Nebraska Moments, New Edition

Nebraska Moments n e w e d i t i on

Donald R. Hickey Susan A. Wunder John R. Wunder

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln & London

© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ’ Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Hickey, Donald R., 1944– Nebraska moments / Donald R. Hickey, Susan A. Wunder, John R. Wunder.—New ed. p. cm. Includes index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-6039-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-6039-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nebraska—History. 2. Nebraska—History— anecdotes. I. Wunder, Susan A. II. Wunder, John R. III. Title. f666.h595 2007 978.2—dc22 2007019489 Set in Sabon.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii List of Maps x Timeline of Nebraska Moments Preface xv

xi

1. The Villasur Expedition 1 2. Old Bellevue 9 3. The Oregon Trail 15 4. The Kansas-Nebraska Act 23 5. The Pony Express 30 6. Daniel Freeman and Homesteading 37 7. Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor 47 8. The Fight for the Capital 55 9. Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 63 10. The Union Pacific Railroad 73 11. The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson 81 12. The Trial of Standing Bear 92 13. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Wild West Show 102 14. The Great Nebraska Migration 110 15. J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day 121 16. The Blizzard of ’88 129 17. William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest 135 18. The Rise of Omaha 145 19. Charles E. Bessey and the Nebraska National Forest 154 20. Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I 160 21. Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children 171

22. The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors 23. Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) 192 24. Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize 204 25. The Nebraska State Capitol, Great Plains Icon 213 26. Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents 221 27. The Pound Family 234 28. Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance 248 29. George W. Norris and the Unicameral 261 30. The Nebraska Home Front and World War II 271 31. Nebraska’s Visual Feast 280 32. Nebraska’s Scientists 290 33. Offutt Air Force Base 301 34. The Ogallala Aquifer 308 35. Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X 317 36. Becoming Madam Governor 331 37. The University of Nebraska Football Champions 342 38. The Murder of Brandon Teena 358 39. The Kearney Arch 370 Index

vi

Contents

381

182

Illustrations

1. Battle between Villasur Expedition and Pawnees and Otoes, 1720 7 2. Peter Sarpy 12 3. Bellevue, Nebraska, 1858 13 4. Emigrant train crossing the Platte River 18 5. Fort Kearny, 1858 20 6. First page of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 25 7. Pony Express rider 35 8. Daniel Freeman 39 9. Custer County settlers, 1886 44 10. Alvin Saunders 48 11. David Butler 53 12. Thomas B. Cuming 56 13. Omaha, Nebraska, 1863 60 14. Red Cloud 64 15. Fort Laramie, 1884 68 16. Union Pacific construction crew 76 17. Along the early up line 78 18. Mari Sandoz at Crazy Horse display, 1954 82 19. Fort Robinson after 1887 86 20. Crawford, Nebraska, circa 1887 90 21. Standing Bear 95 22. Gen. George Crook 97 23. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody 103 24. Annie Oakley poster 107 25. Sutton, Nebraska, circa 1874 111 26. Belgian immigrants, mid-1880s 119

27. J. Sterling Morton 122 28. Arbor Day commemorative postage stamps, 1932 127 29. Minnie May Freeman and students, 1888 130 30. Blizzard Club reunion meeting in 1967 134 31. William Jennings Bryan 137 32. William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson 142 33. International Exposition, 1898 146 34. Omaha, Nebraska, 1878 149 35. Charles E. Bessey 155 36. Nebraska National Forest, 1940 158 37. Lt. John J. Pershing and cadets 162 38. Western Potash Company plant in Antioch, Nebraska, circa 1918 166 39. Grace and Edith Abbott with Jane Addams 173 40. Fr. Edward Flanagan 177 41. Dr. John W. Thompson 185 42. Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte 188 43. Lutheran church near Hampton, Nebraska 193 44. Ku Klux Klan in Neligh, Nebraska, circa 1928 199 45. Willa Cather 205 46. Willa Cather and fellow students, 1895 209 47. State capitol winning design by Bertram Goodhue 214 48. The Sower being raised atop the capitol, 1930 216 49. Charles W. Bryan with the Roosevelts 224 50. Charles G. Dawes 227 51. Pound family home in 1957 235 52. Louise Pound 238

viii

Illustrations

53. Roscoe Pound 242 54. Lincoln High School, 1909 246 55. Bess Streeter Aldrich 250 56. Mari Sandoz and John G. Neihardt 256 57. First meeting of the Unicameral, 1937 264 58. George W. Norris 267 59. Troops at the North Platte Canteen 273 60. German pows at Fort Robinson, 1944 277 61. Wright Morris 282 62. Aaron Douglas painting, Window Cleaning 287 63. Harold Edgerton apple photograph 292 64. George Beadle 294 65. Loren Eiseley 298 66. Fort Crook, 1905 303 67. Lt. Jarvis J. Offutt 304 68. Offutt Air Force Base, 1963 306 69. Center-pivot irrigation system 313 70. Malcolm X 326 71. Gerald R. Ford and U.S. senator Carl Curtis 328 72. Kay Orr 335 73. Helen Boosalis 337 74. Bob Devaney with coaches 346 75. Tom Osborne with players 352 76. JoAnn Brandon 361 77. John Lotter 365 78. Frank Morrison at the Kearney Arch 371 79. Great Platte River Road Archway 374

Illustrations

ix

Maps

Nebraska Today xxii–xxiii Villasur Expedition, 1720 4 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 27 Pony Express Route 32 Ogallala Aquifer 310

Timeline of Nebraska Moments

1720

Otoes and Pawnees defeat the Villasur Expedition.

1807

Manuel Lisa establishes Fort Lisa, forerunner to Old Bellevue.

1840s

Travel begins on the Oregon Trail.

1854

Nebraska Territory created in the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

1860

First Pony Express ride completed.

1863

Daniel Freeman files the first land claim under the Homestead Act.

1864

Nebraskans hold their first constitutional convention.

1867

Nebraska becomes a state, and Lincoln is officially made the state capital.

1868

The Treaty of Fort Laramie is signed.

1869

The transcontinental railroad is completed.

1870s

Thousands of immigrants settle in Nebraska during the Great Nebraska Migration.

1871

Governor David Butler is impeached and removed from office.

1877

Crazy Horse is murdered at Fort Robinson.

1879

Standing Bear achieves his freedom.

1882

“Buffalo Bill” Cody holds his first Wild West Show in North Platte.

1885

Nebraska state legislature creates Arbor Day as an official holiday.

xii

1888

A great blizzard suddenly strikes the state and imperils many children at school.

1892

Populist Party convention meets in Omaha.

1896

William Jennings Bryan delivers “Cross of Gold” speech.

1898

Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition opens in Omaha.

1900

Robert Henri emerges as leader of twentieth-century art realist portraiture.

1907

The Nebraska National Forest, brainchild of Charles E. Bessey, is created.

1910s

Edith Abbott pioneers work in social science research to help immigrant children.

1917

America enters World War I with Gen. John J. Pershing as commander-in-chief.

1917

Father Flanagan opens Boys Town.

1918

Influenza epidemic strikes Nebraskans.

1920s

Louise, Roscoe, and Olivia Pound pursue sports, folklore, law, and teaching accomplishments.

1921

Grace Abbott becomes director of the Children’s Bureau.

1923

U.S. Supreme Court rules Nebraska must allow teaching of German in schools.

1923

Willa Cather is awarded Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours.

1923

Cornerstone laid for new state capitol building.

1924

Nebraskans Charles Dawes and Charles Bryan run for the U.S. vice presidency.

1925

Bess Streeter Aldrich publishes her first book, The Rim of the Prairie.

1925

Aaron Douglas, the father of modern African American art, joins the Harlem Renaissance.

1932

John G. Neihardt publishes his award-winning biography, Black Elk Speaks.

1934

George W. Norris successfully persuades Nebraskans to adopt the Unicameral legislature.

Timeline

1935

Mari Sandoz publishes her first book, Old Jules.

1937

The first session of the Nebraska Unicameral is held.

1941

The North Platte Canteen opens its doors to welcome America’s young soldiers.

1942

Wright Morris takes pictures of Central City and Norfolk that become a part of his nationally praised photo text, The Home Place.

1946

Harold Edgerton is awarded the Medal of Freedom for his inventions creating strobe lights for nighttime aerial reconnaissance photography in World War II.

1947

Frank Zybach invents the center-pivot irrigation system.

1948

Strategic Air Command located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha.

1950s

Loren Eiseley revolutionizes the study of physical anthropology and evolution.

1958

George Beadle receives Nobel Prize in Medicine.

1965

Native Nebraskan Malcolm X is assassinated.

1970, 1971

Bob Devaney coaches the University of Nebraska to two national football championships.

1974

Gerald Ford is the first Nebraskan to be sworn in as president of the United States.

1986

Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis win their political parties’ gubernatorial primaries, setting up the first ever all-female state governor race in the United States and the election of Nebraska’s first woman governor.

1993

Brandon Teena is murdered near Humboldt.

1994, 1995, 1997

Tom Osborne leads the University of Nebraska to three national football championships.

2000

The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument at Kearney officially opens.

Timeline

xiii

Preface

The first edition of Nebraska Moments: Glimpses of Nebraska’s Past was written by Donald R. Hickey and published in 1992. It was a masterful accomplishment. A full generation of Nebraskans have read excitedly about Don’s vision of the Cornhusker State’s history. This book is as special as the state itself. Not everyone understood Nebraska, Don reminded us. They didn’t take enough time to burrow into its grounded past. He noted in his most very thoughtful introduction that Most people had never set foot in Nebraska and had no desire to do so. Many of those who had visited the state had seen only what is visible from U.S. 30 or Interstate 80. According to Mari Sandoz, most of these people saw Nebraska as “that long flat state that sets between me and any place I want to go.” President John F. Kennedy’s chief aide, Ted Sorensen (himself a native of Lincoln), was less charitable. In an attempt to shock Nebraskans out of their conservative complacency, he told a McCook audience in 1961 that the state was “a place to come from or a place to die.”

Don’s first edition challenged all of that, and we’d like to think this new edition continues the tradition—extolling virtues and exposing flaws while highlighting the past and pointing toward the future. So we offer a sincere thanks to Don Hickey for his fine book and the opportunity to build upon its legacy. In addition, we also wish to mention a number of people who have helped make the new edition possible. First is Elizabeth Demers, former history acquisitions editor of the University of Nebraska Press, who invited us to take on this project. Then there are the numerous friends and colleagues who have read chapter drafts, made substantive suggestions, and generally been both

interested and supportive. This includes the late Sue Rosowski, Harl Dalstrom, George Wolf, Elaine Nelson, Lisa Pollard, Peter Maslowski, Joe Starita, David Wishart, Margaret Jacobs, Andrew Graybill, Ron Hull, Lynn Roper, Jeanne Bishop, all of the most professional staffs at the Nebraska State Historical Society Library and the picture archives of the Lincoln Journal Star, the Nineteenth-Century America group of scholars at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Archives and Special Collections, the Omaha Star, Heather Lundine, Bridget Barry, and Chris Steinke of the University of Nebraska Press, and our daughters Nell C. Wunder and Amanda J. Wunder. We are also most grateful for a research grant from the James Rawley Research Fund of the Department of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. When we began this project, we of course knew Nebraska to be a dynamic place. It has always changed over the years, facilitated by its environment and culture even though its citizens like to think that it mostly remains the same. This characteristic—continuity combined with change—means that there is a certain surface placidity to society while a tension resides directly below. Historical moments then identify the changes that reach the surface and suggest through an event or a person just how significant the alterations to that society have been. Nebraska’s moments reveal a specialness about the state and its peoples. They range from great triumphs—surviving the Oregon and Mormon trails, celebrating Arbor Day, healing the many Nebraskans ill from an early twentieth-century flu epidemic, completing the Union Pacific Railroad, inventing center-pivot irrigation, becoming president, discovering the prelude to dna and receiving a Nobel Prize, and winning five football national championships—to great tragedies—the murders of Crazy Horse, Malcolm X, and Brandon Teena, the lynchings of Will Brown and Juan González, the loss of lives in the Blizzard of ’88, and the destruction of the Villasur Expedition. These moments explore the full range of human emotions. Together they comprise a historical drama of many acts in which the great ecologist Charles Bessey, the great Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, the great humanitarians Grace and Edith Abbott, and the great writer Willa Cather meet. Hear the passion of Standing Bear’s speech at his trial, Father Flanagan’s pleas for Boys Town, and Louise Pound’s purxvi

Preface

suit of knowledge and excellence. Their stages included monuments of which Nebraskans are justifiably proud: the building of their unique state capitol, the Neihardt and Sandoz centers, and the Great Platte River Road Archway. Some of Nebraska’s special moments were political. We relive Red Cloud negotiating the Treaty of Fort Laramie, William Jennings Bryan proposing the Populist platform, George Norris campaigning for the Unicameral, and Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis pioneering for women in state politics. It is a family affair, too: the Pounds are introduced to the La Flesche family; the German Lutherans of Hampton confront the kind citizens of the North Platte Canteen; and the Dannebrog Danes salute the Freeman family, Nebraska’s first homesteaders. Yes, these moments are colorful and engaging, and they set Nebraska apart. This new edition of Nebraska Moments is significantly changed from the first. Although both editions have the same number of chapters, eight new chapters have been added, one from the first edition has been deleted (chapter 39, “Toward the Future”), and many chapters have been merged. The new chapters include chapter 1, “The Villasur Expedition,” that expands Nebraska Moments back in time closer to the beginning of Nebraska’s history; chapter 23, “Meyer v. Nebraska (1923),” that documents one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court cases in constitutional history; and chapter 31, “Nebraska’s Visual Feast,” that considers the artistic contributions of Wright Morris, Aaron Douglas, and Robert Henri. In addition, five new chapters have been added that cover the history of Nebraska since 1992, the publication date of the first edition. Chapters 35–39 recall such moments as Gerald Ford becoming the first native Nebraskan president, the assassination of Malcolm X, the first ever gubernatorial election in the United States between two women—Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis, the University of Nebraska’s five-time national championship football team, the brutal rape and murder of Brandon Teena, and the opening of the Kearney Arch over Interstate 80. Changes to first edition chapters involved combining parts of more than one chapter into a single chapter in the new edition. Chapter 2, “The Oregon Trail,” and chapter 3, “Fort Kearny,” became new chapter 3, “The Oregon Trail”; chapter 6, “Nebraska Statehood,” and chapter 8, “Nebraska’s First Governor,” became new chapter 7, Preface

xvii

“Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor”; chapter 18, “Arbor Day,” and chapter 19, “J. Sterling Morton,” became new chapter 15, “J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day”; chapter 22, “Agrarian Protest,” and chapter 23, “William Jennings Bryan,” became new chapter 17, “William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest”; chapter 24, “General John J. Pershing,” and chapter 26, “World War I,” became new chapter 20, “Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I”; chapter 29, “George W. Norris,” and chapter 30, “The Unicameral,” became new chapter 29, “George W. Norris and the Unicameral”; and chapter 33, “Mari Sandoz,” and chapter 34, “John G. Neihardt,” became new chapter 28, “Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance.” All of the chapters have been rewritten, and a number of them have been expanded and retitled. Those with new titles include chapter 14, “Homesteading,” which in the new edition is chapter 6, “Daniel Freeman and Homesteading”; chapter 9, “Red Cloud,” is new chapter 9, “Red Cloud and the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868”; chapter 10, “Fort Robinson,” is new chapter 11, “The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson”; chapter 12, “Buffalo Bill Cody,” is new chapter 13, “‘Buffalo Bill Cody’ and the Wild West Show”; chapter 15, “Nebraska’s Ethnic Heritage,” is new chapter 14, “The Great Nebraska Migration”; chapter 21, “Nebraska National Forest,” is new chapter 19, “Charles Bessey and the Nebraska National Forest”; chapter 25, “Charles G. Dawes,” is new chapter 26, “Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents”; chapter 27, “Boys Town,” is new chapter 20, “Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children”; chapter 31, “Louise Pound,” is new chapter 27, “The Pound Family”; chapter 35, “Nebraska’s pow Camps,” is new chapter 30, “The Home Front and World War II”; and chapter 37, “Loren Eiseley,” is new chapter 32, “Nebraska’s Scientists.” We have sought to remain faithful to the fundamental goals of the book in making all of the chapter revisions. A true Nebraska moment has been identified and inserted into the beginning of each narrative. Each chapter is brought up to the twenty-first century through brief concluding vignettes. Every chapter includes an emphasis on a particular event or trend that is explained through specific stories of persons and groups. Individuals previously underscored are sometimes highlighted, either through the moment narrative, a revised title of the chapter, or through greater attention to detail. The chapters are arranged in the chronological order of the moments, and to give the reader a general xviii

Preface

sense of time without being heavy-handed, we have created a brief timeline. Many of the original illustrations and maps have been kept, but new illustrations grace the pages of the new chapters and some of the retained chapters. Above all, the primary intent is to keep the liveliness and readability of the first edition and to expand upon it further in the new. It will remain for the reader to determine whether or not we have achieved our goals. § When we were invited to undertake these revisions and re-create a new edition of Nebraska Moments and after Don Hickey and we had all signed our contracts with the University of Nebraska Press, we decided to celebrate with a Chinese dinner. Susan’s fortune cookie amazingly brought forth this message: “Time is not measured by a watch, but by moments.” A truism and a good omen, indeed! Happy reading. Susan A. Wunder and John R. Wunder Lincoln, Nebraska July 2005

Preface

xix

Nebraska Moments

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1. The Villasur Expedition

T

he land that would become Nebraska is a dynamic place. Many peoples have lived in the land of the flat water, Nebraska, an Otoe word that has been adopted to designate the state. Indeed, Otoes themselves were relatively recent immigrants to Nebraska, certainly compared to their indigenous neighbors, the Pawnees. The Otoes arrived in Nebraska around 1700 and resided near the flat water, the Platte River, while Pawnees and their descendants had made Nebraska their homeland as early as 900. It would be the Pawnees and Otoes who together would meet a large Spanish expedition led by the colony of New Mexico’s lieutenant governor, Pedro de Villasur. On August 13, 1720, near where the Loup River intersects with the Platte, these Native Nebraskans defeated the Europeans in a momentous battle that would have profound ramifications for all of Nebraska and North America. No doubt the Otoes were surprised to find these odd interlopers in their vicinity. Siouan-speaking peoples, the Otoes had recently immigrated to the eastern Plains. Their original homelands were near the Great Lakes, but in the sixteenth century, more aggressive neighbors with superior arms forced them westward. By 1700 Otoes had constructed villages on the east bank of the Missouri River in what would become Iowa, and a French explorer and trader—Etienne Veniard, sieur de Bourgmont—recorded visiting a village of Otoes in 1714 on Salt Creek, a tributary of the Platte. Otoes lived near the mouth of the Platte throughout the eighteenth century. A small tribe of several thousand, they welcomed their relatives, the Missouria, who joined them in Nebraska in 1798. Together they constructed joint communities. Otoes found themselves residing close to the Pawnees, a large Caddoanspeaking nation of the central Plains. The Pawnees were divided into

four somewhat autonomous separate bands: the Chaui, Kitkahahki, Pitahawirata, and Skidi. Skidis (or sometimes called Skiri Pawnees) tended to live in their own villages, but the other three bands more often than not lived together. Pawnee villages sometimes held up to two thousand inhabitants. At the height of Pawnee power on the Great Plains during the late eighteenth century, the four bands together constituted as many as twenty thousand. Both Pawnees and Otoes were farmers and hunters of the bison. Pawnees had been farming in Plains valleys for hundreds of years, but the Otoes were new residents and thus relied more on hunting. The two neighbors lived uneasily near each other, as both tribes had reason to be careful in their relationships. Their differences seemed minimal, however, when the Spaniards invaded their land in the summer of 1720. The Spanish had settled in the southern Plains after they conquered Mexico, founding Santa Fe in 1610. Throughout the seventeenth century, Spaniards moved into New Mexico, building missions, presidios (forts), and ranches. Although the Pueblos revolted against the Spanish in 1680, forcing them out of New Mexico, the Spaniards returned to reconquer the Río Grande Valley natives in 1692. Much of the Spanish interest in the southern Plains was due to the fact that other European nations, notably France, were active in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish were anxious to protect their gold and silver mines in Mexico. The Spanish occupied the southwestern borderlands (the present states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) primarily for defensive purposes. Of course, Native inhabitants in New Mexico were not all that happy to be invaded, required to labor for the Spanish, and forced to accept Christianity. Some nations were conquered, such as the Pueblos, but others actively resisted Spanish incursions at the turn of the seventeenth century. When an expedition was formed in 1706 led by Juan de Ulibarrí, the Spanish visited Apaches residing at a large settlement in southeastern Colorado. There the Spanish learned that the French were arming Pawnees. The Pawnees had recently captured Apache women and children and sold them into slavery to the French in New Orleans. Pawnees may have been extracting revenge as they too had been the victims of Apache slave trading. Ulibarrí turned down an Apache invitation to make war on the Pawnees, but he took all this information back to Santa Fe, where it had a significant impact. Governor Antonio 2

The Villasur Expedition

Valverde y Cossío himself then led a major expedition in 1719 into northern New Mexico and Colorado. He heard more rumors about the French, and he saw an Apache who had been wounded by a French gun owned by Kansa Indians. His intelligence recorded that the French had built two large towns and were living with and supplying Pawnees with weapons and supplies. Valverde also reported a preposterous rumor that six hundred French, only seventy hours from Santa Fe, were attacking Spanish Indian allies. The French threat now seemed proven and credible. Fear spread from Santa Fe to Mexico City to Madrid that the French were on the verge of invading the Spanish borderlands, and action was warranted. Although nothing could be further from the ability of the French, who maintained an active fur trade some distance away in the Mississippi Valley and who were just beginning to establish a trading presence in the Missouri Valley, the Spanish nevertheless decided that they needed to act and to know precisely what the French were doing. Governor Valverde, in a fit of self-importance, decided he was more needed in New Mexico, so he ordered his lieutenant governor, Pedro de Villasur, to lead an expedition into the Plains to identify French military strength and, if possible, make alliances with those Indian tribes nearest the French, particularly the Pawnees. Villasur gathered his expedition in June 1720, probably in the plaza of Santa Fe. He took with him forty-five Spaniards. They included forty-two soldiers, the best of the Spanish regiments with state-of-theart long guns and pistols, and three settlers. Sixty unarmed Indians, mostly Pueblos with some Apaches, were assigned to assist, plus one priest, Father Juan Mínguez. The soldiers were experienced and well trained. Many had been on the previous Ulibarrí and Valverde expeditions. Juan de L’Archévèque, listed as a settler, came along as a French interpreter. He had helped kill René-Robert Cavalier, sieur de La Salle on his ill-fated expedition to the mouth of the Mississippi River, and L’Archévèque had expatriated from the French settlements to become a successful merchant in Santa Fe. He brought along ten horses and six other pack animals. José Naranjo, a Pueblo Indian assigned to the Villasur Expedition, had scouted for many Spanish expeditions, including Ulibarrí’s and Valverde’s. He advised Governor Valverde against sending an expedition into the Plains, but the governor ignored his advice. Finally, François Sistaca, a young Pawnee slave of one of the Spanish The Villasur Expedition

3

Villasur Expedition, 1720 (from Spain and the Plains: Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great Plains, Ralph H. Vigil, Frances W. Kaye, and John R. Wunder, eds. [Niwot co: University Press of Colorado, 1994], 92).

captains, was brought along in the hopes he would be able to communicate with the Indians and assist in recognizing the terrain. The expedition departed from Santa Fe by mid-June 1720. Its primary purpose was to gather intelligence on the French and to keep the French from further western penetrations. They took maize, swords, knives, sombreros, and a half wagon load of tobacco as offerings to friendly Indians they might encounter along the way. Upon arriving at El Cuartelejo, a large settlement of Apaches on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado that Spanish expeditions had visited previously, marking as Spain’s northernmost penetration of the Plains to date, Villasur made a decision to move out onto the Plains in a northeasterly direction. There is only one diary from the expedition, that of Corporal Felipe de Tamariz, that has survived, and it does not explain much about the trek from Colorado to Nebraska. Maps that have tried to identify 4

The Villasur Expedition

the trail have suggested either a northwest Kansas route crossing the Republican River into Nebraska and traveling due north to the Platte or a more northerly route through Colorado and then into Nebraska crossing the Platte and following it not far from present-day Ogallala. Both seem plausible routes. Whatever the direction, the parties must have been exhausted and bewildered when they came upon the Platte. At this point Villasur called a council meeting that included ten of his officers and Juan de L’Archévèque. They had spotted tracks of a sizable village on the move. Villasur suggested that they either wait where they were and send someone back to Santa Fe for further instructions, clearly a foolish idea, or push on and look for Pawnees. The council decided to move ahead and cross what the Tamariz diary identifies as a large, wide river, presumably the Platte, which the Spaniards named the Río de Jésus María, and then cross the Loup River, which was designated Río San Lorenzo in honor of the upcoming August 10th festival for the Spanish saint. Crossing the Platte took one and a half days because, as the expedition diary explains, the Spanish had to “ferry the baggage across on ladders and on the back of the ‘savages.’ It was not possible to get it across any other way. The large number of islands in this river make it impossible to use Indian canoes. And because the day was not long enough to transport everything across, the camp was divided by the river the following night.” At this point François Sistaca asserted his supposed expertise. He said he knew the lands very well, “but he became lost and returned to the camp.” Scouts were sent out, but they only found abandoned villages. On August 9 scouts reported identifying an Otoe campground where Indians were signing to other Indians and dancing. Everyone was on edge. They reported a large number of Native Americans, so Villasur decided to send Sistaca to speak to his relatives to tell them of the Spanish desire for friendship. When Villasur wanted to send several soldiers with Sistaca, he refused and persuaded him that it would be better if he went alone. Villasur gave him tobacco to take to the Pawnees. The diarist wrote of Sistaca, “May God and the Blessed Virgin grant him success!” Sistaca crossed the river and did not return. Supposedly a Captain Aguilar, as relayed in the diary, saw Sistaca later from the other side of the river and asked him why he did not return, but Sistaca said he The Villasur Expedition

5

was not allowed to return. Sistaca also stated he did not know if any French were in the camp. It seems likely Sistaca alerted the Otoe village that had been entertaining some Pawnees, and that the Otoes then sent messengers to a large Pawnee village not far away. Meanwhile, Villasur detected danger. He tried to communicate with Indians, but he believed that the French were nearby. When he met with an Indian emissary, he gave him a flag and a letter written in French by L’Archévèque plus some paper, ink, and a quill for a return message. For two days they waited, but they received no response. The next day while three soldiers were bathing in the river, Indians approached them and took one of the Spaniards. At this point Villasur decided to retreat, and he ordered his men to cross back over the Loup River. That night they heard dogs barking and sounds of people crossing the river, but when sentries were sent to investigate they found nothing. At day break the next morning, on August 13, Otoes and Pawnees attacked. Wrote Tamariz, “an ambush of some five hundred enemies fell upon them with firearms, lances, and arrows. The number quickly grew so great that they could not resist longer than to free three of their companions who, badly wounded, had escaped from those in the camp.” It was a devastating defeat for the Spanish. Pedro de Villasur, the scout Naranjo, Juan de L’Archévèque, thirty-two elite Spanish soldiers, and eleven Indians were killed. Father Juan Mínguez either was killed in the battle or perished later after he was captured. Sistaca survived and probably made a deal with the Otoes as he was well acquainted with the customs, treachery, and vulnerabilities of the Spaniards. The Otoes and Pawnees presumably celebrated their victory over the invading Spanish force and continued to reside in their homelands. They would await later invasions of French fur traders, Lakotas and Cheyennes from the north, and the United States from the east. For the Spanish it was a bitter loss. Over one-third of their best soldiers were killed, and New Mexico’s defense was severely weakened. Governor Valverde was held responsible for not leading the expedition and instead sending his lieutenant governor to his death, and the Spaniards continued to believe that the French took part in what they called their “massacre.” This historic turning point on the plains of Nebraska was the subject of reports and likely whispered conversations in Mexico City and Madrid, Paris, and even London. Spain never seriously ventured north of New Mexico again. 6

The Villasur Expedition

1. Mural depicting 1720 battle between the Villasur Expedition and Pawnees and Otoes near the Loup River. Detail from Museum of Nebraska History replica of the Segesser II hide painting. (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

The history of the Villasur Expedition is an amazing story in itself. The only written account of the expedition is the diary kept by Corporal Felipe de Tamariz, who survived the battle but lost the diary in his panic. Afterwards, Otoes found Tamariz’s diary, and they kept it. Somehow the diary made its way to a publisher who printed it in 1921. Following the expedition, Spanish authorities supposedly demanded that Tamariz write a second account of what he could remember, but those writings were also lost. The battle was visually recorded in precise detail on three large buffalo hides presumably painted shortly after the Spanish, Pueblo, and Apache stragglers returned to New Mexico. In 1758 Fr. Philipp von Segesser von Brunegg, a Jesuit priest assigned to Sonora, shipped the paintings to his brother in Switzerland. Through the years the hides moved about several Swiss castles where they were even cut to fit various walls. All but one piece have been identified and recovered and now reside in the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. An exact replica mural of the hide paintings can be found in the Museum of Nebraska History at the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln. Artifacts from the actual confrontation were scattered throughout Nebraska. In 1914 several small brass disks identified as portions of seventeenth-century Spanish armor were discovered near Columbus, Nebraska. Old Spanish coins, a bridle and the crest of a helmet that were Spanish in origin, and a brass chain of Spanish workmanship have all surfaced in the general vicinity of the Loup River. Near Genoa, swimmers in the river periodically retrieve Spanish bullets, shields, knives and swords, shot pouches, and even Spanish guns. The history of the confluence of the Villasur Expedition and the Otoes and Pawnees continues to be revealed.

8

The Villasur Expedition

2. Old Bellevue

B

ellevue, Nebraska’s oldest town, resembled many a frontier community. Located on the western bank of the Missouri River about eight miles north of the Platte River, Bellevue began as a fur-trading post. As an entrepôt for the fur trade and gateway to the West, Bellevue quickly became the most important settlement on the middle Missouri. Once Nebraska Territory opened to settlers, however, Bellevue lost its unique position. Other towns sprang up on the Missouri and Platte, and Bellevue went into eclipse. Legend has it that Bellevue received its name from the Spanish fur trader Manuel Lisa. Born in New Orleans in 1772 to a mother from the oldest Spanish North American settlement, Saint Augustine, and a father from Spain, Lisa emerges in history as a young trader very much at home on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers. Lisa reportedly stopped at the future site of Bellevue around 1805 when he was in the process of looking for an ideal location for a trading base. An entrepreneur of significant ability, Lisa moved easily among the various cultures of the region. Supposedly Lisa followed an old Indian trail to the top of a hill overlooking the Missouri, where he beheld a breathtaking vista. Stunned by this magnificent view, Lisa is said to have exclaimed, “Belle vue!”—what a beautiful site! This story is probably apocryphal because Lisa would have more likely spoken in his native Spanish, or even in Omaha or English. Still, he was conversant in French, the language of the fur trade, so Bellevue’s namesake is quite possibly attributed properly to Manuel Lisa. There is no denying, however, that Bellevue was located in a superb setting and that it was named for the beauty that surrounded it. Lisa frequently reconstituted his business relationships, and the

Missouri Fur Company he organized underwent many changes to meet the bustling fur-trade competition. Throughout his business career, however, Lisa retained one constant—his primary goal to capture the fur trade on the upper Missouri, where, according to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the world’s most bountiful creeks and streams in beavers and otters could be found. Lisa attempted to control this trade by establishing a series of forts from Nebraska north, and his first, Fort Lisa, was located in 1813 near the present town of Fort Calhoun. Manuel Lisa died in 1820, not yet fifty years old, but he had a tremendous impact on the American westward movement. His fur brigades up the Missouri trained many a would-be trapper and trader, including his own Missouri Fur Company successor, Joshua Pilcher. Every bit as ambitious as Lisa and by accounts even wilder and more adventurous, Pilcher authorized construction of a post at Bellevue (in what is today Fontenelle Forest). Described by one contemporary as a “handsome trading House,” this post was ready for occupation by early 1823, at which time Fort Lisa was abandoned and Bellevue, the community, was beginning to take shape. The new fort at Bellevue proved to be ideally located for the fur trade. On the busy Missouri, it lured many a traveling party to stop before it reached other posts further north. Bellevue also sat just across the Platte from a major Otoe and Missouria Indian settlement and was within easy reach of Omaha, Ponca, and Pawnee winter villages. Almost from its beginning, Pilcher’s Missouri Fur Company ran into financial difficulties and stiff competition with another St. Louis firm, an arm of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, that opened a rival trading post a few miles upriver. Although Pilcher acquired a new stock of goods in 1824 for the Bellevue fort, the following year his lack of cash resources required him to establish a new partnership with several other traders, including Lucien Fontenelle. From a well-to-do French family in New Orleans, Fontenelle had run away from home at the age of sixteen, but by 1825 he was a seasoned veteran of the furtrading business. He managed the Bellevue operation. Marriages bound the fur traders at Bellevue to the surrounding Native American communities. Manuel Lisa set the pattern early by taking several wives, including the daughter of an upper Missouri River Indian chief. Lucien Fontenelle likely married Bright Sun (Me-um-ba-ne), the daughter of Omaha chief Big Elk. Their son Logan Fontenelle was born 10

Old Bellevue

at Bellevue in the 1820s. He later served as chief of the Omahas and a treaty negotiations interpreter. Another French fur trader, Joseph La Flesche Sr., married first an Omaha woman and then later Wa-tun-na, a Ponca, who some family members believe was also Omaha. One of Wa-tun-na’s children, Joseph La Flesche Jr. (also known as E-sta-ma-za or Iron Eye), became chief of the Omahas after Logan Fontenelle’s death. Mary (also known as Waoo-Winchatcha or Dream Woman), the daughter of U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Gale and Nicomi, an Omaha-Otoe-Iowa woman, married Joseph La Flesche Jr., and she gave birth to Susette (1854), Francis (1857), Rosalie (1861), Marguerite (1862), and Susan (1885). These unions propagated important future Indian families and provided mixed-blood leadership bridging the various cultures. The Missouri Fur Company based at Bellevue was forced out of business in 1828. Lucien Fontenelle took over the Bellevue post working for the American Fur Company, and he greatly expanded a farm that was connected to it. Visitors to Bellevue often commented on his fine fields and animal stock. According to one traveler, there were “farming establishments and large numbers of cattle and horses, and a horse power[ed] mill for grinding corn.” The abundant harvests at the post enabled Fontenelle to become a major supplier to traders and trappers heading west. In 1832 Fontenelle sold his buildings to John Dougherty, a U.S. Indian agent, for one thousand dollars, and Fontenelle established a new post several hundred yards downstream. The Frenchman himself made periodic trips to the Rocky Mountains collecting furs on behalf of the American Fur Company, and he continued to operate his relocated post until his death in 1840. While trapping in the mountains he came across other famous mountain men, including Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. He also met Peter Sarpy, a young but experienced French fur trader also associated with the American Fur Company. Sarpy, the namesake of Sarpy County, moved to Bellevue in 1833 to take over Fontenelle’s post, and it would be Sarpy who would establish a ferry across the Missouri River. Sarpy’s growing commercial interests and commanding presence soon made him into a most influential person in Bellevue. He hired Joseph La Flesche Sr. to assist him. The U.S. Indian agency that located near Bellevue in 1832 stayed until 1841, when it was moved south. The Indian agent at Bellevue had a host of duties. He was responsible for distributing annuity goods to the Otoes, Missourias, Omahas, and Pawnees and for regulating trade Old Bellevue

11

2. Peter Sarpy (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

with them. This latter task was always difficult whenever liquor was involved. The American Fur Company repeatedly tried to slip whiskey past the agent. Company employees would sometimes hide whiskey on boats headed upriver. On one occasion, flour barrels filled with whiskey were unloaded from a company ship when it docked at Bellevue. After the vessel was inspected, the barrels were secretly reloaded, and the boat headed upstream. Both Lucien Fontenelle and Peter Sarpy were intimately involved with their fur company’s distribution of alcohol as a part of doing business. Alcohol proved devastating to Indian communities at Bellevue and elsewhere. The first missionaries in Bellevue, Moses and Eliza Merrill, arrived shortly after the Indian agency was established. The Merrills, who were Baptists, opened a school and mission in 1833 for Otoe and Missouria children. They received five hundred dollars a year from the government for operating the school, which was located eight miles from Bellevue. Moses Merrill was especially incensed with Peter Sarpy and the whiskey trade and what it was doing to the Indian people of Bellevue. Merrill died in 1840, and the Baptists abandoned the school. In 1845 12

Old Bellevue

3. Bellevue, Nebraska, in 1858 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Presbyterians opened a mission for the Otoes and Missouria around Bellevue and then another further north for Omahas in 1847. By the 1840s Bellevue had developed into a small and yet rather diverse community. The town already had become a thriving port, as virtually everyone heading west via the Missouri River stopped there for supplies. Lewis and Clark had passed by this spot in 1804 before even Manuel Lisa, and so too did other adventurers, such as Stephen H. Long (1819); the artists George Catlin (1832) and Karl Bodmer (1833); and John C. Frémont (1842). The first Mormons traveling to Utah found refreshment in Bellevue in the 1840s. Those travelers who returned from the West welcomed the sight of Bellevue because to them it marked the edge of their frontier. As George Catlin put it, “It was a pleasure to see again in this great wilderness, a civilised habitation.” Nevertheless, conditions in the community remained undeveloped for some time. Periodic outbreaks of smallpox and cholera took a heavy toll on travelers, neighboring Indian settlements, and residents alike. In 1835 a St. Louis newspaper reported, “Cholera prevailed at several posts on the [Missouri] river. Ten died of it at Fontenelle’s post.” Epidemics of smallpox in 1837–38 and cholera in 1849 killed many in the area. Old Bellevue

13

Bellevue got a post office in 1849, and by the early 1850s there were probably fifty people living in the town. Shortly before Nebraska Territory was opened to settlement in 1854, Peter Sarpy and other residents organized the Bellevue Town Company to promote development. They also published Nebraska’s first newspaper, the Bellevue Nebraska Palladium, though its first issues were actually printed in Iowa. In 1855 Bellevue became the first town to incorporate in Nebraska. Since land surveys lagged far behind settlement, the residents in Bellevue organized clubs to protect their claims. According to the bylaws of the Belleview Settlers Club, each member could stake out 320 acres of land, and the club was bound to protect these claims from outsiders. These clubs had no legal standing: they simply offered a crude but effective means of upholding squatters’ rights on unsurveyed federal lands. Sarpy and his friends sought to have Bellevue named the capital when Nebraska became a territory in 1854. The first governor, South Carolinian Francis Burt, lent a sympathetic ear, but he died after only two days in office. His successor, Thomas B. Cuming, established the capital in Omaha, where it remained until it was moved to Lincoln in 1868. The loss of the capital was a severe blow to Bellevue, and other reverses followed. Town residents worked to secure a bridge across the Missouri in hopes of winning the transcontinental railroad, but this prize—like the capital—went to Omaha. Ultimately Bellevue did get a railroad, but it ran along a north-south route (linking the town to Omaha) instead of the more heavily traveled east-west route. Bellevue was originally part of Douglas County, and from the beginning it played second fiddle to Omaha in county politics. Sarpy County was carved out of Douglas County in 1857, and Bellevue served as the first county seat until 1875, when county government was moved by popular vote to the more centrally located town of Papillion. The greatest boon to Bellevue came in the 1890s, when Fort Crook was established on the outskirts of town. This sleepy fort evolved into a bomber factory during World War II. After the war, it became Offutt Air Force Base—longtime home of the Strategic Air Command—and a leading employer in the area. Because of its ties to Offutt and its proximity to Omaha, Bellevue’s population mushroomed from approximately 1,200 in 1940 to 44,382 in the 2000 census, making Bellevue the third-largest city in Nebraska. Old Bellevue may be gone, but the town is rich in history and tradition, and it survives today as a healthy and prosperous community. 14

Old Bellevue

3. The Oregon Trail

F

or almost a century and a half, the Platte River route has been one of the most heavily traveled corridors in the American West. Although the Platte River itself has never been suitable for navigation, its hard, flat-bottom valley lands provide an ideal bed for roads. As one early traveler put it, “It is undoubtedly the best natural road in the world.” Travelers across the Plains have long taken this route. In the 1840s they traversed the Oregon Trail; in the 1870s they rode the Union Pacific Railroad; in the 1920s they drove Highway 30; and today they speed along Interstate 80. The first great byway to funnel people into the West was actually a series of interconnected roads collectively called the California Road, the Overland Trail, the Platte River Road, or, most commonly, the Oregon Trail. The principal legs of this system in Nebraska were initially blazed by Zebulon Pike’s troops in 1806, Stephen H. Long’s exploring expedition in 1819–20, and William Ashley and Alexander Henry’s fur trappers in 1824–25. The Oregon Trail was not heavily used until the mid-1840s, when the first wave of migration carried settlers to the fertile lands of the Oregon Country. A second migration began in 1847 when Mormons, under the leadership of Brigham Young, set out for Utah to build a “desert Zion.” In 1849 numerous prospectors rushed to the gold fields of California, and in 1859 thousands headed to the gold and silver mines of Colorado. In all, probably five hundred thousand people traveled the Oregon Trail through Nebraska between the 1840s and the 1860s. Such was the lure of precious metals that more than half of the travelers were prospectors. Gold and silver acted like magnets, drawing people not only to California and Colorado but also to Nevada, Montana,

and other parts of the interior West. Most of these emigrants saw the Oregon Trail as the road to easy wealth, but very few actually struck it rich. Those with more foresight went west to set up businesses that catered to the needs of the miners. A great many family fortunes were started this way. At times traffic on the trail was so heavy that there was considerable congestion. “It was a grand spectacle,” wrote one emigrant, “when we came, for the first time, in view of the vast emigration, slowly winding its way westward over the broad plain. The country was so level we could see the long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles.” Another traveler recorded, “The road is full of teams. Tonight the camps are thick around us. The dust is dreadful.” For emigrants taking the Oregon Trail, there were several “jumping-off” points, all on or near the Missouri River. They usually departed from Independence or St. Joseph in Missouri, or from one of the smaller towns in between. Later travelers were more likely to start from Nebraska City, Omaha, or Council Bluffs. Roads from all jumpingoff places eventually converged at Fort Kearny in central Nebraska. In 1836 Congress authorized the construction of a string of military posts to protect the western frontier, but the War Department did not take action until 1846, when it ordered Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny to construct a fort near Nebraska City on Table Creek. Within two years, most people using the Oregon Trail crossed the Missouri River farther south, and the War Department, realizing its mistake, ordered the fort abandoned and rebuilt two hundred miles further west. The site, chosen in 1847 by Lieutenant Daniel P. Woodbury, was on the south side of the Platte River near the Oregon Trail, six miles from the present city of Kearney. Colonel Kearny went on to fame in the war between the United States and Mexico while the fort was constructed. Although Lieutenant Woodbury suggested that the post be named Fort Childs in honor of his father-in-law, Gen. Thomas Childs, who also served in the war, the federal government preferred to continue to call the post after Kearny, who had recently died. Contemporaries referred to the post as “New Fort Kearny” or “Fort Kearny on the Platte” to distinguish it from the post abandoned near Nebraska City. New Fort Kearny was of great importance to people traveling on the Oregon Trail. The post commander was authorized to sell food to emigrants at cost and in special cases to give it away. “There were 16

The Oregon Trail

a great many people,” recalled one army officer, “who, through accidents or improvidence ran out of provisions in the wild barren country, and there was a constant sale by the post commissary.” An estimated thirty-five thousand people passed by the fort in 1850, and in the early 1860s as many as five hundred wagons were counted in a single day. Weary travelers could rest at Fort Kearny, but they had to camp outside the military reservation that was set aside for the fort. “We are not allowed too near the fort,” reported a traveler in 1849, “as Uncle Sam fears the emigrants’ animals will steal his grazing.” At Fort Kearny, not only could travelers buy provisions and equipment, they had their horses re-shod and their wagons repaired, sent or received mail, and secured medical assistance. Another two hundred miles farther west, travelers encountered picturesque Nebraska landmarks that indicated they were approaching the western edge of the Plains. The first of these was Ash Hollow, a deep canyon flanked by white cliffs and offering an abundant supply of firewood and water. Next came Courthouse Rock, and shortly thereafter Chimney Rock, a landmark that many people considered the most spectacular on the entire trail. Farther down the road, the clay and sandstone cliffs at Scotts Bluff offered still another scenic view. Many emigrants expressed delight at reaching western Nebraska, not only because it marked the end of the first leg of their journey but also because the vistas were so impressive—especially compared to the flat plains they had just traversed. “Here is some of the most beautiful and picturesque scenery on the whole route,” wrote one traveler. From Scotts Bluff, travelers journeyed through Robideaux Pass or Mitchell Pass and then on to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. Here, at the edge of the Rockies (about 650 miles from Omaha), emigrants could again secure needed supplies and services and rest up before venturing across the mountains. From Fort Laramie west, travelers worked their way to South Pass, where they crossed the Continental Divide. Once on the other side of the mountains, they took the northern route to Oregon or one of the southern routes to Utah, Nevada, or California. The entire trip from the Missouri River to the West Coast covered about two thousand miles. Since most travelers could make only fifteen or twenty miles a day, they could expect to be on the road for about four months. Some people walked, others rode horses or mules, and in later The Oregon Trail

17

4. Emigrant train crossing the Platte River (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

years a few even took the stagecoach, which was the fastest but most expensive way to travel. The vast majority, however, rode in heavily laden covered wagons drawn by oxen or mules or walked alongside. The cost for the average family of four was about six hundred dollars (then equal to one or two years’ wages). Most people went in groups for mutual protection, and the typical wagon train included fifteen to twenty-five wagons. The first action taken by members of a wagon train before they departed was to agree on an Oregon Trail constitution that they used to make and enforce the rules for the trip. In spite of a host of guidebooks that advised against it, many people tried to pack too much into their wagons. As a result, the roadside was littered most commonly with abandoned furniture, household goods, and clothing, and also hardware, tools, food, and livestock. Even pianos and piles of books gave silent evidence of overconfidence or ignorance. The comment of one emigrant who had just passed Ash Hollow was typical: “Very heavy sandy roads,” she reported. “Made up our mind to dispose of everything we can spare to make our freight [weigh] less.” One man was so sure he would not find trees in the Pacific Northwest, 18

The Oregon Trail

he brought very few personal items along with him while he drove a wagon full of evergreen seedlings all the way to Oregon whereupon he surprisingly found large evergreen forests. The journey was not only long and arduous but also dangerous. Accidents of one kind or another often injured or maimed, and disease was common. An estimated five percent of the emigrants died on the trip, and many travelers were sobered by the crude grave sites that dotted virtually every leg of the trail. When J. A. Wilkinson crossed Nebraska in 1859, he entered into his diary, “Saw a new grave marked ‘John Snyder Shot by James Garner [M]ay 14.’” Most emigrants came heavily armed, worried about desperadoes and Indians. “When we set foot on the right bank of the Missouri River,” said one, “we were outside the pale of civil law.” “In a region without law,” wrote another, “are apt to be lawless and troublesome characters.” There were few desperadoes, however, and Indians tended to be peaceful though curious or occasionally interested in trading. Sometimes Native Americans asked for food or extracted a toll to allow passage through their lands. Much of the Oregon Trail east of Fort Kearny ran through traditional Pawnee territory, although the Pawnees gave up their claims south of the Platte River in an 1833 treaty with the United States. Some of the trail further west passed through what Plains tribes called neutral zones, areas where Indians hunted buffalo without concerns about trespassing on someone else’s homelands. There were few Indian attacks in part because of the noise of the Oregon Trail. The heavily armed emigrants shot guns constantly. They never seemed to tire of practicing with their guns, and accidental shootings took a heavy toll. Without the ability to do much for even a minor gunshot wound, many emigrants died because of carelessness. Travelers kept their guns loaded, and the most common accident involved a weapon discharging into a person’s leg or stomach when the gun was pulled from a wagon. Drowning was another common cause of death because it was often necessary to cross swollen rivers, and few people at that time were good swimmers. Even the usually mild Platte could be dangerous. One emigrant who crossed this river at Fort Kearny in 1862 called it “the meanest of rivers—broad, shallow, fishless, snakeful, [with] quicksand bars and muddy water.” The biggest killer on the Oregon Trail in Nebraska was probably The Oregon Trail

19

5. Fort Kearny in 1858 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

disease, especially cholera. Cholera is caused by bacteria that grow in contaminated food and water, and unwary emigrants who acquired bad provisions fell prey to the disease. Epidemics periodically broke out in frontier towns and then among travelers, particularly in the 1850s. A traveler in 1850 asserted that he was “scarcely [ever] out of sight of grave diggers.” That year “the ruthless destroyer” (as cholera was often called) killed twenty-five hundred people between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Fort Laramie. In addition to the dangers, the hard work required of emigrants also made the journey difficult. “They talk about the times that tried men’s souls,” said one woman, “but this was the time [that tried] both men and women’s souls.” Another woman, Esther Belle Hanna, counted in her Oregon Trail diary the number of grave markers she saw each day. It weighed on her immensely. Men, by custom responsible for driving and repairing the wagons and for hunting game, sometimes were able to relax at night. For the women, however, cooking, washing, mending clothes, and caring for children were never-ending tasks that left little time for rest or recreation. In times of hardship or danger, moreover, everyone—regardless of age or sex—had to perform whatever tasks were necessary to make the journey. “The plain fact of the matter is,” complained one woman, “we have no time for sociability.” The trials of the road exhausted everyone’s patience. After a particularly drenching storm, one woman reported, “Everyone [is] cross and used up. It is almost beyond human endurance at such times as these 20

The Oregon Trail

to keep amiable.” Some wagons carried a barrel or case of whiskey to which the men resorted at night. Tempers, already short, would flare, sometimes leading to fights and even forcing the breakup of wagon trains. According to one woman, her fellow travelers caused her “far more unhappiness than all the dangers and difficulties of the way.” Psychologically, travel on the Oregon Trail put tremendous pressures on people. Edwin Bryant recorded in his 1846 diary that “[t]he pugnacious and belligerent propensities of men display themselves on their prairie excursions, for slight causes and provocations. The perpetual vexations and hardships are well calculated to keep the nerves in a state of great irritability.” When Henry Allyn’s wagon train reached the North Platte in 1852, Allyn recorded in his journal that “[s]oon after we drove down to the river we saw a man floating down stream—Schuyler Fowler swam in and brought him to shore.” Allyn noted that the bruises on the man, who wore a heavy gold ring with the initials F. W., indicated that he had been murdered. They buried him and crossed the river. If the Oregon Trail offered danger and hardship, it also offered excitement. Travelers often talked of “seeing the elephant,” which was a metaphor for experiencing the unexpected and unknown. Since no trip was without its marvels, virtually everyone who traveled the Oregon Trail caught a glimpse of the unusual. During a cattle stampede, for example, one emigrant thought she “saw the tracks of the big elephant,” and during a violent storm another said he felt “a brush of the elephant’s tail.” A traveler who saw too much of “the elephant” usually turned around and left the trail. The Oregon Trail carried not only people but also freight. Bullwhackers and muleskinners were hired by the thousands to transport goods for settlers and army posts. Although Plattsmouth and Omaha both did a sizable business in freighting, Nebraska City emerged as the leader in 1858 when it became the headquarters for Russell, Majors, and Waddell, the largest freight firm in the West. The company chose Nebraska City not only because of its favorable location but also because all three partners owned slaves and that city was run by ex-Missourians who supported slavery. Other freighting firms also established offices in Nebraska City, and a local economic boom ensued. In 1858 alone, Russell, Majors, and Waddell spent over three hundred thousand dollars in the city, and the following year 212 steamships deposited goods there for transshipment west. In 1862 the city shipped almost 8 million pounds of goods The Oregon Trail

21

west; in 1864, 23 million pounds; and in 1865, 44 million pounds. By the end of the Civil War, the population of Nebraska City had soared to six thousand and the city had become one of the leading commercial centers on the middle Missouri. Many people who traveled on the Oregon Trail were aware of the historic nature of their trek, and at least two thousand left their impressions in diaries, letters, and memoirs that still survive. Though most of these writers were ordinary people, the Oregon Trail also attracted its share of literary figures. As a young historian, Francis Parkman wrote about his trip west in The Oregon Trail (1849). Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor known for his exhortation “Go West, young man,” took his own advice and described his experiences in An Overland Journey (1860). And Mark Twain, who accompanied his brother to an official post in Nevada, wrote about his adventures with characteristic humor in Roughing It (1872). Those who traveled on the Oregon Trail played a central role in further populating the American West. As one scholar has put it, they welded “a continent together with wagon wheels.” But not everyone who took the trail ended up in the Far West. Some people got off in Nebraska and opened trading posts or stores to serve the needs of other travelers. After the construction of the transcontinental railroad, many of these centers of trade evolved into towns and cities. Today the Oregon-California Trails Association seeks to preserve what is left of the old trail. Although most of the trail in Nebraska has been plowed under, some wagon ruts are still visible, particularly in the western part of the state. In fact, deep ruts can still be seen near Scottsbluff. The Nebraska state quarter features an eroding signature site most pioneers saw as they departed Nebraska on the Oregon Trail— Chimney Rock. The real legacy of the Oregon trail, however, has been even more enduring: today most of Nebraska’s larger towns and cities—Omaha, Fremont, Columbus, Grand Island, Hastings, Kearney, and North Platte—are located along this great corridor of westward expansion.

22

The Oregon Trail

4. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

T

he Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 formally organized Nebraska into a territory and opened it to settlement. The official title of the law, “An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas,” might have been shortened to the “Nebraska-Kansas Act,” but that did not happen. Although this bill, called an organic act because the law authorized the creation of an official territory, was introduced in Congress primarily to promote development of the upper Great Plains and to facilitate the construction of a transcontinental railroad, it instead became inseparably linked to the issue of slavery. As a result, it generated a firestorm of controversy that rocked the nation to its very foundations, created a new political party, and helped bring on the Civil War. The United States acquired the Great Plains from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. This acquisition obtained the heartland of the continent for the price of approximately three cents per square mile. It has been called one of the greatest real estate bargains in world history. The northern portion of the Plains termed “Nebraska” included all or parts of the present-day states of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and, of course, Nebraska. Because trees were scarce and rainfall limited, non-Indians considered the area unfit for habitation. In fact, the region was designated as the “Great American Desert” in many geography textbooks published before the Civil War and immediately thereafter because of an inaccurate government report filed by the Stephen Long Expedition of 1819–20 to the Great Plains. Beginning in the 1820s federal officials foresaw the Plains as one large Indian reservation and as a dumping ground for Native Americans who were removed from their lands in the East. Many tribes were forced to leave their homelands to journey under great hardship to lands west

of the Mississippi River, and this movement caused further disruptions with those Indians already established in Louisiana Purchase lands. By the late 1830s many Native Americans living in the eastern edges of the Great Plains had been weakened by diseases, and Indian titles to much of the land—particularly south of the Platte River—already had been extinguished. The Kansa Indians in 1825, Pawnees in 1833, and Otoe-Missourias in 1830, 1833, and 1836—all made agreements with the United States ceding their land claims south of the Platte in the future state of Nebraska. Although this very large reservation was supposed to be permanent, by the 1840s demands by Americans to open the land to settlement grew to a fever pitch. Pleas came from emigrants and freight carriers who used the Oregon Trail. Only an organized territory, they argued, could offer them the protection and rights they needed. Joining the chorus were voices from the nearby states, especially Missouri and Illinois, where land speculators, town builders, and other entrepreneurs were looking for a chance to make their fortunes. “There is a large portion of our population,” said a Missouri senator in 1853, “who are ready and anxious to abandon their homes to go into this Territory. You cannot restrain them much longer.” Already squatters and speculators were slipping across the Missouri River to stake out claims on the west bank. In 1853 a St. Louis newspaper reported, “The emigration to Nebraska is surprisingly great. Trains of wagons may be seen from day to day advancing upon that Territory.” By 1854 close to a thousand white people had settled in the territory, either with or without government permission. Native Americans and whites in the region (including the group at Bellevue) had even selected would-be delegates to Congress to represent their interests. Stephen A. Douglas, a powerful Democratic senator from Illinois, championed the organization of the territory. Known as the “Little Giant,” Douglas chaired the Senate’s Committee on Territories and advocated the development of the Great Plains in order to bind the growing Gold Rush settlements in California to the settled portions of the East. “The Indian barrier must be removed,” he declared in 1853. “The tide of emigration and civilization must be permitted to roll onward until it reaches through the passes of the mountains, and spreads over the plains, and mingles with the waters of the Pacific.” Douglas was particularly interested in organizing the northern Plains to pave the way for the construction of a transcontinental railroad, 24

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

6. First page of the KansasNebraska Act, 1854 (National Archives and Records Administration).

preferably over a Platte River route. The Illinois senator had important political ties and personal real estate interests in Chicago, and he hoped to make that city the eastern terminus for such a railroad. But many coveted this rich prize. At least five different routes for a transcontinental railroad had political advocates in the 1850s. A southern route probably commanded the most support because it had the advantage of being an all-weather route that passed through some lands already open to settlement. Douglas repeatedly urged the organization of the Nebraska country in Congress, but without success. Southerners had no interest in his plans because they saw nothing to gain from the settlement of a territory that might win the railroad as well as yield additional free states. The Missouri Compromise, adopted in 1820, had prohibited slavery on the northern Plains, and any territories established there would probably enter the Union as free states. Southern slaveholders believed that this would further undermine the South’s already declining position in the Union. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

25

To win southern support for his territorial law, Douglas decided to make concessions on the slavery issue. Accordingly, in early 1854, he introduced a bill that provided for organizing the upper Plains into two territories: Kansas (between the 37th and 40th parallels) and Nebraska (from the 40th parallel to the Canadian frontier). In its final form, the bill also provided for repealing the Missouri Compromise and substituting the doctrine of popular sovereignty. This would allow people living in the new territories to decide for themselves in an election whether or not to permit slavery. Douglas regarded his bill as a great triumph for democracy because it authorized the people—rather than Congress—to decide the fate of slavery in the western territories. Though conceding the repeal of the Missouri Compromise might “raise a hell of a storm,” he was confident that his bill would strengthen the Democratic Party and lay the slavery issue to rest. “We shall pass the Nebraska Bill in both Houses by decisive majorities,” he predicted, “& the party will then be stronger than ever, for it will be united upon principle.” The doctrine of popular sovereignty, he added, “will triumph & impart peace to the country & stability to the Union.” Most southerners recognized that climate and geography would probably defeat slavery in Nebraska and perhaps in Kansas as well, because labor-intensive crops did not thrive in the North. Nevertheless, they regarded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a great moral victory and eagerly endorsed Douglas’s bill. The bill was also backed by the presidential administration of Franklin Pierce, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Generally perceived as a weak leader, he bowed to southern pressure from his cabinet and in Congress. President Pierce made the bill a party issue and freely used his patronage to secure the support of both northern and southern Democrats. The Nebraska bill unleashed a deluge of controversy. “Anti-Nebraska” meetings were held throughout the North, and Douglas was viciously assailed as a traitor to freedom and a lackey of the slave interests. A group of northern Democrats issued a public appeal that bitterly attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Act as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” “a criminal betrayal of precious rights,” and “an atrocious plot” to make Kansas and Nebraska a “dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” The bill proved one of the most fiercely contested measures ever taken 26

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

   


 

   



  

  

 

  



  







 

        



 





 




 

 





 



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1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.

up in Congress. Bitter exchanges and threats of violence punctuated a rancorous debate lasting for months. Through it all, Douglas retained his composure and carefully shepherded the bill through Congress. In the Senate, the dispute reached a climax with Douglas’s own three-hour speech delivered in the middle of the night before packed galleries. In the House, the Little Giant worked tirelessly to line up votes. Finally, the bill passed both houses, and on May 30, 1854, President Franklin Pierce signed it into law. The Illinois senator exaggerated only slightly when he said: “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act was fraught with consequences. It ended the policy of maintaining a permanent Indian reservation on the Plains and doomed any possible peaceful transition for Native Americans. In addition, the bill led to the establishment of a transcontinental railroad over the central route, although construction did not begin for more than a decade. The Kansas-Nebraska Act also returned the slavery issue to center stage in American politics. “It annuls all past compromises with slavThe Kansas-Nebraska Act

27

ery,” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said at the time, “and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it put[s] freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them [to] grapple.” By opening the new territories to slavery on a popular sovereignty basis, the bill precipitated a race between northerners and southerners to win control of Kansas. Violence erupted, and the result was “Bloody Kansas,” which foreshadowed the Civil War. The bill also shattered the existing political party system beyond repair. The Democratic Party suffered such heavy losses in the North that it did not recover its strength for a generation. The other major party, the Whig Party, was so demoralized and divided by the controversy that it began to wither away and splinter. It was soon replaced by a new, northern-based party—the Republican Party—that eventually committed to preventing the further spread of slavery into the nation’s territories. First officially named the Anti Kansas-Nebraska Act Party, the Republicans soon embraced other issues, including passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 and the Pacific Railroad Act authorizing the first transcontinental railroad. In the eyes of many northerners, the Kansas-Nebraska Act thoroughly discredited the doctrine of popular sovereignty, even though (as Douglas himself had predicted) slavery never gained much of a foothold on the northern Plains. The census of 1860 showed only ten slaves in Nebraska, and in 1861 the territorial legislature passed a bill over Democratic governor Samuel Black’s veto that prohibited the institution altogether. Nevertheless, many northerners saw the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a betrayal of a sacred pledge and popular sovereignty as a ruse for spreading slavery into the North. Ever after a fatal pro-slavery taint contaminated the doctrine of popular sovereignty. As for Douglas—the man who had “created” Nebraska—he was reviled throughout the North, and his influence in national politics began to wane. “I could travel from Boston to Chicago,” he later recalled, “by the light of my own [burning] effigy.” Although the Democratic Party nominated Douglas for the presidency in 1860, the party was deeply divided. There were four candidates in the race, and new Republican and former Whig Abraham Lincoln won, even though he received only 40 percent of the popular vote. Despite its momentous consequences, the Kansas-Nebraska Act did 28

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

open the northern Plains to settlement and thus paved the way for the creation of new states. Nebraska Territory, originally almost 352,000 square miles, gradually whittled down to 77,000 square miles and obtained admission to the Union in 1867. Although Nebraska never again stirred such controversy, for a brief time in 1854 its fate became intertwined with that of another issue, one that ultimately plunged the nation into division and chaos.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

29

5. The Pony Express

I

n the early evening of April 3, 1860, an express rider carrying mail sped west from St. Joseph, Missouri. Later that night another express rider left Sacramento, California, heading in the opposite direction. The mail these riders carried was relayed to other riders—forty traveled in each direction—until ten days later it reached its destination, 1,966 miles away. This event marked the birth of the Pony Express, which has been described as “a meteor, blazing through the skies of history.” A blazing meteor or not, the Pony Express has been enshrouded in historical myth and in actuality was a short-lived publicity stunt, lasting a mere nineteen months before bankrupting its owners. Express riding was nothing new. In ancient times Darius the Great had used a courier system in the Persian Empire, and other rulers in antiquity imitated his example. In thirteenth-century China Genghis Khan probably developed the most efficient system. During the era of the American Revolution, skilled riders like Paul Revere had often ridden express, sometimes changing horses along the way. But never before had anyone conceived of a privately financed express system that would carry messages two thousand miles over rugged and dangerous terrain on a regular basis. By the mid-1850s there were almost five hundred thousand people living on the West Coast, and yet the railroad and the telegraph extended only to the Missouri River. In 1857 the federal government issued a six hundred thousand dollar mail contract to John Butterfield to organize a stage line between St. Louis and San Francisco that would take a southern route to avoid the Rockies and bad weather. It took twenty-five days for passengers and mail to be carried by the Butterfield Overland Mail stages en route from Missouri via Texas to reach California; or,

twenty-two days if by sea and a disease-ridden march over the Isthmus of Panama. Westerners demanded faster service, and William H. Russell, an irrepressible Missouri promoter, was determined to accommodate them. He persuaded his partners in Russell, Majors, and Waddell, a firm with extensive freight operations in the central Plains and Colorado and an office in Nebraska City, to underwrite the Pony Express. The plan was to use the Pony Express to show that letters and packages could be delivered quickly and efficiently over the central route year-round. Russell’s partners were rightly skeptical of his scheme, for it was a risky, high-stakes gamble. If the Pony Express proved the viability of the central route, the government would probably award a lucrative mail contract, and the freighting firm would prosper. But if the scheme failed, the company, which was already overloaded with debt, might well be ruined. To operate the Pony Express, Russell’s firm created a subsidiary with an unwieldy name: the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company. The new firm laid out close to one hundred thousand dollars to hire personnel and to buy equipment, provisions, and grain, and the company hired four hundred station-masters and assistants. It also hired eighty riders, who started at fifty dollars a month (twice what many skilled laborers made). In addition, 420 high-grade horses were acquired, some for as much as $175 each. Stations were established every ten or twelve miles—190 in all. The company used stagecoach buildings for many of its stations, especially in Nebraska. Most of the stations were one-room shacks. One of these survives and is now in Gothenburg, where it still provides mail services for tourists. In some cases, however, the stations were more primitive: a hole in the ground with a wooden or sod roof and an adobe chimney. For its riders, the firm advertised for “young, skinny, wiry fellows . . . willing to risk death daily.” Unmarried orphans were preferred. Like overland freighters employed by Russell, Majors, and Waddell, each rider had to take an oath not to drink, swear, or fight with other employees. Each was outfitted with a revolver, a carbine (which was later discarded because of its weight), a horn to announce his arrival (which was rarely needed), and a gaudy red shirt and blue pants to make identification easy. Initially each rider’s run was fifty miles, but this was later increased to seventy-five or even one hundred miles. Mounts were changed at every station. Two minutes were allowed for each exchange, The Pony Express

31

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Pony Express Route. During its existence the route ran through the entire Nebraska Territory, from Rock Creek at the Kansas border to South Pass in modern Wyoming.

but most riders needed only a few seconds. Depending on the weather, the terrain, and the distance, most riders traveled their assigned route in only four to eight hours. The Pony Express operated weekly at first and later semi-weekly. The cost for carrying mail was five dollars per half ounce (on top of government postage)—a charge that was later reduced to two dollars and then one dollar. Letters were wrapped in oiled silk for protection. They were carried in a mochita, a bag with four pouches that was pierced with holes so it fit snugly over the horn and cantle of the saddle. Pony Express riders followed a road on the south side of the Platte River that was part of the Oregon Trail system. There were thirty-seven stations on the Nebraska route, which covered 450 miles. Riders from St. Joseph entered Nebraska at Rock Creek in Gage County. They passed by Hebron, Kearney, Gothenburg, and Fort McPherson, and then rode into the northeastern corner of Colorado to Julesburg to cross the South Platte. They then returned to Nebraska—passing Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scotts Bluff—before they rode into Wyoming. 32

The Pony Express

The work was arduous and treacherous, and the turnover rate among riders was high. Riders tried to avoid Indians who did not want trespassers in their homelands, highwaymen, rugged mountains, burning deserts, wild animals, swollen rivers, and storms of all kinds. One rider was murdered while he was in his saddle, and several others were mortally wounded. At one time or another, almost every rider faced some kind of danger on the trail. Violence for the Pony Express also took other forms. The Rock Creek station manager for Russell, Majors, and Waddell in 1861 owed some money for property he had bought from a settler named David McCanles. McCanles, unarmed, came to the station demanding payment, and the manager greeted him with a deadly shot. “No one seemed to doubt the act was murder,” concluded a historian, “but the local justice of the peace was in the orbit of the company,” and the manager was acquitted. That manager was James Butler Hickok, who went on to serve as a spy in the Civil War, a marshal in the cowtown of Abilene, Kansas, and a scout in the U.S. Army, serving with Custer. He eventually evolved into “Wild Bill” Hickok from the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody. Pony Express riders sometimes had to perform double or even triple duty, and there are many stories of heroic rides. William Campbell once spent twenty-four hours in the saddle, riding 120 miles in central Nebraska. The mercury hovered near zero, and the snow was so deep that he had to look for tall weeds on either side of the trail to determine where it lay. Another rider, Jim Moore, rode 140 miles from the station south of Gothenburg to Julesburg, and then (because a fellow rider had died the day before) he made the return trip with only a ten-minute rest in between. Moore averaged eighteen miles an hour for the entire run and was in the saddle for almost fifteen hours straight. Traveling at such breakneck speed, the riders were a sight to behold. When Mark Twain traveled overland to Nevada in 1861, he had “a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider.” Near Scotts Bluff, he got his wish. He described the scene from his stagecoach in Roughing It (1872): Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. . . . In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, The Pony Express

33

more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!

Although it usually took ten days to get the mail through, Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address was rushed to the West Coast in the record time of seven days and seventeen hours. Throughout the secession crisis, the Pony Express facilitated communication between the U.S. government and officials in California. The Pony Express received a great deal of favorable publicity, especially in the beginning. Newspapers heaped praise on the venture, and politicians discussed it in the cloakrooms of Congress. Russell was extolled as an innovative pioneer who typified American ingenuity. But this praise did not translate into profits. Because of the cost involved, the Pony Express was used mainly by business and government officials. Even the British government occasionally used the service to forward official documents from the Far East to London. Although Russell and his partners sank close to a half million dollars into the Pony Express, they received only ninety-one thousand dollars in return. As the costs steadily mounted, Russell found it increasingly difficult to borrow money to keep the Pony Express and his freight operations afloat. Although the government owed him large sums on his freight contracts, Congress was slow to appropriate the necessary funds. In June 1860 he reported that he was “harried to death about money” and that he “[knew] not where to turn.” In hopes of staving off bankruptcy, Russell “borrowed” some $870,000 in bonds from a friendly government clerk who had access to the Indian Trust Fund, which held unpaid annuities belonging to various Indian tribes. Russell used the bonds as collateral for bank loans, but declining economic conditions prevented him from repaying the loans. When the theft of the bonds was discovered, Russell was indicted for fraud and larceny. Although a sympathetic judge quashed the indictment on technical grounds, Russell’s reputation was ruined, and the Indian Trust Fund never recovered its funds. The collapse of Russell’s credit drove Russell, Majors, and Waddell and its subsidiary into bankruptcy. In fact, employees of the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company were fond of 34

The Pony Express

7. Pony Express rider passing a telegraph construction crew (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

saying that the firm’s well-known initials—cocpp—stood for “clean out of cash and poor pay.” Even though the company never closed its doors, it was eventually sold to a rival. From the beginning the Pony Express was threatened not only by financial problems but also by the construction of telegraph lines and railroad tracks. The first transcontinental telegraph, most of which was strung in Nebraska by Edward Creighton of Omaha, was completed on October 24, 1861. Two days later the Pony Express (which had shortened its route the year before) officially went out of business, although it continued to make sporadic deliveries as late as November. As one rider put it, “The telegraph does in a second what it took eighty young men and hundreds of horses to do.” The Pony Express was in operation from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861. In all, 308 runs were made, covering more than six thousand miles. Some thirty-five thousand letters were carried, two-thirds of them sent east. Apparently Californians were more interested in getting their message (and their gold dust) to the East than vice versa. Even though it was a financial failure, the Pony Express succeeded in proving that mail could be delivered year-round over the central route. When the The Pony Express

35

secession of the slave states deprived the post office of its all-weather route in the South, the government gave Russell the Butterfield Overland Mail contract to carry mail over the central route. Although he received the new contract before he resorted to taking the Indian Trust Fund annuities, the Missouri promoter was so overextended that even a mail contract could not save him. The Pony Express became an important symbol in the westward movement. It illustrated a free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit that was typical of the frontier West, and it showed American determination to overcome time and distance in unifying the country. Moreover, as a publicity stunt, it was an enormous success. Although Russell’s companies went bankrupt and his reputation was ruined, the Pony Express won the fancy of the American people then and even now.

36

The Pony Express

6. Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

T

en minutes after midnight on the evening of January 1, 1863, the U.S. Land Office in Brownville was abuzz. A young man from Illinois who had come to Nebraska alone, one Daniel Freeman, had persuaded the local official to file Freeman’s land claim to be the first such claim under the Homestead Act of 1862. He paid a ten dollar filing fee and a two dollar commission to the land agent, and he received temporary title to 160 acres of prime farmland. Freeman located his homestead a few miles northwest of the settlement of Beatrice in northern Gage County. Young Freeman had the foresight to anticipate that the rolling, rich lands of eastern Nebraska were going to be open to new homesteaders, and he took the initiative. The making of a farm out of a Nebraska homestead took time and hard work. The process was filled with occasional detours and despair and required considerable fortitude in those who wished to gamble on agriculture in the Great Plains. When Nebraska was officially opened for settlement in 1854, there were only a few scattered fur traders, missionaries, government officials, and illegal settlers in the territory attempting to live with Nebraska’s more numerous indigenous peoples. Thirty-six years later, the 1890 federal census revealed the state’s population to be close to one million people. The westward movement had carried a great many people to Nebraska, and what had once been dismissed as a barren desert was very quickly transformed into one of the nation’s leading agricultural states. At first the pattern of non-Indian settlement in Nebraska was urban. Most of the original settlers lived in towns on the west bank of the Missouri River. As late as 1860, less than 14 percent of Nebraska’s twenty-nine thousand people counted in the U.S. Census said they were

farmers, and like practically everyone else in the territory even the farmers were interested in land speculation. In time, however, land-hungry pioneers fanned out from the towns, moving first into the river valleys and then to the prairies and plains beyond. Under the land laws of the 1850s, a settler could pre-empt 160 acres of unsurveyed federal land. Once the land was surveyed and put up for sale, the squatter could acquire title by swearing that there was a dwelling on the land and by paying the minimum appraised value, usually $1.25 an acre. Since settlement ran well ahead of government survey teams, most land in the early years was acquired in this fashion. Squatters always faced a danger from claim-jumpers. According to one student of the subject, “Claim-jumping, like horse stealing, was regarded on the frontier as a crime of the highest order.” To protect their rights, squatters established claim clubs, which were extralegal vigilante groups that threatened anyone who challenged an existing claim. “The clubs were a government unto and for themselves,” said a resident of early Nebraska, “as many a wretched man was able to testify, after daring their wrath.” Members of a club would first warn a claim-jumper off. If this failed they might destroy his property, beat him, throw him into a river, or run him out of the territory. One claim-jumper near Omaha was so stubborn that he was dunked in the Missouri River in the dead of winter. Another who refused to submit even after being hanged by the neck until unconscious was finally starved into submission. Throughout the West there was much fraud in the sale of public lands, and Nebraska was no exception. Squatters had to take an oath that they had no intention of selling the land they had pre-empted at minimum prices, an oath they often violated. Many settlers also violated the spirit of the law that required a dwelling on their land. Some who swore that they had constructed a “twelve by fourteen” house had actually built a structure that measured twelve by fourteen inches. Others met the housing requirement with a portable home. One enterprising Nebraskan who put a small house on wheels made a fortune by renting it for five dollars a day. Even though the land laws were enforced loosely, many settlers had trouble coming up with the money needed to secure final title to their acreage. Those who borrowed money had to pay exorbitant interest rates, sometimes 40 or even 60 percent a year. According to Robert W. Furnas, the governor of Nebraska from 1873 to 1875, some settlers, 38

Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

8. Daniel Freeman, Nebraska’s first homesteader (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

“after struggling for several years and paying hundreds of dollars of interest money, walked off and left their farms to the speculator that had sucked the life blood from [them] for several years in the shape of forty per cent interest.” It was much easier to acquire land after Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. Southerners in Congress had blocked homestead legislation because they felt that it would bind the West too closely with the North and that the extension of slavery was unlikely in much of the area. After the South seceded in 1861, Congress moved rapidly to approve the Homestead Act, and President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, any single adult or head of a household could acquire 160 acres by paying eighteen dollars in fees and commissions and by cultivating or living on the land for five years. This revolutionary legislation applied not only to single and married adult white males but also to unmarried, divorced, and widowed women, Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

39

former slaves, and aliens who intended to become citizens. The process of obtaining title was called “proving up.” Formal legal possession after five years came after payment of a small fee and after two neighbors or friends swore willingly to the truth of the homesteader’s statements about land improvements. The homesteader then received a patent signed with the name of the current president of the United States. A homesteader could also acquire title more quickly if after six months of “commuting” to the claim, the would-be landowner had the ability to pay $1.25 an acre. The Brownville Nebraska Advertiser correctly predicted that the Homestead Act would “start a great tide of emigration for the [W]est and especially Nebraska.” Once farmers acquired land, their work had only just begun. They had to break the sod (a difficult task that the invention of the steel plow greatly facilitated), plant their crops (usually corn because it was so versatile and hardy and so easily marketed), cultivate and harvest their crops, and finally ship their produce to market and hope for a reasonable profit. In all of their labors, farmers needed the assistance of family and community members. The first pioneers settled along the river valleys and next to creeks and streams and thus had ready access to wood and water. Those who came later had to improvise. Most settlers had no qualms about commandeering timber from the public domain or from railroad lands. In fact, the Kearney Journal only half-jokingly advised farmers, “Cut timber whenever you find it, provided, however, that the United States marshal is not waiting.” Since wood for housing construction was scarce, many pioneers built a dugout or sod hut. The main advantage of soddies was that they were cheap. A house of “Nebraska marble” could be built for $13.75 in 1886. Such dwellings were cool in the summer and warm in the winter and resisted fire and windstorms. But they were difficult to keep clean, often served as breeding ground for pests, and sometimes leaked for days after a heavy storm. Daniel Freeman first built a small log cabin on his claim and then constructed some wooden farm buildings. He began corresponding with Agnes Suiter, a young Iowa woman who had been engaged to his brother James, who had died in the Civil War. After Daniel proposed in a letter, Agnes joined him on his claim. They married in 1865 and had eight children. With a large family and farming success, the Freemans 40

Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

eventually built a two-story brick house near the woods on their claim. Another structure built near the Freeman homestead was the Freeman School. The Freeman children and their children attended the school, and both Daniel and Agnes were active in school affairs. In the early years most people had to haul their water from the nearest creek because wells were too expensive to dig. As farmers acquired capital, they were able to sink wells and buy or build windmills to pump water to the surface. Windmills soon became one of the most characteristic features of the terrain in eastern Nebraska. Further west, windmills could be found less frequently and usually near rivers or Sandhills ponds. For fuel, farmers burned buffalo and cow chips, known locally as “prairie coal.” Corncobs and cornstalks were also burned, as was corn itself when the market price was too low. Hay, usually twisted into a bundle known as a “cat,” was another popular fuel, and special stoves were built to burn it. “A large number of hay burners are being used by farmers throughout the country this winter,” reported the Wayne Herald-Tribune in 1885. Although they produced stronger heat than prairie coal, hay burners required constant feeding. Some farmers built sod fences to protect their crops from cattle and other foraging animals, but most preferred hedges. Osage orange was popular because of its thick growth and long thorns. The mature tree could reach twenty or twenty-five feet and made good firewood and fence-post material. The main liability of Osage orange was that it drew precious water and nutrients from the soil. It also had to be carefully cultivated to get it started. “If you neglect your hedge,” wrote one farmer, “it will neglect you.” Daniel Freeman planted and carefully maintained an Osage orange hedgerow, and the remains of it still exist today. After barbed wire was invented in 1873, it spread rapidly across the Plains. “We have had our Iron Age, and our Silver Age, and our Golden Age,” said the Nebraska Farmer in 1879, “and now we, of Nebraska especially, are having our Wire Fence Age. Everybody is either putting up wire fence or is contemplating it.” The main problem with barbed wire was that horses could get tangled up in it, and cattle that had to keep moving in very cold weather often wandered into a fenced corner during winter storms and froze to death. Farmers had to contend with a host of problems in frontier Nebraska. In the 1860s Indians had yet to surrender all of their lands, and they Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

41

resisted homesteaders settling too far into traditional hunting areas. Feuds developed between farmers and ranchers, who competed for scarce resources. In 1872 homesteaders in Butler County permanently closed the Big Blue River Trail by butchering cattle scattered by a storm. In 1878 ranchers lynched two homesteaders in Custer County who had killed a prominent stockman. Six years later ranch hands in the same county destroyed the homes of a number of farmers who had torn down an illegal fence put up by the Brighton Ranch Company. Drought was another danger settlers faced, especially farther west. The worst drought came in 1859–60, when there was little precipitation for seventeen months. Crops were destroyed, creeks and springs dried up, and even hardy prairie grass withered. A series of wet years in the 1870s and 1880s convinced many people that farming increased rainfall. As contemporaries put it, “Rainfall follows the plow.” According to Professor Samuel Aughey, who taught natural science at the relatively new University of Nebraska, cultivated soil acted “like a huge sponge” in the absorption of rain. The water then flowed into springs or evaporated into the air, causing an increase in rainfall. Dry years in the 1890s discredited this theory. Blizzards and floods also posed hazards to homesteaders. The most memorable snowstorms were the Easter Storm of 1873 and the Great Blizzard of 1888, both of which took a heavy toll on human and animal life. Floods often followed hard winters because the melting snow produced overflowing rivers. Many settlers who had built their homes too near a river lived to regret it. The town of Niobrara was flooded so many times that it was moved to higher land in 1881. That same year the entire town of Green Island (opposite Yankton, Dakota Territory) was swept away by the Missouri River, although miraculously no one was killed. Prairie fires were also common, particularly in the fall, when the grass dried out. “Prairie fires are again sweeping across the country,” said the Beatrice Express in 1872, “making their annual havoc with the grain stacks and buildings of careless settlers who have neglected to provide means of safety until too late.” Four people were killed by prairie fires in Cuming County in 1860, and practically the entire western range was burned in 1874. Farmers could best protect their property by burning fireguards around their buildings to prevent prairie fires from coming too close. Prudent travelers usually carried matches 42

Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

so they could burn out a patch of land in the face of an onrushing fire. Most prairie fires moved too quickly to be fought head on. To stop a prairie fire, one had to start a backfire to deprive the main fire of fuel or smother the fire on its sides. Insects were another menace. Waves of grasshoppers periodically swept across the state, most notably in 1874, which was known as “the grasshopper year.” The pests ate almost everything in their path: not only crops and bark from trees but also clothing, bedding, curtains, and even tool handles, woodwork, and furniture. On several occasions the remains of crushed grasshoppers halted trains because tracks became too oily to use. Although hogs and fowls feasted on the insects, some people complained that meat from these animals had an unusual taste. In their bid to conquer nature, homesteaders were greatly aided by the proliferation of farm machinery. The large fields and lack of obstructions (like trees) in the West combined with a general labor shortage promoted the development of mechanized farming. Heavy-duty plows came into general use after the Civil War, as did assorted mowers, planters, cultivators, threshers, harvesters, and binders. Even before the spread of the internal combustion engine in the twentieth century, machinery powered by horses or oxen greatly reduced the human effort needed to work a farm. With the aid of machinery, homesteaders transformed Nebraska. “As the sturdy farmer takes possession of and cultivates the soil,” said the Plum Creek (present-day Lexington) Pioneer in 1883, “the Great American desert moves still further west, and soon we may look for it to entirely disappear.” By 1900 almost sixty-nine thousand people had acquired land in Nebraska under the Homestead Act, the largest number of any state in the Union at that time. Still, many other homesteaders met with disappointment. About 43 percent of those who filed homestead claims in Nebraska failed for one reason or another to secure final title to their land. In the western part of the state, many failed because they could not make a living on only 160 acres. To remedy this problem, Congress adopted other land acts modeled on the Homestead Act that allowed for larger land claims. Homesteaders could acquire additional acreage under the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which allowed people to acquire 160 acres if they planted trees on up to 25 percent of the land. This law was particularly popular in Nebraska, and more than a quarter of the land acquired under the act was in this Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

43

9. Settlers in Custer County in 1886 (courtesy of Solomon D. Butcher Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society).

state. Throughout the West, however, the law was a source of fraud as few settlers planted the trees. Other land options included purchasing railroad lands, military land warrants, and agricultural college script from the land given to states under the Morrill Act of 1862. In 1904 Nebraska congressman Moses Kinkaid of O’Neill succeeded in sponsoring a law that allowed homesteaders in thirty-seven northwestern counties of Nebraska to claim up to 640 acres. Some big ranchers in the region used this law to amass grazing lands, but after several were jailed, such frauds ended. Ultimately, the Kinkaid Act, in the tradition of the Homestead Act, contributed materially to settlement and development in Nebraska. Daniel Freeman died in 1908. He and his family represent the success stories that resulted from the Homestead Act. The Freeman clan prospered on their homestead, where they planted corn, wheat, and oats and orchards of apple and peach trees. Daniel Freeman also cared so much about education for his children and his neighbor’s children that in 1902 in a Nebraska Supreme Court case known as Freeman v. 44

Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

Scheve et al. (the Freeman School board), Freeman won his suit to stop a teacher, Edith Beecher, from using her Bible as a textbook in classes to teach his grandchildren. Nebraska settled the issue of separation of church and state in the public schools many years before the U.S. Supreme Court first began to address it. Today the Freeman homestead is under the management of the National Park Service at the Homestead National Monument. There, the histories of Daniel Freeman, his family, and the Homestead Act, “one of the most revolutionary concepts for distributing public land in American history,” are told. A new high school formed by the merging of two small community school districts in Gage County, Adams and Filley, is now known as Daniel Freeman High. Under the Homestead Act, which lasted from 1862 to its repeal in 1976 with a provision for homesteading in Alaska in effect until 1986, over 270 million acres, or 10 percent of the area of the United States, was claimed and settled. The last homestead was taken by Kenneth Deardorff, who filed a claim on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska and proved up in 1988. It all had started with Daniel Freeman in Nebraska in 1863. Recently, some Nebraska towns have embraced a modern version of the Homestead Act on the local level in order to encourage young home buyers to locate in their towns. Kenesaw, settled in 1871 but in 2004 a town of under nine hundred in Adams County, passed the “Kenesaw Homestead Act” that gave away lots for affordable housing to new residents. The Adams County Bank of Kenesaw bought six acres of farmland and laid out fifteen lots. Within three weeks, twelve of the lots were taken, which meant that these new homesteaders reserved up to fifteen thousand square feet for a five hundred dollar deposit that was returned to them if they started building a house within six months. The land then served as an asset by which its owner could secure a bank loan. Nebraska communities such as Elwood, Loup City, Callaway, Curtis, and Oxford as well as other small towns throughout the Great Plains are seriously thinking of copying Kenesaw’s return to homesteading. This, editorialized the Omaha World-Herald, represented a tapping of “the pioneer spirit.” U.S. senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have also embraced that spirit by introducing The New Homestead Act in each session of Congress since 2001. This bill would extend loans to businesses and homeowners, tax credits, and tuition Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

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reimbursements if a person relocated to a county that has lost at least 10 percent of its residents in the past twenty years. In Nebraska fiftysix out of ninety-three counties would qualify. The New Homestead Act’s purpose is to repopulate the nation’s rural areas and reenergize its economy. It appears that the Homestead Act concept continues to be alive in Nebraska.

