see a few buffalo that had strayed away. We went farther west and got
two or three and then went into camp on the Little Blue. We always left
a guard at camp and all of the fun came when Boss Gilmore and I were on
guard so we missed it. The others rounded up and killed about twenty
buffalo. One fell over the bluff into the river and it fell to our lot
to get it out and skin it, but by the time we got it out the meat had
spoiled. The water there was so full of alkali that we could not drink
it and neither could the horses, so we started back, struck the freight
road and followed it until we came to Deep Well ranch on the Platte
bottom. We had driven without stopping from ten o'clock in the forenoon
till two o'clock in the morning. We lay down and slept then, but I was
awakened early by chickens crowing. I roused the others of our party and
we went in search of something to eat. It had been eight days since we
had had any bread and I was never so bread-hungry as then. We came to
the Martin home about three miles west of Grand Island and although we
could not buy bread, the girls baked biscuits for us and I ate eleven
biscuits. That was the home of the two Martin boys who were pinned
together by an arrow that the Indians shot through both of them while
riding on one pony.
"That morning I saw the first construction train that came into Grand
Island over the Union Pacific railroad. If I remember correctly it was
in November, 1867.
"We took home with us five wagonloads of buffalo meat. I did not keep
any of the hides because I could not get them tanned. Mr. Gilmore got
Indian women to tan a hide for him by giving them sugar and flour. They
would keep asking for it and finally got all that was coming to them
before the hide was done, so they quit tanning, and Mr. Gilmore had to
keep baiting them by giving them more sugar and flour in order to get it
done."
Mr. and Mrs. Dixon have eight children, all living. They still own the
original homestead that was their home for so many years.
PIONEERING IN FILLMORE COUNTY
BY JOHN R. MCCASHLAND
In the fall of 1870, with Mrs. McCashland and two children, Addie and
Sammy, I left Livingston county, Illinois, and drove to Fillmore county,
Nebraska. We started with two wagons and teams. I had three good horses
and one old plug. I drove one team and had a man drive the other until I
became indignant because he abused the horses and let him go. Mrs.
McCashland drove the second team the rest of the way.
A family of neighbors, Thomas Roe's, were going west at the same time,
so we were together throughout the journey until we got lost in the
western part of Iowa. The road forked and we were so far behind we did
not see which way Roe turned and so went the other way. It rained that
night and a dog ate our supplies so we were forced to procure food from
a settler. We found the Roe family the next evening just before we
crossed the Missouri river, October 15, 1870.
East of Lincoln we met a prairie schooner and team of oxen. An old lady
came ahead and said to us, "Go back, good friends, go back!" When
questioned about how long she had lived here, she said, "I've wintered
here and I've summered here, and God knows I've been here long enough."
When Mrs. McCashland saw the first dugout that she had ever seen, she
cried. It did not seem that she could bear to live in a place like that.
It looked like merely a hole in the ground.
We finally reached the settlement in Fillmore county and lived in a
dugout with two other families until I could build a dugout that we
could live in through the winter. That done, I picked out my claim and
went to Lincoln to file on it and bought lumber for a door and for
window frames.
I looked the claim over, chose the site for buildings, and when home
drew the plans of where I wanted the house, stable, well, etc., on the
dirt hearth for Mrs. McCashland to see. She felt so bad because she had
to live in such a place that I gave it up and went to the West Blue
river, which was near, felled trees, and with the help of other
settlers hewed them into logs and erected a log house on the homestead.
While living in the dugout Indian women visited Mrs. McCashland and
wanted to trade her a papoose for her quilts. When she refused, they
wanted her to give them the quilts.
I had just forty-two dollars when we reached Fillmore county, and to
look back now one would hardly think it possible to live as long as we
did on forty-two dollars. There were times that we had nothing but meal
to eat and many days we sent the children to school with only bread for
lunch.
I was a civil war veteran, which fact entitled me to a homestead of one
hundred and sixty acres. I still own that homestead, which is farmed by
my son. After visiting in the East a few years ago I decided that I
would not trade my quarter section in Fillmore county for several times
that much eastern land.
FILLMORE COUNTY IN THE SEVENTIES
BY WILLIAM SPADE
We came to Nebraska in October of 1870 by wagon and wintered a mile east
of what now is the Red Lion mill. We made several trips to Lincoln
during the fall and winter and one to Nebraska City, where brother Dan
and I shucked corn for a farmer for a dollar a day with team.
