started toward the antelope and sue- ceeded in killing it. I then went to Bass with part of it, but he said he had just killed one on the north divide and had taken part of it to M. M. Sturdevant, and told me to take mine to the Avers family, which I did.
We returned to our homestead at the end of six months with provisions, seed, and feed, and commenced putting in a crop and breaking more prairie. When the corn was knee high the grass- hoppers began to light down and get busy, and I could see a stalk now and then topple over as it was cut off by the hoppers. I drove to the house and told Mrs. S. that we would go over to Gapens' for a visit, which we did. We went fishing and hunting. While there we went to some sort of a gathering and there met Dan P. West. and since then he has told me that he thought Mrs. Sumny and I were the slimmest couple that he had ever seen, I weighed then about 140 pounds, and now about 190. We returned home in a day or two, and the hoppers had gone north and I went to plowing the corn again. As soon as the corn was laid by I started east again, Ed Allender going with me. to find work during harvest again, which we did in Seward county. The hop- pers came again in August, but soon left and the corn was good. I went east again in 1876 to harvest, and John T. Brown went with me. and we worked together. This year I had some wheat which T. E. Ayers out on the shares. Mrs. Sumny wrote me to come home as we had a splendid show for corn. But the next mail brought the word that the grasshoppers had come in greater numbers than ever, and for me to stay as long as I could get
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work. I returned in a short time and found the corn erop de- stroyed, but the small grain had been cut and was in the stack be- fore the pests came.
Now another trouble met me. We had quite a nice lot of hogs and no corn to feed them. T. E. Ayers and I started cast peddling hogs, trading them for corn or anything that we needed. I traded one at Riverton to a hardware man for a dishpan. We finally got rid of our hogs at White Rock, Kans., and loaded up with corn and returned home. We began to raise better crops and I could stay at home. I was elected county judge, much against my will, and employed to teach the Beaver City school, acting as judge during the noon hour and during the evening and farming when school closed. I found that there was not enough to pay to justify me continuing as judge and at the end of a year I re- signed in favor of Captain Brown, who had run against me. IIe lived in town and wanted the office. I was then nominated for county commissioner and was elected. This did not interfere much with farming.
The year 1879 was a good crop year, but we had hard work to save the grain as it was so wet. That fall Crutcher & Jones prevailed upon me to go into their store as salesman, and I re- mained with them for nearly five years. I was then appointed deputy county clerk by Wm. Howard Phelps and later by C. II. Pierce. At the close of the term of Mr. Pierce, I was elected (terk of the district court.
I must tell a good joke on my friend, J. H. McKee. Many would remark that this would be a great country if we only had a little more rain, and Mr. McKee had a fixed habit of it. Ile was visiting with J. A. Gibson at Wilsonville, who lived in a sod house, and in the night there was a heavy rain and the water came into the house and the folks got onto the tables and chairs to get above it. While perched there Mr. MeKee remarked that 'this would be a fine country if we had a little more rain."
As we had no pasture fenced, we generally staked the mules out in the draw near the house. One night there was a heavy rain, and Mrs. Sumny heard the water roaring and looking out she could see when there was a flash of lightning that the mules were at the end of their rope and trying to get to higher ground. I had to get up and go out and swim out to them as they were on the farther side of the draw. There had been hail and the
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water was so cold I could hardly swim back again. Stock wa lost in this way occasionally.
I must relate an incident that happened when I was aske to teach the Beaver City school. I went over to T. K. Clark' who was then county superintendent, to be examined. I show( him my certificate from Cass county and asked to be examine Hle said we would have dinner first. After dinner I asked hi again, and he said it would be more like me examining him. : he got out his certificates and issued me one without further e amination.
I want to say in conclusion that there were many more i vidents that would be of interest. as there were many funny thin that happened, and some serions things as well Prairie fi did considerable damage and caused great fright for some peop as did one that came from the north one night. They say that jumped the Republican. We backfired from the Beaver, but jumped the creek northeast of the Freas farm. Some of hastened to see how Mrs. Freas had fared. She said that she h taken her family to the center of a piece of ground that h been plowed, and prayed that they might not perish, and h escaped nnharmed.
We had many good neighbors and friends. and often h good times visiting each other. I have already written more th I fear will be published. I hope to meet those who still rema of the old settlers the coming summer, but will feel sad to : some vaeant seats in the church, lodge, and post.