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Daniel Freeman and Homesteading

7. Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

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ebraska’s early history with democracy proved an extremely complicated and controversial experience. It some ways it reflected the national crises that had led to the Civil War. Organized in 1854 as Nebraska Territory during an uproar over slavery and the subject of polarized political appointees immediately prior to and during the Civil War, Nebraska’s first state constitution and governor could not avoid the national political spotlight. Nebraska was granted statehood on March 1, 1867, amidst another bitter controversy, this time over the voting rights of African Americans. Meanwhile, Nebraskans approved a flawed constitution and a corrupt governor, and in both cases they were able to fortunately correct their mistakes. During the 1850s Nebraska was dominated politically by Democrats. Democrats in Washington had engineered the organization of the territory, and they awarded choice positions in the territorial government to Democrats. Most of the first settlers moved into southeast Nebraska, and they were Democrats, many with southern roots. Reflecting this character, the territorial legislature named Nebraska’s first counties after prominent Democrats, such as Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Lewis Cass of Michigan, Augustus C. Dodge of Iowa, and Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. The Civil War brought Democratic control of Nebraska to an end. Deep divisions in the national party cost Democrats the presidential election of 1860, and after taking office Abraham Lincoln filled the territorial offices with Republicans. By the end of the war, more northern settlers had come to Nebraska, and Republicans held a small majority in the territory. Although Democrats and Republicans often feuded over the spoils

10. Alvin Saunders, territorial governor 1861–67 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

of office in Nebraska, the question of statehood did not at first divide them. In 1859 both parties came out in favor of immediate statehood, and the following year the territorial legislature authorized a territorywide referendum. The statehood question, however, was overshadowed by others, and it was voted down by the people. Most of the opposition came from Douglas County, where people feared—rightly, as it turned out—that statehood would pave the way for moving the capital from Omaha to a more central location. By the early 1860s statehood had evolved into a political party issue. According to one contemporary, debate on the subject was “ingeniously engineered so to make it appear that purely economic and financial principles were at stake,” but the real issue was politics. The Republicans, confident that they had enough votes to control any state government, earnestly promoted statehood. According to one observer, they were “almost insane on the subject” and were “willing to do almost anything to get Democratic cooperation.” The Democrats, however, refused to cooperate. Although not opposed to statehood in principle, they hoped to delay the process until they had regained control of the territory. “I 48

Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

shall be a [pro] ‘state’ [man],” said one prominent Democrat, “whenever I think . . . that we can elect two Democrats to the Senate.” In early 1864 Republicans in the territorial legislature adopted a resolution asking Congress for authority to organize a state government. Republicans in Washington welcomed this proposal, since statehood would probably mean an increase in Republican strength in Congress. Hence, in April 1864, Congress passed a law directing the territorial governor to summon a convention to draw up a state constitution. In accordance with this mandate, the territory’s Republican governor, Alvin Saunders, ordered the election of delegates to a constitutional convention. The Democrats attacked the proposal, arguing that statehood would put an end to federal subsidies and thus lead to higher taxes. “Our taxes are about as high as we can bear,” the Omaha Nebraskian declared in what is still a familiar refrain today, “and if we come in [to the Union] they must be ten fold higher.” This argument was persuasive. Democrats swept the election, and when the convention met, the delegates voted 35–7 to adjourn without taking any action. Undaunted, Governor Saunders urged the territorial legislature to draw up a constitution. Hoping to drum up support for legislative action, Republicans circulated petitions throughout the territory, but they obtained only six hundred signatures. Nevertheless, leading Republicans, some of whom were not even members of the legislature, met secretly in Omaha to draw up a constitution. According to the Omaha Herald, most of the work was done by “three or four men who locked themselves up in their [hotel] rooms.” The constitution that emerged was a simple document that made little provision for the actual functioning of state government. According to one Democrat, “its chief merit was that it provided a cheap government. . . . Not a single State officer, except the judges, was to receive as much as a hod carrier’s earnings.” The proposed democracy in Nebraska was also restricted to white male participation only. Even though fewer than one hundred African Americans lived in the territory, they were expressly barred by the constitution from voting. Ignoring established procedures, Republicans railroaded the constitution through the territorial legislature. The document was not printed, and no amendments to it were allowed. Very few members even had a chance to read the document, let alone study it. Said one critic: “Every step of progress through the Legislature was marked by Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

49

a haste and intolerance of all investigation.” The whole procedure was “utterly at war with every recognized precedent in the formation of State Government.” After winning approval in the legislature, Republicans submitted the constitution to the people, as required by federal law. Stressing the advantages of statehood, the Republicans argued that joining the Union would attract settlers and investment capital to Nebraska, ensure local control over school lands, and enable Nebraskans to set aside choice lands for public use before they were all taken up by speculators. The result would be greater prosperity and lower taxes for all. The Republicans also stressed the need to have representatives in Congress to look after Nebraska’s special interests, particularly in connection with the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad. This argument carried considerable weight—especially in Omaha—because representatives from Colorado and Kansas were trying to persuade Congress to move the transcontinental railroad farther south. Democrats replied that the real purpose of the statehood movement was not to promote the interests of the people but to create more offices for Republicans. According to J. Sterling Morton, a young, politically ambitious farmer and Democratic newspaper editor from Nebraska City, the statehood proposal was nothing more than “a scheme of office-aspiring politicians.” Democrats continued to hammer away at the tax issue, claiming that statehood would cost everyone money, and they injected the issue of race into the campaign. Even though blacks were prevented from voting by the proposed constitution, Democrats asserted that the document was linked to a Republican plot in Washington to enfranchise ex-slaves in what would become the Fifteenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1870. According to the Omaha Herald, the aim of Republicans was to transform Nebraska into “a [N]egro colony to which plantation [N]egroes may be imported to vote down white men.” Echoing the position of President Andrew Johnson, leading Democrats in the territory adopted a resolution that proclaimed, “This is and shall be a government of white men and for white men.” As was so often the case in frontier elections, the outcome was determined not by those who cast the votes but by those who counted them. By allowing nonresident soldiers at Fort Kearny to vote and by tossing out votes from several Democratic precincts on technical grounds, the Republicans stole the election. The state constitution was approved by a 100-vote margin, 3,938 for to 3,838 against. 50

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At the same time that Nebraskans supposedly approved their constitution, they also elected state officers. The choice of governor proved very contentious. In 1866 Republicans nominated David Butler, successful Pawnee City farmer, merchant, and lawyer. Although he had grown up in a staunchly Democratic Indiana household, he detested slavery and became an active Republican. In 1861 he had been elected to the Nebraska territorial house and in 1863 to the territorial council. Butler’s Democratic opponent in the governor’s race was J. Sterling Morton. The gubernatorial election was not unlike the constitutional referendum. There were heated exchanges, overblown rhetoric, and charges of vote fraud. The Democrats accused the Republicans of favoring racial equality. “Every vote for Butler,” said the Nebraska City News, “is a vote in favor of [N]egro suffrage in Nebraska . . .; a vote against the Democratic ticket is a vote . . . for equality.” The Republicans countered by challenging Morton’s record during the Civil War. According to the Omaha Republican, he had “persistently opposed coercion of the rebel states” and was “the worst copperhead and rebel” in Nebraska Territory. Charges of this sort were often made against Democrats. “Waving the bloody shirt,” as this practice was called, became a common Republican tactic in elections immediately following the Civil War. Like the constitutional vote count, the election for governor was very close, and Butler prevailed by a 109-vote margin, 4,093 to 3,984. Whether the Pawnee City candidate was actually the choice of the people is open to question. The same voter fraud tactics used by the Republicans to pass the constitution were employed to elect Butler. At Rock Bluff precinct in Cass County, election officials took the ballot box with them to lunch a mile away instead of leaving it in sight of the voters throughout election day as the law prescribed. “The box went to dinner, instead of staying at the polls,” said the county clerk, “so the votes are invalid.” The Democrats protested, but in vain. Butler was declared the winner and assumed office in 1867. With Nebraskans having chosen a governor and a constitution, the struggle now shifted to the nation’s capital. In Washington Nebraska’s proposed constitution became very controversial, arriving at a time when Reconstruction was becoming politically explosive. Even though most state constitutions then denied the vote to African Americans, some Radical Republicans in Congress took offense at the Nebraska Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

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provision. By effectively lobbying on Nebraska’s behalf, senator-elect John Thayer managed to deflate this opposition, and in July 1866 both houses passed a bill that admitted Nebraska to the Union. President Johnson, however, was bitterly opposed to the Republicans and determined to prevent them from increasing their strength in Congress. Hence he ignored the bill and killed it with a pocket veto. When Congress reconvened the following December, the statehood bill was again introduced. This time Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts insisted that Nebraska drop its ban on black voting. “You have before you a constitution creating a white man’s government,” he said. “I am against any such government.” Calling the limitation “odious and offensive” and “one of the most disastrous measures that has been introduced into Congress,” Sumner claimed it would “impair the moral efficiency of Congress” and “injure its influence.” Sumner hoped to establish a precedent with Nebraska, one that could be used to force southern states seeking readmission to the Union to grant the franchise to their black citizens. Although Democrats in Congress vigorously opposed this plan, Sumner’s arguments carried the day in both houses. In January 1867, the Senate approved the Edmunds Amendment, named after its sponsor, Senator George Edmunds of Vermont, which stipulated that “within the said state of Nebraska there shall be no abridgement or denial of the exercise of the elective franchise, or of any other right, to any person by reason of race or color.” With this proviso that required subsequent territorial legislative action attached, the statehood bill passed. President Johnson still was against statehood, and the Edmunds Amendment served only to harden his opposition. Asserting that Congress had no right to dictate suffrage requirements to any state, he vetoed the bill. This time, however, Congress overrode his veto by a vote of 30–9 in the Senate and 120–44 in the House. This is the only time in American history that a statehood bill became law over a presidential veto. News of Congress’s action was hurried to Nebraska, and in February 1867, Governor Saunders called the Nebraska territorial legislature into special session to consider the voting requirement. The legislature quickly adopted a bill that extended the franchise to African Nebraskans. A copy of the bill was rushed to Washington, and on March 1, 1867, President Johnson reluctantly issued a proclamation announcing Nebraska’s admission to the Union as the thirty-seventh state. Although Governor Butler could not be “vetoed,” he could be im52

Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

11. David Butler, first governor of Nebraska (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

peached. When the first state legislature convened in 1867, it established a commission to move the capital from Omaha. The commission consisted of the governor, the secretary of state, and the state auditor. In their haste to develop Lincoln, the governor and the other commissioners often ignored the law and lined their pockets. The governor was next accused of exceeding legislative appropriations in his expenditures, speculating illegally in Lincoln lands, and giving valuable government contracts to friends. He supposedly accepted bribes from contractors, lent state money to cronies without security, and gave away the public lands. It was the public lands that led to his downfall. The legislature asked the governor to account for some seventeen thousand dollars that had been collected from the federal government for the sale of school lands but never deposited in the state treasury. Butler insisted he had deposited the money, but when an examination of the books showed this to be untrue, he admitted that he had “borrowed” the money for his own use, putting up several parcels of Pawnee County land as security. It was not until after the charges had surfaced, however, that mortgages for the land had been drawn up. Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

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On March 1, 1871, the Nebraska house voted thirty-three to six to impeach Butler. Pending a decision by the Nebraska senate, Butler was temporarily suspended from office. His friends mounted a campaign to save his career, and many people scheduled to give testimony against him disappeared. According to an Omaha paper, “more than twenty witnesses were bribed, persuaded, or frightened to leave the state.” Lincoln newspapers came to Butler’s defense, calling his enemies “sneaking defamers,” “black-hearted assassins of character,” and “devils in human shape.” Most other papers in the state, however, joined the hue and cry against the governor or maintained a cautious silence. The evidence in the senate trial showing Butler’s wrongdoing was overwhelming, but most of the testimony came from people who had been victimized by his greed. Hence the senate chose to convict him on only one of the charges—the one for which the evidence was strongest. By a vote of nine to three, the senate found Butler guilty of misappropriating school funds. And as punishment, on June 2, 1871, Butler was removed as governor, although he was not barred from holding office in the future. Thereafter the Omaha Herald referred to Butler as the “dead Governor of Nebraska.” Crowed one Democratic paper, “The boldest and most bungling of all of our official highwaymen has at last received a portion of his just desserts.” His trial reportedly cost Butler forty thousand dollars, and the state later seized thirty-four hundred acres of his land as restitution for the misappropriated school funds. In 1891, after one attempt at a political comeback, David Butler, former governor, died of heart failure at the age of sixty-one, a disgraced man. Thus, early democracy in Nebraska was explosive. Controversies over the constitution and impeachment highlighted not only the consequences of the Civil War and a divided electorate but also important issues of racial equality. Through it all, Nebraska emerged with a functioning democracy that later would become a unique model for the nation with its Unicameral, a one-house legislature. These early years as a state included several firsts in American and Nebraska political history. Never before had statehood legislation been vetoed and overridden by an angry Congress. Never before had Congress refused to accept statehood with a discriminatory clause in the state’s constitution preventing African Americans from having the right to vote. And Nebraska impeached and convicted its very first governor, a one-of-a-kind political moment in Nebraska’s past. 54

Nebraska Statehood and Its First Governor

8. The Fight for the Capital

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henever a new territory or state was created in the nineteenth century, there was often fierce competition among local residents to secure the capital. Nebraska was no exception. There the issue divided people along sectional lines, pitting those who lived north of the Platte River against those who lived south of it. Everyone recognized that the capital was a rich prize—that its selection was likely to turn any city into a boomtown. It is no coincidence that Nebraska’s two capitals are today the state’s largest cities. Omaha was the capital from 1855 to 1868, and Lincoln has enjoyed this distinction ever since. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act officially opened the territory to settlement in 1854, speculators, most of whom were from Iowa, began to organize towns on the western side of the Missouri River. Under a federal town-site law designed to encourage settlement, entrepreneurs could plat 320 acres of land for a town and then add to the site by making claims to adjacent quarter sections under other land laws. They all hoped to make their own new “town” the capital of Nebraska and a way station on the proposed transcontinental railroad. This would enable them to sell off their lands at a handsome profit. The chief competitors for the capital were Bellevue, Plattsmouth, Nebraska City, Florence, and Omaha. The oldest town, and probably the one with the best claim, was Bellevue, which dated back to the 1820s, when it had sprung up around a trading post. By 1854 there were about fifty people living in Bellevue. With the creation of Nebraska Territory, local residents began to promote the town in earnest. The Bellevue Nebraska Palladium proclaimed the goal of securing the capital and making Bellevue “the center of commerce, and the half-way house between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”

12. Thomas B. Cuming, secretary and acting governor of Nebraska Territory in 1854 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Omaha was the brainchild of promoters from Council Bluffs, Iowa, who hoped that creating a community across the river would enhance their chances of securing the railroad. Since 1850 William D. Brown had operated a ferry across the river. Three years later he joined with other speculators to stake out claims on the Nebraska side and establish the Council Bluffs and Nebraska Ferry Company. The promoters also established a newspaper, the Omaha Arrow, to push development. A sympathetic Iowa congressman used his influence to secure a postmaster, and thereafter settlers poured into the new city. The first territorial governor was forty-seven-year-old Francis Burt, a former state legislator and newspaper editor from South Carolina. Arriving in Nebraska in October 1854, he died that same month, only two days after taking the oath of office. Evidently he had planned to make Bellevue the temporary capital. According to his son, Armistead Burt, who had accompanied his father to Bellevue, “the governor’s intention was to convene the first legislature at Bellevue. . . . [He said] he intended to choose a place that would, he hoped, be permanently the capital of the state.” 56

The Fight for the Capital

When Burt died, his duties devolved upon the twenty-five-year-old territorial secretary, Thomas B. Cuming, who became acting governor. Cuming had edited a southeastern Iowa newspaper in Keokuk, and he had close ties to people from Council Bluffs. Although “plied, begged, pressed, entreated, assailed and even threatened” by people from almost every town in the territory, he threw his weight behind Omaha. “The Capital,” he wrote a friend, “will be located, if I control it, at Omaha City.” To ensure legislative support for Omaha, Cuming apportioned the territorial assembly to give the counties north of the Platte a majority, even though two-thirds of the people lived south of the river. Furthermore, he gerrymandered Bellevue out of any representation at all. Having thus set the stage, he announced in late 1854 that the first territorial legislature would convene in Omaha. People living in Bellevue and the districts south of the Platte were furious with Cuming’s high-handed tactics. “The government at Washington,” intoned the Nebraska Palladium, “never intended the Capital to be located by the Governor, but by the PEOPLE, the true and only sovereigns. It was for the Governor to confirm the will of the people and not to defeat it.” A convention in Nebraska City adopted a resolution, drawn up by young J. Sterling Morton, branding acting-governor Cuming “an unprincipled knave.” Charges were freely bandied about that Cuming had been bribed by Omaha promoters. The capital, said the Bellevue newspaper, has been “located for the pecuniary and personal benefit of Tom Cuming and his brother bribers.” The Palladium blamed the whole affair on “vile speculators” and asserted that Omaha had no claim to the capital—that it was “a place . . . totally barren of anything, save whisky shops and drunken politicians.” The Palladium was not far from the mark. A member of the first territorial legislature conceded that the city “consisted of less than a dozen buildings, the greater number of which were saloons.” Most members of the first legislature spent as little time as possible in the city, preferring to eat and sleep in Council Bluffs. Nevertheless, the people of Omaha, who probably numbered about a hundred, did their best to ensure that the capital would remain there. In 1854 the Council Bluffs and Nebraska Ferry Company provided the first capitol “without a cost of one single dollar to the government.” The Fight for the Capital

57

This was a two-story brick structure on Ninth Street, between Farnam and Douglas avenues. Because there was no privy on the grounds, the basement was often used, “which in warm weather render[ed] the upper part of the building unfit for use.” In 1858 this building was replaced by an impressive two-story structure with columns and high ceilings that resided at Dodge and Twenty-first streets on the current site of Omaha Central High School. The legislative sessions in Omaha were informal and often chaotic. One observer wrote, “[Each member] legislat[es] for his own personal interest—and the scheming and ‘log rolling’ that is going on would astonish you.” A correspondent for the New York Times commented it was “a decidedly rich treat” to see the Nebraska Territory legislature in action. “You see a motley crowd inside of a railing in a small room crowded to overflowing, some behind their little schoolboy desks, some seated on the top of desks, some whittling—half a dozen walking about in what little space there is left.” Visitors crowded in on the legislators, and lobbyists wandered from member to member promoting their pet projects. After a few bombastic speeches, continued the Times correspondent, “a thirsty member moves an adjournment and in a few minutes the drinking saloons are well patronized.” Legislators from south of the Platte refused to concede defeat on the capital, and the issue periodically rocked the legislature. In fact, most southern solons came draped in red blankets to the first session to show, they said, their “savage” hostility to the acting governor. Although they mustered enough votes to approve moving the capital to Lancaster County in 1857, Nebraska Territory governor Mark Izard vetoed the bill. The following year the issue led to violence on the floor of the House. After some fisticuffs, members from south of the Platte —who now constituted a majority—declared that they could not conduct business in such an intimidating atmosphere and withdrew to Florence, where they held a rump session. There they passed several bills, including one that would move the capital to Neapolis. Neapolis, whose name in Greek means “new city,” constituted a few buildings located just south of the Platte River in present-day Saunders County. Backers of this new planned community promised to locate a capitol building on a tall hill that offered a good view of the Platte. But new governor William A. Richardson refused to recognize the legality of these proceedings because the bill was not passed in Omaha, and Omaha 58

The Fight for the Capital

remained the capital. Neapolis soon faded away, and the land set aside for a townsite was sold to a farmer in 1866, but the concept of a “neapolis” somewhere else remained viable. The fight for the capital further hardened sectional divisions in Nebraska. At the time, the Platte River constituted an almost Grand Canyon–like physical divide to settlers. One historian metaphorically noted that the river then was much deeper and wider than it is today and that its changing channels made bridge building nearly impossible. To leave the capital, the projected center of agricultural business and markets, north of the Platte where less population resided frustrated many farmers. Consequently, a movement south of the Platte in favor of annexation to Kansas soon developed. J. Sterling Morton spearheaded this movement, publicly urging Congress in 1856 to move the northern boundary of Kansas to the Platte River. Virtually every newspaper in Nebraska’s southern region editorialized in favor of secession. Separation from the area north of the Platte, said the Nebraska City News, was “our only hope—our salvation.” A convention held in Brownville voted for annexation in 1859, and twelve delegates went to a constitutional convention called in Kansas to press their case. This convention, however, rejected the south Platte annexation proposal as Kansans voted 29–19 opposed. It effectively killed the movement. When Nebraska was admitted to the Union in 1867, the south Platte interests finally got their way—and their revenge. They had a majority in the state legislature, and the new governor, David Butler, was sympathetic to their aims. When the first state legislature convened in Omaha in May 1867, a bill creating a commission headed by the governor to move the capital to one of four counties south of the Platte was rushed through. Initially, the new site was to be called “Capitol City,” but Omaha interests substituted the name “Lincoln” for the recently martyred president in a futile attempt to undercut Democratic support for the proposal. Although the commissioners considered Ashland, Yankee Hill, and Saline City, they finally selected a site on the banks of Salt Creek in Lancaster County. This location was chosen because it had salt flats that were thought to have great commercial value. Settlers from miles around visited the flats to replenish their salt supplies, and Oregon Trail travelers often joined them. In later years numerous attempts were made to produce salt commercially, but the lack of a cheap fuel to distill the The Fight for the Capital

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13. Omaha at Thirteenth and Farnam streets in 1863 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

salt from water defeated these efforts, and most of the salt flats were ultimately flooded. When the commissioners chose the new capital site, there already was a small community there. Lancaster, which had been founded in 1864, had a population of about thirty. This town was now replatted and renamed Lincoln. Although the capital was supposed to be built on state land, the commissioners accepted donations of 960 acres from the Lancaster Seminary Association and other people living in the area. Most people in Omaha scoffed at the prospect of moving the capital to the new site. “Nobody will ever go to Lincoln,” sneered the Omaha Republican, “who does not go to the legislature, the lunatic asylum, [or] the penitentiary . . . .” The paper further asserted that Lincoln had no advantages, “no river, no railroad, no steam wagon, nothing.” Undeterred, the commissioners began selling lots to raise money. The initial auction was a failure. The first lot, appraised at forty dollars, sold for twenty-five cents. Subsequent sales brought in more money after the commissioners cooked up a scheme with Nebraska City investors 60

The Fight for the Capital

to bid up the prices. Many of the lots were sold to speculators, with no money down, even though this violated state law. The auctioneers also pushed through a sale for Governor Butler to ensure that he got a choice piece of land at a bargain price. Butler’s involvement with these shady practices no doubt undermined his eventual political support and helped lead to his impeachment and conviction. Since none of the architects in Omaha would bid on the capitol building, the commissioners placed an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune and hired the only man who responded. The only contractor to bid on the project was also from Chicago. The building, constructed mainly of limestone quarried near Beatrice, cost 50 percent more than the initial forty-nine thousand dollar estimate. It was so poorly constructed that a new capitol was needed within a decade. Although the legislature had authorized the removal of the capital to Lincoln in 1867, the actual shift of the principal offices of government did not occur until the end of 1868. The capitol building was completed in late 1868, and the office records and staff of the governor and secretary of state were spirited out of Omaha in a blinding snowstorm in the middle of a December night. In the weeks ahead, the other state offices followed, and government buildings sprang up all over Lincoln. The state legislature met in Lincoln for the first time in early 1869, thus inaugurating the new capitol building. The following year the Burlington Railroad arrived, and other railroads were not far behind. The relocation of the capital proved to be a great boon to Lincoln, justifying the hopes and fears of contemporaries. Almost overnight the city became a boomtown. “Four years ago,” reported a visitor from Illinois in 1872, “Lincoln was a wild prairie, humped into hills or rolled out into green plains. Today it has five thousand live Yankees [from New England], Suckers [from Illinois], Buckeyes [from Ohio], and Hawkeyes [from Iowa]; five banks, with an average deposit of half a million, many elegant residences, three important railroads and half a dozen more on the way.” As a frontier boomtown, Lincoln grew rapidly, attracting some thirteen thousand residents by 1880. Although attempts were later made to move the capital, most notably to Columbus, Clarks, and Kearney, proponents of removal could never agree on a new site. Lincoln’s position was greatly strengthened by a constitutional provision adopted in 1875 that required a statewide referendum on any future capital The Fight for the Capital

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removal proposal. But as late as 1911 there was talk of moving the capital, spearheaded by liquor interests who deeply resented Lincoln’s decision to go dry. By this time, however, Lincoln was recognized as Nebraska’s second city and was never in any real jeopardy of losing the capital. The south Platte interests had decisively triumphed, and in so doing they had created a city that could rival Omaha, a rivalry that continues to thrive.

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9. Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

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n November 4, 1868, after weeks of delay, a large delegation of Sioux warriors rode into Fort Laramie, the U.S. Army’s primary outpost on the northern Plains. Fort Laramie was the site of numerous diplomatic gatherings during the mid-nineteenth century. This time, however, what was about to transpire constituted a major turning point in terms of control of the northern Great Plains. The Sioux delegation included a number of prominent representatives of various divisions of the Sioux nation. The largest Indian nation on the northern Plains, the Sioux include three broad political and cultural groups: the Tetons, the Yanktons, and the Yanktonais. They speak three closely related dialects of the Siouan language: Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota, respectively. The Tetons held dominance over much of western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming and Montana, and the Dakotas west of the Missouri River, and they would be dominant at the Fort Laramie treaty gathering. Seven tribes make up the Tetons, and three of them— the Oglalas, the Hunkpapas, and the Brulés—attended. Red Cloud, a leader of the Oglalas, quickly showed everyone at the peace parley that he was a person to whom deference was required. Maj. William Dye had been left in command, because the members of the official delegation from the federal Peace Commission had tired of waiting and had left Fort Laramie. Red Cloud stayed seated when introductions were made, and he extended only the tips of his fingers for handshakes. He stated that nothing could be accomplished because Major Dye’s superiors were not present, but Dye told the Sioux chief he had authority to represent the Peace Commission, which had provided him with a treaty to discuss. For three days Red Cloud tried a variety of diplomatic maneuvers

14. Red Cloud, circa 1872 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

designed to place his people in the best position. He pressed Dye aggressively about each treaty provision. According to one historian, Red Cloud, “[l]ike [von] Clausewitz . . . seemed to feel that war and politics were part of the same process, and he often pursued his diplomacy in a manner more belligerent than accommodating.” Although Dye held firm to the draft treaty, Red Cloud insisted that his people be supplied with trade, food, and lead and powder for their guns. The terms were agreed upon as Red Cloud was “the one chief who could make peace possible.” The Sioux agreed to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Red Cloud did so by rubbing his hands in the dust on the ground and putting his mark on the parchment. He then, as he so often did, gave a lengthy speech, indicating a readiness for peace but not a reservation. The Lakotas, he said, were ready for peace, but they were not ready for a reservation. They intended to abide by the terms of the treaty as long as the Americans did, and they wished to resume trade relations at Fort Laramie and other forts. Meanwhile, the Sioux would hunt and live as they had always lived. 64

Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

The Fort Laramie Treaty was the culmination of peace efforts by the United States with the northern Plains tribes. It pledged peace between the United States and the Sioux nation. The Americans guaranteed that the Sioux had exclusive rights to the Black Hills area and took responsibility for preventing others from entering the Sioux region. The United States also agreed to set up an agency where trade goods, food, a doctor, carpenter, blacksmith, farmer, teacher, and missionary would toil for the benefit of the Indians. But it was the land that primarily concerned all the parties. The Sioux agreed to relinquish rights permanently to occupy lands outside of what would become South and North Dakota but to retain hunting rights to lands surrounding the North Platte and Republican Rivers. They also agreed to allow for the construction of railroads and forts south of the Platte River and not to disturb wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. In return the United States agreed to abandon all forts north of the North Platte River and east of the Big Horn Mountains. No settlers could enter this area. Both sides had given up a substantial amount. The Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 meant a turning point in Indian relations with the United States, and this signified a great deal for Nebraska. Red Cloud remained committed to its provisions and to peace for the remainder of his long life. Sources differ on Red Cloud’s year of birth, but he said he was born in 1821 on Blue Water Creek, a branch of the Platte River, fifteen miles from what is now known as Ash Hollow in present-day western Nebraska. His father, Lone Man of the Brulés, died when Red Cloud was only four-years-old, and his mother, Walks-As-She-Thinks, took him and his brother and sister to live with her northern Teton people. As a young man Red Cloud became known for his prowess as a warrior, taking part in many raids. By 1860 he was recognized as a head warrior or chief. This meant that other Indians usually followed his leadership, but only as long as there existed consensus that his actions were in the tribe’s best interests. Red Cloud was just thirty when the first Treaty of Fort Laramie was made in 1851. It was the first attempt by the United States to try to intervene in northern Plains intertribal diplomacy. At that time western Nebraska was under the control of a Sioux-Cheyenne-Arapaho alliance. As the superpowers of the region, these tribes kept other smaller tribes in line. But the situation was deteriorating in part because of the Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

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decline of the buffalo and continued American travel on the trails. The Americans believed that they could bring all of the tribes together at Fort Laramie—then an outpost on the Oregon Trail—to establish peace and draw up boundaries between the tribes. Over ten thousand Indians came to the gathering. Some tribes were turned back by the Sioux, who did not wish them to participate. For the right to place military posts in Sioux territory and to establish roads, the United States promised to prevent Americans from traveling outside of the roads, to punish wrongdoers, and to pay fifty thousand dollars per year for fifty years, an amount that was later reduced in Senate debate. “Indeed the whole conference,” wrote one historian, “can be interpreted as a major triumph for the Tetons.” No sooner had the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 gone into effect than Americans violated the treaty. A gold rush to Montana in the early 1860s brought a huge influx of miners and suppliers illegally to the region, and the U.S. Army set up a number of unauthorized posts on what was called the Bozeman Trail. Then in 1864 the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado polarized Plains peoples. The Colorado militia led by Methodist minister John M. Chivington brutally attacked and mutilated a peaceful band of Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos, Sioux allies, killing several hundred women, children, and old men and women—the young men were out on the Plains hunting. Sioux and Cheyennes responded in kind with an attack by a thousand warriors on the settlement of Julesburg in northeastern Colorado on January 7, 1865, burning much of it to the ground. It was during these times that Red Cloud grew to adulthood and became a revered Oglala leader. With Colorado aflame, many younger Sioux warriors desired to join the attacks. In May 1865 Red Cloud, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and other Sioux leaders met on the Tongue River to plan military strategy against the fortifications along the North Platte. Wagon trains would be harassed, and army forts would be isolated and surrounded. Army morale was less than high, and criticism of U.S. Indian policy in the East gained momentum. The Indian Peace Commission was formed to attempt to pacify the West and sent messages to the Sioux to come to Fort Laramie once again for peace talks. To the surprise of many young warriors including Crazy Horse, Red Cloud decided to meet with the Indian Peace Commission. It had been an especially bad winter. Many Lakotas were near starvation, and 66

Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

Red Cloud knew they needed provisions. The Peace Commission was pleased that Red Cloud had come to discuss the situation as the U.S. Government considered him to be one of the top two leaders of the Sioux. Negotiations began with the United States offering provisions in order to make peace and to make more roads, justify the existing Bozeman Trail, and to build more forts in Sioux country. Red Cloud was astounded at this insult, and he left the peace talks. Although some Sioux sanctioned the opening of the trail in a treaty signed in 1866, Red Cloud and many others did not. Some white observers recognized the dubious value of this earlier agreement. “Much doubt prevails,” said the Omaha Herald, “concerning the late so-called Treaty with the Indians at Fort Laramie.” Even those Native Americans who signed the agreement warned that people who traveled into the Powder River country should be prepared to defend themselves. Red Cloud vowed to shut down the Bozeman Trail, and he did so. By October 1866, the Omaha Herald reported, “The lines of travel are wholly interrupted to Montana, and the military garrisons are in a condition of virtual siege.” The climax of these skirmishes was the so-called Fetterman Massacre, which took place in Wyoming in December 1867. The Sioux call this battle the Fight of One Hundred because they believe there were more soldiers under Fetterman’s command than were actually counted. Lt. Col. William J. Fetterman, who had earlier boasted that with eighty men he “could ride through the whole Sioux nation,” was killed—along with eighty men. Fetterman had been given command of a company and ordered to take it outside a besieged Fort Phil Kearny to help a wood supply wagon train. Fetterman did not respect the fort’s commanding officer, Col. Henry Carrington, who was well known to be a cautious military leader. Even so Fetterman followed his orders and took his troops outside the fort to embark upon a dangerous reconnaissance. The Sioux thought Fetterman and his men could be lured into a compromising position, and they were right. Several young Sioux, led by Crazy Horse, came out to taunt Fetterman. The commander could not ignore the obscene gestures, and he and his men pursued Crazy Horse recklessly over a ridge to their deaths. It is unknown whether Red Cloud actually took part in this battle, but at the time most people believed that he did. At this point many settlers and the U.S. Army wanted revenge. A Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

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15. Fort Laramie in 1884 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

new initiative against Red Cloud was planned, and it was generally successful. Several forts were defended against Indian attacks, and at a battle called the Wagon Box Fight, the Sioux suffered serious casualties, perhaps as many as 120 dead warriors. Red Cloud never fought against the U.S. Army again after the Wagon Box Fight, although his warriors continued to attack isolated travelers on the Bozeman Trail and tried to derail a Union Pacific freight train forty miles east of Fort McPherson in west-central Nebraska. All of these events constituted the backdrop to the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. There had been suffering on all sides, but it must have been with some solace that Red Cloud and his people were able to rejoice in the abandonment of the Bozeman Trail fortifications. After the Americans left, the forts were burned to the ground. This was one of the few times that Native Americans triumphed in their struggle to protect their homelands. As great as this victory was, trouble for the Sioux nonetheless loomed ahead. The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) required Indians to collect their government rations at an agency on the Missouri River in eastern Dakota Territory, but the Sioux considered this area so unhealthy they refused to settle there. To resolve this and other differences, Red Cloud and a band of Sioux leaders visited “the Great Father,” as the president was referred to in all of the Indian treaties signed, in Washington dc in 1870. In Washington Red Cloud met with President Ulysses S. Grant 68

Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

and other officials. Although the Indian leader did not get everything he wanted, he did persuade the government to allow the Sioux to receive their rations west of the Missouri River, closer to their traditional hunting grounds. After the Washington meetings, Red Cloud made a triumphal tour of New York, where he delivered a brilliant speech to a packed auditorium. According to the New York Times, “his words were filtered through an interpreter,” but “his earnest manner, his impassioned gestures, the eloquence of his hands, and the magnetism which he evidently exercises over an audience, produced a vast effect on the dense throng which listened to him.” Red Cloud’s trip to the East generated enormous interest there. The New York Times commented that he was “undoubtedly the most celebrated warrior now living on the American [c]ontinent.” Westerners, on the other hand, resented the attention lavished on the Sioux leader. “Rumor has it,” the Omaha Herald commented sarcastically, “that he is to become a member of the Cabinet.” Red Cloud used his influence primarily to keep the peace after his trip. Sioux difficulties, however, continued. Finding a permanent location for the Indian agency proved to be particularly vexing. From 1871 to 1873 the Red Cloud Agency was on the North Platte River in present-day Wyoming, just across from Henry, Nebraska. Government officials, however, were anxious to move it farther from the traffic on the Oregon Trail and the transcontinental railroad. In 1873 the agency was moved to the banks of the White River in northwestern Nebraska, where it remained until 1877. Violence between Indians and whites erupted periodically at the agency, and within a year troops had arrived and established Fort Robinson. The agency was removed again, first to a place on the Missouri River, and then to its current site at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, a mile and a half north of the Nebraska state line. There was friction over other issues as well. Red Cloud complained that “two-legged mice” frequently stole Indian rations before they could reach the agency and that corrupt agents and contractors victimized Indians. “These western men,” he said, “fill their pockets, and when they are full, they fill their hats; and then they say, ‘good-bye,’ and go away.” The principal contractor for the Red Cloud Agency was D. J. McCann of Nebraska City, who was repeatedly charged with cheating Native Americans. Eventually he was indicted for defrauding the Crows and Blackfeet but was exonerated by a sympathetic frontier jury. Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

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The Sioux were also placed under pressure by the government to sell large tracts of land. Although they agreed to sell their hunting rights in Nebraska in 1875, Red Cloud adamantly opposed parting with additional land. When gold brought a flood of prospectors to the Black Hills, another war erupted between the U.S. Army and the Sioux. Although Red Cloud professed to be neutral, he sympathized with his relatives, who were led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. In June 1876, in a major battle, the forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated Col. George Armstrong Custer’s command in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in present-day Montana. Red Cloud did not take part in this battle, but his son did. Thereafter, the government adopted a much tougher Indian policy. The army disarmed Red Cloud’s Indians, who were camped six miles southwest of Chadron, and confiscated their ponies. The army then forced the Indians to move to Dakota Territory and tried to depose Red Cloud, but his people still recognized him as their leader. In his later years Red Cloud watched his people suffer greatly. He had difficulties with the Indian agent appointed at Pine Ridge, Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy. Called “Little Whiskers” by the Sioux because of his moustache, McGillycuddy was a domineering hothead who was determined to break Red Cloud’s power and render the Indians dependent on the government. McGillycuddy tried “many acts of petty tyranny and insults” but could not prevail, and Red Cloud triumphed in 1886 when the despotic agent was relieved of his duties. That summer Red Cloud felt vindicated, and he was in a particularly conciliatory mood when he agreed to take part in the Independence Day celebration at Chadron. “We came here as two nations,” he told his audience, “with different hearts and different minds, but today we must become as one nation with but one heart and one mind.” But more tragedy was to come soon. The relentless pressure of non-Indians wanting to settle on Sioux land continued. The government persuaded some to surrender the Bighorn country in Montana, and in order to secure additional land west of the Missouri along with the Black Hills, Gen. George Crook in 1889 resorted to bribery. As one observer put it, “Crook did outrageously in his treaty of 1889. . . . He received anybody as a signer—anyway to get signers.” About half the Sioux, led by Red Cloud, refused to sign the executive agreement, which prompted the government to try again 70

Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

to depose him. “Red Cloud,” said the acting commissioner of Indian Affairs, “has been for years past and is now a disturbing element among the Indians.” At the end of the 1880s, the Sioux suffered from a host of new problems: epidemic disease, the loss of livestock and crops, and a cut in government rations. The conditions made them particularly receptive to a messianic movement called the Ghost Dance. This movement involved an Indian revival that hastened a return to traditional ways by singing, fasting, and dancing the Ghost Dance, actions most non-Indians around reservations did not understand. The threat of violence at Pine Ridge steadily mounted, though Red Could worked for peace. He even sent a letter to the Chadron Democrat publicly calling for peace, although his own son Jack was a leader in the Sioux Ghost Dance movement. By now, however, Red Cloud was old and nearly blind, and his influence was waning. Although the Sioux and other Indians were expressly forbidden from traveling outside of their reservations, a group of Sioux led by elderly chief Big Foot left Pine Ridge to dance the Ghost Dance. They attempted to return to Pine Ridge during a snowstorm, but violence erupted on December 29, 1890, when U.S. troops surrounded Big Foot and his people near Wounded Knee Creek and attempted to disarm them. Someone shot a gun, and the Seventh Cavalry troops mowed down several hundred Sioux, including many unarmed women, children, and elderly. The Massacre at Wounded Knee provoked some Sioux to take Red Cloud, an advocate of peace, prisoner, but he escaped and sought refuge at the agency. Red Cloud lived until 1909. When an anthropologist visited the old chief in his last years, Red Cloud said, “You see this barren waste. . . . Think of it! I, who used to own rich soil in a well-watered country so extensive that I could not ride through it in a week on my fastest pony, am put down here! . . . Now I, who used to control 5,000 warriors, must tell Washington when I am hungry.” Red Cloud had long before converted to Catholicism, and when he died, he was buried in the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation at his request. Although Red Cloud was unable to halt the tide of settlement, he did as much as any Native American leader could to retard its advance. He showed remarkable talent not only as a warrior but also as a statesman and diplomat. It was his brilliant diplomacy that made the Treaty of Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

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Fort Laramie possible for the Sioux in 1868 and represented one of the few times the westward movement in North America was stopped. In 1870 the New York Times delivered what could have been his epitaph nearly forty years later, when they editorialized that Red Cloud was “a man of brains, a good ruler, an eloquent speaker, an able general and fair diplomat.” In 2002 Red Cloud was officially inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame, and his bust can be found in the rotunda of the state capitol in Lincoln.

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Red Cloud and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

10. The Union Pacific Railroad

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orace Greeley described the building of the first transcontinental railroad in North America as “the grandest and noblest enterprise of our age.” Although there were skeptics, boosters asserted that the benefits would far outweigh the costs. “Our population would be increased,” predicted a California senator, “our resources developed, and the continent covered with people and [s]tates.” Nebraskans were particularly enthusiastic about the project. According to the Omaha Republican, it would be “the grand lever” that would lift Nebraska Territory “to the pinnacle of fortune and expand her population into tens of thousands.” Clearly America’s heartland would be transformed. On May 10, 1869, a “clear, cool beautiful day,” officials from the two companies picked to construct the “noblest enterprise” were on hand near the Great Salt Lake in Utah at Promontory Point (or Summit) to lend legitimacy to the ceremonies marking the completion of the railroad. Although historians disagree as to what actually happened, it was reported that at 12:30 p.m. Leland Stanford, representing the California-based Central Pacific, and Thomas Durant, vice president and chief manager of the Omaha-based Union Pacific, stepped forward to pound in place the last spike, thereby symbolizing the rebinding of a nation so recently torn by Civil War. The crowd yelled and a band blared. The spike, an eighteen-ounce golden pin topped with a gold nugget made especially for the occasion, was set in predrilled holes in an equally special laurel wood railroad tie. Attached to the spike was a telegraph wire so that once the hammer struck, the news could instantaneously “flash to a waiting world.” Leland Stanford swung first and missed. Embarrassed, he passed the hammer to Durant. He also missed. Recognizing that the signal meant

to be sent around the world, or at least to San Francisco and New York City, had not connected, an alert telegrapher at 12:47 p.m. simply typed the message, “Done,” and the celebrations began. The Capitol Bell was rung in Washington, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and the Tower Bell in San Francisco. In Omaha, a general holiday was proclaimed, a parade and patriotic speeches followed, and the entire city was illuminated. Throughout the nation cannons were fired—more, it was said, than during the Battle of Gettysburg. Meanwhile at Promontory, after other railroad officials had driven spikes home, engines from the two lines edged forward and touched cow catchers. The engines then pulled back, and the golden spikes and laurel tie were replaced with conventional materials. Souvenir hunters, however, soon whittled the last wooden tie down to nothing, and it had to be replaced no less than six times before the party was over. The construction of the transcontinental railroad in less than four years was an astonishing feat. The Nebraska portion of this railway extended 472 miles, from Omaha to the Wyoming state line, and yet it was completed in less than two and a half years. In a comparatively short time, the railroad transformed Nebraska from a thinly populated corridor near the Missouri River into a booming agricultural state that promised to become one of the leading food producers in the nation. A transcontinental railroad had been proposed as early as the 1830s, and Congress debated the matter as early as the 1840s. Most people realized that such a project would be an enormous undertaking. No railroad of this size had ever been constructed in advance of settlement over such rough terrain, and everyone believed that such a massive project would require government support. Construction was delayed, however, by differences over the route, at least five of which were under consideration. Not until Southerners pulled out of the Union in 1861, leaving Northerners in control of the government, were proponents of the railroad able to resolve their differences, agree on the central route, and adopt the necessary legislation. Congress passed bills in 1862 and 1864 that chartered the Union Pacific Railroad Company and authorized it to build the eastern branch of the transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific Company, which was already in existence, was designated to build the western branch. For every mile of track laid, each company would receive a 200-foot right-of-way, twenty sections of public land (12,800 acres) and a thirty74

The Union Pacific Railroad

year government loan at minimal interest ranging from sixteen thousand dollars per square mile constructed on the plains to forty-eight thousand dollars per square mile constructed in the mountains. The legislation called for the railroad in Nebraska to follow the Oregon Trail. To avoid dispute, however, Congress left location of the railroad’s eastern terminus to the president. On November 17, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a vaguely worded order designating the Omaha-Council Bluffs area as the terminus. Since there was no bridge across the Missouri River, the order meant that, at least for the present time, Omaha would be the end of the line. When the president’s decision was wired to Omaha, another rousing celebration ensued. Everyone expected all of Nebraska to benefit from the choice. “The President,” said one contemporary, “shows good judgment in locating the road where the Almighty placed the signal station, at the entrance of a garden seven hundred miles in length and twenty broad.” Although the Pacific Railroad Act had been approved in 1862, the first tracks were not constructed in Nebraska until July 10, 1865, at the base of Capital Street in Omaha. At first construction proceeded slowly. By October 1865 only fifteen miles of track had been laid, and by December only forty miles. Union Pacific complained that it could not obtain sufficient financial backing, labor, and construction materials. Sufficient sources of wood were found and transported to eastern Nebraska fording the Missouri, and Union Pacific imported cheap Irish labor from Europe and the East Coast. The Central Pacific utilized Chinese labor on the West Coast. To facilitate credit needs, President Lincoln declared the Great Plains a mountain region so that Union Pacific could receive the maximum rate of financial support at forty-eight thousand dollars per square mile rather than sixteen thousand dollars. Next, the vice president of the up, Thomas Durant, created the Crédit Mobilier of America. Durant had trained as a doctor but left medicine for finance. He learned his trade while serving as construction manager for the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad when it laid tracks across Iowa. Henry Farnam, president of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, wrote that Durant had a penchant for “the general spirit of speculation,” and he used this method to make astounding profits for some Union Pacific stockholders on its road construction. He built a subsidiary corporation called Crédit Mobilier, owned completely by a The Union Pacific Railroad

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16. Sketch of Union Pacific construction crew in Nebraska (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

few of the up’s primary stockholders. Durant funneled all contracts for construction through the subsidiary, which then exaggerated expenses by up to triple the costs. Thus, the Union Pacific showed minimal profit, but the subsidiary paid huge dividends. The Enron of nineteenth-century America’s corporate corruption, Crédit Mobilier upon investigation by Congress collapsed because of its fraud. But in the interim, construction on the up started in earnest. The railroad reached Columbus (91 miles from Omaha) in June 1866 and Kearney (196 miles away) in August. It extended to North Platte (291 miles west) in January 1867, Sidney (414 miles away) in August, and the Nebraska-Wyoming border (472 miles from Omaha) in December. By January 1868 the railroad entered Cheyenne (516 miles away), and from there it snaked its way through Wyoming, reaching the Utah state line the following December (962 miles from Omaha). In May 1869 the Union Pacific reached Promontory, Utah, 1,086 miles from Omaha, at the same time that the Central Pacific approached Promontory (690 miles from Sacramento). Indians resisted the railroad cutting through their homelands. Cheyennes and Sioux objected to the coming of the “fire wagon” as they called the locomotive, recognizing that it represented another threat to 76

The Union Pacific Railroad

their sovereignty. In May 1867 Indians killed five construction workers near Overton, Nebraska, and four road graders west of North Platte. The following August, a band of Cheyennes derailed a handcar and a freight train at Plum Creek (now Lexington), killing seven people. A group of Pawnees under the command of U.S. Army major Frank North of Columbus hunted down and killed some of the Sioux responsible, but there were numerous complaints that the U.S. Army, which was overextended, was not doing enough to protect railroad workers. Declaring that Indians between North Platte and Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, were “as thick as fiddlers in Hell,” a Wyoming newspaper criticized the “feeble, listless opposition offered by the U.S. troops.” In spite of Indian hostility, however, construction proceeded. Probably the biggest problem of the completed transcontinental railroad was its shoddy construction. Some three hundred thousand cottonwood ties had to be replaced by 1879 because they had rotted, and other ties laid on frozen ground sank in the spring, creating what one observer called “a succession of small waves.” Many of the bridges were flimsy, the culverts inadequate, and the ballasting substandard. In fact, by the turn of the century the entire railroad had to be rebuilt. The first trains on the new road burned green cottonwood and, like most trains of this era, moved at only twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. The standard fare was ten cents a mile, but less expensive fares were available. Those who bought the cheapest fare (which was ten dollars from Omaha to North Platte in 1867) sat on benches without backs and felt every bump in springless cars. The perils of railroad travel were greater in the winter. Brigham Young Jr. spent three days traveling from North Platte to Omaha, his train fighting six- and eight-foot drifts along the way. When the train hit the snow banks, Young recorded in his diary, “the concussions were sometimes terrific and then we would become stationary, powerless to retreat or advance until the road was cleared by shoveling.” In spite of these trials, everyone agreed that the railroad was still a vast improvement over the stagecoach or covered wagon. As expected, the railroad was a great boon to Nebraska. The population, which stood at 29,000 in 1860, rose to 123,000 in 1870, 452,000 in 1880, and 984,000, in 1890. The Union Pacific headquartered in Omaha, its population doubling in a year. Money flowed into the city, shop buildings went up, a roundhouse was constructed, and railroad The Union Pacific Railroad

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17. Early Union Pacific commercial activity (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

people settled in. A correspondent for the New York Tribune called Omaha “the liveliest city in the United States.” A downside to this expansion was that it brought many of the usual vices associated with rapid growth to frontier towns. Omaha was known as a wide-open town until the end of the century. In Columbus liquor flowed freely, and brawls between local residents and railroad workers were common. North Platte attracted all sorts of people who were said to be “having a good time, gambling, drinking, and shooting each other.” The principal saloon in North Platte posted placards depicting a revolver and a knife with the inscription: “All disputes will be settled with this code of law.” According to one visitor, “Old gamblers who reveled in the glorious days of ‘flush times’ in the gold districts declare that this town outstrips all.” Other towns along the railroad blossomed with the cattle trade. Schuyler became an important railhead in 1870 when close to fifty thousand cattle were driven up from Texas on the Big Blue River Trail. The following year, as settlement forced the cattle drives further west, 78

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Kearney emerged as the state’s leading cattle town. By 1873, when Ogallala had become the northern hub of the Western Trail up from Texas and Dodge City, Kansas, it replaced Kearney as king of Nebraska’s cattle industry. In 1876 one hundred thousand head of cattle were prodded through the stock pens in Ogallala, a pace that continued until the long drives were abandoned in the mid-1880s. The countryside also filled up with people. The Union Pacific received almost five million acres of land from the federal government in Nebraska, about 10 percent of the state’s total. This astounding largesse for a private corporation has never been duplicated in the state. The land was located in a forty-mile strip along the tracks. Since the government gave the railroad the odd-numbered sections and retained the even-numbered ones, Union Pacific’s holdings in the state resembled a giant, elongated checkerboard. Anxious to sell its land in order to raise money and secure freight business from newly settled areas, the railroad launched a massive promotional campaign, distributing millions of pamphlets, taking out thousands of newspaper ads, and sending agents all over the East and to Europe. The propaganda literature described Nebraska as a veritable California paradise—fertile, verdant prairie lands that were “removed from the severe cold and long winters of the north and the hot, relaxing influences of the south.” The railroad sold most of its farmland at four to five dollars an acre and usually offered easy terms. Special immigrant trains brought settlers to the state, and the Union Pacific maintained an “Emigrant House” in Omaha for layovers. A third of the Union Pacific’s lands in Nebraska were settled by groups, some of which included as many as five hundred families. In some cases, whole towns from Europe resettled in Nebraska, giving some areas a distinct ethnic or religious character. Danish, German, English, Irish, Polish, Czech, and Swedish towns dotted the Nebraska landscape. The railroad also sold large tracts of grazing land in western Nebraska to corporate ranchers, usually at $1 or $1.50 an acre. The boom spawned by the railroad came to an abrupt end in the 1890s, when a depression drove the Union Pacific into bankruptcy and dried up the flow of people into the state. By this time, many Nebraskans regarded the Union Pacific not as a harbinger of progress but as an enemy of fair rates, the corrupt controller of the Nebraska legislature, and a greedy The Union Pacific Railroad

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corporate drag on agricultural prosperity. For almost forty years, however, the railroad had played a crucial role in Nebraska’s development, bringing people into the state and fixing the pattern of settlement. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 did indeed inspire significant agricultural and financial development, but at a significant cost to its citizens. George L. Miller, longtime editor of the Omaha Herald, described the Union Pacific as “the chief parent” of Nebraska, a sobriquet that brings with it a variety of meanings.

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11. The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson

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t Fort Robinson during the early evening of September 7, 1877, the great Sioux patriot, Ta-Shunka-Witca, Crazy Horse of the Oglalas, was assassinated, murdered with a bayonet driven deep into his torso after he had surrendered to U.S. military authorities. It was a time when the worlds of the citizens of the Plains, and especially those of the Sioux peoples, stood still, for this was a moment that would forever shape the lives of so many. In just over a decade, the leadership of the Sioux would be decimated—first Crazy Horse, and then Spotted Tail, chief of the Brulés, killed in 1881 on Rosebud Reservation, and finally Sitting Bull, chief of the Hunkpapas, struck down at Standing Rock just some fifteen days before the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Crazy Horse was born sometime between 1839 and 1845 on Rapid Creek, a tributary of the Cheyenne River in west-central South Dakota. First known as Curly by his family and band, his mother was the sister of Spotted Tail and his father, named Crazy Horse, was an Oglala medicine man. Curly was the oldest of three children, having a younger brother and sister. Early in his brief life Curly personally witnessed a number of confrontations that would define his later experiences of vigilantly protecting the Lakota people. In 1854 one of the earliest encounters between the U.S. Army and the Sioux that turned deadly occurred over the unlikely killing of a cow. On the Oregon Trail near Fort Laramie, a scrawny cow owned by a Mormon emigrant was killed by a young member of a Brulé camp headed by Chief Conquering Bear. Curly, in his early teens at the time, and his family lived in the camp. Conquering Bear sensed there would be trouble over the cow, but he was not prepared for the brash tactics of Lt. John Grattan, who led a

18. Crazy Horse vestments viewed by his biographer, Mari Sandoz, in 1954 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

group of thirty enlistees from Fort Laramie in search of the cow killer. Conquering Bear thought he could sit down with Grattan and reach some form of compensation for the cow, but instead the aggressive lieutenant demanded the Sioux youth. To the horror of the camp, when Conquering Bear refused to give up the young warrior to the army, their beloved leader was shot by Lieutenant Grattan. The Brulé men attacked the troops, killing and mutilating Grattan along with much of the whole detachment. Chief Conquering Bear survived his gunshot 82

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wound for several days. His camp quickly evacuated the region and moved to a more isolated and peaceful area above Box Butte Creek, near modern-day Hemingford, Nebraska. There the Brulé leader died, and many a young warrior harbored thoughts of revenge. A foolish attempt by U.S. soldiers to “teach the Sioux a lesson” had brought on a full-scale destabilization of the area around Fort Laramie and the North Platte portion of the Oregon Trail. Curly now spent his youth training to be a warrior, and so he accompanied a Brulé war party led by Spotted Tail that ventured near Fort Laramie. Close to the fort, they came upon the camp of a group of Omaha Indians who had been trading with the Americans. After stealing some horses, the camp was alerted, and with their cover blown the Brulés were forced into a stand. In the ensuing fight, two important events occurred. Logan Fontanelle, the chief of the Omahas, was killed, and this solidified Omaha enmity toward the Sioux for decades to come. And Curly, caught in the underbrush, was surprised by a moving figure who loomed threateningly. Curly shot an arrow that successfully brought down his target. When he rushed to the body to collect his scalp, he discovered to his distress that he had killed an Omaha woman. This in itself was not a bad thing, as the coup had occurred in battle, but Curly reportedly experienced revulsion by his actions. Nevertheless, his fellow warriors recounted his exploit at subsequent camps. In the summer of 1857 the Sioux gathered in their traditional summer camp to discuss the deterioration of their control over their homelands. Present were the young leaders Sitting Bull, Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, Red Cloud, and Spotted Tail. They resolved to reassert Sioux dominance, and they planned a campaign against a traditional enemy that was moving closer to Fort Laramie from the west—the People Who Live in Grass Houses, the Shoshones. Before the campaign, Curly’s father took his son up to Bear Butte for a vision quest. After a sweat and fasting, Curly reported that he had seen a horse with spots and many colors upon which rode a young warrior wearing blue leggings and a white buckskin shirt. Curly discussed this first with his father who explained to him that the young warrior was Curly himself. Curly then went to a medicine man for further interpretation, and he told Curly to wear an eagle bone whistle, one middle plume of the tail feathers of an eagle, and a stone with a hole in it around his left shoulder. This would set Curly apart from others, protect him, and assert his power. The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson

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In the fall of 1857 Curly’s band encountered a large group of Shoshones. A fight began, and for a time it looked as if the Sioux would be defeated. But Curly, at around age fifteen, turned the direction of the battle. Although his horse was shot out from under him, he jumped free of the falling animal and managed to kill his pursuer, and then Curly grabbed another wild horse in the melee and rode down and tomahawked another Shoshone warrior. Such brave acts required recognition, and his father decided it was time for Curly to have a new name. In telling his son of his pride in him and how he felt certain his son was destined for great leadership of the Sioux people, Crazy Horse, the father, bestowed his own name upon his son. Subsequently, the young and slight Crazy Horse assumed greater and greater warrior prowess. Mari Sandoz, the acclaimed biographer of Crazy Horse, described him as “a small man for a fighter, less than six of the white man’s feet, and slim as a young warrior. One feather stood alone at the back of his head, and his brown, fur-wrapped braids hung long over a plain buckskin shirt, his Winchester in a scabbard at his knee.” Crazy Horse always rode at the front of a war party, taking the first shots. During his fighting career, he reportedly had eight horses shot out from under him but was never wounded in battle. Unlike most young Sioux warriors, Crazy Horse was modest and humble. He did not show off or speak of his war exploits, and he never wore a war bonnet. After a raid, he returned to camp and often chose to sit alone on the cliffs above or at the edge of the village. From his vision, Crazy Horse knew he would not be killed in battle. The 1860s and 1870s brought numerous clashes, even though Red Cloud signed a treaty at Fort Laramie in 1868. These included the Sand Creek Massacre of the Sioux allies, the Cheyennes and Arapahos; a subsequent Cheyenne-Lakota attack on Julesburg and the North Platte River region; and the Fetterman battle in which Crazy Horse assumed the role of lead decoy, luring the army commander and his troops into a trap. In the summer of 1876 the Sioux were very angry. Col. George Armstrong Custer had led troops into the sacred Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, and he had found gold and allowed a mining rush to occur. So many miners had come into the region that the Sioux found they could not meet for their usual conclave at Bear Butte Creek, so they relocated further north on the Little Big Horn River. It 84

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was a huge gathering that included all seven divisions of the Lakotas plus their Cheyenne and Arapaho friends. Supposedly at least thirtytwo thousand horses had to be cared for along with over a thousand lodges. It was the largest number of Sioux ever to meet at one place in their history. Anticipating a battle with the U.S. Army, the Hunkpapa holy man, Sitting Bull, was placed in charge. Five days before the fateful Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse and his followers confronted on Rosebud Creek a large army force led by General George Crook. Crazy Horse had planned well, and his forces drove Crook from the field. It was the first time a large, organized Sioux charge had been executed in Sioux military history, and the army was dumbfounded. Crazy Horse would use the same tactics later that week when Custer met his fate at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, on June 25, 1876. As was the custom, after Little Bighorn, the Sioux nation split up and rode into the central and northern Plains. There was a sense of urgency as the slaughter of the Plains Indians’ commissary, the buffalo, had taken its toll. There were fewer and fewer available herds. Sitting Bull moved further north and crossed with his camp into Canada. Crazy Horse led his people into southeastern Wyoming in hopes of finding buffalo. All of the movement and military engagements had prevented the Sioux from carrying out their vital annual fall hunts, and Crazy Horse no doubt worried that his people could not stand much more deprivation. Food stores needed to be replenished. The U.S. Army, moreover, had vowed revenge, and thousands of Americans came forth to battle the Sioux. Crazy Horse found he was constantly on the move during the wintertime, when his people needed to conserve their strength. On January 8, 1877, an army contingent led by Gen. Nelson Miles attacked Crazy Horse’s people, forcing them to relocate after losing valuable supplies and horses. The harassment continued into the spring, and by late April, Crazy Horse somehow had to get his people to food. He had also lost his only child, a daughter, to the coughing sickness brought to the Plains by the Americans, and his wife Black Shawl was ill with the disease. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse led 899 Oglalas into Fort Robinson on the Red Cloud Agency and surrendered. In an official counting, Crazy Horse brought with him nearly 2,000 horses and mules and 117 guns and pistols. Fort Robinson, what would be the site of Crazy Horse’s killing, The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson

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19. Fort Robinson, sometime after 1887 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

occupies an area dotted with tall buttes, rolling meadows, and pine forests near the White River in northwestern Nebraska. It was established near the Red Cloud Indian Agency, which was responsible for distributing food and supplies to thirteen thousand Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos who had ceded lands to the United States at Fort Laramie in 1868. Originally in Wyoming, the agency was moved to Nebraska in 1873. There was continual tension and recurring violence between the Sioux and those connected to the new agency. The army ordered 950 men, complete with supplies and Gatling guns, to proceed from Fort Laramie to the Indian agency. The troops arrived in Nebraska without incident in early March 1874 in bitterly cold weather. They established tent camps at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska and at the Spotted Tail Agency some forty miles to the northeast in what would become South Dakota. The encampment at Red Cloud Agency was named Camp Robinson in honor of Lt. Levi Robinson, an army officer who had been killed by Indians from the Red Cloud Agency the month before. Like most military posts in the West, Camp Robinson had no walls. To secure better forage and reduce friction at the agency, the camp was subsequently moved a mile and a half west of the Indian agency. While the new camp rarely had problems immediately after the move, 86

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trouble was more common at Red Cloud Agency. A great deal of liquor was consumed at the agency, much of it sold by illegal whiskey runners, and tempers among whites and Native Americans often flared. The Indian agent contributed to the tension when he decided to put up a flagpole. The Sioux, who considered this an affront to their sovereignty, chopped the pole to pieces before it could be erected. Many unsavory characters frequented the agency, including Doc Middleton and other highwaymen who stole Indian ponies and robbed the stage on the Sidney-Deadwood Trail. In the words of one contemporary, the agency was “a mighty tough place.” When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, the troops at Camp Robinson faced the nearly impossible task of keeping prospectors off Indian lands. The government tried to buy the Black Hills, but no Sioux leader would agree, and in 1876 the war between the Sioux and the United States that had been brewing for so long finally erupted in full. Camp Robinson served as a base for army operations in this war. Troops from the post also engaged in patrol and escort duty, particularly on the Sidney-Deadwood Trail. So it was into this active, teeming Camp Robinson that Crazy Horse came in May of 1877. Crazy Horse’s people were greeted enthusiastically by their relatives, and they were fed and nursed back to health. But their encampment was watched nervously by the army, and Crazy Horse began to resent the restrictions that were placed upon him. His people were not allowed to hunt, and their movements were curtailed. Crazy Horse camped as far from the agency as he could, some three miles away. It was at this time that Crazy Horse took a second wife, known to whites as Nellie Larabee, the eighteen-year-old daughter of white trader Joe Larabee and a Sioux woman. Sioux leaders held councils and quarreled. Red Cloud was committed to peace as was Spotted Tail, and they sought to reach agreements that Crazy Horse feared would forsake the beloved Black Hills. Tension mounted within the Sioux community and between the army and Crazy Horse’s camp. Finally, the post commander, Col. L. P. Bradley, summoned Crazy Horse to come to the agency to begin formal talks about surrender terms. Crazy Horse sensed this was the beginning of the end, as he knew that he would not die in battle. To prepare, he took Black Shawl to her people at the Spotted Tail Agency and returned to Camp Robinson. The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson

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General Crook had told Crazy Horse that if he ended his war against the United States, he could live in the Powder River Country in Wyoming and have his own agency there. What he had not told Crazy Horse was that he secretly planned to have him go to Washington dc, to showcase the end of the northern Plains wars, and then to ship him to a Florida prison. Sioux leaders did not trust Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud informed authorities he could not control Crazy Horse, something they surely understood. With this information, Crook ordered Crazy Horse’s arrest. Crazy Horse rode to Camp Robinson with Spotted Tail and a number of Brulé warriors. When they arrived, a large gathering of agitated Sioux met the party. They were tired of war and feared that Crazy Horse would involve them in further confrontations, and some had listened to Red Cloud, who had discredited Crazy Horse among their people. When Crazy Horse went to the headquarters, Colonel Bradley refused to meet with him and ordered him incarcerated in the guardhouse. As Crazy Horse walked into the guardhouse under escort, he suddenly resisted. He did not wish to be imprisoned, and he drew a small concealed knife. Little Big Man, one of his loyal warriors who had become less enamored with him, took Crazy Horse’s arms and pinned them behind his back. When Crazy Horse broke free, a nervous soldier, probably a private in the Fourteenth Infantry, stabbed Crazy Horse in the side. There remains much controversy about the details of this event, but historians who have studied the incident think that there were two wounds: one in his side, and one in his back that lacerated his kidney. Some Lakota today believe it was Little Big Man who stabbed Crazy Horse in the back. Mortally wounded, Crazy Horse refused a cot and lay bleeding on the dirt floor only to die next to the land he had tried to protect. The killing of Crazy Horse shaped Nebraska’s future. It represented the beginning of the end of formal Sioux resistance to American control of their homelands. Crazy Horse had never veered from his basic commitment to Sioux ways. “To the end,” wrote journalist Joe Starita, “he had preferred the Lakota way of life, its values, customs and religion. He was never defeated in battle and never signed a peace treaty. He never allowed himself to be photographed, sketched, or painted. After he died, his parents took the body and rode north into the South Dakota hills.” 88

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Upgraded and renamed Fort Robinson in 1878, the site of the Crazy Horse tragedy witnessed still another dramatic event in the pacification of the northern Plains. The Northern Cheyennes, who had been betrayed and forced to relocate in present-day Oklahoma, escaped from the starvation and disease on their reservation to return to their traditional homelands in the north. Under the leadership of Dull Knife, the Cheyennes crossed Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, often skirmishing with the U.S. Army along the way, but they were eventually captured and taken to Fort Robinson. When the Cheyennes refused to return to their Oklahoma reservation where they believed they would meet a sure death, the army withheld food and fuel, hoping to force them into submission. The Indians responded in early 1879 by shooting their guards and fleeing from their confinement in a large building on the grounds at Fort Robinson called Cheyenne Barracks. Although Dull Knife escaped, thirty-two of his companions, including his daughter, were slain in a running battle. After hiding for several years, eventually some of the Northern Cheyennes were allowed to stay on a Montana reservation, and others settled down with their Sioux friends and relatives on Pine Ridge Reservation. Fort Robinson continued to play a role in the history of Nebraska well into the twentieth century. Troops were sent to the Pine Ridge Reservation before fighting broke out at Wounded Knee, and although they did not take part in the massacre, they did assist soldiers who were involved. When Fort Laramie was decommissioned in 1890, Fort Robinson took over the primary role as a Plains military outpost. Because of its location near the fort, the settlement of Crawford served as a place where the army could let off steam. Named for an officer killed in Mexico, Crawford was a rough and rowdy saloon town where alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes were readily available. “There were seven or eight saloons,” recalled one resident, “and liquor flowed like water in the White River.” At the time there were no state or federal laws controlling the distribution of drugs, and morphine and cocaine could be purchased by anyone. “All the prostitutes in the red light district,” reported a contemporary, “were narcotic addicts.” After Deadwood, a mining town in the Black Hills, Crawford was considered the roughest town on the northern Plains. When two black regiments, known as the buffalo soldiers to the Indians, were stationed at Fort Robinson between 1885 and 1907, greater The Murder of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson

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20. Crawford, Nebraska, circa 1887 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

racial tension was introduced into the area, particularly in Crawford. One African American soldier was killed in a barroom brawl, and another, Emanuel Stance, a black sergeant who had won the Medal of Honor fighting Indians in Texas, was found shot to death on a road east of town. In 1893 black troops from the fort rescued a fellow soldier who was nearly lynched in Crawford. After the incident, one of the soldiers wrote an anonymous pamphlet that contained a sharply worded warning for Crawford residents. “You shall not outrage us and our people right here under the shadow of ‘Old Glory,’” said the pamphlet, “and if you persist . . . we will reduce your homes and firesides to ashes and send your guilty souls to hell.” Other celebrants of history seemed to spend time at Fort Robinson. Dr. Walter Reed, who later gained fame for his work combating yellow fever, was stationed at Fort Robinson. He served at Fort Omaha and Fort Sidney in the early 1880s and then at Fort Robinson from 1884 to 1887. It was Dr. Reed who treated a cranky settler from a farm south of Gordon named Jules Sandoz, father of author Mari Sandoz and the victim of a crippling injury from falling down a water well. Troops from Fort Robinson served in the Spanish-American War and in subsequent fighting in the Philippines. After World War I the fort became the pri90

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mary center for processing army horses and mules, an ideal setting, and in the 1930s it added the k-9 corps, army dogs trained for sentry and scouting. From 1943 to 1946, it served as a prisoner of war camp for up to eight hundred German soldiers, including a regiment from General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Fort Robinson was decommissioned in 1946, and after use as a cattle research station and a training center for soil conservation, the State of Nebraska leased some of the buildings in 1955 with a view toward establishing a state park. The state subsequently acquired title to the post and bought up nearby land. Embracing more than twenty-one thousand acres, Fort Robinson State Park is one of the state’s largest and most popular parks. The state has made considerable efforts to educate the general public concerning the history and ecology of Fort Robinson and its region. In 1956 the Nebraska State Historical Society opened a museum in the old post headquarters to promote the history of the fort and respectfully made available to public visitation the site of Crazy Horse’s death. In 1961 the University of Nebraska established its Trailside Museum to highlight the geology and natural history of the region. In 1989 the largest forest and grass fire in Nebraska history consumed close to forty-nine thousand acres and nearly burned down Fort Robinson. The flora and fauna in the area subsequently rebounded, and state officials implemented a replanting plan to prevent erosion. Finally, in 2003 the Nebraska State Historical Society rebuilt Cheyenne Barracks. As a symbol of renewal and rapprochement, the building was dedicated with the help of the Northern Cheyenne nation. Thus, the history of Fort Robinson and Nebraska Indians, including the murder of Crazy Horse, will not be forgotten.

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12. The Trial of Standing Bear

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n April 30, 1879, Standing Bear, a Ponca Indian leader, appeared before Judge Elmer S. Dundy in U.S. District Court in Omaha. Four months earlier, Standing Bear and a band of Poncas had left their reservation in Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma—to journey to Nebraska in hopes of returning to their traditional lands along the Niobrara River. U.S. government representatives, however, were determined to force the Poncas to go back to Indian Territory, and Standing Bear was in court to prevent his people’s removal. At issue was whether Native Americans had the right to sue in a federal court, and, more broadly, whether they were human beings and citizens under the law and enjoyed the same liberties as other Americans. That Standing Bear and his Ponca friends and relatives were eventually able to stay in Nebraska represents a significant event in Nebraska history and the history of civil rights. The Poncas had flourished before the United States came to the Great Plains. Closely related to the Omahas, with whom they shared a common language dialect, the Poncas had migrated up the Missouri River in the late seventeenth century. They first settled with the Omahas in what is today South Dakota, along the banks of the Big Sioux River around 1700 and by 1715 in the White River valley. The Poncas eventually moved to three villages along the Niobrara River, which they called “Swift Running Water.” The Omahas moved further down the Missouri. Though never numbering more than several thousand, Poncas prospered in their new home, hunting, farming, fishing, and trading at the nearby junction of the Niobrara and Missouri. Ponca contact with Euro-Americans had a devastating effect. Many died from unfamiliar diseases, while alcohol ravaged others. Still more

Poncas perished at the hands of the Sioux, who had ready access to superior weaponry and who far outnumbered the Poncas. Additional Ponca suffering came from periodic food shortages caused by drought, locusts, and the disappearance of game. There were also unprovoked attacks by white renegades. During the 1840s and early 1850s, Poncas were forced to abandon their Niobrara homes part of the year and move west to follow the bison and live on small game, plants, and roots. One historian has called this period “the dark years” of Ponca history. As a result of their deteriorating situation, Poncas were all too often taken advantage of, sometimes even without their own knowledge. In 1854 Omahas signed a treaty with the United States that gave away Ponca territory. This caused a significant rift between neighbors and intertribal relatives. By 1857 Poncas were cut off from their hunting grounds, and they were on the verge of going to war with the Omahas. Led by The Drum, Poncas demanded an accounting from the Americans and better treatment. Accordingly, six Poncas were invited to Washington dc to discuss a treaty with Indian Commissioner Charles Mix, and on December 29, 1857, and January 5, 1858, the terms of a treaty were considered. Ponca leaders were told that they must live in one village, stop hunting, and become farmers. They responded to these government proposals by demanding more favorable provisions and a treaty like that recently negotiated by the Pawnees. They got neither. Instead Mix sent them back to Nebraska, giving them one year to move twenty-five miles up Ponca Creek to a small strip of rugged, barely farmable land that was then part of Dakota Territory. Ponca leaders signed the document feeling they had little choice. By 1865 the situation had deteriorated even further for the Poncas. They were starving. Some attention was given to assigning them to live with the Omahas on their reservation, but instead they were permitted to return to their old cornfields by the Niobrara. In a second treaty, the Poncas agreed to give up claims to thirty thousand acres west of their old reservation. Inexplicably, however, the U.S. government included a provision in the Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux that awarded virtually all of the Ponca land in Dakota Territory to the Sioux. Declaring that the Poncas were now intruders, the Sioux stepped up their raids. The federal government had already determined to concentrate all Native Americans on a few easily managed reservations, and so it The Trial of Standing Bear

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decided to resolve the Sioux-Ponca conflict by moving the Poncas to Indian Territory. Congress appropriated the necessary funds, and in 1877 an arrogant and hardheaded Indian inspector, E. C. Kemble, arrived with a detachment of United States troops to enforce the government edict. Kemble seized Ponca farm equipment and household goods. According to Standing Bear, “The agent took all our plows, harrows, axes and everything and put them in a big house, and we have never seen anything of them since.” Over loud protests from Poncas and their white friends in the area, Kemble next forced the Indians to leave for Oklahoma. This journey was a terrible experience. Swollen rivers, poor roads, and bad weather made the trip grueling, and many Poncas died of disease along the way. Little had been done to prepare for the arrival of the Poncas in Oklahoma. In sharp contrast to the lush river bottoms they had left behind, the new lands were ill-suited for agriculture. They were “stony and broken,” said Standing Bear. “I couldn’t plow, I couldn’t sow any wheat, and we all got sick and couldn’t do anything.” Although the government allowed the Indians to select new lands in the Territory and ultimately provided housing, livestock, and agricultural tools, the Indians were slow to adapt to the dry climate and continued to suffer from disease, particularly malaria. “It was like a great house with a big fire in it,” recalled Standing Bear, “and everything was poison. We never saw such kind of sickness before.” Within a year and a half, he said, the tribe had lost 158 of its 518 members, and many others were ill. When Standing Bear, who had already witnessed the death of several other family members, lost his sixteen-year-old son, he decided to return to the Niobrara country, both to inter the remains of his child and to resume his former way of life. Accompanied by a small band of thirty desperate men, women, and children, Standing Bear left the Oklahoma reservation in early January 1879. These Poncas, who had only twenty dollars and a few provisions, had to rely on handouts from settlers along the way. After ten weeks, the winter travelers, weakened and ill, finally reached Nebraska and the Omaha Reservation, where Standing Bear and his band were given sanctuary. The Omahas offered their kin not only food and other supplies but also land. In a public statement that the New York Herald called “one of the most extraordinary [promises] ever published in America,” the Omahas said, “[We] are willing to share with them our lands, and to assist them until they can, by their industry, support themselves.” 94

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21. Standing Bear (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

By this time, however, the Interior Department, already faced with other Indians leaving reservations, had decided to return the Poncas to Indian Territory, both to set an example and to keep the Poncas under government control. Accordingly, the secretary of the interior ordered the army to arrest Standing Bear’s band and escort it back to the reservation. The War Department assigned the task to General George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, who was stationed at Fort Omaha. Crook ordered a detachment of soldiers to take the Poncas to Omaha. There the Indians were temporarily billeted while they recovered their strength and health. Although Crook was a veteran of numerous wars with Indians, he was sympathetic to the plight of the Poncas and reluctant to compel them to return south. “I’ve been forced many times by orders from Washington to do [the] most inhuman things in dealing with the Indians,” he said, The Trial of Standing Bear

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“but now I’m ordered to do a more cruel thing than ever before.” Convinced that any protest he made to Washington would be ignored, Crook invited Thomas H. Tibbles, an assistant editor of the Omaha Herald, to “take up the matter.” Tibbles, a born crusader who had earlier been active in the antislavery campaign and later would become the Populists’ vice-presidential candidate, eagerly accepted Crook’s charge. In the weeks that followed, he devoted all his spare time to the Ponca cause. First, he persuaded a group of clergymen in Omaha to send a protest to Washington. Next, he wrote a series of vigorous articles in defense of the Poncas, some of which were printed in influential eastern newspapers. Finally, he persuaded two high-powered Omaha lawyers, John L. Webster, who had presided over the Nebraska Constitutional Convention in 1875, and Andrew J. Poppleton, a former mayor of Omaha who was now chief counsel for the Union Pacific Railroad, to file suit on behalf of the Poncas. Working without pay, the two attorneys filed a petition on April 4, 1879, with Nebraska’s federal district court asking for a writ of habeas corpus that would compel General Crook to justify his arrest of the Indians. Judge Dundy, who had a long legal and political career in Nebraska dating back to the days when he was a member of the territorial legislature and who was not particularly known as sympathetic to Native Americans, issued the writ and ordered the opposing parties to appear before him in Omaha to try the merits of the dispute. The case received national attention, and both sides sought to promote their cause in the press. The commissioner of Indian affairs publicly praised the Poncas’ reservation lands in Indian Territory, insisting that the conditions for Native Americans there were steadily improving and arguing against permitting “discontented and restless or mischievous Indians” to leave the reservation. If Native Americans were allowed to roam at will, he direly warned, “The most necessary discipline of the reservation would soon be entirely broken up, all authority over the Indians would cease, and in a short time the western country would swarm with roving and lawless bands of Indians.” Friends of the Poncas replied that an “Indian Ring,” a group of corrupt public officials and private citizens, had orchestrated Ponca removal in order to seize their Niobrara lands. Although no clearly defined ring existed, corruption was notorious in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and such rings did exist in other areas of the West, plus the government’s 96

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22. Gen. George Crook (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

policy of concentrating Native Americans on reservations dovetailed with private demands to open new lands to settlement. In the Poncas’ case, local business interests in Yankton and Sioux City thought the tribe’s removal would open the door to lucrative supply contracts for a new Sioux agency planned for the upper Missouri River. The courtroom was filled with Standing Bear’s supporters when the trial opened on the last day of April 1879. General Crook, who publicly made no secret of his sympathy for the Poncas, appeared in fulldress uniform, a rarity for him. Members of his staff were decked out in similar fashion. Most Indians, on the other hand, were dressed in tattered rags, though Standing Bear appeared in full Ponca regalia, including the emblem of his chieftainship, a bear-claw necklace. The tall, around fifty-year-old Indian chief who held a commanding presence and spoke no English cut an impressive figure, according to notes taken by Crook’s aide. The attorneys for the Indians stressed that the Poncas had renounced tribal authority and had made such great advancements in assimilation that they were entitled under the law to be treated like other Americans. The Trial of Standing Bear

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“Poncas are not savages nor wanderers,” said Webster. “They cultivate the soil, live in houses, and support themselves.” Appealing to cultural prejudices, the attorneys argued that Poncas were in essence more like other American farmers than traditional Plains Indians. They had changed. Moreover, the lawyers also asserted that the government had no right to take the Poncas’ land or move them to Indian Territory. G. M. Lambertson, a young United States district attorney, presented the government’s case that also appealed to cultural stereotypes, but he tried to arouse baser feelings of racial hatred. He insisted that Poncas still adhered to their traditional ways and were still dependent on the government, and that as Indians they were not entitled to the usual rights and privileges of citizenship. Lambertson rested part of his argument on the notorious Dred Scott decision, which had held in 1857 that black people were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Although the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had since been adopted in 1868 and 1870 and addressed issues of citizenship, how these amendments worked constitutionally had not yet been decided. Moreover, the amendments had been crafted to address the status of former slaves and not Native Americans. Worse yet, Lambertson also introduced into argument the subject of Indian atrocities, even though the Poncas had never been accused of any, apparently to show that Indians in general were unfit to have any rights or be citizens. After the lawyers presented their arguments, Judge Dundy allowed Standing Bear to address the court. In an effort to persuade the judge that Indians were entitled to the same legal protection as other people and to address the obvious issue of race, Standing Bear held up his hand and (speaking through an interpreter) said, “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.” Stressing his desire to return to his traditional lands, Standing Bear said, “A man bars the passage [and] I . . . must obey his orders. If he says that I cannot pass, I cannot. The long struggle will have been in vain.” After pausing, Standing Bear looked squarely at Judge Dundy and said, “You are that man.” Standing Bear’s appeal left few dry eyes in the room, and even Judge Dundy was moved. After a moment of silence, the audience in the courtroom shouted its approval and lined up to shake Standing Bear’s hand. 98

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Ten days later, on May 12, 1879, Judge Elmer S. Dundy delivered his path-breaking decision. Declaring that he had “never been called upon to hear or decide a case that appealed so strongly to [his] sympathy,” Dundy ruled in favor of the Poncas. These Indians, he said, had proven that they were persons under the law and thus fully entitled to seek redress in a federal court. Moreover, even though they were members of a dependent nation within the United States, they had certain inherent rights like the American general population. To the judge, Standing Bear was entitled to exercise these rights. Dundy’s decision was important in the history of Indian-white relations. It established for the first time that Native Americans were something other than “Uncle Sam’s step-children,” to be regulated as the Interior Department saw fit. Besides ensuring their right to live where they pleased, particularly if they renounced tribal authority and adapted to white civilization, the case guaranteed Native Americans access to the nation’s courts and thus gave them the means to redress grievances and secure the recognition of additional rights. It represented a legal wedge, a beginning. The Poncas had hoped that Dundy would confirm their American citizenship, but the judge did not address this issue. In fact, five years later in 1884, in the case of Elk v. Wilkins, when an Omaha Indian who owned his farm and had renounced tribal membership attempted to vote, Judge Dundy held that Indians could never be citizens. The Elk case in his eyes was comparable to the Dred Scott decision. It was not until 1924 that Congress adopted the Indian Citizenship Act, conferring citizenship on all Indians born in the United States. Standing Bear was nonetheless jubilant. “I thank God,” he was reported as exclaiming, “I am a free man once more, and I shall never forget those who have helped me.” To show his appreciation, he presented gifts to his attorneys. “Hitherto,” he said, “when we have been wronged we went to war. To assert our rights and avenge our wrongs we took the tomahawk . . . . But you have found a better way. You have gone into the court for us, and I find that our wrongs can be righted there. Now I have no more use for the tomahawk. I want to lay it down forever.” Standing Bear v. Crook (1879) was not appealed to a higher court. In a separate case adjudicated the following year, Judge Dundy ruled that the Poncas still held title to their Dakota lands. By this time, Congress had conceded that a “great wrong had been done the Ponca Indians,” The Trial of Standing Bear

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and in 1881 it appropriated money to compensate them for their losses and suffering. Five months later, the Sioux relinquished their claims to the Niobrara country, and Congress authorized the Poncas to take not a reservation in Nebraska but land allotments there. By this time, other Poncas still in Oklahoma had settled in and most chose to remain there, but Standing Bear and his followers took land near their old reservation, which was now part of Nebraska because of a boundary change. Thenceforth they were known as the Northern, or Nebraska, Poncas. Part of the reason for Congress’s generosity to the Poncas was that Thomas Tibbles and Standing Bear lectured in the East on the cause of Indian justice. They were joined by the Omaha Indian Susette La Flesche (Bright Eyes), whom Tibbles later married. Their appearances did much to publicize the injustices of American Indian policy and contributed to a growing demand for reform. Among those who heard their plea was Helen Hunt Jackson, who was moved to write A Century of Dishonor (1881), a passionate and influential indictment of American Indian policy. Another person who heard them was Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, who sponsored the General Allotment Act in 1887, a landmark piece of legislation designed to encourage the breakup of the tribes and the assimilation of Indians into American society. The Dawes Act, however, turned out to be a terrible mistake, resulting in greater poverty for Native Americans and the loss of more Indian land. By the time the act was repealed in 1934, Indians had lost more land because of this statute than from all of the United States-Indian wars combined. The Poncas were also not done suffering. While they had regained their place in Nebraska, by the 1950s Congress initiated the termination movement designed to abolish Indian tribes and their communal lands. The Northern Poncas were the only Nebraska tribe chosen to be terminated. The last tribe to be abolished, the Ponca Termination Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Termination policy was every bit as destructive as the Dawes Act and would eventually be discredited, but true to form the Poncas fought back. After dispersing to several small towns with some members coalescing in Sioux City, Norfolk, Omaha, and Lincoln neighborhoods, the Poncas organized and were restored to tribal status by Congress in 1990. In 2005 the state of Nebraska recognized the contribution of Standing Bear to its history by holding a special day when his life was celebrated. 100

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The Nebraska Indian Commission, many Nebraska Native Americans, and all of Nebraska’s citizens played prominent roles in the day’s proceedings in the capitol rotunda. A number of Nebraskans hoped that when the new state quarter design was announced the image of Standing Bear and his story would be chosen. They would be disappointed. Governor David Heineman, the former lieutenant governor who had recently become governor after the elected governor’s resignation and who was already running for the governorship against formidable opponents, instead made the final decision to pick an image of Chimney Rock for the state coin. The trial of Standing Bear played an important role in promoting justice for Native Americans. The case was a significant benchmark in the long struggle to define the rights of Indians and to publicize their grievances, struggles that still continue in Nebraska and the United States today.

