Part 21

In the summer of 1874, which in Nebraska history is known as "the grasshopper year," my grandmother, Mrs. William Boone, accompanied by her daughter, Mrs. Mary Hemphill, and granddaughter, Ada Hemphill, came to make us a visit. For their entertainment we drove in a three-seated platform spring wagon or carryall to see the Indians in their village near Genoa. Their lodges were made of earth in a circular form with a long narrow entrance extending out like the handle of a frying pan. As we neared the village we came upon an ordinary looking Indian walking in the road, and to our surprise my father greeted him very cordially and introduced him to us. It was Petalesharo, chief of the Pawnees, but without the feathers and war-paint that I imagined a chief would always wear. He invited us to his lodge and we drove to the entrance, but my grandmother and aunt could not be persuaded to leave the surrey. My cousin, being more venturesome, started in with my father, but had gone only a few steps when she gathered up her skirts and cried, "Oh, look at the fleas! Just see them hop!" and came running back to the rig, assuring us she had seen enough. The Indians must have taken the fleas with them when they moved to Oklahoma, for we seldom see one now.

EARLY DAYS IN POLK COUNTY

BY CALMAR MCCUNE

In the early history of the county, county warrants were thicker than the leaves on the trees (for trees were scarce then), and of money in the pockets of most people there was none. Those were the days when that genial plutocrat, William H. Waters, relieved the necessities of the needy by buying up county warrants for seventy-five cents on the dollar. Don't understand this as a reflection on the benevolent intentions of Mr. Waters, for he paid as high a price as anybody else offered; I mention it only to illustrate the financial condition of the people and the body politic.

Henry Mahan was postmaster and general merchant. The combined postoffice and store which, with a blacksmith shop, constituted the business part of the town of Osceola, was located on the west side of the square. It was a one and one-half story frame and on the second floor was _The Homesteader_ (now the Osceola _Record_). Here H. T. Arnold, W. F. Kimmel, Frank Burgess, the writer, and Stephen Fleharty exercised their gray matter by grinding out of their exuberant and sometimes lurid imaginations original local items and weighty editorials. In those days if a top buggy was seen out on the open, treeless prairie, the entire business population turned out to watch it and soon there were bets as to whether it came from Columbus or Seward, for then there was not a top buggy in Polk county. The first drug store was opened by John Beltzer, a country blacksmith who suddenly blossomed from the anvil into a full-fledged pharmacist. Doctor Stone compounded the important prescriptions for a while.

I need not try to describe the grasshopper raid of 1874 for the old-timers remember it and I could not picture the tragedy so that others could see it. To see the sun's rays dimmed by the flying agents of destruction; to witness the disappearance of every vestige of green vegetation--the result of a year's labor, which was to most of the inhabitants the only resource against actual want, to see this I say, one must live through it. Many of the early settlers were young people newly married, who had left their homes in the East with all their earthly possessions in a covered wagon, or "prairie schooner" as it was called, and making the trip overland, had landed with barely enough money to exist until the first crop was harvested. Added to the loss and privation entailed by the visitation of the winged host was the constant dread that the next season would bring a like scourge.

On Sunday afternoon, April 13, 1873, I left the farm home of James Bell in Valley precinct for Columbus, expecting to take the train there Monday morning for Omaha. The season was well advanced, the treeless prairie being covered with verdure. It was a balmy sunshiny spring day, as nearly ideal as even Nebraska can produce.

As I left the Clother hotel that evening to attend the Congregational church I noticed that the clouds were banking heavily in the northwest. There was a roll of distant thunder, a flash of lightning, and a series of gentle spring showers followed and it was raining when I went to bed at my hotel. Next morning when I looked out of my window I could not see half-way across the street. The wind was blowing a gale, which drove large masses of large, heavy snow-flakes southward. Already where obstructions were met the huge drifts were forming. This continued without cessation of either snow or wind all day Monday and until late Tuesday night. Wednesday about noon the snow plow came, followed by the Monday train, which I boarded for Omaha. As the train neared Fremont I could see the green knolls peeping up through the snow, and at Omaha the snow had disappeared. There they had had mainly rain instead of snow. I may say that the storm area was not over two hundred miles wide with Clarks as about the center, the volume gradually diminishing each way from that point. It should be borne in mind that the farmers raised mainly spring wheat and oats. These grains had been sown several weeks before the storm and were all up, but the storm did not injure them in the least.

On leaving Omaha a few days later I went to Grand Island. At Gardner's Siding, between Columbus and Clarks, a creek passed under the track. This had filled bank high with snow which now melting, formed a lake. The track being bad the train ran so slowly that I had time to count fifty floating carcasses of cattle upon the surface of the water. This was the fate of many thousands of head of stock.