I am cordially your friend,
J. T. SUMNY. Los Angeles, Call
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CHAPTER IX
C. F. Wheeler Admits Coming Too Late for Buffalo, but in Time to Resort to Rabbit Tracks for Grub.
Paonia, Colo., January 20, 1913 .- Editor Times-Tribune, Beaver City, Nebr .- Some time ago you asked if I would write you something in regard to early days in Nebraska, and I pre- sumed that you did not understand that my Nebraska experience only began in 1878. The entire Sappa valley was settled when I arrived at Precept postoffice, kept by H. H. Clason, who had been a resident for three or four years prior to my time. If you would divide Furnas county history into chapters it might be possible for me to give a few pointers on later events
Like J. N. Hadley, I located in Furnas county by accident rather than by design. As a boy, my health was very poor, and mother considered that it would be better for me to leave school and try a change of climate. A friend of ours, Horace G. Clason, suggested that we make a trip to Nebraska, and that he would go along as his people lived somewhere out there. Clason had a team and mother and I fixed up a team, new wagon, and camping outfit. We were to start from Freeborn ,Minn., on a certain Mon- day morning, but as fate would have it, we met George Scott, a boyhood friend, and he wanted to join the party if we would only wait a few days. Of course we waited, and I have never re- gretted our action, as in him I found one of life's best friends- true, honest and forgiving. You may rest assured that we three boys pieked up all the fun that was left along the road by others.
We arrived in Council Bluffs one day in September, and in looking over the town we ran across an immigrant outfit with fourteen wagons, all headed for Furnas county. They were go- ing to eross the Missouri river to Omaha that day, and we decided to go with them. The crossing was made on cars at that time. The transfer cars were like ordinary box cars, perhaps higher, with the ends removed. You drove into the end of the car, the lead team going through to the extreme end of the train. Heavy
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chains were arranged so that the wagons were chained fast to the floor, so that it was not necessary to unhitch the teams. The women and children remained in the wagons, and the vacant space in the cars was filled with loose horses and cattle. At the west end all that was necessary was to unhook the chains and drive out.
Clason had left Minnesota with a soft place under the left lapel of his coat, and Scott had taken advantage of the faet and had painted on Clason's wa- gon eover in large letters, "What is Home Without a Mother-in-law ?" Some eub reporter on the Omaha Bee got his eyes on this work of art, and the Omaha Bee gave us a write-up.
We camped that night four or five miles east of Fremont. Along in the night sometime, eame up one of those storms that is a con- glomeration of wind, rain, hail, lightning and more wind, and you can talk about moving picture shows of lat- er date, but we had one that night that had some action The Wheelers in Colorado to it. Tents were blown down, wagon eovers blown away. Men, women and children were hunting eover under the wagons, many without enough clothing for a bathing suit for a bumble bee. Geo. Scott was a very bashful young man, and he blushed so hard at the sights revealed when the lightning flashed that his hair turned red and it remained that color umtil time whitened it. We left those people the next morning, and in twenty-four years' residence in Furnas county I never found a man, woman or child who would admit that he was one of that party, and I am thinking that they turned back and fol- lowed their elothing baek to Iowa.
We took our leisure and arrived at Hastings about October 5, and just west of there we overtook Frank Gapen, who was ill and
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on his way home. He had lived in the Sappa Valley for several years, and being well posted on life in the west, he explained to us the meaning of "draws," "buffalo hollows," "two-bits" and a few other expressions that had been causing us some mental trouble.
Just north of Walker's ranch we came up with a covered wagon and found those in charge to be a man and wife and their two children. We camped with them during the noon recess. and discovered our first prickly pears. Gapen insisted that the pears were good to eat, I expressed some doubt. Scott and Gapen re- mained non-committal. but the stranger was of an inquisitive dis- position, and after removing the long needles from the pear, he took a mouthful of the delicious fruit. It would not be possible to state in numbers the quantity of small needles remaining in his mouth and tongue, but as William Pruitt, an old buffalo hunter of Furnas county used to speak of great numbers. there were "'dead oodles of um." To the best of my recollection, after the man got through trying to spit them out, he clawed awhile with his hands and then put his feet in his mouth and tried to kick them out. When we left him he was down on his back and the lady was working on him with a sewing needle, a pocket knife and a monkey wrench.
As we neared Orleans. the wind came up strong from the north, and the northwest sky showed a heavy smoke. Gapen re- marked thet we might be compelled to seek shelter from a prairie fire. but I could see no danger from fire in that short grass. It came on all at once, it seemed to me, and was perhaps half a mile from us when we came to a field of fall plowing, and we could see a homesteader's improvements on the west side of the field with six or eight large grain stacks north of the buildings. We left mother and the teams in the center of the field and hastened to help save the property. The only person on the place was a little girl, about 12 or 13, and she was drawing water from a well over 100 feet deep with two buckets hung over a pulley She in- formed us that there were fourteen head of fat hogs in the pens which were located south of the grain stacks, which were by this time in flames. Scott and Clason pulled the pens down .drove the hogs out and then hunted for a cooler place. We did not know hog nature then as well as we do at present, or we might have headed them onto the plowing, but as it happened we let them have their way and they went back into the pens and were
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burned up. We saved the house and granary, and as we drove away the litle girl was siting on the ground, resting her arms and head on her knees sobbing her heart ont. If I were an artist I would draw a picture of the scene as I have it in my mind and name it "Desolation."
