It is not devoted entirely to money-getting. The humanities have been
remembered. There are some thirty-four hospitals, asylums, and benevolent
homes. It has eight hospitals proper for the reception of the sick,
disabled, and diseased, the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company maintaining
one. There are five children's homes, and one industrial home. There are
three homes for the aged, one of which is for colored people entirely.
There is one convent and an institution each for the Sisters of Charity and
the Sisters of Mercy, besides others of lesser importance. In some cases
the buildings may not be pretentious, but they are all ample in size, and
in many instances would not discredit the cities of the largest population.
The exceptional intelligence of the people is proved by other unmistakable
signs. Strong, clean newspapers, beautiful opera houses, first-class
hotels, hundreds of churches, modern schools, great libraries, charming
clubs, beautiful parks and streets, fine hospitals, fine public buildings,
admirable public utilities, and above all an enormous proportion of
beautiful homes,--these are some of the signs that tell of the fruition of
the highest hopes of the hardy pioneers who first gave battle to savagery
and the wilderness at this point.
That the city has a much greater growth before it is the opinion of all who
are familiar with the conditions there. The vast agricultural, mineral, and
manufacturing region surrounding it and directly tributary to it for a
thousand miles in every direction is sure to push it steadily forward among
American cities until it ranks at last with Boston, Baltimore, and St.
Louis.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
OMAHA
THE TRANSCONTINENTAL GATEWAY
BY VICTOR ROSEWATER
Now a city of 100,000 population, with prosperous suburbs that make it the
business centre for 175,000 people, Omaha is the outgrowth of the Nebraska
& Council Bluffs Ferry Company. This company was organized under the
incorporation laws of Iowa, in 1853, to carry on the lucrative ferriage
traffic for transcontinental pilgrims in quest of the gold-fields of
California that had been begun two years previously by a halted
gold-seeker, Brown by name, who saw more gold in paddling passengers across
the murky Missouri than in washing the yellow sands near Sutter's mill.
[Illustration ALFRED D. JONES.]
As an adjunct to the ferry, the company staked out a claim adjacent to its
west landing directly opposite Council Bluffs, and employed Alfred D.
Jones, a young civil engineer, to lay out a town site which on pretentious
paper was invested, without particular thought or design, with the name
Omaha, from the tribe of Indians that was wont to camp upon the creek
brushing its north boundary. The survey was conducted in June and July of
1854, and the adoption of the name was doubtless suggested by the fact that
a month or more before the representative in Congress for the State of
Iowa had prevailed upon the Post-Office Department to issue a commission
to Mr. Jones as postmaster at Omaha City, which at that time must have
existed solely in his prolific imagination. Postmaster Jones carrying the
post-office around with him in his hat is a reminiscence founded on actual
fact and not in fancy.
That the ideas of these early pioneers were of the expansible variety is
readily gathered from the character of the plat prepared to mark the coming
town site as the seat of a great and mighty city. On the broad plateau
overlooking the river, building lots were staked out 66 by 132 feet,
divided by streets 100 feet wide and alleys of 20 feet. There were 320
blocks in all, each comprising eight lots forming squares of 264 feet. Two
squares were reserved, one in the business centre 264 by 280 feet, and the
other on the top of the most conspicuous hill 600 feet square, the latter
designated as Capitol Square and the hill as Capitol Hill, and a broad
avenue 120 feet wide leading to it as Capitol Avenue--all in foreordained
honor of the magnificent structure to be erected when the newly born city
should have achieved the distinction of the capital of Nebraska Territory.
Omaha City was not organized as an incorporated municipality until 1857.
Looking closer into the history and geography of the spot where now run
the busy streets of Nebraska's metropolis, lined with substantial business
blocks and attractive residences, precisely as platted in that lonely
summer of 1854, the conclusion is forced that it was not mere fortuitous
chance that built a wonder city upon an empty ferry landing. The location
was by nature destined to be a turning point on the great central
transcontinental highway bridging the divide between the Atlantic and the
Pacific.
[Illustration WILLIAM. P. SNOWDEN, OMAHA'S FIRST WHITE SETTLER.]