Nobody dared to venture out into that storm for no human being could face it and live. The great flakes driven by a fifty-mile gale would soon plaster shut eyes, nose and mouth--in fact, so swift was the gale that no headway could be made against it.

In those days merchants hauled their goods from Columbus or Seward and all the grain marketed went to the same points. Wheat only was hauled, corn being used for feed or fuel.

A trip to Columbus and return the same day meant something. A start while the stars still twinkled; the mercury ten, twenty, or even thirty degrees below, was not a pleasure trip, to the driver on a load of wheat. But the driver was soon compelled to drop from the seat, and trudge along slapping his hands and arms against his body to keep from freezing. Leaving home at three or four o'clock in the morning he was lucky if he got home again, half frozen and very weary, several hours after dark. Speaking of exposure to wintry blasts, reminds me of a trip on foot I made shortly after my arrival in Polk county. December 24, 1872, I started to walk from the Milsap neighborhood in Hamilton county, several miles west of where Polk now stands, to the home of William Stevens, near the schoolhouse of District No. 5. It was a clear, bitter cold morning, the wind blowing strongly from the northwest, the ground coated with a hard crust of snow. I kept my bearings as best I could, for it should be remembered that there were no roads or landmarks and I was traveling purely by guess. Along about mid-day I stumbled upon a little dugout, somewhere north of where Stromsburg now stands--the first house I had seen. On entering I found a young couple who smiled me a welcome, which was the best they could do, for, as I saw from the inscriptions on a couple of boxes, they were recent arrivals from Sweden. The young lady gave me some coffee and rusks, and I am bound to say that I never tasted better food than that coffee and those rusks. I did not see another house until I reached the bluffs, where, about sunset, I was gladdened by the sight of the Stevens house in the valley, a couple of miles distant. When I finally reached this hospitable home the fingers of both hands were frozen and my nose and ears badly frosted.

In the early days we traveled from point to point by the nearest and most direct route, for while the land was being rapidly taken up, there were no section line roads. Whenever the contour of the land permitted, we angled, being careful to avoid the patches of cultivated land. There were no trees, no fences, and very few buildings, so, on the level prairie, nothing obstructed the view as far as the eye could carry. The sod houses and stables were a godsend, for lumber was very expensive and most of the settlers brought with them lean purses. It required no high-priced, skilled labor to build a "soddy," and properly built they were quite comfortable.

When I grow reminiscent and allow my mind to go back to those pioneer days, the span of time between then and now seems very brief, but when I think longer and compare the _then_ with the _now_, it seems as though that sod house-treeless-ox driving period must have been at least one hundred years ago. It is a far cry from the ox team to the automobile.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

BY MRS. THYRZA REAVIS ROY

In March, 1865, my husband, George Roy, and I started from our home in Avon, Illinois, to Nebraska territory. The railroad extended to St. Joseph, Missouri. There they told us we would have to take a steamboat up the Missouri river to Rulo, forty miles from St. Joseph. We took passage on a small steamboat, but the ice was breaking up and the boat ran only four miles up the river. They said it was too dangerous to go farther so told us we would have to go back or land and get some one to drive us to Rulo, or the Missouri side of the river across from Rulo. We decided to land, and hired a man to drive us across country in an old wagon. It was very cold and when we reached the place where we would have to cross the Missouri, the ice was running in immense blocks. It was sunset, we were forty miles from a house on that side of the river. There was a man on the other side of the river in a small skiff. Mr. Roy waved to him and he crossed and took us in. Every moment it seemed those cakes of ice would crush the little skiff, but the man was an expert dodger and after a perilous ride he let us off at Rulo. By that time it was dark. We went to a roughly boarded up shanty they called a tavern. It snowed that night and the snow beat in on our bed. The next morning we hired a man to take us to Falls City, ten miles from Rulo. Falls City was a hamlet of scarcely three hundred souls. There was a log cabin on the square; one tiny schoolhouse, used for school, Sunday school, and church. As far as the eye could reach, it was virgin prairie.

There was very little rain for two years after we came. All provisions, grain, and lumber were shipped on boats to Rulo. There was only an Indian trail between Rulo and Falls City. Everything was hauled over that trail.

After the drouth came the grasshoppers, and for two years they took all we had. The cattle barely lived grazing in the Nemaha valley. All grain was shipped in from Missouri.

The people had no amusements in the winter. In the summer they had picnics and a Methodist camp-meeting, on the Muddy river north of Falls City.