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13. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Wild West Show

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n 1882 William F. Cody organized North Platte’s Fourth of July celebration. Known as “The Old Glory Blowout,” this gala affair featured exhibitions of horse riding, buffalo hunting, roping, and the like, and was a great success. It was one of the first rodeos ever staged, and it became the prototype for a production that Cody organized the following year. Cody’s Wild West Show took the country and Europe by storm, and at the height of its popularity, it employed almost seven hundred people. Who would have thought that Nebraska’s patriotic fun could become an opportunity for thousands to experience the mythic West on stage even before the Old West had ended? Not many persons are legends in their own time, but that is precisely who William F. Cody, known to almost everyone as “Buffalo Bill,” became. Cody was born near Le Claire, Iowa, in 1846 on the eve of the MexicoUnited States War. He spent most of his youth in Kansas, where his father took an active antislavery position in the turbulent politics of the day. Will, as his family called him, inherited a restless and pioneering spirit from his father. He had little formal education and was forced to become the family breadwinner at the age of eleven when his father died, evidently from an infected knife wound he suffered when an argument over slavery turned violent. To support the family, young Cody held various jobs in the freighting business, working for a time for the teamsters Russell, Majors, and Waddell. While still in his teens, Cody took a position as a professional buffalo hunter, supplying meat to construction crews working on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. A skilled shooter, Cody received the then handsome salary of five hundred dollars a month to kill twelve buffalo a day, a quota he had little trouble filling. With strong riding and shooting skills,

23. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Cody joined the Union army during the Civil War and served briefly as a scout. He resumed his scouting career as a civilian after the war and pursued it intermittently thereafter. Scouts hired by the army engaged primarily in reconnaissance work, but they also had to serve as guides and trackers, deliver dispatches, and occasionally fight Indians. Cody excelled in each phase of his work and was probably one of the army’s best scouts. After one particularly harrowing ride through dangerous territory, when he covered 350 miles in less than sixty hours to deliver important dispatches, Cody was named chief of the scouts in his regiment. “Such an exhibition of endurance and courage,” said Gen. Philip Sheridan, “was more than enough to convince me that his services would be extremely valuable.” Summarized Gen. Eugene Carr, Cody “displayed great skill in following [the trail] and also deserves great credit for his fighting . . . , his marksmanship being very conspicuous.” After the war, Cody looked for a means to put his skills to work. His prowess as a hunter was already established, but it took on more meaning after he earned the nickname of “Buffalo Bill.” His claim to this name came in 1868 when he defeated William Comstock in a celebrated hunting contest in Kansas. Cody killed sixty-nine buffalo while Comstock could down only forty-six. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Wild West Show

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By 1870 Cody had become something of a national hero, partly because Ned Buntline had written a fictionalized account of his exploits for a New York newspaper. Buntline was a journalist and dime novelist who had met the scout, hunter, and Civil War veteran, and Buntline believed Cody’s stories had the possibility to be a successful lead semifictional character. The result was the top-selling novel, Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen (1869), in which Cody became “the greatest scout of the West,” skilled in “the techniques of wilderness survival, Indian fighting, and vigilante justice.” This book was so successful, Cody became the subject of over fifteen hundred dime novels. His fictional exploits became well known to reading Americans. Cody played upon his fame and often sought out wealthy easterners and Europeans who paid him large fees to lead them on buffalo hunts. His most celebrated client was the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, the third son of Czar Alexander II. No doubt Cody’s gracious manners contributed to his popularity. Now “Buffalo Bill,” Cody attempted to parlay his newfound fame into a political career back in Nebraska. He served as a justice of the peace for many years, even though he was more often gone from than residing inside the state. Cody was elected to the Nebraska state legislature as a Democrat in 1872, but he never took his seat. Destiny called him to a bigger stage, and a later recount showed that his opponent had won anyway. Cody had a flair for the theatrical and was already becoming a showman by 1872, when he began to play himself in theater performances and in plays, the first of which was The Scout of the Prairie, written by Buntline. In 1876 he interrupted his stage career to take part in the American war with the Sioux after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In a duel that became enshrouded in legend wherein it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, Cody killed and scalped a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hand (or Yellow Hair) near Fort Robinson. Cody displayed his trophy when he returned to the theater in New England, which earned him denunciations in the press and pulpit. Cody spent a decade on the stage, but he increasingly moved toward producing and playing in exhibitions and spectacles instead of acting in conventional plays. After his North Platte Fourth of July extravaganza, Cody further developed his prototype for a show about the West. His Wild West Show would in fact play for thirty years, beginning in 104

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1883, typically featuring rodeo events, such as horse racing and sharp shooting, and various dramatic spectacles from western history, such as a buffalo hunt, a Pony Express ride, an emigrant wagon train crossing the Plains, and an Indian attack on a frontier settlement. One of the most popular features was Cody’s reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which he entitled “Custer’s Last Stand.” The Wild West Show’s only dress rehearsal was held in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1883. The performance ended in disaster when the show’s animals stampeded and a stagecoach carrying the mayor almost tipped over. The town councilmen had to restrain the mayor from attacking Cody. The show’s opening in Omaha was more successful, and a series of nationwide tours followed. At first the show played one-day stands in small and medium-sized towns, but after 1885 there were longer engagements in big cities. Cody also took his show to Europe for several lengthy tours. In 1887 he chartered the steamship State of Nebraska to carry the show to England. There he played to huge crowds, thirty to forty thousand at a time. The show was particularly successful in London, where it was patronized by the crowned heads of Europe, including Queen Victoria, who took a particular liking to Cody. “Those who went to be amused,” said the London Times, “often stayed to be instructed. The Wild West [Show] was irresistible. Colonel Cody suddenly found himself the hero of the London season.” Black Elk, the respected Oglala Sioux elder and holy man, remembered the day he met Queen Victoria, whom he referred to as Grandmother England. He was a young dancer in Cody’s Wild West Show. Through John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk describes the frightening boat trip ordeal to England and his reactions to this entirely new experience. Then one day a special private showing was arranged for Britain’s monarch. She arrived in an impressive “big shining wagon, and there were soldiers on both sides of her.” No one in the show was allowed to shoot during the performance by order of Queen Victoria’s security. According to Black Elk, We danced and sang, and I was one of the dancers chosen to do this for the Grandmother, because I was young and limber then and could dance many ways. We stood right in front of Grandmother England. She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us. After “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Wild West Show

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we had danced, she spoke to us. She said something like this: “I am sixty-seven years old. All over the world I have seen all kinds of people; but today I have seen the best looking people I know. If you belonged to me, I would not let them take you around in a show like this.”

Several weeks later Black Elk and members of the Wild West Show were taken to visit with the queen and attend one of the official celebrations for her Jubilee. Cody preferred to call the performance an exhibition rather than a show, and it was usually billed simply as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” The advertisements invariably promised “Everything Genuine,” and most contemporaries considered the show authentic. “We hear a great deal about realism on the stage,” said a London newspaper, “but the Buffalo Bill show is something more than realism—it is reality itself.” Just before Cody went to Europe, he had gone back to Nebraska as was his usual habit. There Governor John M. Thayer made Cody, now quite well known and popular, the governor’s aide-de-camp. This appointment carried with it the rank of colonel in the Nebraska National Guard. When Cody returned in 1891 from his successful trip to England, Governor Thayer promoted him to general and sent him to Wounded Knee during the hysteria immediately following the massacre. Although his title was largely honorary, it gave Cody entree, and he went to Pine Ridge where he spoke up for Native American rights. “Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known,” he later said, “has resulted from broken promises, and treaties broken by the government.” At the height of its popularity, the Wild West Show employed a huge cast. The performers consisted mainly of people who had lived in the West, such as cowboys, Indians, Mexicans, and soldiers. One of the later European tours even included nineteen Indians who volunteered to go overseas after having experienced the Wounded Knee Massacre. A number of celebrities worked for the show at one time or another. Among these were Major Frank North, one-time head of the Pawnee Indian scouts, who died from a riding accident in the show; “Pawnee Bill” Lillie, who had once taught in a Pawnee Indian school and later had his own show; Doc Middleton, the notorious highwayman; and along with Black Elk, other Sioux Indian leaders, including Sitting Bull. One of the best-known members of the cast was Annie Oakley, who was dubbed “Little Sure Shot” by Sitting Bull. For seventeen years she opened the show with her feats of marksmanship. 106

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24. Annie Oakley poster (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

The Wild West Show did particularly well in 1893, when it was set up near the World’s Fair in Chicago. Profits from the show that year approached $1 million. Cody enjoyed another triumph in 1898 when his show was featured in the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. Some twenty-four thousand people came to pay him tribute on August 31, which was designated Cody Day. That same year Thomas Edison filmed a performance of the Wild West Show. In 1913 Cody himself made eight short-subject films portraying scenes from the Old West, including the Wounded Knee Massacre. Although these were shown in nickelodeons, Cody made little money from them. Most of his films have since been lost, though a few survive in private hands. The show’s best year was 1899, when 341 performances were given in a two hundred–day season. In all, 50 million people saw the show “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Wild West Show

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in the United States and Europe. Although the show brought in large sums of money, Cody was generous to a fault with friends, employees, and acquaintances. “He was totally unable to resist any claim for assistance that came to him,” recalled Annie Oakley, “or refuse any mortal in distress.” He also lost a great deal of money in highly speculative investments, such as a gold mine in Arizona. As a result, he gradually lost control of his show, and it was finally auctioned off in 1913. Even Cody’s favorite horse, Isham, was put up for sale, though it was bought by friends and presented to Cody as a gift. Cody developed two large ranches, Scout’s Rest on the outskirts of North Platte, now a Nebraska state historical park, and the te Ranch near Cody, Wyoming. He also built the Irma Hotel, which was named for his daughter, in Cody, Wyoming. For many years, he used Scout’s Rest as his base of operations, while his wife, who was periodically estranged from him, lived in a succession of homes in North Platte. Because of his financial problems and his own inherent restlessness, Cody was never able to retire. He did, however, give a great many farewell performances, not unlike a number of contemporary aging American singers. “I can’t stand so much as I used to,” he once confided to a friend in 1902, “but I don’t want to break down until I get out of debt and ahead of the hounds.” He died in Denver on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, still hatching schemes to free himself from debt. Though apparently he wanted to be buried in Wyoming, his wife reportedly accepted ten thousand dollars from a promoter to permit his interment on Lookout Mountain near Golden, Colorado. Cody’s Wild West Show did much to fix our image of the West. It popularized the use of the ten-gallon hat as well as the word “cowboy,” which hitherto had been a term of contempt. It also helped spread the mythic notions that all Indians rode horses and sported war bonnets. Indeed, so established did these images become that life imitated art, and westerners who saw the show began to dress and act as they were depicted. As for Buffalo Bill, he had become the nation’s first media hero and one of the most recognizable faces in the world. He had come a long way from his theatrical debuts in North Platte and Columbus. Companies sought him out to promote their products. He appeared in ads for Winchester rifles, Stetson hats, Chancellor cigars, and Old Crow bourbon. Hundreds of publications featured him as a hero, second only at 108

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the time to a fictional detective named Nick Carter, and Cody later was portrayed in thirty-five feature films. Cody contributed to his own mythology. With his broad sense of humor, he had a penchant for tall tales, and the publicity department of his show shamelessly spread exaggerated stories about Cody’s exploits as a hunter and scout. But when fact is separated from fiction, Cody nonetheless deserves much of the reputation that history has accorded him. “Buffalo Bill was one of those men,” lavished Theodore Roosevelt, “whose daring prowess opened the great West to settlement and civilization.” He was a crack shot, a skilled horseman and hunter, and a courageous and tireless soldier. In his numerous military campaigns, Cody was repeatedly commended for heroism under fire. He was also adept at following a trail, estimating distances, and judging the land. In 1872 Cody received the Medal of Honor, but because he was a civilian at the time he was later ruled ineligible, and the award was withdrawn formally in 1917. In 1989, however, the U.S. Army restored his name to the rolls. As a scout and showman, “Buffalo Bill” Cody had the rare distinction of making history twice, first when he helped extend the nation’s western frontier and then when he embellished and promoted its image in his Wild West Show.

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14. The Great Nebraska Migration

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n the 1870s the Great Nebraska Migration began. It would last for three decades, distributing population throughout disparate parts of frontier Nebraska. Many communities were planted, and as they matured, they became known for the immigrants they attracted. Each settlement harbored great hopes of becoming a metropolis, but few did. In this process, however, Nebraska developed a rural international diversity few other states could match. Three such towns—Sutton, Overton, and Dannebrog—among many others, participated in the Great Nebraska Migration. Modest at best, Sutton’s beginnings started in the spring of 1870, when Luther French constructed a homestead dugout on the banks of School Creek in northeastern Clay County for his “flock of motherless children.” French had moved to Nebraska from Iowa with his eight children after his wife had died, perhaps in childbirth. Later that summer French broke six acres of land, and although he planted and harvested wheat to prove up his homestead, he had something else in mind for his land—a town site. By August 1871 French had laid out six hundred lots on his property, and upon the suggestion of a new neighbor he named the projected settlement “Sutton” after a town of the same name in Massachusetts. The new year found thirty-five residents calling Sutton home. On the town site were two houses, a grocery store that also sold whiskey, and two tent saloons. After some land disputes and a serious shakedown by the Burlington and Missouri Railroad for the rights to a depot, the railroad reached Sutton, kindling hopes of building a city by local residents and speculators. In the fall of 1873, the railroad’s recruitment of immigrants bore fruit when a large colony of Germans from Russia, who had journeyed all

25. Downtown Sutton, Nebraska, circa 1874 (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

the way from southern Russia near the port of Odessa on the Black Sea, arrived in Sutton on one of its first trains to stop there. Significant environmental and culture shock must have greeted these new immigrants. To be sure, they had carefully planned their move, and they welcomed the opportunity to own new lands, but it was not an easy trip for the fifty-five Germans from Russia families who made the trek. Together they purchased over sixteen thousand acres of land, much at the rather high price of seven dollars per acre (or $112,840) from the Burlington and Missouri Railroad Company, plus they filed on the maximum number of homesteads. They also bought lots in Sutton costing eighteen thousand dollars. In total, these frugal, serious, and temperate people invested nearly a half million dollars in Clay County, Nebraska. One of the leaders of the colony was Henry Grosshaus. He made the move with his wife, children, and his father, John, and his family. The senior Grosshaus purchased eight hundred acres, and his son helped him farm. In 1876 both Grosshaus families moved into Sutton, where they set up a grain company and continued to farm. They also built Grosshaus Hall, where the first meetings of the German Reformed Church were held until its members constructed a church in 1878. In The Great Nebraska Migration

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1881 Henry began an agricultural implement business, and that same year he was elected a trustee of the village. Upon the arrival of more Germans from Russia immigrants, they too immediately went to work in farming and agribusiness as they constructed a new society in Gilded Age Nebraska. Like Sutton, Overton in southeastern Dawson County evolved first as a railroad creation. The Union Pacific Railroad established a siding that it called “Overton” in the mid-1860s. Probably named for a railroad official, the town wasn’t officially laid out until 1873. The following year settlers constructed the first building, a wooden structure built to serve both as a post office and grocery store. Population movement to the Overton area was not rapid until 1880, when a large group of African American immigrants from Canada settled in and around Overton. They in turn attracted other black settlers from the South. Charles Meehan led the immigration movement to Overton. Meehan, born in Detroit to Irish parents, grew up with George and Maurice Brown, children of a black father and an American Indian mother. The Browns also adopted an African American daughter who married Meehan. The Meehan and Brown families, along with a number of other former southern slaves who had escaped to freedom in Canada before the Civil War, filed for homesteads in Dawson County. They were skilled artisans as well as educated, “weather-wise,” and experienced farmers who brought goods, supplies, and wealth with them. Other blacks came directly from the South in the 1870s. They were called Exodusters, a term that combined the biblical idea of an exodus to a promised land with the desire to become a farmer, a duster. This black colony at Overton, however, did not remain. Instead of establishing themselves permanently both in the town and countryside as did an increasing variety of European immigrants primarily from England and Ireland who came to Dawson County, the Overton African Americans eventually moved further north to Cherry County, where they built their own town, DeWitty, in 1907, and claimed farmland in the Sandhills under the Kinkaid Act. Dannebrog, our third example, evolved somewhat differently than Sutton and Overton. It was the creation of the Danish Land and Homestead Company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The President of dlhc was Lars Hannibal, and he led a committee of five to Nebraska in early 1871 to locate land for Danish immigrants. They chose eight townships in Howard County. 112

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Danish families started arriving almost as soon as the company purchased the land, beginning first on Oak Creek, one mile north of the Loup River, in May 1871. By 1872 Hannibal had secured permission for a post office for a new settlement. He was urged to call it “Carthage,” but he decided instead to name the new community after the Danish flag, “Dannebrog,” because Danish settlers, he believed, represented goodwill and peace. The new Danish farmers found their early years to be very difficult, but they sought solace in maintaining traditions from their homeland, such as celebrating Grundlovs Fest in the summer. Although the settlement did not grow very quickly during its first decade, a jump in population occurred once a railroad connected Dannebrog to St. Paul and Loup City in 1886. Thus, Dannebrog, Overton, and Sutton became new homes to a diverse group of Nebraska immigrants. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has always been a land of many cultures. This was especially true in the years immediately after the Civil War. Between 1865 and World War I, some 25 million people came to this country, mainly from Europe. Driven from their homelands by economic hardship, political persecution, religious discrimination, or military conscription, these people were searching for a better life. Nebraska profited enormously from the immigrant influx. Between 1860 and 1890 the population of the state soared from less than twentynine thousand to one million. To a large extent, this increase was fueled by foreign immigration. In 1870 54 percent of the state’s population was foreign-born or had foreign-born parents, and in 1900 the figure was still 47 percent. Although most descendants of these immigrants gradually blended into the population, even today ethnic enclaves persist, and the state’s rich ethnic heritage is still evident. What lured most immigrants to Nebraska was cheap land. Land was available for a small fee under the Homestead Act, and it could also be purchased from earlier settlers, railroads, or speculators. States and territories competed fiercely for settlers, and the railroads played a vital role in promoting Nebraska. Agents of the Burlington and the Union Pacific railroads scoured the East and Europe looking for native-born Americans and immigrants willing to repatriate. The railroads frequently offered incentives, particularly to large groups of immigrants willing to migrate en masse. The railroads even maintained free hotels, called emigrant houses, in such places as Omaha and Lincoln to facilitate relocation. The Great Nebraska Migration

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The largest group of immigrants during the Great Nebraska Migration was made up of Germans. First- and second-generation Germans constituted 18 percent of the state’s population by 1900. Although some Germans migrated to Nebraska from states in the East, most came directly from Europe, either from Germany proper or from German-speaking regions in other countries. There was a particularly large contingent from Russia who had become successful merchants and farmers. These Germans had settled there in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century after being promised free land, an exemption from military service, religious freedom, full control over their schools and local governments, and other incentives. When the Russian government threatened to annul these privileges in the 1870s, many Germans like those who settled in and around Sutton migrated to the United States. Germans could be found almost everywhere in Nebraska. Immigrants directly from Germany or the East Coast were most numerous in Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island, Hastings, and elsewhere in the Platte Valley. There were also many in the northeastern part of the state, particularly in Pierce, Cedar, Stanton, and Cuming counties. Germans from Russia congregated in Lincoln, where they constituted a third of the city’s population by 1910. They also lived in the vicinity of Scottsbluff and in the eastern part of the state, especially in Jefferson, York, Hamilton, Clay, and Fillmore counties. Sutton soon had such a pronounced GermanRussian character that it became known as “Russian Town” in the region. Germans from Russia had a reputation for being excellent farmers, and they played an important role in establishing the sugar-beet industry in the western part of the state. Somewhat clannish and old-fashioned, they were also often derided by other Nebraskans as “Rooshans.” Although most of the German immigrants were middle-class or lowermiddle-class farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, some had amassed large estates in Europe. They brought sizable fortunes to Nebraska, such as the Grosshaus family did in Clay County. German Mennonites also saved their resources, and this made them especially attractive settlers. Railroads sometimes engaged in spirited bidding wars, offering ever greater incentives in the hope of persuading them to settle along their lines. The Burlington even built an emigrant house near Henderson in York County for the exclusive use of the Mennonites who settled there. Like other ethnic groups in America, Germans were eager to re-create their “Old World” culture, so they established German churches, 114

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schools, newspapers, clubs, businesses, and political organizations. The churches, schools, and newspapers played a particularly important role in preserving and transmitting German culture. Almost every town and rural enclave with a significant German population had a church, and by 1885 the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church alone could boast of fifty-seven schools in the state. There were German-language newspapers in Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island, Beatrice, Columbus, West Point, Norfolk, and elsewhere. The most influential was the Lincoln Freie Presse, which was read throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest and by 1905 had a circulation of almost 160,000. Unlike other ethnic groups, Germans normally did not vote as a bloc. Those Germans who had lived in the nation longest, as well as those who were Protestants, usually favored the Republican Party, whereas recent immigrants and Catholics were more likely to support the Democrats. Only when their ethnic interests were seriously threatened did Germans close ranks. Most were firmly opposed to prohibition, women’s suffrage, state regulation of parochial schools, and laws that restricted activities on Sunday, and when these issues were before the public, Germans usually voted together. After the Germans, the largest immigrant group in Nebraska was the Swedes, who constituted 5.1 percent of the population in 1900. Most Swedes usually came to Nebraska from other states, although some migrated directly from Sweden. They settled in large numbers in and around Omaha. They were also numerous in the Platte River Valley, especially in Saunders, Polk, and Phelps counties, and in the northeastern part of the state, particularly in Burt County. A number of towns were settled almost entirely by Swedes, most notably Stromsburg, Swede Home, and Osceola in Polk County; Mead, Malmo, Wahoo, and Swedeburg in Saunders County; Oakland in Burt County; Gothenburg in Dawson County; and Axtell in Kearney County. Swedes who immigrated, like Germans, sought to preserve their ethnic heritage. Swedish-language newspapers were published in Omaha, and Luther Academy School was established in Wahoo to perpetuate Swedish culture, language, and Lutheranism. After a rocky start, the academy thrived, and between 1883 and 1933, 312 of its graduates became teachers and another eighty-five became Lutheran ministers. As proof of the strength of Swedish culture in Nebraska, a Fourth of July celebration held in Swedeburg in 1884 drew over a thousand Swedes. The Great Nebraska Migration

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Most Swedes were loyal to the Republican Party, and even the hard times of the 1890s did not undermine their political faith. A Swedishlanguage newspaper was published briefly in Lincoln to promote the Farmers’ Alliance, but it was discontinued for lack of support. Most Nebraska Swedes agreed with a Kansas compatriot who said that a Swede was the best thing in Europe, an American the best thing in the United States, and a Swedish-American Republican the best thing in the world. After the Germans and Swedes, the Irish were the next largest nineteenth-century immigrant group to Nebraska, accounting for 4.3 percent of the population by 1900. Most Irish immigrants settled in cities. From the beginning they could be found in large numbers not only in Omaha but also in other towns in the Platte River Valley as they had labored to build the Union Pacific and other Nebraska railroads. The Irish also started scattered settlements in rural Nebraska. In 1856 Irish immigrants founded St. Johns in Dakota County, though this town was later abandoned in 1860 in favor of a new one two miles away, Jackson. With the assistance of the Irish Catholic Colonization Association, other Irish immigrants established Spalding in Greeley County in 1875. John O’Neill, an Irish nationalist who had served time in an American jail during his youth for taking part in an invasion of Canada, was a particularly active colonizer. O’Neill believed, “The next best thing to giving the Irish people their freedom at home is to encourage and assist [them] in procuring homes for themselves in this free land.” Hoping to establish “a New Ireland radiating a political influence around the globe,” O’Neill helped start several Irish colonies in Nebraska, most notably the town that bears his name in Holt County. Like other ethnic groups, the Irish worked to perpetuate their faith and culture, but they did so primarily through their religion. The first church of any denomination in Nebraska was a Catholic church built in Omaha by Irish immigrants in 1856. Other Catholic churches sprouted across the territory, and a number of Catholic orders—such as the Sisters of Mercy in Omaha and the Franciscan Fathers in Columbus—took root. Catholic schools proliferated, and in 1878 Creighton University was founded in Omaha. Like their compatriots elsewhere in the nation, the Irish in Nebraska generally supported the Democratic Party. Czechs were another important immigrant group, constituting 3.6 per116

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cent of Nebraska’s population in 1900. The large influx of Czechs from Bohemia and Moravia in the late nineteenth century made Nebraska one of the most important Czech centers in the United States. Bohemians were especially numerous in Douglas, Saunders, Butler, Colfax, and Saline counties. Edward Rosewater, editor of the Omaha Bee, established the first Czech-language newspaper in Nebraska in 1871, and others sprang up in Wilber, Clarkson, and Schuyler. Bohemians also established a number of sokols—patriotic Czech organizations that featured gymnastic displays and promoted Czech culture. Railroads, as happened at Sutton with the Germans from Russia, also encouraged Czechs to emigrate to Nebraska to create farming communities. In Saunders County railroad land sold through the Lincoln Land Company helped establish a village for Czech immigrants in 1887. At first the people tried to use the name “Praha,” the Czech translation for their capital in Czechoslovakia, but that name had already been reserved for a town in Colfax County (that coincidentally never really developed), so they chose the English version, Prague, which many Nebraskans pronounce with a long A. Czechoslovakia was known as “the land of musicians,” and almost every Bohemian town in Nebraska had a band or orchestra. Czechs also prized education and sought to require the Czech language in their public schools. Although most Bohemians were Catholic, there were a large number of Protestant free-thinkers who revered the memory of Fr. Jan Hus, the Bohemian nationalist who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415. Whatever their religious preference, most Czechs in Nebraska strongly supported the Democratic Party. The English had a significant presence in Nebraska, too, accounting for 3.1 percent of the population in 1900. Because they shared a common language and similar culture with native-born Americans, the English were less clannish than other immigrant groups and usually blended into the population quickly. Their settlements were also more willing to accept other individual immigrant families from other countries more easily. Nevertheless, an identifiable English settlement was founded at Palmyra in Otoe County, as were others in Cass, Adams, Clay, and Fillmore counties. The English usually built Episcopal churches and supported the Republican Party. Immigrants from Denmark were also numerous, accounting for 2.5 The Great Nebraska Migration

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percent of Nebraska’s population in 1900. Like the Swedes, many Danes came from other parts of the United States as well as directly from their motherland. Danish settlements like Dannebrog were scattered around the state, but Danes were most numerous in Howard and Kearney counties. Typically, Danish immigrants came as a part of land companies controlled by Danish Americans, and they platted communities like Dannebrog and other Danish settlements, such as Dannevirke, Boelus, and Nysted, also in Howard County, and Brownlee in Cherry County. To preserve their faith and culture, Danes in Nebraska established Lutheran churches, folk schools, and a Danish-language newspaper in Dannebrog. In Blair they founded Dana College, the only four-year Danish college established in the United States. Though normally loyal to the Republican Party, many Danes in Nebraska were attracted to Populism in the 1890s. Danes also established cooperative ventures to process sorghum, cut lumber, produce dairy products, provide insurance, store grain in elevators, and oversee livestock sales. Nebraska also became the home at this time to a unique migration of African Americans from the American South and from Canada. After the Civil War, many former slaves and their families and relatives opted to exercise their newfound freedom and pursue homesteads on the Great Plains. Most had agricultural skills, and they wanted to try their hands, like the Germans from Russia, Swedes, and other European immigrants, at farming their own land. Black immigrants of the late 1870s and early 1880s were mostly from the rural upper South, but African Americans came from northern cities as well. The first black homesteader was Robert Ball Anderson, a former slave from Green County, Kentucky, who had escaped slavery and joined the Union army. He claimed a homestead in 1870 near Valley, became a very successful farmer, and also published his autobiography. For a time, entrepreneurs attempted to create black towns and to assist the former slaves with obtaining homesteads as most would-be black settlers had few cash assets so necessary in order to start farming. This approach was successful in Oklahoma and Kansas, the most notable black town being Nicodemus. There were also attempts in Nebraska. Black settlers in Franklin County in 1871 tried to create the town of Grant, but sufficient assets were never realized for constructing the community, and after a year the African American pioneers left 118

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26. Belgian immigrants in front of a two-story sod house near Broken Bow in the mid-1880s (courtesy of Solomon D. Butcher Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society).

and migrated to Omaha. In 1880 two Exoduster groups from Tennessee attempted to settle near Aurora in Hamilton County and also in Harlan County, but both settlements failed within a year. Not everyone was welcomed. When 150 potential black homesteaders from Mississippi arrived in Lincoln around 1880, they were driven from the Capital City by an angry white mob. The most successful African American settlement in Nebraska occurred later after black farmers near Overton moved into the Sandhills to take up farming. Their town of DeWitty in Cherry County survived for nearly thirty years, beginning in 1907. Black settlers built sod houses, planted corn, potatoes, and beans, and raised cattle and mules. They built an African Episcopal Church in 1910, served by Reverend O. J. Burchkardt, who journeyed north from Lincoln. By the time of World War I, DeWitty was home to one hundred families, but the town did not last beyond the Great Depression and the severe drought of the late 1920s. Most African American settlers were attracted to the Republican Party, the party they credited with ending slavery. The Great Nebraska Migration

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The Great Nebraska Migration also included other ethnic groups. They came from Belgium, Poland, Norway, Canada, Russia, Scotland, Austria, Switzerland, Scotland, and Wales, and in the early twentieth century there was an influx of Italians, Russians, Mexicans, and Japanese. For most immigrants, life in Nebraska was hard because they had to adapt to an unfamiliar culture and environment and contend with discrimination. This was especially true in the nineteenth century. “Unfortunately,” said Willa Cather of the new immigrants, “their American neighbors were seldom open-minded enough to understand . . . and profit by their older traditions.” Under these circumstances, surviving Nebraska was not a task for the weak or faint of heart. As one English settler put it in 1872, “If any man has plenty of money, nerves of steel, a constitution warranted to withstand all climates, and last, but not least, ‘an India rubber conscience,’ he may do well out here. Anyone not possessing these qualities had better stay away.” Despite these hardships, many immigrants who came to Nebraska sank deep roots. Besides playing a central role in the state’s economic growth, they have left an important cultural legacy as well. As Cather put it, they have “spread across our bronze prairies like daubs of color on a painter’s palette,” contributing to the vitality and energy of the region. The extraordinary ethnic variety that once characterized Nebraska faded during the early twentieth century and World War I when Americans placed enormous national pressure on stamping out foreign traditions and restricting immigration. Nevertheless, the state still retains something of its old ethnic character. A recent census has shown that Nebraskans are more likely to be aware of their ethnic origins than other Americans and are more likely to consider their ethnicity important and worthwhile. Moreover, the number of immigrants born in other countries who are residing in Nebraska in the twenty-first century is on the rise. Modern Nebraska is the home of many of America’s newest immigrants: the Vietnamese; the Hmong of Laos; Russian Jews; Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs; South Asians from India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan; El Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, and Cubans; Iraqis; and Sudanese.

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15. J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day

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ot many states can make a claim to have invented a holiday, but Nebraska is an exception. In 1885 the Nebraska state legislature designated Arbor Day as an official holiday, setting the date for its annual observation on April 22. Arbor Day, a time set aside for the planting of trees, originated in Nebraska. It was the brainchild of J. Sterling Morton, a prominent newspaper editor and Democratic politician who was the state’s leading conservationist in the late nineteenth century. And April 22nd happened to be the birthday of J. Sterling Morton. The process of creating a holiday for trees took several decades. Morton jumpstarted the movement by offering the following proposal to the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture on January 4, 1872: “Resolved, that Wednesday the 10th of April, 1872, be, and the same is hereby, especially set apart and consecrated for tree planting in the state of Nebraska.” The idea behind the proposal, Morton later said, “was to concentrate all the thought of all the commonwealth on a single day, upon the very important topic of tree planting.” The board unanimously adopted Morton’s proposal. Although some members wanted to call the date “Sylvan Day,” Morton persuaded them to accept “Arbor Day” from the Latin word for “tree” because this term was more inclusive and embraced fruit trees as well as trees of the forest. Morton’s resolution called for the board to give twenty-five dollars in books to the individual who planted the most trees on Arbor Day and one hundred dollars in cash to the agricultural society of the most active tree-planting county. Although the first Arbor Day was poorly publicized, more than a million trees were planted that day. J. D. Smith, a farmer who lived outside of Lincoln, won the individual prize by planting thirty-five thousand trees, or about sixty acres, on the desig-

27. J. Sterling Morton in January 1900 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

nated day. “J. D. Smith,” said the Plattsmouth Land Dealer, “has the championship for tree planting on ‘Arbor Day.’” There was no observance in 1873, but the following year the Board of Agriculture again proclaimed a day in April as Arbor Day and passed a resolution making it an annual occurrence. That year Morton wrote in his diary, “Arbor Day, an invention of mine, now become a public holiday, [is] destined to become a blessing to posterity as well as to ourselves.” Thereafter, the governor annually proclaimed an Arbor Day until the state legislature officially took matters into its own hands. When he celebrated the first official Arbor Day, fifty-three-year-old J. Sterling Morton was a prominent Nebraskan, nearing the twilight of his long political career. Born in upstate New York in 1832, Julius Sterling Morton came from a hardworking and prosperous family. When he was two, the family moved to Monroe, Michigan, on Lake Erie, where his father entered the newspaper and merchandising business. At the age of fourteen, young Morton enrolled in a stern Methodist preparatory school, where he was known for his mischievous behav122

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ior. “I achieved the enviable reputation,” he later recalled, “of being so full of the Devil that the very pores of my skin were said to exude the essence of diabolism.” In 1850 Morton enrolled at the University of Michigan. “My ambition to be somebody,” he told his father, “is slowly waking up and if I can only keep straight, be contented and have my health, no one knows what I may not attain to.” Morton proved a good student but was expelled from Michigan shortly before graduation because he criticized the college president for dismissing a popular teacher. Morton transferred his credits to Union College in New York and graduated instead from that institution. Years later, after he had achieved prominence, the University of Michigan awarded him a degree. During his college years, Morton frequently contributed to the Detroit Free Press, an influential and lively paper whose editor was dedicated to the proposition that the duty of a newspaper was “to print the news, and raise hell.” After graduating from college, Morton became a fulltime reporter for the paper, but his job was short-lived. In the fall of 1854 he married his childhood sweetheart, Caroline Joy French, and the newlyweds left immediately for Nebraska, which had just been opened to settlement. After traveling overland to St. Louis, the young couple took a steamship up the Missouri River to St. Joseph and then journeyed north by stagecoach first to Maryville, Missouri, and then into Iowa, where they crossed the Missouri River by ferry, settling in Bellevue. Already an ardent Democrat and a forceful and eloquent speaker, Morton threw himself into politics and championed Bellevue’s claim to the territorial capital. When this prize went to Omaha and Morton was defeated in a race for a seat in the territorial legislature, he decided in 1855 to move to Nebraska City, a rapidly growing trade center that seemed to offer better prospects for his ambition “to be somebody.” Upon his arrival in Nebraska City, Morton became editor of the Nebraska City News, a position he held for fifteen years. Like other newspapers in the territory, the News was founded mainly to promote the town and espouse the views of a political party. “Each newspaper in the Territory,” Morton later recalled, “was at that time merely the advance agent of a town company.” In this position, Morton refined his already tart political pen and tongue. Later that same year, Morton won election to the legislature, where J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day

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he assumed leadership of the anti-Omaha faction. Frustrated in his attempts to move the capital, he worked to annex southern Nebraska to Kansas. “Fortunately,” he later conceded, “Nebraska did not become a scion on the trunk of Kansas.” Morton also opposed legislation making it relatively easy to create banks or “wildcat” banking, declaring, “[I can see] neither the neces[s]ity nor the propriety of establishing and legalizing Swindling Powers in this young and flourishing territory.” Although his opposition cost him his legislative seat, he was vindicated when the banks collapsed in the Panic of 1857. In 1858 Morton was appointed secretary of the territory by President James Buchanan, a position he held until President Abraham Lincoln replaced him with a Republican in 1861. Morton served as acting governor in 1858–59, and in 1860 he was a Democratic candidate for territorial delegate to Congress. There was considerable vote fraud on both sides in this close election, but Republicans controlled Congress and awarded the seat to his opponent. At this time Morton also began a long-standing political feud with Elmer Dundy, his Republican contemporary who would become Nebraska’s first U.S. District Court judge. So vitriolic was Morton’s political desire that he even tried to arrange for Congress to vote to impeach Dundy. The impeachment failed like many of Morton’s political maneuvers. An outspoken antiwar Democrat during the Civil War, Morton was repeatedly labeled a “Copperhead,” “rebel,” or worse, charges that dogged him long after the war was over. Even Morton’s own father, who was a Republican, believed there could “be but two parties in the Free States—Patriots & Traitors.” Unwilling to scale down his rhetoric, Morton continued to criticize Republican policies, including the Emancipation Proclamation. He also opposed the Republican attempt to enfranchise African Americans after the Civil War. Morton was a vigorous opponent of Nebraska statehood. He knew that Republicans would dominate state government and that taxes would probably rise once federal subsidies were withdrawn. In another disputed election, he was defeated for the governorship in 1866 by David Butler, who was later successfully impeached and removed from office. Morton also lost a bid in 1866 for a seat in the United States Senate. Given all of these political losses, Morton at age thirty-six decided to forsake public life in order to concentrate on a private career. He devoted his considerable energies to developing a farm and building a 124

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mansion, Arbor Lodge, on the outskirts of Nebraska City. “One of the grandest of material labors,” he told an audience at the opening of the University of Nebraska in 1871, “is the reduction of untried lands to tillage.” He also became a great proponent for agricultural experimentation and tree planting. Morton worked closely with two other advocates of agricultural improvement, the future governor Robert W. Furnas of Brownville and George L. Miller, editor of the Omaha Herald. A great believer in railroads, Morton led the drive to link Nebraska City to the nation’s railway network. In 1872 he took a job with the Burlington and Missouri Railroad promoting the sale of railroad lands in the West. Burlington officials were so impressed with his work that they retained him for many years as a lobbyist to fight federal regulation of the railroads. The job paid very well. Morton reentered politics in 1880. He lost a bid for the Senate and three gubernatorial elections. His last, in 1892, was one of the dirtiest campaigns in state history. The Omaha Republican called Morton “a common, selfish, unprincipled, ambitious, audacious, time-serving, railroad anti-monopoly Democrat.” The Lincoln Nebraska State Journal charged that as representative of a Nebraska City cemetery Morton had written delinquent lot owners, threatening to disinter their loved ones’ bodies and throw them out of the cemetery if their dues were not paid. Friends in Nebraska City vigorously denied this charge and accused the State Journal of “engendering political hatred” by means that were “cowardly, malicious and untrue.” Morton was also no friend of the country’s most prominent Democrat at the time, Grover Cleveland, the only person to serve two nonconsecutive terms as president (1885–89 and 1893–97). “The President has a big belly,” Morton said in 1887. “His brains are not proportioned to it.” The two men, however, shared a common commitment to economy in government, a low tariff, and the gold standard, and probably most importantly they both hated the rising star in the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Accordingly, at the beginning of his second term in 1893, Cleveland asked Morton to join his cabinet as secretary of agriculture. During his four years in this post, Morton sought to reverse the free spending of his predecessor. “I am trying to bring the department down to a practical business basis,” he said. He carefully scrutinized departmental expenses, eliminated all unnecessary jobs, including one created J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day

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for a rainmaker, and closed experimental stations that were not serving the public. He also expanded his department’s research and weather services and greatly increased the number of departmental employees covered by civil service. Morton tried to do away with the department’s free distribution of seeds, but this brought him into conflict with Congress, whose members used the seeds to build good will in their districts. Because of his penchant for controversy, Morton was called the administration’s “stormy petrel,” referring to a small, dark sea bird with short wings and nasal tubes that open upwards. Nevertheless, Cleveland considered him one of the best men in his cabinet, and according to Leslie’s Weekly, Morton commanded “the respect of many who regarded his appointment as a mistaken one.” There was talk of Morton for the presidency in 1896, but by this time the party was under the sway of Bryan. After the Cleveland presidency ended, Morton returned to Arbor Lodge to promote the various causes he believed in by publishing the Conservative, a weekly magazine, from 1898 until his death four years later. Bryan remained Morton’s bête noire. “The difference between anarchy and Bryanarchy,” the Conservative declared, “is that the former believes in no government at all, and the latter believes in no government without Bryan.” A founder and longtime president of the Nebraska State Historical Society, Morton spent his later years writing history. His best work is the multivolume Illustrated History of Nebraska that he coauthored with Albert Watkins. Morton also doted on his four sons, all of whom enjoyed successful careers. Two sons, Joy and Mark, founded the Morton Salt Company, and Joy later endowed the Morton Arboretum near Chicago. Another son, Paul, held several high-level jobs in the railroad industry before becoming secretary of the navy under Theodore Roosevelt and president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of New York. But Morton’s greatest legacy was Arbor Day. He claimed that in the thirty years after the first Arbor Day, twenty-five billion trees were planted across the nation. The idea caught on quickly. Within twenty years, every state except Delaware and Utah adopted Arbor Day, and in the twentieth century they also did so. It spread to other countries as well, the first adoption by the state of South Australia in Australia. In 1895 the state legislature proclaimed Nebraska the “Tree Planters’ State,” and this remained the state’s official nickname until it became the “Cornhusker State” in 1945. 126

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28. Two-cent postage stamps issued in 1932 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Arbor Day (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Between the World Wars, interest in Arbor Day declined, but the ecology movement of the 1960s gave new life to the movement. Congress authorized the president to proclaim Arbor Day in 1970 and again in 1972, but a permanent national holiday continued to elude its advocates. The desire to develop land in Nebraska raised issues about the loss of timber, and hoping to reverse this trend, Governor Robert Kerrey issued a proclamation designating 1985 as “The Year of the Tree.” After a century of celebration, today Arbor Day is promoted by the National Arbor Day Foundation, which has its headquarters in Nebraska City and claims over eight hundred thousand members. Morton never wavered in his support for Arbor Day. “In our own country,” he said, “it promises to do more than anything else to convert us from a nation of wanton destroyers of our unparalleled heritage of trees to one of tree planters and protectors.” Morton also practiced what he preached. His “ranch,” as he liked to call his eleven-hundredacre farm, became a proving ground for many species of trees brought into the state. “If you seek my monument,” Morton often said, “look around you.” After Morton’s death in 1902, his son Joy expanded Arbor Lodge to J. Sterling Morton and Arbor Day

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fifty-two rooms and rebuilt the exterior, using columns and stucco to give it a classical look. In 1923 Joy deeded the mansion and grounds to the state. The sixty-five acre estate is now Arbor Lodge State Historical Park and boasts some 250 varieties of trees. J. Sterling Morton was fond of pointing out that Arbor Day was the one holiday that looked forward rather than backward. “Other holidays repose upon the past,” he said. “Arbor Day proposes for the future.”

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16. The Blizzard of ’88

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he Great Blizzard struck on January 12, 1888. There was snow on the ground that morning, but the weather was pleasant because a breeze brought warm air up from the south. People who were outside wore light clothing, and children frolicked in the snow on the way to school. “It was so warm,” a Sherman County man later recalled, “that I took off my coat and worked in my shirt sleeves.” Although most people expected a January thaw, which is common during Plains winters, experienced observers recognized that the morning might be what they called a “weather-breeder,” a set of conditions that brings on severe weather. That January day a gigantic storm moved into western Nebraska in the late morning and traveled across the state at about fortyfive miles per hour. By late afternoon the entire state was engulfed. The Blizzard of ’88 is sometimes called the School Children’s Storm because it hit when many young people were in school. The mega snowstorm demanded courage and heroism from many teachers, some of whom were barely out of high school. Minnie May Freeman was teaching in a rural school near Ord. Although the school was made of sod, the wind blew part of the roof off, necessitating an evacuation. Assisted by several older students, Freeman safely led her charges directly into the blizzard to her boarding house a half mile away. Eastern newspapers made much of her heroism, often in highly exaggerated accounts, without giving proper credit to the older students who had aided her. In later years, because of the publicity some people referred to the storm as the Minnie Freeman Blizzard. Not everyone survived. Although most of her students went home at noon, Lois May Royce, a teacher in a rural school near Plainview, had three of the younger ones with her when the storm hit. Since there was

29. Minnie May Freeman (far left) with her students in front of their sod schoolhouse, 1888 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

not enough fuel to get them through the night, Royce and her pupils set out for her boarding house, which was only two hundred feet away. Becoming hopelessly lost, the small band took refuge in a haystack. The children froze to death, and Royce barely lived, losing both of her legs. Etta Shattuck, a teacher in Holt County, was another victim of the storm. All of her students made it safely home, but she got lost when she tried to reach the home of a school official. Taking refuge in a haystack, she was too weak and stiff to move when the storm finally ended. She was found three days later having ultimately died of exposure. Although the storm lasted only one day, the impact was felt universally across the state with deaths and injuries suffered in many Nebraska communities. Some children and teachers perished trying to get home, and parents across the state spent a sleepless night worrying. “Many a Nebraska home,” said a Butler County man, “was anxious that night because of school children who were not in their own beds.” In many rural schools, teachers kept their charges overnight. Fuel was sometimes in short supply, and the school furniture had to be sacrificed. A teacher in a rural school near O’Neill recalled, “It was a long time before we could have school again, for new desks and seats had to be made.” The storm appeared with astonishing quickness. Temperatures fell dramatically, snow “as fine as flour” fell, and powerful winds blew. Although the snowfall was not heavy, the winds picked up the ground 130

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cover and whipped it through the air. “It seemed as though a wall of snow came down from the northwest,” recalled one survivor. The only warning was a dark cloud that moved rapidly across the sky, accompanied by a thunderous noise. “The storm broke without a moment’s warning,” said a man who was in a Colfax County school at the time. “With the suddenness of a clap of thunder the sheer front of the blizzard crashed against the schoolhouse like a tidal wave, shaking the wooden frame building and almost lifting it from its foundation.” Almost everyone agreed that the storm struck with unusual force. One survivor recalled that it felt like the building he was in was hit by a train. A railroad worker who was using a boxcar for an office near Omaha felt obliged to seek safer quarters. “The old boxcar,” he said “was groaning and swaying on its tracks at every blast until I was afraid to stay there longer, expecting that at any moment it would roll down into the creek with me and a red hot stove in it.” The storm restricted visibility to a few feet. “It was like trying to see with my face pushed into a snowdrift,” said one man. Although many people put a lamp in the window to aid travelers, these beacons were all but invisible. The noise generated by the storm was also terrific. “One could hardly make himself heard about the roar of the wind,” said a Holt County man. Unable to see or hear, people caught outside had to travel by feel, moving along a fence, railroad track, or wagon rut, or along a corn furrow or row of trees. People often found buildings only by bumping into them, and some died within a few feet of their own or a neighbor’s home. Those who could not find a house sometimes took refuge in a barn, chicken coop, or line shack. Some people created a shelter by turning over a wagon. Others had to bury themselves in a haystack or even a snowdrift. Those who had to spend the night outside usually tried to avoid sleep, fearing that they would not wake up and would freeze to death. Some people were saved by their livestock. An eleven-year-old Antelope County girl who was caught outside in the storm with some cows found her way home by grabbing the tail of the lead cow. “The storm was so bad,” said a survivor, “she could not see where she was going, but the cow knew her way and brought her and the herd home safely.” A number of people who were in horse-drawn wagons loosened the reins and let the animals find their way home. “I would not be here today,” ran a typical refrain, “had not my horses been keen in their homing instincts.” The Blizzard of ’88

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Even those people who were inside had trouble staying warm. Sod houses offered the best insulation against the cold. “The soddie,” said one survivor, “was the salvation of many families during that storm.” Some people incinerated coal or wood; others had only hay or cobs; while still others burned cow chips. Those who ran out of fuel had to put their furniture on the fire or try to reach the home of a neighbor. Since “the sun went out like an extinguished lamp,” people caught without candles or lamp oil could not see. “The darkness was terrifying,” said a Loup County survivor. Temperatures dropped sharply in the days that followed, in some cases reaching 35 degrees below zero. The snow was packed in deep drifts; a Washington County woman declared, “There were drifts twenty to thirty feet high and as hard as stone.” Everywhere the drifts were so firm that humans and beasts alike could walk across them. Initial reports greatly exaggerated the number who died in the storm into the hundreds. No official count was made, but the best estimate is probably about one hundred. Around the Chambers area of Holt County alone, fifteen people died. Many people suffered from frostbite, often resulting in permanently discolored skin or worse. Said one survivor, “For a number of years I used to meet people in Omaha who had parts of ears, fingers or toes missing.” One man even lost his voice in the storm and never recovered it. Livestock losses were also heavy. A man near Hartington lost 265 of his 300 steers. All that he salvaged were two dollars for each of the hides he recovered. Those without barns sometimes saved cattle and hogs by bringing them into the house. A number of big cattle syndicates that had suffered from previous storms were driven out of business. One cattle drover stated, “In one day the Great Blizzard destroyed more livestock on the range than any winter storm, before or since.” “For weeks afterward,” said a Wheeler County woman, “we could see dead animals lying in sight of the house.” The Omaha and Lincoln newspapers were slow to realize the depth of the tragedy. Not until January 15, three days after the storm, did the Omaha papers carry data of what the Republican called the “FRIGHTFUL RECORD” of the storm. By January 18 the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal conceded that “returns from all parts of the Northwest show that the storm of last [Thursday] was the most calamitous that has visited the country since it was settled. . . .” The O’Neill Frontier echoed 132

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this judgment. “The storm,” it said, “was the worst in the history of the ‘oldest settler.’” Newspapers established relief funds to aid those who had suffered from the storm. Children were urged to bring their pennies to school, and donations from other sources poured in. By February 19 the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal had collected almost twenty-five hundred dollars, and by the end of the month the Omaha Bee had amassed more than eleven thousand dollars. Almost everyone agreed that the storm was a unique and terrifying experience. One man who spent the night outside said that “he faced shot and shell for four years in the Army [during the Civil War] but he never passed such a night before in his life.” A Butler County man remembered the day as “one of terror.” Another survivor called the storm “the wickedest thing I ever saw.” The Blizzard of ’88 probably deterred some potential immigrants from settling in the state and induced others to leave. A visitor from Illinois exclaimed, “The West! Never again for me!” Those who stayed, however, often remembered the kindnesses and heroism of their neighbors. As a Holt County man put it, “Neighbors were neighbors in those days. They helped you, they nursed you if you were sick, and they buried you if you died—and they didn’t charge anything, either.” More than a half century after the great storm, on January 12, 1940, survivors held a reunion in Lincoln. At the urging of W. H. O’Gara of Laurel, a former speaker of the Nebraska House, they decided to establish a permanent organization, hold annual meetings, and put out a book of reminiscences. The book, In All Its Fury, was published in 1947 and reissued in paperback in 1973. At first the survivors called their organization the “Greater Nebraska Blizzard Club.” But since the January storm was often confused with one that struck the East in March 1888, the name was later changed to “the January 12, 1888, Blizzard Club.” Initially the club was open to those who had survived the storm and had 240 members. But as their numbers thinned, the survivors welcomed descendants or anyone else interested in the blizzard. Because of declining membership, the club disbanded after observing the centennial of the blizzard on January 12, 1988. Although the Blizzard Club has disappeared, the great storm it commemorated is not likely to be forgotten. It is still one of the most intense storms on record in the state. Because of the loss of life, limb, and property, it is also one of the worst natural disasters in Nebraska The Blizzard of ’88

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30. Blizzard Club of 1888 at historical marker south of Ord, September 14, 1967 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

history. Lying on a flat and open plain, Nebraska has always been subject to winter storms that sweep down from the Northwest. The worst storms are characterized by subzero temperatures, heavy snowfall, and gale-force winds. Old-timers used to argue over whether the Easter Storm of 1873 or the Great Blizzard of 1888 was worse. Although the former lasted longer, the latter was more intense and far more tragic in its consequences. There have been many weather disasters in Nebraska over the years, including the winter of 1948–49—commemorated in Mari Sandoz’s Winter Thunder—and the great ice storm in Kimball, southeastern Nebraska, and in Lincoln and Omaha in 1997; lethal and extremely damaging tornadoes in Omaha in 1913 and 1975, Hebron in 1953, Coleridge and Deshler in 2003, and Hallam in 2004; and numerous destructive floods of the Missouri, Elkhorn, Loup, Platte, and Republican rivers, but none quite rank with the Blizzard of ’88.

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17. William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest

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n the summer of 1896, a young two-term Democratic congressman from Nebraska who had managed to win election from a Republican district strode to the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. William Jennings Bryan, an extremely talented speaker, had been invited to address the party multitude. Given the chance to speak, Bryan delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, a stirring plea on behalf of farmers and workers urging the United States to make credit and money easier to obtain by coining silver freely. “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world,” he said, “we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” It was an electrifying speech. The entire nation took note. The governor of Illinois called it “the greatest speech I have ever listened to,” and it had a profound effect upon the convention. Despite being only thirty-six years old, the “Boy Orator of the Platte” was nominated for the presidency after several ballots. Because of his commitment to agrarian causes, Bryan was also nominated by the Populist Party as their 1896 presidential candidate that same year. He was the very first Nebraskan to run for the presidency. William Jennings Bryan’s meteoric political career corresponded to the extreme agony being felt in the farming communities of the Great Plains. By 1890, when he was first elected to Congress, Nebraska farmers had had it. They had contended not only with sagging commodity prices but also with drought and grasshoppers, high taxes and tariffs, and excessive freight charges and interest rates. Most believed that they were being victimized by banks, railroad operators, and implement

dealers—those in the “middle” of the economy who denied farmers the fruits of their labor. As conditions worsened, many people fled the state. “Money is very scarce [and] times hard,” reported a Clay County resident. “Many settlers [are] leaving for the East, some for the winter, some for good.” Although normally conservative, many Nebraskans have been willing to embrace radical solutions to problems and non-mainstream politics when large swings in the economy have threatened their livelihood. Such was the case at two different political conventions in the 1890s, one in Omaha in 1892 and the other in Chicago in 1896, where Bryan gave his great oration. These events would forever change politics in Nebraska and the United States, and this time agrarian unrest provoked a political earthquake, especially in Nebraska. For years farm and labor groups had talked of establishing a third party, but resistance was not overcome until the Populist Party, or the People’s Party, was launched at a convention in Omaha in 1892. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” said the party’s platform. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for the few.” The Populist Manifesto called for radical economic and political solutions to the plight of farmers and workers, including such notions as a graduated income tax, the return by railroads of land grants they held to the public domain, “free silver” or the adoption of silver with gold as a means of backing an inflationary money policy, a secret ballot, the direct election of senators (they were then chosen by state legislators), and the recall, referendum, and initiative. The Populists nominated a Civil War general from Iowa, James B. Weaver, for president as a thirdparty candidate, and he won 8.5 percent of the vote in 1892, including almost 42 percent in Nebraska. Although the Populists did not prevail at the national level in 1892, they did well at various state and local levels throughout the Midwest, South, and West. Initially, many farmers in Nebraska joined the Granger movement to remedy their problems. The Patrons of Husbandry (commonly called the National Grange) had been founded in 1867, and local organizations called granges soon sprouted across the nation. The first grange in Nebraska was organized at Orleans in Harlan County in 1872. Two years later a Nuckolls County resident reported, “Patrons of Husbandry in full blast. Granges are being formed rapidly.” By late 1874 there were 136

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31. William Jennings Bryan as a young man (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

596 granges in Nebraska, the largest number per capita of any state. Communities commonly built a grange hall where farm families gathered for social events and educational purposes. By the late 1870s farmers in Nebraska and other states turned the granges into pressure groups to achieve economic and political ends. Besides lobbying state legislatures for farm legislation, Grangers sought to eliminate the middlemen in their farming operations by establishing cooperatives to purchase supplies, market produce, and manufacture farm machinery. Most of these ventures eventually failed, as they were undercapitalized and those who ran them lacked sufficient managerial experience. There was also fierce competition from other suppliers, and farmers were rarely loyal to local co-ops when they could get a better price elsewhere. Largely because of these failures, the Granger movement declined after 1876. Increased rainfall and higher prices brought prosperity to Nebraska agriculture in the early 1880s, but by 1887 conditions had again begun to deteriorate. Lack of rain cut into production, commodity prices William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest

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sagged again, and bank credit dried up. Nebraska corn, which had sold for thirty-nine cents a bushel in 1881, fell to seventeen cents in 1889. Many farmers who had gone heavily into debt to expand their operations could not borrow the funds they needed to keep afloat, except at ruinous interest rates of 20 or even 40 percent. The result was a host of failures, so many that in 1891 some eighteen thousand prairie schooners crossed the Missouri River in a headlong flight eastward. With conditions worsening, all the old grievances of the 1870s resurfaced. Farmers complained that the state had done little to curb railroad abuses and that Nebraska freight rates were 50 percent higher than in Iowa. There was even more bitterness over the lack of credit. “We feel,” said a Nebraska senator, “that, through the operations of a shrinking volume of money . . . , the East has placed its hands on the throat of the West.” Once again farmers organized for action, this time using the Farmers’ Alliance. Following the lead of farmers elsewhere, a group near Filley in Gage County organized the first Nebraska alliance chapter in 1880. During the hard times of the late 1880s, alliances spread all over the state, and by 1890 there were more than two thousand local organizations with some sixty-five thousand members. One of the dominant figures of this movement was Luna E. Kellie, who served as secretarytreasurer of the Nebraska State Alliance. Throughout the late nineteenth century, she often spoke and wrote on behalf of agrarian causes. Like the Grangers, alliance supporters sought to increase farm profits by setting up cooperatives that would eliminate the middlemen. They also resorted to political action. Unable to secure their ends by working through the existing party system, alliance men in 1889 voted for independent tickets in several counties. The following year representatives from local alliances met with other farm and labor groups in Lincoln to nominate an independent slate for state office. In the ensuing campaign, the Independents, or pre-Populists, outlined their goals for Nebraskans: easy credit, currency inflation, railroad regulation, tariff reduction, lower taxes, reduced elevator fees, an eighthour work day, the secret ballot, and other election reforms. They held rallies across the state that were enlivened by picnics, games, and singing. When the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal called them “hay seeds” and compared them to “a herd of hogs . . . in the parlor of a careful housekeeper,” the Independents responded by working harder and publicizing the “greed and corruption” of the existing political parties. 138

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In 1890 the Independents did surprisingly well, winning a majority of the Nebraska senate, a plurality of the state house, and two of the three congressional seats. They lost the governorship, but only by a few votes. They also did well in subsequent elections, especially after the Populist Convention in 1892, when they coalesced with Democrats in the state. Although never able to win complete control of state government, the Populists, as Independents were now called, secured the adoption of a number of reforms, including railroad, stockyard, and utility regulation; abolition of the free pass on railroads that railroad corporations gave to legislators and judges; the secret ballot in Nebraska; and the nation’s first initiative and referendum. The Populists also sent their candidate, William V. Allen, to the U.S. Senate in 1893. In the midst of this farming turmoil, William Jennings Bryan moved to Nebraska in 1887. Born in Salem, Illinois, in 1860, Bryan came from a pious, prosperous, and politically active family. After securing an education and passing the bar, he married Mary Elizabeth Baird, a gifted woman who was to be his lifelong companion and political helper. In 1887 the young couple moved to Lincoln, where Bryan established a law practice. Bryan and his wife planted deep roots in Nebraska, and Lincoln remained their home until 1921. Here they built their dream house, Fairview, a country estate on the southeast side of town. Bryan’s geniality, sincerity, and ability enabled him to build a successful legal practice, but the law never had a firm hold on him. His real interest was in reform politics, and this led him to serve in the House of Representatives for two terms and gain three presidential nominations, the first in 1896. As a member of Congress, Bryan advocated tariff reduction and railroad regulation, reforms that he hoped would aid suffering farmers. Bryan searched for a way to end the credit crunch that had plagued farmers since the Civil War. The United States, like other western European nations, suffered from deflation in the Gilded Age. Between 1865 and 1900 prices fell by more than 45 percent. This worked a special hardship on farmers and other debtors, who had to repay loans with dollars that were worth more than the ones they had borrowed. To halt this deflation, Bryan advocated that the government expand the nation’s money supply by minting silver as well as gold coin. Representative Bryan’s commitment to free silver brought him in conflict with other Democratic leaders. He broke with President Grover William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest

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Cleveland over this issue and also with leading Democrats in Nebraska, most notably J. Sterling Morton. As a result, Bryan briefly lost influence within the state party, but in 1894 he wrested party control from the old-line Democrats and formed a coalition with the recently created Populist Party. Defeated in a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1894–5, Bryan decided to retire from the House and devote more time to stumping for his causes. “If I am foot-loose,” he wrote to a friend, “I can help make combination [with other reformers] and go where I can do [the] most good.” By this time Bryan enjoyed a national reputation as a reformer, and already people were mentioning him for the presidency. “I have begun to talk [of] you for President,” said Jim Dahlman, the future mayor of Omaha. “No gift in the hands of the people is too high for you.” In 1894 Bryan became editor-in-chief of the Omaha World-Herald, a post he held for two years. Although he was a prolific writer, Bryan spent little time in the office, and his editorial position was more or less nominal. Nevertheless, Gilbert Hitchcock, the owner of the WorldHerald, was deep into Democratic politics and welcomed Bryan’s association, both to enhance his profits and to promote reform. Many of the notes Bryan sent to the paper’s staff were rewritten and published as editorials under his name, and the paper vigorously supported Bryan’s candidacy for national office. The Democratic Party and Populist Party turned to Bryan as corn production fell by 86 percent in 1894 and corn sold in 1895 for nine cents a bushel. Discontent in urban areas also played a role in a campaign designed to build a winning coalition of rural farmers in the South and West and urban workers in the East. Bryan’s opponent in the 1896 presidential election was William McKinley, who conducted a conservative, front-porch campaign from his home in Canton, Ohio. The Republicans won, in part because they spent ten times more money than their opponents. Not only did they use their ample war chest to buy votes, a typical political party pattern before implementation of the secret ballot; they also conducted for the first time a massive propaganda campaign, distributing more than 120 million campaign items across the nation. According to Theodore Roosevelt in 1896, the Republicans advertised McKinley “as if he were a patent medicine.” They also tried to show that Bryan’s election would lead to anarchy and runaway inflation, causing the loss of many manufacturing jobs. Bryan lost, labor 140

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having deserted him, but it did not stop the Democrats from nominating him again in 1900 and 1908. He never won the presidency. By the turn of the century, agrarian discontent had begun to subside, mainly because conditions for farmers were improving. By then the Progressive movement was also gaining momentum, and it encouraged the much-needed reform legislation that was adopted at both state and national levels. Nebraska farmers, however, retained their distrust of monopolies and middlemen. After his first presidential campaign loss, from 1896 on, Bryan made his living from lectures and book royalties. He continued to favor agrarian reform, but he now framed his views within the budding Progressive political movement. Bryan spoke on the Lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, often delivering two speeches a day. He earned as much as one thousand dollars per speech, which made him the highest-paid speaker in the world. According to his daughter, he loved “the freedom of lecture circuits.” Bryan could speak to thirty thousand people without amplification aids, and his wife once heard every word he uttered through an open window, even though she was in a hotel three blocks away. When the summer heat turned Chautauqua tents into ovens, Bryan kept cool by placing one hand on a block of ice, occasionally wiping his brow with it, and using the other hand to fan himself. He also ate large quantities of food, convinced that this would restore the enormous energy he expended speaking. Although Bryan was gaining a greater following nationwide, he was losing political clout in Nebraska in the first decade of the twentieth century. A lifelong teetotaler, he lost influence among Nebraska Democrats when he came out in favor of prohibition in 1910. In spite of his eclipse locally, he remained an important force in national politics by using the Commoner, a highly successful weekly magazine published in Lincoln from 1901 to 1923, to argue against the influence of big business and wealth in politics. At the Democratic national convention in 1912, Bryan challenged the New York leaders in his party and played an important role in nominating Woodrow Wilson, a former educator and then governor of New Jersey. According to one observer, “This was the most remarkable triumph in Bryan’s long political career.” Although the Democratic Party was a minority party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal, Republicans in 1912 were hopelessly split between William Howard William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest

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32. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (right) with President Woodrow Wilson and Bryan’s grandson at Fairview in Lincoln, circa 1913 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. This enabled Wilson to capture the presidency, even though he won only 42 percent of the popular vote. Bryan was offered his choice of positions in the cabinet. He chose to become secretary of state, hoping to use this position to promote reform at home and peace abroad. In the years that followed, he used his influence to secure the enactment of a host of Progressive reforms, such as the adoption of the Federal Reserve System, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, new antitrust legislation, and a reduction in the tariff. He was also instrumental in the adoption of four Constitutional amendments, the Sixteenth through the Nineteenth, which provided for the income tax, the direct election of senators, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. In essence, he played a prominent role in the realization of many of the Populist Party’s original reforms proposed in Omaha in 1892. As secretary of state, Bryan negotiated a series of arbitration treaties with other countries in the hope of averting war. Though his influence 142

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in the Wilson administration was considerable, after the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914 his position became increasingly untenable. A lifelong pacifist, he resigned in 1915 in response to the administration’s vigorous criticism of Germany for sinking the Lusitania, a British luxury passenger liner carrying American citizens. Bryan was convinced that the United States was forsaking its neutrality and tilting dangerously toward the Allies. But when the United States became a belligerent in 1917, he fully supported the war effort. After World War I, the Bryans moved to Florida because of Mary’s deteriorating health. Here Bryan used his oratorical skills to promote Florida real estate. He also became increasingly active in religious causes. A devout Presbyterian, he was hostile to the theory of evolution, believing instead in the literal creation story in the Bible. “You may trace your ancestry back to the monkey if you find pleasure or pride in doing so,” he once said, but “you shall not connect me with your family tree without more evidence than has yet been produced.” In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a test case against a Tennessee law that prohibited teaching in a public school any theory that contradicted the biblical story of creation. Bryan agreed to join the prosecuting attorneys in upholding the law, while Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow led the defense. At issue was whether a science teacher, young John T. Scopes, had the right to teach evolution in the classroom. The high point in the Scopes trial came when Darrow persuaded Bryan to take the stand and then mercilessly exposed the superficiality of his beliefs. Bryan died quietly in his sleep five days after the trial was over. Although Scopes was convicted of violating the law, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on technical grounds. Bryan was often caricatured in his own lifetime and after. To many contemporaries, he seemed self-righteous and shallow. One wag declared that Bryan was like the Platte River, “six inches deep and a mile wide at the mouth.” Another called him “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.” A fellow member of Wilson’s cabinet insisted, “One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of [Bryan’s] argument and never scrape against a fact.” Critics pointed out that he never won an election after 1893, and that many of the issues he championed looked more to the past than to the future. But Bryan had his defenders. While conceding he was sometimes William Jennings Bryan and Agrarian Protest

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trite, Willa Cather said a conversation with Bryan could be “absolutely overwhelming in its richness and novelty and power.” Gilbert Hitchcock described him as “the greatest moral force of his day,” and many scholars agree. “He was more a man of heart than of brain,” says one student of the period, “but his heart was great.” Bryan articulated the hopes and fears of many westerners, particularly in Nebraska. He was “Nebraska’s ‘shout of joy,’” said the poet Vachel Lindsay, “a gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun, smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West.” There is no denying that Bryan left a lasting imprint on American life. In 1896 he helped transform the Democratic Party into an instrument to reform American society. Moreover, most of the measures he advocated were later enacted into law, and this included much of the Populist platform of 1892. In short, the Great Commoner spoke to the future as well as the past, and his legacy remains dynamic.

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18. The Rise of Omaha

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he opening ceremonies of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition marked a special occasion for Omaha and the state of Nebraska. Not only was this the first World’s Fair to ever open on the actual day set for the event, June 1, 1898, but it also was the first to have its main buildings completed and exhibits installed on time. Everything was in order on that clear and balmy morning of an early Nebraska summer, and officials were ready to offer their praise for the opening speeches. Organizers planned to begin the ceremonies at 10:30 a.m. with a parade that included the Omaha High School Cadets, the Cosmopolitan Band, and the Pawnee City Band, who would be followed at noon by snappy marches performed by the U.S. Marine Band, a prayer by the Rev. Samuel J. Nichols of St. Louis, and personal addresses from Senator William V. Allen and Governor Silas Holcomb, and a telephonic message from President William McKinley. From Washington dc, McKinley would press a button electrically starting the exposition. Later that evening a concert was to be given by the Theodore Thomas Orchestra assisted by the Exposition Chorus, and at 9:00 p.m. a “grand illumination of fire works” was to explode to pass the exposition’s first day into history. Much of the plan was brought off. What Omaha’s young president of the exposition, banker Gurdon W. Wattles, didn’t anticipate was the Spanish-American War and a technologically challenged president. Nebraska’s Populist senator Allen did not attend because he felt he was needed in Washington dc to vote on important war measures. He sent a speech that was read by Gilbert Hitchcock, the editor of the Omaha World-Herald. Senator Allen’s speech focused on the war and his

33. Grand Court of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

advocacy of Cuban liberty, but he did call attention to the value of the exposition, noting how hundreds of thousands will “be attracted to Omaha and the state at large” and will receive “a desirable and peculiar means of education” from touring the exposition. Next came President McKinley’s address. The plan was for McKinley to use a long distance telephone and have his speech magnified for the audience, stretching the latest of science and technology, but the president changed his mind at the last moment and sent his message by telegraph instead. Governor Holcomb read the brief message, explaining that President McKinley was not accustomed to using a telephone and felt more comfortable telegraphing his few words than saying them. The words were indeed sparse, with only about 150 uttered by the governor. The president noted the “memorable half century which the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition commemorates” and how the “mighty West affords the most striking evidences of the splendid 146

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achievements and possibilities of our people.” McKinley listed America’s pioneer energy and endurance, development and progress in agriculture and manufacturing, and advancements in education as “matchless” in the world. “Nowhere have the unconquerable determination, self-reliant strength and sturdy manhood of our American citizenship been more forcibly illustrated.” The president then regretted that he could not attend because of the responsibilities of war and peace, but promised he would later make a visit to the exposition. Omaha was off to a good start. The exposition was indeed a significant success, and thousands journeyed to Omaha to see the many pavilions. An added feature was the Indian Congress also held on the exposition grounds. Only within the last decade had the wars over control of the American West between the U.S. Army and Native Americans been fought. Here was the largest Native American gathering in the West during peacetime, and it fostered social and cultural exchanges among the tribes and between Indians and visitors. The official photographer of the exposition was Frank A. Rinehart. Only he had access to the grounds. He took photos of over five hundred individual Indians from twenty-eight tribes and eighteen hundred of the exposition. The pictures reveal a vibrant and creative city. Omaha by 1898 had developed very quickly into the “Gate City to the West,” as the first issue of its first newspaper, the Omaha Arrow, had predicted, and it was recognized as one of the region’s leading metropolitan centers. Only some forty-eight years earlier Omaha had been a mere dot on the landscape. In 1850 William D. Brown, a Council Bluffs ferry operator, began transporting people across the river in his leaky scow to Omaha. Three years later Brown and some other Council Bluffs promoters staked out a claim for “Omaha City.” In 1854 Alfred D. Jones secured an appointment as postmaster and a commission to survey the land. Jones laid out a town of 320 blocks with streets 100 feet wide, except for Capitol Avenue, which was 120 feet wide. To commemorate the occasion, the promoters crossed the river and held a picnic in Omaha on July 4, 1854. In the fall of 1854 Omaha City had twenty houses, several saloons and stores, and two shacks with dirt floors that served as hotels. When the city became the territorial capital the following winter, it entered into an era of rapid expansion. Even the newspaper of an Omaha rival, Nebraska City, conceded that Omaha was developing quickly. “The The Rise of Omaha

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buildings are fine, large, elegant, and commodious, and generally built with neatness and good taste,” said the Nebraska City News. “The site of the town, too, is a beautiful one, while the view from the Capitol is really magnificent.” By 1857 Omaha’s population was close to two thousand, and the territorial legislature granted the city a charter. Thus did “Omaha City” become the city of Omaha. Paper money issued by wildcat banks with few if any assets fueled Omaha’s early growth. “The mania for land speculation and town shares,” reported a correspondent for the New York Times in 1857, “is now at its height.” The bubble burst later that year in the Panic of 1857. Real estate values plummeted, paper money lost all value, and most of the banks closed their doors. “All our bright prospects vanished in one hour,” a resident later recalled, “and we lost half of our most energetic citizens.” The hard times did not last, for already Omaha was developing into an important outfitting point for emigrants on the Oregon Trail. With the discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858, Omaha became a jumping-off point for many of the “Fifty-Niners” who flocked to the gold fields. The wave of emigration was followed by others as gold and silver were discovered elsewhere in the West. Many emigrants seeking land in Oregon, California, Utah, or other parts of the West also passed through Omaha. By 1859 the city’s grocery and hardware stores (many of which stayed open all night) were doing three thousand dollars a day in business. “No one can fail to note the rapid increase of business in our city,” said an Omaha newspaper, “and each succeeding day adds to our commercial operations.” The pace of emigration quickened in the 1860s after the government built pontoon bridges across the Platte River near present-day Columbus and at Fort Kearny. In 1866 Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman advised travelers to take the Omaha-Fort Kearny route in order to secure better military protection, and this contributed to Omaha’s booming growth. By 1868 the city boasted two newspapers, five banks, eleven hotels (at least one of which was considered first class), and close to sixteen thousand people. Steamboats arrived in Omaha daily from St. Louis, filled with emigrants and freight. The number of freight companies operating out of the city increased rapidly, and by 1860 the Western Stage Company was offering mail and passenger service to Denver. That year telegraph lines 148

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34. Omaha, Nebraska, in 1878 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

were strung to Omaha, connecting it to the East. By 1861 Omaha was also linked to the West Coast. Thereafter, the city became an important telegraph center for the Midwest and Great Plains. Even more important to Omaha was the development of the railroad. In 1863 Omaha was chosen to be the eastern starting point for building the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. In the rush of construction activity that followed the Civil War, a great deal of Union Pacific money poured into the city, contributing to its growth. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and thereafter the Union Pacific maintained its headquarters in Omaha. Two years earlier, the Chicago and North Western Railroad had reached Council Bluffs, and other railroads quickly followed. This put the people of Omaha a ferry ride away from the entire rail system east of the Missouri. All that remained to ensure Omaha’s place as a premier rail center was construction of a bridge across the Missouri River. The Union Pacific planned to build a bridge at Childs Mill, three miles south of Omaha, but a group of Omaha promoters headed by Governor Alvin Saunders The Rise of Omaha

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and Omaha Herald editor George L. Miller rushed to Chicago. By offering a large sum of money and land for a depot, they persuaded railroad officials to change their plans. “Sound the loud timbrel!” Saunders telegraphed friends back home. “Bridge located at Omaha.” Once Omaha emerged as a rail center, it began to attract industry. The Omaha Smelting Company, which cost sixty thousand dollars to establish in 1870, was doing $20 million in business by 1885. By this time, Omaha also had one of the largest linseed-oil companies in the country. In addition, German immigrants established several breweries in Omaha, and the Gate City was challenging Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis for the title of beer capital of the United States. Omaha’s leading industry, however, was meatpacking. As a rail center close to cattle ranches and feed corn, the city was well positioned to develop the slaughter business. There were small packinghouses in the city as early as 1871, but it was not until 1884 that John McShane, a local businessman who later served in Congress, organized the Union Stockyards in South Omaha. Under McShane’s dynamic leadership, the stockyards attracted large packinghouses like Cudahy, Swift, and Armour by offering favorable leases and cash or stock bonuses. At first railroad officials tried to block the development of the stockyards. Preferring to keep the slaughter business concentrated in Chicago and Kansas City, they refused to ship any livestock to Omaha. McShane went to Chicago and pointedly asked the Chicago and North Western traffic manager whether he would like the Nebraska legislature to pass a bill “prohibiting the shipment of any Nebraska livestock to Chicago.” Fearful that McShane could make good on this threat, the railroads caved in and resumed shipments to Omaha. Thereafter the meatpacking business thrived. By 1892 this business accounted for two-thirds of Omaha’s industrial output, and the Gate City ranked third among the nation’s meatpacking cities. Nearly 2.5 million head of livestock, primarily cattle and sheep, went through Omaha’s stockyards in 1890. This number expanded to 6.1 million head by 1910, with the livestock worth over $100 million. By 1900 Omaha had developed all the accoutrements of a major city. The population topped one hundred thousand; there were a new opera house, library, and art gallery; and there was an extensive interurban streetcar system. Omaha had its own medical school and several hospitals. It also had Creighton College, founded in 1878 and named for 150

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Edward Creighton, the entrepreneur who had strung telegraph lines across the West. Omaha also had a reputation for being a wide-open, lawless city. As early as 1862 a family arriving in the city was appalled to find that the only accommodations for rent were two rooms that had served as a saloon and gambling house and that these were available only because the proprietor “had been shot and instantly killed in this saloon by a desperado a few weeks previous.” The saloons in Omaha were open day and night, and prostitutes haunted the tenderloin district around Ninth and Douglas. In 1867 the Omaha Herald reported that the city only had 20 churches but 127 saloons and 25 “temples of vice.” “It seemed to me,” said an early resident, that “life among these Omaha fellows was a constant spree.” The city was also littered with gambling dens. One such establishment on the second floor of a building even had a dumbwaiter to a pawnshop below so that losers could “soak” their watches, diamonds, or other valuables to get more money. A gang of con artists and ruffians headed by a man named “Canada Bill” controlled most of the gambling. The gaming and bunko artists were supposed to prey on visitors rather than on locals, and the police were paid to look the other way. When one police captain became too inquisitive, he was soundly beaten. The offenders were on friendly terms with the city’s judges and hence received only a small fine for their transgression. Although Canada Bill was driven out of town in 1876, the illegal operations continued well into the twentieth century, under the direction of underworld czar and ward boss Tom Dennison. Omaha’s licentious ways were well known, and boosters of other cities were quick to publicize them. A Kansas City paper called Omaha “a very cesspool of iniquity” and declared, “Mobs of monte men, pickpockets, brace faro dealers, [and] criminal fugitives of every class find congenial companions in Omaha, and a comparatively safe retreat from officers of the law.” A St. Louis newspaper said, “Omaha is emphatically a rapid city. Whiskey shops are innumerable, and attached to each is a faro bank, which is kept in full blast night and day. Many keno and poker rooms are also to be found.” Despite Omaha’s unsavory reputation, no one could deny that it was becoming a leading metropolitan center. As the Gate City to the West, it was a natural choice to host the Trans-Mississippi and International The Rise of Omaha

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Exposition in 1898. The exposition was designed to ameliorate the depression that came from the financial Panic of 1893 and publicize the enormous growth of the West. The economic doldrums had stagnated the state. The state’s population, which had experienced huge growth in the 1880s, declined in the early 1890s, and towns such as Beatrice, Nebraska City, and Plattsmouth actually lost population. Leaders in Omaha determined that something was needed to move beyond this momentary glitch. As Omaha went about the rebuilding of its economy, it renewed its efforts to forge ahead. Business leaders formed a chamber of commerce chapter, and the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben started as an elite group dedicated to raising community spirit. Suburbs such as Benson and Dundee were founded, and South Omaha greatly increased its population as the meatpacking industry expanded. Omaha was definitely ready for something like a world’s fair. The exposition was built on a 184-acre plot of land just north of Omaha. It extended from 24th Street east to Sherman Avenue and from Pinkney Street north to Ames Avenue, encompassing 108 city blocks. Patterned after the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the exposition featured exhibits from many states and foreign countries. More than 2.6 million people visited the exposition, and unlike most world’s fairs, this one made money, returning 92 percent of the investments to its sponsors. Besides enhancing Omaha’s reputation, the exposition also pumped millions of dollars into the city’s economy. “The Exposition has been like a rain in a drought,” said its organizer, Gurdon Wattles. By its last day on October 31, 1898, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition had served notice to the world that the little town established on the banks of the Missouri River only forty-four years before had become a major industrial, transportation, and retail center. Called “Omaha Day,” the closing ceremonies reflected on the exposition’s accomplishments and the future. All businesses and schools were urged to close. This was a time to celebrate. The exposition had captured the imagination of many. “Special trains bring thousands,” observed the Omaha World-Herald. “Every train was loaded . . . [with] special trains [coming] from McCook, Hastings, Sioux City, Kansas City and eastern Iowa.” The Omaha Bee noted that two Plattsmouth boys, Eddie Wallman and Robert Vance, ran away from home to see the exposition. They “stole a ride on a train to get 152

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here, but lacked the means to return,” and were arrested by the police. The favorite exhibit and building was from New York City, home to 90 percent of the midway visitors. It so captivated the son of Nebraska federal district court Judge Elmer Dundy that he moved to New York City and built an amusement park on Coney Island. The Omaha WorldHerald also reported that everyone on that last day wanted souvenirs. “Many have the impression that anything that can be carried away constitutes a free souvenir, if the owner isn’t looking.” Supposedly, “one pavilion lost 6000 beer steins,” and an “alarming scarcity” of spoons and salt and pepper shakers were noted. Unfortunately, none of the buildings of the exposition exist today because they were constructed with green wood and plaster to keep costs down. They were not built to last but rather to tour. At the closing ceremonies on the afternoon of Halloween 1898, the mayor of Omaha spoke of the impact of the exposition and the future. The exposition, he intoned, “has shown our citizens that no enterprise is too large for them to undertake.” He believed that the spirit of Omahans was never higher. “It has made Omaha people proud of their city and they have formed the habit of doing their part to make the city neat, clean and attractive. . . .” The mayor noted that even “our most hopeless old fogies have become so accustomed to hearing other people say good things about Omaha that they sometimes find themselves praising the city.” He noted Omaha’s new national reputation. “My prediction,” gushed the mayor, “is that during the next ten years Omaha will experience a larger proportion of growth than any other city in the country and that the close of the decade will see here a population of 250,000 to 300,000 with a commensurate increase in business in all lines.” There was great optimism in the rising Gate City at the dawn of the new century. Omaha is an Indian word meaning “against the current.” That phrase does not adequately convey the history of the city of Omaha, as it actually has flowed with the current of American expansion. As a result, Omaha became not only Nebraska’s first city but one of the leading cities of the American West.

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19. Charles E. Bessey and the Nebraska National Forest

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lthough the Sandhills resemble a desert—with sandy soil, a dry atmosphere, and high summer temperatures—a few determined Nebraskans at the turn of the century were convinced that this grassland could support forests. The result was the making of a wildlife and recreation area that now embraces thousands of acres of timberland. Nebraska National Forest, created in 1907, is the largest human-made forest in the United States and the only such forest in the National Forest system. It represents the Progressive Era’s emphasis on conservation and wise use of natural resources as exemplified at the federal level in the programs designed and implemented by President Theodore Roosevelt and his chief forester and top environmental advisor, Gifford Pinchot. The driving force behind this project in Nebraska was Charles E. Bessey (1845–1915), a brilliant botanist who has been rightfully called “the father of the Nebraska National Forest.” Born and raised on an Ohio farm, Bessey later enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), earning a bachelor of science degree in 1869 and a master’s degree in 1872. As a student, he developed a love for botany, believing that a knowledge of plant life greatly enhanced one’s understanding of the world. For the student of botany, he once said, “nature is not a chaos of unrelated forms, but a most orderly arrangement of related organisms.” In 1870 Bessey joined the faculty at the Iowa State College of Agriculture (now Iowa State University). He spent the next fifteen years at Iowa State, and his accomplishments there earned him a national reputation. He became the botany editor of American Naturalist, wrote textbooks that were used in high schools and colleges across the

35. Charles E. Bessey in November 1899 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

nation, and introduced the laboratory method of instruction at Iowa State only a year after it had been pioneered at Harvard. Recognized as “a power among his fellow scientists,” Bessey was rewarded with a series of promotions and served for a time as acting president and as vice president of the college. In 1884 the University of Nebraska lured Bessey to Lincoln by offering to make him a professor of botany and horticulture and dean of the Industrial College at a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a year. In the years that followed, Bessey revamped the Industrial College’s curriculum and transformed what was little more than a trade school into an institution offering a rigorous scientific education. He also established an agricultural experiment station. Bessey had to fight farmers, ranchers, and politicians who were hostile to his reforms, but with the support of the Board of Regents and the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal, he prevailed. Bessey was not only a scholar and educational reformer but also a dedicated conservationist. Like other conservationists of his day, including Roosevelt, Pinchot, and J. Sterling Morton, Bessey believed that the nation must preserve and protect its natural heritage. He proCharles E. Bessey and the Nebraska National Forest

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moted a number of conservation projects in his lifetime, but his special interest was trees. “We have been so accustomed in this country to cutting away forests,” Bessey once said, “that we are yet scarcely able to think seriously of growing forests.” Although he played an important role in the preservation of the Calaveras Big Trees in California and the timberlands of the Appalachian Mountains, the project closest to his heart was the establishment of a forest in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Bessey embarked upon a lengthy campaign to convince the U.S. government to make experimental plantings in the region. At first he was opposed by local ranchers who feared the loss of their customary grazing lands and by government officials who saw little prospect of the experiment succeeding. But Bessey’s persistence finally paid off in 1891, when the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry (forerunner to the United States Forest Service) agreed to supply seedlings if Bessey would furnish the land and plant the trees. A colleague of Bessey’s at the university offered the use of land near Swan Lake in southwestern Holt County. The government then shipped several species of pine to the state, and under Bessey’s direction some 13,500 seedlings were planted. Although the experiment had a promising start, Bessey was unable to persuade state or federal officials to undertake further experiments, and eventually those involved lost sight of the project. Bessey and his colleagues made no further visits to the site and assumed that the trees had died. “We supposed,” he later said, “as probably did everybody else who knew of the original planting, that the trees had disappeared.” In the late 1890s Bessey urged the federal government to set aside large tracts of public land in the Sandhills as forest reserves, a novel idea in view of the fact that the region had virtually no trees. Bessey was joined in the campaign by Sandhills resident T. C. Jackson of Purdum, and their pleas ultimately paid off. In 1901 William L. Hall, the assistant superintendent for tree planting in the Bureau of Forestry, persuaded his superiors to conduct a study of timber-growing conditions in the state, particularly in the Sandhills. Hall arrived in Nebraska with a crew to carry out the survey. Bessey arranged for a botanist from the university to accompany the crew and even requested a railroad pass for Hall. Writing to the general manager of the Burlington and Missouri Railroad, he said, “If we can have the 156

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general government inaugurate several forest plantations of considerable extent in this state it will be the greatest value ultimately.” Hall knew about Bessey’s experiment in Holt County and insisted on visiting the site to ascertain the results. Bessey had considerable misgivings about the visit. “I confess,” he later said, “to have been quite troubled over the fact that Mr. Hall was to visit this plantation as I felt sure that it must have disappeared and its disappearance would be an argument against the possibility of foresting the Sandhills.” A week after leaving on his inspection trip, Hall returned to Lincoln and burst into Bessey’s office in a great state of excitement. Bessey later recalled: “I called to him and said, ‘What is the matter, Mr. Hall?’ When he answered, ‘Why, I have seen them,’ I said, ‘Seen what?’ He said, ‘Those trees,’ I said, ‘What trees?’ ‘Oh, those trees planted in Holt County ten years ago,’ and then he went on and, in much excitement, told me what he had seen. The pine trees were eighteen to twenty feet high. They had formed a dense thicket in which forest conditions had already appeared.” Buoyed by this news, members of Hall’s crew ranged widely over the Sandhills to study growing conditions and to search for other trees. In the western part of the state, they found a number of ponderosa pine. Although early settlers had cut the larger trees, some of the stumps were more than two feet thick and the growth rings indicated that the trees were three hundred years old when they were cut. Hall sent back enthusiastic reports to Gifford Pinchot, who was head of the Bureau of Forestry. At the same time, Bessey sought to mobilize state support for the creation of forest reserves, and he continued to promote the project to federal officials as well. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt responded by issuing a proclamation establishing two forest reserves in the Sandhills: the Dismal River Reserve in Blaine and Thomas counties and the Niobrara Reserve in Cherry County. Together the two reserves totaled 206,000 acres of land. In 1906 President Roosevelt created a third reserve south of Hyannis, but this land was later opened to homesteading under the Kinkaid Act. The creation of the Nebraska reserves was unprecedented, for this was the only time that the federal government ever created forest reserves out of lands in the public domain that did not contain trees. When Congress created the National Forest system in 1907, the reserves became the Nebraska National Forest. The Dismal Reserve was chosen as the site for a nursery and was Charles E. Bessey and the Nebraska National Forest

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36. Ponderosa pines in Nebraska National Forest in 1940. These trees were planted in 1905 and survived the fires of 1910 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

subsequently renamed the Bessey Division. Many of the early plantings in the nursery failed, victims of disease, the elements, or improper care. “We had many hardships and difficulties to overcome,” recalled the first supervisor of the forest, “and many disappointments to live down.” One of the turning points in the early days was the arrival of Nebraska-born plant pathologist Carl Hartley, who developed an experimental treatment that saved many of the seedlings from disease. As a result, young trees began to take root and even thrive. Ponderosa pine and red cedar, two trees native to Nebraska, fared the best. Norway, Scotch, and jack pines did well, too. Bessey Nursery has since developed an international reputation, attracting scientists from around the world. In the first fifty years, the nursery produced 200 million seedlings. Under various federal laws, these seedlings were distributed in Nebraska and neighboring Great Plains states to provide shade and shelter for farms, parks, and schools. The establishment of Nebraska National Forest also promoted wildlife in the area. Over two hundred species of birds have been sighted in 158

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the forest, and deer, antelope, wild turkey, grouse, and rabbit abound. Indeed, by 1945 deer had become so plentiful that for the first time in the state’s history a statewide open season was declared. As a result, hunters killed 368 deer. The Nebraska National Forest also has become an important recreation area. People by the thousands visit the forest every year to picnic, camp, hunt, fish, swim, canoe, or simply relax. The forest serves other purposes as well. The public can cut firewood there, and ranchers can graze their cattle on forest lands. This has been a great boon to ranchers since it has enabled them to graze their herds on prime grassland protected from the elements and from scrub bulls that might undermine their breeding stock. “Long before I left,” recalled the forest’s first supervisor, “I could call every ranchman grazing stock on the Nebraska National Forest my friend and an enthusiastic supporter of the Forest Service’s grazing policy.” Over the years the forest has suffered several natural disasters. A fire in 1910 destroyed several hundred acres of trees, and the prolonged drought of the 1930s killed some of the jack pine. More serious was the great fire that broke out in the spring of 1965, destroying more than a third of the forested areas. According to the Thedford Herald, some 2.5 million trees were consumed in the conflagration. Most of the burned-over land has since been replanted. In 1960 the federal government added two new areas to the Nebraska National Forest: the Pine Ridge District and the Oglala Grasslands in Dawes and Sioux counties in northwestern Nebraska. Although the worst fire in state history burned much of this land in the summer of 1989, the government replanted and reseeded the burned-over areas. The Niobrara Division is now called the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest (after a former governor of the state), but all four districts are still part of a single administrative unit. Together they embrace more than 325,000 acres of land. Nebraska National Forest is a tribute to Bessey and other range scientists who insisted that the Sandhills could support trees. Near the end of his life, Gifford Pinchot compared this venture to the great reforestation projects of the Dalmatian Coast and in southern France. He was hardly exaggerating when he said that the Nebraska National Forest was “one of the great successful tree-planting projects of the world.”