Lewis and Clark, who worked their way to Oregon up the Missouri Valley,
were the first white men to leave a record of their visit. From their
journal is taken the following extract noting their arrival and detention
at the mouth of the Platte in July, 1804, whence they continued northward
and passed over the ground now included in the city:
"July 27.--Having completed the object of our stay, we set sail
with a pleasant breeze for the northwest. The two horses swam
over to the southern [western] shore, along which we went,
passing by an island, at three and a half miles, formed by a
pond, fed by springs; three miles further is a large sand
island in the middle of the river, the land on the south [west]
being high and covered with timber; that on the north [east] a
prairie. At ten and a half miles from our encampment, we saw
and examined a curious collection of graves or mounds, on the
south [west] side of the river. Not far from a low piece of
land and a pond, is a tract of about two hundred acres in
extent, which is covered with mounds of different heights,
shapes and sizes; some of sand, and some of both earth and
sand; the largest being near the river. These mounds indicate
the position of the ancient village of the Ottoes, before they
retired to the protection of the Pawnees. After making fifteen
miles, we camped on the south [east] on the bank of a high,
handsome prairie, with lofty cottonwood in groves, near the
river."[14]
That the mounds referred to constituted the ancient Indian burial ground,
remnants of which long remained in the lower part of the town as objects of
curiosity to inquisitive observers, has been established to the
satisfaction of historical critics, as also that the council held by Lewis
and Clark with the Indians, from which Council Bluffs derives its name,
took place in reality not on the Iowa side opposite Omaha but on the
Nebraska side several miles farther up, in the vicinity of what is now Fort
Calhoun.
A no less interesting historical chapter is found in the Mormon encampment
that for a time promised to make Omaha the centre of its church
establishment. It is needless here to state details of the Nauvoo
persecutions and the early expeditions in search of the promised land. When
the advance-guard sighted the east bank of the Missouri, it took a stand on
Miller's hill,--so named after a Mormon elder,--where the various companies
into which the emigrants had been divided for their historic march across
Iowa converged. It might have been called Miller's hill to this day had not
just at that moment a call arrived to enlist a body of volunteers for the
United States in its impending war with Mexico, followed by the prompt
organization of the Mormon battalion under Colonel T.L. Kane, in whose
honor the name of the halting place was changed to Kanesville. Kanesville
it might have remained but for the fact that the post-office at that point
had been designated as Council Bluffs City, whither the last mail for the
emigrants setting out over the great divide was regularly addressed; and to
avoid confusion the name of Kanesville was dropped after two or three
years and Council Bluffs left in undisputed possession of that corner of
the map.
[Illustration A TYPICAL OMAHA INDIAN. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF F.A.
RINEHART, OMAHA.]
But the east bank of the river was not suitable for the Mormons' purposes.
They crossed over and established themselves in Winter Quarters at a point
about six miles north of what later became Omaha, making themselves as
comfortable as possible in seven hundred and more hastily built log cabins
and dug-outs. The place was fortified with stockades, a tabernacle erected,
and various workshops and mills were constructed to provide temporary
employment. At Winter Quarters was held the annual conference of the
church, April 6, 1847, attended by people from all parts of the country
prepared for moving west. From Winter Quarters, on the 14th day of the same
month, a party of about 150, all but four or five being men, set out, with
seventy-three wagons drawn by horses and oxen, under the personal
leadership of Brigham Young, the expedition culminating in the famous
founding of Zion in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. The excursion of
apostles and pioneers returned to the Missouri for their families and
friends, their arrival at Winter Quarters in October calling forth as an
occasion for special joy and thanksgiving an elaborate celebration. The
summer of 1848 saw the great body of Latter Day Saints following Brigham
Young to the new Utah settlement, but Winter Quarters was maintained for
years as the stopping point and outfitting station for the Mormon emigrants
on their westward wandering. By 1856 the name had been changed to Florence
and it is so referred to in the writings of the later Mormons. For years it
remained the busy hiving place for the church converts moving on Zion from
all quarters of the world. To-day it is a quaint, old-fashioned sleepy
village, interesting chiefly for a few ancient landmarks, and visited on
good-weather Sundays by recreation seekers from Omaha in cart or on wheel.