Over the Nemaha river two and one-half miles southwest of Falls City, on a high hill above the falls from which the town was named, was an Indian village. The Sac and Foxes and Iowa Indians occupied the village. Each spring and fall they went visiting other tribes, or other tribes visited them. They would march through the one street of Falls City with their ponies in single file. The tipi poles were strapped on each side of the ponies and their belongings and presents, for the tribe they were going to visit, piled on the poles. The men, women, and children walked beside the ponies, and the dogs brought up the rear. Sometimes, when the Indians had visitors, they would have a war-dance at night and the white people would go out to view it. Their bright fires, their scouts bringing in the news of hostile Indians in sight, and the hurried preparations to meet them, were quite exciting. The Indians were great beggars, and not very honest. We had to keep things under lock and key. They would walk right into the houses and say "Eat!" The women were all afraid of them and would give them provisions. If there was any food left after they had finished their eating, they would take it away with them.

Their burying-ground was very near the village. They buried their dead with all accoutrements, in a sitting posture in a grave about five feet deep, without covering.

The Indians cultivated small patches of land and raised corn, beans, pumpkins, etc. A man named Fisher now owns the land on which the Indians lived when I reached the country.

The people were very sociable. It was a healthy country, and we had health if very little else. We were young and the hardships did not seem so great as they do in looking backward fifty years.

NOTE--Thyrza Reavis Roy was born August 7, 1834, in Cass county, Illinois, the daughter of Isham Reavis and Mahala Beck Reavis. Her great-grandfather, Isham Reavis, fought in the war of the Revolution. Her grandfather, Charles Reavis, and her own father, Isham Reavis, fought in the war of 1812. She is a real daughter of the war of 1812. She is a member of the U. S. Daughters of 1812, a member of the Deborah Avery Chapter D. A. R. of Lincoln, and a member of the Territorial Pioneers Association of Nebraska. Her husband, George Roy, died at Falls City March 2, 1903.

TWO SEWARD COUNTY CELEBRATIONS

BY MRS. S. C. LANGWORTHY

I recall one reminiscence of my early life in Nebraska which occurred in 1876, when we first located in Seward. We could have gone no farther, even had we wished, as Seward was then the terminus of the Billings line of the Burlington railroad.

We soon learned that a county celebration was to be held on the fourth of July, and I naturally felt a great curiosity to know how a crowd of people would look to whom we had been sending boxes of clothing and bedding in response to appeals from the grasshopper sufferers. My surprise cannot be imagined when I saw people clothed as well as elsewhere and with baskets filled with an abundance of good things for a picnic dinner.

The same pretty grove in which this gathering occurred thirty-nine years ago is now our beautiful city park, where during the summer of 1914 our commercial club gave an old-time barbecue costing the members twelve hundred dollars. They secured the state band and fine speakers, and served a bounteous dinner to about fifteen thousand people. Everything was free to all who came, and a happier crowd can not be imagined. I speak of this because in the years to come it will be a pleasant reminiscence to many who may have been present.

NOTE--Elizabeth C. (Bennett) Langworthy, fourth state regent of the Nebraska Society D. A. R., is a daughter of Jacob and Caroline (Valentine) Bennett. Her paternal grandfather was also Jacob Bennett, a soldier in the Revolutionary war. He was taken prisoner and held in an English ship off the coast of Quebec for some time. Mrs. Langworthy was born in Orleans county, New York, in 1837. The family moved to Wisconsin in 1849, and the daughter finished her education at Hamline University, then located at Red Wing, Minnesota. In 1858 she was married to Stephen C. Langworthy, and in 1876 became a resident of Seward, Nebraska. Mr. Langworthy died March 3, 1904.

Mrs. Langworthy has been active and prominent in club work, and is widely known. She served for five years as a member of the school board at Seward and organized the History and Art Club of Seward of which she was president for several years. She was the first secretary of the State Federation of Woman's Clubs, and was elected president in 1898. Mrs. Langworthy is the mother of six children.

SEWARD COUNTY REMINISCENCES

COMPILED BY MARGARET HOLMES CHAPTER D. A. R.

Seward county shared with other counties all of the privations and experiences of pioneer life, though it seems to have had less trouble with hostile Indians than many localities in the state.

The struggles of pioneer settlers in the same country must necessarily be similar, though of course differing in detail. The first settlers deemed it important to locate on a stream where firewood could be obtained, and they were subject to high waters, prairie fires, constant fear of the Indian, and lack of provisions.

At one time the little band of settlers near the present site of Seward was reduced to one pan of corn, though they were not quite as reduced as their historic Pilgrim forefathers, when a load of provisions arrived that had been storm-bound.

Reminiscences are best at first hand, and the following letters, taken from the _History of Seward County_ by W. W. Cox, recount some of the incidents of early pioneer life by those who really lived it.

Mrs. Sarah F. Anderson writes as follows:

"At the time of the great Indian scare of 1864, my father's family was one of the families which the Nebraska City people had heard were killed. It had been rumored throughout the little settlement that there were bands of hostile Indians approaching, and that they were committing great depredations as they went.