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20. Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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orld War I (1914–18) was a great watershed in the history of the modern world. In bloodshed and wealth, it was the costliest and most destructive war up to that time. Between fifteen and twenty million people were killed in the conflagration, and four great empires—the German, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman—either disappeared from the map or were fundamentally reshaped. The war was touched off by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a group of Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914. Because of the formal alliance system that existed in Europe, the Great Powers were drawn into the war that ensued. On one side were the Allied Powers— Great Britain, France, and Russia; and on the other, the Central Powers— Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). Americans were shocked by the outbreak of war but believed that they were not involved. As a neutral nation, the United States reaped enormous profits from its wartime trade, most of which was with the Allied Powers. This booming commerce was so one-sided that gold and silver flowed into the United States, and for the first time in its history the republic became a creditor nation. The United States remained neutral until 1917, when Germany initiated unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships trading with the Allies. The United States responded by declaring war on April 6, 1917. The vote in Congress was overwhelming but not unanimous: 373–50 in the House, 82–6 in the Senate. Among those who opposed the decision was Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska, who believed that the only reason the nation was going to war was “to preserve the commercial right of American citizens to deliver munitions of war to belligerent nations.”

The commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Force sent to Europe was Gen. John J. Pershing, a one-time Nebraskan. Pershing (1860–1948), a career army officer, was an excellent administrator who not only managed the war effort efficiently but also recast the American army into its modern form. When the general reached Europe, he endeared himself to the French by reportedly greeting a crowd with, “Lafayette, we are here” (a reference to a French hero of the American Revolution). According to a fellow officer, he “captured the fickle Paris crowd and could be elected King of France tomorrow if it depended on Paris.” On the whole, Pershing worked well with Allied leaders, although a few were unhappy with his refusal to break the American army into small detachments to serve in diverse Allied units. “The American people and the American government,” said Pershing, “expect that the American Army shall act as such and shall not be dispersed here and there along the Western front.” Pershing was quick to dismiss senior officers who failed to produce results, and he showed a remarkable talent for establishing an organization that could transform raw troops into an effective army. Although his commitment to aggressive tactics was outmoded in this era of trench warfare, his fresh and dedicated troops did much to lift sagging Allied morale. Fighting with courage and determination, the Americans helped halt the last great German offensive in the spring of 1918 and then took part in the Allied counteroffensive that brought the war to an end that fall. American riflemen also reintroduced Europeans to the fine art of marksmanship, which had been virtually lost in the hail of massive firepower that characterized the war. Pershing was promoted to majorgeneral and then general in 1916–17. Pershing had been training all his life for this important moment, and Nebraskans like the general played in important role in the war effort. John J. Pershing was born in rural Laclede County, Missouri, on the eve of the Civil War. Despite declining family fortunes, he saved enough money from odd jobs to attend the normal school in Kirksville, Missouri (today Truman State University), from which he graduated in 1880. After teaching for two years, he won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. His aim was not to pursue a military career but to secure a college legal education to enable him to become a lawyer. Pershing adapted so well to the regimentation at West Point that in Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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37. Lt. John J. Pershing (front center) with military cadets at the University of Nebraska, circa 1895 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

his senior year he was appointed First Captain of the Corps, the top student rank in the school. This appointment indicated that, despite average grades, Pershing was considered the best soldier in his class. “No military rank,” he later recalled, “that has ever come to me gave me quite the satisfaction that I felt that day.” After graduating from the Point in 1886, Pershing served at remote outposts on the western frontier. Although he took part in several Indian campaigns with the U.S. Army, this era of warfare was virtually over by the time he took the field. Indeed, there was so little activity and so much public apathy toward the army that he doubted whether his future lay with the service. In 1891, after serving briefly at Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, Pershing secured an appointment at the University of Nebraska as professor of military science, commandant of the University Battalion of Cadets, and mathematics teacher. Among his math students were the future editor of the New Republic magazine and founder of The New School for Social Research in New York City, Alvin Johnson, and future novelist Willa Cather. While at the University, Pershing obtained a law 162

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degree, although friends dissuaded him from abandoning military life for a legal career. Lincoln was a remarkably cosmopolitan community in the 1890s, and the atmosphere worked like a tonic on Pershing. He moved in intellectual and political circles that included University of Nebraska chancellor James H. Canfield, who took the young officer under his wing; legal scholar Roscoe Pound; political reformer William Jennings Bryan; and future vice president Charles G. Dawes, who became Pershing’s lifelong close friend. As commandant of cadets, Pershing had his work cut out for him. “The interest in the battalion [was] weak,” said Canfield, “the discipline next to nothing, and the instincts of the faculty and the precedent of the University against the corps.” Pershing ordered new rifles and sabers, set up a target range in the basement of the armory, and began drilling his men in earnest. The results were so impressive that within three months a student magazine reported that the military science department was in “a flourishing condition.” Pershing’s work with the university cadets won him great acclaim. “There cannot be a better drill team outside of West Point,” said an army inspector. “The high degree of proficiency attained is due entirely to . . . Lieut. Pershing.” The men, who drilled as much as five hours a day, did exceptionally well in national competitions and took such pride in their work that they began wearing their uniforms to class and even to social functions. In 1895 the varsity unit took the name “Pershing Rifles” and became a model for hundreds of similar units organized on college campuses across the nation. Pershing lived in Lincoln for only four years, but he always retained ties to the city. His parents lived there in the 1880s, and later his sisters did, too. Pershing’s son joined his father’s sisters after Pershing’s wife and three daughters died tragically in a fire in their home in San Francisco in 1915. Pershing always remembered his Lincoln days fondly, and in later years he periodically visited the city. His experience at the university, he once said, was “one of the most . . . profitable” of his life. After leaving Lincoln in 1895, Pershing served in Montana and then in the nation’s capital before being appointed an instructor at West Point. It was here that he received the nickname “Black Jack” because he drove his cadets hard and often compared them unfavorably with the troop of black soldiers he had commanded on the Montana fronGen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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tier. “He was gruff and unsympathetic,” said one cadet, “and made a hard life harder.” Pershing delightedly returned to the field first in Cuba, and then in the Philippines and Mexico. In 1898 he took part in the Spanish-American War. Dispatched to Cuba, he showed such extraordinary and reckless bravery in battle that one superior officer described him as “the coolest man under fire I ever saw.” Pershing was subsequently dispatched to the Far East, where he helped suppress the Native Filipino opposition to American occupation and won acclaim for his service as military attaché in Japan in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. His reward came the following year when President Theodore Roosevelt (who had served with Pershing in Cuba) promoted him from captain to brigadier general over nearly a thousand higher-ranking officers. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson sent Pershing on a punitive invasion into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa, whose men had raided Columbus, New Mexico, earlier that year. Although he never caught Villa, Pershing’s yearlong pursuit broke up the Mexican leader’s band and undermined his power. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Pershing had proven himself such a capable and loyal officer that Wilson decided to put him in charge of the American forces sent to Europe. In contrast to his experience in Mexico, Pershing’s orders gave him almost unlimited freedom of action. Mindful of War Department meddling during the Civil War, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker told Pershing: “I will give you only two orders, one to go to France and the other to come home. In the meantime, your authority in France will be supreme.” Other Nebraskans also played important roles during World War I. Of the 4,735,000 Americans who served in the armed forces during the war, almost 58,000 came from Nebraska. Several Nebraska units saw considerable action, and of the 321,000 American casualties almost 1,700 came from Nebraska. Nebraskans were justly proud of Base Hospital No. 49 in Allereye, France, which was financed by Nebraskans and staffed largely by faculty and alumni from the University of Nebraska’s medical school. This unit had the best record for saving lives of any American hospital in Europe. A number of Nebraskans were decorated for bravery during the war. Captain Nelson Holderman of Trumbull was given the Medal of Honor when he was trapped for five days in the Ardennes Forest with the 164

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so-called Lost Battalion in October 1918. Though wounded seven times, Holderman persisted by propping himself up with two rifles and “firing his forty-five and whooping and yelling like a madman.” Another Nebraskan, Carl Lange of Hartington, received four French medals, including the Medaille Militaire, the highest award that could be given by France to an enlisted man. Nebraska contributed to the war in other ways, too. Fort Omaha was the army’s principal school for training soldiers for balloon observation. Thirteen of the seventeen balloon companies that saw action on the western front during the war were trained at Fort Omaha, and an army officer who worked with the balloonists in Europe declared, “No balloon school in the world has done as good work . . . as Fort Omaha.” The work of the balloon observers was important and dangerous. They had to identify enemy positions, but the hydrogen balloons they flew were highly flammable and easy targets for enemy artillery or aircraft. Nebraskans also made a substantial economic contribution to the war, mainly in the production of food. With federal encouragement, some 2.9 million acres of new land were brought into agricultural production, and with the application of new technologies and favorable weather conditions, production across the state soared. Most crop prices doubled in the early years of the war and remained at record levels until 1920. Land values also rose dramatically, by 72 percent between 1916 and 1920. This was truly the golden age of American agriculture, but those farmers who overextended themselves paid dearly when prices collapsed in the 1920s. It was not only farmers who stepped up production during the war. The entire economy was mobilized. Many existing industries expanded rapidly, and whole new industries blossomed. The war deprived the United States of German potash, which was used in a variety of products, such as soap, glass, munitions, and especially fertilizer. To meet this national demand, potash plants were established in western Nebraska, particularly in Sheridan County, where alkali lakes offered a source of raw materials. Antioch, “the potash capital of Nebraska,” enjoyed a booming growth until 1921, when the resumption of trade between the United States and Germany virtually killed the town. The U.S. government sought to mobilize not only the economy but also the hearts and minds of the American people. To encourage people Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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38. The Western Potash Company plant in Antioch, Nebraska, circa 1918 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

to support the war, the government launched a massive propaganda campaign. The Committee on Public Information, headed by a crusading journalist named George Creel, was established to whip up support for the war and hatred against the enemy. The committee put out posters, pamphlets, press releases, and films, all designed to demonstrate the righteousness of the “Four-Minute Men,” who delivered patriotic addresses at movies, plays, concerts, and other public spectacles. There were 914 of these speakers working in Nebraska alone. People in Nebraska responded favorably to this patriotic appeal, and nowhere was the response more enthusiastic than in Omaha. The Gate City was second among American cities in per capita enlistments in the armed forces and first in Red Cross memberships. It was also the first city to fill its quota of war bonds. People in Omaha did a great deal of volunteer work, not only for soldiers overseas but also for those stationed at Fort Omaha. Even school children got involved, doing Red Cross work and learning all four verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the English version of the French national anthem, “The Marseillaise.” 166

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The United States was determined to suppress all opposition to the war, especially among German Americans and Irish Americans (whose support for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain made them initially favor the cause of the Central Powers) and others who regarded American participation in the war as a mistake. In 1917–18 Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition acts, which made it illegal to obstruct the war effort in any way and prohibited all criticism of the American government, the Constitution, and the armed forces. Most states (including Nebraska) adopted similar Bill of Rights restrictions, so that opponents of the war who escaped the federal dragnet were often prosecuted on state charges. Like other states, Nebraska established a host of patriotic organizations to promote the war effort. The most powerful was the Nebraska State Council of Defense, which was created at the request of the federal government and given broad powers to stimulate production, enforce rationing, promote the sale of war bonds, and aid the Red Cross. The State Council was also charged with stamping out dissent, especially among Nebraska’s large population of German heritage. A special target of the Nebraska State Council of Defense was an independent political organization, the Nonpartisan League. The league was lukewarm in its support for the war, branding it “a rich man’s war,” but its real sin was that it was a radical farm group that favored government ownership of stockyards, grain elevators, and food-processing plants. Sometimes mob violence attacked league members. In Plainview the home guard of the community (similar to an ad hoc militia) arrested a league organizer, and many people justified the arrest by appealing to “an unwritten, higher law in regard to disloyalty.” Near Clarks a mob took a league organizer to an island in the Platte River and almost lynched him. He was spared only when he promised to sell his league car, donate the proceeds to the Red Cross, and enlist in the army. Further north the Nonpartisan League was especially active in North Dakota and Minnesota, where it achieved local and state political power. In Nebraska, those accused of disloyalty were called before the State Council to explain themselves, and they were accorded none of the usual rights of those charged with a crime. “When we summon offenders before our committee,” said a council member, “we do not permit them to be represented by attorneys, and we do not reveal the names of the Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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men who make the complaints.” The council, he added, was “partial to the tender touch, to the educational process. But we have had cases— many of them—where the ‘iron hand’ was necessary, and we have not hesitated to use it.” In 1918, after the State Council accused members of the faculty at the University of Nebraska of disloyalty, claiming that sedition stalked the halls of academia, the Board of Regents bowed to pressure and held public hearings. Two professors who questioned America’s participation in the war were forced to resign, and several others were warned to mend their ways or lose their jobs. County councils were established to aid the State Council in its work. The local councils kept records of each family’s financial resources. Based on these figures, people were expected to buy so many liberty bonds or postal savings stamps, and to contribute so much to the Red Cross and other war-related charities. Those who protested were branded as “slackers” or worse and were sometimes threatened with violence. In early 1918 Governor Keith Neville called on the Nebraska legislature to take action against the state’s perceived domestic enemies. “There are those in our midst,” he said, “who have more or less openly given aid and comfort to our enemies, while others, less bold, have covertly done so. The time has come when the last vestige of sedition must be stamped out.” The legislature responded by making it illegal to discourage enlistments in the armed services or to encourage strikes or lockouts in munitions factories. The legislature also withdrew voting privileges from unnaturalized aliens and required alien teachers and preachers to secure a license from the courts. Governor Neville and the legislature were both reacting to and creating a climate of suspicion and violence, but Nebraska’s experience in the First World War was not unique. Every state had its agencies to suppress dissent, and every state was afflicted with mob violence. The war, in other words, was fought on two fronts, one abroad and one at home. In their eagerness to win the war overseas, Americans suspended many basic rights at home. And in their determination “to make the world safe for democracy,” Americans forgot to safeguard the very liberties that underlay their own democratic system. General Pershing returned from the war in 1919 a great hero. Congress was so grateful it elevated Pershing to the prestigious rank of general of the armies. From 1921 to 1924 he served as chief of staff. Although unable to secure the funds he sought from an economy-minded Congress, 168

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Pershing used his position to modernize the general staff organization and expand the army’s educational system. Although he garnered some support for a presidential bid in 1920, Pershing’s defeat in the Nebraska presidential primary killed his candidacy. Unlike popular generals from other wars, he disliked public appearances and was too much of a disciplinarian to succeed in politics. “The boys will never call him ‘Papa Pershing,’” commented one journalist. “The sympathetic touch which makes a popular hero . . . [is] lacking.” Added another reporter, “Just a chuckle would have made him a great man.” After retiring from the army in 1924, Pershing remained in Washington dc, his permanent residence for the rest of his life. In 1931 he published his memoirs, My Experiences in the World War. Although dismissed by some critics as poorly organized and boring, this work won Pershing the Pulitzer Prize and brought in more than three hundred thousand dollars, mainly from newspaper serialization rights. During World War II, Pershing periodically met with military leaders, giving special counsel to his one-time aide, Gen. George C. Marshall. His health deteriorating, in 1941 Pershing moved to Walter Reed Hospital, where he suffered a stroke in 1944 and in 1948 slipped into a coma and died quietly at the age of eighty-eight. Pershing was a great general not because he dreamed up brilliant strategies or performed inspired tactical maneuvers. Rather, he was a careful, well-organized, and hard-working leader who knew how to manage troops, money, and equipment to maximize his charges on the field of battle. It was his talents as an administrator, so critical in modern warfare, that made him an effective leader. “He has an immense faculty for disposing of things,” said one friend. “He is not only a great soldier, but he has common sense and tremendous energy.” Pershing always obeyed orders, admitted when he was wrong about an issue, and lead his troops with fairness. Under the trying circumstances of World War I, Pershing worked particularly well with Allied leaders. “He could listen to more opposition to his apparent view,” said Marshall, “and show less personal feeling than any man I have even seen.” His greatest accomplishment was to remold the American army into a modern and effective fighting force, creating the system of branches, services, and technical schools that became the foundation for the American army during World Gen. John J. Pershing and World War I

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War II—“Pershing’s most enduring gift to the country and his most enduring monument.” In Nebraska today, Pershing continues to be remembered by the Pershing Rifles of the U.S. Army rotc unit headquartered at Pershing Armory on the campus of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the Pershing Auditorium in Lincoln where thousands of Nebraskans have enjoyed and continue to attend concerts, rodeos, state basketball tournament games, and high school graduations.

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21. Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children

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ix boys and a young Irish priest moved into 106 North Twenty-fifth Street in Omaha on December 12, 1917. An anonymous friend of the priest had donated the ninety dollars necessary to cover the first monthly rental payment. By Christmas Eve that same year, there were twenty-five or more boys living in the home. The priest had no funding, and legend has it that the holiday dinner’s main dish was sauerkraut, a gift from a local Omaha merchant. The youngsters were homeless, the priest was Fr. Edward J. Flanagan, and the house was the first site of what is today Girls and Boys Town. Father Flanagan’s vision and hope was to provide shelter, education, and direction to boys who were orphaned, abandoned, in trouble, or about to be. His ideas have endured and his legacy is an international organization estimated to serve one million children annually. Flanagan’s Boys Town originated during the Progressive Era, a time early in the twentieth century when reformers at local, state, and national levels sought social justice and improved living conditions for more Americans. While often involved in urban industrial centers, the Progressive Movement had an important presence in Nebraska as well. Drawn to its goals were Father Flanagan and Grand Island’s Abbott sisters, Edith and Grace, who sought better lives for America’s children. The first U.S. Census of the twentieth century identified 1,066,000 Nebraska residents. Males outnumbered females, the population was predominantly white, and the majority of Nebraskans lived in rural areas. Of these one million plus Nebraskans in 1900, 134,000 were under the age of five and another 255,000 were between 5 and 14 years. In contrast, only 173,000 Nebraskans were over age 45 at a time when life expectancy was 49 years. Youth, then, comprised over one-third of

the state population, and they were the focus and immediate beneficiaries of a number of Progressive Era initiatives early in the 1900s. As the nation looked ahead to the new century, many citizens believed that it was necessary to take up a variety of social and political issues to enhance the conditions of the nation, hence the term “Progressives.” Their attentions and intentions varied somewhat, but all these early twentieth-century reformers were intent on improving the living and working conditions of individuals in an increasingly industrialized, urbanized, impersonalized, and dangerous society writ large. Some of the Progressive causes were aligned with those of the earlier Populist movement, and many of their efforts were directed toward the inclusion of groups previously excluded from participation in the American Dream as well as the protection of women, children, immigrants, and the poor. Progressive movement issues included women’s suffrage, child and women’s labor hours and conditions, prohibition, education, government regulation of industry, and political reforms. Yet, most Progressives paid little attention to segregation and racism toward African, Asian, and Native Americans. President Theodore Roosevelt is said to have considered the newly founded naacp a dangerously radical organization. To accomplish their aims, Progressives were confident about the benefits of scientific management and of evidence-based policy making. Two Nebraska sisters, Edith and Grace Abbott of Grand Island, were national leaders in conducting and applying research to social issues. Both compiled distinguished service and academic careers that originated in their family home in Hall County. Othman Ali Abbott was Nebraska’s first lieutenant governor. A veteran of the Ninth Illinois Cavalry during the Civil War, he moved to Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1867. An attorney, he quickly entered Nebraska’s political scene, serving as a Nebraska Constitutional Convention delegate and state senator. He married Elizabeth Griffin, a school principal from West Liberty, Iowa, and an avowed abolitionist and suffragist. Together they hosted Susan B. Anthony when she spoke at a Grand Island gathering in 1882. They had four children: Othman A., Jr., Edith, Grace, and Arthur. The senior Abbotts’ commitments to education and civic service were embraced by the next generation in the family, especially the Abbott sisters. Edith, the older Abbott daughter, was born in 1876. By age seventeen, she was teaching at Grand Island High School, and she then went 172

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39. Grace Abbott (middle row, fourth from left); Edith Abbott (middle row, second from right); Jane Addams (seated fourth from left), circa 1918 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

on to graduate from the University of Nebraska in 1901. A scholarship supported her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, where she took a PhD degree in political economics and next completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics. This was a supreme accomplishment for a woman of the era as few were able or allowed to pursue advanced higher education. After teaching at Wellesley College for a term, Edith Abbott returned to Chicago and moved into Hull House, the well-known settlement house established in 1889 by Jane Addams. Like others, this settlement house was intended to help newly arrived immigrants adjust to living in American cities and emphasized the work and domestic concerns of women. Social work based upon professional approaches and research data was a new and significant advancement in 1900, and it was Edith Abbott’s specialty. She published over one hundred articles on social Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children

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work over the course of her career. These included essays on juvenile delinquency, truancy, suffrage, immigration, and a history of American women workers. Edith Abbott also served as dean of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and as a member of a federal commission on law observance and enforcement. At a time when a number of Americans were supporting anti-immigrant legislation, Edith Abbott’s research proved that recently arrived potential citizens committed fewer crimes than did those in the wider population. Her social work career and projects flourished into the 1930s, including her election to the presidency of the National Conference of Social Work. In 1951 she was honored with the National Conference’s Survey Award. Edith Abbott retired to Grand Island, where she died in 1957 and where the city library is named for her. Younger sister Grace Abbott was born in Grand Island in 1878 and, like Edith, taught school in her hometown. Grace attended Grand Island Baptist College and later studied at the University of Nebraska, where she was the only female in her law classes. Instead of completing her degree, she returned to teaching and then moved to Chicago to join her sister, obtaining a master’s degree in political science at the University of Chicago and residing at Hull House. Soon named the director of the Immigrants’ Protective League, Grace Abbott began to write about and work for the legal protection of immigrants, women workers, and children. A committed researcher, Grace Abbott journeyed to Europe to see the places and circumstances the newly arriving Americans were leaving, collected extensive social science data both in the United States and abroad, and published The Immigrant and the Community, in which she argued for governmental intervention on behalf of immigrants. Over her objections, a national literacy requirement for immigrants to become citizens became law. In 1917 Grace Abbott moved to Washington dc, when she accepted the position of director of the Industrial Division of the Federal Children’s Bureau. In this capacity, she fought and lobbied for national protection and restriction on child labor, though not always successfully. Four years later, Abbott ascended to the directorship of the entire Bureau, a position that gave her the forum she wanted as an advocate for the health of mothers and children. She headed the Children’s Bureau until 1934, and during her tenure she also served as the U.S. representative to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women 174

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and Children and, like her sister, a term as president of the National Conference of Social Work. Readers of Good Housekeeping named her one of America’s Most Distinguished Women in their 1931 poll. Before leaving Washington, President Franklin Roosevelt invited Grace to serve on the President’s Council on Economic Security, and she helped plan and write the Social Security Act. Grace Abbott next returned to Chicago to accept a professorship of public welfare administration at the University of Chicago. Tuberculosis and anemia did not slow her down before her death in Chicago in 1939. Her efforts and accomplishments have been recognized by her selection to the Nebraska Hall of Fame and by the annual choice of the Grace Abbott Award by the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation for leadership and commitment to improving child and family well-being. These ongoing recognitions reflect the words of U.S. senator George W. Norris about Grace Abbott: “Few in this world have done as much good for suffering humanity as she had accomplished.” While Edith and Grace Abbott were advocating for children from their Chicago and Washington bases, Fr. Edward Flanagan was busy helping homeless and troubled boys in Omaha. Born in Ireland in 1886, Flanagan was the product of a large Catholic family. As a boy, Eddie, as he was commonly called, was thoughtful, quiet, and obedient. His intelligence and temperament marked him early for the priesthood. “Eddie was born to be a priest,” his mother later said. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in Summer Hill College, a kind of advanced high school on the northwest coast of Ireland. His existence there was lonely and austere, but his grades were excellent. When he graduated (in 1904 or 1905), he moved to the United States to live with his sister Nellie in New York City. Several years later, the rest of the Flanagan clan joined them in America. Flanagan planned to go to seminary school, but the Archbishop of New York urged him to first get a college education. Accordingly, he attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, graduating in 1906. Returning to New York, he enrolled in St. Joseph’s Seminary, but an attack of double pneumonia forced him to give up his studies. Doctors advised him to seek a drier climate, so the Flanagan clan decided to move to Omaha, where Eddie’s older brother Patrick (known as Father P.A.) was a parish priest. Father P.A. was delighted to learn that the family was joining him. “Welcome to the front door of the West,” he wrote. Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children

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The Bishop of Omaha was favorably impressed with Eddie and agreed to finance the completion of his seminary work at the Gregorian University in Rome. Still plagued by poor health, Flanagan had to interrupt his studies in Italy and return to Omaha, where he worked for two years as a bookkeeper at Cudahy’s, a large meatpacking company. He finally finished his seminary work at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and was ordained in 1912. After returning to the United States, Father Flanagan became an assistant to Fr. Michael Cassidy in O’Neill, one of several Irish communities in Nebraska. Flanagan spent six months in this town, often traveling to minister to the needs of his far-flung flock and to celebrate mass at mission chapels in the outlying areas. In 1913 Father Flanagan was assigned to St. Patrick’s Church in Omaha, where he again served as an assistant priest. Here he came into contact with itinerant farm laborers who were out of work. To assist these people, Flanagan started a free hotel that was ultimately known as the Workingmen’s Hotel. No one was ever turned away from this hotel, and eventually Flanagan was feeding and housing as many as a thousand men a day. Father Flanagan was especially moved by the plight of children who sought shelter at the hotel. Many had nowhere else to go. The priest began to visit Omaha’s juvenile court, and because social services were limited, these children were often shunted off to a reform school in Kearney. As an alternative, Flanagan persuaded the court to assign a growing number of the boys to his care. “I decided,” he later said, “to spend my life in saving boys from becoming misfits and recruits to the army of crime.” Although Father Flanagan was able to help many of the children, he believed that what they really needed was a healthy and wholesome home environment. Determined to provide such, in December 1917 Flanagan borrowed ninety dollars from a friend and rented a house at Dodge and Twenty-fifth streets. This was the genesis of Boys Town. The arriving boys soon outgrew this facility, and Flanagan moved them to the old German-American Home on south Thirteenth Street. He was able to rent this building cheaply because World War I had generated such intense hostility to all things German. Once established in his new quarters, Father Flanagan rapidly expanded his operation. He started a school, a band, and an athletic program. He also began a small farm and published a magazine, the Boys’ Home Journal. Carlo—Boys 176

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40. Fr. Edward Flanagan with Charles McMahon and Jeff Delton, 1941 (courtesy of Hall of History Collection, Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home).

Town’s first dog—was also adopted. Over the years Carlo became friend and protector to thousands of boys. After his death, he was stuffed and mounted and placed in the home’s lobby so that the boys could still pet him on their way in or out. To manage his growing flock, Flanagan secured help from several sources. His nephew, Patrick Norton, became his assistant and lifelong companion; priests and nuns in Omaha served as teachers and performed other duties; and neighborhood women formed the Mother’s Guild to aid in the housekeeping chores. Even so, by 1921 Father Flanagan’s home was once again bursting at the seams, and once more the priest began looking for new quarters. Hoping to move to the country, Flanagan acquired a small farm in Florence, but local opposition squelched his plans to build a home there. Later Father Flanagan set his sights on Overlook Farm, a 160-acre plot of land eleven miles west of Omaha. The owner, David Baum, was willing to sell the farm for one hundred thousand dollars and offered generous terms so Flanagan could afford to buy it. In 1921 the boys moved to Overlook, where they lived in temporary Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children

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buildings until Flanagan’s friends in Omaha could raise enough money to build permanent quarters. A sign went up designating the place as “Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home,” though after 1926 it was officially known as Boys Town. Flanagan’s mother joined him to help manage the home, and when she retired, her place was taken by his sister Nellie. Boys Town secured its own post office in 1934, and two years later it was officially incorporated as the Village of Boys Town. Father Flanagan faced a host of problems in the early years. Although he arranged adoptions for some of the children, he later had to abandon this practice because the adoptions rarely worked out. Some farm families even engaged in a kind of profiteering—adopting a boy to help plant and harvest their crops and then returning him after the harvest was over. There was also hostility to Boys Town from those who thought Father Flanagan was coddling criminals. Others objected to Boys Town’s ties to the Catholic Church, even though the home had always been nonsectarian. Still others opposed Boys Town’s racial policy. “We admit boys of all classes, creeds, and nationalities,” said Flanagan, “and there is no color line drawn at Boys Town.” To those who challenged this policy, Father Flanagan posed a question: “What is the color of your soul?” Finding money to operate the home was a constant problem. Some funds were raised by a traveling show that featured the boys. A choir started by Fr. Francis Schmitt also generated support, as did Boys Town’s highly successful football teams. Father Flanagan had a nationally syndicated radio program, Links of Love, in the 1920s, and he wrote and spoke incessantly on behalf of Boys Town’s mission. In the mid-1930s, Louis B. Mayer, head of mgm, learned about Father Flanagan’s home from a newspaper article and decided to make the movie Boys Town. Starring Spencer Tracy as Flanagan and Mickey Rooney as a troubled youth, the film was released in 1938 to popular and critical acclaim. Tracy won an Academy Award for his performance, and his Oscar is now on display at Boys Town. In 2003 Mickey Rooney was named Honorary Mayor for Life of Girls and Boys Town. The movie endeared Father Flanagan to millions, and almost overnight Boys Town became an American legend. Immediately after the appearance of the movie, donations fell off because most people assumed that Boys Town had made money from the film. Later, however, donations began to increase after Boys Town 178

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began sending out millions of letters each year (mainly at Christmas and Easter time) appealing for help. The response enabled Flanagan in 1941 to realize his longtime dream of establishing an endowment. Father Flanagan’s home was successful in other ways, too. The vast majority of his children went on to lead useful lives. Flanagan’s philosophy was simple; he offered the boys a small dose of religion and a large dose of love. “There are no bad boys,” he was fond of saying. “There is only bad environment, bad training, bad examples, and bad thinking.” Flanagan encouraged his children to love and help each other. Boys Town’s motto, “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . . He’s my brother,” embodied this spirit. The motto grew out of the willingness of the larger boys to carry around one of their disabled mates. Flanagan also believed in the dignity of labor. “Every boy at Boys Town, from the youngest to the oldest,” he said, “has a specific duty to perform each day.” The priest refused to condone physical punishment. Instead, those who were uncooperative or recalcitrant were denied privileges or assigned extra duties. Father Flanagan became a recognized authority on children, and in his later years he traveled extensively to promote his ideas. After World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur invited him to the Far East to consult on the treatment of war orphans in Japan and Korea. “The young of Asia,” said MacArthur, “are crying out to you.” Many of the recommendations Flanagan made during this visit were adopted, and institutions modeled after Boys Town were established in Japan and China. “You have reached millions,” MacArthur told him, “where others have reached only thousands.” In 1948 the government asked Flanagan to visit Europe to study the conditions of youth there. While in Berlin, he died of a heart attack on May 15. His body was returned to the United States, and he was buried in a vault in the Dowd Memorial Chapel at Boys Town. Father Flanagan was selected for the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1965. Boys Town continued to flourish after Father Flanagan’s death until the 1960s. At that time it went through a difficult period. Discipline became a serious problem among the boys, and the number of runaways apparently increased. Then in 1972, the Omaha Sun ran a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles showing that Boys Town was spending little of the enormous amount of money that was coming in each year from its investments and public contributions. “Boys Town,” the paper Fr. Edward Flanagan, the Abbott Sisters, and Nebraska’s Children

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concluded, “has more money than it knows what to do with.” Although the newspaper articles received national attention, in the end the publicity proved therapeutic. Boys Town’s board of trustees hired consultants to plan for the future, and the result was a host of needed reforms. The administrative structure was revamped and many new programs were established that have reached a large number of young people. In 2000 Boys Town students in all affiliated locations voted officially to amend the name to Girls and Boys Town in order to better reflect the mission of the organization: “to change the way America cares for her children and families,” and to acknowledge that girls make up about one half of the residents. At the celebration of the name change, a banner with the motto, “She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister,” was featured. The mayor of the home was quoted as stating, “I think it’s a big, positive thing. I did think it would pass by a little more than it did” (68 percent voted “yes” for the new name). Today the Omaha location extends over nine hundred acres in West Omaha with seventy dwellings that provide family homes for over five hundred children annually. Additional Omaha locations include the National Research Hospital for children with communication disorders and the National Resource and Training Center at which educational programming in child care training, including new technologies, is provided to various individuals and organizations. There are also nineteen sites in fourteen other states and the District of Columbia that serve approximately forty-three thousand children each year. Programs in Omaha and beyond include family preservation, foster family, and behavioral health. A national hotline to which any troubled youth may dial twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is estimated to take five hundred thousand calls per year; and through total outreach and training programs, approximately one million children and youth are served annually. Since the death of Father Flanagan in 1948, four other men have served as director. The first three successors were native Nebraskans: Monsignor Nicholas H. Wegner (1948–73); Monsignor Robert P. Hupp (1973–85); and Fr. Valentine J. Peter (1985–2005). As Girls and Boys Town has extended its services, it has also had several difficulties during recent years. These include lawsuits it brought against the American Institute of Philanthropy for defamation and against the District of Columbia for discrimination, and lawsuits brought against Girls and 180

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Boys Town by former residents based on charges of sexual abuse by several staff members, plus the loosening of its relationship with Omaha’s archbishop. Recently, Fr. Steven Boes succeeded Peter and was inaugurated on July 1, 2005. The son of Nebraskans, Boes served previously as director of the St. Augustine Indian Mission and School in Winnebago. At his inauguration, Boes referred to Father Flanagan when he stated that “there’s only one true leader of Girls and Boys Town,” and then he pledged to help make Flanagan’s dream of having a presence in all fifty states a reality. This goal places him in the tradition of Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, and Fr. Edward Flanagan, who each sought and worked to make better the lives of children, those within and beyond Nebraska.

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22. The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors

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n Monday, October 7, 1918, the town of Ravenna in Buffalo County imposed a quarantine. All schools, churches, the picture show, dance halls, and lodges were closed until further notice. Businesses were to shut their doors by 6:30 p.m., and children had an 8:00 p.m. curfew. Local newspapers reported up to seventy-five cases of Spanish influenza, the “flu,” or just plain influenza. Victims were advised to stay warm, get into bed, and contact a doctor. Within two weeks, six persons died in Ravenna from the epidemic. Nebraskans and all Americans soon learned of this “great and terrifying menace to public health.” It fell to Nebraska’s doctors to calm the citizenry and treat the ill. By the late nineteenth century, physicians had become increasingly professionalized and specialized, and they had made significant advances in treating various diseases and ailments. Most Nebraskans accepted the theory that microorganisms, or germs, caused infection and disease could be prevented by cleanliness. Antiseptics like carbolic acid enjoyed widespread usage as well as the X-ray machine, laboratories, and a host of vaccines and antitoxins to ward off or combat disease. With their improved efficiency and greater competence, doctors gained new patients and new respect. Physicians could often be recognized by their Prince Albert coats, silk hats, and whiskers, though the latter soon disappeared in the interest of cleanliness. Medicine had come of age in Nebraska, and it could not have come sooner given the crisis at hand. The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 struck with a silent fury just when the nation was focused on World War I being waged in France, Belgium, and Germany. The disease had, in fact, started in Europe and had been transported first to Boston in September. Within two weeks, hundreds

died on the East Coast. At one point, 175 people per day were dying in Boston and up to 700 per day in New York City. An astounding number of 1,700 Philadelphians succumbed in one twenty-four hour period. Military bases training recruits for battle reported grave concerns about the spreading epidemic. Nebraskans did not notice the “dread disease” until mid-October. Newspapers may have downplayed the disease so as not to cause a general panic. Kearney reported twenty cases the first day of October, and several Nebraskans in army and navy installations died of the disease, including a Kearney boy. Physicians in Kearney noted there were a number of cases in the city, but they did not recommend a quarantine yet. Instead they concentrated on giving information to the public on how to avoid the flu. People were advised to stay away from crowds and not to use roller towels or common drinking cups. No one was to spit on floors or sidewalks. Doctors told patients to cover sneezes and coughs, and dancing and “promiscuous nursing” were specifically labeled as purveyors of influenza. In a preview to the twenty-first century’s sars outbreak in China, office workers and postmen donned face masks at work. A number of remedies were proposed. Tanlac, “a powerful reconstructive tonic,” reportedly had ingredients that held influenza at bay. Vicks VapoRub and Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery came onto the market making similar claims. Sometimes low-grade alcohol proved to be the prime element for treatment. Although some doctors claimed to have found a cure, none really was dependable, and even if a vaccine had been discovered, it could not have been made available in time to stop the disease from spreading. By mid-October, Nebraskans were starting to panic. Shelton banned public meetings after forty cases occurred there and a young farmer west of the community died. A strict quarantine was put in place in Grand Island. After two Kearney residents succumbed, on October 14 Kearney’s mayor issued a proclamation: “In order to prevent the spread of disease and to protect the health of the public it has become necessary to close all places of amusement, churches, schools, and such places of business where crowds congregate.” The mayor also ordered that “children must remain at home and will not be permitted on the streets.” Even with the Kearney quarantine, many new cases struck the city, including college students from Kearney Normal (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney). The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors

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Some Nebraskans even turned to unique homemade cures. Buffalo County witnessed people eating large quantities of fried onions and wearing medicated bags over their heads. Some sprinkled formaldehyde on the streets. People were willing to try anything to stop the dreaded disease, and some communities started shunning those who were ill. At the height of the epidemic, some Nebraska hospitals started to reject flu patients in fear of contaminating other patients. At Kearney, patients were put in a separate building. The problem of so many doctors and nurses away at war also meant many communities were without medical help. Those doctors available were soon overwhelmed with the task, and volunteers came forward to take care of the sick. Nevertheless, there were success stories. Gibbon reported four hundred cases but no fatalities and lifted its ban on public gatherings in mid-November, 1918. Kearney’s city physician noted that with four hundred cases of flu and only six deaths, what could have been a catastrophe had been controlled. The medical profession that was so profoundly stressed by the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 had come a long distance since its previous half-century in Nebraska. At first it was relatively easy to become a doctor. With the medical profession crowded in most of the settled parts of the United States, some adventurous doctors decided to head West. Dr. Thomas Maghee, for example, “set up shop” first in Warrenton, Indiana, “and stayed two weeks without a single call.” Given such dull prospects, he jumped at the chance to become a contract doctor for the U.S. Army and served successively at Fort Omaha and Fort McPherson before moving on to Wyoming. Likewise, Dr. John Thompson found so little business in Cridersville, Ohio, that he, too, looked for greener pastures. A cousin practicing in Fairbury, Nebraska, encouraged him to migrate to the state. “The fields of practice are wide open,” he said, “with little competition and too much to do.” Thompson took his cousin’s advice and practiced in a succession of towns south of the Platte—including Belvidere, Hendley, Strang, and Sutton—before moving to Lincoln to close out his career. Since medical specialization was still in its infancy, virtually all doctors in Nebraska were general practitioners. They had to know how to treat diseases, perform surgery, and set broken bones. Because dentists came to most towns only once or twice a year, doctors also had to handle dental emergencies, which usually meant extracting teeth. Few had any 184

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41. Dr. John W. Thompson in his office in Sutton, Nebraska, 1914 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

training in dental work and had to learn from experience. While most physicians became reasonably proficient, stories nonetheless abounded of cases where the wrong tooth was pulled. Although most doctors set up practice in a town, they spent much of their time traveling to see patients in the country. “It was nothing then to be called to make a trip,” recalled an Ainsworth doctor, “to some outlying ranch 25 to 50 miles distant.” Dr. William Bancroft, who opened an office in Plum Creek (now Lexington) in 1873, had a practice that initially extended fifty miles north to Broken Bow, twenty miles east to Elm Creek, thirty-five miles west to Brady, and thirty-five miles south to the Republican River. Dr. Cass Barns of Madison once made nearly twenty visits to a family suffering from typhoid fever twenty miles out of town. On another occasion two Nebraska physicians had to ride two days into Dakota Territory to perform an amputation necessitated by frostbite. Since they remained with the patient for two days before returning, their house call took a week. Some doctors, particularly the younger ones, traveled by horse, but The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors

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most preferred a buggy. Either way their journey could be long and arduous. In the winter they had to dress for warmth, which meant wearing a buffalo robe and putting a jug of boiling water or a charcoal warmer at their feet. At night most carried a lantern, and some posted a light on a pole at home to guide them when they returned. Doctors frequently got lost, especially in bad weather. One physician who lost his way on a snowy night found himself, buggy and all, on the roof of a partially dug out sod house. Fortunately it was occupied by the man who had summoned the doctor. One doctor tried every conceivable transportation device in order to help his patients. Dr. Frank Brewster practiced medicine in several Nebraska communities. When he was in Arapahoe, he started making house calls on a motorcycle in 1903. He then bought the first Brush horseless carriage in 1905 to use for visiting his patients. The next year he traded it for a one-cylinder, topless Cadillac that had acetylene lights. During the Influenza Epidemic, Dr. Brewster reportedly traveled to flu victims’ bedsides by “open touring car, by horseback, and by handcar.” In 1919 Lt. Wade Stevens, who had flown planes in France in World War I, persuaded Dr. Brewster to purchase a small airplane. The two got to put the plane to use when the good doctor was called to save an oil field employee in Herndon, Kansas. They flew to Kansas, operated on the injured man in a local hotel, had the man transferred to Kansas City in an ambulance where he later recovered, and returned to Furnas County in just five hours. Dr. Brewster became known as the “world’s first flying surgeon,” although he modestly noted that, “the airplane saved the man’s life” as time was the most important factor in his recovery. Brewster continued his practice and the use of airplanes for the next three decades, buying a 320-acre farm east of Holdrege that he turned into an airport. It was named Brewster Field and was one of five airfields he built. Dr. Frank S. Morris practiced medicine in McCool Junction for fifty years, from 1887 to 1937. He developed a unique communications system for his patients. Dr. Morris left carrier pigeons at selected outposts up to ten miles from McCool, and when a patient was sick, the family would write a message summoning the doctor and insert it into an aluminum tube attached to the bird’s leg. They then released the pigeon for a homeward flight. The pigeon returned to the pigeon house in Dr. Morris’s backyard. When the pigeon opened a tiny door and 186

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went in the birdhouse, an electrical relay alerted Dr. Morris’s medical office in downtown McCool Junction. He then went home to read the message from the homing pigeon and took off in his buggy to treat his patient. Many doctors practiced out of their homes, which played havoc on family life. Sometimes spouses, usually a wife, had to serve as receptionist and cashier. Often she had to launder surgical linens and bandages and entertain patients while the doctor was away. Spouses had to be prepared for emergencies. In Madison a young woman with two small children was horror-struck when the sheriff brought a mentally disturbed man to her home when her husband was out on a call. The sheriff told her to “watch the man and not let him get away” and then disappeared. Fortunately, the woman was able to entertain her unexpected guest until her husband returned to treat him. Not all women associated with the medical profession were doctors’ wives. A growing number were nurses, and by 1920 there were more than fifty women doctors in the state. When Mari Sandoz researched her novel, Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail (1955), she constructed her female doctor around the lives of three of the earliest women doctors in Nebraska: Dr. Mary Quick, who had a medical practice just west of the Missouri River beginning in 1867 for twenty-five years; Dr. Phoebe Briggs, who practiced medicine among the Otoe Indians beginning in 1872; and Dr. Georgia Arbuckle Fix, who set up her practice on her homestead along the Sidney-Deadwood Trail in 1886. Perhaps it was not surprising for Sandoz to write a frontier doctor novel as her father Old Jules had been a medical student in Switzerland before he emigrated to the Sandhills. One of the most illustrious woman doctors was the Omaha Indian, Susan La Flesche Picotte. Dr. Picotte was the granddaughter of Dr. John Gale, a U.S. Army surgeon, and Nicomi, of Omaha-Otoe-Iowa descent. With the help of several easterners, Picotte attended the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Graduating at the head of her class in 1889, she became the first American Indian woman to earn a medical degree. After serving for a time as a government physician to her tribe, she moved to Bancroft and then to Walthill, where she helped establish a hospital. A great proponent of preventive medicine, she campaigned against the menace of common drinking cups and the housefly. “I believe in prevention of disease and hygienic care more than I do in The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors

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42. Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865–1915) (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

giving or prescribing medicine,” she once said, “and my constant aim is to teach these two things, particularly to young mothers.” Although people in Nebraska escaped some diseases that flourished in warmer climates or in crowded cities, doctors practicing in the state nonetheless faced a bewildering array of ailments. Most dreaded were the epidemic diseases that could sweep through a town in a matter of days and wipe out whole families. Cholera, which was spread by contaminated water or food, could kill a person within twelve hours. It reached epidemic proportions in Omaha as early as 1857 and periodically stalked emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Typhoid fever, which was also carried by polluted water, attacked anyone without respect to age, and dysentery was also common. Diphtheria most often preyed on the young, while tuberculosis, known as the “white plague,” was the greatest killer of adults, especially among Native Americans. The drugs physicians used to treat disease were rarely adequate. 188

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A doctor in Jefferson County boasted of a single panacea for all ailments: “August flower bitters.” He may have been a quack, but even legitimate doctors had few drugs of any real therapeutic value. Patent medicines were widely used. Most had an alcohol or opium base, and they claimed to cure almost every ailment that existed. All they really cured, however, was the poverty of their inventors, such as the maker of Hostetter’s Bitters who earned more than eighteen million dollars from the sale of his “medicine.” Often the most patients could hope for was an alleviation of symptoms while nature took its course. Most doctors carried a medicine case with a dozen or so drugs. The most widely prescribed were aconite and quinine for fevers; calomel, a chalky mercury compound used as a laxative; and opium and morphine. All of these were toxic in large doses, in which they were frequently administered. Given the primitive state of pharmacology, it is little wonder that one critic declared that doctors were trained to see “how much poison [could] be given without causing death.” Before 1900 doctors in Nebraska usually charged one dollar for town visits and fifty cents a mile for country calls. Since a visit to the country could be expensive, doctors sometimes accepted commodity pay, such as food, livestock, or feed grain. Some doctors waited months or even years to collect their fees, and those who collected two-thirds of their billings did well. Dr. Victor Coffman of Omaha, who probably had the largest practice in the state, carried one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid bills on his books, and this did not include his extensive charity work. Before World War I, there seemed to be a sufficient number of doctors in Nebraska. Some Nebraska towns even became overstocked with doctors. At one time in the 1880s, there were five doctors practicing in Madison, a town of fewer than one thousand people, and seven doctors in McCook, a town with only two thousand people. “A doctor’s work,” said one of the McCook physicians, “is almost as irregular as a gambler’s luck.” In the early years especially, a number of doctors often had to supplement their incomes by pursuing a second career, such as farming or politics. Dr. M. O. Ricketts, an ex-slave who graduated with honors from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1884, practiced medicine in Omaha’s black community from 1884 to 1893 and also The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Nebraska’s Doctors

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served in the Nebraska legislature for two terms, in 1892 and 1894. Some abandoned the profession altogether. Omaha’s first physician, George L. Miller, practiced for more than a decade before forsaking medicine for a newspaper career. He founded the Omaha Herald in 1865 and edited it for almost a quarter of a century. At first, doctors in Nebraska were not subject to regulation. “Anyone who had the nerve,” a Lincoln doctor recalled, “could call himself ‘doctor’ and prey upon the credulity of the sick and afflicted.” As time passed, however, doctors became increasingly successful in regulating their profession. The state also played a role. Beginning in 1881 all doctors had to demonstrate proof of a medical diploma and register with the county clerk, which disqualified 14 percent of those practicing. In 1891 the State Board of Health was established to license doctors. The Omaha Medical College (which later became the University of Nebraska College of Medicine) was founded in 1881, and Creighton Medical College followed in 1892. The state’s first medical journal, the Omaha Clinic, was founded in 1888. By the end of the century, hospitals were beginning to spring up across the state, not only to serve the needs of the sick but also to provide training for young doctors. Doctors in one community would even see the opportunity to set up a hospital in another community. For example, African-American Dr. George A. Flippin from Grand Island and his father operated for several years the Mawood Hospital at Stromsburg. Dr. Frank Brewster set up the first hospitals in southwest Nebraska at Arapahoe in 1906 and at Beaver City in 1914. Thus, by the time of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, the Nebraska medical profession was in place. It was fortunate that it was as trained as it was, because the epidemic was catastrophic. It was estimated “that in six to eight weeks of the fall of 1918, 500 million people around the world were affected, [and] 20 million of those [were] dying.” Approximately five thousand Nebraskans perished. By November 1918 most cities and towns, however, had abolished their quarantines, but a December scare frightened enough communities to close school until after the new year. It seems that the flu plague came and went with rapidity, and part of the reason Nebraskans survived without even greater panic was their reliance on an increasingly skilled medical profession. Reverence for doctors, particularly in rural Nebraska, continues today. There is a shortage of physicians outside of the major cities of Omaha 190

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and Lincoln, and when doctors leave, residents try hard to attract new doctors. When disputes develop, particularly between local hospital boards and doctors, inevitably patients support their doctors. Recently, protests have divided Falls City, Ord, Gothenburg, Imperial, and Lynch when physicians have lost access to nearby hospitals. That people are willing publicly to back their doctors, even to the extent of holding recall elections for hospital board members and demanding the firing of hospital administrators, is not too surprising, as the recently conducted Nebraska Rural Poll found that next to good schools and safe streets, Nebraskans want quality health care in their communities. They have greatly admired their family physicians throughout the years.

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23. Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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n May 25, 1920, Robert T. Meyer, a calm and quiet teacher at Zion Lutheran School, located in central Nebraska just four miles north of Hampton, was teaching in German the story of Joseph in bondage in Egypt to a dozen elementary school children in his classroom when he received a visitor. Meyer’s German Bible class met during a designated recess period between 1:00 and 1:30 p.m., a time when the Zion Lutheran School Board had decided it was permissible to teach German classes. The board declared that the language study related to their Lutheran religion. It was a stretch of the Nebraska law, but the board thought this action to be legally permissible and important for the German American community. Just at the moment when one of the fifth-graders, Raymond Parpart, began his recitation, Hamilton County attorney Fred Edgerton of Aurora entered the classroom. “There was a real hush,” Raymond later recalled. “We were wondering what was going on. We could tell by the look on Teacher Meyer’s face that something pretty serious was happening.” Young Parpart had learned German initially at home from his parents, but after he turned age five, he spoke mostly English, so his parents had arranged for him to take German instruction. Although Edgerton’s arrival had startled Meyer, the teacher knew that the county attorney was only trying to threaten his classroom. Earlier that year, the Hamilton County school superintendent had warned Meyer to stop teaching German, even outside of his regular school hours. The superintendent had refused to make his request an official one in writing, instead saying, “I am no policeman.” At first the county attorney paced around the room, and then he asked pupil Parpart to read from the Bible and to explain what he had read in

43. Zion Lutheran Church, near Hampton, Nebraska (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

English. After Raymond finished reading some German lines, Edgerton grabbed the book from him and never returned it. It would later become evidence in Meyer’s trial. Before leaving, Edgerton spoke with Meyer, and the two had a long conversation. Edgerton asked Meyer if he taught German each day, and Meyer admitted that he had since the school board had granted permission. Edgerton then left, and Meyer continued his German biblical lesson that spring day. Both Edgerton and the superintendent were seeking to enforce the Siman Act, a Nebraska state law passed in 1919. This statute prohibited any teacher in any school from teaching in any language other than English. The only exception was language taught after a pupil passed the eighth grade as certified by the county superintendent. Anyone who broke this law would be prosecuted for a misdemeanor and upon conviction fined from twenty-five to one hundred dollars or confined in the county jail for up to thirty days for each offense. The Siman Act was specifically aimed at the teaching of German and at nullifying the Mockett Act of 1913 in which all school districts Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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were required to teach a modern European language starting in the fifth grade, if fifty or more parents petitioned the school board. This far-reaching act required foreign language instruction upon request in at least one period each day, five days a week, and no more than five hours per week. Governor Keith Neville had condemned the Mockett Act as “vicious, undemocratic, and un-American,” and the legislature repealed it. The Siman Act, however, was broadly phrased. Governor Samuel McKelvie signed the Siman Act into law, which spurred Lutheran and Roman Catholic schools and synods to challenge it with a lawsuit. Not only German, but Polish, Czech, and Danish Nebraskans quickly sought an injunction to stop its enforcement based upon the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Nebraska Supreme Court quashed any injunction. What had happened between the Mockett Act of 1913 and the Siman Act of 1919 in Nebraska was World War I. But the war alone cannot be blamed for a general attack on civil liberties. Violence of an unprecedented nature in the United States during this era was perpetrated by the majority society upon those who were somehow different racially, culturally, religiously, and linguistically. The decade from 1915 to 1925 was a time of great hysteria, fear, and intolerance in all of America, and Nebraska was not immune. Rapid change because of increased mechanization, urbanization, and agricultural depression made many Americans react in this time of social and economic instability and dislocation with bigotry and violence. After the Hampton Zion School had been singled out for allowing extended recess time for German language instruction, the building was vandalized. Windows were blasted with shotguns, and all German-language books were ripped up, with the exception of the Bible. Robert Meyer feared for his life, and he was not alone. During World War I, many Nebraskans, “bitter about the past and fearful of the future,” as summarized by one historian of this era, turned against their German American neighbors. There were 202,000 German Americans living in Nebraska, including 57,000 who had been born in Germany. German language was widely used in everyday life, and some forty Germanlanguage newspapers were published in the state on a regular basis. “Germanism,” said the Lincoln Star, “is the cancer which has been undermining patriotism in the United States, and if not removed root and branch, its poison will continue to spread.” 194

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Nebraska’s State Council of Defense advocated what it called the Americanization of its population. This state agency put great pressure on the German language press in Nebraska, which lost many of its readers. Moreover, the study of German was eliminated from school curricula, German-language books were purged from the state’s traveling library, and many shopkeepers prohibited their employees from speaking German. The State Council instructed local phone companies to prohibit the use of German on all telephones. This was not particularly successful, but many German-speaking Nebraskans fearfully gave up their phone service. Towns with a German heritage sometimes found it prudent to change names. Thus, Germantown in Seward County became Garland, and Berlin in Otoe County became Otoe. Some German businesses also changed their names. The State Council also was especially critical of the Lutheran Church, accusing its leaders of fomenting treason and disloyalty. The State Council attacked the Missouri Synod in Nebraska for using German language in its worship services and in parochial school religion classes. A New York newspaper even declared that “the Herr Professors [teachers in Nebraska] . . . whip children who speak English in German schools.” Nebraska had its share of mob violence aimed at German Americans, opponents of World War I, or others who expressed unpopular views. Liberal doses of yellow paint were applied to houses, barns, and fences throughout the state, and those who expressed unacceptable views were forced to recant. One Lutheran minister in Riverdale was hanged in effigy; a second in Burr was almost tarred and feathered; and a third in Papillion was beaten for alleged disloyalty. In Lyons a mob compelled a man who asserted that the “Kaiser is just as good a man as Woodrow Wilson” to salute the flag and bless Wilson. In Gering another mob almost lynched a man for praising the Kaiser. And in Emerson, still another mob tarred and feathered a German American for refusing to contribute to the Red Cross. Although no actual lynchings of German Americans occurred in Nebraska during this time of hysteria and intolerance, lynchings did happen during this era. This brutal act of violence, where mobs attacked and killed individuals sometimes with ropes but more often than not with guns, happened to Mexicans, Greeks, and Black Nebraskans. One recorded lynching in Nebraska occurred on February 19, 1915, near Scribner, when Juan González was murdered by a lynch mob. Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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González, a Mexican immigrant, lived with fellow immigrant Juan Parral and other Mexicans who worked in the meatpacking industry. Temporarily unemployed, González or another tenant in his room may have been fencing stolen property taken from railroad cars. Two officers, one for the Union Pacific, and another, Tom Ring, of the Omaha Police Department, arrived at the apartment building that housed a number of Mexican immigrants in Omaha. They witnessed several Mexicans coming out of the apartment going to a nearby saloon, and the men were wearing new shoes. After questioning Juan Alvarado and Miguel Macias, Ring and his partner learned that the shoes had been purchased in a room on the second floor, so the cops decided to investigate. After banging on the door, Ring demanded entrance, but a voice in the room responded, “[K]eep away from the door!” Ring did not obey and instead climbed up to look in the transom. A gun blast exploded, Officer Ring died immediately, and the Mexicans in the room ran from the building. Parral was caught immediately and was later tried and found guilty of manslaughter, although many Omahans, including some of Omaha’s newspapers, considered him innocent. While González hopped a train and was presumed missing, Nebraska turned on all Mexicans. Alleged sightings of González were investigated in Millard, Elkhorn, Beatrice, and Plattsmouth with a number of false arrests but to no avail. One Omaha newspaper reported that the escaped men were “Mexican Indian halfbreeds, and thoroughly bad men.” On Valentine’s Day, three Mexican males made the mistake of being in a group, and Sheriff Gus Hyers of Lincoln arrested them. He thought he had the culprits, but his racial profiling did not check out. The same thing happened in Wahoo. Throughout eastern Nebraska, numerous Mexican males were arrested and placed in jails without charges or evidence. In Wakefield, a mob of one hundred chased a man they thought was González and almost killed him before discovering he was an Indian. Eventually González left Omaha on a train, and he spent some time in Norfolk before he was discovered. He then grabbed another train that took him to near Scribner, where he was identified. Taking off on foot, farmers began to report sightings, and local law enforcement organized groups to track González down. A few days went by, and no one could find him. Finally, trigger-happy Louis Rasmussen, a twentyyear-old man from Scribner, and two companions found González near 196

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the Elkhorn River. After pumping a number of rounds of ammo into González’s hiding place, they retreated and told authorities, who quickly organized an eighty-man posse, including officers from Omaha. They circled González. After the now desperate man emptied what few rounds of ammunition he had left, he leapt up on top of the riverbank and threw his hands in the air, shouting, “I give up.” At that point González was shot from behind, and he died. The coroner ruled González was shot by “an unknown gunman while resisting arrest.” No one was charged with any crime. New immigrants had not been well received in Omaha. Previously, before the anti-Mexican outbreak, in 1909 an anti-Greek riot had occurred with the near lynching of a Greek man when a huge mob assailed an Omaha jail. Over one thousand men in South Omaha invaded “Greek Town,” burning shops and attacking any Greeks they found. Some attacked unsuccessfully an ambulance removing an injured Greek. The Omaha Daily News editorialized, “Their quarters have been unsanitary; they have insulted women. . . . Herded together in lodging houses and living cheaply, Greeks are a menace to the American laboring man—just as the Japs, Italians, and other similar laborers are.” From May through September 1919, over twenty-five race riots occurred in the United States, and one happened in Omaha. It began when a white woman, Agnes Loebeck, stated she had been assaulted by a black man. The Omaha Bee, well known for its vicious racial editorials, pounced on the opportunity to stir up trouble and exaggerated the event under the headline, “Black Beast First Stick-up Couple.” The paper reported that “The most daring attack on a white woman ever perpetrated in Omaha occurred one block south of Bancroft Street . . . last night.” The evening of September 25, police brought Will Brown, a black packinghouse worker, to Agnes Loebeck’s home, where she and her boyfriend identified him. Brown, age forty-one, suffered from acute rheumatism, and physically he could not have perpetrated the assault, but he was arrested anyway and taken to the Douglas County Courthouse. By Sunday, September 28, rumors had overtaken Omaha, and a mob primarily of young white men, estimated by some to be as many as fifteen thousand people, marched to the courthouse demanding the prisoner. Guns were looted from nearby stores, and the mob started firing at the courthouse. Two members of the mob were accidentally killed in the Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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gunfire. Mayor Edward Smith tried to reason with the mob, but they remained unruly, setting the courthouse on fire. The mayor begged the mob to let the firemen put out the flames, but he was attacked, a rope placed around his neck, and almost lynched himself. The mob next turned toward finding Brown and getting him out of the courthouse. They took over the building and dragged Brown outside. Cheering and yelling, the mob quickly found a rope and hoisted Will Brown. His dangling body was then shot with many bullets, the body cut down, tied behind a car, and towed to the intersection of 17th and Dodge, where it was burned. Pieces of rope used to lynch Brown were sold as ten-cent souvenirs. Henry Fonda, age fourteen, witnessed this event from his father’s printing plant across the street from the courthouse. “It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen,” reflected Fonda. “We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope.” After Will Brown had been murdered, the U.S. Army was dispatched to Omaha to restore order. Troops dispersed along Twenty-fourth and Lake Streets in the black community to prevent any further violence against African Americans. Anyone with a gun faced immediate arrest, and black Omahans were ordered to stay in their homes and not go out the next day. By the evening of September 29th, order had been restored, and the army started to investigate the riot and lynching. A number of the mob leaders were arrested, but although photographs identified those directly involved with the lynching, no one was ever charged with the murder of Will Brown or the attempted murder of Mayor Edward Smith. Some evidence did surface implicating gambling boss Tom Dennison in fomenting the mob because of his rivalry with the reformist mayor. Throughout the unrest, some Omaha newspapers, particularly the Omaha Bee, sought to exploit and encourage further racial violence. The Omaha World-Herald, however, tried to find out what caused the race riot and temper the populace. Its first story documented the event, “Douglas County Court House fearfully damaged as howling avengers storm jail with bullet and flame—one man killed and many injured— police overwhelmed and soldiers summoned. Crowds search through streets, attacking Negroes everywhere.” For its follow up editorial, “Law and the Jungle,” the World-Herald won a Pulitzer Prize. 198

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44. Ku Klux Klan in Neligh, Nebraska, circa 1928 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Such racial tension encouraged the renewal of one of America’s worst terrorist groups, the Ku Klux Klan. Originally started in the South shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, it had eventually lost membership, but by 1915 the organization found new participants outside the South in the Midwest, Far West, and Great Plains. The first Nebraska Klavern or cell of the kkk was begun in Omaha in 1921. By the next year, twenty-four chapters were active in the state with an estimated membership of eleven hundred. The national headquarters in Atlanta claimed forty-five thousand Nebraskans were active in the kkk in 1923, particularly in Lincoln, Omaha, Fremont, York, Grand Island, Hastings, North Platte, Neligh, and Scottsbluff. Lincoln residents were startled to learn that their Klavern had constructed a special electric cross that was portable and more efficient for use in various hate ceremonies. Nebraska kkk groups attacked German Americans, other immigrants, and Nebraskans of color, intimidating groups with open displays of threats and coercion. On one Sunday, the Klan brazenly interrupted a German Lutheran Church service, parading into a local church near Hastings. Some individual Nebraskans stood up against attempts at harsh intimidation and discrimination. In 1909 the Nebraska Supreme Court Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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ruled in a landmark decision, the first by any state supreme court, that a Japanese witness to a murder case could testify even though he was not a Christian and did not take the standard oath to swear on a Bible to tell the truth. This unique case, Pumphrey v. Nebraska, had involved the 1907 murder of Ham Pak, a Chinese restaurant owner and prominent member of the Omaha Chinese community, by three waiters: Charles Pumphrey, a white man, and two African American young men, Basil Mullen and Willis Almack. All three were captured, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison, but Pumphrey appealed, challenging the testimony of the main witness against him, Jack Naoi, of Japanese descent, who had delivered ice to Ham Pak’s restaurant. While the state supreme court acted honorably, allowing Japanese-American testimony in American courts, and overruling Pumphrey’s appeal, Governor Ashton C. Shallenberger commuted Pumphrey’s sentence to time served and released him from prison in 1913; Mullen and Almack lived out their lives at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Similarly, a number of Nebraskans came to the defense of Robert Meyer when he was arrested for violating the Siman Act. Meyer’s pastor, Rev. C. F. Brommer, and the entire congregation of Zion Lutheran supported the teacher and encouraged him to appeal his conviction and fight against the charges. When Meyer was convicted of violating the Siman Act and given the minimal sentence of a twenty-five dollar fine, he refused to pay. “I shall not pay the fine,” he said. “It is not a matter of money. This is a question of principle. If I go to jail for doing what I know to be right, I go to jail. I shall not compromise with what I know is not right.” Raymond Parpart’s father posted bond and kept Meyer out of jail while the case was appealed, despite the wishes of his son’s teacher. Nebraska’s German newspapers closely covered Meyer’s county court trial, some from as far away as Omaha. The headline of an article in the Tägliche Omaha Tribune read, “Wegen Uebertretung der Siman=Akte bestraft” (“Fined for a violation of the Siman Act”), with a sub-headline, “Lehrer Meyer zu $25 und Kosten verurteilt; wird Berufung beim Obergericht ein-reichjen” (“Teacher Meyer sentenced to $25 and costs—will appeal to the superior court”). At this point, Robert Meyer and his family decided to accept a call to teach at a Zion Lutheran School in Pierce, Nebraska. Robert and Emma had five children at that time, and the family moved north to Pierce County in the summer of 1920. The court case, however, continued. 200

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Prosecutor Fred Edgerton won at the local and district court levels, and when Meyer appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court, Edgerton and Nebraska state attorney general (1919–23) Clarence A. Davis, representing Hamilton County and the state, prevailed. Edgerton was quite familiar with education and Nebraska, having moved to Fremont where he was a high school principal and football coach before he studied the law. His son, Harold, who was sixteen at the time of this legal dispute, would go on to become a nationally recognized high-speed photographer, electrical engineer, and inventor. The Hampton Register covered the trials and supported county attorney Edgerton. “We have all hoped,” wrote the newspaper, “that this question would be one which all would now see alike, and after the war no one would seek to continue or perpetuate foreign language communities under American government.” The Register ardently supported suppressing German American culture. “Our local council of defense met these people in an attitude of great liberality during the war on a fair understanding that at the earliest possible moment, everything was to be thoroughly Americanized, and we trust the future will prove they were acting in absolute good faith.” The lines remained drawn. In 1921 the Nebraska legislature decided to increase the pressure on German-speaking communities. It passed the Norval Act, which declared English the official language of the state of Nebraska for all official proceedings and records. It readopted the restrictions on schools originally in the Siman Act, and it also limited language instruction other than English in any school to be for religious purposes only in observation of the Sabbath. It added that no school or organization could discriminate against the use of English. The same penalties as found in the Siman Act were continued. In anticipation of any appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the legislature provided that any section of the act that might be declared unconstitutional would not void the rest of the law. Willa Cather was moved to comment on this latest legal maneuver. “[N]o Nebraska child now growing up will ever have a mastery of a foreign language,” Cather regretted, “because your legislature has made it a crime to teach a foreign language to a child in its early years, the only period when it can really lay a foundation for a thorough understanding of a foreign language.” Those backing the Meyer viewpoint appealed again, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. They constituted a formidable legal team. Arthur Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

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Mullen, a former Nebraska attorney general (1910–11) and Omaha lawyer, delivered the arguments. Former Nebraska state senator (1915–17) and future U.S. district attorney for Nebraska C. E. Sandall, who made the oral arguments at the district court, worked with Mullen on the Supreme Court strategy. Consultants included Judge I. L. Albert from Columbus, a former state district court judge (1898–1900), Nebraska state senator (1911–17), and delegate to the 1919–20 Nebraska state constitutional convention; Judge John Sullivan, former justice and chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court (1897–1904); and Judge Alfred M. Post, also a former justice and chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court (1892–98). The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in February 1923, and issued its decision in June 1923. Justice James C. McReynolds wrote the majority opinion overruling all of the Nebraska courts and finding in favor of Teacher Meyer and instruction in the German language. The Siman and Norval acts were unconstitutional because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Wrote Justice McReynolds, “Practically, education of the young is only possible in schools conducted by especially qualified persons who devote themselves thereto. . . . Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful.” The right of Robert Meyer to teach and the parents to hire him to teach was a fundamental liberty to be protected. Reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court decision was swift. Judge Albert of Columbus feigned expectation. “The result is not surprising to me,” said the former Nebraska Supreme Court justice. “In the beginning, I advised my client [Robert Meyer] that this law contravened the Bill of Rights.” The judge continued, “The whole country should rejoice that there is, somewhere, a power that stands between the minority and an excited, hysterical majority—a power that is not set-off its feet by a temporary wave of passion.” Many from around the nation praised chief counsel Arthur Mullen. The Omaha World-Herald observed, “Telegrams from a number of leading lawyers of the East reached his [Mullen’s] office yesterday congratulating him upon his ‘great victory.’” On the other side, “no comment” seemed to be the muted response. Still, the effect of the attack on German American culture proved profound. Many Lutheran churches stopped conducting services in German. For a short time, Zion’s Rev. C. F. Brommer held one service in English and one in German before he became president of Concordia College 202

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and moved to Seward in 1924, where he served until 1941. Wrote one historian, “The failure of most modern Americans to study German, or indeed, any foreign language, is a part of the legacy of World War I. During and after the war, the study of German almost disappeared from American schools.” In fact, before the war one in four high school students studied German; immediately after the war, less than one in one hundred took German language courses. The 1920s represented a bitter legacy for many Americans. In Nebraska, the lynchings of Will Brown and Juan González and the charges against Robert T. Meyer represented the state’s participation in the national hysteria. Meyer continued teaching in Pierce until he retired in 1942 and moved to Iowa to be closer to two of his children, including his son Reuben, who had become a Lutheran minister at Concordia Lutheran Church in Sioux City. Robert eventually moved to the Lutheran Home for the Aged in Omaha, where he died in 1972 at the age of ninetyfour years. Of Robert Meyer’s willingness to pursue his right to teach German, historians have noted that Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) began the crucial extension of the Bill of Rights to the states. It would be this expansion that would lead to major breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s in ending segregation in American society, particularly in the schools, and in support for outlawing lynching and attempting to prevent racial violence. That “[the] Meyer [case] stands out as the most significant civil liberties victory of the World War I period” is justification alone, observed one historian, for Hamilton County to erect a statue in Aurora’s community square in the name of Robert T. Meyer.

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24. Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize

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n April 1923 Willa Cather (1873–1947) received word from Columbia University’s president and Alfred A. Knopf, her publisher, that she had won the Pulitzer Prize for her World War I novel, One of Ours (1922). It was a particularly important moment for this author who had done so much to inform the nation about Nebraska through her fiction. Her work introduced many people to frontier Nebraska and to the struggles and triumphs of its immigrant population. An excellent stylist with a keen sense of history, Cather wrote a series of short stories and novels that won her international acclaim. She became the best-known Nebraska author both within and beyond the state and, with the Pulitzer, its most accomplished and recognized. When Sinclair Lewis, a nationally known writer, gave a lecture in Omaha in 1921, he boldly summarized the impact of Cather, “Willa Cather is greater than General Pershing; she is incomparably greater than William Jennings Bryan.” Lewis warmed to his audience, “She is Nebraska’s foremost citizen because through her stories she has made the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done.” And her fame continued to grow. Joseph Pulitzer, an innovative journalist, reformer, and publisher of the New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, died in 1904. His will set aside two million dollars to be administered by Columbia University to endow prize awards to be made each year for true writing excellence. The very first were announced in 1917, and they have been made each year ever since. Today the Pulitzer Prize is recognized as going to America’s very best in some twenty-one categories. Willa Cather was Nebraska’s first literary Pulitzer. Cather was not alone in receiving the coveted prize. The 1923 Pulitzer

45. Willa Cather, circa 1912 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Prize Board recognized seven other winners in two categories: Journalism, and Letters and Drama. In journalism the Memphis Commercial Appeal was extolled because of its courageous reporting on the violent operations of the Ku Klux Klan; Alva Johnson, a reporter for the New York Times, received a Pulitzer for his science reporting; and just down the road from Beatrice, the editor of the Emporia (ks) Gazette, William Allen White, was acclaimed for his editorial writing. On the literary side, joining Cather as honorees were Owen Davis for his play Icebound; Charles Warren for his path-breaking history The Supreme Court in United States History; Burton J. Hendrick for a biography, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page; and Edna St. Vincent Millay for her poetry. Cather was neither the first nor last Nebraskan to receive a Pulitzer Prize. In 1919 Harvey Newbranch won the first Nebraska Pulitzer for his editorial writing for the Omaha World-Herald. Four other University Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize

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of Nebraska graduates have also won Pulitzers for reporting: James V. Risser Jr., twice (1976 and 1979), Charles H. Mohr (1984), Karen Blessen (1989), and Marjie Lundstrom (1991). Howard Hanson of Wahoo was the winner in music (1944). The only other literary prizewinner has been Ted Kooser, 2005 winner in poetry for his collection Delights & Shadows (2004). Kooser’s teacher at the University of Nebraska in the 1960s was Karl Jay Shapiro, who prior to coming to Nebraska had won a Pulitzer for his poetry in 1945. Cather has been the only Nebraskan to be honored for what is arguably the most prestigious Pulitzer, for best novel. The plot behind Cather’s One of Ours involves one Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farm boy from a dysfunctional family. His father seemed only interested in obtaining more land and making more profits. His brother Bayliss was “thin and dyspeptic, and a virulent Prohibitionist.” Only Claude’s mother seemed to care about him or try to understand this serious, thoughtful young man. Claude’s best friend was a young Czech farmer, Ernest Havel, who believed “there ought to be something—well something splendid about life, sometimes.” What happens to Claude, however, is far from splendid. His mother forces him to go to an oppressive church college in Lincoln that he initially hates; but after he finally feels comfortable in Lincoln and makes friends, Claude’s father makes him quit college and come home to farm. In response, Claude enters into an unfortunate first marriage and then joins the army to escape his life. He is sent to France and killed during the first major battle of World War I. Cather’s novel was bittersweet and forced readers to come to grips with the destruction of lives caused by war at a time when many in the United States were disillusioned by the nation’s World War I experience. What had the war brought but Prohibition, Communism, witch hunts and hysteria, attacks on Germans, lynchings, and an American culture undergoing significant change? One of Ours was not the title Cather had selected. She had chosen “Claude,” named after the chief protagonist, but Alfred Knopf did not think her title would help sell the book. Just before it was printed, Cather caved in to her publisher’s argument. When Knopf read the finished manuscript, he sent a telegram to Cather, who was in Red Cloud, remarking, “Just finished the book. Congratulations. It is masterly, a perfectly gorgeous novel, far ahead of anything you have ever yet done, and far ahead of anything I have read in a very long while.” Such praise 206

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did not continue once the book came out. Some critics did not like the tone of the work, which was decidedly antiwar. H. L. Mencken wrote that the Nebraska portions of One of Ours were realistic, but he found the war chapters “fought out, not in France, but on a Hollywood movielot.” Other critics were less kind and said Cather’s new novel was not at the level of excellence of her previous work. That all changed as a result of the Pulitzer Prize. Many bought the book; in the first year of publication it went through seven printings. Cather made nineteen thousand dollars in royalties and had no financial concerns for the rest of her life. Her biographer James Woodress has observed that the Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours “in many ways . . . was a turning point in her career.” Like so many frontier Nebraskans, Cather was not born in the state. In 1873 she came into the world in Back Creek Valley, a little town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and was christened Wilella Cather, named after her father’s youngest sister, who had died of diphtheria as a child. The eldest of seven children, Willa (as she decided to call herself) came from a family that had migrated to America from Northern Ireland before the American Revolution. Cather’s grandfather remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and as a result the family prospered in the immediate postwar years. Willa’s grandfather owned a successful sheep farm, but because several family members had died of tuberculosis, he regarded Virginia’s damp and humid climate as unhealthy. So, when his four-story barn burned down in 1883, he decided to follow a young son and wife, Willa’s uncle and aunt, to Nebraska. Willa’s grandfather sold the large farm and most of the family’s possessions and headed west. Shortly thereafter Willa’s father and reluctant mother were told by her grandfather to join the entire family in Nebraska. The family initially settled on a homestead in Webster County staked out by Willa’s grandfather. To young Willa, who was accustomed to the rolling hills and great forests of the East, this country seemed like “wild pasture” that was as “naked as the back of your hand.” It “was open range and there was almost no fencing,” she said. “As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything.” In Cather’s eyes one redeeming feature of this raw frontier was its polyglot immigrant population. “We had very few American neighbors,” Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize

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Cather recalled, “they were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians.” Cather liked her new neighbors. The older women, she said, “used to tell me of their home country,” and “they understood my homesickness [for Virginia] and were kind to me.” Farming on the Plains was not easy, and within eighteen months the family sold its equipment and livestock and moved to Red Cloud, a booming railroad town of about eighteen hundred people that was some twelve miles to the southeast. Like most railroad towns in the nineteenth century, Red Cloud was wide open, and saloons, prostitution, and gambling all thrived there. Willa’s father set up a farm-loan and insurance business in Red Cloud, and the family lived in a rented frame house on Cedar and Third streets. In later years, this house frequently appeared in Cather’s stories. The house has since been restored and, along with related Cather sites, is a branch museum of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Encouraged by her father and teachers to broaden her horizons, Willa read voraciously in Red Cloud. “She read constantly and indiscriminately,” says one scholar, “good books, trashy books, whatever came her way.” She also cultivated an interest in music, plays, and the opera. She loved to perform, both in music and theater, and in speeches. Adults thought her a remarkable and precocious child; other children saw her more as a tomboy and show-off. Above all, she had contempt for the traditional role thought to be required for young women. She aimed to get an education. In 1890 Cather moved to Lincoln, where she spent a year at a preparatory school and then enrolled at the University of Nebraska at age eighteen. She became a close friend of Louise Pound, a brilliant young athlete and scholar who later gained fame as a philologist and folklorist. This was the first of a series of deep emotional attachments that Cather developed with women in her life. During her first year in Lincoln, Cather took science courses in hopes of becoming a doctor, but she was also very interested in writing. Her future was sealed in 1891 when the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal published an essay she had written on Thomas Carlyle that had been submitted by one of her teachers without her knowledge. So thrilled at seeing her work in print, henceforth Cather devoted herself entirely to writing. “Up to that time,” she said, “I thought I would like to study medicine. But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself 208

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46. Willa Cather and Hesperian staff at the University of Nebraska in 1895 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

in print!” She honed her writing skills at the university by contributing to several campus literary publications, particularly the Hesperian. When the hard times caused by drought and depression of the 1890s visited her family, Cather began to contribute regularly for pay to the Nebraska State Journal in order to send money home. After spending a full day at school, she often attended a play and then stayed up until two in the morning writing her reviews. “I was paid one dollar a column,” she recalled, “which was certainly quite all my high-stepping rhetoric was worth.” As a student and writer, her days were long and exhausting. When the young novelist Stephen Crane came to Nebraska to report on the drought for a newspaper syndicate, he found Cather in the newspaper office fast asleep—standing up. Cather’s reputation as a drama critic quickly spread. She was known for her “biting frankness,” and it was largely her work that prompted the Des Moines Record to comment in 1895, “The best theatrical critics of the West are said to be connected with the Lincoln, Neb., press.” That same year the Nebraska Editor described Cather as a “young woman Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize

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with a genius for literary expression.” Said the Editor, “If there is a woman in Nebraska newspaper work who is destined to win a reputation for herself, that woman is Willa Cather.” In 1896 Cather left Nebraska for Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly, a magazine patterned after the Ladies’ Home Journal. Although hired as an assistant editor, Cather had to write many of the articles and put out the entire first issue herself. Later she became a part-time drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader, and in 1897 when the Home Monthly was sold, she went to work full time for the Leader as an assistant editor. Four years later she resigned from the newspaper and taught Latin and English at Pittsburgh Central High School in order to have more time for her own writing. In 1906 Cather gave up teaching and moved to New York to take a job with McClure’s, a Progressive magazine famous for its muckraking exposés on the ills of society. The magazine’s dynamic and forceful publisher, S. S. McClure, drove his staff relentlessly. Although the pressure sometimes made Cather ill, she thrived at McClure’s, and by 1909 she was serving as managing editor in all but name. Cather developed a deep and lasting friendship with McClure and even wrote his autobiography, called by one scholar “the best ghost-written autobiography ever produced.” When his creditors forced McClure out of business in 1911, Cather ceased working for the magazine, although she continued to contribute occasional articles. Thenceforth, she devoted her time to her own work. Cather thrived in New York’s literary world, and even though she traveled extensively that city remained her home for the rest of her life. She spent her summers on Grand Manan Island off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, and her autumns in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she did some of her best work. She also visited Europe and the Southwest several times and frequently returned to Red Cloud to see family and friends. She retained her close ties with Nebraska and continued to contribute material to the Lincoln press long after she had moved away. Cather published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. Although she deprecated it in later years, most critics consider it a good first novel. Thereafter, Cather wrote a novel every two or three years, publishing twelve in all. She regarded My Ántonia (1918) as her best work, but some critics prefer Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). 210

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In all her novels, Cather showed a special talent for painting clear and compelling landscapes and for creating realistic characters that are brought fully to life. “The one real subject of all her books,” said fellow Nebraska writer and friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “is the effect a new country—our new country—has on people transplanted to it from the old traditions of a stable, complex civilization.” Cather agreed but put the matter more concisely. “Escape,” she said, was the principal theme of her books. Even though she wrote her novels after she left Nebraska, the state left an indelible imprint on Cather. She later described Nebraska as “the happiness and the curse of my life,” perhaps because it had such a lasting effect on her work. “The ideas for all my novels,” she said, “have come from things that happened around Red Cloud when I was a child.” Nebraska was the setting for her two great pioneering novels, My Ántonia and O Pioneers! (1913), and later One of Ours and A Lost Lady (1923). Red Cloud, a melting pot of European social and intellectual traditions, appeared again and again in Cather’s stories. “There perhaps is no small town in America,” says one critic, “that has been described more often in fiction than Red Cloud.” According to one of Cather’s friends, the people of Red Cloud made up “the great gallery of characters in her books.” Cather made a good living from her books, especially after Alfred Knopf became her publisher in 1920. Knopf and Cather became lifelong friends, and he proved far more adept at packaging and promoting her books than her first publisher, Houghton Mifflin. “We haven’t much money to spend here,” Knopf told Cather at their first meeting, “but we’ll take any amount of pains with a book.” Cather was showered with accolades for her work. After the Pulitzer Prize, she was awarded a gold medal in 1928 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop. Her literary triumph was tempered by the death of her father that same year. The University of Nebraska bestowed an honorary degree upon Cather in 1917, and in later years a half-dozen other universities followed suit, including Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. Cather never married, and although she lived alone, she maintained close, intimate friendships with several women and an active correspondence with others. She became increasingly reclusive in her later years, occasionally spending time with family members, like her twin nieces. Willa Cather and Her Pulitzer Prize

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She “was not a person who craved for or sought many human relations,” said one acquaintance. Obsessed with privacy, she burned her letters and in her will prohibited the publication of any that survived. A collection of Cather’s surviving letters, available for scholars to read but not to quote or publish, is held in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Archives and Special Collections. Cather was unwilling to allow her books to be anthologized or published in cheap editions, fearing that school children fed a diet of her work would grow to hate her. Nor would she allow her work to be dramatized in film or on stage. The only exception was A Lost Lady, which Warner Brothers made into a silent film in 1925. The movie opened in Red Cloud, but Cather found it so disappointing she never again sold movie rights to any of her books. After her death her literary executrix allowed television movies to be made under specific stipulations. In the 1930s Cather frequently sent money to farmers and other friends in the Red Cloud area who were suffering from the Great Depression. She did little writing in her last years and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Although Cather spent only thirteen of her seventy-three years in Nebraska, these were her formative years, and forever thereafter life on the Plains haunted and intrigued her. She put Nebraska and its people in many of her stories, and she demonstrated that the Plains was a suitable stage not simply for dime novels about the “Wild West” but for serious literature as well. Today Willa Cather is remembered not only as an outstanding Nebraska writer but as one of the nation’s greatest.