I moved on the William Bussard claim, later the Elof Lindgren farm, in
March, 1871, and raised a crop, then moved on our homestead in section
24, town 8, range 3 west. We built part dugout and part sodup for a
house and slept in it the first night with only the blue sky for a roof.
Then we put on poles, brush, hay, dirt, and sod for a roof. This was in
October, and we lived in this dugout until 1874, then built a sod house.
In April, 1873, we had a three days' snow storm called a blizzard. In
the spring of 1871 I attended the election for the organization of the
county of Fillmore. I followed farming as an occupation and in the fall
of 1872 William Howell and I bought a threshing machine, which we ran
for four seasons. Some of the accounts are still due and unpaid. Our
lodging place generally was the straw stack or under the machine and our
teams were tied to a wagon, but the meals we got were good. Aside from
farming and threshing I put in some of the time at carpentry, walking
sometimes six miles back and forth, night and morning.
In July or August, 1874, we had a visit from the grasshoppers, the like
of which had never been seen before nor since. They came in black clouds
and dropped down by the bushel and ate every green thing on earth and
some things in the earth. We had visits from the Indians too but they
mostly wanted "hogy" meat or something to fill their empty stomachs.
Well, I said we built a sodup of two rooms with a board floor and three
windows and two doors, plastered with Nebraska mud. We thought it a
palace, for some time, and were comfortable.
In June, 1877, I took a foolish notion to make a fortune and in company
with ten others, supplied with six months' provisions, started for the
Black Hills. We drove ox teams and were nearly all summer on the road;
at least we did not reach the mining places till August. In the meantime
the water had played out in the placer mining district so there was
"nothing doing." We prospected for quartz but that did not pan out
satisfactorily, so we traded our grub that we did not need for gold dust
and returned to our homes no richer than when we left. However, we had
all of the fresh venison we could use both coming and going, besides
seeing a good many Indians and lots of wild country that now is mostly
settled up.
EARLY DAYS IN NEBRASKA
BY J. A. CARPENTER
I came to Gage county, Nebraska, in the fall of 1865, and homesteaded
160 acres of land, four miles from the village of Beatrice, in the Blue
River valley. I built a log house 12x14 feet with one door and two
windows. The floor was made of native lumber in the rough, that we had
sawed at a mill operated by water power.
With my little family I settled down to make my fortune. Though drouth
and grasshoppers made it discouraging at times, we managed to live on
what little we raised, supplemented by wild game--that was plentiful.
Wild turkeys and prairie chickens could be had by going a short distance
and further west there were plenty of buffalo and antelope.
Our first mail was carried from Nebraska City on horseback. The first
paper published in Gage county was in 1867 and was called the _Blue
Valley Record_. In 1872 a postoffice was established in the settlement
where we lived, which was an improvement over going four miles for mail.
For the first schoolhouse built in the district where I lived I helped
haul the lumber from Brownville, Nebraska, on the Missouri river,
sixty-five miles from the village of Beatrice. The first few crops of
wheat we raised were hauled to Nebraska City, as there was no market at
home for it. On the return trip we hauled merchandise for the
settlement. Every fall as long as wild game was near us we would spend a
week or two hunting; to lay in our winter supply of meat. I remember
when I came through where the city of Superior now is, first in 1866 and
again in 1867, nothing was to be seen but buffalo grass and a few large
cottonwood trees. I killed a buffalo near the present town of Hardy.
We have lived in Nebraska continuously since 1865 and it is hard to
believe the progress that it has made in these few years.