The earliest history of Omaha is a chronicle of bitterly waged fights for
the possession of the seat of government of the new Nebraska Territory. The
proud privilege of advertising itself as the capital city was eagerly
sought after not only by Omaha but by every other ambitious town-site
company along the eastern frontier. It should be remembered that the
initial steps in the territorial organization were taken under the
presidency of Franklin Pierce, who, although a Northern man, was almost
completely under Southern domination. The position of governor was first
offered to General William G. Butler of Kentucky, but unceremoniously
declined, whereupon it was passed on to another Southern gentleman in the
person of Francis H. Burt of South Carolina. Governor Burt arrived at
Bellevue in company with the secretary, Thomas B. Cuming of Iowa, in
October, 1854, but before he undertook in any way to exercise his official
powers he succumbed to a fatal illness, leaving the succession by virtue of
his office to Secretary Cuming. Governor Cuming in due time issued his
election proclamation and called the territorial Legislature to convene at
Omaha in January. In this connection it should also be remembered that
Omaha was located and settled by Iowa promoters while the competing towns
to the south looked on slave-holding Missouri as the parent. Had the first
capital designation been asserted by the South Carolina executive instead
of by his fortuitous Iowa successor we may well doubt whether Omaha would
have fared so fortunately.
[Illustration THE HIGH SCHOOL, OMAHA, ON THE SITE OF THE OLD CAPITOL.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF HEYN, OMAHA.]
The earliest territorial legislatures have been described by eye-witnesses
and participants as often bordering on an organized mob. To keep the
capital at Omaha was the watchword on the one side and to take it away the
battle-cry on the other. Money and town-lot stock are said to have played
an important part with members who seem to have anticipated later-day
legislative methods and yielded to "inducements" that overcame their local
loyalty. While the Capitol building rose on Capitol Hill, Omaha had to
contest for its retention at every annual session of the Legislature from
1855 to 1858, from which time it was left in undisputed possession until
1867, when with the investiture of Statehood a seat of government was
carved anew on the virgin prairie to be christened Lincoln after the
martyred President.
The great impetus that sent the infant Omaha forward by leaps and bounds
ahead of its rivals in the Missouri Valley north and south came from two
closely connected enterprises--the one the building of the Pacific
telegraph, the other the construction of the first transcontinental
railroad.
The Pacific telegraph assumed tangible form through the unquenchable
energies of Edward Creighton. Still in the prime of sturdy manhood,
invigorated by the Irish blood inherited from his ancestry, Creighton had
come to Omaha in 1856 to visit his brothers, engaging for a time in the
lumber business. In 1860 he built the Missouri & Western line from St.
Louis to Omaha, but already a year before had evolved a plan for a
telegraph from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast. With the
encouragement and material assistance of men like Jeptha H. Wade, Ezra
Cornell, and Hiram Sibley, whose confidence he earned and kept, his idea,
originally received as a weird fancy, took shape in surveys, contracts, and
actual construction, the first message transmission occurring in October,
1861, speeding on in an hour by electric current intelligence that would
previously have required weeks and months to journey. The fortune sprung
from this venturesome undertaking has given the name of Creighton a
foundation lasting to the end of time. Edward Creighton died in 1874,
leaving $1,500,000 to be bestowed eventually for educational and charitable
purposes. The good work he began has been carried further by his brother,
John A. Creighton, and the Creighton College, the Creighton Medical School,
and the Creighton Memorial Hospital, not to enumerate smaller benefactions,
all attest as enduring monuments the activity and foresight that paved the
way for the electric fluid to flow unchecked from ocean to ocean.
[Illustration CITY HALL.]