That night we reached Orleans and found the town filled with people who were running away from the Indians. It seemed that the Indians had commited some murders on the head creeks as they were passing north to Dakota. While so many people were fleeing east the Indians were making the best time possible for the north. Scott and I were quite determined to go on to Colorado, but mother did not like the idea of going on farther west, so on October 11. 1878, we located on the Sappa at the Pre- cept postoffice. Scott and I made arrangements to put in a store, and returned to Kearney for Inmber to put up the building, and were hauling lumber and merchandise off and on all winter It was on one of these trips that I met my first-and last-wife. She had been a resident of the Sappa valley for eight or nine years at that time, and I have often told her that eating so much jerked buffelo meat is what made her hair curl and gave her sneh a dark complexion. She admits that buffalo steak was the steady diet and often speaks of one hunt taken with her father when he killed a buffalo just north of where Beaver City now stands. Her father, A. C. Robbins, told me in after years that he had the place marked in his memory, because he could call to mind looking south and west and seeing the clay bluffs near which the Lashley Mills were afterward built. This must have been in 1870 or 1871. The lady does not care to give the date as it might diselose her age.
You well know that there is a time each year when we are between hay and grass, and it is always a trying period with stoekmen. I came to Furnas county when the people were be- tween buffalo and heef. Up to that time in my life I had a strong dislike for fat pork or baeon, and I got so hungry for beef that I could kiss the cow every time I went out to do the milking. It might be called the rabbit period in Furnas county's history. Jackrabbits were very plentiful and fences were few, so that a greyhound was good property. Your standard of citizenship was measured according to the speed of your dog. C. E. V. Smith owned the fastest Found living, with Dan West's string coming a close sceond. Smith's dog was black in color, and
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when she started a rabbit if you looked straight in the direction she had taken, fixing your cye on the horizon, it would appear that some one had drawn a black line elear back to the starting place. Some of the boys used to say that this hound would sometimes go over the hill and catch the rabbit on her way back. Of course I don't youch for these stories. You know Jay Clason and Ben Reed as well as I do. But I do know that Ed Smith was one of the high livers, while I had to satisfy myself with eat- ing rabbit tracks while they were hot and fresh.
My first visit to Beaver City was made one cold day in October, and the only person whom I met that day to remember in after years was M. R. Hadley. Of course it was only a few months until I knew all of the business men, as we got acquain- ted easily in those days. As I call it to mind, E. D. Jones has grown considerable since that time. He could have hid behind a lead peneil when I first met him, and of my last meeting with him here in Colorado it would have required a brick block to conceal him from view.
There were many strange things to me, one of which was a herd of long horns being fed by N M. Ayers on hopes and per- haps. These were the first Texas cattle I had ever seen, and they were a great curiosity to me, and they came up to recom- mendations.
Another of the strange sights was the large quantity of bones one saw collected for shipment at the railroad stations. Coming out from Kearney one would meet team after team loaded to the limit with bones. Most of the wagons had two extra sideboards, and the white bones would show up a long distance before you would meet the teams. I was told that the bones were shipped east and ground into fertilizer. What a testimony to the slaugh- er and natural death toll that must have taken place on the prairie. Every time that I saw one of those white skulls I used to speculate to myself as to its history and wonder how it met death. What a history was hidden there if we could only have read it. It would have told of cold and heat; storms and sun- shine; plenty and famine; floods and drouth; battles for life when starvation had made flight impossible If one had known enough to have inaugurated the breakfast food fad at that time and used bone dust for a foundation, what a fortune he could have made and what a field for the ad writer.
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One of the sad features of the early days was the death toll among children. The spring of '79 witnessed a terrible run of diphtheria and many deaths resulted. Galand Northup lost all his children, and he and his wife returned to their old home in the east, and their recollections of pioneer life must be sad indeed. When I think of these cases I feel thankful that I have nothing of that kind to mar our recollections of the past.
In looking back over the changes that have taken place in Furnas county during the thirty-four years that I have known the country, I wonder if the theory of theosophy is not true, and and that we are living in another life. Note the changes from Timothy Hedges' oxen to the automobile. And the old mixed train and your through passenger, that comes and goes the same day. I used to wonder that my wife didn't get a divorce on the . grounds of desertion while I was going around to Oxford and return. But then the Burlington made it up on the main line. I think that it was W. T. Ager who told me about an incident that happened on the main line. Some fellow grabbed a purse from a by-stander at the Oxford depot and boarded the flyer just as it started west. The thief was arrested at McCook ten minutes before the crime was committed. W. T. thought that the Burlington and Justice were working hand in hand, until he learned that Fults made the jury believe that the prisoner had a perfectly good alibi.