"One Sunday morning my uncle and Thomas Shields started down the river on a scouting expedition. After an all-day search, just at nightfall, they came suddenly upon an Indian camp. The men thought their time had come, but the redskins were equally scared. There was no chance to back out, and they resolved to know whether the Indians were friendly or hostile. As they bravely approached the camp, the Indians began to halloo, 'Heap good Omaha!' The men then concluded to camp over night with them, and they partook of a real Indian supper. The next morning they went home satisfied that there were no hostile Indians in the country.

"A day or two after this, my father (William Imlay) and his brothers were on upper Plum creek haying, when grandfather Imlay became frightened and hastened to our house and said the Indians were coming upon the settlement. He then hurried home to protect his own family. About three o'clock in the afternoon we saw a band of them approaching. They were about where the B. & M. depot now stands. We were living about eighty rods above the present iron bridge. My mother, thinking to escape them, locked the cabin door, and took all the children across the creek to the spring where she kept the milk. To kill time, she commenced churning. Very soon, four Indians (great, big, ugly creatures) came riding up to the spring and told mother that she was wanted over to the house. She said, 'No, I can't go; I am at work.' But they insisted in such a menacing manner that she felt obliged to yield and go. They said, 'Come, come,' in a most determined manner. The children all clinging to her, she started, and those great sneaking braves guarded her by one riding on each side, one before, and one behind. Poor mother and we four children had a slim show to escape. They watched our every movement, step by step. When we reached the cabin, there sat sixteen burly Indians in a circle around the door. When we came up, they all arose and saluted mother, then sat down again. They had a young Indian interpreter. As they thought they had the family all thoroughly frightened, the young Indian began in good shape to tell just what they wanted. They would like to have two cows, two sacks of flour, and some meat. Mother saw that she must guard the provisions with desperation, as they had cost such great effort, having been hauled from the Missouri river. The Indians said, 'The Sioux are coming and will take all away, and we want some.' 'No,' said mother, 'we will take our cattle and provisions and go to Plattsmouth.' 'But,' said the Indian, 'they will be here tonight and you can't get away.' Mother at this point began to be as much angry as frightened. 'I will not give you anything. You are lying to me. If the Sioux were so close, you would all be running yourselves.' At this point another brave, who had been pacing the yard, seeing mother grow so warm, picked up our axe and marched straight up to her and threw it down at her feet. She picked it up and stood it beside her. Mother said afterward that her every hair stood on end, but knowing that Indians respect bravery, she resolved to show no cowardice. We could all see that the whole river bend was swarming with Indians. Mother said with emphasis, 'I now want you to take your Indians and be gone at once.' Then they said, 'You are a brave squaw,' and the old chief motioned to his braves and they marched off to camp. The next day our family all went over to Plum creek and remained until things became settled.

"The following winter father was at Omaha attending the legislature; and I am sure that over a thousand Indians passed our place during the winter. It required pluck to withstand the thievish beggars. Sometimes they would sneak up and peep in at the window. Then others would beg for hours to get into the house.

"A great amount of snow had fallen, and shortly after father's return home, a heavy winter rain inundated all the bottom lands. We all came pretty near being drowned but succeeded in crawling out of the cabin at the rear window at midnight. Our only refuge was a haystack, where we remained several days entirely surrounded by water, with no possible means of escape. Mr. Cox made several attempts to rescue us. First he tried to cross the river in a molasses pan, and narrowly escaped being drowned, as the wind was high and the stream filled with floating ice. The next day he made a raft and tried to cross, but the current was so rapid he could not manage it. It drifted against a tree where the water was ten feet deep, and the jar threw him off his balance, and the upper edge of the raft sank, so that the rapid current caught the raft and turned it on edge against the tree. Mr. Cox caught hold of a limb of the tree and saved himself from drowning. A desperate struggle ensued but he finally kicked and stamped until he got the raft on top of the water again, but it was wrong side up. We then gave up all hopes of getting help until the water subsided. The fourth day, tall trees were chopped by father on one side and by Mr. Cox on the other, and their branches interlocked, and we made our escape to his friendly cabin, where we found a kindly greeting, rest, food, and fire."

The following from the pen of Addison E. Sheldon is recorded in the same _History of Seward County_:

"My recollections of early Seward county life do not go back as far as the author's. They begin with one wind-blown day in September, 1869, when I, a small urchin from Minnesota, crossed the Seward county line near Pleasant Dale on my way with my mother and step-father (R. J. McCall), to the new home on the southeast quarter of section 18, town 9, range 2 east--about three miles southeast of the present Beaver Crossing. Looked back upon now, through all the intervening years, it seems to me there never was an autumn more supremely joyous, a prairie more entrancing, a woodland belt more alluring, a life more captivating than that which welcomed the new boy to the frontier in the beautiful West Blue valley. The upland 'divides' as I remember them were entirely destitute of settlement, and even along the streams, stretches of two, three, and five miles lay between nearest neighbors.