The telegraph was but the forerunner of the railroad. With Omaha the
initial point of the Pacific telegraph lines, it enjoyed a marked advantage
in the competition for the eastern terminus of the Pacific Railway. Up to
that time, all transportation had been by steamboat up the Missouri River
or in wagon and coach overland. The race of the iron horse across Iowa had
been interrupted, first by the financial crash of 1857, and then by the war
of 1861, so that the first locomotive to carry its train to the Missouri
River arrived January 17, 1867, bearing the escutcheon of the Chicago &
Northwestern. Within two years four railroads converged at the river
opposite Omaha eager to share the through transcontinental traffic already
in sight.
The history of Omaha and of the Union Pacific is inseparably linked. It is
not necessary to weigh the conflicting claims to credit for suggesting the
railroad to the Pacific slope. The war demonstrated the military necessity
of a rail connection with the coast States and forced Congress to take the
steps that made its immediate construction possible. Without the subsidy
offered in the Acts of 1862 and 1863 the road certainly would not have been
built for years, and the development of the whole western country would
have been long retarded.
At the recommendation of the chief engineer, Peter A. Dey, the eastern
terminus was fixed "on the western boundary of the State of Iowa, opposite
Omaha," an event so auspicious as to provoke a responsive demonstration
from the enthusiastic inhabitants of the young city, who made the
master-stroke of their celebration the actual breaking of the ground for
the newly projected road. This occurred December 2, 1863, with the
thermometer hovering close to the freezing point.
The work of construction was pushed with all possible rapidity, but with
the best expedition it was May 10, 1869, before the juncture of the two
roads heading for one another from east and west was effected, in the
presence of a distinguished body of spectators, by the driving of the
golden spike at Promontory Point, girding the continent with bands of
steel. According to all accounts the celebration at Omaha of the completion
of the Union Pacific was on a scale commensurate with its importance to the
commercial and industrial position of the city.
If Engineer Dey was the central figure in the initial work, Thomas C.
Durant, as First Vice-President and General Manager, had more to do with
its successful completion than any other one man. While many names have
since shown bright in the progress of this epoch-making enterprise, those
of Dey and Durant must form the base-stones of the arch that has raised
this great railroad to its eminence, and carried it through stress and
storm.
[Illustration RETURN OF THE FIRST NEBRASKA VOLUNTEERS, AUG. 30, 1899.]
The prestige acquired by Omaha as a railway centre in those early days has
been constantly maintained, until to-day the steel rails radiate in every
direction, while three magnificent bridges span the Missouri where Brown's
lonely ferry formerly transferred victims of the gold fever from one bank
to the other.
[Illustration THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, OMAHA.]
With a firmly established industrial foundation, the progress of the city
has gone steadily forward. Commercial expansion, it is true, has been
broken occasionally by bursting real-estate booms, grasshopper plagues,
drought-stricken crops or general financial depression, but in material
welfare and ever-widening public activity the community takes rank with its
most wide-awake competitors. Besides its extensive jobbing interests, its
manufacturing development has been along the lines of silver smelting and
refining, linseed oil mills, white lead works, machine and locomotive
shops, and the great live-stock market and meat-packing establishments
that have formed the nucleus of the magic city braced against its boundary
under the name of South Omaha, and sure, sooner or later, to be one with it
in corporate existence, as it is already in life and business. Although not
yet past the fiftieth anniversary, Omaha boasts of all those advantages
that make an attractive living place--good schools, well-stocked free
libraries, substantial churches, art galleries, well-paved streets, with
water, light, and rapid transit, fine public parks, imposing public
buildings. Above all, it is a city of homes and home owners, thick with
modest dwellings though only meagrely supplied with palatial mansions.
Omaha's contribution to the world of science, art, and literature is
perhaps small, but it has given two presidents to the American Bar
Association in James M. Woolworth and Charles F. Manderson, the latter also
having filled the position of President _pro tem._ of the United States
Senate; in banking circles Herman Kountze and Joseph H. Millard are known
throughout the country; Edward Rosewater and his newspaper, _The Bee_,
occupy a place in the front rank of American journalism; the art gallery of
George Whininger is classed among the best private collections on this
side of the Atlantic; and the benevolence of John A. Creighton has received
recognition in the title conferred on him of Count in the Holy Roman See.
[Illustration OMAHA EXPOSITION, 1898. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF F.A.