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25. The Nebraska State Capitol, Great Plains Icon

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n November 1923 the cornerstone was laid on Nebraska’s new capitol building. Only a year and a half earlier, a groundbreaking ceremony had been held. By 1925, after the first of four construction phases had been completed, the state government moved into its new quarters. The other three phases reached their final stages by 1932, and most of the finishing touches were in place by 1934. New paintings and murals were added over the years. Like any good cathedral, and most Nebraskans view their state capitol reverently, it remains a dynamic work in progress. Designed by architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Nebraska’s capitol is known as the Tower on the Plains. It was the first state capitol to contain a tower with usable space, and it is still considered one of the finest examples of early modern architecture. A new capitol was sorely needed. The first state capitol was built in Lincoln in 1868 and was constructed so poorly that a new building was authorized in 1879. Completed in 1888, this second building had deteriorated badly by World War I. The walls were crumbling, the foundation was sinking, and other repairs were needed. Hence in 1919 the state legislature authorized the construction of a new building. To oversee the project, the legislature established the Capitol Commission, a special committee headed by Governor Samuel R. McKelvie. The commission, in turn, chose Thomas R. Kimball, president of the American Institute of Architects, as its technical advisor. A longtime resident of Omaha, Kimball had designed numerous buildings in the city, including the public library, the Burlington Railroad Station, and St. Cecilia’s Cathedral. Kimball had also served as chief architect for the Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898. To choose an architect for the new capitol, Kimball organized a two-

47. Front elevation of the winning design for the Nebraska State Capitol submitted by Bertram Goodhue (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

stage competition designed to produce ten finalists, three from Nebraska and seven from beyond the state. A jury of experts was chosen to judge the competition, and a blind system of refereeing was adopted so jurors did not know whose work they were judging. The Capitol Commission offered no suggestions “as to plan, scope, style, type, or material” to guide the architects. “It is clearly the intention not to in any way limit the possibilities,” said Kimball. Only a few general guidelines were established. The capitol was to be “an inspiring monument worthy of the State for which it stands; a thing of beauty, so conceived and fashioned as to properly record and exploit our civilization, aspirations, and patriotism, past, present, and future.” In addition, the cost of the building was limited to five million dollars, and the structure was to serve as a memorial for the dead from World War I as well as a home for the government. The architects were also urged to provide for the collaboration of sculptors, painters, and landscape artists. 214

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Most of the designs submitted were elegant but conventional. They provided for a building in the classical tradition patterned after the United States Capitol in Washington dc. They featured a large dome and were replete with columns, pediments, pilasters, cornices, and porticoes. The winning design, however, was quite different. It reflected Bertram Goodhue’s reputation for independent thinking and architectural innovation. Born in Pomfret, Connecticut, in 1869, Goodhue had no formal training in architecture, although he did serve an apprenticeship starting at age fifteen with the New York office of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell. In 1898 Goodhue joined in partnership with the architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. Reared in the tradition of the Gothic revival, Goodhue helped design a large number of churches as well as buildings at the U.S. Military Academy and the University of Chicago. But according to his partner, he “was steadily losing interest in Gothic, and indeed all the other historic styles.” Hence in 1914, he established an independent practice in New York City and began to experiment more freely. Goodhue still professed “a decent reverence for the historic past of the art,” conceding that the Gothic style was “the generally accepted spirit in which churches should be built. But he believed that the development of steel frames and reinforced concrete had “put . . . all historic forms on the blink,” and he projected a breakthrough in architecture that would utilize these forms. “I assure you,” he told a friend, “that I dream of something very much bigger and finer and more modern and more suited to our present-day civilization than any Gothic church could possibly be.” Goodhue was delighted with the terms of the Nebraska competition. “Never, in any competition,” he said, “have I been set free as in this one.” Goodhue’s winning design called for a two-story square base 400 feet on each side (later increased to 437 feet) and featuring four symmetrically placed open-air courtyards. Rising from the center of the base was a 400-foot tower that was to house government offices and a war memorial room. The tower was to be capped by a dome supporting a 15,000-pound bronze statue of a man sowing grain. The Sower was to symbolize the growth and emergence of an agricultural economy. In a day when almost all state capitols were built in the classic tradition, Goodhue’s design was unusual. Its bold, simple lines with minimal The Nebraska State Capitol, Great Plains Icon

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48. Raising The Sower atop the capitol, April 1930 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

surface ornament gave the building a sleek, modern look. The tower was also unconventional since most state capitols had short domes without usable space. Even the building material was unusual. Instead of granite or other conventional materials, Goodhue chose light brown Indiana limestone because of its durability. The innovative character of Goodhue’s design was immediately recognized, and it was soon featured in architectural magazines. Besides its striking style, Goodhue’s design offered other advantages. Because it could be built around the existing capitol, the state would not have to demolish the old building before erecting the new one. This would save an estimated four hundred thousand dollars in rent 216

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during the transition period. The design also allowed for expansion if additional space was needed. The building’s simplicity was considered a plus, too, because as Goodhue pointed out, it “would prove no labyrinth to the unfamiliar visitor.” Goodhue expected the Capitol Commission to choose Lee O. Lawrie (1878–1963) to do the sculpture for the capitol. An experienced architectural sculptor, Lawrie had worked on the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and had collaborated with Goodhue on a number of projects, including several churches in New York City and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington dc. So when the Capitol Commission proposed to put the sculptural work out for bid, Goodhue was stunned. “The idea of putting this on a competitive basis precisely as you do plumbers is preposterous,” he said. “It’s preposterous to ask me to ‘take up’ with any sculptor other than Mr. Lawrie, the only man in my opinion who understands the relation between sculpture and architecture, at least between sculpture and my architecture.” In the end, the Commission bowed to Goodhue’s wishes and chose Lawrie. Lawrie modestly saw himself as simply “one of the fiddlers in any orchestra.” He declared, “My chief interest in the work is to echo Mr. Goodhue’s architecture.” Lawrie worked up clay models of his sculptures in his New York studio. They were then carved into limestone by a New York stonecutting firm. To advise on subject matter and inscriptions for the sculptures, the Capitol Commission chose Hartley Burr Alexander, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska. After The Sower, other important sculpture motifs are the buffalos and tribal designations at the northern entrance and the bas-relief over the main entrance entitled Spirit of the Pioneers. This latter sculpture portrays the westward emigration of a family led by one of the state’s best-known citizens, William F. Cody. Below this panel is an inscription that reads, “The Salvation of the State is Watchfulness in the Citizen.” The other panels and inscriptions on the exterior deal mainly with the political and legal evolution of Nebraska as a territory and state and the development in the world of democracy and law. The plans for the capitol interior called for a colorful mosaic of dome and floor tiles and bright murals focusing on a broad range of topics dealing with human beings and nature. “Though they may easily be criticized,” observed one architectural historian, “the interiors—when compared to the drab chambers of most civic structures—enliven the The Nebraska State Capitol, Great Plains Icon

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quality of the spaces within the Nebraska capitol.” The primary mural painters were Augustus V. Tack, who painted murals for the governor’s office and reception room, and Elizabeth H. Dolan, a Nebraska artist who painted most of the other murals that adorn the interior. The chief mosaicist was Hildreth Meiere, who had earlier worked with Goodhue and Lawrie on the National Academy of Sciences building. The design for the capitol was approved in 1920. A railroad spur eight blocks long, with more than a mile of switching track, was specially built to haul materials to and from the construction site. Known affectionately as “the Capitol and H line,” it is the only state-owned railroad in Nebraska history. In the ensuing years of construction, it carried an estimated six hundred thousand tons of cargo. Construction took much longer than anyone had anticipated. Two people were killed during the construction of the building, and Goodhue (1869–1924), who died at the age of fifty-four, did not live to see the building completed. The final cost of the project was ten million dollars, twice the original estimate. Since the Nebraska Constitution prohibits the state from borrowing money, the capitol was financed as a pay-as-you go project by a special property tax known as the Capitol Fund Levy. To this day, the Nebraska State Capitol is the only one in the nation for which the state did not borrow funds to finance the construction. Although there was some grumbling over the cost, especially after the advent of the Great Depression, most Nebraskans were justly proud of the results, and by today’s standards the building was a bargain. There were also complaints over the architectural fee paid to Goodhue’s firm, which totaled $175,000. But this was significantly below the going rate, 6 percent of the building’s cost, which would have raised the fee to $600,000. Other architects appreciated Goodhue’s innovative style because it was likely to promote greater freedom in future capitol competitions. A Chicago architect told Goodhue, “You have done a service of inestimable value to the Nation in freeing the capitol problem in such a way that progressive thought may be at least represented in all future competitions of this sort.” Goodhue’s work influenced the design of several other state capitols, particularly those in Oregon, North Dakota, and Louisiana. Critics have been almost uniform in their praise of Goodhue and his work. After visiting state capitols all over the nation, travel writer 218

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John Gunther called the Nebraska Capitol “the most dramatic” he had seen. Similarly, a mural painter who toured the building in 1932 said, “It reminds me of everything I ever like in art. In my opinion the Nebraska capitol and the Empire State building of New York represent the culmination of the modern era in Art.” In a survey published in 1948, American architects rated the Nebraska Capitol as the fourth greatest American architectural achievement, behind the Folger Library and Lincoln Memorial in Washington dc and the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The editors of American Architect were so impressed with the project that they devoted an entire issue to the building. They praised Goodhue for using a skyscraper for a public building in such a way as “to give striking architectural results and at the same time provide convenience, utility and economy to an unexampled degree.” The editors also considered the building a benchmark in American architectural progress. “As a break from the precedent of tradition,” they said, “the Nebraska state capitol did much to advance a new and more virile architectural philosophy.” Recently, the Nebraska State Capitol has been modernized. In 1976 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1999 the Nebraska Capitol Landscape was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark. This designation protects not only the capitol site but also the capitol grounds and immediate neighborhoods. Beginning in 1989, major renovations and restorations have been accomplished and planned for the capitol. Internally, throughout the building, offices have been restored to their original designs, including lighting and carpets, and modifications have been made for computer wiring and a closed circuit television network. In 1991 Stephen Roberts was commissioned to paint eight murals for the Memorial Chamber. His panels complete a set of twenty in a collection honoring Nebraska’s citizens for their service to their communities, state, and country. Externally, a major restoration project was begun in the fall of 1997. Significant water damage was discovered to the gold tile dome, corner turrets, and parapets; much organic growth had occurred in eroded mortar between the limestone bricks; and The Sower had sustained lightning damage. A plan was developed that would cover five phases over an eight-year period, 1999–2007. Nebraskans, ever proud of their The Nebraska State Capitol, Great Plains Icon

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capitol, wanted to make sure that their architectural icon lasted for future generations. The Nebraska State Capitol continues to receive high praise today. Because it is visible for up to forty miles, most critics agree that the building is ideally suited for the Great Plains. A leading student of the capitol, Eric McCready, called the building “monumental, symbolical, innovative.” According to McCready, the Nebraska State Capitol’s design “can scarcely be overestimated as the pioneering example of American ‘modernism.’”

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26. Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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he presidential election of 1924 was one of the most amazing presidential elections in American history, and Nebraska played a very prominent role in it. Two of its favorite sons were unlikely candidates of the major parties, Charles Gates Dawes for the Republicans and Charles Wayland Bryan for the Democrats, and both parties had considerable difficulties in making their choices. It all began with the convening of the Republican Convention on June 20, 1924, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the very first convention covered by radio. Incumbent President Calvin Coolidge had succeeded President Warren G. Harding when Harding died of food poisoning while on a West Coast train trip. Although Coolidge had not stood for election as president before, the nation seemed reasonably calm, and so the Republicans opted to nominate him as their standard bearer. Perhaps because of the radio coverage, the longest speech ever delivered at a political convention was given placing the taciturn and remote Coolidge in nomination. Then on June 22, another first occurred in American political history. Since Coolidge did not choose his running mate, the convention turned on its own to the governor of Illinois, Frank O. Lowden. Many delegates felt Governor Lowden had been cheated out of the 1920 nomination by a decision made in smoke-filled rooms, so he was a popular choice. Lowden, however, did not wish to be vice president, and he flatly turned it down. This had never happened before, so the convention had to choose another vice-presidential candidate. One person who knew that Lowden would turn down the vice-presidential nomination was Mark Woods of Lincoln. Woods, who thought of himself as somewhat of a politico, had been the prime promoter of

General John J. Pershing’s run in the Nebraska presidential primary in 1920, which had become a disaster when Pershing lost. Now Woods, a delegate from Nebraska, wanted Charles Dawes as vice president. When probed by Woods, Dawes was noncommittal, but Woods went ahead with his plan. William Jennings Bryan, attending his first Republican Convention, was seated in the press section, providing color commentary on the first radio broadcasts. When Woods mentioned his plan to Bryan, the threetime Democratic presidential candidate said, “You know I share your high regard for Dawes, Mark.” But Bryan cautioned the Republicans, “If you succeed, your party will have a vice-president candidate who is abler than its president candidate.” Once Dawes was nominated, the convention stampeded to him, and the Republicans were set. Just two days later, on June 24, 1924, the Democrats convened in hot New York City for their convention. Little did they anticipate that they would not conclude their historic conclave until July 10th at 3:30 a.m. It was a terrible ordeal, and it cost the party dearly. When they emerged, their presidential ticket was quite a surprise. Going into the Democratic Convention, two candidates were acknowledged as front-runners: William McAdoo, senator from California, and Alfred Smith, governor of New York. A two-thirds vote was required to win, and neither had the votes to clinch the nomination. This potential stalemate did not surprise Democrats, as their last several conventions had been long affairs. It took Democrats forty-six ballots to choose Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and forty-four ballots to pick James Cox of Ohio in 1920. But this convention set the record, requiring 103 ballots before a presidential nominee was agreed upon, a ticket that included neither McAdoo nor Smith. As often happens in a void of political power at a political convention, states put forward favorite-son candidates, in part to maneuver politically and also to give an up-and-coming politician a chance to make a national name. Four states put up favorite sons. West Virginia nominated John W. Davis, former ambassador to Great Britain and President Wilson’s solicitor-general. Known as a lawyer’s lawyer, Davis practiced law on Wall Street, anathema to a number of delegates and especially to William Jennings Bryan, who was a McAdoo-pledged delegate from the state of Florida, where he had moved in 1921 for the health of his wife. Nebraskans put forward their new governor, 222

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Charles W. Bryan, WJB’s younger brother, as a favorite son. The nomination speech by Fred Brown, a Nebraska delegate, was very brief and mostly about William Jennings Bryan, not the candidate himself. Actually William called Charles, “Brother Charley,” and Charles referred to his famous brother as “Double-ya Jay.” Double-ya Jay was much in evidence throughout the convention. After a number of ballots, it became clearer that there was no consensus. The Democrats were badly divided not only over their leadership but also over the issues of the day: prohibition, big business, the Ku Klux Klan, and whether to join the League of Nations. Finally, after one hundred ballots, the convention adjourned and party leaders hammered out a compromise, putting forward the surprise choice of John W. Davis. An exhausted convention finally made its will known on the 103rd ballot, but now they needed a vice-presidential candidate to balance the ticket. Davis—Protestant, dry, Wall Street, and cozy with the kkk—needed a westerner, and he chose Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana—Catholic, wet, progressive, and chairman of the convention, who all felt had done a good job under very difficult conditions. Senator Walsh, like the Republican’s Governor Lowden, turned down Davis. Who could they turn to? At another private meeting away from the convention, which was still in session in the early morning hours, Charles Bryan was mentioned. Although Brother Charley was a dry, Al Smith approved the choice if that was what Davis wanted, and after all, Charles was Brother Charley. Charles Bryan’s nomination would keep William Jennings Bryan, still a force nationally and a powerful speaker, from bolting the party over the Wall Street interests of Davis. Ironically, Charles Bryan was nominated to run with the Wall Street lawyer exactly twenty-eight years from the day William Jennings Bryan had given his Cross of Gold speech railing against Wall Street interests. To say this was a surprise would be an understatement. When he was told on the floor of the convention, Charles said, “Quit your kidding.” WJB, when asked, exclaimed, “It can’t be true!” But it was. There was confusion at the convention. George Berry of Tennessee even lead at the end of the first vice-presidential ballot, 263½ to 238 over Bryan, and West Virginia, Davis’s home state, cast its votes for no less than eight candidates. But before the final tally was officially announced, word got out and the shift by many delegations to Bryan pushed him over the top. When the chair of the convention asked for acclamation, Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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49. Charles W. Bryan seated next to Eleanor and President Franklin Roosevelt in Lincoln, 1936 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

too many delegates still refused, so he quit trying and announced at 3:30 a.m. that Bryan was nominated. Some in the gallery started yelling, “We want Coolidge.” By the end of the summer, three major candidates had emerged before a now somewhat restive American electorate. There was President Calvin Coolidge for the Republicans, a man known for his stability, predictability, conservatism, and inactivity. There was John W. Davis for the Democrats, a man unknown to most Americans. And there was Senator Robert LaFollette, Republican Wisconsin senator and reformer who had run previously for national office, and who had the backing of the Progressive Party, a remnant from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, along with the Socialist Party. Running with Lafollette was the progressive Democratic senator from Montana, Burton Wheeler. And two Nebraskans were also about to compete for the vice presidency. In many ways, Charles G. Dawes (1865–1951) proved to be the 224

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winner of this election. He had come to Nebraska in 1887, a young man ready to make his mark. Born in Marietta, Ohio, at the end of the Civil War, Dawes hailed from a prominent family that counted among its ancestors William Dawes, who rode with Paul Revere in 1775 to warn the people in Lexington that the British were coming, and James W. Dawes, his father’s cousin, who served as governor of Nebraska from 1883 to 1887. Young Charles had taken bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Marietta College and then a law degree at the University of Cincinnati before he arrived in Lincoln, an up-and-coming boom city whose population had skyrocketed from approximately thirty-four thousand in 1870 to three hundred thousand in the late 1880s. During Dawes’s first year in Lincoln, he found the competition for business so fierce that he had to rely on a fifty dollar a month allowance from his father. “I had come out West,” he later recalled, “under the impression that it would be comparatively easy to get rich. But migration acts as a cream separator; and, when I got here, there were gathered some of the brightest young men of the East, all of whom had come here under the same circumstances and with the same aspirations as I.” Dawes began his legal practice with a public crusade to force railroads to reduce their freight rates. The prominence he achieved led to other cases, and his legal career was launched. In 1889 he made the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal’s list of most eligible bachelors. The paper described him as an “attorney at law and anti-monopoly agitator; 125 pounds, neatest moustache in Lincoln.” Dawes took an active part in the intellectual life of Lincoln. He and the Bryan brothers frequently participated in the lively meetings of the Lincoln Round Table, an informal discussion group that attracted the city’s social and intellectual elite. John J. Pershing often joined the young men at what they called the “Square Table,” at a popular restaurant owned by a man named Don Cameron. Cameron’s place offered not only a forum for discussion but also cheap pancakes, which was of special importance to young men watching their pennies. For nearly half a century, Dawes and Pershing periodically referred to Cameron’s restaurant in their correspondence with one another, and after they had made their fortunes they contributed to make Cameron’s old age comfortable. Dawes was always intrigued by the great economic issues of his day, and in the course of his career he wrote a host of books on the subject. Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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He published his first book while living in Lincoln in 1894. In The Banking System of the United States, he called for federal guarantees of banking deposits, thus anticipating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation by forty years. Dawes developed extensive business interests in Lincoln. Using his own money as well as funds supplied by relatives and friends, he invested in real estate, banking, and the meatpacking industry. Despite the many public offices he later held, his first love was always business. “I am a businessman,” he once said, “and shall always remain one.” Dawes was very much in tune with the American people who came to believe in the early 1920s that the business of America was indeed business. Business people could do no wrong it seemed, but that would soon be disproved by the stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression. Dawes spent eight years in Lincoln, from 1887 to 1895. This was a formative period of his life, a period in which he launched his legal and business career and tested his entrepreneurial spirit. “I started my business life in the western country,” he reflected. “I credit that particular period in my life as being the most educational part, especially because in [the Panic of] 1893 I had impressed upon me what was then a new truth to me—that a ninety-day note comes due.” In 1895 Dawes moved to Chicago, both to secure a larger field for his business activities and to better oversee utility companies he had purchased in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Evanston, Illinois. The Windy City remained his base for the rest of his life and was where he came to own many public utilities companies. Before he left Lincoln, Dawes had met William McKinley through his Ohio connections. He regarded McKinley as “the coming man” and helped him win the Republican presidential nomination in 1896. Although McKinley ran against Dawes’s old friend William Jennings Bryan, Dawes handled the finances of McKinley’s campaign. When McKinley won, Dawes was rewarded with an appointment as Comptroller of the Currency, which made him responsible for regulating the nation’s banks. Dawes held the position for four years and carried out his duties with efficiency and integrity, despite the political pressure that was occasionally brought to bear on him. After his McKinley years and before his nomination in 1924, Dawes continued his business investments and dabbled in politics. His growing reputation provoked President McKinley to have Dawes invest the 226

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50. Charles G. Dawes on a hunting trip in Nebraska in 1926 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

president’s fortune, with large amounts in real estate and business ventures in Lincoln and Nebraska. Dawes failed to win a Senate seat from Illinois, so he instead channeled his considerable energies into directing a new bank, the Central Trust Company. When World War I broke out, Dawes recognized that an era had ended. He used his influence with Pershing to secure a commission in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then became head of the General Purchasing Board. Dawes was responsible for all supplies purchased in Europe for the two million American troops stationed there, and he did an outstanding job. One senior American officer later called Dawes “the most outstanding civilian in the American uniform” during World War I. After the war President Warren G. Harding asked Dawes to be his secretary of the treasury, but Dawes declined. Instead he became director of the Bureau of the Budget, which he stipulated had to be an office that would be “impersonal, impartial, and nonpolitical.” He held it for a year and then left, escaping the budding corruption scandals of the Harding presidency. In 1923 Dawes performed his best-known work when he was appointed to the Allied Reparations Commission in Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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Europe. He devised a strategy, known as the “Dawes Plan,” that enabled Germany to stabilize the mark and to resume payments of the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles. For this he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. In many ways Dawes was quite prepared for becoming vice president except he had not held political office before. Charles Bryan (1867–1945), on the other hand, sat at the feet of arguably the greatest politician of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, his brother William Jennings Bryan. Charles lived and breathed politics. Born and educated in Illinois, Charles moved to Lincoln in 1896 to work on his brother’s presidential campaign. After the loss in 1900, Charles managed his brother’s newspaper, the Commoner, and he built the circulation of the Commoner to nearly three hundred thousand, an astounding accomplishment. Brother Charley was the taller of the two Bryans, standing six feet, one inch, and he was known for his rapid, staccato speech. He was quick, lively, and combative. Political commentators described Charles as feisty. In 1908 he expanded his political expertise and became very directly involved in the presidential nomination fight of WJB. Charles sent out over 120,000 letters to prospective delegates and interested politicos, and at the Democratic Convention in Denver, he managed the campaign on the floor of the convention and served as the Bryan spokesman on the platform committee. As a result William went to the convention with the two-thirds majority he needed. At the next Democratic Convention in 1912, Charles and his brother decided to be neutral between then-Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, the eventual nominee, and Champ Clark, Speaker of the House from Missouri, who eventually lost. Throughout Charles and William Jennings Bryan were thoroughly involved in political maneuvering. Charles ventured into his own political races starting in 1915 when he successfully won the mayor’s office in Lincoln. That position has often led to serious consideration and successful campaigns for the Nebraska governorship, and Charles parlayed it into an unsuccessful bid to be Nebraska’s governor in 1916. The Bryans early in their careers opted for the dry side of the political ledger, but in the Democratic primary, Charles came up against a wet Democrat, Keith Neville, a rancher from North Platte, who also latched onto the anti-German feelings growing in the state and was suitably ambivalent on the Ku Klux Klan. Neville won the primary, and although William Jennings Bryan had tried to 228

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purge the Nebraska Democrats of liquor interests—what he called the “saloon picked, brewery-branded crowd”—he had failed for his brother. Neville went on to an easy victory in the general election but then was turned out of office in 1918. Charles finally got the Democratic nomination for governor in 1922 and won the general election with 55 percent of the vote. He left his Commoner position but continued to manage his brother’s considerable real estate and bond portfolio at Nebraska banks. As Nebraska’s governor, Charles engaged in many partisan battles with the legislature. He fought to reduce taxes on gasoline and ice, recognizing before many others did that farmers and ranchers were experiencing a serious downturn in earning power and that the economy was not in good shape, at least for the agricultural sector. Wheat that had sold for $2.02 per bushel in 1919 sold for only $0.83 per bushel by 1921. Similarly, corn prices at $1.22 per bushel in 1919 dropped to $0.27 in 1921. Beef cattle sold for $9.53 per hundred weight in 1920 but brought $6.13 the next year. Hogs also dropped from $12.62 per hundred weight in 1920 to $7.52 in 1921. Farmers were squeezed by high mortgages and high interest on loans, falling prices, and an unchanging property tax. Charles was known to many as the “do something” governor, but his wrangling with the legislature proved his undoing in state politics. “The state’s ears are afflicted,” observed one contemporary, “but its pocketbook is spared, and it cares more for its pocketbook than for its ears.” For the time-being, Nebraskans put up with Charles, but they were becoming tired of his shrill approach to state issues. Those who paid attention to Nebraska politics in the East meanwhile thought Governor Bryan a joke. After his nomination for vice president, his reelection campaign fizzled, and he also lost his governorship. The drama of the 1924 presidential campaign took many different turns as it unraveled. The first detour occurred almost immediately after the Republican Convention. On July 1, Coolidge summoned Dawes to Washington to discuss the coming campaign. They really didn’t know each other very well. At dinner that evening, fourteen-year-old Calvin Coolidge Jr. took ill at the table and went to his room. The president was quite concerned, and he had reason to be. Within a week his namesake died, having played tennis on the White House lawn barefoot with a broken blister that led to a fatal blood poisoning. President Coolidge was beside himself in grief and played a minimal role throughout the rest of the campaign. Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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That left the Republicans to rely on the untested Dawes, who was more than ready. Dawes immediately established himself in charge of the campaign. William Butler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, wanted economic issues to be the primary talking point, but Dawes disagreed. Instead he planned to ignore the Democrats and focus on the radicalism of Senator LaFollette. LaFollette’s party platform called for the congressional veto of Supreme Court decisions, and Dawes saw this as demagoguery and a lack of proper respect for law. He also wanted to take on the Ku Klux Klan. He considered the Democratic South a lost cause, but the rest of the country was uncomfortable with America’s homegrown brand of terrorism. Republican Party officials wanted Dawes to stay away from this issue, especially in states where the Klan was strong, like Indiana and Maine. Dawes deliberately went to Maine and publicly condemned the Klan. On August 29, Dawes came to Lincoln, where he addressed a crowd of twenty-five thousand. He talked of the current farm crisis and wowed those in attendance. From Lincoln, he left on a train trip to the West where he gave 108 speeches, most covered by radio. Overall, Dawes was an electric speaker who slashed his opponents and traveled over fifteen thousand miles on the campaign. He hit the themes he had already established, plus he took on foreign policy, urging that the United States join the World Court. Dawes was no isolationist. And Dawes pushed the silly campaign slogan, “Keep Cool With Coolidge,” while calling for some Progressive reforms such as tax reductions, the eight-hour day, prohibition of child labor, and a federal anti-lynching law. Said a fellow Republican who had opposed his nomination, Dawes was the “most successful vice-presidential campaigner in history.” Dawes also got mileage out of an elaborate political subterfuge. Given that there were three viable presidential candidates, if the Republicans did not get a majority of the electoral college, the election would be thrown into the Senate and House. The Senate considered the vice presidency. Because it was controlled by LaFollette Republicans and Democrats, Dawes argued, it would back Charles Bryan. The House was split and would not be able to make a presidential choice. Thus, Davis and Coolidge would be ignored and Bryan would then become acting president. This was about the only time Dawes reflected on the Democratic ticket. His strategy, however tortured, proved brilliant and prevailed. 230

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Charles Bryan, meanwhile, was also active on the campaign trail. Davis spent most of his time in the East and South, leaving the West to Charles. But his brother proved the more durable campaigner. William Jennings stumped in fifteen states and gave over one hundred speeches for the Davis-Bryan ticket, and he urged a union of the South and West against the corrupt corporations of the East. It was a Populist-like message that didn’t catch on with the American populace. Meanwhile, the LaFollette campaign attracted the support of a who’s who in Progressive politics, regardless of party. Jane Addams, settlement house founder and social reformer; John Dewey, advocate of public education; Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justices, present and future, and even Helen Keller, all endorsed LaFolletteWheeler. But these endorsements could not carry the election. When election day came in November 1924, many thought President Coolidge would retain his presidency. “Silent Cal” had been mostly quiet during the campaign, but Charles Dawes had more than made up for the president’s loss of voice and interest. The Republican ticket carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states. Coolidge-Dawes garnered over 15 million votes to Davis-Bryan’s 8 million and LaFollete-Wheeler’s nearly 5 million. The Republicans had 382 votes in the electoral college, compared to 136 for the Democrats and 13 for the Progressives. In the Nebraska contest that pitted Nebraska’s two would-be vice presidents, Dawes bested Bryan, 47 percent to 30 percent. The Progressives achieved 23 percent of the Nebraska presidential vote. Together the Progressives and Democrats would have carried the Cornhusker State. Interestingly, Nebraska had the fourteenth best showing for the Progressives, who only carried LaFollette’s native Wisconsin, and twenty-fourth for the Democrats, whose electoral success was confined to southern states, but interestingly not Davis’s West Virginia. Republicans carried Nebraska, but it was the thirty-first best state for the party in power. After the election was over, most commentators blamed the ill-fated Democratic Convention for the party’s debacle. Many Democrats pointed the finger at William Jennings Bryan, and WJB in turn blamed the Tammany Hall machine in New York state and eastern monied interests. Davis had proved a poor and inefficient campaigner. H. L. Mencken said the Democrats in the hot New York summer went insane and then tried to commit suicide by picking Davis as their presidential candidate. Nebraska’s Would-be Vice Presidents

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Charles Dawes went to Washington, and Charles Bryan stayed home in Lincoln. After serving his term as vice president, Dawes went on to become ambassador to Great Britain from 1929 to 1932, following ironically in John W. Davis’s footsteps. He played a vital role in the London Naval Conference of 1930 that limited naval armaments. Dawes foresaw the crash of 1929 and warned his friends to get out of the stock market. When he came home, he took over a major Chicago bank and staved off bankruptcy. In his later years he turned to composing music, being an accomplished musician, and he devoted much of his time to philanthropy in the Chicago area. Charles Bryan continued in politics. He ran for governor in 1926 and 1928 and was defeated each time, but he won in 1930 and served for two terms from 1931 to 1935, losing again in 1936 and 1938. Charles usually advocated a fiscally conservative government, restrictions on alcohol consumption, and highly partisan politics. Each governorship began out of serious agricultural distress. Although Bryan did sign laws creating public power and irrigation districts and allowing them to borrow money by issuing bonds, his failure to adjust and cooperate with Republicans in order to make laws and to work with New Deal officials to help alleviate economic hardship eventually did him in politically. In his last term as governor, Charles Bryan got into a battle with his Republican lieutenant governor, one T. W. Metcalfe. When Bryan took a vacation out of state, Metcalfe created the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska and started giving out admiralties in the Nebraska Navy to his cronies. It was all in fun, but Governor Bryan did not view it that way. Bryan himself never became an admiral, but the admiralties continue today as an honor for many a governor to bestow. In his last years, Bryan spent much time writing and commenting on politics. In the course of their long political careers, both Charles Dawes and Charles Bryan contributed greatly to American debate and public policy, both nationally and in Nebraska. They each held many high-level government jobs and personally knew dozens of presidents and political leaders. Both succeeded in many of their life’s goals, and interestingly their paths crossed in the most unusual of presidential elections, that of 1924. Moreover, they proved to be the precursors of more would-be vice presidents from Nebraska. In 1992, when Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas obtained the Democratic presidential nomination, he almost 232

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chose Nebraska’s then senator and former governor Bob Kerrey as his running mate. Instead, he settled on Tennessee senator Albert Gore Jr. And then in 2000 the Republicans picked what turned out to be a winning two-term ticket of Texas governor George W. Bush as their presidential candidate and Lincoln native-born and former Wyoming representative Dick Cheney as Bush’s vice-presidential running mate.

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27. The Pound Family

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n 1925 Dr. Louise Pound decided to do something no one else had ever done before. This was not too unexpected as she had been surprising Nebraskans and many others since her birth in 1872. She founded a professional journal, American Speech, that explored phonetics, the history of language, and folklore. Her work transformed the teaching of English, and it turned quaint specialties that attracted dabblers into legitimate fields for serious-minded scholars. According to critic H. L. Mencken, Louise Pound’s “work and that of her students put the study of American English on its legs.” It would not be the last of her many contributions. Of course, Louise was not alone in the pursuit of knowledge in the Pound family. While she was pursuing a new linguistics research path, her older brother Roscoe was completely altering the legal world. By 1925 Dr. Roscoe Pound, who received a PhD in botany and a law degree, resided in Boston, where he had become dean of Harvard University’s College of Law. He invented the term “sociological jurisprudence,” a revolutionary legal concept that required judges to take into consideration information and materials, such as government statistics, treatises, and psychological and economic data, in the making of legal decisions. This new jurisprudential approach was called legal realism, and it took the place of the old legal formalism that emphasized procedure rather than the substance of legal disputes. Legal formalism had dominated American courts and American legal education prior to Roscoe’s discovery. The year after Louise’s journal made its first appearance, Roscoe published his second law book, an eye-opening exposé, Criminal Justice in America (1926), that provoked national debate. Roscoe would have a very distinguished legal career.

51. Pound home at 1632 L Street, Lincoln in 1957 (courtesy Lincoln Journal Star).

The Pound family also included the youngest sibling, Olivia. Her impact was not as renowned as that of her brother or sister, but it was in many ways as important if not more so. By 1925 she had already at the age of forty-eight achieved her silver anniversary of teaching at Lincoln High School. She went on to become principal at the first public high school in the Capital City. Many of her students achieved distinguished careers and leadership in Nebraska. Truly, the Pounds were an amazing Nebraska family. How did so much accomplishment reside in one Nebraska home? In fact, this particular home was as unique as its children. The stately, three-story Victorian house with a tower-room library and study sat one block north of the state capitol in Lincoln. “To me,” wrote Mamie Meredith, an English professor at the University of Nebraska and a friend of the Pounds, “1632 L St. was a haven of understanding, . . . a challenge to do my very best, and a spot where I was appreciated.” At this address for nearly a century, from 1870 to 1961, one or more members of the Pound family resided, and the door was almost always open to the talented. Usually the first in the family to rise on any given day was the honorThe Pound Family

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able Stephen B. Pound, a mildly eccentric, stalwart Republican Nebraska state judge of the second judicial district. A native New Yorker, he graduated from Union College in 1859, joined the bar in 1863, and entered into a law partnership in New York state. After his partner died in 1866, Stephen decided to cast his lot west. He married Laura Biddlecombe in January 1869, and later that same year the newlyweds moved to the relatively new state of Nebraska. Stephen Pound put up his shingle upon his arrival in Lincoln, was elected probate judge his first autumn in Nebraska, and took a position in the state senate in 1872. In 1876 he won a district court judgeship, a position he held for the duration of his legal career. Judge Pound greeted his brood in the mornings with “Hurrah, the generals.” He had called his children “the generals” ever since a witness in his court had constantly referred in his testimony to his children as “genrans.” After repeated questioning, Judge Pound finally figured out who the witness had been describing. The Pound “generals” included an amazingly accomplished threesome. The first-born Pound in 1870, Roscoe studied at home until age twelve, when he was admitted to the University of Nebraska preparatory Latin School. In 1884, at age fourteen, he amazingly entered the university, just five blocks from the Pound house, where he majored in botany and classics. Graduating in four years at the ripe age of eighteen and not yet content with his education, Roscoe completed an ma in botany also at Nebraska in just one year, 1889, and he then left to go to Massachusetts, where he studied law at Harvard University. This was his first time away from home. Although Stephen Pound certainly wanted his son to become a lawyer, Roscoe had been independent about his life path. The practice of law in the 1890s did not require a law school degree; most would-be Nebraska attorneys “read” the law with local lawyers and then submitted to an oral exam from a judge. Going to Harvard was almost unheard of in Nebraska, and that appealed to young Pound. A nineteen-year-old on his own for the first time negotiating the city of Boston no doubt worried his parents. Roscoe returned to Lincoln in 1891, soon obtained his certificate to practice law in Nebraska, and opened his practice. Still, he continued his strong interests in Plains plants. By 1897 Roscoe had not only assumed the directorship of the Nebraska Botanical Survey, but he had 236

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written and successfully defended a PhD dissertation in botany at the University of Nebraska under the direction of Professor Charles Bessey. Roscoe and his best friend from college, Frederick E. Clements, were collaborating that year on a book, the first of many for Roscoe. The Phytogeography of Nebraska, a new kind of botany that emphasized the dynamic ecological interrelationships of an entire region, was published the next year. Roscoe also began dating Grace Gerrard of Columbus, Nebraska, and they married in 1899. The second Pound child, Louise, born in 1872, also proved precocious. With a pattern established in the Pound family, at age fourteen, she too entered the university’s Latin School and then two years later, in 1888, enrolled at Nebraska. She finished her degree in 1892 at age twenty, majoring in music with an emphasis in piano, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. At the university, Louise demonstrated a keen interest in just about every subject. She was especially taken with the study of language—literature, folklore, the history of words, and even slang. She was also very active in sports. Louise mastered the traditional female game of croquet by age fourteen, and she then moved on to skating, bicycling, and tennis. By 1890 Louise, a modern-day Billie Jean King, had won her first state tennis championship, competing mostly against men. In 1895 she earned her first Century Road Club Bar, meaning she had ridden one hundred continuous miles in a single day. In ice skating, she mastered many different twirls, such as the Maltese Cross, the Double Philadelphia Grapevine, and the On-to-Richmond. Lincoln did not have much in the way of skating facilities. “Racing was impossible on such tiny areas so I had to cut figures,” she recalled later in her life. Louise was even told she had been the first skier in Lincoln. Louise Pound began what would become an illustrious teaching career in the University of Nebraska’s Department of English as a teaching assistant in 1894. Her first teaching assignment was a course entitled “Anglo-Saxon” that she taught to eighty sophomore students. The next year she received her ma in English from Nebraska. During the summer of 1897, Louise went to Chicago, in part to think about her future. She took several summer session courses at the University of Chicago and decided she would soon work on a PhD. Also that summer she entered the Western Women’s Tennis Tournament in Chicago and scored a major upset. She defeated the tournament favorite, one Jane Craven of Evanston, and along the way this unknown young Nebraska athlete The Pound Family

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52. Louise Pound and her first bicycle (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

beat the U.S. singles champion, both U.S. doubles champions, and the Canadian singles champion. “[F]or that season,” wrote the Omaha World-Herald, “Miss Pound was ranking player of the United States, even though she had not entered—and never did enter—a national tournament.” By the end of the summer, Louise decided she would go to Europe to study for her PhD. Pound set out to enhance her position as a teacher of English. She journeyed to Germany to study for her PhD. Surprisingly rejected in her application to the University of Leipzig, she gained acceptance at the University of Heidelberg to work with noted professor Johannes Hoops studying the English language, although she was warned to wear proper attire at all times so she would not distract male students. She completed her studies at Heidelberg in one year, 1899–1900, achieving her PhD and graduating magna cum laude. Her rather tedious dissertation, “The Comparison of Adjectives in English in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” reflected the current state of the study of English at the time, which she soon abandoned in her future writings. 238

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While she was at Heidelberg, Louise won the women’s singles and doubles tennis championships at her university, and in a famed match with the recent 1900 Olympics men’s singles gold medalist, Hugh “Laurie” Doherty of Great Britain, it was reported she barely lost. Said Louise reflecting upon her PhD achievement, “Winning that degree in two semesters was the hardest thing I ever did.” Even studying for her PhD aroused the competition within her. Said her brother Roscoe of Louise, “[S]he has always taken first place in everything she has ever undertaken.” Louise returned to Lincoln to resume her university teaching career. The youngest and most demure was Olivia, born in 1874. She followed by then the familiar family pattern of initial home schooling from her mother, a brief stint at the Latin School, and early admission to the University of Nebraska. In 1895 Olivia Pound received her bachelor’s degree, but she was not yet satisfied with her education. In 1897 at age twenty-three, she received her master’s and began work on becoming a high school teacher. In 1900 she joined the faculty at Lincoln High School. All three Pound children usually lived at home. It would not be until Roscoe moved to Chicago in 1907 that one of the siblings would leave the nest permanently. Louise and Olivia remained single throughout their lives, and they stayed in the family home after their parents died. The Pound home was known throughout Lincoln as an exciting and intellectually engaging place to visit, and consequently a penalty imposed by Stephen and Laura Pound on a university student banning her from their family home was particularly stern. While Louise worked on student publications at the university, she became fast friends with another bright student, Willa Cather. When Cather wrote a scathing satire about Roscoe in the student literary magazine, all of the Pounds rallied round their only son and brother, and Louise ceased her relationship with her friend. Late in both of their lives, Louise reopened letter communication with Cather. Thus, the Pounds were fiercely loyal and supportive of each other. By the turn of the century, the children had already achieved two PhD’s, a legal practice, a teaching degree, and two master’s degrees; and no one had yet to count a thirtieth birthday. Some attributed their great achievements to their parents and to their mother in particular. Laura Biddlecombe Pound, like her husband, a native New Yorker, had achieved a college degree at Lombard College The Pound Family

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in the days when few women were allowed to do so, and when she and her husband moved to Lincoln in 1869, she taught elementary school for a year before she became pregnant. After Laura Pound had Roscoe, Louise, and Olivia within a four-year period, she decided to stay at home and teach her children there. Home schooling to Laura Pound meant meticulous preparation and instruction for her children. Every opportunity for learning was explored, but German language, English and American literature, and prairie botany were her particular favorites. That same love of those subjects was especially instilled in her two oldest children. An example of how Laura encouraged her children to learn as much as they could is seen in the Pounds’ religiosity. Their friends and neighbors thought the Pound family somewhat liberal about religion; they had arrived in Lincoln as Quakers, and the Pounds enjoyed attending several churches, not unlike Benjamin Franklin. Roscoe at an early age was allowed to attend a Lincoln church that conducted its services in German in order to practice his language skills. After her children went on to the university’s preparatory academy, Laura gave greater attention to community projects. She was especially active in supporting the Lincoln Public Library, serving on its board for many years. There was much to discuss at the Pound home. In her later years, Olivia recorded a typical day in the life of the Pound family. All three children usually came down to breakfast sliding on a banister in the curved stairway. Laura Pound always prepared meals for her flock, but she took no solace nor particular pride in her cooking ability. Olivia remembered that “Our breakfasts usually consisted of apple sauce, oat meal, or cracked wheat mush and graham gems, for some unknown reason called ‘Gemmybejasits’ by us children. There was cocoa for us, and Arbuckle’s coffee for our parents.” The menu, Olivia recorded, “frequently varied with poached eggs and toast, and pancakes on Sunday.” The Pound children truly lived the Nebraska good life. After 1900 the accomplishments and lives of the Pound family accelerated. Roscoe became a professor of law at the relatively new University of Nebraska College of Law. Two years later he became a commissioner judge for the Supreme Court of Nebraska, serving until 1903. That same year, Pound published his first of many legal articles and books, this time an essay in the prestigious Columbia Law Review; became a full partner in the Lincoln law firm of Hall, Woods, and Pound; and 240

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assumed the deanship of the Nebraska law school. By 1906 Roscoe had published three books—on jurisprudence, the common law, and even Readings in Roman Law—putting to good use his extensive classics education and his sharp legal mind, and he shook up the legal profession by delivering a sobering address at the annual American Bar Association meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, entitled “Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice.” Roscoe’s legal career had taken off. Within a decade, Roscoe Pound became one of the most respected and revered legal minds ever in American history. In 1907 esteemed law professor John H. Wigmore lured Pound to Northwestern University, away from Lincoln. Two years later, Roscoe crossed town to teach at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1910 Pound accepted an appointment to the Joseph Story Professorship, named for one of the first U.S. Supreme Court justices, at Harvard University’s College of Law. Pound would teach at Harvard for thirty-seven years. In 1911 Roscoe assumed the presidency of the Association of American Law Schools, and in 1916 Harvard made Roscoe Pound their law school dean, a post he would hold for twenty years. Who might have predicted this national success of the oldest Pound child? Roscoe made a significant impact on his world. He testified before Congress, advocating the constitutionality of child labor legislation; he took public stands, appealing for clemency for the imprisoned immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti and decrying the illegal searches and arrests made during the infamous Attorney General Palmer raids after World War I; he mingled with Supreme Court justices, including coauthoring a definitive survey of the status of the criminal justice system with future justice Felix Frankfurter. Kermit L. Hall, American legal historian, summarized Roscoe Pound’s career, “A prolific author of legal scholarship, his essays and books ranged over a wide number of topics including criminal law, prison reform, and the organization of courts.” Pound’s most significant books included An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1922), Criminal Justice in America (1926), The Formative Era of American Law (1938), and The Task of Law (1944). Roscoe Pound published over sixty lengthy legal essays and books on law and botany during his intellectual life. He received seventeen honorary degrees and was often invited to European universities to lecture. When Pound retired from Harvard in 1947, he agreed to spend three The Pound Family

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53. Roscoe Pound, Harvard University law professor, 1910 (courtesy of University of Nebraska– Lincoln Archives and Special Collections).

years in China as advisor to the Ministry of Justice helping to construct a new court system. After he returned to America, he was convinced that Communism was an inherently corrupt political and legal system. He entered into the Cold War debate, often expressing himself strongly, including favoring loyalty oaths for teachers. He wrote to Olivia in 1946 that he did not like being called a reactionary, but he totally rejected Communism. Roscoe also attacked what he saw as the administrative excesses of the U.S. government. He became so unhappy with American politics that he refused to support General Dwight Eisenhower for president because he did not feel Ike had denounced sufficiently the “welfare state.” Roscoe returned to Harvard where he spent his last days writing, researching in Harvard Library, and going to his office in Langdell Hall. In 1959 he completed a five-volume compilation of his legal publications, Jurisprudence, and then at the age of ninety-four in 1964, Roscoe Pound passed away peacefully. He had had an amazing journey through life that had helped transform modern American law. Despite his significant intellectual success, Roscoe Pound recognized the greater contributions of his sister Louise. Upon her eighty-fifth birth242

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day, he wrote an essay paying tribute to her, and he observed that “In my native state I am best known as Louise Pound’s brother,” a candid and honest assessment. Of all the Nebraskans who have achieved excellence in a chosen field, the one who has probably done the most to advance the cause of women in academia and sports is Louise Pound. Dr. Louise Pound returned to Nebraska after she received her PhD in Germany, and she would teach at the University of Nebraska for fortyfive more years. In the Department of English, she taught Old English, Middle English, English literature, phonetics, American folklore, and American literature. She inspired her students. By 1912 she had achieved the rank of full professor, and she later held visiting professorships at the University of California, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Stanford. She pioneered in teaching American literature and language. Most English departments at the turn of the century offered only English literature, but Louise believed that American authors also had important things to say. Her first book, Folk-Song of Nebraska and the Central West, published in 1915, was the very first state collection of folklore ever published. That same year, she traveled to Kansas City to team with a doubles partner, Carrie Neely, to win the Western Tennis Championships. That would be her last tennis competition, because by the early 1920s she needed bifocals and she found they caused her to shorten her lobs. Throughout her life, Louise Pound competed in athletic competitions. For her, a brilliant mind that she aspired to develop required a healthy body that was exercised vigorously, a relatively new concept for women. At the University of Nebraska, Pound participated in intercollegiate women’s basketball before it was later abolished, only to be revived in the 1970s. She played and coached in the games. Reflected Pound, “Those events were great fun. . . . The last game we played was with Minnesota in 1910. In the audience of five thousand people were the governor of Minnesota and the University band. Yes, we won!” Regretfully, “We had to stop them [basketball games], finally because the Dean of Women thought such activity inadvisable for the girls’ health.” Many people in Louise Pound’s day—especially early in her career— questioned whether women should do or were capable of doing graduate work and serious scholarship. In 1922 Pound reported that the idea of women in graduate school was still “somewhat new and experimenThe Pound Family

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tal” and that college teaching opportunities for women were “meager.” Indeed, after World War I some institutions replaced women “of long and efficient service” with men. “When a man does well,” Pound commented, “it is taken for granted that he is typical. When a woman does well . . . , it is taken for granted that she is not typical but the product of special circumstances.” In spite of a heavy teaching load, Pound was an active scholar. She believed it was the mission of a university not only “to preserve the learning of the world,” but also “to seek to add to that learning.” She wrote several book-length studies, including Poetic Origins and the Ballad (1922) and Ideals and Models (1935) with four other English colleagues; three textbook collections of American literature (1939, 1940, 1942); and edited volumes on Homer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. In 1925 she founded a new journal, American Speech, and served as senior editor for many years. In her astounding literary career, Louise Pound published 161 articles, 17 books, and 59 critical reviews. The extent and range of her research was remarkable. She showed great versatility, breadth of learning, and common touch. For example, Pound wrote articles on such diverse subjects as the origins of the word “darn”; the pronunciation of “either” and “neither”; the sources of commercial trade names; slang words for death and dying; popular variants of the word “yes”; and the fondness of Americans for indefinite names—like “doohickie,” “thingumajig,” and from within the Pound family, “Gemmybejasits”—that, by her count, numbered more than a hundred. Her pioneering work in folklore focused on Nebraska subjects, such as cave and snake lore, rain making and rain lore, lovers’ leaps and strong men, and folk customs. She also explored the legend of the Lincoln salt basin, the sources of cowboy songs, and the hoaxes of John G. Maher, a Chadron lawyer who enjoyed telling tall tales and spoofing people. All of Pound’s work was eminently readable. Particularly popular were her essays on American folklore and word usage. Since many of her articles were prepared for a listening audience, they had what one reviewer called “a warm and personal quality.” Another reviewer described her work as “entertaining and instructive” and free of “pedantry and fussiness.” 244

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In 1955 at age eighty-two, Louise Pound’s professional career was recognized in two significant ceremonies. She was chosen to be the first woman president of the Modern Language Association, one of the largest academic organizations in the United States. Previously, she had been president of the American Dialect Society and the American Folklore Society. Also in 1955 Louise was inducted into the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame. She was the first woman so honored in Nebraska history. This ardent competitor with red hair wrapped in a braid, this strong advocate for women’s education and the improvement of women’s status in Nebraska and at her university, and this dynamic woman who spoke to women’s groups throughout the state, described her two honors tersely in a letter to a friend: “First woman again.—life has its humors.” Three years later and just two days before her eighty-sixth birthday, Louise Pound suffered a fatal heart attack in her home. Said one of her former students, “For all of us, her students and her friends, she is truly immortal. Every day for as long as we live, we will see her influence expressed in innumerable ways and the ideas that she implanted in us reflected in turn by our children and students.” Louise Pound, the first of the Pound siblings to die, continues to be remembered at the University of Nebraska with a fellowship that Roscoe and Olivia created in her honor for talented women students, an award given each year to an outstanding faculty member for service to the university, and the namesake of Pound Hall, a dormitory built on a site “where Louise in her voluminous long skirts used to spin about on her bicycle.” The Pound offspring who perhaps had the most lasting local influence and least publicity was Olivia. Beginning in 1900 she worked for many years as a high school teacher in the Lincoln Public Schools. She eventually served as principal at Lincoln High as well as girls’ vocational director in the City of Lincoln. Olivia in many ways handled most of the duties around the Pound home, particularly when her parents became elderly. Like her sister, Olivia never married. Olivia often corresponded with her brother. Roscoe commented on the issues of the day in his letters to Olivia where he sought her opinion and gave his version of various events. When his colleague Louis Brandeis was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Jew to be so honored, and leading members of the eastern bar and Harvard The Pound Family

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54. Lincoln High School, 1909, where Olivia Pound was teacher and principal.

faculty fought against the nomination, Roscoe wrote to Olivia that it was “all prejudice.” For Roscoe, it was similar to when the Populists opposed good lawyers for the bench because they had once taken a case for a corporation. Olivia approved Roscoe endorsing Brandeis even though it was a dangerous professional move. Olivia retired from teaching in 1943. She had served her community and its schools for over forty years. After retirement, she continued to be active in Lincoln community affairs, particularly the Nebraska State Historical Society, until her death in 1961 at the age of eighty-seven. Olivia willed a sizeable portion of her estate to the nshs, which continues to support Nebraska state history projects. Pound Middle School in Lincoln is named for her. Olivia in her later life reflected on her home, her parents, and her brother and sister. It all began with reading, she wrote. “Father read aloud to us a great deal. I remember his reading much of Dickens’ work, also Scott’s, Thackeray’s and many of Shakespeare’s plays. Louise never cared much about listening. She would rather have the book herself and read at her own lightning pace.” Olivia noted that Louise was always the fastest reader, but Roscoe “had a photographic memory and thus retained more of the facts.” 246

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Growing up as a Pound in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the house on L Street was an education unto itself. When Stephen and Laura Pound moved to Nebraska they brought with them a total commitment to bettering their community and to raising the most engaging and energetic children they could. They more than succeeded. The contributions of the Pound family to Nebraska life continue to this very day.

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28. Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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n December 1, 1925, an impromptu dinner was organized at the old Cornhusker Hotel in downtown Lincoln. It was a special occasion called by the superintendent of the Nebraska State Historical Society, Addison Sheldon. A community of writers that had evolved around the Cornhusker gathered to honor Bess Streeter Aldrich on the occasion of the publication of her first novel. Many of her new friends came. Although we do not have an exact record of who joined in a toast and good cheer that evening, it is probable that, in addition to the honoree, would-be young writers Mari Sandoz, Loren Eiseley, and Weldon Kees were in attendance. It had been a difficult year for the short story writer and new novelist from nearby Elmwood as Aldrich’s husband had died suddenly, and now she had to support four young children. But her friends and Sheldon had encouraged her, and here she was marking her own personal evolution as a writer. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Nebraska provided the setting for an exponential growth of literature. A training ground for many creative individuals, writers gravitated toward this place on the Great Plains as the subject of their own reflections and stories. Such was the pattern for the Pulitzer-Prize winning Nebraskan Willa Cather. So too would it be for writers Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mari Sandoz, and John G. Neihardt, all leaders of Nebraska’s literary renaissance. Bess Streeter Aldrich (1881–1954) celebrated the human spirit in her writings, and she featured intricate personal stories of Nebraska pioneers. Born Bessie Geneva Streeter in February 1881, she was the last of the eight children of Mary and James Streeter, both pioneers in central Iowa in the 1850s. The Streeters had farmed most of their lives until they moved to Cedar Falls, Iowa, just before Bess was born to her

forty-five-year-old mother. Bess, who chose to go by a shortened version of her name, grew up among adults hearing pioneer recollections. Her childhood was filled with growing flowers, playing with other children, thoroughly enjoying school, learning the new sport of girls’ basketball, and reading. Bess seemed captivated particularly by literature and the writings of Shakespeare. At age seventeen she wrote a story, “A Late Love,” that she entered in a Baltimore News writing contest. She won fifth prize, and it was published much to her surprise and pleasure. A writing career seemed in her future. In 1898 Bess enrolled in the Iowa normal school nearby, today known as the University of Northern Iowa. She walked four miles to class every day, and on campus she continued to play basketball and participate in debates, orations, and plays. Bess graduated in 1901 and went to work teaching, first in Boone and then in Marshalltown, Iowa. At Marshalltown, she met Captain Charles Aldrich at a dinner. A dashing University of Iowa graduate and football player, Cap had obtained a law degree. In 1898 he organized a company of Iowa Volunteers who went off to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War. He contracted typhoid fever in Havana and returned to Iowa, only to go off to the Alaska gold rush in 1900. Bess too had the traveling fever, journeying to Salt Lake City with her sister and her husband in 1905, where she taught school. In 1906 both Cap and Bess returned to Cedar Falls, and when they met once again they started dating. This led to marriage in 1907, a brief period in Cap’s hometown, Tipton, Iowa, and then Cap and Bess’s brother-in-law, John Cobb, bought a bank in Elmwood, Nebraska, in 1909. Meanwhile, Bess had her first child, after which the new family moved to Nebraska, where they would permanently reside. Having settled in Elmwood into a large house with a growing family that eventually reached four babies, Bess began to rekindle her love of writing stories. In 1911 she submitted an essay to a writing contest sponsored by the Ladies’ Home Journal. Although her story did not win (it was one of twenty-three hundred entries), the editors asked Bess if they could publish it, and after they did they sent her a check for $175. This would be the first of many writing payments for Bess Streeter Aldrich. As Carol Petersen, Aldrich’s biographer, has written, Bess Streeter Aldrich “was one of the best known, best loved, and best paid fiction writers from the 1920s through the early 1950s.” All told, Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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55. Bess Streeter Aldrich (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Bess published 111 stories, frequently in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal; she also wrote thirteen novels, including her most praised and still popular A Lantern in Her Hand (1928). The writings of Bess Streeter Aldrich appeared at a time when Americans were confronted with tremendous changes in their personal lives, changes that many found disconcerting and frightening. Her stories took the reader back to days when security could be found in small towns and family settings. In an Aldrich story, one could escape an impersonal urban existence and the unknown changes brought by technology and World War I. Moreover, Bess’s essays were geared to help women adjust to modernity. She wrote of a can-do mothering philosophy, and her plots showed that through strong determination women could prevail. Best Streeter Aldrich became something of a publishing sensation in the 1920s. By 1930 she had published over forty stories and had gained a popular following. Her fictional family, the Masons, was the subject of many conversations. In 1921 she received twelve hundred letters of fan 250

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mail, and she answered each one. Aldrich found that she had choices to make, and fortunately for her and her readers, she chose to pursue her writing, hiring a local Elmwood woman as a housekeeper and engaging a neighbor to cook. The Aldrich household was alive with activity. In 1923, at the First Nebraska Author’s Week celebration, Bess Streeter Aldrich was honored for her short stories. Two years later her first novel, The Rim of the Prairie, was published to much acclaim. It featured a love story of several young characters who found each other in a small town and a side story of two older pioneers moving to Nebraska. Throughout the novel, Aldrich explored the notion that individuals have little personal control over their lives and that they must leave much to destiny. In many ways it was escape literature, but there was a purpose to it, extolling the virtues of small town life in Nebraska, a life she knew very well. Aldrich’s small towns predated the “Our Town” of Thornton Wilder plays by several years. Bess was jolted out of her writing reverie by the sudden heart attack and death of her husband Cap one Sunday in church in the spring of 1925. A local economic and political leader who had achieved state recognition, he had only recently turned down an invitation to run for governor of Nebraska. It was a shock to the Aldrich family and to the Elmwood community. Bess, there and then, resolved to marshal all of her strength and to “go on.” Her writing would become the family’s “bread and butter,” she later reflected. The success of Bess Streeter Aldrich’s early novels encouraged her to keep writing. That there seemed to be so much interest in the older settlers of her first novel surprised her and set her to writing about her elderly mother’s pioneer days. One Sunday afternoon, she was invited to do a telephone interview on a radio station, the ultimate new technology of communications. She and her children went over to the local Elmwood doctor’s home, as it had the only telephone in Elmwood. During the course of her conversation on the radio, she asked for stories of pioneer life, hoping to receive several. She was swamped by mail the next week with hundreds of responses, and she was off and writing. The result was her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, A Lantern in Her Hand (1928). This book emphasized the role played by the female pioneer. Aldrich wanted to disprove the stereotypes in frontier literature that characterized women as either drudges or prostitutes. She knew women to be strong, not weak. Her heroine, Abbie Deal, moved Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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from Iowa to southeastern Nebraska as a pioneer who farmed, lived in a sod house, and had six children. A New York Times review praised the book, calling the novel “a splendid tribute to the pioneer woman, whose part in the growth of the country cannot be measured.” Bess Streeter Aldrich continued to write throughout her life. Her stories and novels were very popular. After A Lantern, she wrote nine more books and numerous essays, all the while raising her children and watching them flourish. Her health began to deteriorate in her sixties, and she sold her Elmwood home in 1945, moving to Lincoln to be near some of her children and grandchildren. On August 3, 1954, Bess Street Aldrich passed away at age seventy-three, having published her last story that year. She was buried in the Elmwood cemetery next to Cap. Later a Bess Streeter Aldrich Foundation was organized, and the group purchased the Aldrich home in Elmwood. It is managed by the foundation today, and Bess Streeter Aldrich readers, of whom there are many, can tour the home. Each first Sunday in October, Elmwood celebrates its famous author. Nothing aggravated Bess Streeter Aldrich more than to hear Easterners denigrate the people of the Plains. She resented comments on how boring Nebraska people were, and she answered them with letters and retorts of her own. She was very pro-Plainsmen and women in her writings and in her interviews. As her biographer has written, Bess Streeter Aldrich “defended rural values and people.” Perhaps that contributed to her friendship with Mari Sandoz. Recently Caroline Sandoz Pifer recalled that her sister Mari thought Bess Streeter Aldrich was the best writing stylist she had ever read. No doubt Bess and Mari’s mutual respect for each other’s craft helped both achieve writing prominence. Nebraska has produced a number of nationally acclaimed writers who focused on regional themes, and Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) probably gave the grittiest portrayal of life on the Plains. A historian as well as a novelist, Sandoz conducted an enormous amount of research to ensure the accuracy of her depiction of Western culture. Mari Sandoz grew up in the Nebraska Sandhills. The greatest influences on her life were her father Jules, a university-educated Swiss immigrant who had come to the United States in 1881, and her mother Mary, Jules’s fourth wife. Jules Sandoz spent three years on a homestead near Verdigre before moving to the Niobrara River country in Sheridan County in 1884. A visionary who championed agricultural improve252

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ment and the rights of small farmers, he was also selfish and cruel. He married Mary Fehr, a fellow Swiss immigrant, in 1895; Mari, christened Mary and called Marie to distinguish her from her mother, was the first born of this union. The oldest Sandoz daughter later adopted the spelling Mari and a pronunciation stressing each syllable equally, not unlike Bess Streeter Aldrich’s fashioning of her own name. Mari Sandoz’s childhood was difficult in many ways. She was physically beaten by her father, once suffering a broken hand. At an early age, she had to take care of her siblings, who eventually numbered two brothers and two sisters so that her mother could assist with the farm work. By the time she was ten, she was responsible for much of the household cooking and cleaning. Life on the farm was socially isolated. Her father did not allow her to attend school until she was nine, when the family was reported to the county truant officer. Because she spoke the Swiss-German language of her mother, she did not learn to speak and write English until she turned eleven. At age fourteen a major blizzard whipped through the Sandhills, and she and her oldest brother Jule (his name also shortened to distinguish it from his father’s) were ordered by their father to rescue the small family cattle herd that had become lost. Mari and Jule saved the cattle, but she lost an eye to snowblindness in the ordeal. Mari was very interested in writing. Shortly before her twelfth birthday and unknown to Mari, her teacher sent a story her student had written, “The Broken Promise,” to a writer’s contest sponsored by the Omaha Daily News. It won and was published, much to Mari’s delight. When she told her family, her father, who regarded writers as “the maggots of society,” beat Mari and confined her to the snake-infested cellar. Mari screamed until he let her out, and she continued to write, although she kept her writing to herself and she used a pseudonym when she submitted it for publication while she lived at home. After Mari Sandoz finished eighth grade in 1913, she secured a thirdclass teaching certificate, and she taught intermittently in the rural schools in the Sandhills. In 1914 she married Wray Macumber, a young rancher, but this marriage lasted only five years. Some of Mari’s first published stories were done under her married name, but after she left the Sandhills she signed her publications as Mari Sandoz. In 1919 Sandoz moved to Lincoln to begin a new life, taking first secretarial courses and then college work, mostly in literature and history, at the Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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University of Nebraska. Completely on her own, she supported herself with various odd jobs, laboring in a drug laboratory, grading papers for English professors, and working at the Nebraska State Historical Society. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Sandoz spent her free time writing and submitting her stories, working on a biography of her father after he died in 1928, and drinking coffee and smoking with her artistic friends in the Teepee Restaurant of the downtown Cornhusker Hotel. Her first breakthrough in writing for income came with the publication of a two-part article, “The Kinkaider Comes and Goes,” about homesteaders in the Sandhills, in the North American Review in 1930. Previously she had published a short story, “The Vine,” the first story in the first issue of the new literary journal published at the University of Nebraska, Prairie Schooner, in 1927. By 1933 Sandoz had been writing for eight years and had earned only $325 from her work, most of it from articles that she herself claimed “weren’t fit paper for a Wyoming outhouse.” She became despondent and considered giving up on writing. “I was all washed up,” she later recalled. “I was through. I had no money and I feared no writing ability.” After burning some of her papers, she left Lincoln and returned to the Sandhills. The next year, however, Addison Sheldon wrote to her offering her a full-time job with funds that the Nebraska State Historical Society had received from the Works Progress Administration, and she returned to Lincoln, renewed and dedicated to her nearly finished biography, Old Jules. She resubmitted a revised version of her manuscript to a contest sponsored by the Atlantic Press in 1935. It had been rejected previously in 1932 for the same competition, but this time Sandoz won. The prize, five thousand dollars, was a large sum of money in the Depression, and when the book was made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, her good fortune doubled. Success had finally come to Mari Sandoz. One critic wrote, “Like a long Nebraska drough[t], the literary apprenticeship of Mari Sandoz was over.” Never again would she want for money, and never again would she have trouble finding a publisher for her work, although her relationships with publishers were often of a roller-coaster nature. She guarded her western vernacular and her realistic portrayals of the American West from the ignorance of her editors. Most critics liked Old Jules, though some were shocked by its raw language and frankness. “The book is strong meat,” said the New York 254

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Sun, “not merely that, but strong meat with a decidedly gamy flavor.” The work was also well-received internationally. It was offered as a selection by the leading book club in England. According to the London Evening Standard, Old Jules “knocked the stuffing out of the covered wagon sentimental epic.” Her next two books were not as well received. Slogum House, an allegorical novel about a woman rancher who ruthlessly dominated the Niobrara region, was banned in Omaha and McCook because of its violence and language. Capital City (1939), a protest novel showing the seamier side of politics in a fictional midwestern state capital, generated considerable resentment in Lincoln because many people there saw the book as an attack on them personally and on their city. Sandoz asserted that she was harassed in the streets of Lincoln, received threatening phone calls, and even had her apartment burgled. To escape from Lincoln to write and research, Sandoz moved to Denver in 1940; and then like Willa Cather, Sandoz in 1943 moved to New York City to be nearer to her editors and the great research libraries of the East. New York remained her home for the rest of her life, though she always maintained that she was “only in New York, not of it.” She continued to travel extensively and often visited Nebraska and the West to lecture, see friends and family, and conduct research. Before Sandoz left Lincoln, she formulated a plan for a trans-Missouri series of books tracing the history of the Great Plains, from its origins to the near present. Her plan included a sympathetic and accurate nonstereotypic treatment of Native Americans, long before that had occurred to other white scholars, with a stress upon the interrelationship of the environment and culture. Ultimately, six volumes appeared: Old Jules (1935), Crazy Horse (1942), Cheyenne Autumn, (1953), The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964). These works are best known for their detailed and meticulous research as well as constructed dialogue. Her ability to evoke the mood of the West established her reputation as one of America’s premier western writers. All of her histories are still in print. Of the twenty-one books Sandoz eventually wrote, Crazy Horse was not only her favorite but also considered by many critics as her finest. Many Lakotas also consider her work the best description of their national patriot’s life. Her episodic history of Nebraska, Love Song to the Plains (1961), one reviewer extolled, “contains some of her finest and Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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56. Mari Sandoz and John G. Neihardt in Lincoln, 1962 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

most poetic writing about . . . Nebraska.” Sandoz believed that writers needed to be read as well as be heard. Her biographer, Helen Winter Stauffer, observed that Sandoz “felt a strong need to preserve the past, seeing it as a guide to the future.” She used her fame to advocate Indian rights, protect the environment, and ensure the destruction of fascism before, during, and after World War II. When Mari Sandoz had writer’s block, she always turned to a good friend and fellow Nebraska writer, John G. Neihardt, for guidance. She noted later in her life that she had read Black Elk Speaks many more times than she could recall. She believed Neihardt’s book put her in touch with her homeland and its people in ways that she could only try to emulate. Mari died of cancer in New York City in 1966. She donated her extensive papers to the University of Nebraska and was buried on the family homestead in her beloved Sandhills. Today one can travel south of Gordon on Highway 87, renamed the Mari Sandoz Sandhills Trail, to visit her grave site. The Mari Sandoz Heritage Society raised 256

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over $2 million recently to remodel an old Carnegie Library on the campus of Chadron State College as a center of Sandoz Studies, and it meets there annually in April to hear programs and talks about Sandoz’s essays, novels, and histories. In a career that spanned three-quarters of a century, Sandoz’s friend and contemporary John G. Neihardt (1881–1973) produced some of the nation’s best contemporary poetry and helped write an important work on Sioux history and culture. Two of his works, A Cycle of the West (a five-volume collection of poetry published from 1915 to 1941) and Black Elk Speaks (1932), are considered classics and likely to retain their appeal for years to come. The product of a German-Irish family, Neihardt was born on a farm near Sharpsburg, Illinois, in 1881. Christened John Greenleaf Neihardt, after the poet Whittier, Neihardt later changed his middle name to Gneisenau, an old family name, because he preferred not to be identified with another poet, especially one he did not admire. His family lived for several years in Illinois, then moved to a sod house in western Kansas, and then later to Kansas City, Missouri. Although John’s father abandoned the family in 1891, the senior Neihardt had a taste for adventure and introduced his son to the pleasures of the wilderness and the splendors of the Missouri River. John remained a devoted outdoorsman the rest of his life. Though barely five feet two inches tall, Neihardt was a formidable wrestler and a strong swimmer. In 1892 Neihardt’s mother moved the family to Wayne, Nebraska, a town that the poet later called his “hill of vision” because his world view was forged there. Young Neihardt read voraciously and after completing elementary school in 1893, he was admitted as a special student to Nebraska Normal College, now Wayne State College. He paid for his education by ringing the class bell in the tower and by doing other odd jobs, and he spent much of his spare time studying oriental mysticism. Likely the youngest student ever enrolled in the college, Neihardt was one of its brightest, graduating in 1896 at the age of fifteen. In 1900 Neihardt and his mother moved to Bancroft, where the young writer got his first taste of journalism, working for the Bancroft Weekly Blade and later for the Omaha Daily News. In 1903 Neihardt became editor of the Blade but resigned two years later because, he said, “I was not fashioned for the pleasant and flowery path of a country ediNebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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tor.” Neihardt next worked for an Indian trader, developing close ties with the Omaha Indians. While in Bancroft, Neihardt sold a number of stories to magazines and worked on refining his poetry. His writings earned him a reputation in eastern literary circles, and a visit to New York City in 1907 enabled him to meet a number of the literati of his day. That same year he published his first collection of stories, The Lonesome Trail, and his first anthology of poems, A Bundle of Myrrh. Both were well received. Neihardt romanced and married in 1908 Mona Martinsen, a young woman sculptor from a well-to-do eastern family who had studied with Auguste Rodin in Paris. Martinsen was enthralled with Neihardt’s poetry, and after striking up a correspondence, the two met in Omaha and were married the next day. They settled in the Neihardts’ Bancroft home. Mona remained Neihardt’s companion and helper until her death in 1958. Over the next two decades, Neihardt moved about from job to job interspersed with periods of writing. He worked for the Minneapolis Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and gave public speeches and readings. In 1917 the University of Nebraska awarded him an honorary doctorate, and the state legislature named him Poet Laureate of Nebraska and the Prairies in 1921. The university also appointed Neihardt to a chair of poetry that required only a few lectures a year. Despite his growing reputation in Nebraska, he found Nebraska’s physical climate of hot, humid summers and cold winters more and more difficult to endure, so he moved with his growing family to Branson, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains. Along the way, Neihardt decided, as early as 1912, to give up lyrical poetry in order to write an epic on the American West. “There comes a time in the life of a poet,” he said, “when he must either widen or desert the field of his earlier endeavor.” The result of his new direction would be a five-volume work, A Cycle of the West, that took twentysix years to complete. The Cycle covers the years from 1822 to 1890 in the exploration and settlement of the Missouri River valley, focusing on the exploits of explorers, fur traders, and Indians. The five volumes of the Cycle, in their chronological substantive order but not their publishing order, include The Song of Three Friends (1919), The Song of Hugh Glass (1915), The Song of Jed Smith (1941), The Song of the Indian Wars (1925), and The Song of the Messiah (1935). Though epic poetry had long been out of fashion, critics praised the Cycle, some 258

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calling Neihardt the American Homer. The Poetry Society of America proclaimed Three Friends the best book of verse published in 1919, and most critics consider the Messiah, winner of several awards, the best volume in the series, an assessment Neihardt also shared. Neihardt’s other great work, Black Elk Speaks, was a direct outgrowth of his research for The Song of the Messiah. In 1930 Neihardt visited Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, looking for a Lakota elder to talk to him about the Ghost Dance Movement that had swept onto the Plains during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Black Elk, an aging Sioux medicine man, welcomed the opportunity to talk with Neihardt. Calling him “a word sender,” Black Elk invited the poet to return the following spring so that he might share his recollections with him. Black Elk believed that he would soon “be under the grass,” and he wanted to make known some of the knowledge that had been taught to him. Said Black Elk, “You [Neihardt] were sent here to save it, and you must come back so that I can teach you.” The result of the ensuing interviews was Black Elk Speaks, a book that presents Black Elk’s recollections as told by John Neihardt during an astonishing time of changes for the Lakota people. Though well received on both sides of the Atlantic (the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was particularly impressed), the book was not a financial success. In fact, the publisher remaindered the original edition at forty-five cents a copy. When the book was reprinted in 1961, it sold much better, and after Neihardt appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, sales exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold in the United States and in numerous foreign editions. Black Elk Speaks continues to influence its readers. Tim Giago, long-time Lakota editor of Indian Country Today, recently interviewed Billy Mills, the Pine Ridge Reservation Sioux runner who won a gold medal for the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Mills told Giago that his ability to run drew strength from his Lakota spirituality and philosophy. “I read Black Elk Speaks four times,” said the Lakota runner, “and I drew something new from it every time.” Despite critical acclaim for his work, Neihardt’s financial fortunes took a turn for the worse after World War II. He found that there were few employment opportunities for a sixty-year-old poet with failing eyesight. Desperate for money and fearful of losing his Branson home, Neihardt went to Chicago in 1943 searching for employment and landed a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There he edited the Bureau’s Nebraska’s Literary Renaissance

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magazine, Indians at Work, and he became a proponent for the preservation of Native American tribal life and culture. He returned to Pine Ridge for more interviews with Black Elk and other Lakotas, and the result of these interviews was another book, When the Tree Flowered (1951), a highly praised novel about the Sioux. In 1946 he returned to Branson, and then two years later he joined the Department of English at the University of Missouri, where he taught courses that were so popular they had to be moved to the college’s auditorium. In his later years, Neihardt was in great demand as a speaker. He made a number of television appearances, and many of his poetry readings were filmed. The University of Missouri dedicated a wing of its library to preserve his books and papers, and in Nebraska an annual Neihardt Day was instituted in Bancroft, where the Nebraska State Historical Society opened the Neihardt Center. Neihardt retired from teaching in 1966 at the age of eighty-five. He spent his last years with friends and family in Lincoln and died in Columbia, Missouri, in 1973 at the age of ninety-two. At his request, he was cremated, and his remains, along with those of his wife Mona, were scattered over the Missouri River. Called “the most American of contemporary poets,” Neihardt was a kind and gentle man who had an influence on almost everyone he met. His writings introduced thousands of Americans to the history of the West and to Sioux culture. “He has done for the prairies,” said one commentator, “what Homer did for Ilium.” Said another, “Our world is brighter for his having lived among us.” Over the years Nebraska has continued to be a place that fosters and celebrates writers, and its literary excellence continues. Nebraska with a sense of place and realism can be enjoyed today in the poetry of Ted Kooser, recently named in August 2004 and renewed in 2005 the national poet laureate, the first national poet ever named who writes about and resides in the Great Plains. The Omaha World-Herald editorialized about this honor, “Celebrated Nebraska authors of the past, such as Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather, captured the vast sweep of the Plains before they were settled. Poet Ted Kooser captures the Midlands as they are today.” Experiencing an Aldrich story, a Neihardt epic, a Sandoz history, or a Kooser poem, makes one ponder the Plains, feel a certain knowing compatibility, and then, as the World-Herald advises, “nod and agree.”

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29. George W. Norris and the Unicameral

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n November 1934 Nebraskans approved a revolutionary state constitutional amendment creating a unicameral legislature, and the first session of the Nebraska Unicameral convened on January 5, 1937. The Unicameral has remained the only one-house legislature in the continental United States for over seventy years. It has become such a fixture in Nebraska politics that the very word “unicameral” has been transformed from an adjective into a proper noun. The person primarily responsible for persuading Nebraskans to approve the Unicameral was their revered U.S. senator, George W. Norris. Norris had long distrusted bicameralism and believed there was no reason to have two houses when the qualifications and responsibilities of the members were the same. As early as 1923, he had written an article for the New York Times calling for a one-house legislature, and in the years that followed this article was reprinted in pamphlet form and widely circulated in Nebraska. Norris rejected the notion that in the bicameral system the two houses checked and balanced each other. Only half in jest he said, “As a matter of practice, it has developed frequently that, through the conference committee, the politicians have the checks, and the special interests the balances.” Norris was convinced that the conference committee, which negotiated differences between the two houses, was the bane of state politics. “It is more powerful in all matters referred to it,” he said, “than either house, or than both houses combined.” It was both “undemocratic” and “un-American” because its meetings were held in secret, no rollcall votes were taken, and there was no record of its proceedings. To Norris, the conference committee allowed special interest groups to get their way without fear of public reprisals.

Norris also opposed partisanship, believing that officeholders must be free to vote their consciences rather than follow a party line. Insisting that unicameralism and nonpartisanship went hand in hand, Norris refused to support one without the other. Although other proponents of unicameralism were reluctant to link the two reforms, Norris was adamant, and in the end he prevailed. Nebraska’s legislators had to run without a party affiliation, and the offices of minority leader and majority leader were abolished. In 1934 unicameralists in Nebraska established the Model Legislative Committee to draft a constitutional amendment for the unicameral system. The committee included John “Nate” Norton, a Polk County farmer long active in state politics, who first spearheaded a drive for a unicameral in 1915. He was convinced that a unicameral would “save time, talk, and money.” Also on the committee were several political scientists from the University of Nebraska and other interested parties. Norris submitted a proposal to the committee, and with some modifications it was approved. The proponents of unicameralism had to use the initiative because most members of the state legislature opposed any change. To get the signatures they needed, the unicameralists paid those who circulated petitions five cents for every name they secured. The law required at least 57,600 signatures. About 95,000 were obtained. As a result of the petition drive, a constitutional amendment was placed on the 1934 ballot that provided for creating a single-house legislature with thirty to fifty members. The members were to be elected for two-year terms on a nonpartisan basis. Their combined salary as legislators was fixed at $37,500. The amendment had the support of young people, the clergy, and most of the state’s educators. The opposition, however, was formidable. Most politicians, lawyers, bankers, and other special-interest groups opposed the proposal. So too did African Americans in Omaha, fearing—incorrectly as it turned out—that they would lose their black representative in the new legislature. The Nebraska Farmer came out against the measure, as did most of the state’s 440 newspapers. Among the dailies, only the Lincoln Star and the Hastings Tribune voiced support. Senator Norris decided he had to take the issue directly to the people. The opposition was so strong that Norris’s speaking engagements often went unreported in the press, and handbills announcing them were 262

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ripped down. Through it all, Norris’s enormous prestige and tireless energy saved the day. Using his own funds, the white-haired seventythree-year-old statesman toured the state on behalf of the proposal. “I never made a more complete campaign in Nebraska, or in any other political contest,” he said. “I traveled every section of the state, nearly wearing out my automobile.” With such powerful opposition, most observers expected the amendment to fail. And yet it prevailed by a large majority, 286,000 votes to 193,000. All but nine of the state’s ninety-three counties gave the proposal a majority, and those that did not were mainly sparsely settled ones in the west. The Unicameral prevailed because of widespread dissatisfaction with the existing legislature. The Depression had swept many inexperienced Democrats into office in 1932 along with feisty Governor Charles Bryan, and this contributed to a long and fruitless legislative session in 1933. Equally important was the appeal of economy. The old bicameral legislature with thirty-three senators and one hundred representatives had a salary budget of $106,000, while the unicameral’s budget was only a third of this. This was no small matter during the Great Depression, when money was hard to come by. “In the end,” said a New York Times reporter, “it was a sure-fire Nebraska issue—economy—that proved [Norris’s] trump card.” The unicameral amendment also may have benefited from its association with two other popular amendments on the ballot in 1934: the repeal of prohibition and the legalization of pari-mutuel betting. In 1935 the state’s last bicameral legislature met to implement the unicameral amendment. Guided by the recommendations of Professor John P. Senning, a University of Nebraska political scientist who had long advocated a unicameral system, the legislature established forty-three new election districts. Although the constitutional amendment made no mention of titles, from the beginning, members of the Unicameral called themselves senators. George W. Norris (1861–1944), the father of the Unicameral, was one of a handful of statesmen whose public career spanned three great reform movements: Populism in the 1890s, Progressivism in the early 1900s, and the New Deal in the 1930s. A determined and courageous reformer, Norris spent forty years in Congress working to democratize American society and “to protect the helpless, the weak, and the poor from exploitation by the strong.” George W. Norris and the Unicameral

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57. The first meeting of the Nebraska Unicameral in 1937 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Born on an Ohio farm at the beginning of the Civil War, Norris came from a large family that was of German and Scotch-Irish descent. The family was poor, hardworking, deeply religious, and thoroughly Republican. After the death of his father in 1864, Willie (as he was then called) was raised by his mother. Norris attended public school in Ohio and then worked his way through Northern Indiana Normal School (now Valparaiso University). After earning a law degree, he taught school in Ohio and in Washington Territory and then in 1885 moved to Nebraska. He lived for a short time in Beatrice, for a longer time in Beaver City, and after 1900 in McCook. In Nebraska Norris established a law practice, which included work for the Burlington Railroad. He engaged in the milling and mortgage loan business and also dabbled in land speculation. In 1889 he married Pluma Lashley, daughter of one of Beaver City’s leading businessmen. Fourteen years later, after the death of his first wife, he married Ellie Leonard, a McCook schoolteacher. 264

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In 1890 Norris made his first bid for public office. An ardent Republican in a county dominated by Populists, he ran for prosecuting attorney of Furnas County but was defeated. In 1892, however, he was elected to this office, and three years later he won a state judgeship, a post he held for seven years. As a judge, Norris was pragmatic and fair-minded. Preferring “to lean to the side of mercy,” he frequently bent the letter of the law to aid farmers who were unable to pay their debts in the depression-ridden 1890s. “It is a very hard and difficult thing,” he said, “to take away from a man his home when it is all he has, and where he is trying to save it and pay the debt, and has been prevented from doing so by some act of Providence, or some circumstance beyond his control.” In 1902 Norris was elected to Congress, serving in the House from 1903 to 1913. His service coincided with the rise of Progressivism, a powerful reform movement that aimed to purge the government of corruption; democratize the political process; introduce efficiency to government; and ameliorate the worst effects of the Industrial Revolution, particularly among the nation’s urban poor. Norris had been elected to Congress with the help of railroad interests, and by his own admission he was “a bitter Republican partisan.” In 1906, however, he quietly turned in his free railroad pass that railroad companies gave to politicians with expectations of pro-railroad political behavior, and thereafter he worked closely with a group of House reformers. In 1910 Norris led a drive that made the House Rules Committee an elected committee no longer controlled by the Speaker. This reform, which one scholar has called “possibly the most important in the history of the House,” undermined the Speaker’s power and made the House more responsive to the people. From this great victory, Norris ran for the Senate in 1912 and was the leading vote getter in the state. He spent the next thirty years in the Senate, longer than any other Nebraskan. His victory over the Speaker of the House made him a national figure, and he was now recognized as one of the leading reformers in the country. During his first term in the Senate just before America’s entry into World War I, Norris championed a host of progressive causes, such as conservation, labor and anti-monopoly legislation, regulation of the nation’s banks and railroads, and a progressive income tax and inheritance tax. He also favored a number of political reforms, such as the George W. Norris and the Unicameral

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initiative and referendum, primary elections, the recall, and direct election of U.S. senators. Although Norris worked with the Democrats on domestic reform, he was a vocal critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, particularly the drift toward intervention in World War I. Convinced that the United States was being dragged into the war by “the influence of money,” Norris participated in a filibuster in 1917 that blocked Wilson’s request for congressional authorization to arm American merchant ships. When Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany, Norris was one of six Senators to vote against the proposal. After the nation entered the war, Norris criticized the government’s heavy-handed policy of stifling dissent. He also opposed the Treaty of Versailles, which was never approved by the Senate. Though the mood of the American people turned sharply conservative in the 1920s, Norris stayed deeply committed to democracy and “to drive special privilege out of control of government and restore it to the people.” Said one commentator of the time, Norris is “perhaps the clearest, straightest thinker on political and governmental questions in America.” A critic of reform legislation called him “a fighter of great principle, courage and tenacity.” With the onset of the Great Depression in 1930, the causes Norris favored were once again in vogue. Though nearly seventy years old, the Nebraska Senator entered the most important and constructive phase of his career. Working closely with President Franklin Roosevelt and other Democrats, Norris endorsed a host of New Deal reforms, many of which he had long advocated. In 1932 Norris secured enactment of the Norris-LaGuardia Act, a landmark piece of labor legislation. Hereto, employers, particularly in the coal mining industry, had blocked unionization by utilizing court injunctions and requiring workers to sign “yellow-dog” contracts that prohibited them from joining labor unions. The Norris-LaGuardia Act guaranteed workers the right to unionize, outlawed anti-union contracts, and sharply curtailed the use of injunctions. In 1933 Congress enacted another measure long championed by Norris, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public agency charged with building dams to control flooding and to develop electrical power in the Tennessee River Valley. Norris was also instrumental in the establishment of several public-power projects in Nebraska. In 266

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58. Senator George W. Norris, 1942 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

addition, he sponsored legislation that shaped the Rural Electrification Administration, a government agency charged with bringing electricity to the nation’s farms. Norris was also the prime mover behind the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment, the so-called Lame Duck Amendment, ratified in 1933, which moved presidential inaugurations from March 4 to January 20 and put an end to the lame-duck congressional sessions that were held after federal elections were over. By the time World War II erupted, Norris had severed all ties with the Republican Party. Increasingly disillusioned with the party’s commitment to conservatism and its close ties to big business, Norris endorsed the election of liberal Democrats as early as the 1920s. He supported Al Smith over Herbert Hoover in the presidential election of 1928, and he endorsed FDR in all four of his presidential races from 1932 to 1944. Convinced that public leaders must follow their consciences, Norris was an outspoken critic of party politics. “One of the greatest evils of Government,” he maintained, “is partisanship.” George W. Norris and the Unicameral

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By 1930 Republican leaders in Nebraska had become so hostile to Norris that they put up a phony primary candidate, another man named George W. Norris who was actually a grocer from Broken Bow. Their aim was to invalidate Senator Norris’s candidacy by making it impossible to distinguish between votes cast for the two men. The courts, however, thwarted the scheme, and the grocer Norris was jailed for lying about his part in the conspiracy. The Republican National Committee then tried to defeat Norris by flooding the state with scurrilous campaign literature, but the veteran senator prevailed. Norris was elected to the Senate again in 1936, this time as an Independent, largely because he had the support of the Democratic Party. When some Nebraska Democrats abandoned him in 1942, however, he was defeated in a three-man race by Kenneth S. Wherry, who capitalized on a Republican resurgence and growing disillusionment with policies in Washington. Initially Norris, who was now eighty-one years old, took the defeat hard, calling it “a repudiation of 40 years of service.” Within days, however, he had recovered his customary buoyancy, and in his autobiography, Fighting Liberal (1945), published posthumously, he expressed no regrets over his career nor any animosity toward his political rivals. Norris died in 1944 and was buried in McCook. His home is a museum maintained by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It was Norris’s dogged and successful determination to persuade Nebraskans of the virtues of the Unicameral that marked his greatest achievement. Once the one-house legislature was put in place, newspapers from around the country editorialized on the “Nebraska experiment.” Said the Baltimore Sun, “Under our scheme of government, it is possible for any state to embark upon such governmental experiments and serve thereby as a laboratory for practical tests of their value. The Nebraska departure from our historical system of state government will be watched with interest.” Most journalists liked the experiment because it made their job easier. “It’s a reporter’s dream,” said one. “With a single house it’s so much easier to track down legislation and find out its status.” At least a dozen major newspapers dispatched correspondents to Lincoln to report on the Unicameral’s first meeting in 1937. “No session of any Nebraska legislature,” said the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal, “has called so many unofficial observers to Lincoln.” Norris 268

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himself skipped the opening of Congress in order to address the first Unicameral. Journalists were impressed by what they saw. A Lincoln Star reporter praised the Unicameral for its openness, declaring that it “moved the session from hotel rooms to the Capitol.” A New York Times reporter said that the experiment “proved that one house is cheaper than two,” and another observer pronounced the first Unicameral “an able body.” A correspondent for the Des Moines Register thought the proceedings of the first Unicameral remarkably quiet and orderly compared to the last meeting of the bicameral legislature. In 1962 a constitutional amendment extended the term of service for Unicameral members from two to four years, and the following year the number of members was increased to forty-nine, which is where it is today. The pay of members has also been increased from the original $872 a year to $12,000, and since 1984 members have received expenses when the legislature is in session. Nebraska voters approved term limits that were first implemented in the election of 2006, and a number of long-standing legislators had to find new avocations. In 2006 Nebraskans voted down another raise for Unicameral senators. With Nebraska’s apparently successful example before them, many states in the late 1930s debated unicameral proposals. In 1937 alone, twenty-one states considered the reform. A number of states also have considered nonpartisan legislative systems. Minnesota had one for more than fifty years until it was abolished in the 1970s. As recently as the 1990s, when Minnesota had independent governor Jesse Ventura, he sent representatives of the Minnesota legislature to Lincoln to study Nebraska’s Unicameral in action. Their partisanship squelched Minnesota’s attempt to reform their bicameral legislature. In the end, however, no state has followed Nebraska’s lead, and its nonpartisan unicameral “experiment” remains unique. Unlike Minnesota and other states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico approved changing from a bicameral to a unicameral legislature in July 2005. Puerto Ricans gave the unicameral over 83 percent approval, the largest margin ever for referenda on the island. “We kept referring to Nebraska when arguing how you can have a unicameral and be a part of the U.S.,” said one of the leaders of the pro-unicameral movement. The Unicameral has become a tradition in Nebraska. According to George W. Norris and the Unicameral

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one newspaper editor, “The people of Nebraska are just about as likely to vote out . . . unicameralism as the people of Colorado are to vote out Pike’s Peak.” There has been no serious movement to return to a bicameral system, although a bill advocating bicameralism was introduced for the 2007 legislative session. A study of the fifty state legislatures published in 1971 concluded that the Nebraska legislature was first in the nation in accountability and ninth in overall effectiveness. George Norris got it right when he took to his automobile and cajoled Nebraskans all over the state into adopting the Unicameral “bold experiment” back in 1934.