REMINISCENCES OF GAGE COUNTY
BY ALBERT L. GREEN
The writer has in his possession an old map of the North American
continent published in London in 1796, twelve years after the close of
the American Revolution, whereon the region now comprising the state of
Nebraska is shown as a part of Quivera; that supposed kingdom of
fabulous riches in quest of which Coronado pursued his tedious
wanderings more than three hundred years ago. At the time this map was
published the French had visited Indian tribes as far west as the
Missouri, and it must have been from French and Spanish sources that the
geographer and map-maker gathered the information that enabled him to
compile that part of his map covering the vast unknown regions of the
west. Guess-work and supposition resulted in elongations and
abbreviations of territory and rivers that made it possible for him to
show our own Blue river as emptying into the Gulf of California, and the
great kingdoms of Quivera and Teguayo as extending from the Missouri
river to the Pacific coast. The greater part of what is now Mexico is
shown as "New Biscay" and "New Navarre," while Mexico or "New Spain" is
crowded down towards Central America. The existence of the Rocky
Mountains, at the time this map was made, was unknown; and the whole
region covered by them is shown as a vast plain. While spending leisure
hours among some rare old books in the library of the Union League of
Philadelphia, I came across the chronicles of Coronado's wanderings and
adventures, as detailed by his monkish chaplain and preserved in the
Spanish archives. A careful perusal of these fully convinced me that the
route traversed was through eastern Nebraska as far northward as the
present site of Lincoln, and possibly as far as the Platte. The great
salt marsh was referred to, and the particulars of a disastrous
encounter with the warlike Otoes are given. Mention is made of the
Missouri nation and its bold warriors, as well as of other tribes whose
habitat and hunting grounds were the plains or prairies of eastern
Nebraska. In prehistoric times the Indian trails led along the level
river bottoms where both wood and water could be obtained and where game
was usually most abundant, and also in the direction of salt springs or
licks where salt might be obtainable and the larger kinds of game be
more plentiful. At the time of its settlement by white people the bottom
lands of the Blue were threaded by many deeply worn trails that had
evidently been traveled for centuries and a careful consideration of
happenings, as recorded by the monkish chronicler, and the fact I have
just stated in regard to the prehistoric routes of travel, forces the
conclusion that Coronado's weary cavalcade must undoubtedly have
followed the course of the Blue river to a point where the well worn
trail diverged towards the great salt basin. Possibly the party may have
encamped on the site of Beatrice and there can be little doubt that one
of the Indian cities mentioned by the faithful monkish historian,
occupied the present site of Blue Springs, where evidences of an ancient
Indian town can still be seen, and the outlines of ancient
fortifications be traced. Fragments of Indian pottery and stone knives
and implements, of both the paleolithic and the neolithic ages, are
frequently turned up by the plowshare in that vicinity, all indicating a
long established occupancy that must have continued for centuries. As
late as the early part of the last century the Pawnees occupied the
site; and when the writer as United States government agent took charge
of the Otoes and Missouris, in the summer of 1869, there were still old
warriors living who remembered hearing their fathers tell of deeds of
bloody warfare done in this very vicinity, and who pointed out to the
writer the very spot, in a deep draw or ravine on the prairie a few
miles east of Blue Springs, where a war party of thirty Otoes met a
well-deserved, but terrible death. At the time of this occurrence the
Otoes were living at the mouth of the Nemaha and were on very bad terms
with the Pawnees, many of whose scalps the writer has seen adorning Otoe
medicine bags or hanging in their wigwams. The Pawnees had started on a
buffalo hunt, leaving at home only the old and decrepit and a few
children, and the Otoes, knowing that the defenders of the village had
started on the hunt, made an attack at daybreak the next morning,
murdering and scalping old and young alike and after loading themselves
with plunder, hastened on their homeward trip. Unfortunately for the
Otoes the Pawnee hunters had encamped only eight miles up Indian creek
and one of them that morning had returned to the village on some errand
and arrived just in time to discover what was going on. The Otoes
wounded him severely, but he succeeded in escaping to the Pawnee camp
and giving the alarm. The enraged Pawnee warriors, mounted on their
freshest and fastest ponies, were not long in reaching the village, nor
were they long in discovering the trail of the Otoe war party, which
they followed until they overtook it at the place pointed out to the
writer. Here a fierce battle took place which resulted in the complete
extermination of the Otoe party; the tall slough grass, in which they
took shelter, having been set on fire, the wounded all perished in the
conflagration. This is probably one of the most tragic incidents of
which we have any knowledge as having happened within the limits of Gage
county.
The first store established within the county was located in a log house
on Plum creek near the present site of the village of Liberty. It was
established, primarily as an Indian trading place, by a Mr. MacDonald,
of St. Joseph, Missouri, but was under the management of Mrs. Palmer,
who with her husband, David, were the first white settlers within the
limits of the county, having arrived in 1857 a few weeks prior to the
coming of the founders of Beatrice. David was drowned a few years ago
while bathing in the Blue. The store on Plum creek, on one occasion, was
raided by a party of Pawnees who, loaded with plunder, were pursued by a
large party of Otoes, who overtook them on the Little Blue some distance
above the present site of Fairbury, and killed them all. The site of
this battle was pointed out to the writer by the Otoes while
accompanying them on a buffalo hunt in 1870. The skulls and bones of the
slain were still in evidence at that time, being concealed in the dense
thicket in which the battle had taken place.