It used to be that if you had a pop jury and a republican de- fendant, or vice versa, that you could almost guess on the ver- dict with a hope of finding it.
And what a change in your political field. The white and yellow have again blended with J. W. in the state house, and W. J. in the cabinet. Norris wins his way to the U. S. Senate by cut-popping the pops, and old Nebraska has the initiative and referendum, when but a few years ago they hooted John O. Yeiser, its lone advocate, wherever he attempted to mention the subject. And it is true that you are to have an election but once in two years? Such is life in Colorado, and it is very tame. Dur- ing two years of idleness we often forget our own party affilia- tions, but having woman's suffrage we get back nearly right, be- cause you can depend upon the wife to remember when the kids had the measles and how yon claimed to have voted at the last election. Colorado always eleets a fine looking bunch of officials. The men vote solid for the handsomest lady candidate, and the
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ladies for the best dressed and best looking man on the ticket. The ladies make more distinction as to dress than we men do. One or two progressives just missed an election by wearing the wrong colored ties. Some of the ladies mistook them for repub- licans. I see that I am getting back to the present, so I had bet- ter elose this letter.
As to my life in Furnas, I don't think I would make many changes if I had to live it over. The friendships formed there were more than any hardships or discomforts that I may have met, and my only hope that is that I may live to repay some of the kindnesses I have received at the hands of my Nebraska friends.
C. F. WHEELER.
Old House Home of Frank Brouhard and Family
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CHAPTER X
Mrs. O. A. Harvey Relates Experiences in Her Pioneer Days of Thirty-five Years Ago
Beaver City, Nebr., January 30 .- Editor Times-Tribune .- Among the first settlers in Furnas county were the Wilsons, from whom Wilsonville derived its name. The brothers engaged in stoek raising and merchandise, the goods being hauled from Plum Creek and Kearney. In 1878 Carlos Wilson returned to his home at Hopkinsville, Iowa, to visit his parents. Being in- timate friends of the Wilsons, we were invited to spend a day with them, and were highly entertained by the adventures and possibilities of Furnas county and especially Wilsonville and Beaver City. Mr. Harvey caught the fever to go West, and in October 1878, he left us for Wilsonville, and was soon busy at his trade, which was blacksmithing. Believing that Beaver City was a more desirable place, he moved the next spring and opened the first blacksmith shop here, Charles Laub being his first cus- tomer. Each letter I received from him contained encouragement to come to this new country, and the thought of 160 acres of land, all our own, made me willing to come. In the meantime he had made a deal with J. H. McKee for 30 acres on the east side of his quarter section in exchange for our home in Hopkinsville, lowa. A new frame house had been built on this, and is now a part of the house owned by Mr. Crommett. It with an addition that was built later was our home for many years.
The next June, with my three little girls, I started for this new home, Mr. Harvey meeting us in Kearney. He had hired a team from June Denham to bring us and our trunks and some bedding. At the foot of the first steep hill the horses refused to pull, and all of the whipping and coaxing would not make them, so we unhitched. 1 led the horses and Eugene rolled the boxes and trunks up the hill. This performance we repeated several times in the journey. Night brought us to a sod farm house where we obtained shelter but no bed. So, throwing down some
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bedding on the floor, we hoped to find sleep and rest. But oh, oh, we soon had so much company that we had to sit up and hold the children in our arms until morning. This was my first night in Nebraska. The next day, just in time to witness a prairie sun- set with tints of blue and gold, casting its reflection over the valley, we arrived in Beaver City, and I saw my new home. 1 was favorably impressed. Mr. Harvey found plenty of work. There was more rain than usual and everything seemed pros- perous.
We founded & Sunday school. T. M. Williams was superintendent and Mr. Bushnell preached. We took our organ to the little church which was played by Marie Harvey, and Mrs. Gar- linghouse leading the sing- ing. We had a good Sun- day school and laid the foun- dation for the future church.
When we all seemed well, prosperous, and happy, a woman died in Kearney, leaving a child. Some friend brought the little one here, and it sickened and died with diphtheria. From that time the disease spread, and the next few months was a time of sorrow. Many MRS. O. A. HARVEY homes were bereft of their loved ones. Who shall ques- tion God's wisdom, power or plan, but the human heart longs to know why it seemeth good to deal with us this way.
In this new country we found friends. Mr. Danforth, meet- ing Eugene one morning asked after our financial condition. He offered us the means to pay the expenses of the sickness and deaths that had so suddenly come to us and taken our two girls. It was several months before we could pay it back.
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