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30. The Nebraska Home Front and World War II

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n Christmas Day—December 25, 1941—something happened in Nebraska that eventually startled and pleased the entire nation. The country was mobilizing for the war effort, and hundreds of soldiers and sailors needed to be transported by train to each of the coasts in order to fight World War II in Europe, Africa, and Asia. What a surprise it was for them to stop in North Platte for ten to twenty minutes to take on water and other supplies only to be greeted by friendly women, men, and children with welcoming smiles and baskets of free food, magazines, and treats. The local and area townspeople had decided to say “thank you” to all who were defending the country. At the Union Pacific Railroad depot on Front Street was born the North Platte Canteen, a place not to be forgotten by the thousands who would drop by during those next four years. On December 7, 1941, a day that President Franklin Roosevelt told Americans “will live in infamy,” Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Even before that fateful December morning, the United States had been moving closer and closer to a war footing with fascist Germany and Italy, and once their ally Japan attacked, war was imminent with the Axis Powers. The war declaration came the very next day from Congress and the president, and Americans prepared for the war effort. Nebraskans were not alone in wanting to do something to defend the United States, and although they resided in the center of the nation, their home front was no less patriotic. The North Platte Canteen started because of a misunderstanding. Rumor had it that Nebraska National Guard Company D was on a train that was to stop in North Platte on December 17th, so people gathered at the depot to give the young soldiers presents as a send-off.

When the train stopped, Company D of the Kansas National Guard got out to stretch their legs. Everyone passed out the gifts anyway; and then Rae Wilson, a twenty-six-year-old North Platte store clerk and sister of Denver Wilson, the Nebraska National Guard Company D commander, wrote a letter to the North Platte Daily Bulletin. Even though the three hundred Kansans at the depot had been mistaken for Nebraskans, Rae observed, “An officer told me it was the first time anyone had met their train and that North Platte had helped the boys keep up their spirits.” Rae concluded with a call to arms on the home front, “I say get back of our sons and other mothers’ sons 100 per cent. Let’s do something and do it in a hurry! We can help this way when we can’t help any other way.” And so the North Platte Canteen was under way, and Nebraskans prepared for the long war. Nebraskans like other Americans paid a significant price and contributed greatly to the World War II effort. Over 120,000 Nebraska women and men joined the army, navy, marines, and air force, and 3,839 died in service to their country. In addition, Nebraskans made essential war equipment. Large bombers were constructed at Bellevue, and ordnance plants at Mead, Grand Island, and Sidney produced weaponry. Air force training facilities were constructed or enhanced at McCook, Harvard, Alliance, Lincoln, and Ainsworth, among other local airfields. But as during World War I probably the most significant contributions from Nebraskans came through the production of food. Unique to the World War II home front, however, were the construction of prisoner-of-war camps in Nebraska once the war started, and the high morale encouraged in the U.S. troops as a result of the truly remarkable North Platte Canteen. Every day, twenty-four hours a day, for over four years, the North Platte Canteen provided troops with good cheer, tasty treats, and a friendly smile. In the first year, approximately 3,000 to 5,000 troops stopped daily at North Platte. Near the end of the war, up to 8,000 troops a day went through the Canteen. Sometimes up to twenty-three separate trains, heading in both directions, made the stopover. For the soldiers, often teenagers who were on their first train ride and away from home for the first time, this was the one and only humane moment on their anxious and unknown journey. Bob Greene, who would chronicle this story in Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (2002), interviewed scores of World War II veterans around the coun272

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59. American World War II troops at the North Platte Canteen (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

try. They all remembered, teary-eyed and forever touched, that moment when they were surprised by the kindly Nebraskans and sometimes rural eastern Coloradans at the North Platte Canteen. Most of the people running the Canteen were young women, single or married, along with their daughters and young sons, and sometimes with their older parents. Virginia Neville Robertson came home to North Platte once her husband joined the army, and she volunteered at the Canteen as did her father, former governor of Nebraska Keith Neville. Neville had been elected governor in 1916 at the age of thirtytwo and served one term during World War I before he was defeated for reelection. He returned to his hometown, North Platte, to build a prominent hotel and theater. Now fifty-six, the father with his daughter helped out at the Canteen. The women who ran the Canteen were well organized; they had to be. A central committee was formed, and it planned each week. Many The Nebraska Home Front and World War II

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women’s organizations from North Platte and surrounding communities were assigned various days. There was the Valley Extension Club of Maxwell, the Methodist Ladies Aid of Hershey, the Happy Hour Club from Big Springs, and the Ladies Aid of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Gothenburg. All in all, over 125 communities helped at the Canteen. Someone even brought a piano to the depot that was put to good use. People gave generously of their own limited resources in a time of gasoline rationing, no interstate highways, and food coupons. People prepared sandwiches with fresh pheasant or egg salad with mayonnaise, a specialty; brought apples, magazines, and cigarettes; and made coffee, popcorn balls, and angel food birthday cakes. There was always at least one birthday cake per train, and it was bestowed whether anyone had a birthday or not. Sometimes the women left a name and address in a popcorn ball or cake, and when troops responded with letters, they responded in kind. Even a few marriages, such as that of Ethel Butolph of Tryon to Virgil Butolph, resulted from these correspondence relationships after the war. But the most important message conveyed, said the sailors and soldiers, was one of friendliness and optimism. Rosalie Lippincott of Shelton told Bob Greene later that at the time it was important to make the troops know how much everyone respected them. “I always knew darn well that a lot of those soldiers in the Canteen were never coming back. But I was an optimistic girl, and I tried not to let it enter my mind. They were handsome young men in the Canteen, people I admired, and I wasn’t going to think about them not coming home.” No train ever was ignored. No soldier was forgotten. Although no one was supposed to know when the trains were coming, the Canteen folks worked out a system whereby the railroad workers wired ahead to the North Platte depot that, “The coffee pot is on.” Word then spread on the platform, and the pace quickened. Although America was still a highly segregated society in the 1940s, World War II eventually resulted in an integrated armed forces, and African American troops were welcomed equally by all of the largely white volunteers at the Canteen. A 1942 photo documents when Lyda Swenson presented a birthday cake to African American private Clifton Hill. While Nebraskans were doing their best to send off the young troops to war, other Nebraskans were preparing to receive Germans and Italians who were captured during the war. More than two million enemy sol274

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diers became pows, and nearly one-fourth of them—428,000—were shipped to America. Of those, most were Germans (372,000, including a number of non-Germans who had been drafted into the German armed services). Approximately 51,000 Italians and 5,000 Japanese were also transported to American soil as pows. About 12,000 pows came to Nebraska. They were assigned to either one of several base camps or over twenty side camps. Most camps were located in southern or western Nebraska. The three largest base camps were at Atlanta in southwestern Phelps County, Scottsbluff, and Fort Robinson. Fort Crook in Sarpy County near Omaha briefly housed Italian prisoners, as did Scottsbluff. No Japanese prisoners were brought to Nebraska, and no Japanese-American internment camps were set up in Nebraska. A few Japanese Nebraskans were unfortunately sent to the closest internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Principal pow side camps resided in or near Alma, Bayard, Bertrand, Bridgeport, Franklin, Grand Island, Hastings, Hebron, Kearney, Lexington, Lyman, Mitchell, Morrill, Ogallala, Palisade, Sidney, and Weeping Water. The treatment of pows was governed by the Geneva Convention of 1929. This international agreement required that prisoners be treated the same as troops of the host country. Each prisoner was entitled to receive ample food and recreation as well as an opportunity for intellectual and spiritual growth. The policy of treating pows well in the United States, historians have written, led to better treatment for American prisoners of war overseas. Most prisoners in Nebraska and elsewhere were surprised at the treatment they received at first, particularly the amenities they found in the barracks, which were equipped with hot and cold running water, toilets, and showers, and their rations. “Here we eat more in a single day than during a whole week at home,” said one. Many prisoners pleaded with family and friends not to send them food, since it was in short supply at home. “I am still well off,” a German prisoner at Fort Robinson wrote to his mother in 1944, “I have, all things considered, a good life also here in Nebraska.” Prisoners had opportunities for learning. Sometimes they could partake of courses offered by nearby colleges at the camps. Fort Robinson prisoners were especially interested in learning about the fort and the history of Indian-white relations. Beginning in 1945, each base camp produced a newspaper, prepared by the prisoners themselves and published in German. Prisoners could send and receive letters and packages, The Nebraska Home Front and World War II

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though all mail was censored. Many had radios that were often checked to make sure they were not being used to send out secret messages. Most pows were young enlisted men, typically in their twenties, and many were sportsmen. Handball, volleyball, softball, and boxing matches were common, and soccer was especially popular. Germans were particularly skilled at soccer, and Americans traveling along Highway 6 near Camp Atlanta on almost any Sunday in good weather could see them playing. Baseball, however, was not of interest to the pows. Under the Geneva Convention, officers could not be forced to work. Instead, they received allowances ranging from twenty to forty dollars a month, depending on rank. Enlisted men, however, received only three dollars a month and could be required to perform noncombatant work. They did much of the routine maintenance work around the camps, which freed American soldiers for duty overseas. Most of the work away from the camps was mainly agricultural, which was contracted through agricultural extension agencies. pows were in great demand because the war had created a severe farm labor shortage. Many pows welcomed the opportunity to work away from camp because they were treated well and often received extra rations. “Farmers usually showed us prisoners a wonderfully natural hospitality and friendliness,” recalled one pow. Said the Scottsbluff Star-Herald, the Germans in return were “good soldiers and good prisoners; they kept their barracks in trim and military order, their mess halls spick and span. When they were offered a chance to work, they took it gladly and were surprised to find they would be paid.” Morale of prisoners was generally high, according to American camp officers. Relations between the pows and their guards were usually friendly. According to a German prisoner at Fort Robinson, “Conditions were very good at the camp. The prisoners got along real well with the soldiers.” On one occasion, German pows at Fort Robinson who found a box of hand grenades in a warehouse turned it over to their guards. Wolfgang Dorschel, elected spokesman for the German pows at Fort Robinson, also said as much and noted that prisoners and guards developed friendships. He related one incident with a Captain Silverman, guard at the fort. After Hitler had been threatened in 1944, German soldiers had been told to use Nazi salutes in the camp. Dorschel refused to do so when he saw Captain Silverman, “I gave him the old salute. He asked me if I hadn’t read about the new order. I told him I had but I 276

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60. German pows arriving at Fort Robinson in 1944 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

was ashamed to salute him that way because I knew he was Jewish. He said I was a soldier and I had to obey orders. He understood that.” Prisoners also got along well, it seemed, with civilian Nebraskans. During the holidays, it was common for people from nearby towns to send cookies and other food to the camps. People in Crawford raised money to buy Christmas gifts and to furnish a recreation room for pows at Fort Robinson. They also donated books to the camp library. A romance between a prisoner and a Crawford woman was reported, and a volunteer worker at Fort Robinson summed up the typical civilian attitude, “You know those German boys weren’t responsible for that war. It was Hitler and those high Moguls who caused it.” Not all was happiness, however, in the pow camps. At first hardened Nazis—usually members of the Hitler Youth, Gestapo, or Afrika Corps—controlled many of the camps. “The real Nazis were still in charge,” said an American soldier at Fort Robinson. Anti-Nazis were ostracized from the imprisoned German community and in some cases beaten, murdered, or driven to suicide. Only a few serious incidents happened in Nebraska. A German soldier at Scottsbluff not considered The Nebraska Home Front and World War II

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a good Nazi was beaten by his fellow Germans after he insisted on writing to his father, who resided in the United States. More than twenty-eight hundred pows tried to escape from the American camps. Most were captured or surrendered quietly after running out of food or realizing the futility of reaching Mexico or Canada and then getting back home. The usual punishment was thirty days in the stockade and two weeks on bread and water. Although American officials feared escaped prisoners would commit sabotage, none was ever recorded. A few escaped from Nebraska camps, but all were recaptured. In December 1944 two pows from Sidney stole a jeep and were apprehended thirty miles away in Sterling, Colorado; and in January 1945 two more German pows from Bridgeport were captured near Fort Morgan, Colorado. On another occasion, a prisoner who escaped from Fort Robinson was picked up at a tavern in York. World War II ended in Europe in May 1945 and in the Pacific in August 1945. With the end of the war, the home front would also never be the same. Repatriation of the pows did not begin until January 1946, and it was not completed until July of that same year. In a survey of German pows, 74 percent said they liked staying in the United States, and it is estimated that five thousand returned to settle, including some in Nebraska. German pow groups have periodically held reunions and occasionally visited their old camps in the United States. In 1987 a number of former German pows, including one who lived in Rushville, met with some of their captors at Fort Robinson. They agreed that they had experienced a new and positive way of life in Nebraska, something they would not forget. The end of the war also meant the folks at the Canteen in North Platte would soon experience a change. The headline on August 15, 1945, in the North Platte Daily Bulletin said it all: “WAR ENDS!” The paper reported that “A few minutes after 6 o’clock, North Platte promptly went mad. Residents poured into the loop district as whistles shrilled, bells rang and horns squawked.” The next night a Victory Dance sponsored by the North Platte Lions Club was held at the Canteen. The end of the war, of course, did not mean the end of the Canteen, not just yet. Soldiers and sailors were now coming home. They needed to be greeted properly, and they had also heard about the North Platte Canteen and eagerly anticipated their reception there. The last day marking the official closing of the Canteen and an era 278

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in western Nebraska was April 1, 1946. Sixteen trains came through North Platte that day, and the Ladies Aid of St. John’s Lutheran Church at Gothenburg met them all. Closure meant a kind of “wind-down in North Platte,” one local resident later recalled. A proper accounting revealed $3,033.56 plus equipment remained. It was sent to the Veterans’ hospital in Lincoln, which bought one hundred thousand matchbooks inscribed, “With the compliments of the North Platte Canteen.” No accounting could ever tell how much time, energy, and food had been donated. That was impossible. And no federal money was involved in the entire operation of the North Platte Canteen except for five dollars donated by President Roosevelt shortly after he heard about what the people of western Nebraska were doing. The citizens of North Platte thought they would probably return to the way things were after April 1, 1946, but life did change. In this railroad center for the central Plains, a way of life would be over within a few decades. By 1971 the last passenger trains stopped in North Platte, Amtrak having decided to take a different route through Nebraska. The Union Pacific Railroad devoted itself exclusively to freight, so they did not need a depot there. As town residents told Bob Greene, “in the middle of the night” the up stole into North Platte and tore down the depot. They destroyed the Canteen in a fit of the corporate pursuit of the bottom line. Today in North Platte, the Union Pacific is still a force. Its Bailey Yard handles twelve thousand freight cars per day, and it maintains fifty westbound tracks and sixty-four eastbound tracks. And on Front Street, a plaque and flagpole commemorate this amazing home front event in Nebraska.

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31. Nebraska’s Visual Feast

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n the summer of 1942, thirty-two-year-old Wright Morris and his wife Mary Ellen decided to travel by car from Pennsylvania to California. Wright had been making trips across the country since he was a teen growing up in Nebraska. World War II was being fought, and having been rejected by both the navy and the army Wright turned to photography and writing as his life’s vocation. The death of his father in 1941 had also made Wright desirous of tracing his family roots and finding his own sense of place. Armed with a Guggenheim Fellowship to help pay for expenses, off the couple ventured. Wright Morris visited his Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara Morris in Norfolk. Wright wrote that his return to his origins left him “drugged by feelings that both moved and disturbed me.” He decided not to take pictures then but to return. He made a “pact with the bygone,” resolving to record for posterity what he would eventually call The Home Place, a highly praised photo-text of his early years in central Nebraska. “By the time we left,” wrote Morris, with “the setting sun burning on the windshield, I was committed to the recovery of a past I had only dimly sensed that I possessed.” This moment in time would result in a lifetime of questioning of place and identity for one of America’s and Nebraska’s greatest creative artists. From its very beginnings, Nebraska has been the subject of the visual arts. The earliest Americans carved cave etchings and recorded winter counts on buffalo hides. Scenes, portraits, and intricate designs adorned the material culture of Native Nebraskans. The first European Americans to journey across Nebraska also took note of its beauty and recorded its physical features. Lewis and Clark sketched alongside their journal entries, marking their various flora and fauna finds, as did later expedition leaders.

Painters and drawers descended upon Nebraska by the mid-nineteenth century. They came to document and place their own interpretation upon Nebraska’s visual feast. George Catlin sketched Indians he met as he ascended the Missouri River and returned to his eastern studio to complete his oil paintings. So too did Karl Bodmer, a Swiss painter, who with his German patron Prince Maximilian of Wied, toured the Missouri Valley. Recently, when Omaha Indians sought to reconstruct their own past, tribal historian Dennis Hastings credited Bodmer’s paintings as important visual reminders of the Omahas’ material culture. It was not until the twentieth century that Nebraska began to produce artists with a national following who would have a significant impact on their particular art. Some would choose to highlight their origins, such as in the photography of Wright Morris; others would search for an identity in their past relatives and cultures and lead an artistic movement, such as Aaron Douglas; and still others would paint within existing canons without reference to their Nebraska past, such as Robert Henri. All would be celebrated. Wright Morris (1910–98) was born in Central City, Nebraska, on January 6, 1910, to Grace and Will Morris. Six days later his mother died. His father was ill-equipped to handle this catastrophe as well as raise a young child, and so Wright was passed from neighbor to relatives during much of his early life. Wright lived in Central City for his first nine years and then moved with his father first to several towns along the Platte River and ultimately to Omaha in 1919. Employment never seemed to work out. When Wright was fourteen he and his father relocated to Chicago. Wright found solace and employment at the Larrabee ymca as his father drifted in and out of his life. On one occasion Will took his son on a car trip to California that would become the basis of Wright’s first novel. The Depression found Wright Morris briefly attending an Adventist college in California where he was asked to leave and then reuniting with his mother’s relatives as he sought to find his way in life. Then in 1931 he tried further studies at Pomona College, where he was influenced positively by several professors to think and write with artistic realism. Wright later saw this era as crucial to shaping his thinking. He quit his studies without completing his degree in 1933 to travel to Europe. This interlude also influenced his later work. After he returned from Europe in 1934, he married Mary Ellen Finfrock, who took a teaching job in Nebraska’s Visual Feast

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61. Wright Morris in his later years (courtesy of University of Nebraska–Lincoln Archives and Special Collections).

Connecticut, and the couple moved east. Throughout his first thirty years, Wright Morris seemed to live a nearly nomadic existence. Although he traveled extensively, Morris did not forget his origins. In the course of his lengthy and productive career, Morris published four volumes of his own photographs with text, and he wrote twenty novels, six short story collections, six volumes of literary criticism, and a four-volume autobiography. His work extended beyond Nebraska, but his art and writing about Nebraska constitute some of his most critically acclaimed work. Wright Morris began his photography with the purchase of a special camera shortly after his first marriage. He experimented with phototexts. Morris first published a photo-text essay, The Inhabitants, as a result of an exhibition at the New School in New York City. The founder of this avant-garde institution of higher education was also a native Nebraskan, Alvin Johnson, and even today the school’s connections to Nebraska remain strong with former Nebraska governor and senator Robert Kerrey serving as its president. From 1940 to 1941 Morris organized and executed an extensive 282

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“photo-safari” around the United States. During this time his estranged father died in Brooklyn, New York. All the while, Morris took photos and wrote and published the first of his novels about Nebraska and Nebraskans in 1942, My Uncle Dudley. Others that embraced Nebraska include The Field of Vision (1956), recipient of the National Book Award; Ceremony at Lone Tree (1960); and his last novel, a concluding tribute to women of the Great Plains, Plains Song for Female Voices (1980), winner of the American Book Award. In 1944 Morris again uprooted himself and moved to suburban Philadelphia, where he began a long friendship with Nebraskan Loren Eiseley. While there, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship that helped him continue his dual artistic endeavors. In 1947 Morris returned to Nebraska to snap his most celebrated pictures. His photographs, taken with a 4 x 5 view camera, eventually constituted The Home Place (1948). Wright next participated in a controversial photography symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it was after this event that he forsook his photographic interests. He divorced his wife, married Josephine Kantor, and concentrated on a writing career that led him ultimately back to California to teach at San Francisco State University. Morris later wrote, “I have spent most of my life puzzling over the lines on the map of my childhood.” He then pondered, “In what sense, it might be asked, have I been away? The high plain lies within me. It is something I no longer try to escape.” It is evident in his photography that the Great Plains of Nebraska were truly within him. Some of his most praised photos include “Uncle Harry, Norfolk, Nebraska,” “School Outhouse and Backstop,” “Reflection in Oval Mirror,” “Screened Window with Curtains,” “Rocker,” and “Straightback Chair.” All are found in The Home Place. Another hallmark Plains photo that has been reproduced extensively came from his photo-safari in 1940, when Morris captured “Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas.” Morris’s photos and novels are stark. They are also richly textured and complex. In many ways, they reflect his complicated early years in Nebraska and his own time. His formative artistic years were the 1930s and early 1940s, a time of tremendous upheaval in the United States and Europe. There is a taciturn feel to his pictures and stories. “In the dry places, men begin to dream,” wrote Morris. “Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Nebraska’s Visual Feast

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Meridian—where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t—towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops.” A non-Nebraskan might look at Morris’s photos and see poverty, the remnants of the Dust Bowl, and the Depression. Morris saw something more human and humane. Perhaps because of the confusions of his childhood, Morris felt a driving need to find stability and his root identity. He sometimes wrote that he had been left out or missed by history. Morris lamented that he had “come too late” for experiencing what he termed Nebraska’s heroic past. The settlement era had ended before Morris took up photography. He recorded instead a different Nebraska. “Cather came to the Plains at the age of nine,” wrote Morris, “the year that I left them.” Wright Morris died in Mill Valley, California, in 1998. His biographer, Joseph J. Wydeven, assessed Morris’s contributions: “As a novelist and photographer, Morris sought to position himself in meaningful relationship to the past, not so much looking for stories as for objects that had stories—and histories—imbedded in them.” Morris, wrote Wydeven, continually explored folkways and elders as cultural guardians through frontal photography. Nebraska places were captured clearly with deliberate placement. “The images,” observed his biographer, “are given to us with such ceremony that one begins to believe each one, if properly understood, might hold the key to all his work.” After Morris’s death, his widow Jo Morris donated many of his photos and his personal archives to the University of Nebraska’s Love Library and Sheldon Art Gallery. Another artist connected to Nebraska who, like Morris, engaged throughout his life’s work in a search for his past and his identity was Aaron Douglas (1898–1979). Douglas emerged in the 1920s as a leading painter of the Harlem Renaissance. Born into an African American family in segregated Topeka, Kansas, in 1898, Douglas worked very hard to achieve an education. As a teenager he labored in a Topeka nursery and in the Union Pacific rail yard, saving for a college education. He worked in the same dangerous place where young Linda Brown had to cross in the 1950s in order to attend her all-black elementary school until she and her family decided to challenge the separate but unequal status of African American education. This eventually resulted in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), a landmark civil rights constitutional law decision. 284

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After graduating from high school, Douglas was accepted at the University of Nebraska, where he experienced his first integrated education and worked at several waiter jobs to support himself. He was one of the first African Americans to achieve an undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska, receiving his bachelor’s degree in art in 1922 at the age of twenty-four. While he was an undergraduate student, Douglas probably read The Crisis, an undergraduate student magazine published at the University of Nebraska to which black students contributed poems and stories that already anticipated the “New Negro” consciousness and social movement. After graduating from Nebraska, Douglas taught in Kansas City schools for several years, but he decided that he needed further art training and moved to New York City, where he began to study with Winold Reiss, a German illustrator. Reiss encouraged Douglas to spend time in Paris perfecting his art and to study African art. Douglas did both, and he also traveled throughout the American South and to Haiti. By 1925 Douglas resided in New York and began to paint. So successful an artist, he became known as the “father of modern African American art.” He was the first black American artist to use modernism and to explore African art in his paintings. Douglas is generally considered the most renowned artist of the Harlem Renaissance, a term used to describe “an explosion of black creativity in literature, art, music, and dance.” The Harlem Renaissance occurred in the 1920s and was centered in New York City, but its writers and artists could be found throughout the country. It was symbolized by the publication in 1922 of “With an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius” by James Weldon Johnson. Why did the Harlem Renaissance develop? First, many African Americans after World War I moved away from their homes. Aaron Douglas had also ventured forth. Some escaped the oppressive conditions in the Jim Crow South, including the border state cities such as Topeka, and they moved to northern cities. Others relocated from rural areas and obtained an education. Harlem, to most young black intellectuals such as Douglas, was a place of freedom that drew them for they could express their art in ways previously unknown or forbidden. Fundamental to this creativity were the first Black American attempts directly to link Africa and African Americans in both a literary and an artistic sense. Nebraska’s Visual Feast

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W. E. B. DuBois led this cultural revival, describing in The Negro (1915) how important African culture was to American Blacks. When Douglas’s art attracted the attention of DuBois, he urged Douglas to embrace themes that integrated African art with his own Nebraska, Kansas, and urban cultural experience. Aaron Douglas met this challenge, painting American subjects that often also included African masks and images of African trickster stories. Douglas is best known for his murals and book illustrations. The murals are brilliantly colored depictions of African American life and culture. He was among the first African Americans to establish a panAfrican artistic style. In 1934 under the New Deal wpa, he was hired to paint a series of murals for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The murals in four panels, entitled Aspects of Negro Life, represented African American history tracing the journey of Black Americans from freedom in Africa to slavery in the United States and then from liberation after the Civil War to migration to the city. The influence of African sculpture, music, and geometric forms characterize Douglas’s art. Today this building and this mural are a part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the preeminent archives for African American history. His murals also grace the Fisk University Library in Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the Art Department and taught at Fisk from 1937 until he retired in 1966. In 1942 Douglas completed an ma in art at Columbia University. One of Douglas’s most prominent paintings is entitled Window Cleaning. Here he displayed a strong and dignified black man cleaning a window in a high-rise urban setting. This painting is in the collection of the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Douglas’s portraits show a strong sense of solemnity and cultural pride that suggest an insistence upon the achievement of rights in society. Douglas also designed book illustrations, including dust jackets, that show African connections, like ancient Egyptian sculpture, to modern African American life. Douglas’s most successful book illustrations were in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). In this collection, the prominent poet, teacher, diplomat, and naacp executive secretary composed a series of folk sermons in verse that over the years have been performed many times in theaters and on television. Douglas’s illustrations pictured angular black figures under mystical lights that caught significant attention. When James 286

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62. Window Cleaning (1935) by Aaron Douglas (courtesy of Nebraska Art Association Collection, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska–Lincoln).

Weldon Johnson died in 1938, his request to be buried with Douglas’s original illustrated book was honored. Douglas wrote that for African Americans, “Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black.” Douglas wanted his fellow black artists to create, reflecting the African American past, its highs and lows. He recognized that the freedom to create that he had achieved through his education at the University of Nebraska occurred at the same time horrible race riots happened in northern cities, including in Omaha where Will Brown was lynched. “Let’s bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let’s do the impossible. Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.” These words truly represent the gritty, powerful intellectual contribution of artist Aaron Douglas. Nebraska’s Visual Feast

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Aaron Douglas was living in New York City when another prominent artist with a Nebraska connection died. That artist was Robert Henri (1865–1929), one of America’s greatest painters of realism. He was a leader of the Ash Can School of American artists who pioneered realistic painting and freedom of expression in art. Henri (pronounced HEN-rye) was born in 1865 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He moved to Cozad, Nebraska, in 1873, when he was eight years old. His father, John J. Cozad, who had founded the town, was also a riverboat gambler and a disreputable swindler who became embroiled in a legal dispute that ended with him murdering a man. Fearing he would be charged and convicted of the crime, Cozad escaped Nebraska, secretly settling in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After a decade in Nebraska and growing to adulthood, young Robert and the rest of his family followed their father east. John J. Cozad changed his name to Richard Henry Lee, and Robert posed as his foster son, taking the name of Robert Henry, which he later changed to Henri. Shortly after his arrival in New Jersey, Robert left for Philadelphia to enroll in an art school. Here he made his artistic home, painting and teaching. Much of Robert’s early life is chronicled in the historical novel, Son of a Gamblin’ Man: The Youth of an Artist (1960), written by Mari Sandoz. After several apprenticeships in Paris, Henri moved to New York City in 1900, where he established himself as a coming artist of realism and a very popular art teacher with a number of students who went on to make significant artistic contributions. Robert Henri became a leading portraitist of diverse human subjects, including Irish, African, Chinese, and Native Americans. He perfected delicate, airy brushwork and liked to use warm colors like reds and browns. Three of his most famous paintings include The Working Man, The Little Dancer, and Isadora Duncan. It is rare for a portrait painter to be dedicated to realism as most who sit for portraits wish to be remembered as beautifully as possible. Today Henri’s life and paintings can be explored in Cozad at the Robert Henri Museum and Walkway. Henri taught his students that their work “should be a social force that creates a stir in the world.” He himself painted work that criticized the death and destruction of war, specifically World War I, which affected Americans and Nebraskans deeply. Henri wrote a caption for an exhibit of his in 1917 expressing the opinion that “It is disorder in the mind of man that produces chaos of the kind that brings about such a 288

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war as we are today overwhelmed with. It is the failure to see the various phases of life in their ultimate relation that brings about militarism, slavery, the longing of one nation to conquer another, the willingness to destroy for selfish, inhuman purposes.” Henri, like Douglas, personified efforts to paint the truth with integrity and dignity. Today Nebraskans continue to support the creative geniuses of the state. Through the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Humanities Council, artists and writers alike are encouraged to offer their visual and literary contributions. So strong is this commitment that the Nebraska state legislature, when confronted with the possible congressional abolition of federal programs in the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, by a vote of thirty-nine to one, created the Nebraska Cultural Trust that united the nac and nhc as partners to raise funds to be matched by state resources. Nebraska is the only state that strongly supports its creative citizens by providing a permanent endowment to ensure the continued artistic endeavors of a Wright Morris or an Aaron Douglas or a Robert Henri.

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32. Nebraska’s Scientists

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he conclusion of World War II and the subsequent beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s quickly brought home to Americans the need to develop quality scientists. Science had always been a part of life in the Americas ever since the first indigenous peoples’ Agricultural Revolution and their domestication of corn and the discoveries of the Benjamins: Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Banneker, and Benjamin Franklin, that is. These enlightenment inventors of the Revolutionary War era dabbled in inoculations, seventeen-year locust cycles, bifocals, stoves, and street paving, to name a few of their many scientific contributions. But by 1945, after two world wars in thirty years and the continuation on a war footing, there was a greater sense of urgency about science in the United States than ever before. The federal government now sought to encourage science and to find scientists ready to make their mark. Three Nebraska scientists of the mid-twentieth century—Harold Edgerton, George Beadle, and Loren Eiseley—more than made impressions. The mid-1940s found Harold Edgerton assisting the U.S. Army’s air squadrons in Italy, England, and France. He figured out how to create strobes of light for nighttime aerial reconnaissance photography so that the Allies could detect enemy troop movements, and for his scientific contribution Edgerton received the Medal of Freedom in 1946. Meanwhile, George Beadle had just completed nine years of collaboration with Stanford University biologist Edward Lawrie Tatum. Beadle’s research discovered that genes regulate biochemical events within cells, a crucial prelude to the unraveling of dna. For this important biological breakthrough, both Beadle and Tatum would receive the 1958 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Loren Eiseley, a soon-to-be renowned paleontologist and ecologist, moved to the University of Pennsylvania to head its

Department of Anthropology in 1947. A few years earlier, in 1942, he had published a significant essay in Scientific American entitled “The Folsom Mystery” that explained how the origins of human civilization interacted with the natural world. Four years later he wrote his critically acclaimed first book, The Immense Journey (1946). This collection of essays relied upon Eiseley’s early life experiences and revealed his unique ability to combine science and humanity. A later work, Darwin’s Century (1958), would win for him Phi Beta Kappa’s prize for the best book in science. Most certainly, the end of World War II found these three Nebraskans hitting their collective scientific strides. Because of their contributions, optometry, photography, biology, biochemistry, plant pathology, physical anthropology, and ecology would never be the same. Harold Eugene Edgerton, the oldest of three children born to Mary Nettie and Frank Edgerton, came into the world in Fremont on April 6, 1903. After twelve years of moving no less than four times, the Edgerton family settled permanently in Aurora. There young Harold attended junior and senior high school, and he learned photography from his uncle. Harold even set up his own dark room. Beginning in 1920, teenage Edgerton worked summers for the Nebraska Power and Light Company, where he developed an interest in electricity. In 1921 he enrolled at the University of Nebraska to major in electrical engineering. After he graduated in 1925, he took a position with an electric company in Schenectady, New York, working with turbines, but he remained scientifically curious. That curiosity led Harold to begin graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1926. Here he pursued his scientific interests without abandon, focusing on the use of strobe lights with rotating engines. An able student, Edgerton received his ma and permanently joined the mit faculty in 1927. In 1928 Edgerton married Nebraskan Esther May Garrett, and they would have three children between 1931 and 1935. During that time, Harold continued his studies at mit, obtaining his PhD in 1931, and he invented the stroboscope, a device used in ultra-high-speed and still photography. With his invention, Harold Edgerton attained the realization of his lifelong fascination with high-speed photography and explanations of the scientific complexities of light to the general public. His first displayed photographs were included in a 1933 exhibition by the Royal Nebraska’s Scientists

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63. Harold Edgerton’s high-speed apple photograph (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

Photographic Society in London, and the next year more of his highspeed photos were shown at the same annual event where Edgerton won the Society’s Bronze Medal, his first of many photography awards. In 1937 he began a collaboration with Life Magazine photographer Gjon Mili, and together they presented the very first photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Edgerton’s scientific expertise attracted the interest of the U.S. Army, and in 1939 it commissioned him to develop a strobe lamp sufficiently powerful to use for aerial photography at night. This task was successfully completed by 1944 and used during campaigns in both Europe and the Far East. The Atomic Energy Commission also engaged Edgerton to assist them, and he invented a camera capable of photographing nuclear explosions from a distance of only seven miles. All the while, Harold Edgerton continued to seek ways to show the public the humanistic values of his science. In 1947 he published the first of many essays with the National Geographic entitled “Hummingbirds in Action” that captured visually for the first time the wing movement 292

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and flight patterns of these birds. Six years later Edgerton began a very successful collaboration with French underwater explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Edgerton developed cameras that could be used to photograph highly detailed pictures of the ocean floor, and he started experimenting with sonar. That led to his invention of the sonar Thumper, a device that could penetrate the deepest sea floor and bring back objects and rocks for observation. At the same time, Edgerton and mit assistants invented a special camera that took pictures of the blood flowing in human beings. It was, however, his work with Cousteau that captured Edgerton’s imagination. Together they explored the ancient Greek city of Helice that had been submerged by earthquakes around 373 bc. Edgerton next located the Civil War battleship, the USS Monitor, lost since 1862 off the coast of North Carolina. In 1985 he worked with Cousteau again to locate Spanish shipwrecks off the coast of Havana, and his cameras were used to photograph the Titantic off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1986. On January 4, 1990, just after Harold Edgerton finished his lunch at the mit Faculty Club, he experienced a fatal heart attack at age eighty-six. The world knew Harold Edgerton as a man who gave to everyone “a window on the invisible.” Born October 22, 1903, the son of Hattie and Chancey Beadle, farmers near Wahoo, George Wells Beadle seemed destined to follow his father’s footsteps. George grew up in and around Wahoo and went to junior and senior high school at Wahoo Public. One of his science teachers recognized George’s talents and encouraged him to go to the University of Nebraska rather than back to the farm after he graduated, and fate had it that he would pursue that goal. At age eighteen, young Beadle matriculated to Lincoln to major in agriculture. George Beadle received a bachelor of science degree in 1926, but rather than return to Saunders County, he stayed in Lincoln to work on a hybrid wheat project with Professor F. D. Keim. This resulted in a master’s degree the very next year, and Professor Keim then secured for his young student a teaching assistantship at Cornell University, where Beadle pursued his PhD, receiving it in 1931. After Cornell, educational success continued to follow him, this time to the California Institute of Technology, where, with a National Research Council Fellowship, he worked for five years on the evolution of Indian corn, a subject he would return to in his later years. Nebraska’s Scientists

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64. George Beadle at work in the greenhouse (courtesy of University of Nebraska– Lincoln Archives and Special Collections).

In 1935, just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, George Beadle traveled to Paris to spend six months on a project that would forever change life as we know it. He went to France to work with Professor Boris Ephrussi at the Parisian Institut de Biologie Physicochimique. There, they collaborated to discover how eye pigment was genetically determined in the fruit fly. That led Beadle upon his return to the United States to move to Stanford University to team up with E. L. Tatum for nine years to do further genetic explorations, this time on bread mold. What they discovered would shake the scientific community. Beadle and Tatum found that genes control a cell’s production of enzymes and dictate the basic chemistry of cells. This concept, briefly summarized as the “one gene, one enzyme” hypothesis, paved the way to the discovery of dna and major advances in molecular biology. The revolution in medicine has been profound. In 1946 George Beadle returned to Cal Tech as professor and chair of biology, and he remained there until 1961, when he was chosen to be chancellor of the University of Chicago. Before he became a university president, he was honored by many universities for his scientific 294

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discoveries, including the University of Nebraska, where he was bestowed an honorary doctorate of science in 1949. In 1958 he received the ultimate scientific recognitions—a Nobel Prize for Medicine and the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in Science. Beadle served as president of Chicago for six years. During that time, he emphasized undergraduate education. Beadle, who had begun as a rather poor teacher, worked hard to get better. In his biography, George Beadle, An Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century (2003), the authors Paul Berg and Maxine Singer wrote that Beadle in his later years “was critical of top scholars who forsake undergraduate teaching to further their research,” and borrowing a term from another higher education critic, Beadle called such professors, “intellectual eunuchs.” At the end of his presidency, Beadle deadpanned when he said his most important contribution had been encouraging grass to grow on campus in place of cement. While at Chicago, Beadle also wrote his own book in 1966. In The Language of Life, Beadle described his involvement with genetics research as well as the many exciting developments permeating the field of biology. After Beadle retired in 1967, he returned to his original interest in Indian corn, tracing its genetics. He organized a major scientific consortium that led to his work with over two million seeds that eventually isolated up to four genes linking ancient Indian maize to today’s modern domesticated corn. George Beadle married twice and fathered one son. Nebraska’s only Nobel prize-winner passed away on June 9, 1989. Loren Corey Eiseley, born to Daisey and Clyde Eiseley in Lincoln in 1907 just four years after the births of George Beadle and Harold Edgerton, was of German and English pioneering ancestry. His early years were difficult. “I was a solitary child in a divided household,” he later recalled. His father “had a great genius for love [but] his luck was very bad.” An actor-turned-hardware salesman, Clyde Eiseley was frequently away from home, which left the boy’s deaf and neurotic mother in charge. “I never saw my mother weep,” Eiseley said; “it was her gift to make others suffer instead.” Although the Eiseleys spent most of Loren’s childhood in Lincoln, they lived in Fremont from 1909 to 1911 and in Aurora from 1917 to 1918. No doubt Loren walked the same paths that Harold Edgerton had strolled. Impoverished and reclusive, the family usually rented houses on the edge of town. Loren’s only sibling was a half-brother fourteen Nebraska’s Scientists

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years older, so for all practical purposes Loren was an only child. He had few friends. “In the quiet social isolation of his childhood,” a friend later said, “he kept intimate company with . . . the contents of abandoned houses, of woods, fields and stream edges.” To escape his home life, Loren turned increasingly to the world of books and to nature. By the time he went to high school, he wanted to be a nature writer. With the illness and death of his father and the family’s need of financial assistance, Loren took menial jobs and dropped out of Lincoln High, never graduating, but he was able to enroll in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska in 1925. As a freshman, Eiseley was on the same campus with junior George Beadle and senior Harold Edgerton, but no evidence suggests any of the three actually met. Already skilled at writing, Eiseley was accused of plagiarizing a freshman English paper. “You didn’t compose this,” his instructor insisted, “it is too well written.” In his junior year, like Mari Sandoz, Eiseley contributed an essay to one of the first issues of Prairie Schooner, the university’s new literary magazine, and the following year he joined the magazine’s editorial staff. The Great Depression caused many to place their college educations on hold, and Eiseley dropped out to work and save money. He took odd jobs and even rode the rails as a hobo. He lived for a time in Colorado and California, seeking a cure for the tuberculosis he had contracted. After recovering his health, he returned to Lincoln where he resumed his education, graduating with a degree in English and anthropology in 1933. While he pursued his degree, Eiseley worked on excavations for the Nebraska State Museum. He went on one dig west of Scottsbluff that yielded bones proving that early humans (the Folsom peoples) had been in North America for at least ten thousand years—much longer than archeologists had believed. “His experience out there,” an observer later said, “influenced him profoundly. The vast solitude and timeless grandeur of that country would set the mood and suggest the themes for some of his best writing later on.” Eiseley resolved at the time to become a professional anthropologist. With help financially from an uncle, Eiseley enrolled in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a master’s degree in anthropology in 1935 and a doctorate only two years later in 1937. He helped put himself through graduate school by working on Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State, a volume put out by the Federal 296

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Writers’ Project in the 1930s. In 1938 he married Mabel Langdon, a bright young woman who worked for the University of Nebraska State Museum and who later served as assistant director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Eiseley’s first academic job was at the University of Kansas. There, the budding physical and cultural anthropologist taught an introductory sociology course that made him feel like “the proverbial Russian fleeing in a sleigh across the steppes before a wolf pack.” Eiseley found teaching a challenge as he was such an introvert, but he overcame his anxieties and blossomed into a popular teacher by drawing upon his own personal experiences to illustrate points. During World War II, Eiseley hoped to join the army so that his anthropological expertise might be useful in the Pacific, but he was rejected because of sight and hearing disabilities and also because he was teaching anatomy at the University of Kansas Medical School, an important national priority. After a brief sojourn as head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio, Eiseley returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 to lead the Department of Anthropology. There he rebuilt his home department, and he became very engaged in his lifelong research. Eiseley was especially interested in the physical characteristics that set humans apart from most animals: bipedal locomotion and prehensile hands, stereoscopic eyes and color vision, and expanded brain size and prolonged infancy. These traits in turn made possible certain social advances, most notably the use of fire, tools, and weapons, and the development of agriculture. Developing his essay style more fully and devoting himself to the study of evolution, Eiseley in 1957 published his first book, The Immense Journey, which contains his reflections on the development of life on earth. Long used in college courses, this book is still Eiseley’s best-known work. It has sold more than five hundred thousand copies and been translated into ten foreign languages. Although this work appeared when Eiseley was fifty, it proved to be the first of more than a dozen books he would produce. Eiseley was interested not only in the evolution of life but also in the development of Charles Darwin’s famous theory of evolution. Darwin’s most acclaimed work, The Origin of Species, had been published in 1859. To commemorate the centennial of this event, Eiseley wrote his most important book, Darwin’s Century (1958), a brilliant analysis of Nebraska’s Scientists

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65. Loren Eiseley outside his University of Pennsylvania office (courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Archives).

the intellectual origins of evolutionary theory. Here Eiseley explored not only the changing climate of opinion that made Darwin’s work possible but also those intellectual forebears to whom Darwin was indebted. Always sympathetic to the underdog, Eiseley in this and other works strove to ensure that Darwin’s predecessors were properly credited for their own pioneering work. Like Beadle, Eiseley interrupted his writing in order to take a college administrative post, becoming provost of the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. And also like Beadle, he was frustrated by his experiences in college administration. Eiseley later claimed that his most noteworthy achievement was elimination of a traffic route through campus that was dangerous to pedestrians. To keep Eiseley after he resigned the provostship in 1961, Penn created the Benjamin Franklin Professorship that gave Eiseley a significant salary, a light teaching load, a secretary, and freedom to write. Eiseley threw himself into his writing, producing book after book that further enhanced his reputation. That same year Eiseley returned to the University of Nebraska to 298

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deliver a series of lectures on Francis Bacon, a man he considered “the first great statesman of science,” the first to explore “what science in its totality meant for man.” The University of Nebraska Press published his lectures under the title Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma, but Eiseley was so unhappy with the editing of the volume that he halted production after only fifteen hundred copies had been distributed. Eiseley also published in a broad range of magazines, including Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, Life, Saturday Evening Post, and even Playboy. He later asserted that he received more commentary from his 1970 Playboy article than he earned from some of his books. Increasingly in his later life, Eiseley embraced a commitment to preserving the natural environment. He worked on Sierra Club books about the redwoods of California and the Galapagos Islands, and he became an important speaker in the ecology movement of the 1960s. Convinced that science created almost as many problems as it solved, Eiseley said, “We must learn not to worship the rather shoddy gods that are presented to us in the shapes of machines but rather try to adjust human understanding to the enormous range of the cosmos as we now understand it.” Throughout his adult life, Eiseley was plagued by insomnia. As a result, he did much of his thinking and writing in what he called “the night country.” He wrote, “It is the sufferer from insomnia who knits the torn edges of men’s dreams together in the hour before dawn.” He revealed much of his inner life in his haunting and surrealistic autobiography, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life, published in 1975. Eiseley, like Edgerton and Beadle, was showered with honors for his work. He received more than thirty-six honorary degrees, including one from the University of Nebraska in 1970. His book Darwin’s Century won the Phi Beta Kappa Award for best science book in 1958, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. From his salary, book royalties, and lecture fees, Eiseley amassed a large estate, but he never forgot the poverty of his youth and never felt financially secure. Eiseley and his wife lived simply. They did not own a house, they gave away their last car—a 1939 Dodge—in 1966, and they had no children. In 1977 Eiseley died of cardiac arrest following a series of cancer operations. Eiseley has sometimes been compared to Henry David Thoreau and Nebraska’s Scientists

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, but scholars are still debating the merits and implications of his work. Eiseley always resisted labels. As one observer put it shortly before Eiseley’s death, “He has never quite fit the neat cages we have built to separate animals, people, and gods, the past from the present or scientists from poets, and he has always deliberately fled from such confinement.” Whatever the assessment of Eiseley as well as Beadle and Edgerton, they enriched the lives of many by making the sometimes forbidding world of science both humane and helpful. Nebraska praises its scientists just as it does its writers. Shortly after Harold Edgerton died, Aurora leaders met to decide how to honor their most famous near-native son. They created a foundation that built the Harold E. Edgerton Explorit Center, Nebraska’s most sophisticated hands-on science museum, that is easily accessible just off Interstate 80 at the Aurora exit. George Beadle is featured at the Saunders County Museum with a permanent exhibit in Wahoo, and the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln features a state-of-the-art biochemistry building near the corner of Seventeenth Street and Vine named appropriately the George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research. Loren Eiseley’s home in Lincoln is a site of historical recognition, and the Friends of Loren Eiseley Society welcomes membership as well as visits to its Web site. Each of these Nebraska scientists shared Loren Eiseley’s views: “It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.” Harold Edgerton, George Beadle, and Loren Eiseley had a common legacy: to make the world of science both useful and understandable.

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33. Offutt Air Force Base

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he end of World War II found the United States unprepared to continue its strategic presence in much of the world. Never before had the nation made such a commitment to fight a war, and never before had it needed to continue to be on alert after a major war effort. The Cold War in fact began among the Allies, pitting the United States, Britain, and France against the Soviet Union even before Germany and Japan surrendered. After winning previous wars, Americans always wished to return to the way things had been, which involved downsizing the military. The problem in 1946 was not just a matter of reducing the forces involved in the war. A vast war machine needed to be carefully deactivated. Thousands of American sailors, soldiers, and pilots wanted to go home. Huge numbers of planes had been produced for the war, including the bombers that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, but these aircraft were scattered throughout the world. Some were in serious disrepair. By June 1946 nearly thirty-four thousand aircraft had come home to the United States. What should be done with them? Inter-service competition and confusion over commands had been kept under control during the war, but once hostilities ceased, old and new armed services rivalries emerged. To prepare for possible problems with the Soviet Union and to bring some order to the armed forces, Congress, with the support of President Harry Truman, passed several laws that would significantly impact Nebraska. On March 21, 1946, the Strategic Air Command was created, and in 1948 sac, as it would become known, decided to locate its headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha. sac was specifically charged to “be prepared to conduct long-range offensive opera-

tions in any part of the world” in order to support American security and to “conduct maximum-range reconnaissance over land or sea.” In essence, sac was “solely devoted to the creation and maintenance of a global deterrent to Soviet aggression.” Although this was a tall order for any new military agency, during its first year 63 percent of sac’s initial personnel were let go, and 78 percent of the aircraft under its jurisdiction were decommissioned. First would come retrenchment, and then rebuilding would begin. On September 16, 1947, the U.S. Air Force was created as a new autonomous and independent branch of the armed services. Prior to this time, aircraft had been developed and commanded by several branches. With the need for greater organization as well as a stronger defense, the time seemed right. Moreover, the entire Strategic Air Command had only 148 bombers that were available, and none were prepared for atomic combat. World War II had not only shown just how important airplanes were; it had ushered in the atomic age. Said H. H. (Hap) Arnold, the first chief of staff of the air force, “The influence of atomic energy on air power can be stated very simply. It has made air power all-important.” The first commander of sac was Gen. George C. Kenney. He was authorized to hire one hundred thousand personnel and secure thirteen hundred aircraft. His headquarters were at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. It soon became obvious that this base did not have enough physical space to expand in order to accomplish the ambitious goals needed for the country’s security. Moreover, General Kenney did not seem inclined to move very expeditiously on sac’s goals. By 1948 Kenney was replaced with Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. LeMay, who served the longest of any military commander at sac (1948–57), had a reputation for action. He achieved the nickname of “Boom-Boom” LeMay later for the large numbers of bombs he ordered dropped during the Viet Nam War in the 1960s, and his politics seemed to have a racial tinge when he agreed to serve as George Wallace’s vice-presidential running mate in their unsuccessful independent campaign in 1968. Nevertheless, starting in 1948 LeMay, arguably sac’s ablest leader and “the Cold War’s fiercest warrior,” moved ahead with vigor to build the Strategic Air Command. Before much building could proceed, a major international crisis occurred that would directly involve sac. The USSR-backed East German 302

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66. Infantry on parade at Fort Crook in 1905 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

communist regime decided to blockade the Allied sections of Berlin. Quick deployment of two bombers by sac to bring in supplies to Berliners, however, not only proved to the Russians that the United States would not back down but showed Washington dc political leaders how important it was to have a strong Strategic Air Command. By the 1950s sac was receiving nearly one-half of the entire U.S. military budget. Military officials reasoned that sac was the nation’s primary deterrent against Soviet aggression and had the only strategic war planning system in place. General LeMay’s first major internal decision was to move sac’s headquarters away from the East Coast where he considered it too vulnerable to enemies and too crowded without sufficient land for expansion. sac determined that it would move to the heartland of America, to a location just ten miles south of Omaha, where a closeness to highways and railroads, an urban center, one of the only runways outside of the East and West Coasts where a b-29 could land and take off, and sufficient land for expansion all existed. That would be at Offutt Air Force Base, a somewhat small air installation that was about to be re-created. Prior to 1948 Offutt had been through any number of military makeovers. Originally built on 546 acres of land near Bellevue as Fort Crook in 1891, its construction was completed in five years in time for its troops Offutt Air Force Base

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67. Lt. Jarvis J. Offutt (courtesy of Offutt Air Force Base).

to serve in the Spanish-American War and in the ensuing campaign to suppress Filipino opposition to American occupation of the Philippine Islands after the end of the war. Although the fort was subsequently used as a recuperation center and then actually closed for a few years, World War I turned it into a hub of activity once again. Many recruits were trained there, and Fort Crook served as a subpost for a balloon observation school. The fort did have problems that limited its uses. It lacked a sufficient water supply, and it did not have a proper munitions range, so troops had to march to the Omaha Indian Reservation, seventy-five miles away, or to Fort Riley, Kansas, two hundred miles away, for target practice. The water supply problem was remedied in 1926 by linking the fort’s reservoir to water supplies in Omaha, and the army bought over six hundred additional acres of land to use for a target range. Fort Crook first became an air field in 1921. This occurred largely through the work of an enlisted man from the Omaha area, Byron Fowler, who literally built a runway from scratch. According to Captain 304

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Ira Rader, Fowler’s commanding officer, Byron was “a Godsend. . . . He was not only a mechanic—he seemed to know everyone of influence in the county—he was a carpenter, farmer, roadman, and above all, he was a diplomat and a horse trader.” Fowler got the runway built, but traffic was obstructed by a large oak tree. So much red tape was involved in cutting down the tree that Captain Rader’s superiors advised him simply to remove it at night. Dynamite was used to bring the tree down, and saltpeter turned it into ashes. “Nobody said a word,” Rader recalled, “and I thought we had gotten away with it, until the president of the local chapter of the Nebraska Historical Society brought her flock of eager disciples to Fort Crook one Sunday morning about a month later to see the OLDEST TREE IN THE COUNTY.” In 1924 the airfield was officially named Offutt Field in honor of Lt. Jarvis J. Offutt, Omaha’s first air fatality in World War I. The field saw increasingly heavy use in the years that followed. The U.S. Post Office used the base for its airmail service, and the U.S. Weather Bureau had a station there, too. In 1930, however, both of these operations were moved to the newly constructed municipal airport in Omaha. With the addition of floodlights and improvements to the runway in the 1930s, Offutt became an alternative landing site for planes that could not land in Omaha, and it became a popular destination for pilots getting in their flight time. During World War II, the fort bustled with activity. As an induction center for draftees it processed nearly seventy-seven thousand men during the war. It also served as a motor vehicle supply depot, dispensing spare parts to other military posts around the country. A school specializing in motor-vehicle maintenance was established at the post, and between 1943 and 1945, twenty-four thousand graduated from it. At the end of the war, the fort also housed Italian prisoners of war for a brief time. The most important wartime activity at Offutt was the production of bombers. A factory built on land leased to the Martin-Nebraska Company employed 14,500 people, 42 percent of whom were women. The plant produced over two thousand bombers, mostly b-26s and b-29s, including the two specially designed planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomber plant, known as Building D and still standing, is a remarkable facility embracing 1.2 million square feet—the equivalent of twenty-five football fields. Offutt Air Force Base

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68. Aerial view of Offutt Air Force Base, 1963 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

In 1946 the entire military installation at Fort Crook was renamed Offutt Field. Two years later, after the U.S. Air Force was established, the field became Offutt Air Force Base. After the establishment of sac headquarters at the base, Offutt underwent a rapid expansion. The number of personnel attached to the post increased dramatically, and new buildings went up. The air force also assigned a fleet of aircraft to the base and later added missiles. One of the most impressive changes was the further lengthening of the main runway, a spectacular engineering feat that required changing the contour of the land. One of the largest construction projects at Offutt was a one hundred million dollar underground combat operations center completed in the mid-1990s. This center processes information for the nation’s warning systems and alerts the government in case of an enemy air or missile attack. Offutt duplicates the underground center at Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, thus giving the government an alternative nerve center in case the one in Colorado is destroyed or knocked out of service. Over the years, Offutt Air Force Base has developed a close relation306

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ship with Nebraska, particularly with Bellevue and Omaha. When sac moved in, the Omaha Chamber of Commerce raised money to donate to the base two parcels of land totaling eighty-eight acres. The base returned the favor in 1952 by supplying the personnel needed to stem the flood waters of the Missouri River, and later by establishing various recreational and counseling programs for civilian youths. Today Offutt Air Force Base is a thriving little “city” that is one of the largest employers in the Omaha area. In 1990 Offutt employed almost 13,600 people and pumped $350 million into the local economy. Also in 1990 General LeMay died; he was buried at the U.S. Air Force Academy cemetery in Colorado Springs. After forty-five years of service, sac was dissolved in 1992, a victim of the end of the Cold War. Its equipment and personnel were transferred to other organizations and a new command—the U.S. Strategic Command or stratcom—took over at Offutt. stratcom placed the nation’s nuclear war planning under one command. This was in part necessary because of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or start I, signed in 1991. start II, signed in 1993, required mutual reductions in nuclear warheads, and for the United States the treaty needed a sophisticated and careful response. With the fall of the Soviet Union and a friendlier Russia, the Cold War ended, but Offutt Air Force Base continued to play a role in a dangerous world. Even though some defense cuts reduced personnel at Offutt in the 1990s, the base continues to be the hub of international communications and defense networks that play a vital role in protecting the United States. In December 2000 President Bill Clinton came to Nebraska and visited Offutt. He said he had toured more military bases than any previous commander-in-chief. Clinton praised the U.S. Strategic Command and the various units at Offutt, calling them “the finest [military] in the entire world.” When, on September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington dc were attacked with commercial airliners taken over by Middle East terrorists, President George W. Bush was flown secretly to Offutt Air Force Base for his own protection and so that the president and his staff could have immediate access to the most sophisticated and up-to-date security information available.

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34. The Ogallala Aquifer

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uring the summer of 1947, Frank Zybach observed an irrigation demonstration on his neighbor’s farm near Strasburg, Colorado. Zybach had grown up in Columbus, Nebraska, where he had watched his father, a blacksmith, tinker with metal. Frank liked to invent things. In the 1920s he had applied at age twenty-six for his first patent, an automatic tractor guide for steel-wheeled tractors. Although his first invention never quite made it, over twenty years later, Zybach—a reluctant farmer—still was an engaged inventor. At the demonstration, he thought about how to improve the possibilities of irrigation as he watched a helper move pipes with sprinkler heads on posts from one section of a field to another. Such metal equipment was not practical on most terrains, and turning the system off and on and frequently moving it required a great deal of physical labor. It seemed extremely inefficient, and perhaps the worst part of it was the inevitable leaking and wasting of the water. Frank Zybach went back to his farm and further pondered what he had witnessed, and he decided he could do better. Later that year, he created a prototype for the first center pivot irrigation system. The water entered through a central wellhead that supplied the water to sprinklers spaced evenly by guy wires on a circular pipe that rotated and rode on skids. After some trial and error, Zybach replaced the skids with wheels. In July 1949 he successfully applied for the “Zybach SelfPropelled Sprinkler Apparatus” patent, and in 1954 he agreed to sell his patent to Bob Daugherty and the Valley Manufacturing Company, now Valmont Industries, of Valley, Nebraska. Over the next few years, Valmont improved upon Zybach’s design and made the irrigation system taller, stronger, and more dependable. The best improvements included

galvanizing the pipes to prevent corrosion of the equipment from the water, converting the original hydraulic power system to an electric drive, and injecting fertilizer into the water as it was being pumped onto the field. The center pivot was the key to the new technology. In fact, one student of engineering has called it “perhaps the most significant mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animals by the tractor.” Center pivots rotate around a central point, and most are designed to irrigate 135 acres in a 160-acre quarter section, though with a special corner unit it is possible to irrigate nearly an entire quarter section. During one rotation, the system can deposit onehalf inch to two inches of water on the ground. Unlike other irrigation systems, the center pivot distributes water evenly, works well in coarse or sandy soil and on a rolling terrain, and because it is self-propelled requires little labor. Zybach’s center pivot irrigation system revolutionized agriculture in Nebraska and the Great Plains. At the time of this invention, technological changes were making the Ogallala Aquifer more accessible. Centrifugal and turbine pumps and improvement in well digging allowed for deeper and more productive wells, and the growing availability of cheap electrical and gas power made it possible to operate the pumps inexpensively. The refinements to the self-propelled center pivot sprinkler system in the 1950s completed the revolution. Prior to this pathbreaking invention, few had understood how irrigation might change the lives of Nebraskans. Before 1850 there was little interest in settling Nebraska beyond the 100th meridian because the limited rainfall and lack of trees suggested the region could not support agriculture and Iowa was not yet completely settled. Annual precipitation in Nebraska ranges from fifteen inches in the extreme southwest to thirty-six inches in the southeastern corner. The statewide average is only twenty-three inches—a far cry from the thirty-five to forty-five inches that is common in the East. No one at the time realized how plentiful water in Nebraska really is. Quite apart from the massive quantities that flow in the rivers, there are large aquifers beneath the ground. The most important is the Ogallala, named after the western Nebraska city, and which is a part of several High Plains aquifers. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest systems of undergroundwater in the world and stretches across the Great Plains The Ogallala Aquifer

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from northern Texas to southern South Dakota. In his biography of the Ogallala Aquifer, historian Donald Green, retired dean of liberal arts at Chadron State College, calls this expanse “the land of the underground rain.” The pool covers 174,000 square miles and contains more water than Lake Huron—about 3.25 billion acre-feet. (An acre-foot of water is the amount needed to cover an acre to a depth of one foot, the equivalent of 325,851 gallons.) Even though the Ogallala Aquifer is spread over eight states, two-thirds of it lies under Nebraska. In fact, some experts think Nebraska may have more undergroundwater than any other state—perhaps as much as six billion acre-feet. That works out to almost two quadrillion gallons, enough to cover the state with 122 feet of water. Although Nebraskans established extensive surface-water irrigation projects as early as the 1890s, they were slow to utilize the Ogallala Aquifer because they lacked the technology to bring the water to the surface. Windmills were rarely capable of pumping more than thirty to forty gallons of water a minute and usually could reach no more than 310

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seventy or eighty feet into the ground. Hence they could tap only the shallowest portions of the aquifer and could draw only enough water to meet domestic and livestock needs. Among the first to utilize the aquifer were crews on the Union Pacific Railroad, who pumped water from wells to supply their steam engines. As settlers moved into central Nebraska, they tapped the aquifer with shallow wells along river bottoms. In 1887 the state’s Department of Agriculture confirmed the existence of the Ogallala Aquifer—though no one yet knew its size or value. As late as 1931, Walter Prescott Webb, in his classic book The Great Plains, acknowledged that “an enormously large amount of groundwater” lay under the Plains but argued that the water was “below economical pumping depth for irrigation” and that “the prospects for agriculture in the Great Plains . . . [were] not very encouraging.” All that changed with Frank Zybach’s invention. With the new technology available, groundwater irrigation spread rapidly in Nebraska. The number of wells increased from around seventy-five hundred in 1950 to almost seventy-four thousand in 1990. The peak year for construction was 1976, when some fifty-six hundred new wells were sunk that year alone. The amount of irrigated land also increased dramatically, from about nine hundred thousand acres in 1945 to almost eight million acres in 2000. More than 85 percent of all irrigated land in Nebraska now receives its water from the ground, and most of this comes from the Ogallala Aquifer. Groundwater is used in the production of corn, sorghum, soybeans, milo, alfalfa, potatoes, sugar beets, beans, and even wheat. Nebraska ranks second behind California in the amount of groundwater used for irrigation, and only Kansas uses a higher percentage of groundwater as opposed to surface water to meet its irrigation needs. Although 94 percent of all groundwater pumped to the surface in Nebraska is used for irrigation, the other 6 percent plays a vital role in meeting domestic, livestock, and industrial needs. In fact, 82 percent of the people in the state are dependent, to a greater or lesser degree, on water pumped from the Ogallala and other various smaller aquifers. Except for Omaha, which obtains some of its water from the Platte River aquifer, and Blair, Crawford, Beaver City, and one rural water district, all other Nebraska municipalities get their water from the ground. In general the quality of Nebraska’s groundwater is good. The major solids dissolved in the water—calcium, magnesium, sodium, The Ogallala Aquifer

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potassium, bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, and silica—are present in harmless amounts. There is, however, a danger of pollution from other sources. The principal threat is from nitrates, which percolate into the aquifer from nitrogen fertilizers and hog and cattle feedlots. “Much of the presence and build-up of nitrates in Nebraska groundwater,” says a state study, “has been definitely associated with the application of fertilizer and water to overlying crop lands.” By 1985 thirty municipal water-supply systems in the state exceeded the recommended limits for nitrates, and Grand Island and Wood River had to drill new wells to secure safe water. In 1986 the state adopted legislation to try to minimize pollution from nitrates and other contaminants. This legislation required that all well diggers be licensed by 1991 and that all irrigation systems that apply chemicals be fitted with special devices to prevent the back flush of those chemicals into the aquifer. Another problem associated with the use of water from the Ogallala Aquifer is that of overdrafting—that is, “mining,” or pumping water out of the ground faster than nature replenishes it. This is a pressing problem in Box Butte, Chase, Fillmore, and Hamilton counties. Over the years water tables in these areas have fallen by as much as forty feet. In general, however, the drawdown and recharge of the aquifer varies from one state to another with the greatest concern occurring in Texas and the least in Nebraska, according to Don Wilhite, a University of Nebraska agricultural climatologist. Water in West Texas has become more and more difficult to take from the aquifer, and farms that had relied upon it for irrigation have had to return to dryland farming. Water studies covering from 1993 to 1997 in the Texas Panhandle show that groundwater in eight counties is so low it is not at a recoverable volume and that the Ogallala Aquifer is declining at an average of 1.74 feet per year. The debate over groundwater usage is one that pits those who prefer to use the water in increasing amounts for today’s needs against those who want to save more of the water for future generations. In some places, the water table is actually rising. In south central Nebraska, particularly in Gosper, Phelps, and Kearney counties, excessive crop watering and seepage from irrigation canals connected to the Platte River have increased the amount of water percolating into the aquifer. In fact, the water table in these areas by the 1990s had risen by as much as sixty feet. One problem with the growing use of groundwater for irrigation has 312

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69. A center-pivot irrigation system in operation, 1971 (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

been the destruction of land in the Sandhills. It is estimated that close to 20 percent of the water in the Ogallala Aquifer—some 700 million acre-feet—is located under the Sandhills. Although the region is suitable for ranching, the porous, fine-grained sand is subject to severe blowouts when the grass cover is removed, and the transformation of grassland into cropland can have a devastating effect on the region’s delicate ecology. Moreover, because the soil is so porous, nitrates from fertilizers more readily seep into the aquifer. Proponents of irrigation in the Sandhills argue that the investments— most of which come from outside sources—have generated considerable wealth for people living in the region. Says one Rock County resident, “I can count guy after guy working for these outsiders who have a better standard of living than if they were farming for themselves.” Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons a number of these investments have turned sour. In fact, in 1983 and 1984 alone 141 center pivot systems were taken out of service in the Sandhills. The Ogallala Aquifer

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Nebraska groundwater law was slow to develop mainly because of the abundance of the resource but also because of the power of the irrigation lobby and the state’s tradition of unfettered individualism. State law has established a pecking order for the use of groundwater that favors residential users first, then agricultural users, and finally industrial and manufacturing users. Because the state legislature did not act quickly, groundwater policy was initially set by the courts. In 1933 the state supreme court established the doctrine of reasonable use. “The owner of land is entitled to appropriate subterranean waters found under his land,” the court said, “but he cannot extract and appropriate them in excess of a reasonable and beneficial use upon the land which he owns.” At the same time, the court established the doctrine of correlative water rights, which holds that “if the natural underground supply is insufficient for all owners, each is entitled to a reasonable proportion of the whole.” Surface water, on the other hand, is appropriated on a first-come, first-serve basis. In 1966 the court decided that municipalities could condemn land to obtain water rights, and in 1981 it ruled groundwater “is publicly owned” and thus subject to regulation. However, in 2005, the court retreated from this position when it declined to endorse any specific regulation of groundwater without legislative action. Now the Nebraska state legislature must consider the seriousness of the groundwater problems. The state has had a number of public agencies oversee groundwater use. The most important today are the twenty-three Natural Resources Districts, or nrds. State law created the nrds in 1969 by consolidating more than 150 special-purpose districts, such as flood control and soil conservation agencies, thus eliminating overlapping authority and bureaucratic infighting. According to one authority, the creation of the nrds “thrust the state into the forefront of the nation in the management of water and soil resources.” In 1975 the state empowered the Department of Water Resources in conjunction with the nrds to establish controls in areas where the water table was dropping. Three control areas were established in the next two decades: one in the Upper Republican nrd, another in the Upper Big Blue nrd, and a third in the Little Blue nrd. According to the director of natural resources in Nebraska, such controls are likely to increase in the future: “We’ll see that coming across the state more and more as [the water level in] the aquifer begins to decline.” 314

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As the use of groundwater increased, there has been growing conflict between urban developers and conservationists. In 1978 the Nebraska chapter of the Sierra Club called for the adoption of a “sustained yield” policy, which would limit water use to the rate at which it is naturally replenished. While this doctrine is too extreme for most Nebraskans, there has been considerable interest in conservation. In 1982 an amendment to the state constitution, Initiative 300, prohibited corporate land purchases in order to curb the growth of corporate farms and curtail abusive water practices in the Sandhills. That initiative continues to be discussed in the state and appears to be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Other conservation measures have cut down on the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer in those areas where the water table is dropping. In Chase, Dundy, and Perkins counties, water-scheduling programs have decreased the average annual per-acre use significantly. Elsewhere water has been conserved with re-use pits that capture runoff from irrigated fields, minimum-tillage practices that leave crop residues in the field to capture water, and improvements in center pivot technology, such as reducing energy costs by up to 80 percent and installing computers on the pivots. Even with conservation measures, a state study has concluded that some three hundred thousand acres of irrigated cropland—mainly around the Big and Little Blue rivers—will probably revert to dry land farming by 2020. In 1972 Woody Varner, then president of the University of Nebraska, encouraged the development of irrigation as a means of boosting agricultural production and hence state prosperity. “Nebraska’s great ‘secret weapon’,” he said, “is its water resources.” Varner’s injunction was prophetic, for in the years that followed, the spread of irrigation and the usage of Frank Zybach’s center pivot invention played significant roles in Nebraska’s prosperity, adding billions of dollars to the state economy. Trouble, however, already looms on the horizon. Since 2002 Lake McConaughy and the Platte River have experienced record water level drops, and crop losses due to drought in Nebraska in 2002 and 2003 alone have reached $500 million. So worried are legislators that in their 2005 session, a bill was introduced to pay landowners along the Republican River to give up irrigation and return to dryland farming on up to ten thousand acres. Recent studies by agricultural researchers warn The Ogallala Aquifer

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that Nebraska and much of the Great Plains are entering a new drought cycle. Water rights, according to University of Nebraska–Lincoln agricultural economist and lawyer J. David Aiken, will be a primary future commodity. Their worth will increase substantially. The director of the Energy and Environmental Research Center calls water “the petroleum of the 21st century.” Because water defies political borders, disagreements over water usage are increasing in the Great Plains. Disputes over surface water rights to the Platte, Republican, and Missouri rivers are already in the courts, and groundwater issues are also prime for litigation. Observes Peter J. Longo, University of Nebraska at Kearney political scientist, “Water conflicts are a drain on economic as well as natural resources, and the conflicts tend to bring the worse out of parochial actors.” Thus, ensuring prosperity and agriculture’s future in Nebraska will require careful and vigilant management of the state’s water resources.

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35. Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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n February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was about to give a speech in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, when three men burst into the room. In the confusion and hail of gunfire that followed, they shot and killed a native Nebraskan, one of the finest orators in American history. Two of the three murderers were later identified as members of the Nation of Islam. Before Malcolm X was assassinated, he was scheduled to speak at the United Nations on human rights issues. Why had it come to this? That same year another native Nebraskan, Michigan congressman Gerald R. Ford Jr., coauthored a book based upon his recent experiences as a member of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The book, Portrait of the Assassin, attempted to understand the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of the president. Indeed, these were violent times. The assassinations of President Kennedy and Malcolm X were soon followed by the murders of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the attempted assassinations of Alabama governor George Wallace and even Ford himself. In death as well as in life, these native Omahans—Gerald Ford and Malcolm X—shared a kindred place in the history of Nebraska and the nation. On July 14, 1913, Leslie Lynch King Jr. was born in his grandfather’s home, the Woolworth Mansion in Omaha. Nearly a dozen years later, Malcolm Little came into the world on May 19, 1925, at University Hospital in Omaha. Few at the time would have projected the historical significance of these two baby boys at the time of their births, but both would become American leaders of the twentieth century. One whose name was legally changed to Gerald R. Ford ascended to the presidency in 1974 as the first and only Nebraskan to ever hold that office, and the

other, whose name was legally changed to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and who was generally known as Malcolm X, became a highly effective national spokesman for African Americans and the Nation of Islam before his assassination two months prior to his fortieth year. Each would make his mark in post–World War II America. Gerald Ford was born to Dorothy and Leslie King. Gerald’s father came into the world in Chadron, Nebraska. Leslie King lived his early years in White River, where his parents had moved in 1884 to set up a general store to trade with Lakota Indians. They were so successful in this endeavor that they parlayed their wealth into lumberyard, general store, and other real estate investments selected along projected railroad routes. In 1905 Gerald’s soon-to-be grandfather, now worth approximately $10 million, moved his family to Omaha, where he established the Omaha Wool and Storage Company. They resided at 3202 Woolworth Avenue in a fourteen-room, three-story Victorian mansion. This birthplace of Gerald Ford was eventually converted into an apartment building in 1960 and was destroyed by fire in 1971. Dorothy Gardner King, Gerald’s mother, was born in Harvard, Illinois, to a prominent local family. Her father owned a furniture store and a real estate business. Dorothy was educated at Knox College, where she developed a close friendship with Marietta King, who introduced Dorothy to her brother Leslie. Shortly after they met, Leslie asked Dorothy’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and Leslie discussed his future prospects telling the Gardners that he had thirty-five thousand dollars in an Omaha bank and a steady income with his father’s company. In fact, he had no bank account, and his income was only twenty-five hundred dollars a year as a lowly general manager for Omaha Wool and Storage, his father’s company. Dorothy and Leslie married on September 7, 1912, and traveled to Portland, Oregon, on their honeymoon. It was here, only twenty days after their marriage, that Leslie struck his wife for the first time, slapping her repeatedly after she had merely acknowledged a nod from a gentleman who had got on and off a hotel elevator. Five days later, King struck her again and kicked her, calling her “vile and insulting names.” Leslie King promised his new wife that their own home was awaiting them in Omaha, but it was a lie. When they returned, they moved into his father’s mansion. One week later, King attacked Dorothy and ordered her from the house. She took a train and returned to her fam318

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ily’s home. They responded by hushing up this family embarrassment, and when Leslie came to apologize, Dorothy was pressured to return to Omaha with him. The Kings next moved into a basement apartment, but Dorothy soon found out that her husband had lied about his money. In a classic case of spousal abuse, Leslie began restricting Dorothy’s activities and isolating her. He even refused to let her go to her family’s home for the Christmas holidays, and the beatings began once again. When her mother came to check on her, King forced his mother-in-law to leave; and when the elder Kings were gone from their family mansion, Leslie moved Dorothy back into the Woolworth home. In early 1913 Dorothy found that she was pregnant. That July Dorothy gave birth to Leslie L. King Jr., the name insisted upon by his father. A few days after the baby came, Leslie, Sr., began to berate his wife and threaten her. Dorothy’s mother and father and her doctor succeeded in persuading her husband to agree to a separation to allow Dorothy and the baby to go back to Illinois. After Dorothy’s father returned to the family business, Leslie, Sr., refused to allow Dorothy to leave. He brandished a butcher knife and threatened to stab his wife, baby, and mother-in-law. The police arrived in time to restrain King, and Dorothy, after only sixteen days of motherhood, escaped with her baby and returned to Illinois. On December 19, 1913, Dorothy and Leslie, Sr., were divorced. King was found guilty of extreme cruelty and forced to pay alimony and child support. He refused to pay anything, and after the court seized his few assets, he fled to Wyoming. Such was the life into which young Gerald Ford arrived. Malcolm Little’s birth was of a different nature. Malcolm’s father was the Reverend Earl Little, an African American Baptist preacher who came from Georgia. Earl had first married Daisy Mason with whom he had three children, but his marriage did not last. He decided to start over, so he moved to New York City to join the Harlem Renaissance, where he became enamored with the Universal Negro Improvement Association—a black self-help economic and political organization that had been founded in 1914 by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica. By 1919 Garvey, a flamboyant and powerful speaker, had moved to New York and had established thirty branches of his unia throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Garvey’s newspaper, The Negro World, advocated black pride, the glorification of the African past, and black entrepreneurship. Garvey’s biggest project was his purchase of a steamship Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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company that would return blacks to Africa. The company eventually went bankrupt, however, and Garvey was charged and found guilty of criminal fraud and deported. Earl Little found much to believe in as a Garveyite. In New York City he worked as a writer on The Negro World, where he met Louise Norton, a West Indian Caribbean immigrant to Montreal who also had moved to New York. Strongly committed to pride in her own African past and to Garveyism, she also wrote for The Negro World. Soon Earl and Louise married, and they would have eight children, their first born in 1920. Malcolm was their fourth child. The Littles moved to Omaha to help organize a chapter devoted to the teachings of Garvey. They found this Nebraska city not particularly welcoming to a new African American family. Malcolm X later recalled in his Autobiography that his mother told him that when she was pregnant with Malcolm in 1925, a hooded group of Ku Klux Klan riders galloped past their house at 3448 Pinkney Street, surrounded it, shot their rifles in the air, and demanded that his father come outside. Their threats warned his mother that Malcolm and his family had better leave Omaha. Although the Littles made their home as best they could, they would eventually be driven from Omaha four years later. In 1929, when Louise was pregnant with her seventh child, Yvonne, Malcolm—now age four—experienced a nightmare. He remembered it as his “earliest vivid memory.” One evening he suddenly awakened to great chaos, hearing pistol shots and screaming and seeing smoke and flames. His home was burning down around him. His family in their night clothes clamored outside, crying and gasping for air, only to see the white police and firemen standing around watching their house burn. Shortly thereafter, Earl and Louise Little moved their family to the relative safety of Lansing, Michigan, where they continued to work for the unia. Malcolm grew up in Michigan, but his family soon broke apart. His father died in 1931 in Lansing. His body was found near railroad tracks, cut in half by a train car. Some, including Malcolm, believed that local Klansmen had killed his father. Malcolm’s mother never recovered from this tragedy and was eventually determined to be legally insane in 1939, when she was committed to a mental institution. Malcolm and his brothers and sisters were placed in foster care. Michigan, on the other hand, proved to be a place where Gerald Ford 320

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found a family. His mother and her parents moved to Grand Rapids shortly after her escape from her violent marriage to Leslie King. There she fell in love and married Gerald R. Ford, a local furniture store and paint factory owner. After two years of marriage, the Fords changed Dorothy’s son’s name to Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., and they would have three more boys, Gerald’s step-brothers. Until 1930, Gerald believed that G. R. Ford Sr. was his biological father. When Leslie King took a trip to Michigan, he sought out his son, who was working at a part-time, after-school job. A stranger greeted young seventeen-year-old Gerald with, “I’m Leslie King, your father.” “Nothing could erase the image of my real father that day,” wrote Ford in his memoirs, “a carefree, well-to-do man who didn’t really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his first-born son. When I went to bed that night, I broke down and cried.” King had remarried twice in Wyoming, owned a ranch near Riverton, and had three more children. In 1939, when King visited Lincoln, he was arrested for never having fulfilled his divorce-decree obligations, and he finally paid the alimony and support he owed after twenty-three years. Leslie King Sr. died in Akron, Ohio, in 1941. Gerald Ford graduated from Grand Rapids South High School, where he excelled athletically and scholastically. He worked in the family businesses during his teenage years. In 1931 he entered the University of Michigan, where he majored in economics and political science and played center on two Wolverine national championship football teams. After turning down offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers to play professional football, he entered law school at Yale University. To help pay for his legal training, he worked as an assistant coach both for the Yale University football varsity and the freshman boxing teams. Ford graduated in the top 25 percent of his class, and in 1940 he helped with Republican Wendell Wilkie’s unsuccessful presidential campaign. Shortly after returning to Michigan in 1941 to establish a law practice in Grand Rapids, Gerald left to fight in World War II as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. When Ford came home from the war, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Ann Warren, a department store fashion consultant. They would eventually have four children, beginning with their firstborn in 1950. In 1948 Gerald decided to challenge the local Grand Rapids isolationist Republican incumbent, Congressman Bartel Jonkman. Ford prevailed in Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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the primary and then was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the November election. He would be reelected twelve more times to Congress, where he served from 1949 to 1973. Malcolm’s life, however, took a much different turn. After being shifted in and out of various foster homes, he started high school in Mason, Michigan, only to drop out. He next moved to Boston in 1941 to live with his sister Ella, but he slipped into the criminal scene. After some brushes with the law, he moved back to Michigan in 1942 and then back to New York, where he worked for the New Haven Railroad. This time when he got involved in drugs and a burglary, he was caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to serve ten years in prison. While he was incarcerated, Malcolm experienced his first contact with a new religion, Islam, and he became a Black Muslim and follower of Elijah Muhammad. In 1952 Malcolm was paroled, and he once again moved back to Michigan to live with his brother. At this time he worked in a furniture store, and he studied and debated Muslim doctrines. As he later said, he obtained his “X” during this time, meaning he earned his right to preach as a Black Muslim religious leader. In 1953 Malcolm X moved to Boston to lead Temple No. 11, and in subsequent years he was assigned to Philadelphia’s Temple No. 12 and New York’s Temple No. 7. His sermons were intense and dramatic; he was a spellbinding speaker who stressed black pride and Black Nationalism. In New York Malcolm made a series of effective radio programs for wbai-fm called “Malcolm X Speaks,” and the night of his murder a tape recorded his last words. Because of his leadership, the five hundred-member Nation of Islam increased to thirty thousand in a decade. Malcolm also met Betty Sanders in New York City. They married and would have four daughters while he was alive, their firstborn in 1958. Twin girls were born to Betty after Malcolm’s death. The decade of the 1960s and on into the early 1970s involved traumatic turning points for both Gerald Ford and Malcolm X and their families. It was a difficult time for them and for America. Ford proved a durable politician for the Republican Party. His popularity was such that he was asked to run both for the Michigan governorship and the U.S. Senate by the Michigan Republican Party, but he declined because, he said, he preferred to aim for Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 1960 Richard Nixon considered Ford as a running mate, but Nixon chose Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador to the United Nations and scion 322

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of a prominent Massachusetts political family. In the House, Ford had served since 1951 on the House Appropriations Committee, and he became chair of the House Republican Conference and House Minority Leader for the Republicans. In 1963 Gerald Ford was appointed to the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As House Minority Leader, Gerald Ford could be counted upon to oppose many of President Lyndon Johnson’s programs, particularly Johnson’s social welfare legislation and the policy of gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam. Once Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and was subsequently reelected, Ford supported Nixon’s economic and foreign policy initiatives, including Nixon’s beginning diplomatic relations with China. After Vice President Spiro Agnew plea-bargained out of a criminal prosecution for his false income tax returns over kickbacks he had received and quit the office, President Nixon had to appoint a new vice president, and he turned to Gerald Ford. Congress quickly approved one of its own, and Gerald Ford was sworn in as vice president on December 6, 1973. The nation looked to Gerald Ford as an honest person and as a leader who might clean up the corruption that seemed to be so much a part of the Nixon Administration. Ford was a bipartisan foreign policy advocate, a moderate on social issues, and a fiscal conservative. On February 15, 1974, Ford made his first official visit to Omaha as vice president. He toured Offutt Air Force Base and visited his birth site, which had become a community garbage-strewn lot after the house had burned down. Students from nearby Park Elementary had cleaned up the empty lot in anticipation of Ford’s visit, and when the vice president heard of their good deed, he responded by making an unscheduled stop at the school to thank the children personally. That evening Ford spoke at a one hundred dollar per plate fund-raising dinner for the Republican Party. He received a standing ovation when he said, “I happen to think we have a great president.” And Ford was unusually open for a politician when he admitted that he intended to stay out of the 1976 presidential race. “I’ll do a better job as vp if I’m not out soliciting delegates,” he pledged. Of course, this was all just before the roof crashed down on the White House six months later. President Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign under threat of impeachment, and grand juries were investigating his Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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conduct in the Watergate scandal. The public had heard Nixon’s tapes where he swore and used racial epithets and planned criminal activity in the oval office. On August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford became the nation’s 38th President, and the Omaha World-Herald headlined the event, “Omaha Native Enters White House.” Ford realized he didn’t have charisma, but he said, “I think the day is here when the public wants somebody they think is honest and decent.” On August 20, President Ford selected former governor of New York Nelson A. Rockefeller to be his vice president, an act social conservatives in the Republican Party could never forgive. And on September 8, Ford used the power of the presidency to pardon former President Nixon from any criminal current and future charges. This action that President Ford deemed necessary to assuage the nation cost him the coming presidential election. The American public was not yet in the mood to forgive its most corrupt president. As it was, more Cabinet officials went to prison under Richard Nixon than under any other presidential administration in all of American history. Gerald Ford would have just two years to prepare for a presidential election. As president, Ford pushed through a modest tax cut and some spending cuts in order to contain inflation and unemployment. He signed into law the deregulation of the railroad and securities industries and reform of antitrust laws. He presided over the nation’s bicentennial celebration in July 1976. In foreign policy, Ford stood vigilant, holding talks with Soviet Russia’s General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev on the limitation of strategic offensive arms in Helsinki, Finland, during November 1974, and in May 1975 Ford ordered U.S. forces to retake the Mayaguez, an American merchant ship seized by North Koreans in international waters off the North Korean coast, and they were successful. In 1975 Ford survived two assassination attempts, both in California and both by women assailants, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore. He won a difficult Republican presidential primary challenge from the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Ford ended up with 1,187 delegates to the Republican Convention held in Kansas City to Reagan’s 1,070. Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter, a relatively unknown governor of Georgia. Carter went on to defeat Ford and his running mate, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, in the general election in November 1976. Carter had 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 241, but Ford carried his native state easily, winning all of Nebraska’s five electoral votes. 324

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While Gerald Ford was experiencing a surprisingly meteoric rise up the political ladder, Malcolm X was gaining attention and adherents to the Nation of Islam. He traveled all over the United States, and he frequently appeared on television and in civil rights court cases advocating equality and leadership for blacks and Black Nationalism. His rhetoric was sometimes scorching. When President Kennedy was assassinated, he said that JFK’s advocacy of civil rights might have been a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” This comment caused Elijah Muhammad to suspend Malcolm from the Nation of Islam and ban him from public speaking for ninety days. In 1964 Malcolm made two trips that significantly altered his life. First, he traveled to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holy city. He adopted the name of El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz, and Shabazz was retained as the family name. He also announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam to organize his own movement: the Organization of AfroAmerican Unity. This organization showed a different philosophy, one closer to that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights message in which blacks could make gains by working with whites through established channels and that not all whites were evil. Malcolm X realized he might be in danger for advocating peace between the races, and he received death threats as a result of his change in ideology. Later in 1964 Malcolm returned for the first time to his birth city, Omaha. His visit was headlined in the Omaha World-Herald, “Malcolm X Declares Anything Whites Do Blacks Can Do Better: Tells 400 America Is Country of Past; Africa Nation of Future.” The paper’s coverage of Malcolm X’s return was particularly hostile, labeling him a “self-appointed leader of the black nationalist extremists” and mistakenly calling him a Black Muslim. Malcolm gave a question and answer session with all members of the press, including reporters for the African American newspaper, the Omaha Star. The Star reported that Reverend Kelsey Jones of the Zion Baptist Church had sermonized about Malcolm’s coming to Omaha, “If Omaha can back [Barry] Goldwater [for President in 1964], it ought to be able to stand Malcolm X for one day.” Throughout the exchange, Malcolm X advocated direct action by African Americans to protect themselves from police brutality and to project themselves in control of their own lives. Shabazz urged young blacks to assert themselves, to be roaring lions rather than docile lambs. He also told black children to stay in school. “The African American Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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70. Malcolm X during his return to Omaha in 1964 (courtesy of Omaha Star).

youth who drops out of school is committing economic suicide,” Malcolm implored. “Failure of Negro youth to stay in school does more harm than all of the laws of discrimination against them.” Education, he said, should be used as a tool “to help raise the Afro-American people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self-respect.” In the audience was a young, African American barber and Omaha community activist named Ernest Chambers, who would later become a very forceful and accomplished senator in the Nebraska state legislature. The Shabazz family resided in Queens in New York City. On Valentine’s Day of 1965, their home there was firebombed. No doubt this event provoked memories of fear for Malcolm, who had escaped from his parents’ burning house in Omaha during his youth. In North Omaha, the Little’s home at 3448 Pinkney Street had been condemned and torn down that very same year. Then, just one week after the latest firebombing in Malcolm’s life, on February 21, 1965, he was brutally killed. In the years following the murder of Malcolm X and the defeat of 326

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President Gerald Ford, these two native sons of Nebraska have been remembered in various ways. For Gerald Ford, who lived to be ninetythree, dying in December 2006, there have been many honors. They include a black walnut gavel that Ernest Sonderegger of Beatrice carved for the President to use at Cabinet meetings. The wood was acquired from the heirs of the first homesteader in Nebraska, Daniel Freeman, and grown on the land that has become the Homestead National Monument. Another honor for Ford was the renaming of a portion of Interstate 480 in the heart of Omaha as the Gerald R. Ford Expressway. James Paxson, president of Standard Chemical Company, a livestock feed manufacturing operation, bought the Ford birth-site lot and adjacent properties on Woolworth Avenue for $250,000 in 1974, and then gave the land and approximately two million dollars to the Nebraska State Historical Society to construct the Ford Birthsite and Gardens and the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center. The center provides “for the conservation and preservation of museum artifacts, textiles, and paper, including rare books, manuscripts, and photographs,” and it also has a permanent gallery exhibit on Ford. Gerald Ford and his family visited Nebraska often to participate in various dedications. In 1976 President Ford gave the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s graduation address and was presented with an honorary Doctor of Law degree. On another occasion when former all star football player Ford visited Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, meeting with Athletic Director Bob Devaney and then Cornhusker head coach Tom Osborne, Ford said, “I’m glad I was born in Nebraska but I’m happy I moved to Michigan, because I probably couldn’t have made the team here.” More seriously, when Ford participated in his birth site memorial dedication in 1977, he encouraged people to visit and “think about the qualities of good citizenship . . . [and] the way we choose and support our leaders and about our cherished form of government.” Historians have assessed Gerald Ford’s contributions to the nation’s past. James Cannon, Ford’s political biographer, wrote that “Ford became President because he was qualified by experience and trusted as a man.” Evaluating Ford’s leadership, Cannon observed that Ford “was steady, not brilliant. He was honest. He was reliable. His peers saw in him the qualities of truth and integrity necessary to bring back the legitimacy of the Presidency.” In 1999 the oldest former president received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. In his preOmaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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71. President Gerald R. Ford shares a private moment with U.S. senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

sentation, President Bill Clinton recognized Ford’s role in guiding the United States through the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation, and his continued humanitarian service to America. When President Ford died in 2006, the Omaha World-Herald praised him, reflecting upon “a decent, down-to-earth man who pursued consensus, not conflict, when America needed it most.” Said Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, “This guy had a balance to him I’ve never seen in politics. He was so anchored in who he was and what he believed.” These same observations might have been made over thirty years earlier of Malcolm X at the time of his death. Malcolm X has also been remembered in Omaha and the state, and his birth site has also been the subject of meetings, plans, and official commemorations. In 1971 the Nebraska State Historical Society authorized placement of a historical marker honoring Malcolm X at his birth site on Pinkney Street. Four years later, his widow, Betty Shabazz, visited Omaha and 328

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Malcolm’s birth site. She brought word of a sizable grant to be given to the Great Plains Black Museum in Omaha. Rowena Moore, who owned the land where the birth site was located, created the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, and as its president she advocated constructing a park and future community center on the site. Through the years, numerous public events have been held at the birth site. In 1971 Omaha Mayor Eugene Leahy signed a proclamation that he presented to Rowena Moore that called Malcolm X “a man who dedicated his brief life to teaching men to strive for self-dignity and to mold their own destinies. No American more exemplified this essential link to our national creed than the late Malcolm X.” A tribute to Malcolm X occurred at his birth site with Rowena Moore and Senator Ernie Chambers speaking at the ceremony. Wilfred Little, Malcolm’s brother, journeyed to Omaha in May 1985 to observe Malcolm X’s 60th birthday. He talked about his brother’s ideas and developing the birthsite. In 1988 the African American community urged that the North Freeway be designated Malcolm X Freeway. It was noted that the South Freeway had already been officially renamed after Gerald Ford. This request was denied in 1989 and thereafter because the mayor said that the city of Omaha would have to pay for the changes in state highway signs and that it didn’t have the money to do so. (In 1989 the cost was estimated to be $140,000.) Plans were then developed for a park and a community center in the late 1980s. On May 30, 1990, the first national Malcolm X Commemoration took place in Omaha. Several hundred people attended the event, and it included music, speeches, ecumenical prayers, and a parade. Dick Gregory and Senator Chambers spoke, as did Betty Shabazz. At the birth site, a sign honoring Malcolm X was defaced overnight with a swastika. Betty Shabazz noted that Malcolm’s message—“freedom by whatever means necessary”—should be interpreted as “Blacks can lift themselves out of poverty and the morass of racism and whites can escape their racist mentality and join the struggle.” Acknowledgment of the contributions of Malcolm X has not come easily. Senator Chambers vowed in 1986 to nominate Malcolm X for the Nebraska Hall of Fame, and that nomination has yet to be approved. In 2005 the latest effort to approve Malcolm X for the Hall of Fame led by a group of teenagers in the Pine Ridge Job Corps resulted in a Omaha’s Gerald Ford and Malcolm X

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4–3 vote in favor of U.S. senator Kenneth Wherry, but that vote was taken illegally and was subsequently thrown out. Unfortunately, said the archivist of the Malcolm X Memorial foundation, “White people in Nebraska and Omaha are in denial about how important he was.” Chambers called Malcolm “a profound thinker” who “analyzed the problems black people faced and began to map a strategy for overcoming these problems.” What Malcolm X considered a top priority for African Americans was self-respect, observed the senator. Finally, in 2003, the Omaha City Council agreed to designate a street in Malcolm X’s honor. It voted in favor of renaming one block of North 34th Avenue near Malcolm’s birthplace “Malcolm X Avenue.” The worlds of these two very different leaders intersected by happenstance. Both were born in Omaha; both experienced violence in their early childhoods; both escaped to Michigan, where each found his life’s calling—the religion of politics or the politics of religion. Both even worked in family furniture stores and married strong women named Betty who have also made significant contributions to the nation. One became a president who tried to protect and heal a nation; one emerged a prophet who sought to protect and heal his people. And their lives began in Nebraska.