About the year 1868 a war party of Osages made a raid on the aboriginal
inhabitants of the county and murdered and scalped several squaws who
were chopping wood near the Blue. The trail of the Osages was followed,
by a war party of Otoes, to the reservation of the former and
satisfaction exacted in the shape of a gift of forty head of ponies. On
their way back the Otoes concluded that they had settled too cheaply and
feared they might be censured by the kindred of the murdered women.
They halted, and leaving the forty head of ponies under guard, made a
flying raid on the Osage pony herds and succeeded in stealing and
getting safely away with another forty head. In due time, with eighty
head of Osage ponies, they made a triumphal daylight entry into their
home village. If they had been unsuccessful they would have stolen in
one by one during the darkness of the night.
The last Indian war party to traverse the soil of Gage county consisted
of thirty naked and painted Omahas. It transpired that a party of
Kickapoos had raided the pony herds of the Omahas and stolen thirty head
of ponies, and in order to throw suspicion on the Otoes, had cunningly
directed their trail towards the Otoe reservation, passing in the night
as near to the Otoe village as possible without being discovered. The
Otoes at this time were expecting, and trying to guard against, a raid
from the Osages, whom they had great reason to fear, as it was fully
expected that they would exact satisfaction, sooner or later, for that
extra forty head of ponies that the Otoes had stolen. As a protection
from the Osages, the Otoes had constructed a sort of a stockade of poles
tied together with withes and strips of bark, in front of each wigwam,
where they kept their nearly eight hundred head of ponies under careful
watch every night. The Omaha war party stealthily approached under cover
of the darkness and finding sentinels posted and watching, they hid in
the tall weeds and sunflowers as close to the stockades as they could
safely get, until daybreak, when the sleepy sentinels, thinking all
danger over, entered the wigwams for something to eat and a nap, then
emerging from their hiding places the Omahas made quick work of cutting
the lashings that bound the poles and selecting thirty of the best
ponies they could get hold of. The noise of the ponies' hoof-beats, as
the Omahas rode swiftly away, aroused the Otoes, and in a very few
minutes the whole village was in a commotion. Fierce war whoops
resounded; the heralds went about calling the braves into action and
soon there was mounting in hot haste. The writer, awakened by the
tumult, stepped out upon a balcony in front of the agency building and
beheld a sight such as no historian of the county will ever again
record. In the far distance the naked Omahas were riding for their very
lives, while perhaps a hundred or more Otoes were lashing their ponies
in a wild frenzy of pursuit. In the village the greatest commotion
prevailed, the women wailed, the heralds shouted, and the dogs barked;
scores of women stood on the tops of their wigwams shrieking and
gesticulating and the temper of the community closely resembled that of
a nest of hornets when aroused by the rude thrust of a pole. It was
nearly noon when the distant war whoops, announcing the return of the
pursuers, were heard; as they drew near it was apparent that they were
wildly triumphant and were bringing with them the thirty hideously
painted Omahas. The prisoners were delivered to the agent who directed
his police to disarm them, and cause them to be seated on the floor of
the council room where they formed a dejected looking group with their
naked bodies and shaved and vermillion painted heads. It was then that
their leader explained that their seizure of ponies was honestly
intended as a reprisal for ponies which they had lost. Old Medicine
Horse, an Otoe chief, assured them that his braves would have killed
every one of them if the agent had not talked so much about the
wickedness of killing, and it was only their fear of displeasing him
that caused them to take prisoners instead of scalps. After much
speech-making, the agent adjourned the council and suggested that the
Otoes take the Omahas to their wigwams, feed them, and allow them to
depart in peace; and this was done. The only blood shed during the
campaign was in the shooting of one of Elijah Filley's hogs by the
Omahas. The first notification I had of this atrocious and bloody affair
was when Elijah, then quite a young man, came to see me and file a
complaint, bringing with him the blood-stained arrow that had pierced
the vitals of his innocent hog.