RINEHART, OMAHA]
The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 constitutes Omaha's crowning
achievement of recent years. Projected in the period of densest industrial
gloom and executed in the face of the war with Spain, the enterprise
proved an unexpected and unprecedented success, returning to the stock
subscribers ninety per cent. of the money they had advanced. The financial
success was, however, subordinate to the success in other directions. A
white city of such architectural perfection could not fail to afford an
æsthetic stimulus in itself of wonderful educational effect. Participated
in by all the trans-Mississippi States and Territories as an exhibition of
the resources and products of this vast region, the Exposition served to
open the eyes of visitors from both at home and abroad to the limitless
possibilities there spread before them. The Indian Congress alone,
including as it did representatives of nearly all the remaining tribes of
aboriginal inhabitants gathered together under the direction of the Indian
authorities of the Federal Government, formed an ethnic object-lesson the
like of which had never before been presented. No fitter culmination could
have been prepared than the Peace Jubilee, in its closing month of October,
attended by President McKinley, members of his Cabinet, and heroes of the
armed conflict just concluded, all uniting in acclaiming the end of war
typified in the Exposition as a towering triumph of the arts of peace.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTE:
[14] In this account the directions are misleading, as they thought the
river ran east and west instead of north and south at this point.
[Illustration]
DENVER
THE QUEEN CITY OF THE PLAINS
BY JOHN COTTON DANA
Denver has historic background. Behind its own brief chronicles we note the
outline of the story, full of the good work of strong men, of the
exploration and civic conquest of the wide country between the Mississippi
River and the Pacific coast. To ask of Denver's beginnings is to go back of
1858 and the hopeful Aurarians by the ford at the mouth of Cherry Creek, to
government explorations, California gold seekers, Mormon emigrants,
trappers and traders, and Spanish pioneers.
The incidents which lead up to Denver's origin took place here and there
in a great mid-continental area so vast as to make those incidents seem at
first sight isolated, unrelated to one another. But there is a simplicity
of plan in that great country which, taken with the gold of the west coast
and the migrant spirit of the early settlers of the Mississippi Valley,
makes the early ventures across the plains seem natural enough and binds
them to one another. Given the country and the factors mentioned, and a
great central city, at once a focus and distributing point for all that lay
across the plains, the Denver of to-day, was foreordained.
[Illustration Sources of Territorial Acquisition of Colorado.]
Westward of the Mississippi lie six hundred miles of plains, fertile and
attractive on their eastern edge, a desert waste beyond, ending abruptly
in rocky mountains. The mountains, dropping here and there into high and
barren tablelands, roll on a thousand miles to the Pacific. From the
Canadian to the Mexican boundary, plains and mountains thus dispose
themselves and make the arena for the drama of the Anglo-Saxon conquest
of the new West,--a conquest of a not too unwilling nature by energetic
and efficient men. The scene was remote; the land, generous when once
subdued, was repellent if not hostile in its aspect, and added to the
barrier of a desert waste upon its border the deterrents and terrors of
the unknown. The Indians who claimed the soil--chiefly Arapahoes and
their allies near Denver, and their hereditary foes, the Utes, in the
mountains--did all in their power to make a seemingly inhospitable
nature yet more inhospitable. They were never large in number. They were
foredoomed to defeat. Their presence in this vast area added more of
romance than of difficulty and danger to the coming of the white man.
Some of their travel-worn paths among the mountains, like the old Navajo
trail of Southwest Colorado, may still be traced, can still arouse
sympathetic interest in a people for whom the modern man could not wait,
and despised as laggard. From Aztec Springs, across Lost Cañon, over the
Dolores River near its big bend, out upon Dolores Plateau to
Narraguinnep Spring and the borders of Disappointment Valley, and then
on and on again, so runs the old Navajo trail; here a single foot-path
up the cañon side, there deep triple and quadruple ruts worn by men,
women, horses, and dragging teepee poles. With no signs of permanent
habitation on its way, out of wild nature it comes, into wild nature it
goes; significant of the passing of the people who made it and of the
petty trace they left on the world about them.