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36. Becoming Madam Governor

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n Wednesday morning, May 14, 1986, Nebraskans awoke to realize that their state had made national political history. In the gubernatorial primary elections of both the Republican and Democratic parties held the day before, women won. “Most American school children,” reported Time Magazine several days later, “learn that Nebraska’s outstanding political feature is its unique unicameral legislature. Last week voters in a statewide primary gave Nebraska an even more memorable feature: two women . . . won their parties’ nominations for Governor, thus setting the stage for the first all-woman gubernatorial race in U.S. history.” In the coming November, Nebraskans would choose between Republican Kay Orr, Nebraska state treasurer, and Democrat Helen Boosalis, the mayor of Lincoln. Only seven women had previously been elected governor of an American state. They all had been Democrats, and their opponents all had been Republican men. Women were now running for governor in both parties and in record numbers. In 1986 alone, twenty women ran in gubernatorial primaries, and the increase in the number of women running for state offices over the past fifteen years was nearly fourfold, increasing from 362 in 1971 to 1,103 in 1986. Thus, it was inevitable that two women would run against each other, and it happened first in Nebraska. Neither Nebraska woman won a majority of her party’s vote. Orr won 39 percent of the primary Republican vote, and Boosalis won 44 percent of the Democratic vote. Orr defeated seven other declared candidates, including one other woman and six men. Only Kermit Brashear, Nebraska Republican state party chairman from Omaha, and Nancy Hoch, a University of Nebraska regent from Nebraska City, mounted

significant campaigns. Boosalis bested six other candidates, including two other women and four men. Like the Republicans, it was basically a three-person Democratic primary among Norfolk attorney David Domina, Chris Beutler, a Nebraska state senator from Lincoln, and Boosalis. This election result captured national attention on cbs’s Morning News and abc’s Good Morning America. Coverage extended beyond Nebraska’s media as feature stories were carried in London, England’s The Guardian; the International Herald Tribune; and the Christian Science Monitor. Downplayed the New York Times, “Outsiders seemed more struck with the result than Nebraskans last week when the conservative but populist state became the first to nominate women as the candidates [for governor] of both major political parties.” Nebraskans themselves held a variety of opinions. The two candidates welcomed the attention. “It’s going to be a great opportunity to tell [the nation] what we have in Nebraska,” said Kay Orr, now the Republican candidate for governor. Agreed Helen Boosalis, the new Democratic candidate for governor, “It feels wonderful because it says something about Nebraskans.” Republican National Committeeman Duane Acklie observed, “[W]e’re a very open state. We don’t have closed minds.” And Nellie Snyder Yost, longtime member of the Nebraska State Historical Society Board and prominent state historian, concluded, “We are a conservative state and I don’t see that this changes our conservatism at all. If these two women seem to have the best ideas for bringing the state out of its financial difficulties, then that’s just the way we are. We vote for what’s best for Nebraska and ourselves.” Still, there was a sense of euphoria, pride, and even a little defensiveness among Nebraskans. A volunteer for the Boosalis campaign allowed, “I like to see history made. We should be proud that Nebraska had the opportunity to make a little piece of history.” And the Republican National Committeewoman from Nebraska noted, “I guess the fuss is because it’s never happened. Everybody looks at Nebraska as being kind of backward, but I don’t think we are.” Come November, Nebraskans would pick their first female governor ever. This all came about because in December 1985 popular Democratic governor Robert Kerrey surprised the state by announcing he would not seek reelection. He had previously held no elective office. Nebraskans sometimes like to elect a new face, a dark horse, and that had hap332

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pened in 1982. While he was governor, Kerrey had cleaned up a financial emergency with some tough belt-tightening measures, and he had a very public romance with movie star Debra Winger while she was making the Academy Award-winning film Terms of Endearment in Lincoln. He stepped out of politics retaining his high popularity, and he would reenter Nebraska politics several years later, winning two terms as a U.S. senator. Still, his surprise announcement upset the state’s political apple cart. Democrats understood but regretted Kerrey’s decision. Senator Vard Johnson of Omaha said, “I suppose if I were capable of weeping, I would have. I think it’s a terrible loss for the state.” Democrats had to regroup. A number of candidates were mentioned, but as the chair of the Democratic state party Tom Monaghan noted, “[M]ost of them did not see themselves running for governor quite this soon.” Potential Democratic candidates included Ed Zorinsky, one of Nebraska’s U.S. senators; Mike Boyle, mayor of Omaha; Gene Mahoney, Nebraska State Game and Parks director; David Domina, a young lawyer appointed by Governor Kerrey to investigate the failure of Commonwealth Savings Company that had proved a devastating blow to many Nebraskans’ lifetime savings; and state senators Chris Beutler and Johnson. Republicans saw a good chance to regain the governorship, there being no Democratic incumbent in a majority Republican state. Nancy Hoch, University of Nebraska Regent who had been eying the race, said that the 1986 election would not be a race against Bob Kerrey. Instead, “It would be a race for Nebraska.” Republicans mentioned in the press as potential gubernatorial candidates included Hoch, the Republican state chairman Kermit Brashear; Bill Barrett, a state senator from Lexington who would eventually serve several terms in Congress from the large western Third District; two other state senators, Howard Lamb of Anselmo and John DeCamp of Neligh; and Baptist minister Everett Sileven of Louisville. Ironically, no one mentioned either Kay Orr or Helen Boosalis in the preliminary political skirmishes. The Republican state treasurer sensed a political opportunity. Orr said of Governor Kerrey, “He’s just been unpredictable, yet it’s still startling news. The governor has been a very popular governor.” Noting that Republicans could reclaim the governorship, she observed that “There’s no question that this [Kerrey’s retirement] makes it easier.” And Mayor Boosalis admitted that when Becoming Madam Governor

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Gene Mahoney announced in January 1986 that he would not run for governor, she had already been strongly leaning toward entering the race and had been raising funds for the campaign. When all the political dust settled, eight Republicans and seven Democrats announced their candidacies. Nine of the candidates proved marginal, and they rarely campaigned. Republicans ranged from Pastor Sileven, who did not distinguish himself when he said that female leadership “is a sure sign of God’s curse”; an unemployed auto salesman from Lincoln whose central issue was opposing mandatory seat belt laws; a Wausa farmer who had spent numerous times in court and who publicly railed against lawyers, judges, and bankers as a “parasitic class”; to a bankrupt Lincolnite who favored statewide video slot machines and higher sales taxes. Democrats countered with an eighty-five-yearold Omaha evangelist who operated a gift shop from her home; an Omaha state senator and relative of Mayor Mike Boyle who said she wanted to be governor for “the little people;” an unemployed Lincoln bus driver; and a polemical University of Nebraska regent from Wilbur who more often than not vehemently sparred with Regent Hoch. That left six strong candidates in the unusually wide-open primaries. Early polls for the Republicans suggested an easy victory for Regent Nancy Hoch. A Lincoln Star poll taken in February 1986 found that 82 percent of the respondents would consider voting for a woman while only 11 percent said that they could not. Hoch was favored by 35 percent of Republican voters; Orr was second with 16 percent. “[I]t appears that there is more ground to be made up by the men in the race than most might have expected,” editorialized the Capital City newspaper. Democrats, meanwhile, wondered whether Lincoln-based Senator Beutler and Mayor Boosalis might cancel each other’s strengths, allowing a relative unknown candidate, attorney David Domina, to prevail. The state’s media noted that the electorate believed the main issues in the primary involved state spending, reductions of property taxes, stimulation of economic development, protection of the state’s water supply, and Legislative Bill 662, slated to be on the ballot in November. lb 662 encouraged school district consolidation along with the promise of a one cent sales tax increase to finance more state aid to education. All of these issues remain prominent in today’s Nebraska state politics. Both parties had strong candidates who articulated clear positions on the issues. Republicans had two major candidates who were women. 334

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72. Governor Kay Orr (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Nancy Hoch, forty-nine, hailed from Nebraska City. She grew up on the family farm in eastern Otoe County. Married with three children and a graduate of the University of Kansas, she had served on the University of Nebraska Board of Regents since 1982. In 1984 she had lost the race for the U.S. Senate to incumbent senator James J. Exon. Kermit Brashear, forty-two, lived in Omaha, where he was managing partner of a law firm with offices in Omaha, Lincoln, and Denver. A native of Crawford in Dawes County, Brashear was married with three children and a graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Law. He served as chairman of the Republican Party from 1983 to 1985. He recently completed his state legislative career in 2006 as speaker of the Nebraska state senate. Kay Orr, forty-seven, had lived in Lincoln since 1964. Born in Burlington, Iowa, and a high school graduate from Columbus Junction, Iowa, she attended the University of Iowa for three semesters before she married William Orr, who eventually became senior vice president of Woodmen Accident and Life Insurance Co. She had two children. Becoming Madam Governor

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Orr worked her way up in the Nebraska Republican Party, holding various positions and serving as a delegate to national conventions in 1976, 1980, and 1984. She co-chaired Charles Thone’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1978, and when a state treasurer vacancy occurred, Governor Thone appointed Orr. In 1982 Kay Orr was the first woman elected in Nebraska to a state constitutional office at the same time that Governor Thone was losing his reelection race to Democrat Bob Kerrey. Very little separated these candidates. All opposed lb 662; all wanted to modify Initiative 300, which had outlawed corporate farms in Nebraska. Subtleties could be detected in their various approaches to state government. Hoch put the emphasis on planning for the state’s future; Brashear believed the state should change its tax system to attract industry; and Orr wanted to reorganize state government to make it smaller and more efficient and invest in higher education. Democrats had comparably strong candidates. Chris Beutler, fortyone, had represented Lincoln in the state legislature since 1978. He practiced law in Lincoln and was president of a title company. Married at the time with four children, he graduated from Yale University in 1966 and from the University of Nebraska College of Law in 1973. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army. In 2006, like Brashear, Beutler served his last term in the state legislature. David Domina, thirty-five, of Norfolk and married with two children, graduated from the University of Nebraska College of Law in 1972. He was a partner in the law firm of Domina and Gerrard. A former member of the Democratic State Central Committee, in 1983 he was appointed to the State Board of Educational Lands and Funds. He served as special deputy attorney general for Governor Kerrey to investigate the conduct of public officials related to the collapse of Commonwealth Savings in 1983. And Helen Boosalis, sixty-six, was mayor of Lincoln, having served sixteen years on the Lincoln City Council before her election as mayor in 1975. She was the first woman elected mayor of a city with a population of more than one hundred thousand in the United States and the first woman elected president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Born in Minneapolis to Greek immigrant parents, she attended the University of Minnesota for four semesters but left school to find a job during the Depression. She later married Michael Boosalis in 1945, and when he accepted a professorship at the University of Nebraska, they moved to 336

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73. Mayor Helen Boosalis (courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society).

Lincoln in 1951. All Democratic candidates opposed changes or repeal of Initiative 300; all supported a state lottery; and all supported lb 662. Beutler favored a code of ethics for state senators and elected officials; Domina wanted the state to be more innovative in attracting businesses; and Boosalis supported an expanded role for the state’s Department of Agriculture and a study of the state tax system. It was a hard-fought primary in both parties. For the Republicans, surprises included the collapse of the Hoch candidacy, the strength of Orr in southeast Nebraska, Omaha, and the Platte Valley; and Brashear’s carrying only northwest Nebraska. Of Nebraska’s ninety-three counties, Hoch took only two (her home county of Otoe and Dakota), and Brashear carried nine (the northwest counties of Banner, Dawes, Morrill, Scotts Bluff, and Sioux plus Gosper, Nuckells, Seward, and York). Brashear and Orr tied in Clay County, each with 559 votes. Thus, Orr carried eighty-one counties, including the two most populous, Douglas and Lancaster. The final vote tally was Orr, 75,914; Brashear, 60,308; and Hoch, 42,649. Democrats also surprised the pundits. Boosalis swamped Beutler, Becoming Madam Governor

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who carried no counties. Domina, however, showed strength in northeast Nebraska, carrying sixteen counties, including Madison County. Boosalis carried the rest, seventy-seven counties. Most importantly, she swept Lancaster County with 11,776 votes to Beutler’s 5,314 and Domina’s 3,313. She also won Douglas County by nearly three thousand votes over both Domina and Beutler. The totals for the Democratic primary were Boosalis, 63,830; Domina, 37,975; and Beutler, 31,605. Thus, Nebraska’s political parties chose two savvy political women to lead their respective political banners in the fall campaign. It promised to be one that evoked national attention. Interestingly, the parties also chose two men to run for lieutenant governor. Subsequent Nebraska gubernatorial candidates chose their own running mates, but in 1986 Democrats re-nominated Lieutenant Governor Donald McGinley, a lawyer and attorney from Ogallala and a former congressman from the third district. Republicans chose William Nichol, speaker of the legislature, and former Scottsbluff mayor and city councilman. There were differences between the gubernatorial candidates. In a state survey in September, some Nebraska voters thought Boosalis too old to handle the job; and some thought Orr too inexperienced. Orr herself thought it would be a close and difficult campaign, saying, “This is no Bake-Off.” Both women proved to be polite, professional, and well-spoken, Time Magazine reported. Each attempted to exploit any political weaknesses the other harbored. Republican state senator John DeCamp tried to generate a write-in candidacy to provide a male alternative to what he described as a “prom-queen contest,” but he gave up as no one found him worthy. Nebraskans settled in for an all-female campaign. Three potential turning points in the election occurred during the fall of 1986. First, lb 662 split the candidates clearly. Boosalis supported it, saying that the bill would provide property tax relief and equity. Orr opposed the bill. She thought there was no way to ensure that lower property taxes would result, and rural schools would be lost. The bill was eventually withdrawn from the ballot that some felt helped Orr and her position on taxes. Second, President Ronald Reagan visited Nebraska to raise money for Kay Orr. At the Civic Auditorium in Omaha, seventyfive hundred people turned out to hear the president say, “By electing Kay, the people of this state will be sending a message to the rest of the 338

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nation, and especially to the liberal leadership of the Democratic Party. Stop the taxing; stop the spending; and make government live within its means.” The evening brought in two hundred thousand dollars for Orr’s campaign. This highlighted a growing fund-raising difference between Orr and Boosalis. While they both spent comparably during the primaries (Orr expended $286,081; Boosalis used $273,778), Orr soon outspent Boosalis in the general election. Orr had $1,188,901 at her disposal; Boosalis $975,684. It proved crucial at the very end of the campaign. Orr’s race up to that time was the most expensive campaign in Nebraska history. Reagan’s visit made a difference financially, but at the time it was controversial. Orr introduced Reagan as a “friend of the farmer,” but farmers outside and inside the hall were not convinced. Boosalis made the visit a political one, saying that she believed Reagan might have been more genuine in his desire to help rural Nebraska. “If I were hosting my president,” said the Democratic nominee, “I would take him out to where the hurt is greatest in the agricultural communities. Perhaps if he could see what his administration’s policies have done to agriculture, there might be a greater sensitivity to the farmers and their problems.” Orr herself after the election was not sure if Reagan’s visit helped or hurt her. Finally, during the last two weeks of the campaign, Orr aired a television ad that attacked Boosalis’s taxation plans. The commercial used an Omaha World-Herald article quoting figures from Boosalis’s goal of reaching a formula that required a minimum of one-third of all state and local revenues to come from three tax sources: property, sales, and income taxes. Orr stated that the proposal would mean significant increases in sales and income taxes. At the same time, the ad emphasized Orr’s “no tax increase” stance and boosted her own spending ideas. Boosalis’s campaign tried to fire back, complaining that she had been misrepresented, but it was too little too late. On November 4, 1986, Nebraskans went to the polls to cast their votes in this historic campaign. Up to the last week, Boosalis held a slight lead in state polling, but by the end of the evening on Election Day, Kay Orr received 298,325 votes, or 53 percent, while Helen Boosalis tallied 265,156 votes, or 47 percent. Orr carried seventy-nine of the ninety-three counties, including populous Douglas County, a traditional Democratic bastion, by a mere 603 votes out of 137,662 votes cast. Becoming Madam Governor

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In some ways, it represented a significant shift. Democratic Catholics were more comfortable with Republican Orr on the abortion issue. She opposed all abortions; Boosalis instead favored exceptions made for rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother. Both candidates were from Lancaster County, and Boosalis did well there, winning 44,044 to 28,542, but it was not sufficient. She never recovered in northeastern Nebraska, the Omaha suburbs, or the Platte Valley. Nebraska’s pundits analyzed the election. Some felt Orr depicted a more “macho” psyche while still able to appear compassionate. The tough yet caring attitude appealed to both men and women. Others thought the tax issue hurt Boosalis, especially the last week of the campaign. Some found Boosalis to have concentrated her messages and efforts too much upon groups with urban ties. She ignored smaller cities, whereas Orr knew she could not compete in Lincoln, where Boosalis was regarded by most as a competent and popular mayor. Instead, she concentrated on the Platte Valley and Douglas County. Early Wednesday morning, Helen Boosalis addressed her supporters. Dry-eyed and smiling, she told them she had no regrets about her campaign, that they had been open and honest throughout, and she congratulated her opponent as the choice of the people of Nebraska for governor. Said retiring Governor Kerrey, “I think Nebraska is going to be well led by Kay Orr. I don’t think Nebraska could have lost with either candidate.” That same morning, Kay Orr gave every indication she was going to be an aggressive governor. She thanked her opponent for a good campaign, and she announced the formation of a jobs creation council to help small towns recover from the farm depression and a task force charged to seek remedies for the state’s agricultural problems. Kay Orr had become the first Republican woman elected as a governor, the first woman elected a governor of a state by defeating another woman, and the first woman governor for the state of Nebraska. The next four years Kay Orr often found the governor’s job to be a difficult one. Sometimes her relationships with the Unicameral were strained. Her greatest contribution was seeking and achieving significant funding increases for higher education in Nebraska that during the previous decades had dramatically declined, leaving the University of Nebraska behind its peer institutions. Orr linked education to economic development successfully, and the legislature signed on. Nevertheless, Orr faced a difficult reelection fight in 1990, and she lost to Democrat 340

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Ben Nelson, an Omaha insurance industry attorney and native of McCook. She returned to the private sector and became very involved in Christian religious activities throughout Nebraska, serving on the Lincoln People’s City Mission board, the First Family board of directors, and the National Board of Prison Fellowship. Helen Boosalis retired from political office after the 1986 governor’s race. She continues to support other state Democratic candidates and remains active in the Lincoln community. Every Thursday she has breakfast at the Cornhusker Hotel with a loyal group of bipartisan friends. The topic of discussion: state and local politics. Both women knew they had accomplished something historic in their race to be governor of Nebraska. Kay Orr was particularly conscious of the role that she had played. When she won her first position as state treasurer, she said, “I hope what I have been able to achieve will encourage other women to consider seeking political offices.” They have. Since she won in 1982, several women have held the positions of lieutenant governor, treasurer, and auditor. A year after Orr became governor, she wrote in June 1987 on the celebration of Malcolm X Day in Omaha, “Although we realize today that human potential is too precious a natural resource to waste, our country in its early years often sacrificed human potential in the name of custom. A half a century ago the presence of a black senator or a woman governor in the Nebraska state government would not have been an issue. It simply would not have been.”

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37. The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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t was fourth down with only seconds remaining in the fourth quarter. The University of Nebraska’s undefeated season was on the line, and this season—1997—was the last one for Coach Tom Osborne. Who would have thought that Missouri, even on their home field, would give the Cornhuskers such a tough game? Diehard Tiger fans cheered, and the entire state of Nebraska held its breath as Quarterback Scott Frost came to the line of scrimmage. There were many players spread out, so to everyone in the stadium it looked like Nebraska would try a last-ditch pass play. Nebraska was not known for its passes; instead, it was feared for its running sweeps and its in-your-face football that Missouri had so far successfully contained. The ball was hiked. The would-be pass catchers fled into the end zone to be covered by a number of Missouri defenders. Down 38 to 31, would this be the end of the national championship dreams all Cornhusker fans held for their beloved coach? Frost retreated into the backfield, and suddenly he threw a bullet pass that looked like it was headed straight for the ground in the end zone. Then a miracle occurred. Someone deflected the pass, and at the last second an unheralded freshman flanker named Matt Davison from Tecumseh grabbed it just before he hit the ground. It would be his play of a lifetime; a play for the entire season; a play perhaps for the century; maybe even a play for all-time. In the kicker went, and the stunned crowd prepared for an overtime test of strengths. Of course, all Cornhusker fans knew they had “dodged a bullet” and that the Huskers would prevail as they did in the November 8, 1997, thriller in Columbia, 45–38. Football is very special to the state of Nebraska. Throughout the summer, Nebraskans jaw, cajole, and predict about the prospects of

their team, and when autumn arrives, all eyes and ears are on Lincoln. Memorial Stadium fills to capacity as it holds the record for ncaa consecutive sell-outs, a record that is unlikely ever to be matched and most fans believe will never end. But then as all Cornhuskers so painfully know, especially after the 2004 season, records are often made to be broken. Each game during the fall is savored and dissected at local barbershops, pool halls, and sewing circles. Sportscasters on the radio and television spend hours worrying about football trivia. Young boys think about the day they too might play on the field in Memorial Stadium. After the last yell is screamed, the last football is thrown, and the last bowl game speculation has ended in December, it is winter on the Great Plains, and Cornhusker fans begin to gossip about the new recruits who must make their choices for college known in February. When spring arrives, the annual rite of passage exhibition in Lincoln often takes on a real game atmosphere. Indeed, at the team’s 2004 spring game, over sixty thousand fans came to see what the new team, new offense, and new coaches looked like. Yes, football is a religion in Nebraska, and it came to this exalted status primarily because of the strategies and foresight of two men, who during their watch as head Cornhusker football coaches achieved five national championships, dominating the game for nearly three decades. Prior to the 1961 season, Nebraska was not known for successful football. In the years since 1940, the Cornhuskers endured losing seasons in seventeen years out of twenty-one. A promising new coach, Bill Jennings, was hired in 1957. Jennings had been a successful assistant coach at Nebraska and at the Cornhuskers’ major rival, the University of Oklahoma; but in Jennings’s five seasons, the losses continued. More depressing for fans was the fact that Nebraska did not score in more than one-third of its games. When Jennings left Nebraska in 1961, he moved to the University of Kansas to coach running backs. “Many people speak fondly of Bill Jennings, the individual,” wrote sports historian Jim Sherwood. “Few speak fondly of Bill Jennings, the coach. . . . [He was] too nice a guy to be a head coach.” Several prospects were considered for this position, generally viewed as hopeless by many coaches, but Bob Devaney, head coach at the University of Wyoming (1957–61), decided to travel east down Interstate 80 to Lincoln. Devaney’s time in Laramie had been very successful. His five-year record stood at 35-10-5, with four league titles and the The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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championship of the Sun Bowl in 1958. He considered several coaching opportunities while at Wyoming but decided upon Nebraska, although at first he wondered if he had made a mistake. Devaney wrote later that Nebraska’s football facilities were “the worst in the Big Eight. You didn’t see much of anything that didn’t need improvement.” He even admitted that “when I came [to visit Nebraska] to talk about the job, I really did not inspect the facilities perhaps the way I should have.” People encouraged the Cowboy coach to become a Cornhusker. Regent Clarence Swanson told Devaney, “Bob, if you come here and win, you’ll never be sorry. These people want to win that much. You’ll get all the support you need here; you know, whatever you need we’ll try to do.” Still, the losing tradition was a strong one. “I was impressed by the size of the stadium at Nebraska,” remembered Devaney, “and the number of people that came to the games even when things went badly for the team.” Of course, Bob Devaney did move to Nebraska, and he worked hard to turn a losing tradition into a winning one. Bob Devaney was born Robert S. Devaney on April 13, 1915, in Saginaw, Michigan, to Grace and Ben Devaney. Grace held two parttime jobs until the end of the Depression, running errands for a doctor in general practice and working in a cafeteria. Ben was a sailor on the Great Lakes and later worked as an insurance agent. Bob was the oldest of three sons. At Arthur Hill High School, he played end on both offense and defense for the football team, and his senior year he made the all-conference team and received all-state honorable mention. Sports rather than studies interested young Bob, and after he graduated from high school he had few options. There were no jobs in Saginaw at the height of the Depression, so he rode freight trains with a friend to Florida, where he found work in turpentine camps and orange groves near Orlando. Eventually, after many ups and downs, Bob hitched train rides back to Saginaw, where he found work in the Chevrolet iron foundry. After the tough work in the foundry, Bob began to think about college. He had friends who went to Alma College, a private churchsponsored school in nearby Alma, Michigan. The coach invited him to try out, and he decided to enroll. Bob did well in Alma football. Playing end and linebacker, he was named all-conference and captain of the team. Although he didn’t particularly like his studies, he did meet Phyllis Wiley his freshman year, and they married within a year. He 344

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later credited Phyllis with keeping him in school and making sure he graduated with a teaching certificate in 1939. Now what? After searching high and low for the entire summer to find a teaching and coaching position, a Catholic priest friend told him that there might be a position at Big Beaver High School, a community twenty miles from Alma. Bob interviewed for it, got the offer, and took the job. Big Beaver had not won a football game in two years. Devaney’s job required him to teach six classes and coach all the sports at the school. He decided to teach his football squad plays he knew from his college team, and he bought books on coaching and attended coaching clinics. He sought to improve his knowledge, and it paid off. His second year, Big Beaver went unbeaten, winning eight games and tying three. Bob Devaney coached high school football and taught at three Michigan schools from 1939 to 1953 (Big Beaver, Keego Harbor, and Alpena). His teams did very well, and his success attracted the attention of Michigan State’s coach Hugh “Duffy” Daugherty. He hired Bob as an assistant coach in 1953, and Devaney stayed with the Spartans until he took his first head coaching position in college football at Wyoming in 1957. When Devaney took over at Nebraska, he started a winning tradition that continued until 2004. He chose coaches who stayed with him throughout most of his time as head coach, including a young Tom Osborne, whom he hired as a graduate assistant in 1962. In his first season, Devaney’s team went 9-2 and played in the ill-fated Gotham Bowl in New York City. The next year, Nebraska went 10-1, won the Big Eight, and played in the Orange Bowl. All totaled, Bob Devaney’s Nebraska teams won eight league titles, three straight Orange Bowls, and two national championships. His players received two Outland Trophies, the Lombardi Award, and the Heisman Trophy (Johnny Rodgers), and twenty-two players were all-Americans. Devaney’s two national championship teams, 1970 and 1971, were special, he always said. In 1970 the team kind of slipped into the title. The season began with a thrashing of Wake Forest and a tie with the third-ranked team in the nation, Southern California. After this game, Nebraska moved up to No. 8 in the national poll. Game 3 saw Nebraska defeat Army, 28–0, beginning a twenty-three game winning streak. The best game of the season was a 51–13 victory over No. 20 Kansas State in which the Huskers intercepted the Kansas State quarterback a schoolrecord seven times. After this game, Nebraska jumped up to No. 3 in The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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74. Coach Bob Devaney and his coaching staff, 1964 (courtesy of University of Nebraska–Lincoln Archives and Special Collections).

the national poll. Nebraska finished the regular season 10-0-1, its first undefeated record in many years, and won the Big Eight title. Going into the Orange Bowl in Miami, played on January 1, 1971, against fifth-ranked Louisiana State University, the Huskers had little hope of achieving their first national championship. Notre Dame had previously been No. 1 until they lost their last game of the season to the University of Southern California, a team Nebraska had tied previously. Notre Dame now played No. 1 Texas in the Cotton Bowl, and Ohio State, No. 2, played Stanford in the Rose Bowl. Before the Orange Bowl was over, Nebraska’s players and fans had learned that Notre Dame had beaten Texas, 24–11 and that Stanford had upset Ohio State, 27–17. The lsu game in the Orange Bowl was the third largest crowd ever in Husker history. Over eighty thousand people saw the game in Miami. Nebraska led in the first quarter, 10–0, but lsu dominated the 2nd and 3rd quarters, moving ahead at the end of the 3rd quarter, 12–10. In the 4th quarter, the Huskers drove 67 years down the field, and Jerry Tagge scored the winning touchdown with just under nine minutes re346

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maining. Then the Husker defense held lsu without a score, with Bob Terrio securing the victory by intercepting an lsu pass with only fortyfive seconds left in the game. Huskers win, 17–12. Some political maneuvering occurred while the teams waited for the final poll results. The Notre Dame coach said he felt his team deserved the title because they defeated No. 1 Texas. Devaney responded, “I don’t see how the Pope could vote Notre Dame number one.” He reminded the Irish that Nebraska had only one blemish on their record, a tie against the very same team that had beaten Notre Dame, 38–28. The Huskers were ironically injected into presidential politics when, on January 14, President Richard Nixon came to Lincoln and proclaimed the Cornhuskers No. 1 in front of a crowd of eight thousand in the university’s coliseum. He gave Nebraska a national championship “endorsement.” The Associated Press poll finally came out and bestowed the championship upon the Huskers in a landslide vote. The 1971 season held great promise. Many important players from Nebraska’s first national championship team were returning, and the Cornhuskers began the season ranked No. 2 and moved to No. 1 after their first game, when they pounded Oregon, 34–7. The Huskers dominated their opponents, allowing only seven touchdowns during the entire season. Four of them, however, were in the traditional showdown with Oklahoma in what would turn out to be the “Game of the Century.” Minnesota, Texas A&M, Utah State, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma State, Colorado, Iowa State, and Kansas State—all felt the sting of defeat from Nebraska. Then came Thanksgiving Day for the traditional rivalry game, this year in Norman, Oklahoma. Both teams were unbeaten and untied. Nebraska had the nation’s top-ranked defense; Oklahoma had the nation’s top-ranked offense. Something had to give. The week of the game, Sports Illustrated ran as its cover headline, “Irresistible Oklahoma Meets Immovable Nebraska.” It would prove to be the only game in Nebraska’s season when the Huskers trailed an opponent. Johnny Rodgers opened the scoring less than four minutes into the game with a 72-yard punt return. It was a symbol of what was to come. Back and forth, the Sooners and Cornhuskers charged. Jeff Kinney scored four touchdowns that day for Nebraska, and Rich Glover made twenty tackles of the Sooners. The score, a Nebraska victory, 35–31, indicated the closeness of the two outstanding teams. But Nebraska, The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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with the victory, won the Big Eight championship and earned the right to play No. 2 Alabama in the Orange Bowl. The Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day in 1972 was supposed to be another “Game of the Century” pitting the strategies of Bob Devaney against those of Alabama coach Bear Bryant. It didn’t turn out to be even close. Going into the game, Nebraska had some revenge to extract as the Huskers had lost to Alabama in two previous bowls in the 1965 and 1966 seasons. After Johnny Rodgers returned another punt for 77 yards to set up a touchdown by Jeff Kinney in the first quarter, Alabama collapsed. Nebraska eventually prevailed, 38–6. Said Coach Bryant after the game, “This is one of the greatest teams ever to play football. I surely think they’re one of the greatest, if not the greatest team, I’ve ever seen.” The game represented the worst defeat Bryant ever had during his long career. Bob Devaney reflected after the game. “We tried not to impress on the players,” said Devaney, “the importance that I felt about this game. I’ve lost twice to Bear and I don’t like to think that there’s a guy around who can just walk out on the field and beat me any time he wants to—even if his team is very good.” Actually, most of the players felt more pressure to defeat Oklahoma than Alabama. The season concluded with Nebraska No. 1, Oklahoma No. 2, and Colorado No. 3, the Big Eight making a complete national poll sweep. The next year Coach Devaney named his young assistant Tom Osborne as assistant head coach as Devaney began the process of retiring from coaching. Although he stepped down in 1973 and installed his handpicked successor, he continued to be a strong presence in Nebraska athletics, serving as athletic director from 1967 to 1993 and then as athletic director emeritus until 1996. So much happened under his watch. Memorial Stadium grew from 36,000 to 72,700 in seating capacity, and Devaney oversaw tremendous improvements to the Cornhusker physical plant, including construction of a huge $15 million indoor sports building that opened in 1976 on the Nebraska State Fair Grounds and was renamed the “Bob Devaney Sports Center” in 1978. Devaney’s defensive line coach from 1962 to 1968, George Kelley, began the legendary Blackshirt defense that remains with the current Huskers, and Bob Devaney was the first Nebraska football head coach to be named national “Coach of the Year” in 1971. In 1995 Bob Devaney suffered a stroke and retired the following year. On May 9, 1997, he passed away in Lincoln at age eighty-two. 348

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As a coach and personality, he had revolutionized Nebraska football. Said sports historian David Israel, Bob Devaney “not only organized the team, he organized the town. He organized the state. All of Lincoln and most of Nebraska went red. Like an old tenting evangelist Devaney traveled the length of the state preaching the gospel of Americanism and Cornhusker football.” Building upon Devaney’s accomplishments would be his young disciple, Tom Osborne. Osborne remembered that on the bus ride home from a 10–7 victory over Kansas State in 1969, Coach Devaney leaned over and surprisingly told him, “I don’t want to go much longer. Maybe another year or so. I’d like you to take over as head coach.” Reflected Osborne, “I really had not aspired to be the head coach at Nebraska. I wanted to go somewhere else where I could develop my own staff and my own ideas. I thought following Bob would be a very difficult task because he had turned the program around and was very popular.” All of that was true, so Osborne had started to look for opportunities. He interviewed for a job at the University of South Dakota in 1968, but it was not offered to him. He was offered a job at Augustana College in Sioux Falls in 1969 but turned it down. He also interviewed that same year at Texas Tech University, but again he was not offered the position. Then, in 1973, Coach Devaney decided he was ready to turn over the reins to his trusted assistant, and Tom Osborne, age thirty-six, became the next Nebraska head football coach. Tom Osborne was a native Nebraskan, born in St. Paul, February 23, 1937. He was named after his grandfather Thomas, who had gone to Hastings College in the late 1890s and played football there. After college, Thomas had become a Presbyterian minister, serving churches in Alliance, Bayard, Bridgeport, and Scottsbluff. Fluent in Lakota and well respected by Native Americans and ranchers alike throughout northwestern Nebraska, Thomas retired from the ministry and was elected to the Nebraska State Legislature. In many ways, Tom would follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Like his grandfather, Tom’s father Charles also attended Hastings College and played football. Charles worked as a traveling salesman and fought in World War II. Tom’s mother worked in a munitions plant and taught school. The Osborne family made their home first in St. Paul and then moved to Hastings when young Tom was entering junior high. They lived just two blocks from the campus of the college. The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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Tom Osborne was a high school sports star. He played baseball, basketball, and football, and he ran track. In baseball he played third base on the state championship runner-up team; in basketball Osborne made the all-state team and played on the 1954 championship team; and in football he started as quarterback beginning his junior season and in his senior year made second-team all-state. When it came time to consider colleges, Tom received scholarships from the University of Nebraska, the University of Wyoming, Denver University, and two other smaller colleges. He later said that he really liked the University of Oklahoma, and if they had offered him a scholarship, he probably would have gone to Norman. Ultimately, Osborne decided to attend Hastings College because he knew the school and the coaches; he didn’t think he would fit in with the social life in Lincoln, particularly student drinking; and he would be the third generation of Osbornes to play football for Hastings. Osborne lived at home and paid his way to college, where he lettered in three sports: football, basketball, and track. Tom enjoyed success on the college gridiron, leading Hastings to an undefeated season in 1957, including playing in the Mineral Water Bowl in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where they were badly defeated. In 1959 he was named “College Athlete of the Year” in Nebraska. Tom later commented that he was not very happy with this award because some of his teammates resented it and it affected their play. His senior year wasn’t nearly as pleasant as he experienced a number of injuries. Osborne graduated in 1959 with a 3.8 gpa and a major in history and a minor in political science. The San Francisco 49ers drafted him with their 18th round pick, and that summer he tried out in a training camp but was cut to the taxi squad. Tom Osborne was at a fork in life’s road. He decided that he would pursue the ministry, and he moved to San Anselmo Presbyterian Seminary just north of San Francisco. This lasted, however, for only two weeks before he concluded that he really missed football. He tried to play once again on the 49er taxi squad, and he stayed with the team to learn the system that fascinated him. The next season Osborne was released by the 49ers and then picked up by the Washington Redskins. After the first of two seasons with the Redskins, Tom began graduate school at the University of Southern California in psychology, but after one more year with the Redskins he quit because of injuries and contract issues 350

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and returned to Nebraska, where he continued his graduate studies at the University of Nebraska with the program in educational psychology. He found employment with the Cornhuskers’ new head football coach as a graduate assistant with the football program. During this time, Tom met his wife-to-be, Nancy Tederman. They married and would have three children. Tom received his ma in educational psychology in 1963 and his PhD in 1965. When the chancellor at the University of Nebraska offered Osborne a job opportunity in college administration, he declined and instead approached Coach Devaney about becoming a full-time assistant football coach. Devaney upgraded Osborne to a full-time position in 1966. Tom Osborne’s first season as head football coach in 1973 was not easy, although by any standards it was successful. “I had mixed feelings,” wrote Osborne. “I was pleased I was going to get the chance to be a head coach. . . . And yet at the same time, if I were to be a head coach, I really didn’t want to follow Bob Devaney.” Osborne was criticized for being too conservative in a 10–9 win over Kansas; two aggressive in going for two points after a touchdown in a 13–12 loss to Missouri, and gambling by going for a touchdown rather than a field goal in a 17–17 tie with Oklahoma State. He was even told he was just too nice. The lowest point that infuriated many Nebraska fans was a 27–0 shutout loss to Oklahoma. The team concluded the season with a 9-2-1 mark and a victory in the Cotton Bowl. Osborne coached for thirty-six years at the University of Nebraska, the longest tenure of any Nebraska coach. His cumulative record as head coach was 255 wins and only 49 losses and 3 ties. Every team he coached went to a bowl game, an ncaa record. He won thirteen conference titles and three national titles. One of his players won a Heisman Trophy—Mike Rozier in 1983—and fifty-five players were first-team All-Americans. Osborne was especially proud that 63 percent of his players achieved their college degrees. Nebraska was only the third college to post back-to-back perfect undefeated national championship seasons, in 1994 and 1995, the others being Notre Dame in 1946 and 1947 and Oklahoma in 1955 and 1956. Osborne’s first national championship season occurred in 1994. The previous season had ended with a disappointing 18–16 loss to Florida State in the Orange Bowl. Nebraska wanted to rectify its situation, and the head coach realized that his team lacked an ingredient that The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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75. Coach Tom Osborne instructs his players during a 1988 game in Memorial Stadium (courtesy of University of Nebraska–Lincoln Photography Archive).

the strongest southern footballers had: outstanding team speed. He set out to recruit with that characteristic particularly in mind. The season began with a No. 4 ranking and a shutout victory over West Virginia, 31–0. Nebraska then moved up to No. 1. Although the Cornhuskers won convincingly the next Saturday at Texas Tech, 42–16, they dropped to No. 2. There may have been a lingering hangover from their poll decline in the next game, at home against Bob Devaney’s old school, the University of Wyoming, when the Huskers won over the Cowboys in a surprisingly close game, 42–32. Then when they defeated Kansas State 17–6, Nebraska dropped to No. 3. There had been quarterback problems. Perhaps the greatest quarterback in Nebraska football history, Tommie Frazier, was sidelined after the fourth game against Pacific University because of a blood clot behind his right knee. He would not return until the Orange Bowl game. Brook Berringer, a tall and gangly talented quarterback from Kansas, took over, and he played very well, only to suffer from a collapsed lung after the fifth game against Wyoming. Berringer shortly after he graduated from college would tragically lose his life when the small plane he was piloting crashed. That meant a walk-on quarterback from Wahoo, 352

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Matt Turman, had to lead the team, and he did so to two important victories, over Kansas State and Oklahoma State. That Coach Osborne was able to design three very different game plans for three very different quarterbacks was a tribute to his considerable offense acumen. The Cornhuskers were still unbeaten. Redemption awaited when the No. 2 Colorado Buffaloes came to Lincoln. On that day, Nebraska recorded its two hundredth consecutive sellout, a record that continues to build, and espn held its popular Game Day Pre-Game Show at Memorial Stadium for the first time. In a very hard fought game, the Cornhuskers prevailed, 24–7, and Nebraska was rewarded with a No. 1 ranking the next week. The nation’s No. 1 team then dispatched with the rest of the season, easily defeating Kansas and Iowa State, and edging a tough Oklahoma Sooner squad at Norman, 13–3. The Orange Bowl and the Cornhuskers’ nemesis, Miami, awaited. The Miami game for the national championship was very close. Brook Berringer started and played most of the game, keeping the Cornhuskers in a position to win. Tommie Frazier, who hadn’t played since September, came in near the end of the game and led Nebraska to a game-winning touchdown, as Nebraska prevailed, 24–17. Frazier was named the mvp of the Orange Bowl, and the Nebraska Cornhuskers had won their third national championship. The season closed with great optimism as most of the players were returning for 1995. In the following September, Nebraska was ranked as the nation’s No. 1 team, and they stayed that way the entire season. The Cornhuskers were so dominating in 1995 that they were never seriously challenged by any opponent. The closest games, against Washington State and Kansas State, still resulted in fourteen-point victories. Nebraska crushed most of its opponents, such as Iowa State, 73–14; Missouri, 57–0; and Arizona State, 77–28. The season finale, in the Fiesta Bowl, against a pass-oriented speedy team from the University of Florida, was a laugher, with Nebraska prevailing 62–24. The score was not even indicative of the complete dominance of the Cornhuskers, who also won their second consecutive and fourth overall national championship. Tommie Frazier returned from his injury-riddled season of 1994 to break the Cornhusker career record for total offense and number of touchdowns (seventy-nine). He finished second to Ohio State’s Eddie George in the Heisman Trophy balloting, and many Husker fans felt he The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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should have won. He was also mvp in the Fiesta Bowl. Frazier would later take a position as an assistant football coach at Baylor University and then served two years as head coach at Doane College. Ahman Green, who would go on to star in pro-football for the Green Bay Packers, was the starting I-back and broke a school rushing record for a freshman, gaining 1,086 yards and scoring twelve touchdowns. Six players earned all-conference first-team designation on offense: Green, Frazier, Eric Anderson, Chris Dishman, Aaron Taylor, and Aaron Graham; and five were named to the first team on defense: Grant Wistrom, Christian Peter, Jared Tomich, Terrell Farley, and Tyrone Williams. Nebraska ranked No. 1 in the nation in both rushing and scoring and No. 2 in total offense. When all college football teams have been ranked, sportswriters compiled a list that contained the best twenty-five teams since 1956. At the top of that all-time ranking were the 1995 Nebraska Cornhuskers. No. 2 on the list was also Nebraska, the 1971 team. Also ranked on the list were the 1970 and 1972 teams. Nebraska football was the best of the best. Replacing Tommie Frazier proved difficult in 1996, and although Stanford transfer and Wood River graduate Scott Frost had a strong season, an early loss to Arizona State and a series of close games did not allow for Nebraska to win an unprecedented third straight national title. Many players returned, however, for 1997, and Nebraska began the season highly ranked. Tom Osborne, who had had some serious health problems, also announced near the end of the season that this would be his last as head coach. Thus, the 1997 team embarked upon a crusade. Nebraska began the final season of Coach Osborne with a series of impressive victories. Most meaningful were the 27–14 win over a strong University of Washington team in Seattle, and a 69–7 trashing of Oklahoma in Lincoln. Perhaps such an easy victory over the Cornhuskers’ arch rival, their own 8-0 record, and their No. 1 ranking contributed to their taking the ninth opponent of the season, the Missouri Tigers, less seriously, but in Columbia before over sixty-six thousand rabid football fans, Nebraska soon found it was in for a very difficult game. That they prevailed in overtime and needed Matt Davison’s miracle catch, perhaps the most dramatic moment in Nebraska football history, resulted in the Huskers losing their No. 1 ranking to Michigan, 354

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who rose from No. 4 to No. 1 on the strength of their victory over Penn State that same weekend. No more mistakes could be made if the Cornhuskers were to achieve an unprecedented fifth national championship. And none were. Iowa State was next dispatched at home, 77–14, and a very tough Colorado team was defeated 27–24 at Boulder, always a difficult place for Nebraska to play. Having joined the Big 12 meant that another obstacle remained, the championship game, and Nebraska found it had to defeat Texas A&M in order to go to the Orange Bowl. It proved not to be a difficult task, as the Cornhuskers ran over the Aggies, 54–15, and they headed to Miami to take on No. 3 Tennessee. The 1997 bowl lineups featured some historic matches. No. 1 Michigan played No. 4 Washington State in the Rose Bowl; and No. 2 Nebraska battled No. 3 Tennessee in the Orange Bowl. The odds that Nebraska might win a national title required that Michigan lose or at least stumble. Since the Orange Bowl had always been the last game on a football-packed New Year’s Day, those playing in Miami often knew the results of the other matches. Earlier in Pasadena, Michigan stumbled. They managed to win, but they did not look very impressive in doing so, the Wolverines prevailing over the Cougars, 21–16. Thus, Nebraska had a chance. And the Cornhuskers made the most of their opportunity. Led by Jason Peter and Grant Wistrom, two All-American defensive linemen, Nebraska made the Tennessee Volunteers wish they hadn’t come to Miami, beating them 42–17. Tom Osborne later observed that “Those two guys, among some others, ramrodded that football team. They decided a year ago they were going to come back and get the thing done.” And they did. Quarterback Frost played very well, and after the game he made a direct pitch on national television for at least sharing the national championship as a tribute to their departing coach. In some ways, a split seemed inevitable, and talk of a playoff game once again dominated sports shows, newspaper sports pages, and local gatherings throughout the country, particularly in Michigan and Nebraska. It wasn’t like sharing the national championship hadn’t been done before. In fact, the national title had been split no less than nine times previously. Finally, the two polls were compiled. Michigan ended as No. 1 in the Associated Press poll, whose voters are primarily sportswriters. But Nebraska ended as No. 1 in the USA Today/espn The University of Nebraska Football Champions

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Poll, whose voters then were coaches. Thus, the 1997 national title was shared, but it was a national title nevertheless. Significantly, Nebraska became only the second university football program to earn three national titles in four seasons, the only other being Notre Dame in 1946, 1947, and 1949. The retirement of Tom Osborne as head football coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers is still reverberating in Nebraskaland. He remains arguably the most popular man in the state. When he decided to begin a political career in 2000, he was easily elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a congressman from the Third Congressional District. He was reelected twice, and he quit Congress to run for governor in 2006. He lost the Republican primary. In his six years in Congress, Representative Osborne championed making agriculture more profitable, expanding access to high-speed Internet in rural areas, and strengthening rural education. As a coach, he and his wife Nancy have worked to establish mentoring programs for at-risk youth, and he carried this interest to Washington, successfully amending an education act to establish a national mentoring program. As a football coach, Tom Osborne’s accomplishments are legendary. He ranks fifth in history as the nation’s most winning coach among Division I football coaches. When he assumed his head coaching position, Nebraska’s overall record was 412 wins, 243 losses, and 37 ties; when he retired, the Cornhuskers stood at 722 wins, 292 losses, and 40 ties. His players won Outland, Lombardi, and Unitas trophies. Osborne’s twenty-five years as a head coach are the most for the Big Eight and Big 12 conferences in their histories, and in 1999 he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, the customary three-year wait for entrance into the hall being waived. When Tom Osborne retired as head football coach, he passed the baton to his longtime assistant coach Frank Solich. Solich barely continued the winning tradition, and Nebraska fans became restive. Several of the records that had been achieved since 1962 began to fall. Although the string of bowl games remained intact, it was barely so, the Huskers earning a chance to play in the 2002 Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, losing to Mississippi and finishing with the first non-winning season since 1961 (7-7). The next year, a new athletic director, Steve Pederson, arrived from the University of Pittsburgh. Pederson was a native Nebraskan from North Platte who had also worked in the athletic 356

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department in Lincoln before moving to Pittsburgh. He decided that the football program had deteriorated and needed fundamental changes, and so at the end of the season in 2003, he fired Frank Solich and hired a new coach without Nebraska connections, Bill Callahan, a former head coach of the Oakland Raiders professional team. Nebraskans were of two minds: some were very angry that a longtime loyal player and coach would be terminated, while others were elated with the choice, heralding the installation of the more modern West Coast passing offense. That Nebraska finished the initial season of the new regime in 2004 with its first losing season in over forty years did not quiet the controversy, but a projected excellent recruiting class gave the most die-hard fans reason to hope that the past was not too far away once again. The five national championships were major accomplishments for University of Nebraska football and moments of pride all Nebraskans have enjoyed. They brought recognition to the state and the university and legendary status to its two very successful coaches.

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38. The Murder of Brandon Teena

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t was cold and dreary during the early morning hours of December 31, 1993, in western Richardson County just outside the small town of Humboldt. A car silently pulled up to a rented farm house, and two men—John Lotter and Tom Nissen, one twenty-two and the other just twenty-one, and both already having served time in prison—entered the house. Inside were four residents. There was the renter, Lisa Lambert, a young woman who worked in the Colonial Acres Nursing Home and who the townsfolk thought to be a kind, friendly soul and responsible mother. There was her baby, nine-month-old Tanner. When Phillip DeVine, a young African American who had come from Dennison, Iowa, to spend the holidays with a girlfriend from Falls City, Leslie Tisdel, had a falling out and needed a place to stay before catching a bus back to Dennison, Lisa volunteered her living room couch. And there was a young soul who needed shelter. This was Brandon Teena, with a name that reversed the birth name JoAnn Brandon had given her baby daughter, who had been raped five days earlier and was awaiting a ride back home to Lincoln. Then the shots and the screams began. After the sun came up, Anna Mae Lambert, who lived in Pawnee City, a little over fifteen miles southwest of Humboldt, and who worried about a morning call from the nursing home reporting that her daughter had not come to work, decided to visit her daughter’s house to check on her and her grandson. Arriving around ten o’clock in the morning, she heard Tanner crying as she approached the slightly askew front door. Anna opened the door cautiously and discovered a chilling scene. There sitting next to the sofa on the living room floor was Phillip DeVine, shot twice and dead. In the bedroom she found her daughter Lisa face up on a waterbed, shot three times and dead. At the foot of the

bed lay Teena, shot twice and stabbed in the liver, dead. Anna picked up her grandson to comfort him and called the police. What Anna Mae Lambert did not yet know was that she had discovered the execution-style murders of three twenty-something adults by two twenty-something adults in rural southeast Nebraska. In a nation committed to the rule of law, toleration, and the end of discrimination, this kind of crime occurs so often that many state legislatures and the U.S. Congress have debated and passed hate crime legislation. Violence to a victim because of race, nationality, or sexual orientation is a hate crime, and Richardson County had just experienced a brutal explosion that would be broadcast to the world through the state and national media and Hollywood. No one with the slightest involvement would be left untouched. What made the murders a homophobic hate crime was the fact that Nissen and Lotter thought Brandon Teena was gay. Born Teena Brandon in Lincoln to her mother JoAnn, whose husband—Teena’s father—had been killed in an automobile accident when JoAnn was just one month pregnant, Teena grew up in a loving family. She lived with her mother, who suffered from a severe case of asthma and survived with the help of disability payments, and her older sister Tammy in a trailer house in northeast Lincoln. Teena’s childhood was filled with typical events except that at an early age both she and her sister were sexually molested by a male relative. Moreover, as both girls moved into their teenage years, Tammy gravitated toward the strongly feminine while Teena preferred what society considered tomboy activities and dressed in black pants and shirts. Both girls would go to Pius X High School. Teena refused to wear the typical female uniform or be put into situations determined by traditional gender assignments. Teena eventually dropped out of high school in 1991 and began to date young females as a handsome young man who called himself Brandon. He was approximately five foot five, weighed about 120 pounds, had blue eyes and short brown hair, and by all reports swept young women off their feet. He knew how to treat a woman and what a woman wanted, they would all later report. The problem for Brandon Teena was that to carry off these courtships he needed resources, and he was not employed most of the time. He began forging checks and taking money from friends, from dates, and even from his grandmother, who pressed charges against Teena. In October 1991 he was arrested for The Murder of Brandon Teena

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forgery and tried unsuccessfully to swallow a bottle of pills to commit suicide. Soon the Lincoln authorities were aware of Teena Brandon, and her mother JoAnn became very concerned. Finally, in the spring of 1992, Brandon Teena’s mother, sister, and a group of friends confronted him and brought him to Lincoln General Hospital’s psychiatric wing for help. After some resistance, Teena agreed to cooperate with therapists, who concluded after a battery of tests and interviews that he was a transsexual with a personality disorder. Such a diagnosis was not uncommon, since there are at least an estimated fifty thousand identified transsexuals in the United States alone. Discharged from the hospital and living with an older family friend, Teena continued for a time in counseling sessions. Here the doctors recommended sex change surgery. First, however, “she” should attempt to live as a man and undergo proper and lengthy preparations before any surgery. That kind of advice might work for persons with plenty of resources and adequate support systems, but Teena had neither. With bound breasts, Teena began the process as best he could. He even tried to enlist in the air force to fight in Operation Desert Storm but was rejected because he failed the written test. There is confusion over what to call JoAnn Brandon’s child. JoAnn always refers to the birth name, Teena Brandon, and regards Teena as her daughter. Teena alternated between names, but more often than not in her later years preferred Brandon Teena and “he” as a proper pronoun. One publication used Brandon Teena Brandon as the appropriate name. For the historian, this constitutes a dilemma: one does not wish to mislabel a person with a wrong name or gender. Moreover, one does not want to disrespect either the feelings of the family of a deceased or the express wishes of the deceased, and in this case these sometimes are not in harmony. Thus, pronouns here slip between genders depending upon when Brandon/Teena self-described as a man or a woman; and because this story emphasizes the last year of life, the male pronouns and the name “Brandon Teena” predominate. After receiving the medical diagnosis, Teena returned to a pattern of dating young women and soon met and fell in love with a student at the Lincoln School of Commerce, Gina Bartu. After a whirlwind courtship, Teena proposed to Bartu in May 1993, and they planned to marry the following May. Teena even threw a lavish engagement party. Problems, however, continued to mount for him when, in late 1992, he was con360

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76. JoAnn Brandon holds portraits of her late daughter, Teena Brandon, in this 2000 photo (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

victed of forgery, having used Bartu’s credit card and processed a bank withdrawal slip of hers for $130. This was a second conviction, and for Bartu it ended their relationship. She discovered Teena was not who she thought. Although told of plans for a sex change, Bartu thought the plans were too uncertain. With his engagement broken off and the law closing in, Teena decided to leave Lincoln. He had heard from a friend of a friend about a safe place an hour’s drive southeast of Lincoln, Lisa Lambert’s farmhouse near Humboldt. After relocating there, he dated several girls in nearby Falls City, county seat of Richardson County, including first Lisa Lambert and then Lana Tisdel. Through Lana, her sister Leslie, and their mother Linda Gutierres, Teena met a number of unemployed rural young adults and moved to Falls City. Among them were Tom Nissen and John Lotter. Thus, all these changes for Teena, including hospitalization, the possibilities of sex change surgery, problems with the law, The Murder of Brandon Teena

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a move to rural southeast Nebraska, and new acquaintances and a new social network, happened within a six-month period in 1993. Tom Nissen, born Marvin T. Nissen to his single mother Sharon, age fourteen, who at age fifteen married Ed Nissen after a ten-day courtship, had grown up in Mississippi. He lived with his father after Ed and Sharon separated. In his teenage years, having gotten into trouble stealing cars, hanging around white supremacists, drinking and driving, and resisting arrest, Tom escaped, first to Washington State, then back to Nebraska. He quickly found an unmarried young woman, Kandi Gibson, who also had a baby. When their relationship did not work out, Nissen joined the army. After a few months, he left the armed services, worked for a carnival, and then returned to Falls City, where he married Gibson in June 1992. Within a month, and already cheating on his wife locally, he was arrested and convicted of second-degree arson for having set two fires in Falls City. Nissen found himself in the Nebraska State Penitentiary serving a one- to three-year term. John Lotter had a similar life story. Born in Falls City, as a child he was slower than most and exhibited anti-social behavior, beating up on other children. Found by a juvenile court to be “uncontrollable,” Lotter became a ward of the state and spent time in foster homes. He shuffled between five schools in six years, and even Boys Town turned him down. By 1993, at age twenty-two, John Lotter had spent four of his past six years in prison for various crimes, including theft, burglary, drunken driving, and an escape from a juvenile detention center. Tom Nissen and John Lotter met up and had become constant drinking companions only a month before their evening in Lisa Lambert’s farmhouse. Both had strong homophobic and racist views of their limited world. The underside of rural America is not pretty, a place where what are sometimes considered problems found only in urban America are plentiful. They include substance abuse, chronic unemployment, promiscuity, alcoholism, petty crime, and deep poverty. No state seems immune from this tragedy, and Nebraska has experienced its fair share, perhaps beginning with the murder rampage of one Charles Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1957. All of the people involved in the murders of Brandon Teena, Lisa Lambert, and Phillip DeVine seemed a part of this human quagmire. Richardson County was not significantly different from other parts of Nebraska or the Great Plains, except for a spate of violence that 362

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had attracted attention outside the small communities of Nebraska’s southeastern corner. One of those communities was Rulo, a small, isolated village of fewer than two hundred residents located ten miles east of Falls City on the western bank of the Missouri River. In the early 1980s a small cult led by one Michael Ryan moved to a site near Rulo. Articulating an ideology based upon the Bible, white supremacist ideas, and polygamy, Ryan charged his followers to prepare for Armageddon. They busied themselves accumulating food and guns. Some members of the Rulo sect, designated slaves by Ryan, were subjected to sodomy, torture, and even murder. In 1986 a trial convicted Michael Ryan of murder, gross sexual assault, and torture of a five-year-old boy and a young adult male member of the cult who had fallen into slave status. Ryan received a death sentence. After a number of appeals, this criminal process eventually cost Richardson County taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. With extensive Missouri River floods during the spring of 1993, suffering and violence seemed to be singling out the citizens of Richardson County. At first, Brandon Teena had managed in Falls City to keep up his identity as a man. But after he was arrested on December 15, 1993, for forgery, he spent a week in jail in the women’s section until Lana Tisdel bailed him out. This fact, now public knowledge, heightened the interest of his acquaintances in Teena’s sexuality. Tisdel’s mother, convinced that Teena was a woman, ordered him to stay away from her daughter. Looking for lodging, Teena moved to Nissen’s house, where Nissen’s sometime wife resided. On Christmas Eve the Nissens threw a party that became violent. After drinking all day, Lotter and Nissen forced Teena into the bathroom, where they removed his pants and underwear to show Tisdel that Brandon Teena was truly Teena Brandon. After more drinking and bravado, Lotter and Nissen forced Teena into Lotter’s car, and they drove out to the Hormel meatpacking plant outside of Falls City, where both Nissen and Lotter raped Teena and Nissen beat him. They then returned to the Nissen house where Teena, bloodied and bruised, was ordered to take a shower. When both Lotter and Nissen fell asleep, Teena escaped out the bathroom window, called his sister, went to the hospital for treatment, and then contacted the local police. Christmas morning found Richardson County’s officers of the law woefully unprepared for what had transpired the previous evening. Proof The Murder of Brandon Teena

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of this is heard in the tape-recorded interview of Teena made by Sheriff Charles Laux and Deputy Sheriff Tom Olberding. While Olberding appeared to be trying to find out what happened in ways sympathetic to the victim, Laux fixated on Teena’s sexual identity. In accusatory tones, he asked highly inappropriate and irrelevant questions. At one point, the deputy sheriff felt he had to leave. Teena was emphatic about what had happened even though the sheriff persisted in harassing him, suggesting that if a rape had occurred it was probably “her” fault. Nissen and Lotter, who were brought in later that day, denied the rape accusations and were released. A complaint against Nissen and Lotter was duly filed by the sheriff’s office, but Richardson County attorney Douglas Merz didn’t think there was sufficient evidence to arrest the two men. Informed that Teena went to the police, Nissen and Lotter decided to murder him. Lotter stole a gun, and the two carried out their plan, leaving no witnesses. Afterward, they went on a joyride through Richardson County, throwing the gun out the car window into the Nemaha River. Symbolic of their ineptitude, the river was frozen and the gun remained in clear sight to passing travelers. Discovery of the three bodies and recovery of the gun signaled to law enforcement that Tom Nissen and John Lotter should be arrested. They were found easily in Falls City and formally arraigned on January 3, 1994, charged with murder, rape, and kidnapping. That same day, when Teena’s family came to the county courthouse to meet with Sheriff Laux, according to family members interviewed in the Lincoln Journal Star, the sheriff asked Tammy Brandon, “What kind of a sister do you have anyway?” Funeral services were held in Lincoln at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on January 4, at which Fr. Paul Witt reportedly gestured toward the coffin and said, “She was a very confused young lady.” Interestingly, the trials did not attract much attention. Most Richardson County citizens stayed away, having already heard too much about all that had happened. Local editors and officials did not help matters. The editor of the Humboldt Standard referred to Teena as a “queer” and seemed to regard the victim as partially to blame for “her” own murder. When an irate reader called the editor on it, he agreed he had been somewhat harsh, saying in part this was because he resented the appropriation of the term “gay” by homosexuals. County attorney Merz told a visiting reporter later, “I don’t know what a hate crime is. I don’t know if we have laws against hate crimes in Nebraska. You should ask your New York attorneys about that.” 364

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77. Convicted murderer John Lotter at his Richardson County District Court trial (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

The trials came and went. Nissen struck a plea bargain. In return for his testimony against Lotter, he received life in prison without parole. He then told a rather self-serving story about the evening of the murder from which it is difficult to discern fact from fiction, but since Lotter did not testify, no counter explanation was offered. Lotter was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. As of this writing, both men are in prison. Charles Laux, who first lost his reelection campaign for sheriff and then an attempt to become a county supervisor, next worked as a prison guard at the same prison in Tecumseh where Lotter was housed. By now these events attracted the attention of the outside world. At first, syndicated talk shows attempted to interview persons directly involved as well as family members of the victims and killers. A Current Affair, Inside Edition, Sally Jesse Raphael, The Montel Williams Show, and The Maury Povich Show invited a number of southeast Nebraskans to tell their stories. Some came forward. Reporters from cbs and abc News, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Washington The Murder of Brandon Teena

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Post, and Denver Post descended upon Falls City. Paul Harvey’s news radio commentary show featured Teena’s murder. Writers and filmmakers also came forward. The New Yorker and Playboy commissioned lengthy essays, “The Humboldt Murders” and “Death of a Deceiver,” respectively. Independent filmmakers Susan Muska of Connecticut and Greta Olafsdottir of Iceland began a joint documentary project, The Brandon Teena Story, and pulp paperback writer Aphrodite Jones announced the murder would be the subject of her next book. Jones chose a title, All She Wanted, and interviewed residents of Richardson County for this, the third of her true crime exposés. “I know I am feeding an appetite and I have to. I am looking to feed people,” she acknowledged. She also hoped to sell her book to Hollywood. Hollywood did weigh in, but not with Aphrodite Jones’s manuscript, offering several thousand dollars to persons who might tell their versions of the tragedy for a feature film eventually scripted as Boys Don’t Cry. Perhaps most amazing about all of this media energy and fixation were the mistakes in reporting, the contrived and stereotypical agendas pushed, and the general tone of offensiveness. The Boston Globe, for example, stated that Brandon “felt she was a man and had begun a series of sex-change operations by the time she moved from Lincoln, Neb., to the smaller town of Falls City.” Not true. The big lies came from the movies. The Brandon Teena Story (1999), a documentary that among other things featured the horrifying tape-recorded interview of Teena by Sheriff Laux, won many awards, including Best Documentary Film at the Berlin Film Festival. Even so, the Daily Nebraskan (Lincoln), the University of Nebraska’s student newspaper, printed a scorching critique of the film, asserting that it falsely portrayed rural Nebraska with contrived scenes often overemphasized and accusing the filmmakers of creating a scenario of inevitability using mostly interviews of people who seemed to have little empathy for Teena. The film, wrote the Daily reviewer, included only pictures of “the seediest parts of downtown Lincoln and Falls City.” The Brandon Teena Story was summarized in five words: “Anti-hate film purveys stereotypes.” In a review profiled by the Washington Post, the author buys into the docudrama’s stereotypes: “A tv newscaster in the film says the murders and the trial ‘could have a lasting scar on this close-knit community.’ Aww. Isn’t that just too bad? If The Brandon Teena Story helps keep the scar fresh, so much the better.” 366

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The biggest poetic license came with Boy’s Don’t Cry (1999), which claimed to be a true story. The film took amazing liberties with the facts. Phillip DeVine was written out of the script completely, as if this young African American’s life and death had gone for naught. Shot in East Texas, the film did not portray Nebraska. The movie began with Teena attempting to flee in an automobile from police in the fictional Falls City. This never happened. JoAnn Brandon did not hesitate to criticize the film. “I am very angry,” she said. Her daughter had been sexually molested, and JoAnn believes her daughter “pretended she was a man so no other man could touch her.” The film had suggested that Brandon had embraced being a lesbian, which was false. Brandon did not think of herself as a woman but as a man and held onto the idea of a sex change. Moreover, the film included contrived scenes of intimacy between Teena and Lana Tisdel after Teena had been raped that had never happened. This portrayal especially offended JoAnn Brandon. After the rape, Teena sought and found sanctuary at Lisa Lambert’s farmhouse. Hollywood, nevertheless, awarded Hilary Swank an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon. Wrote one critic, “Hilary Swank was awarded an Oscar for her performance of Brandon’s performance. Brandon Teena was sentenced to a brutal rape and murder for his performance.” JoAnn Brandon perhaps voiced best what many believed: “I’m really sick and tired of people making money off my child.” Despite the films and media coverage, many remained interested in this event. When JoAnn Brandon sued Richardson County and its former sheriff for civil damages, her lawsuit attracted numerous amicus curiae briefs from many organizations, including those committed to civil rights and anti-domestic violence. She won only a small partial restitution. The aftermath of Brandon Teena’s murder did not see an end to gender issues in Nebraska or the nation, particularly for individuals who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. For example, Nebraska held an election in November 2000, amending its constitution to define marriage as “between a man and a woman” by a vote of 70.3 percent in favor to 29.7 percent opposed. While every county approved Amendment 416, Douglas County (Omaha) did so by the lowest margin, 58 percent, which may have reflected a slight urban and rural split. The level of the campaign in Nebraska was nasty. Nebraska’s proThe Murder of Brandon Teena

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Amendment 416 campaign was led by a professional anti-gay organizer who promptly left the state after the campaign and moved to Virginia, where she worked for a private organization that took this message to eleven other states for the 2004 presidential election. The Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints offered strong financial support to the pro-Amendment 416 campaign. Amendment 416 opponents had little money and organization outside of Omaha and Lincoln. The Nebraska amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage was different from legislation in other states in that it included a second line banning the state from legally recognizing same-sex partnerships. This was done, its supporters urged, to prevent a Vermont-like situation, Vermont having legalized same-sex unions. The fact that a father-son farm partnership or a sister-sister small town diner partnership might be jeopardized did not lessen support in the voting booths. In the rush to vote, three Nebraska counties lacking quality proof-reading printed ballots with a typographical error defining marriage as between a man and “women.” For example, Gage County, site of the first proved up homestead, declared by a vote of 7,120 to 2,070 that the only legally valid marriage had to be polygamous. Fortunately for those who opposed polygamy, Nebraska does not have local county option on marriage laws. Litigation awaits. To meet the problem of homophobia, Nebraska’s legislature in 2002 approved hate crime legislation, Neb §28-111, extending to categories of “race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability.” Under this law, victims may bring civil damage suits against their attackers. In February 2005 Senator Ernest Chambers of Omaha held a legislative hearing on his bill to include banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace. If it had passed, Nebraska would have joined twenty-three other states that have adopted similar legislation. The hearing attracted religious leaders. Some, such as a Lincoln United Methodist minister, supported the bill, but others did not. Eric Bents, pastor at Trinity Church in Omaha, said he voiced the opinion of the majority of Christian clergy who opposed same-sex marriage. This proposed law preventing discrimination, he argued, would create a “moral tsunami” swamping other cultural institutions. Furthermore, Bents said, “We believe that a Christian should have the right to turn 368

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down a homosexual who is applying for a job.” This was the same kind of argument made by those who opposed civil rights legislation and the integration of public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. That many Nebraska companies as well as the cities of Omaha and Lincoln have adopted policies to protect gay employees had little influence on opponents of the proposed anti-discrimination statute. When, in 2003, the Lincoln Journal Star revisited the story of the triple murders a decade after, reporters interviewed the family currently living in the Humboldt farmhouse where Lotter and Nissen murdered Teena, Lambert, and DeVine. The couple’s eighth-grade daughter said her middle school friends would not visit her because of what happened in her home. Her mother, when asked about the house, said, “It ain’t ugly for us—we live here.” And her father added, “Heck yeah. It’s nothing to us.” Others around Humboldt did not want to talk about the murders because, they said, Tanner was living with an aunt and they wanted to protect him. Nebraska Supreme Court justice D. Nick Caporale, writing an opinion in 1999 in the case brought by JoAnn Brandon against Richardson County and its public officials, noted that society, and in this instance law enforcement officers, have “a duty to protect the victim.” One should not have expected, or continue to anticipate, anything less.

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39. The Kearney Arch

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ebraska greeted the twenty-first century with the construction of a unique structure. It turned out to be a kind of “back to the future” phoenix for all the world to see. Straddling Interstate 80 on the eastern outskirts of Kearney, the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument arose as the truly first “museum” of its kind. It cost approximately sixty million dollars to build, and it officially opened in the summer of 2000. At its grand opening on July 16, former Nebraska Governor Frank Morrison, a vigorous ninety-five years, enthusiastically welcomed a crowd of over six hundred, including both of Nebraska’s senators and its current governor. In spearheading the effort to construct the archway, Morrison later reflected, “My thinking was when people drove on i-80 they failed to realize they were going through one of the most historical places on Earth.” That could now be corrected if they stopped at the Kearney Arch. The Kearney Arch stands eight stories tall, weighs fifteen hundred tons, and spreads more than three hundred feet over the interstate highway. Building it necessitated extensive infrastructure investment. The arch required a sewer, at a cost of four million dollars alone, plus water, gas, drains, roads, police, fire, and electricity, for a total price of seven million dollars. To some it looks architecturally more like a stockade from seventeenth-century Massachusetts than a miniature Great Plains fort, the original design intent. It also has the feel of a famous Madison County, Iowa, covered bridge. Inside the monument is a modern museum of the history of transportation, from the earliest peoples of the Plains to the present. Multimedia exhibits feature the history of Indian horse travois, ox-driven wagon trains, riverboats, locomotives, modern automobiles and trucks, and

78. Governor Frank Morrison at the construction site of the Kearney Arch, a project dear to his heart, in 1999 (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

even the Internet. Displays include the Overland migration trails to Oregon, the Gold Rush to California, the Mormon Trail to Utah, cattle trails, the federal highway system including the Lincoln roadways and interstate, and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable—all located within the Platte River valley. These monuments of intercommunication and migration represent moments of great significance in this place throughout time. It all began with Governor Morrison, known as “the father of modern Nebraska tourism.” In a story in the Omaha World-Herald, Morrison allowed that he had a long-standing dream about creating a museum over Interstate 80 featuring Nebraska history. After reading that story, Buffalo County’s economic adviser contacted Morrison to let him know that the city of Kearney was very interested in promoting this idea. Morrison, born in McCook and a resident of various Nebraska communities including Omaha, had a vast knowledge of Nebraskans. He got in touch with J. Greg Smith, a former Nebraska tourism official who had coined the motto, “Nebraska: The Good Life,” to enlist his support. The Kearney Arch

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Smith and his son, Greg M. Smith, developed the Kearney Arch concept, and they promoted the idea to private investors and the U.S. Department of Transportation. After all, to build the arch would require permission to occupy air space above the interstate. This proved a difficult challenge, but it was met. The Kearney Arch became the very first entity permitted to lease air space over a federal interstate highway. Several more years of planning and the securing of sixty million dollars of investment capital plus two years of construction resulted in the opening of the archway. Throughout these seven years, Governor Morrison carefully watched the rising monument. He even spent his own money to see his dreams come true. “The only thing I asked is that it be historically accurate—this isn’t Disneyland,” he said. The elder Smith called the Kearney Arch “the absolute pinnacle in impulse tourism marketing.” Approximately three million cars per year traverse Nebraska on Interstate 80. If a modest percentage stopped at the monument and the tourists paid $8.50 per adult or $7 per child, age three to eleven, and seniors, sixty-five and over, the archway could meet its financial obligations. In fact, the startling discovery of the monument by motorists provoked some to stop in their tracks along the roadside of the busy interstate. That necessitated warning signs on both sides of the four-lane highway urging drivers to pay close attention and not stop under penalty of a fine. Yet the promoters’ estimate of nine hundred thousand annual visitors to the Kearney Arch turned out to be somewhat overly ambitious in the first five years. What is inside the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument? As visitors enter, they are immediately confronted by a gigantic escalator moving skyward that carries them into another world, through what looks like a covered wagon. After paying for tickets and figuring out how the state of the art electronic headphones work, the journey west begins. Upon reaching the top of the moving steps, everyone experiences a Plains thunder storm as Jim Bridger, mountain man and fur trapper, speaks through the earphones and becomes a guide for the excursion. Tourists meet a girl who kept an Oregon Trail diary and visit various Indian nations who inhabited the Platte Valley. Miners, farmers, ranchers, and religious freedom seekers are found along the route. A bison stampede then quickly hastens everyone along. What is perhaps most important, two reviewers wrote, is that “Treatment of the Oregon Trail, the Mormon migration, and the Gold Rush are given modern, not mythic, renderings.” 372

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Five murals dominate the tour of the nineteenth-century West. They include mountain men, featuring Jim Beckwourth and Jim Bridger again, and a rendezvous. There is one depicting John Sutter’s gold discovery in California and the impact of the Gold Rush. Then present-day travelers meet Mormons Brigham Young and Emmeline Wells, a Mormon women’s rights advocate. A fourth mural tells of the problems of those taking the trails, such as the plight of the Donner Party; Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding, spouses of missionaries; and Bridget Mason, a black woman journeying to the Pacific Northwest. The final mural entitled “Winds of Change” explains how Native Americans saw their homeland invaded, the problems this represented to them, and their own lives today with features on Cheyenne River Sioux bison rancher Fred Dubray and Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday. The journey next introduces the Pony Express, the railroad, and the overland stage. Video reenactments of express riders carrying the mail are breathtaking. The Union Pacific has a prominent role to play as part of the first transcontinental railroad that forged its path through the Platte Valley. Once the spike is driven at Promontory Summit linking the Central and Union Pacific, and the West to the East, the message moves from 1869 to 1912 and the construction of the Lincoln Highway. Transcontinental railroader becomes transcontinental driver. There are exact car and license plate replicas on Highway 30, and then the 1950s emerge with the construction of the interstate highway system again with replicas, this time with a drive-in movie theater and a coffee pot–shaped diner. Here everyone is invited to look through the floor to see cars racing past underneath the archway and the radar gun monitoring their speeds. The museum concludes with a patriotic message. What the Platte River Road is all about is “freedom,” the freedom to travel. The drivethrough land “fed the restless spirit of a pioneer nation on the move.” Songs of Woody Guthrie crescendo, and President John F. Kennedy speaks of exploration and the moon landing. Then the exhibits feature the modern information highway—the Internet—and relay the story of the construction of the first transcontinental fiber-optic cable along the Great Platte River Road. A gift shop and restaurant await. Reactions to the opening of this truly unique museum have varied. Many visitors responded positively. A Coloradan said that he had come with his family to see the Sandhill cranes and stopped in. His son liked The Kearney Arch

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79. Placing the final touches on the Great Platte River Road Archway, 2000 (courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star).

the gift shop, his wife enjoyed the murals, and he “liked the part over the highway with the radar guns.” Akane Nagashima, an international studies major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, said her sister liked the highway diner, her mother was intrigued by the covered wagons, and she was amazed by the Fort Kearny opening exhibit and the Indian scenes. In its first several years, the Kearney Arch attracted many international visitors and tourists from every American state. Those who objected seemed to miss the point. The New York Times reviewed the Kearney Arch and mostly trashed Nebraska and the Great Plains, trivializing its history. It called the trip to the arch “a 460-mile journey best made at the fastest speed possible,” and described the monument as “two distant towers [that] emerge out of the nothingness.” The reviewer summarized, “Nebraska’s fields of monotony are what 350,000 men, women and children traveled through as part of a much larger tale of migration.” An art historian and popular culture professor at the University of Minnesota, Karal Ann Marling, wrote a book entitled The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol Along the American Highway in which she argued that monuments like the Kearney Arch “are basically markers between nothing and nothing.” The Times quoted Marling to make its point. Wrote Marling, “They create a space where one is almost forced into contemplation about what is on one side and what is on the other: ‘Here I am in civilization, and now I enter—what? Chaos? This is where the West begins?’” Closer to home, a former dean of the University of Nebraska College of Architecture, Cecil Steward, criticized the archway. He objected to 374

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its use of public property as well as its causing safety problems on the highway. For Steward, the monument represented “visual clutter.” If Nebraska history was to be presented in its best possible way, he said a better location might have been chosen and an architectural competition for the building might have been conducted. While Steward thought the building looked “backward, rather than forward,” visitors continued to stop. Unfortunately, not enough of them came to the museum to prevent a serious financial emergency for the arch investors. The tourist shortfall began after the Kearney Arch’s first summer. Approximate attendance figures for the first five years include 300,000 during the seven months in 2000; 275,000 for all of 2001; 170,000 in 2002; 147,000 in 2003; and a low of 127,000 in 2004. Rock bottom for the archway was reached in the summer of 2002, when the monument defaulted on its bond payments. By February 2003 the debt was restructured allowing for annual payments on the bonds to be cut to $216,000 from $3.3 million per year. In addition, hours were reduced, paid staff was halved, more reliance on volunteers was implemented, a less costly vendor was found for the restaurant, new programming initiatives were begun, children were admitted free if they were five years or under, and a local Nebraska management team replaced a more expensive Florida operation. Perhaps even more importantly, museum managers began to understand that those who came to the arch did so out of conscious planning rather than impulse, and thus a different kind of public relations was needed targeting regional schools and organizations and national tourism. Initial figures for attendance in 2005 suggest these changes have paid off, and the bond debt has been reduced from $59 million to $22 million. The Kearney Arch also attracted a certain amount of notoriety. Two events have brought national and international publicity to the monument. In December 2002 the movie About Schmidt opened to critical acclaim. The movie’s Oscar-winning director, Nebraskan Alexander Payne, has made a habit of making films in and about Nebraska. In the film, star Jack Nicholson drives his huge rv into the archway parking lot and tours the museum. In December 2000 Nebraskans discovered that President Bill Clinton, still rather politically unpopular in the Cornhusker state, had yet to visit Nebraska during his presidency. He had finished third in Nebraska in 1992, when he first won the presidency, losing the state to George Bush, The Kearney Arch

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then president, and to another Texan, Ross Perot. Nebraska was the only state Clinton had not seen during his eight-year presidency. Not everyone wanted him to visit. Some rabid Republican Party officials declared Nebraska a Clinton-free zone, but Nebraskans in general preferred to think of the White House spin, saving the best for last, as a more positive approach. Moreover, Clinton decided to come to Kearney. On December 9, 2000 President Bill Clinton received an honorary degree from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, gave an important speech on post–Cold War American foreign policy, visited Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, and toured the Kearney Arch. At the archway, the president impressed the guides with his knowledge of western history, the bison, and Plains explorers. One monument official told how Clinton had said he’d been in a lot of museums across the country, “. . . but never in a museum as beautiful as this one.” When he signed the register in the lobby, President Clinton wrote, “This is a fantastic place. Thank you so much.” At the gift shop, the president did some early Christmas shopping. National newspapers recorded the visit and at the same time discovered the arch. Their reports tended toward the political. The Los Angeles Times noted that Clinton had been to California fifty-six times, Missouri nineteen times, and even neighboring Kansas twice, and that his visit to Nebraska seemed “gratuitous.” It suggested that Nebraskans were not particularly enamored with the world’s popular statesman. “[T] his pragmatic, no-frills state—the one that invented the 911 emergency system, the frozen tv dinner and Kool-Aid—is not buying this lastditch attempt to write history on Nebraska soil.” Still, the Associated Press observed that many Nebraskans, regardless of their voting history, seemed pleased that the president came. They enjoyed his speech that quoted their local hero, William Jennings Bryan, and they lined the streets of his motorcades in Kearney and Omaha. Restructuring the bond debt, movie attention, and a visit from the president and the national press, however, would not be sufficient to solve the problems that plagued the Kearney Arch. The message needed to get to the people, the ones who would stop, pay, and learn at the monument. The future needed to be embraced, and the city of Kearney and the managers of the archway intuited this need. How do we increase knowledge of the arch? For the city of Kearney, it was back to its future. Certain towns in 376

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Nebraska and the Great Plains are known for their boosterism. Kearney has been particularly astute in this ability, reflecting its frontier urban hustle. It had, after all, turned a small normal college into a strong branch campus of the University of Nebraska system. Kearney’s support for the archway had resulted in approximately $2 million annually coming to Kearney businesses. Anyone who has stopped in Kearney or lived in Kearney in the past ten years notices the profound difference in the number of businesses along the single interstate exit. Within that mindset, Kearney decided to push for another tourist attraction, a museum of firefighting, a structure officially to be called the Nebraska State Firefighters Museum and Education Center. The Smeal Fire Apparatus Company had already donated one million dollars toward a building that backers hope to construct by 2007, costing $3.5 million. Fire engines, equipment, documents, photos and other memorabilia will be displayed. A stop at the Kearney Arch might lead to an extended stay in this hustling city on the Platte. Other tourist destinations in Kearney would complement the arch, but an even greater need, many felt, was a second interstate exit. A vibrant city required such a construction, and its absence hindered further archway development and discouraged potential museum visitors. Monument officials estimated that with an exit, attendance would increase by one-third. In addition, went the argument, the new exit would make for much easier access for Kearney’s airport and facilitate greater business development, including Cabela’s, a popular outdoor outfitter based in Nebraska. However, when the citizens of Kearney were asked to approve higher property taxes to help pay for an exit, in spite of their natural boosterism, they declined. Still, they urged their congressman, Representative Tom Osborne, the popular former University of Nebraska football coach, to introduce a bill to pay the $8.5 million interchange price tag. With Osborne in the House and Democrat Ben Nelson in the Senate championing the arch exit, Congress approved such an appropriation for the transportation bill that in the summer of 2005 received a presidential signature. The enthusiasm and new momentum for the Kearney Arch was momentarily stymied when its greatest champion, Governor Frank Morrison, died in McCook shortly before his ninety-ninth birthday, on April 19, 2004. The previous March his wife Maxine had passed away at age eighty-eight. They had been mainstays in Nebraska poliThe Kearney Arch

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tics for most of the twentieth century. Democrat Morrison had served three terms as governor from 1961 to 1967, and he ran for statewide office eleven times. Born in Colorado, educated in Kansas, Morrison as a young college student had heard William Jennings Bryan, his political model, speak at Kansas State University’s football stadium, and he had marveled at Bryan’s ability to reach a filled-to-capacity arena without a microphone. Beloved by Nebraskans regardless of political party, Morrison became an elder statesman for the state in his last three decades. A friend of presidents and world leaders, Morrison was universally respected. A close friend of the governor, former Republican Nebraska governor Charles Thone, observed, “Frank and Maxine will go down in Nebraska history as the best tandem ever as governor and first lady in terms of selling Nebraska. You’d find them at the Wilbur Czech festival, the O’Neill St. Patrick’s Day parade, the 4th of July in Seward, North Platte Frontier Days, Milo Day in Alexandria.” Shortly after his wife had died, Governor Morrison granted an interview, and he reflected upon his life. He remained the strongest supporter of the Kearney Arch. “I’ve got a lot of unfinished business. I’m trying to convince those birds in Washington we ought to have a presidential debate at the archway.” The governor mentioned that he hoped that the monument could expand to include an “Air Age” and a “Space Age” to complement the “Transportation Age.” He then allowed several transportation metaphors to summarize his ninety-eight years: “It’s been a great ride. I’ve seen the whole world change. But sooner or later, you have to come to the end of the road.” On July 9, 2005 four hundred attended a dinner, fund-raiser, and celebration at the arch to honor the late governor’s 100th birthday. His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were in attendance, and the first Frank B. Morrison Pioneer Spirit Award was bestowed upon Ron Hull, an enthusiastic mover and shaker for Nebraska Educational Telecommunications since its origin. The event raised seventy thousand dollars to equip and convert a room at the archway for educational outreach and group activities. Planning for the future was a fundamental part of Governor Morrison’s life, and he transferred that to the Kearney Arch and beyond. In addition to the Morrison Room, the arch projects a hiking-biking trail, development of land north of the archway with the use of a historic bridge brought from the Elkhorn River near Pierce, and maintaining an outdoor Trail Blaze Maze for children who visit 378

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the monument. Complementing the Kearney Arch with its focus on the history of transportation in the heartland, the Nebraska Department of Education and the Nebraska State Historical Society recently created an interactive Web site on Nebraska history. Perhaps the greatest compliment to the Kearney Arch is an archclone. A group of Texans has organized to build a eighty million dollar archway over Interstate 35 near Hillsboro, Texas, between Dallas-Fort Worth and Waco. They plan to build a 15-story, 485-foot-long archway called the Great Texas Trails Monument. On top will be an enormous replica of the horns of longhorn cattle. Further west down Interstate 80 from Kearney, North Platte residents tout a proposed Golden Spike railroad tower, a 93-foot, $3.2 million planned tourist attraction. Would other highway monuments like the Kearney Arch take away some of its luster? “No chance,” said the president of the Kearney Chamber of Commerce. After all, imitation may be the best kind of flattery. The Nebraska Arch will always be the first and the only one dedicated to telling the stories of trails, railroads, highways, and telecommunications founded in the Platte River Valley. Just as the Kearney Arch anticipates the future, so too do Nebraskans.

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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations Abbott, Arthur, 172 Abbott, Edith, 171–74, 173 Abbott, Elizabeth Griffin, 172 Abbott, Grace, 171–75, 173 Abbott, Othman A., Jr., 172 About Schmidt (film), 375 Acklie, Duane, 332 Adams County Bank of Kenesaw, 45 Adams County ne, 45, 117 Adams school district, 45 Addams, Jane, 173, 173, 231 African Americans: Aaron Douglas on, 287; citizenship rights, 98; education, 284; immigrants, 112, 118–19; J. Sterling Morton on, 124; in military, 89–90, 274; and Progressive Movement, 172; on Unicameral, 262; at University of Nebraska, 285; violence against, 197–99; voting rights, 47, 49–52, 54. See also buffalo soldiers; Exodusters; Harlem Renaissance; Malcolm X; racism; slavery African art, 285–86 African Episcopal Church, 119 Afrika Corps, 91 Agnew, Spiro, 323 agriculture: of African Americans, 118–19; in Bellevue, 11; Charles Bryan on 229, 232; Charles E. Bessey’s experiments with, 155; cooperatives, 136–38; of Danes, 118; and economy, 135–39; and farm machinery, 43; George Beadle’s contribution to, 293–95; George W. Norris on, 265, 267; of Germans from Russia, 114; in gubernatorial election, 336, 339; and homesteading, 37–38, 40; and irrigation,

315; J. Sterling Morton on, 124–27; of Native Americans, 93–94, 98, 290; and prisoners of war, 276; and Progressive Movement, 141; and railroad, 74, 79–80, 138, 139; and rainfall, 42; in Sutton, 112; Tom Osborne on, 356; water for, 308–16; William Jennings Bryan on, 135–36; and World War I, 165 Aguilar, Captain, 5–6 Aiken, J. David, 316 Ainsworth ne, 272 Albert, I. L., 202 alcohol, 12, 21, 87, 89, 150, 228–29, 232. See also prohibition Aldrich, Bess Streeter, 250; background, 248–49; death of, 252; education, 249; publication of first novel, 248; subject matter, 250–52; writing career, 249–52 Aldrich, Captain Charles, 249, 251 Alexander, Hartley Burr, 217 Alexander’s Bridge (Cather), 210 Alexis, Grand Duke of Russia, 104 Allen, William V., 139, 145–46 Allereye, France, 164 Alliance ne, 272 Allied Reparations Commission, 227 All She Wanted (Jones), 366 All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (Eiseley), 299 Allyn, Henry, 21 Almack, Willis, 200 Alma College, 344 Alma ne, 275 Alvarado, Juan, 196 Amendment 416, 367–68 American Bar Association, 241 American Civil Liberties Union (aclu), 143

American Dialect Society, 245 American Folklore Society, 245 American Fur Company, 10–12 American Institute of Philanthropy, 180 Anderson, Eric, 354 Anderson, Robert Ball, 118 Andrews Air Force Base, 302 Anthony, Susan B., 172 anthropology, 291 Anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act Party. See Republican Party Antioch ne, 165 Apache Indians, 2 Appalachian Mountains, 156 Arapaho Indians, 2 Arapaho ne, 186, 190 Arbor Day: designation, 121, 127; interest in, 126–28; postage stamps, 127; prizes for, 121–22; proposal, 121 Arbor Lodge: construction, 124–25; expansion, 127–28; J. Sterling Morton’s work at, 126 Arbor Lodge State Historical Park, 128 Arnold, H. H. (Hap), 302 Ash Can School, 288 Ash Hollow, 17, 18 Ashland ne, 59 Asian Americans, 172. See also Chinese; Japanese; Vietnamese Aspects of Negro Life (murals), 286 Association of American Law Schools, 241 Astor, John Jacob, 10 athletics, 237–39, 243, 245, 249. See also University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team Atlanta ne, 275 Atomic Energy Commission, 292 Aughey, Samuel, 42 Aurora ne, 203, 291, 295, 300 Autobiography of Malcolm X, 320 Axtell ne, 115 Bacon, Francis, 299 Bailey Yard, 279 Baird, Mary Elizabeth. See Bryan, Mary Elizabeth Baird Baker, Newton D., 164 balloon observers, 165 Bancroft, William, 185 Bancroft ne, 187, 257–58, 260 Bancroft Weekly Blade, 257–58 The Banking System of the United States (Dawes), 226 banks: and Charles Bryan, 229; Charles G. 382

Index

Dawes on, 226, 232; George W. Norris on, 265; Panic of 1857, 124, 148; Panic of 1893, 152, 226 Banneker, Benjamin, 290 Baptists, 12 Barns, Cass, 185 Barrett, Bill, 333 Bartu, Gina, 360–61 Base Hospital No. 49, 164 Battle of Little Big Horn, 70, 84–85, 105 Baum, David, 177 Bayard ne, 275 Baylor University, 354 Beadle, Chancey, 293 Beadle, George Wells, 294; background, 293; contribution of, 290; death, 295; honors, 295, 300; at University of Nebraska, 293, 295, 296, 300 Beadle, Hattie, 293 Bear Butte, 83 Beatrice Express, 42–43 Beatrice ne, 115, 152, 264 Beaver City ne, 190, 264, 311 The Beaver Men (Sandoz), 255 Beckwourth, Jim, 373 Belgians, 119 Bellevue ne, 13; as competitor for state capital, 55–57, 123; farming, 11; fur trade, 9–10; Indian agency near, 11–12; J. Sterling Morton in, 123; land claims, 14; marriages of fur traders in, 10–11; missionaries, 12–13; and Offutt Air Force Base, 307; origin, 9; popularity with travelers, 13; population, 14; post office, 14; railroad, 14; and World War II, 272 Bellevue Nebraska Palladium, 14, 55, 57 Bellevue Settlers Club, 14 Bellevue Town Company, 14 Belvidere ne, 184 Benson ne, 152 Bents, Eric, 368–69 Berg, Paul, 295 Berlin blockade, 303 Berlin ne, 195 Berringer, Brook, 352, 353 Berry, George, 223 Bertrand ne, 275 Bessey, Charles E., 154–56, 155, 237 Bessey Nursery, 158 Bess Streeter Aldrich Foundation, 252 Beutler, Chris, 332–34, 336–38 Biddlecombe, Laura. See Pound, Laura Biddlecombe

Big Beaver High School, 345 Big Blue River, 314, 315 Big Blue River Trail, 42, 78 Big Elk, 10 Bill of Rights, 167 Black, Samuel, 28 Black Elk, 105–6, 260. See also Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt) Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt), 105, 256, 257, 259 Blackfeet Indians, 69 Black Hills, 65, 70, 84, 87 Black Nationalism, 322, 325 Black Shawl (wife of Crazy Horse), 85, 87 Blackshirt defense, 348 Blaine County ne, 157 Blair ne, 118, 311 Blessen, Karen, 206 Blizzard Club. See “January 12, 1888, Blizzard Club” Blizzard of 1888, 129–34; deaths and injuries from, 129–30, 132; and homesteaders, 42; loss of livestock in, 132; news coverage, 132–33; and schools, 129–31; strength of, 130–31, 133–34; survivors and club, 133–34, 134 Bob Devaney Sports Center, 348 Bodmer, Karl, 13, 281 Boelus ne, 118 Boes, Fr. Steven, 181 Bohemians, 117 Boosalis, Helen, 337; background, 336–37; candidacy for mayor, 331–32; conduct in race, 338; fund raising, 339; platform, 337; in primary, 337–38; and prospects in gubernatorial election, 333–34; retirement, 341; on taxes, 339; votes received, 339–40 Boosalis, Michael, 336–37 botany, 236–37, 240. See also trees Box Butte County ne, 312 Box Butte Creek, 83 Boyle, Mike, 333, 334 Boys Don’t Cry (film), 366, 367 Boys’ Home Journal, 176 Boys Town: funding, 178–79; growth, 176–77, 180; and John Lotter, 362; motto of, 179; origin, 171, 176; in Overlook, 177–78; problems in, 179–81 Boys Town (film), 178 Bozeman Trail, 66–68 Bradley, L. P., 87, 88 Brandeis, Louis, 231, 245–46 Brandon, JoAnn, 358–60, 361, 367, 369 Brandon, Tammy, 359, 360, 364

Brandon, Teena. See Teena, Brandon The Brandon Teena Story (film), 366 Branson mo, 258–60 Brashear, Kermit, 331, 333, 335, 336 Brewster, Frank, 186, 190 Brewster Field, 186 Brezhnev, Leonid, 324 Bridgeport ne, 275, 278 Bridger, Jim, 11, 372, 373 Briggs, Phoebe, 187 Brighton Ranch Company, 42 Bright Sun (Me-um-ba-ne), 10 “The Broken Promise” (Sandoz), 253 Brommer, Rev. C. F., 200, 202–3 Brown, Fred, 223 Brown, George, 112 Brown, Linda, 284 Brown, Maurice, 112 Brown, Will, 197–98, 203, 287 Brown, William D., 56, 147 Brownlee ne, 118 Brownville ne, 37, 59 Brownville Nebraska Advertiser, 40 Brulé Sioux Indians, 63, 81–83 Brush horseless carriages, 186 Bryan, Charles Wayland, 224; background, 228; in election (1924), 221, 231; as governor, 229, 232, 263; legacy, 232; at Lincoln Round Table, 225; political career, 228–29, 232; vice-presidential nomination, 223–24 Bryan, Mary Elizabeth Baird, 139, 143 Bryan, William Jennings, 137, 142; on alcohol, 228–29; background, 139; banking interests, 229; Bill Clinton’s quote of, 376; and Charles G. Dawes, 222, 225, 226; and Charles Wayland Bryan, 228; in Congress, 135, 139–40; death, 143; editorship of Omaha World-Herald, 140; and election (1924), 222, 223, 231; Frank Morrison on, 378; and John J. Pershing, 163; John T. Scopes trial, 143; J. Sterling Morton on, 125, 126; legacy of, 144; perceptions of, 143–44; presidential nomination, 135, 140–41, 228; as secretary of state, 142–43; Sinclair Lewis on, 204; speaking engagements, 141 Bryant, Bear, 348 Bryant, Edwin, 21 Buchanan, James, 124 buffalo, 85, 93, 102–4 Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows, 33, 102, 104–8 Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen (Buntline), 104 Index

383

Buffalo County ne, 182, 184, 371 The Buffalo Hunters (Sandoz), 255 buffalo soldiers, 89–90 A Bundle of Myrrh (Neihardt), 258 Buntline, Ned, 104 Burchkardt, Rev. O. J., 119 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 96, 259–60 Burlington and Missouri Railroad, 110–11, 125, 156–57 Burlington Railroad, 61, 113, 114, 213, 264 Burr ne, 195 Burt, Francis, 14, 56 Burt County ne, 115 Bush, George, 375 Bush, George W., 233, 307 Butler, David, 51–54, 53, 59, 61, 124 Butler, William, 230 Butler County ne, 42, 117 Butolph, Ethel, 274 Butolph, Virgil, 274 Butterfield, John, 30 Butterfield Overland Mail, 30–31, 36 Cabela’s, 377 Calveras Big Trees, 156 California gold rush, 15, 24 California Institute of Technology, 293, 294 California Road. See Oregon Trail Callahan, Bill, 357 Callaway ne, 45 Cameron, Don, 225 Campbell, William, 33 Camp Robinson, 86–87. See also Fort Robinson “Canada Bill,” 151 Canfield, James H., 163 Cannon, James, 327 capital: buildings in, 57–58, 61; fight for location, 55–62; Lincoln as, 14, 53, 59–62, 72, 213; Omaha as, 14, 48, 53, 56–59, 123, 147–48 Capital City (Sandoz), 255 capitol. See Nebraska State Capitol building Capitol bell (Washington), 74 Capitol Fund Levy, 218 Caporale, D. Nick, 369 Carlo (Boys Town dog), 176–77 Carlyle, Thomas, 208 Carr, Eugene, 103 Carrington, Henry, 67 Carson, Kit, 11 Carter, Jimmy, 324 Carter, Nick, 109 Cass, Lewis, 47 384

Index

Cass County ne, 51, 54, 117 Cassidy, Fr. Michael, 176 Cather, Willa, 205; awards, 204–6, 211; background, 207; death, 212; early writing career, 208–10; education, 208–9; fame, 204; on Hesperian staff, 209; on immigrants, 120; and John J. Pershing, 162; landscapes, 211, on language instruction, 201; legacy, 212; letters, 212; move to Nebraska, 207–8; relationships with people, 208, 211–12, 239; ties to Nebraska, 210, 211, 212; on William Jennings Bryan, 144 Catlin, George, 13, 281 cattle, 78–79, 131, 132, 229. See also meatpacking industry The Cattlemen (Sandoz), 255 Cavalier, René-Robert, 3 Cedar County ne, 114 Central City ne, 281 Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, 31, 34–35. See also Pony Express Central Pacific Railroad, 73–76, 373 Central Trust Company, 227 A Century of Dishonor (Jackson), 100 Century Road Club Bar, 237 Ceremony at Lone Tree (Morris), 283 Chadron Democrat, 71 Chadron ne, 70, 318 Chadron State College, 257 Chambers, Ernest, 326, 329, 330, 368 Chase County ne, 312, 315 Chaui Indian Band, 2. See also Pawnee Indians Chautauqua circuit, 141 Cheney, Dick, 233 Cherry County ne, 112, 118, 119, 157 Cheyenne Autumn (Sandoz), 255 Cheyenne Barracks, 91 Cheyenne Indians: and Fort Robinson, 91; at Little Big Horn, 85; in Nebraska, 65–66; at Pine Ridge, 89; and railroad, 77; and Red Cloud Agency, 86; return to homeland, 89; and Sand Creek Massacre, 84 Chicago and North Western Railroad, 149 Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, 75 Chicago World’s Fair, 107, 217 children, 171–72, 174–76, 178, 230, 241. See also Boys Town Childs, Thomas, 16 Chimney Rock, 17, 22, 32, 101 Chinese, 75, 200, 288 . See also Asian Americans Chivington, John M., 66

cholera, 13, 20, 188 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 368 Civil War, 23, 47, 51, 54, 103, 124, 164 claim-jumpers, 38 Clark, Champ, 228 Clark, William, 10, 13, 280 Clarks ne, 61 Clarkson ne, 117 Clay County ne, 110–12, 114, 117 Clements, Frederick E. 237 Cleveland, Grover, 125–26, 139–40 Clinton, Bill, 232–33, 307, 328, 375–76 Cobb, John, 249 Cody, William F., 103; as army scout, 103–4, 109; background, 102–3; death, 108; financial problems, 108; legacy, 108–9; and North Platte Fourth of July, 102; political career, 104, 106; sculpture of, 217; shooting skills, 102–3; theater performances, 104. See also Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows Coffman, Victor, 189 Cold War, 290, 301, 307 Coleridge ne, 134 Colfax County ne, 117 College Football Hall of Fame, 356 Colorado, 2, 15, 50, 66, 148 The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol Along the American Highway (Marling), 374 Columbia University, 204, 211, 243, 286 Columbus ne, 8, 22, 61, 76, 78, 105, 115, 116 Committee on Public Information, 166 Commoner, 141, 228 Commonwealth Savings Company, 333 Communism, 242 Comstock, William, 103 Concordia College, 202–3 Congress: on Arbor Day, 127; on Constitution, 50; George W. Norris in 263, 265–69; Gerald Ford in, 321–23; and homestead acts, 39, 43, 45–46; House Rules Committee, 265; on Indian citizenship, 99; and J. Sterling Morton, 124, 126; and John J. Pershing, 168–69; on Kearney development, 377; Roscoe Pound before, 241; and National Forest system, 157; and Poncas, 94, 99–100; and presidential decisions, 230; on railroad, 74–76; on statehood, 49, 51–52, 54; and Strategic Air Command, 301; William Jennings Bryan in, 135, 139–40; on World War I, 160, 167 Conquering Bear, 81–83 Conservative magazine, 126

Coolidge, Calvin, 221, 224, 229, 231 Coolidge, Calvin, Jr., 229 corn: domestication of, 290; George Beadle’s work with, 293, 295; and homesteading, 40; and irrigation, 311; prices, 138, 140, 229 Cornell University, 293 Cornhusker Hotel, 248, 254, 341 Cornhuskers (football team). See University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team “Cornhusker State,” 126 Cosmopolitan Band, 145 Cotton Bowl (1973), 351 Council Bluffs and Nebraska Ferry Company, 56, 57, 147 Council Bluffs ia, 16, 56, 57, 149 Courthouse Rock, 17, 32 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves, 293 Cox, James, 222 Cozad, John J., 288 Cozad ne, 89, 90, 277, 311 Crazy Horse: assassination of, 81, 88; background, 81; at Battle of Little Big Horn, 70; at Camp Robinson, 87; at Fort Laramie, 83; meeting with George Crook, 88; and peace meetings, 66; and Shoshones, 83–84; vestments, 82; vision, 83, 84; and William J. Fetterman, 67, 84 Crazy Horse (father), 81, 83–84 Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas (Sandoz), 255 Crédit Mobilier of America, 75–76 Creel, George, 166 Creighton, Edward, 35, 151 Creighton Medical College, 190 Creighton University, 116 Criminal Justice in America (Pound), 234, 241 Crook, George, 70, 85, 88, 95–97, 97 “Cross of Gold Speech,” 135 Crow Indians, 69 Cudahy’s meatpacking company, 150, 176 Cuming, Thomas B., 14, 56, 57 Cuming County ne, 42, 114 Curtis, Carl, 328 Curtis ne, 45 Custer, George Armstrong, 33, 84–85 Custer County ne, 42, 44 “Custer’s Last Stand,” 105 A Cycle of the West (Neihardt), 257–59 Czechs, 116–17 Dahlman, Jim, 140 Daily Nebraskan (University of Nebraska– Lincoln), 366 Index

385

Dakota County ne, 116 Dakota Sioux Indians, 63 Dakota Territory, 70, 93, 185 Dana College, 118 Daniel Freeman High School, 45 Danish, 112–13, 117–18 Danish Land and Homestead Company, 112 Dannebrog ne, 110, 112–13, 118 Dannevirke ne, 118 Darrow, Clarence, 143 Darwin, Charles, 297–98 Darwin’s Century (Eiseley), 291, 297–99 Daugherty, Bob, 308 Daugherty, Hugh “Duffy,” 345 Davis, Clarence A., 201 Davis, John, W., 222–24, 231, 232 Davis, Owen, 205 Davison, 342, 354 Dawes, Charles G., 227; background, 224–25; on business, 226–27; campaign strategy, 229–31; on economic issues, 225–26; and John J. Pershing, 163; legacy, 232; military and government careers, 227–28; political career, 226–27, 232; vice-presidential nomination, 221, 222 Dawes, Henry L., 100 Dawes, James W., 225 Dawes, William, 225 Dawes Act, 100 Dawes County ne, 159 “Dawes Plan,” 228 Dawson County ne, 112–13, 115 Deardorff, Kenneth, 45 Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather), 210, 211 DeCamp, John, 333, 338 deer, 159 Delights & Shadows (Kooser), 206 Delton, Jeff, 177 Democratic Party: and 1908 convention, 228; and 1912 convention, 228; and 1924 convention, 222–23, 231; in 1924 election, 231; and 1986 gubernatorial election, 331–38; on alcohol, 228–29; and Czechs, 117; dissatisfaction with, 263; dominance of, 47–48; and George W. Norris, 266–68; and Germans, 115; and governorship, 51; and Independents, 139; and Irish, 116; and J. Sterling Morton, 123; and Missouri Compromise, 26; on statehood, 50. See also Unicameral Dennison, Tom, 151, 198 dentistry, 184–85 386

Index

Deshler ne, 134 Devaney, Bob, 346; in 1972 Orange Bowl, 348; background, 344–45; coaching staff, 345; death, 348; and Gerald Ford, 327; hiring of, 343–44; hiring of Tom Osborne, 348, 349, 351; legacy, 349; record at Nebraska, 345; retirement, 348, 349 Devaney, Phyllis Wiley, 344–45 DeVine, Phillip, 358, 367 Dewey, John, 231 DeWitty ne, 112, 119 Dick Cavett Show, 259 diphtheria, 188 diseases. See cholera; diphtheria; influenza; smallpox Dishman, Chris, 354 Dismal River Reserve, 157–58 Doane College, 354 doctors: careers, 189–90; credentials and regulations for, 190; fees, 189; and flu epidemic, 184, 190; practices in Nebraska, 184–87, 189; respect for, 182, 190–91; travel and communication, 185–87. See also influenza Dodge, Augustus C., 47 Doherty, Hugh “Laurie,” 239 Dolan, Elizabeth H., 218 Dole, Robert, 324 Domina, David, 332–34, 336–38 Donner Party, 373 Dorgan, Byron, 45 Dorschel, Wolfgang, 11 Douglas, Aaron, 281, 287; background of, 284–85; career and art of, 285–87; contribution of, 287 Douglas, Stephen A., 24–28, 47 Douglas County ne, 14, 48, 117, 197–98, 339, 340, 367 Dowd Memorial Chapel, 179 Dred Scott decision (1857), 98 drought, 42 Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, 183 The Drum, 93 DuBois, W. E. B., 286 Dubray, Fred, 373 Dull Knife, 89 Dundee ne, 152 Dundy, Elmer S. 92, 96, 98–99, 124, 153 Durant, Thomas, 73–76 Dye, William, 63–64 Easter storm of 1873, 42, 134 ecology movement, 299

Edgerton, Esther Mary Garrett, 291 Edgerton, Frank, 291 Edgerton, Fred, 192–93, 201 Edgerton, Harold, 290; background, 291; contribution of, 291; death of, 293; honors received by, xiii, 13, 314; photography of, 292, 292–93; strobe and other inventions of, 293 Edgerton, Mary Nettie, 291 Edgerton Explorit Center, 300 Edison, Thomas, 107 Edmunds, George, 52 Edmunds Amendment, (1867), 52 education, 44–45, 172, 192–203, 284, 356. See also Legislative Bill 662 Eiseley, Loren Corey, 298; anthropology career, 296–97; background, 295–96; death, 299; honors, 299, 300; interest in evolution, 297–98; legacy, 299–300; publications, 297–99; at University of Pennsylvania, 290–91; and Wright Morris, 283 Eiseley, Mabel Langdon, 297 Eisenhower, Dwight, 242 El Cuartelejo, 4 Elkhorn River, 134 Elk v. Wilkins (1884), 99 Elmwood ne, 249–52 Elwood ne, 45 Emancipation Proclamation, 124 Emerson ne, 195 English immigrants, 117 English language instruction, 193, 201, 237, 238, 240, 243–44 Ephrussi, Boris, 294 Episcopal Church, 117 Equitable Life Insurance Society of New York, 126 Espionage and Sedition acts, 167 espn Game Day Pre-Game Show, 353 E-sta-ma-za (Iron Eye). See La Flesche, Joseph, Jr. Evangelical Lutheran Zion Church, 193 evolution, 143 Exodusters, 112. See also African Americans Exon, James J., 335 express riding, 30 Fairbury ne, 184 Fairview country estate, 139 Falls City ne, 191, 361–64 Farley, Terrell, 354 farmers, 42, 229, 265. See also agriculture Farmers’ Alliance, 116, 138 farm machinery, 43

Farnam, Henry, 75 Federal Children’s Bureau, Industrial Division, 175 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 226 Federal Reserve System, 142 Federal Trade Commission, 142 Federal Writers’ Project, 196–97 fences, 41, 42 Fetterman, William J., 67, 84 Fetterman Massacre, 67 The Field of Vision (Morris), 283 Fiesta Bowl (1995), 353, 354 Fifteenth Amendment, 50, 98 Fighting Liberal (Norris), 268 Fight of One Hundred, 67 Filley school district, 45 Fillmore County ne, 114, 117, 312 Finfrock, Mary Ellen. See Morris, Mary Ellen Finfrock fires, prairie, 42–43 First Family, 341 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 211 Fisk University, 286 Fix, Georgia Arbuckle, 187 Flanagan, Fr. Edward J., 171, 175–76, 177, 179, 181 Flanagan, Fr. P. A. (Patrick), 175 Flanagan, Nellie, 175, 178 Flippin, George A., 190 floods, 42 Florence ne, 55, 58, 177 Florida State University, 351 Folk-Song of Nebraska and the Central West (Pound), 243 “The Folsom Mystery” (Eiseley), 291, 296 Fonda, Henry, 198 Fontenelle, Logan, 10–11, 83 Fontenelle, Lucien, 10–12 Fontenelle Forest, 10 Ford, Dorothy, 318–20 Ford, Elizabeth “Betty” Ann Warren, 321 Ford, Gerald R., 321 Ford, Gerald R., Jr., 328; background, 318; birth, 317, 319; death, 328; education, 321; legacy, 327–28; name change, 321; as president, 324; similarities to Malcolm X, 330; as vice president, 323; on Warren Commission, 317 Ford Birthsite and Gardens, 327 forest reserves, 157 The Formative Era of American Law (Pound), 241 Fort Calhoun ne, 10 Index

387

Fort Crook, 14, 275, 303, 303–5. See also Offutt Air Force Base Fort Kearny, 16–17, 20, 50, 67, 148 Fort Laramie, 17, 63, 65, 66, 68, 82, 83, 89 Fort Laramie Treaty (1868), 64–68, 84, 86–87, 93 Fort Lisa, 10 Fort McPherson ne, 32, 184 Fort Niobrara ne, 162 Fort Omaha, 90, 165, 166, 184 Fort Robinson, 86; assassination of Crazy Horse at, 81; decommissioning, 91; description, 86–87; establishment, 69; naming, 89; Oglalas at, 85–86; prisoner-of-war camp, 275–78; Walter Reed at, 90; uses, 90–91 Fort Robinson State Park, 91 Fort Sidney, 90 “Four-Minute Men,” 166 Fourteenth Amendment, 98, 194, 202 Fowler, Byron, 304–5 Fowler, Schuyler, 21 Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma (Eiseley), 299 Franciscan Fathers, 116 Frank, U.S. Army Major, 77 Frank B. Morrison Pioneer Spirit Award, 378 Frankfurter, Felix, 231, 241 Franklin, Benjamin, 290 Franklin County ne, 118 Franklin ne, 275 Frazier, Tommy, 352–54 Freeman, Agnes Suiter, 40–41 Freeman, Daniel, 37, 39, 40–41, 44–45, 327 Freeman, James, 40 Freeman, Minnie May, 129, 130 Freeman School, 41, 44–45 Freeman v. Scheve, et al. (1902), 44–45 Frémont, John C., 13 Fremont ne, 22, 199, 201, 295 French, 2–4, 6 French, Caroline Joy. See Morton, Caroline Joy French French, Luther, 110 Friends of Loren Corey Eiseley Society, 300 Fromme, Lynette “Squeaky,” 324 Frost, Scott, 342, 354, 355 fuel sources, 41, 132 Fugate, Caril Ann, 362 Furnas, Robert W., 38–39, 125 Furnas County ne, 186, 265 fur trade, 9–10 Gage County ne, 32, 37, 45, 138, 368 Gale, John, 11, 187 388

Index

Gale, Naomi, 11, 187 Garland ne, 195 Garrett, Esther Mary. See Edgerton, Esther Mary Garrett Garvey, Marcus, 319–20 General Allotment Act (1887), 100 genes, 290, 294, 295 Geneva Convention of 1929, 275, 276 Genoa ne, 8 George, Eddie, 353 George Beadle, An Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century (Berg and Singer), 295 George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research, 300 Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center, 327 Gerald R. Ford Expressway, 324, 351 Gering ne, 195 German language, 192–95, 202–3, 240. See also Germans German Reformed Church (Sutton), 111 Germans: immigrants, 114–15, 194; Keith Neville on, 228; and Ku Klux Klan, 199; in Omaha, 150; prisoners of war, 274–78, 277; from Russia, 110–12, 114; suppression of, 194–95, 201–3; and World War I, 167, 176. See also German language Germantown ne, 195 Gerrard, Grace. See Pound, Grace Gerrard Ghost Dance Movement, 71, 259 Giago, Tim, 259 Gibbon ne, 184 Gibson, Kandi, 362 Girls and Boys Town, 171, 180–81. See also Boys Town Glover, Rich, 347 God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (Johnson), 286–87 gold, 15–16, 135, 136, 139–40, 148, 371–73 Golden Spike railroad tower, 379 González, Juan, 195–97 Goodhue, Bertram Grosvenor, 213, 215–19 Gore, Albert, Jr., 233 Gosper County ne, 312 Gothenberg ne, 31, 32, 115, 191 Grace Abbott Award, 175 Graham, Aaron, 354 Grand Island Baptist College, 174 Grand Island High School, 172 Grand Island ne: Abbott family in, 172, 174; flu in, 183; immigrants in, 114, 115; Ku Klux Klan in, 199; and Oregon Trail, 22; water supply, 312; and World War II, 272, 275

granges, 136–37 Grant ne, 118 Grant, Ulysses S., 68–69 grasshopper year, 43 Grattan, John, 81–82 Great Depression, 226, 263, 266, 284, 296 Greater Nebraska Blizzard Club, 133 The Great Plains (Webb), 311 Great Plains Black Museum, 329 Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. See Kearney Arch Great Texas Trails Monument, 379 Greeks, 197 Greeley, Horace, 22, 73 Green, Ahman, 354 Green, Donald, 310 Green Bay Packers, 354 Greene, Bob, 272–74, 279 Green Island ne, 42 Gregorian University, 176 Gregory, Dick, 329 Griffin, Elizabeth. See Abbott, Elizabeth Griffin Grosshaus, Henry, 111, 114 Grosshaus, John, 111, 114 Grosshaus Hall, 111 Grundlovs Fest, 113 Gunther, John, 219 Guthrie, Woody, 373 Gutierres, Linda, 361 Hagel, Chuck, 45, 328 Hall, Kermit L., 241 Hall, William L., 156–57 Hall, Woods, and Pound law firm, 240 Hamilton County ne, 114, 119, 192, 201, 203, 312 Ham Pak, 200 Hampton Register, 201 Hanna, Esther Belle, 20 Hannibal, Lars, 112–13 Hanson, Howard, 206 Happy Hour Club (Big Springs), 274 Harding, Warren G., 221, 227 Harlan County ne, 119, 136 Harlem Renaissance, 284–86, 319–20 Harold E. Edgerton Exploit Center, 300 Hartley, Carl, 158 Harvard ne, 272 Harvard University, 234, 236, 241–42 Hastings, Dennis, 281 Hastings College, 349, 350 Hastings ne, 22, 114, 199, 275, 349–50 Hastings Tribune, 262

hate crimes, 195–200, 203, 230, 287, 359, 364, 368 hay, 41, 132 Hebron ne, 32, 134, 275 Heineman, David, 101 Heisman Trophy, 345, 353 Hendley ne, 184 Hendrick, Burton J., 205 Henri, Robert, 281, 288–89 Hesperian, 209, 209 Hickok, James Butler, 33 Hill, Clifton, 274 Hitchcock, Gilbert, 140, 144, 145 Hoch, Nancy, 331, 333–37 Holcomb, Silas, 145, 146 Holderman, Nelson, 164–65 Holt County ne, 116, 131–33, 156, 157 Holy Rosary Mission, 71 The Home Place (Morris), 280, 283 Homestead Act (1862): acquisition of land under, 39–40, 43; first claim under, 37; and immigrants, 113; modern version, 45–46; Republican Party on, 28; success, 44–45. See also homesteading; New Homestead Act homesteading, 37–46, 110, 118–19, 157. See also Homestead Act (1862) Homestead National Monument, 45, 327 Hoops, Johannes, 238 Hoover, Herbert, 267 hospitals, 190, 191 Hostetter’s Bitters, 189 Howard County ne, 112–13, 118 Hull, Ron, 378 Hull House, 173, 174 Humboldt ne, 358, 369 Humboldt Standard, 364 “Hummingbirds in Action” (Edgerton), 292–93 Hunkpapa Sioux Indians, 63 Hupp, Monsignor Robert P., 180 Hus, Fr. Jan, 117 Hyers, Gus, 196 Icebound (Davis), 205 Ideals and Models (Pound, et al.), 244 Illustrated History of Nebraska (Morton and Watkins), 126 The Immense Journey (Eiseley), 291, 297 The Immigrant and the Community (Abbott), 174 immigrants: Cather on, 204, 207–8; Edith Abbott on, 174; hardships of, 120; in Omaha, 197–200; and railroad, 79; Index

389

immigrants (cont.) settlements, 110–20; in United States, 113; violence against, 199. See also specific nationalities Immigrants’ Protective League, 174 Imperial ne, 191 In All Its Fury (Greater Nebraska Blizzard Club), 133 Independence Bowl (2002), 356 Independence mo, 16 Independents (political), 138–39, 268 Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 99 Indian Congress, 147 Indian Country Today, 259 Indian Peace Commission, 63–64, 66–67 “Indian Ring,” 96 Indians. See Native Americans Indians at Work, 260 Indian Trust Fund, 34, 36 influenza, 182–84, 190. See also doctors The Inhabitants (Morris), 282 Initiative 300, 315, 336, 337 insects, 43 Internet, 373 Interstate 80, xv, 39, 324, 370–72, 377, 379 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (Pound), 241 Iowa State College of Agriculture, 154–55 Iowa State University, 353, 355. See also Iowa State College of Agriculture Irish, 75, 116, 167 Irish Catholic Colonization Association, 116 Irma Hotel, 108 irrigation, 311–15; center pivot, 308–9, 313, 315 Isham (Cody’s Horse), 108 Islam, 322, 325 Israel, David, 349 Izard, Mark, 58 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 100 Jackson ne, 116 Jackson, T. C., 156 “January 12, 1888, Blizzard Club,” 133 Japanese, 200 Jefferson County ne, 114 Jennings, Bill, 343 Johnson, Alva, 205 Johnson, Alvin, 162, 282 Johnson, Andrew, 50, 52 Johnson, James Weldon, 285–87 Johnson, Lyndon, 323 Johnson, Vard, 333 Jones, Alfred D., 147 390

Index

Jones, Aphrodite, 366 Jones, Rev. Kelsey, 325 Jonkman, Bartel, 321 Julesburg co, 32, 66, 84 Jung, Carl, 259 Jurisprudence (Pound), 242 k-9 corps, 91 Kansa Indians, 3, 24 Kansas: African Americans in, 118; annexation to, 59, 124; establishment, 26; groundwater, 311; on railroad, 50; and violence over Kansas-Nebraska Act, 28; and visual arts, 285–86 Kansas National Guard, 272 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854): first page, 25; land divisions, 27; and population, 55; proposal and passage of bill, 26–27; purpose, 23, 28–29; and slavery, 23, 25–28 Kansas Pacific Railroad, 102 Kansas State University, 345, 352, 353, 378 Kantor, Josephine. See Morris, Josephine Kantor Kearney Arch: Clinton at, 376; construction, 370, 372, 374; contents, 372–73; expansion, 378–79; idea for, 371–72; media coverage, 375–76; museum, 370–71; overview of, 370; public opinion on, 373– 75; visitors to, 374–77 Kearney County ne, 115, 118, 312 Kearney Journal, 40 Kearney ne: and capital location, 61; flu in, 183, 184; and Oregon Trail, 22; and Pony Express, 32; prisoner-of-war camp, 275; railroad in, 76, 79; reform school, 176; tourism, 376–77. See also Kearney Arch Kearney Normal College, 183 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 16 Keim, F. D., 293 Keller, Helen, 231 Kelley, George, 348 Kellie, Luna E., 138 Kemble, E. C., 94 Kenesaw Homestead Act (2004), 45 Kenesaw ne, 45 Kennedy, John F., xv, 100, 317, 323, 325, 373 Kennedy, Robert, 317 Kenney, George C., 302 Kerrey, Robert, 127, 233, 282, 332–33, 336, 340 Kimball ne, 134 Kimball, Thomas R., 213–14 King, Dorothy Gardner. See Ford, Dorothy King, Leslie, 318–19, 321 King, Leslie Lynch, Jr.. See Ford, Gerald R., Jr.

King, Marietta, 318 King, Rev. Martin Luther, Jr., 317, 325 Kinkaid, Moses, 44 Kinkaid Act, 44, 112, 157 “The Kinkaider Comes and Goes” (Sandoz), 254 Kinney, Jeff, 347, 348 Kirksville (mo) normal school, 161 Kitkahahki Indian band, 2. See Pawnee Indians Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, 152 Knopf, Alfred A., 204, 206–7, 211 Kooser, Ted, 206, 260 Ku Klux Klan, 199, 199, 205, 223, 228, 230, 320 labor issues, 172, 179, 230, 241, 265, 266 Ladies Aid of St. John’s Lutheran Church (Gothenburg), 274, 279 La Flesche, Joseph, Jr., 11 La Flesche, Joseph, Sr., 11 La Flesche, Mary, 11 La Flesche, Susan. See Picotte, Susan La Flesche La Flesche, Susette, 11, 100 La Flesche family, 11 LaFollette, Robert, 224, 230, 231 Lake McConaughy, 315 Lakota Sioux Indians: and the King’s store, 318; and John G. Neihardt, 259, 260; language, 63; at Little Big Horn, 85; and Mari Sandoz, 255; peace terms, 64, 66–67; and U.S. Army, 81–82 Lamb, Anselmo, 333 Lambert, Anna Mae, 358–59 Lambert, Lisa, 358, 361, 367 Lambert, Tanner, 358, 369 Lambertson, G. M., 98 Lame Duck Amendment, 267 Lancaster County ne, 58–60, 340 Lancaster ne, 60 Lancaster Seminary Association, 60 Langdon, Mabel. See Eiseley, Mabel Langdon Lange, Carl, 165 The Language of Life (Beadle), 295 A Lantern in Her Hand (Aldrich), 250, 251–52 Larabee, Joe, 87 Larabee, Nellie, 87 L’Archévèque, Juan de, 3, 5, 6 Lashley, Pluma. See Norris, Pluma Lashley Latin School, University of Nebraska, 236, 237, 239 Laux, Charles, 364, 365, 366 Lawrie, Lee O., 217 League of Nations, 223 League of Nations Advisory Committee on

Traffic in Women and Children, 174–75 Leahy, Eugene, 329 Lee, Richard Henry. See Cozad, John J. Legislative Bill 662, 334, 336–38 LeMay, Curtis E., 302–3, 307 Leonard, Ellie. See Norris, Ellie Leonard Lewis, Meriwether, 10, 13, 280 Lewis, Sinclair, 204 Lexington ne, 275 The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Hendrick), 205 Lillie, “Pawnee Bill,” 106 Lincoln, Abraham, 28, 34, 39, 47, 75, 124 Lincoln Freie Presse, 115 Lincoln General Hospital, 360 Lincoln High School, 235, 239, 245, 246 Lincoln Highway, 373 Lincoln Journal Star, 364, 369 Lincoln Land Company, 117 Lincoln Memorial, 219 Lincoln ne: capital in, 14, 53, 59–62, 72, 213; Charles Bryan in, 228; Charles G. Dawes in, 225–26, 230; and gubernatorial election (1986), 340; homosexuality in, 369; immigrants in, 113–16, 119; John J. Pershing in, 163, 170; Ku Klux Klan in, 199; Loren Corey Eiseley in, 295, 296; Mari Sandoz in, 253–55; Mexicans arrested in, 196; Poncas in, 100; population, 55, 61, 114; Pound family in, 236, 239, 240, 246; salt basin, 244; storms in, 134; Willa Cather in, 208; William Jennings Bryan in, 139; and World War II, 272, 279 Lincoln Nebraska State Journal, 125, 132–33, 138, 155, 208, 209, 225, 268 Lincoln People’s City Mission, 341 Lincoln Public Library, 240 Lincoln Public Schools, 245 Lincoln Round Table, 225 Lincoln Star, 194, 262, 269, 334 Lindsay, Vachel, 144 Links of Love (radio program), 178 linseed oil, 150 Lippincott, Rosalie, 274 Lisa, Manuel, 9–10 Little, Daisy Mason, 319 Little, Ella, 322 Little, Louise Norton, 320 Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X Little, Rev. Earl, 319–20 Little, Wilfred, 329 Little, Yvonne, 320 Index

391

Little Big Horn River, 84–85 Little Big Man, 88 Little Blue nrd, 314 Little Blue River, 314, 315 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 322–23 Loebeck, Agnes, 197 London Naval Conference (1930), 232 London School of Economics, 173 Lone Man, 65 The Lonesome Trail (Neihardt), 258 Long, Stephen H., 13, 15, 23 Longo, Peter J., 316 Lookout Mountain, 108 A Lost Lady (Cather), 211, 212 Lotter, John, 358, 359, 361–65, 365 Louisiana Purchase, 23 Louisiana State University, 345–47 Loup City ne, 45, 113 Loup River, 1, 5, 6, 134 Love Song to the Plains (Sandoz), 255–56 Lowden, Frank O., 221, 223 loyalty oaths, 242 Lundstrom, Marjie, 206 Lusitania, 143 Luther Academy School, 115 Lutheran Church, 115, 118, 195, 199, 202–3. See also Zion Lutheran schools Lutheran Home for the Aged (Omaha), 203 Lyceum circuit, 141 Lyman ne, 275 lynchings, 195–98, 203, 230, 287. See also hate crimes Lynch ne, 191 Lyons ne, 195 MacArthur, Douglas, 179 Macias, Miguel, 196 Macumber, Wray, 253 Madison ne, 185, 187, 189 Maghee, Thomas, 184 Maher, John G., 244 Mahoney, Gene, 333, 334 malaria, 94 Malcolm X, 326; assassination of, 317, 318, 326; birth, 317, 319, 320; early life, 320, 322; and Islam, 322; legacy, 328–30; name, 318, 325; public speaking, 325–26; similarities to Ford, 330 Malcolm X Avenue, 330 Malcolm X Commemoration, 329 Malcolm X Freeway, 329 Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, 329 “Malcolm X Speaks” (radio program), 322 392

Index

Malmo ne, 115 Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, 256–57 Mari Sandoz Sandhills Trail, 256 Marling, Karal Ann, 374 Marshall, George C., 169 Martin-Nebraska Company, 305 Martinsen, Mona. See Neihardt, Mona Martinsen Mason, Bridget, 373 Mason, Daisy. See Little, Daisy Mason Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 291 Mawood Hospital, 190 Maximilian of Wied, Prince, 281 Mayaguez, 324 Mayer, Louis B., 178 McAdoo, William, 222 McCanles, David, 33 McCann, D. J., 69 McClure, S. S., 210 McClure’s magazine, 210 McCook ne, xv, 189, 255, 264, 268, 272 McCool Junction, 186–87 McCready, Eric, 220 McGillycuddy, Valentine “Little Whiskers,” 70 McGinley, Donald, 338 McKelvie, Samuel R., 194, 213 McKinley, William, 140, 145–47, 226–27 McMahon, Charles, 177 McReynolds, James C., 202 McShane, John, 150 Mead ne, 115, 272 meatpacking industry, 150, 152. See also cattle medicine: advances in, 182; effectiveness, 188– 89; for flu, 183–84; preventive, 187–88 Meehan, Charles, 112 Meiere, Hildreth, 218 Memorial Stadium. See University of Nebraska Memorial Stadium Mencken, H. L., 207, 231, 234 Mennonites, German, 114 Meredith, Mamie, 235 Merrill, Eliza, 12 Merrill, Moses, 12 Merz, Douglas, 364 Metcalfe, T. W., 232 Methodist Ladies Aid of Hershey, 274 Mexicans, 195–96 Meyer, Emma, 200–201 Meyer, Reuben, 203 Meyer, Robert T., 192–94, 200–203 Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), 201–3 Michigan Agricultural College, 154 Michigan State University, 345. See also Michigan Agricultural College

Middleton, Doc, 87, 106 migration, 110–20, 148. See also immigrants Miles, Nelson, 85 Mili, Gjon, 292 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 205 Miller, George L., 80, 125, 150, 190 Mills, Billy, 259 Mínguez, Father Juan, 3, 6 Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail (Sandoz), 187 Missouria Indians, 10, 11–13, 24 Missouri Compromise (1820), 25–26, 28 Missouri Fur Company, 10, 11 Missouri River, 11, 69, 92, 134, 149, 307, 316 Mitchell ne, 275 Mitchell Pass, 17 Mix, Charles, 93 mochita, 32 Mockett Act (1913), 193–94 Model Legislative Committee, 262 Modern Language Association, 245 Mohr, Charles H., 206 Momaday, N. Scott, 373 Monaghan, Tom, 333 Moore, Jim, 33 Moore, Rowena, 329 Moore, Sara Jane, 324 Moravians, 117 Mormons, 13, 15, 371–73 Morrill Act (1862), 44 Morrill ne, 275 Morris, Frank S., 186 Morris, Grace, 281 Morris, Josephine Kantor, 283, 284 Morris, Mary Ellen Finfrock, 280–82 Morris, Will, 281, 283 Morris, Wright, 280–84, 282; background of, 281–82; career of, xiii, 282–83; death of, 284 Morrison, Frank, 370–72, 371, 377–78 Morrison, Maxine, 377–78 Morton, Caroline Joy French, 123 Morton, Joy, 126–28 Morton, J. Sterling, 122; on annexation to Kansas, 59; background, 122–23; as conservationist, 155; construction of Arbor Lodge, 124–25; and governorship, 51; idea for Arbor Day, 121, 126–28; political career, 123–26; on statehood, 50; on Thomas B. Cuming, 57; and William Jennings Bryan, 140 Morton, Mark, 126 Morton, Paul, 126

Morton Arboretum, 126 Morton Salt Company, 126 Mount St. Mary’s College, 175 Muhammad, Elijah, 322, 325 Mullen, Arthur, 201–2 Mullen, Basil, 200 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 283, 292 Museum of Nebraska History, 8 Museum of New Mexico, 8 Muska, Susan, 366 My Ántonia (Cather), 210, 211 My Experiences in the World War (Pershing), 169 My Uncle Dudley (Morris), 283 naacp (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 172 Nagashima, Akane, 374 Nakota Sioux Indians, 63 Naoi, Jack, 200 Naranjo, José, 3, 6 National Academy of Sciences, 217 National Arbor Day Foundation, 127 National Board of Prison Fellowship, 341 National Conference of Social Work, 174, 175 National Endowment for the Arts, 289 National Endowment for the Humanities, 289 National Forest system, 154, 157 National Grange, 136–37 National Historic Landmarks, 219 National Park Service, 45 National Register of Historic Places, 219 National Research Hospital (Omaha), 180 National Resource and Training Center (Omaha), 180 Native Americans: agriculture, 290; citizenship rights, 99; Cody on rights of, 106; diseases, 188; doctors, 187; and homesteaders, 41–42; and John G. Neihardt, 258–60; Mari Sandoz on, 255–56; museum exhibit on, 373; on Oregon Trail, 19; Plains as reservation for, 23, 27; and Progressive Movement, 172; and railroad, 65, 77; at Trans-Mississippi Exposition, 147; U.S. government policy toward, 95–100; and visual arts, 280, 281. See also specific tribes Natural Resources Districts (nrds), 314 Nazis, 277 Neapolis ne, 58–59 Nebraska: constitution, 47, 49–52, 367–68; nicknames, 126; population, 37–38, 43, 45–46, 77–79, 113, 116–18, 171–72; Index

393

Nebraska (cont.) statehood, 47–52, 124; as territory, 14, 23, 24–26, 29, 47 Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State, 296–97 Nebraska Arts Council, 289 Nebraska Botanical Survey, 236 Nebraska Capitol landscape, 219 Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, 175 Nebraska City ne, 16, 21–22, 55, 60–61, 123, 125, 127, 152 Nebraska City News, 51, 59, 123, 147–48 Nebraska Cultural Trust, 289 Nebraska Department of Agriculture, 311 Nebraska Department of Education, 379 Nebraska Department of Water Resources, 314 Nebraska Editor, 209–10 Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, 378 Nebraska Farmer, 41, 262 Nebraska Hall of Fame, 72, 175, 179, 329–30 Nebraska Humanities Council, 289 Nebraska Indian Commission, 101 Nebraska National Forest, 154, 157–59, 158 Nebraska National Guard, 106, 271 Nebraska Navy, 232 Nebraska Normal College, 257 Nebraska Power and Light Company, 291 Nebraska Rural Poll, 191 Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame, 245 Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, 121, 122 Nebraska State Capitol building, 214, 216; artwork, 217–19; design competition, 213– 15; public opinion on, 218–20; renovations and restorations, 219–20; tower, 213 Nebraska State Capitol Commission, 213–14, 217 Nebraska State Council, 195 Nebraska State Council of Defense, 167–68 Nebraska State Fair Grounds, 348 Nebraska State Firefighters Museum and Education Center, 377 Nebraska State Historical Society: on Bess Streeter Aldrich, 248; and Cather house, 208; and Fort Robinson, 91; and Gerald R. Ford, 327; J. Sterling Morton at, 126; and Kearney Arch, 379; Mari Sandoz at, 254; and Malcolm X, 328; Neihardt Center, 260; and Norris home, 268; and Olivia Pound, 246; Villasur expedition mural at, 8 Nebraska State Museum, 296, 297 Nebraska Supreme Court, 44, 194, 199–200, 201 Neely, Carrie, 243 394

Index

The Negro (DuBois), 286 The Negro World, 319, 320 Neihardt, John G., 105, 248, 256; background and education of, 257, 260; death of, 260; as friend of Black Elk, 259; as friend of Mari Sandoz, 256; physical description of, 257; writings of, 257–60 Neihardt, Mona Martinsen, 258, 260 Neihardt Day, 260 Neligh ne, 199, 199 Nelson, Ben, 341, 377 Neville, Keith, 168, 194, 228–29, 273 Newbranch, Harvey, 205 New Deal, 232, 263, 266, 286 New Haven Railroad, 322 New Homestead Act, 45–46 New Republic, 162 New School for Social Research (New York City), 162, 282 newspapers: Bellevue, 14; on blizzard, 132–33; Czech-language, 117; Danish-language, 118; German-language, 115, 194, 200; and Morton, 123. See also specific titles Nichol, William, 338 Nichols, Rev. Samuel J., 145 Nicholson, Jack, 375 Niobrara ne, 42 Niobrara Reserve, 157, 159 Niobrara River, 92–94, 100 Nissen, Ed, 362 Nissen, Sharon, 362 Nissen, Tom, 358, 359, 361–65 Nixon, Richard, 322–24, 328, 347 Nobel Peace Prize, 228 Nobel Prize in Medicine, 290, 295 Nonpartisan League, 167 Norfolk ne, 100, 115, 280 Norris, Ellie Leonard, 264 Norris, George W., 267; background, 263–64; death, 268; on economy, 263; on Grace Abbott, 175; on partisanship, 261–62, 267; political career, 265–70; proposal of Unicameral, 262–63; in Senate, 265, 268; on U.S. entry into World War I, 160 Norris, George W. (grocer), 268 Norris, Pluma Lashley, 264 Norris-LaGuardia Act, 266 North, Frank, 106 North Dakota, 167, 218 Northern Indiana Normal School, 264 North Platte Canteen, 271–74, 273, 278–79 North Platte Daily Bulletin, 272, 278 North Platte Lions Club, 278

North Platte ne: Amtrak in, 279; CheyenneLakota attack at, 84; Fourth of July celebration, 102; Frontier Days, 378; Ku Klux Klan in, 199; monument proposal, 379; and Oregon Trail, 22; railroad in, 76–78; Sioux at, 83; William F. Cody’s wife in, 108; during World War II, 271 North Platte River, 65, 66, 69 Northwestern University, 241 Norton, John “Nate,” 262 Norton, Louise. See Little, Louise Norton Norton, Patrick, 177 Norval Act (1921), 201, 202 nurses, 187 Nysted ne, 118 Oak Creek settlement, 113 Oakland ne, 115 Oakley, Annie, 106, 107, 108 Oberlin College, 297 Offutt, Jarvis J., 304, 305 Offutt Air Force Base, 306; Bill Clinton at, 376; expansion, 305; Gerald R. Ford at, 323; history, 14, 303–5; naming of, 306; purpose, 301–2, 305, 307; relationship with Nebraska, 306–7; as Strategic Air Command headquarters, 303. See also Fort Crook Ogallala Aquifer, 310; access to, 309–11; conservation efforts, 315; control areas, 314–15; problems, 311–12; rights to, 312, 314–16; size and location, 309–10, 313. See also water supply Ogallala ne, 79, 275 O’Gara, W. H., 133 Oglala Sioux Indians, 63, 66, 85–86 Oklahoma State University, 351, 353 Olafsdottir, Greta, 366 Olberding, Tom, 364 “The Old Glory Blowout,” 102 Old Jules (Sandoz), 254–55 Omaha Arrow, 56 Omaha Bee, 117, 133, 152, 197, 198 Omaha Clinic, 190 Omaha Daily News, 197, 253, 257 “Omaha Day,” 152 Omaha Herald: on Butler, 54; on constitution, 49, 50; on crime in Omaha, 151; on Fort Laramie Treaty, 67; founding and operation, 190; and J. Sterling Morton, 125; on Poncas, 96; on railroad, 80; on Red Cloud, 69 Omaha High School Cadets, 145

Omaha Indians, 11–12, 83, 92–94, 258, 281, 304 Omaha Medical College, 190 Omaha ne, 60, 149; airport, 305; as capital, 14, 48, 53, 56–59, 123, 147–48; capital moved from, 61; crime in, 151, 199, 287; development as metropolitan center, 147–48, 150–51; disease in, 188; early legislative sessions in, 58; emigrants and freight through, 148–49; establishment, 147; Fr. Edward J. Flanagan in, 175–77; Gerald R. Ford in, 323, 327; Germanlanguage newspaper, 115; Girls and Boys Town in, 171, 180; and gubernatorial election (1986), 340; homosexuality in, 369; immigrants in, 113–16, 119, 197– 200; industry, 150; Malcolm X in, 317, 320, 325, 328–30; Mari Sandoz books in, 255; Mexican immigrants in, 196; and Offutt Air Force Base, 307; and Oregon Trail, 16, 21, 22; political convention (1892), 136; Poncas in, 100; population, 55; and railroad, 50, 74, 75, 78, 149–50; rebuilding after Panic of 1893, 152; storms in, 134; as telegraph center, 148–49; TransMississippi Exposition site, 145–46, 151– 53; and Unicameral, 262; water supply, 311; Wild West show in, 105, 107; World War I supplies in, 166 Omaha Nebraskian, 49 Omaha Republican, 51, 60, 73, 125, 132 Omaha Smelting Company, 150 Omaha Star, 325 Omaha Sun, 179–80 Omaha Wool and Storage Company, 318 Omaha World-Herald: on Gerald R. Ford, 324, 328; on gubernatorial election (1986), 339; on Kearney Arch, 371; on Kenesaw Homestead Act, 45; on Louise Pound, 238; on Malcolm X, 325; and Pulitzer Prize, 205; on racial violence, 198; on Siman and Norval acts, 202; on Ted Kooser, 260; on Trans-Mississippi Exposition, 152, 153; William Jennings Bryan at, 140 Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (Greene), 272–73 O’Neill Frontier, 132–33 O’Neill, John, 116 O’Neill ne, 44, 176, 378 One of Ours (Cather), 204, 206, 207, 211 O Pioneers! (Cather), 211 Orange Bowl (1971), 345–47 Orange Bowl (1972), 348 Index

395

Orange Bowl (1994), 351, 353 Orange Bowl (1997), 355 Ord ne, 191 Oregon-California Trail Association, 22 Oregon Trail: dangers, illness, and death on, 19– 21, 188; emigrants on, 16, 18, 19, 24; Fort Kearny on, 16–17; Fort Laramie on, 17, 63, 65, 66, 82, 83; gold and silver prospectors on, 15–16; history of use, 15; landmarks on, 17; legacy and preservation, 22; materials transported on, 18–19, 21–22; modes of travel on, 17–18; museum exhibit, 371, 372; Omaha as outfitting point, 148; and Pony Express, 32; and railroad, 75; record of travel on, 22; Red Cloud Agency on, 69; roads of, 15; route, 17; rules for travel on, 18; unusual sights on, 21 The Oregon Trail (Parkman), 22 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 325 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 297–98 Orr, Kay, 335; background, 335–36; candidacy, 331, 332; conduct in race, 338, 339; fund raising, 338–39; as governor, 340; legacy, 341; platform, 336; in primary, 337; and prospects in gubernatorial election, 334; on Robert Kerrey, 333; votes received, 339–40 Orr, William, 335 Osage orange, 41 Osborne, Charles, 349 Osborne, Nancy Tederman, 351, 356 Osborne, Thomas, 349 Osborne, Tom, 352; on 1997 Orange Bowl, 355; as assistant head coach, 348, 349, 351; background, 349–50; final season, 342, 354–56; and Gerald R. Ford, 327; as graduate assistant, 345; on Kearney development, 377; political career, 356; professional football career, 350–51; record as head coach, 351, 356; retirement, 356 Osceola ne, 115 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 317 Otoe County ne, 117 Otoe Indians: at Bellevue, 10–13; doctor to, 187; and Felipe de Tamariz’s diary, 8; and François Sistaca, 6; land claims, 24; mural of battle, 7, 8; and Pawnees, 1–2 Otoe ne, 195 An Overland Journey (Greeley), 22 Overland Trail. See Oregon Trail Overlook Farm, 177–78 Overton ne, 77, 110, 112–13, 119 Oxford ne, 45

396

Index

Pacific Railroad Act (1862), 28, 75 Palisade ne, 275 Palmer raids, 241 Palmyra ne, 117 Papillion ne, 14, 195 Park Elementary School, 323 Parkman, Francis, 22 Parpart, Raymond, 192 Parral, Juan, 196 Pawnee City Band, 145 Pawnee County ne, 53 Pawnee Indians: at Bellevue, 11–12; and François Sistaca, 6; and French, 2–3; land claims, 24; mural of Villasur battle, 7, 8; on Oregon Trail, 19; and Otoes, 1–2; peace treaty, 93; and railroad, 77 Paxson, James, 327 Payne, Alexander, 375 Pearl Harbor, 271 Pederson, Steve, 356–57 Perkins County ne, 315 Perot, H. Ross, 376 Pershing, John J.: background, 161; beginning of military career, 161–62; combat experience, 164; legacy, 169–70; nickname, 163; presidential bid, 169, 222; promotion, 168–69; retirement, 169; Sinclair Lewis on, 204; at “Square Table,” 225; at University of Nebraska, 162, 162–63; at West Point, 161–63; in World War I, 161, 164, 169, 227 Pershing Armory, 170 Pershing Rifles, 163, 170 Peter, Christian, 354 Peter, Fr. Valentine J., 180, 181 Peter, Jason, 355 Petersen, Carol, 249 Phelps County ne, 115, 275, 312 photography: of Edgerton, 291–93; of Eiseley, 290–93, 292; of Morris, 282–84 The Phytogeography of Nebraska (Pound and Clements), 237 Picotte, Susan La Flesche, 11, 187–88, 188 Pierce, Franklin, 26, 27, 47 Pierce County ne, 114 Pierce ne, 200–201, 203 Pifer, Caroline Sandoz, 252 Pike, Zebulon, 15 Pilcher, Joshua, 10 Pinchot, Gifford, 154, 155, 157, 159 Pine Ridge Job Corps, 329 Pine Ridge Reservation, 69, 70, 71, 106, 259, 260

Pitahawirata Indian band, 2. See Pawnee Indians Plains Song for Female Voices (Morris), 283 Plainview ne, 167 Platte County ne, 340 Platte River: crossing of, 18, 19, 148; floods, 134; Pawnees and Otoes on, 1; political significance of, 57–59, 62; and Pony Express, 32; and railroad route, 25; Villasur expedition at, 5; as water supply, 311, 312, 315, 316 Platte River Road. See Oregon Trail Plattsmouth Land Dealer, 122 Plattsmouth ne, 21, 55, 152 Playboy, 299, 366 Plum Creek ne, 77, 185 Plum Creek Pioneer, 43 Poetic Origins and the Ballad (Pound), 244 political party system, 28, 48–49. See also specific parties Polk County ne, 115 Pomona College, 281 Ponca Indians: citizenship rights, 99; history, 92–93; land, 92–93, 95–97, 99–100; in Oklahoma, 94; peace treaties, 93; rights of, 97–99; and Sioux, 93–94; termination, 100. See also Standing Bear Ponca Termination Act (1962), 100 Pony Express: birth and demise, 30, 34–35; cost of mail transport, 32; employees, 31; finances of, 31, 34–36; and government communication, 34; museum exhibit on, 373; obstacles, 34–35; overview of, 35–36; riders, 32–34, 35; route, 32, 32; schedule, 31–32; stations, 31; and violence, 33 Poppleton, Andrew J., 96 popular sovereignty, 28 Populist Party: and Danes, 118; and Democrats, 139; and George W. Norris’s career, 263; influence, 139; on lawyers, 246; Omaha convention (1892), 136, 142; precursor to, 138; and Progressive Movement, 172; and William Jennings Bryan, 135, 140, 144 Portrait of the Assassin (Ford and John Stiles), 317 Post, Alfred M., 202 potash, 165 Pound, Grace Gerrard, 237 Pound, Laura Biddlecombe, 236, 239, 247 Pound, Louise, 238; athleticism, 237–39, 243, 245; career, 237; death, 245; education, 237–40; founding of American Speech, 234; living arrangements, 239; publications, 244; recognition of, 239,

242–43, 245, 246; scholarship, 243–44; and Willa Cather, 208, 239 Pound, Olivia, 235, 239, 240, 245–46 Pound, Roscoe, 242; death, 242; education, 236, 240; and John J. Pershing, 163; legal career, 240–42; on legal realism, 234; living arrangements, 239; on Louise Pound, 239, 242–43, 245; and Olivia Pound, 245–46; and plants, 236–37; publications, 240–42; retirement, 241–42; and “social jurisprudence,” 234; Willa Cather on, 239 Pound, Stephen B., 236, 239, 247 Pound family home, 235, 235, 239, 240, 246–47 Pound Hall dormitory, 245 Pound Middle School, 246 Powder River, 67 Prague ne, 117 prairie coal, 41 Prairie Schooner, 254, 296 Presbyterians, 13, 143 Princeton University, 211 prisoner-of-war camps, 272, 274–78, 305 Progressive Movement, 141, 142, 171–73, 263, 265 Progressive Party, 224, 231 prohibition, 172, 263. See also alcohol Promontory Point, 73–74, 76, 373 Protestants, 115, 117 “proving up,” 40 public-power projects, 266–67 Pueblo Indians, 2 Pulitzer, Joseph, 204 Pulitzer Prize, 204–6 Pumphrey, Charles, 200 Pumphrey v. Nebraska, 200 Quick, Mary, 187 racism, 172, 178, 194, 197–99, 287. See also lynchings Rader, Ira, 305 railroad: and agriculture, 74, 79–80, 138, 139; authorization of first transcontinental, 28; in Bellevue, 14; and capital location, 56; for capitol construction, 218; Charles G. Dawes on, 225; construction, 74–77, 116; deregulation, 324; effect on Nebraska, 74, 77–80; fares, 77; and George W. Norris, 265; J. Sterling Morton on, 125; and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 23; and migration, 110–14, 116, 117; museum exhibit on, 373; Native Americans on, 65, 77; in Omaha, 50, 74, 75, 78, 149–50; and Pony Index

397

railroad (cont.) Express, 35; Populists on, 136; and Red Cloud Agency, 69; risks of travel on, 77; route, 24–25, 50, 74. See also Central Pacific Railroad; North Platte Canteen; Union Pacific Railroad ranchers, 42, 44, 79, 156, 159, 229 Rasmussen, Louis, 196–97 Ravenna ne, 182 Readings in Roman Law (Pound), 241 Reagan, Ronald, 324, 338–39 Reconstruction, 51 Red Cloud, 64; accomplishments, 71–72; attempts to depose, 68, 70–71; background, 65; on Crazy Horse, 88; death, 71; and Fort Laramie Treaty, 65, 87; negotiations with Dye, 63–64; in New York, 69; peace meetings, 63–64, 66–67, 84; at Pine Ridge, 70; and Shoshones, 83; on theft of Indian rations, 69; and Wagon Box Fight, 68; warrior reputation, 66 Red Cloud Agency, 69, 85–87 Red Cloud ne, 208, 210, 211, 212 Red Cross, 166, 168, 195 Reed, Walter, 90 Reiss, Winold, 285 religion, 194, 201, 240. See also specific denominations Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell architectural firm, 215 Republican Party: and African Americans, 119; on Bill Clinton’s visit, 376; and constitution, 49–50; convention (1924), 221, 229; and Danes, 118; dominance, 47–48; in election (1896), 140; in election (1912), 141–42; in election (1924), 231; and English immigrants, 117; and George W. Norris, 264–68; and Gerald R. Ford, 322–24; and Germans, 115; and governorship, 51; and gubernatorial election (1986), 331–37; and J. Sterling Morton, 124; and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 28; on statehood, 48–49, 51–52; and Swedes, 116. See also Unicameral Republican River, 134, 314–16 Richardson, William A., 58 Richardson County ne, 358, 362–64, 367, 369 Ricketts, M. O., 189–90 The Rim of the Prairie (Aldrich), 251 Rinehart, Frank A., 147 Ring, Tom, 196 Río de Jésus María, 5 Río San Lorenzo. See Loup River 398

Index

Risser, James V., Jr., 206 Riverdale ne, 195 Robert Henri Museum and Walkway, 288 Roberts, Stephen, 219 Robertson, Virginia Neville, 273 Robideaux Pass, 17 Robinson, Levi, 86 Rock Bluff ne, 51 Rock Creek ne, 32, 33 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 324 Rockefeller Center, 219 Rocky Mountains, 17 Rodgers, Johnny, 345, 347, 348 Rodin, Auguste, 258 Roman Catholics, 115–17, 178, 340, 368 Rommel, Erwin, 91 Rooney, Mickey, 178 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 224 Roosevelt, Franklin, 175, 224, 266, 267, 271, 279 Roosevelt, Theodore, 109, 140, 142, 154, 155, 157, 164, 172, 224 Rosebud Creek, 85 Rosebud Reservation, 81 Rosewater, Edward, 117 Roughing It (Twain), 22, 33–34 Royal Photographic Society (London), 291–92 Royce, Lois May, 129–30 Rozier, Mike, 351 Rulo ne, 363 Rural Electrification Administration, 267 Rush, Benjamin, 290 Russell, Majors, and Waddell freight firm, 21, 31, 34–35, 102 Russell, William, 31, 34, 36 “Russian Town.” See Sutton ne Russo-Japanese War, 164 Ryan, Michael, 363 Sacco and Vanzetti, 241 Saline City ne, 59 Saline County ne, 117 Salt Creek, 1, 59 Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest, 159 Sandall, C. E., 202 Sand Creek Massacre, 66, 84 Sanders, Betty. See Shabazz, Betty Sanders Sandhills: African American settlement in, 112, 119; establishment of forest in, 156–57; Mari Sandoz in, 252–54, 256; soil condition, 154; water use in, 313, 315 Sandoz, Jule, 253 Sandoz, Jules, 90, 187, 252–54

Sandoz, Mari, 256; background, 252–53; and Bess Streeter Aldrich, 252, 253; on blizzard, 134; as Crazy Horse biographer, 82, 84; death, 256; education and employment, 253–54; father of, 90; interest in writing, 253; and John G. Neihardt, 256; Miss Morissa, 187; on perceptions of Nebraska, xv; on Prairie Schooner, 254, 296; public reception of, 254–56; on Robert Henri, 288; tributes to, 256–57; writing career, 254–55 Sandoz, Mary, 252–53 San Francisco 49ers, 350 San Francisco State University, 283 Sarpy, Peter, 11–12, 12, 14 Sarpy County ne, 14, 275 Saunders, Alvin, 48, 49, 52, 149–50 Saunders County Museum, 300 Saunders County ne, 58, 115, 117 Schmitt, Fr. Francis, 178 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 286 School Children’s Storm. See Blizzard of 1888 Schuyler ne, 78, 117 Scopes, John T., 143 Scotts Bluff, 17, 32 Scottsbluff ne, 22, 199, 275, 277–78 Scottsbluff Star-Herald, 276 The Scout of the Prairie, 104 Scout’s Rest ranch, 108 “seeing the elephant,” 21 Segesser von Brunegg, Fr. Philipp von, 8 Senning, John P., 263 September 11, 2001, attacks, 307 Seward ne, 203, 378 Shabazz, Betty Sanders, 322, 328–29 Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El-. See Malcolm X Shallenberger, Ashton C., 200 Shapiro, Karl Jay, 206 Shattuck, Etta, 130 Sheldon, Addison, 248, 254 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. See University of Nebraska Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Shelton ne, 183 Sheridan, Philip, 103 Sheridan County ne, 165 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 148 Sherwood, Jim, 343 Shoshone Indians, 83–84 Sidney-Deadwood Trail, 87, 187 Sidney ne, 76, 272, 275 Sierra Club, 299, 315 Sileven, Everett, 333, 334

silver, 15–16, 136, 139–40 Silverman (captain at Ft. Robinson), 276–77 Siman Act (1919), 193–94, 200–202 Singer, Maxine, 295 Sioux County ne, 159 Sioux Indians: and Crazy Horse’s death, 88; at Fort Laramie, 63; at Fort Robinson, 87, 88; Ghost Dance movement, 71; John G. Neihardt on, 257, 259, 260; land, 65, 68–70, 100; at Little Big Horn, 84–85; military tactics, 85; in Nebraska, 65–66; and Omaha Indians, 83; peace terms, 64–65, 86–87, 93; at Pine Ridge, 89; and plans for agency on Upper Missouri, 97; and Poncas, 93–94; and railroad, 77; and Red Cloud Agency, 86–87; Wagon Box Fight, 68; and William J. Fetterman, 67; at Wounded Knee, 71. See also Brulé Sioux Indians; Dakota Sioux Indians; Hunkpapa Sioux Indians; Lakota Sioux Indians; Nakota Sioux Indians; Oglala Sioux Indians; Teton Sioux Indians Sistaca, François, 3–6 Sisters of Mercy, 116 Sitting Bull, 70, 81, 83, 85, 106 Skidi Indian band, 2 Skiri Pawnee Indians, 2 slavery, 23, 25–28, 39, 47, 51, 102, 118. See also African Americans Slogum House (Sandoz), 255 smallpox, 13 Smeal Fire Apparatus Company, 377 Smith, Alfred, 222, 223, 267 Smith, Edward, 198 Smith, Greg M., 372 Smith, J. D., 121–22 Smith, J. Greg, 371–72 Socialist Party, 224 Social Security Act, 175 social work, 173–74 sod fences, 41 sod houses, 40, 119, 119, 132 sokols, 117 Solich, Frank, 356–57 Sonderegger, Ernest, 327 The Song of Hugh Glass (Neihardt), 258 The Song of Jed Smith (Neihardt), 258 The Song of the Indian Wars (Neihardt), 258 The Song of the Messiah (Neihardt), 258, 259 The Song of Three Friends (Neihardt), 258, 259 Son of a Gamblin’ Man: The Youth of an Artist (Sandoz), 288 Sorensen, Theodore, xv Index

399

South Sioux City ne, 100 Soviet Union, 301–3, 307, 324 The Sower, 215, 216, 219 Spaniards, 2–3. See also Villasur, Pedro de Spanish-American War, 90, 145–46, 249, 304 Spaulding, Eliza, 373 Spirit of the Pioneers, 217 Spotted Tail, 81, 83, 87, 88 Spotted Tail Agency, 86, 87 “Square Table,” 225 squatters, 38 stagecoaches, 18, 373 Stance, Emanuel, 90 Standing Bear, 92, 94, 95, 95, 97–101 Standing Bear v. Crook (1879), 97–99, 101 Standing Rock, 81 Stanford, Leland, 73–74 Stanford University, 243, 294 Stanton County ne, 114 Starita, Joe, 88 Starkweather, Charles, 362 State of Nebraska (steamship), 105–8 Stauffer, Helen Winter, 256 St. Augustine Indian Mission and School (Winnebago), 181 St. Cecilia’s Cathedral, 213 Stevens, Wade, 186 Steward, Cecil, 374–75 St. Johns ne, 116 St. Joseph mo, 16, 30, 32 St. Joseph Seminary, 175 stock market crash (1929), 226, 232 Story, Joseph, 241 St. Patrick’s Church (Omaha), 176 St. Paul ne, 113 Strang ne, 184 Strategic Air Command (sac), 14, 301, 303, 307 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (start I), 307 Streeter, Mary and James, 248–49 strobe lights, 290–92 Stromsburg ne, 115, 190 sugar-beet industry, 114, 311 Suiter, Agnes. See Freeman, Agnes Suiter Sullivan, John, 202 Summer Hill College, 175 Sumner, Charles, 27–28, 52 The Supreme Court in United States History (Warren), 205 Sutter, John, 373 Sutton ne, 110–12, 111, 184 Swank, Hilary, 367 Swan Lake, 156 Swanson, Clarence, 344 400

Index

Swedeburg ne, 115 Swede Home ne, 115 Swedes, 115–16 Swenson, Lyda, 274 Tack, Augustus V., 218 Taft, William Howard, 141–42 Tagge, Jerry, 346 Tägliche Omaha Tribune, 200 Tamariz, Felipe de, 4–8 Tammany Hall, 231 Tanlac, 183 Ta-Shunka-Witca. See Crazy Horse The Task of Law (Pound), 241 Tatum, Edward Lawrie, 290, 294 taxes: for capitol construction, 218; Charles Bryan on, 229; Charles G. Dawes on, 230; constitution on, 49, 50, 142; George W. Norris on, 265; in gubernatorial election, 334, 336–40; J. Sterling Morton on, 124; Populists on, 136 Taylor, Aaron, 354 Tederman, Nancy. See Osborne, Nancy Tederman Teena, Brandon, 358–61, 361, 363–68 Teepee Restaurant, 254 telegraph, 35, 73–74, 148–49, 151 Tennessee Valley Authority, 266 te Ranch, 108 Terms of Endearment (film), 333 Terrio, Bob, 347 Teton Sioux Indians, 63 Texas, 79, 310, 312, 379 Texas A & M University, 355 Thayer, John, 52, 106 Thedford Herald, 159 Theodore Thomas Orchestra, 145 Thomas County ne, 157 Thompson, John, 184, 185 Thone, Charles, 336, 378 Thumper (sonar), 293 Tibbles, Thomas H., 96, 100 Timber Culture Act of 1873, 43–44 Tisdel, Lana, 361, 363, 367 Tisdel, Leslie, 358, 361 Titanic, 293 Tomich, Jared, 354 tourism. See Kearney Arch Tracy, Spencer, 178 Trailside Museum, 91 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (Omaha): attractions, 152–53; construction, 152; grand court, 146;

opening ceremonies, 145; selection of Omaha for, 145–46, 151–53; souvenirs, 153; success, 147, 152; and Thomas R. Kimball, 213; Wild West show at, 105, 107 travel, 185–86. See also Oregon Trail; railroad Treaty of Versailles, 228, 266 trees, 43–44, 156, 158, 305. See also Arbor Day; botany; Nebraska National Forest Truman, Harry, 301 Truman State University, 161 tuberculosis, 188 Turman, Matt, 353 Twain, Mark, 22, 33–34 Twentieth Amendment, 267 typhoid fever, 188 Ulibarrí, Juan de, 2–3 Unicameral: benefits of, 261–62; draft of constitutional amendment for, 262–63; first meeting, 264, 268–69; history, 261; and Kay Orr, 340; public opinion on, 268; roots of, 54; tradition of, 269–70 Union College, 123 Union Pacific Railroad, 76, 78; Aaron Douglas at, 284; bankruptcy, 79–80; and constitution, 50; construction of railroad, 73–76; headquarters, 78; Irish laborers on, 116; land owned by, 79; and migration, 112, 113; museum exhibit on, 373; at North Platte, 271, 279; and Ogallala Aquifer, 311; in Omaha, 149; and Red Cloud, 68; travelers on, 15 unions. See labor issues Union Stockyards, 150 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 319–20 University Battalion of Cadets, 162, 163 University of Alabama, 348 University of California, 243 University of Chicago: buildings at, 215; Edith Abbott at, 173, 174; George Wells Beadle at, 294–95; Grace Abbott at, 174, 175; Louise Pound at, 237, 243; Roscoe Pound at, 241 University of Colorado, 353, 355 University of Florida, 353 University of Heidelberg, 238–39 University of Innsbruck, 176 University of Kansas, 297, 351 University of Leipzig, 238 University of Miami, 353 University of Michigan, 123, 321, 354–55 University of Missouri, 260, 342, 351, 353, 354

University of Nebraska: Aaron Douglas at, 285–87; Bob Devaney as athletic director at, 349; Charles E. Bessey at Industrial College, 155; Edith Abbott at, 173; George Wells Beadle at, 293, 295, 296, 300; Gerald R. Ford at, 327; Grace Abbott at, 174; and John G. Neihardt, 258; and John J. Pershing, 162, 162–63, 170; J. Sterling Morton at, 125; Kearney campus, 376, 377; Loren Corey Eiseley at, 291, 296, 298–99; Louise Pound at, 237, 243–45; and Mari Sandoz, 254, 256; Olivia Pound at, 239; Roscoe Pound at, 236, 237, 240– 41; Samuel Aughey at, 42; Tom Osborne at, 351; Trailside Museum, 91; and Willa Cather, 208, 211, 212; during World War I, 164, 168; Wright Morris’s donations to, 284. See also Kearney Normal college; Omaha Medical College; University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team: Bob Devaney’s contributions to, 349; Gerald R. Ford on, 327; national championships of, 343, 345–48, 351–57; physical facilities, 344, 348; post-Osborne, 356–57; record under Devaney, 345; significance of, 342–43; v. Missouri (1997), 342 University of Nebraska Memorial Stadium, 349, 353 University of Nebraska Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 284, 286 University of Notre Dame, 346, 347, 351, 356 University of Oklahoma, 347–48, 350, 351, 353, 354 University of Pennsylvania, 290–91, 296–98 University of Southern California, 345, 346, 350 University of Tennessee, 355 University of Washington, 354 University of Wyoming, 343–45, 352 Upper Big Blue nrd, 314 Upper Republican nrd, 314 U.S. Air Force, 302 U.S. Army: and Black Hills gold prospectors, 70; and Brown lynching, 198; and Brulé Indians, 81–83; at Camp Robinson, 86–87; and Cheyennes, 89; and Fetterman Massacre, 67–68; football team, 345; Harold Edgerton in, 290, 292; John J.Pershing in, 161–62; and Lakota Indians, 81–82; and Little Big Horn, 85; and Pershing Rifles, 170; and railroad, 77; scouts, 103–4, 109; Thomas Maghee in, Index

401

U.S. Army (cont.) 184; unauthorized posts, 66; William F. Cody in, 103–4, 109; at Wounded Knee, 71 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 227 USA Today/espn Poll, 355–56 U.S. Bureau of Forestry, 156, 157 U.S. Bureau of the Budget, 227 U.S. Census, 171 U.S. Constitution, 50, 52, 98, 142, 194, 202, 262–63, 267, 269 U.S. Department of Agriculture Division of Forestry, 156 U.S. Department of the Interior, 95–96, 99 U.S. Forest Service, 156 U.S. House of Representatives, 321–23, 356. See also Congress U.S. Indian agencies, 11–12 U.S. Marine Band, 145 U.S. Navy, 321 U.S. Post Office, 305 USS Monitor, 293 U.S. Strategic Command (stratcom), 307 U.S. Supreme Court, 201–2, 230, 241 U.S. War Department, 16, 95–96, 164 U.S. Weather Bureau, 305 Valley Extension Club of Maxwell, 274 Valley Manufacturing Company, 308 Valmont Industries, 308 Valparaiso University, 264 Valverde y Cossío, Antonio, 2–3, 6 Vance, Robert, 152–53 Varner, Woody, 315 Veniard, Etienne, 1 Ventura, Jesse, 269 Victoria, Queen of England, 105–6 Vietnamese, 144 Vietnam War, 302, 323, 328 Villa, Pancho, 164 Villasur, Pedro de, 1, 3–6, 4, 7, 8 “The Vine” (Sandoz), 254 Wagon Box Fight, 68 Wahoo ne, 115, 196, 293, 300 Wakefield ne, 196 Wake Forest University, 345 Walks-As-She-Thinks, 65 Wallace, George, 317 Wallman, Eddie, 152–53 Walsh, Thomas, 223 Walter Reed Hospital, 169 Walthill ne, 187 Waoo-Winchatcha (Dream Woman). See La Flesche, Mary 402

Index

Warren, Charles, 205 Warren, Elizabeth “Betty” Ann. See Ford, Elizabeth “Betty” Ann Warren Warren Commission, 317, 323 Washington Redskins, 350 Watergate scandal, 324, 328 water supply: conservation efforts, 315; in gubernatorial election, 334; history in Nebraska, 309–11; quality, 311–12; rights to, 312, 314–16. See also Ogallala Aquifer Watkins, Albert, 126 Wattles, Gurdon W., 145, 152 Wa-tun-na, 11 Wayne Herald-Tribune, 41 Wayne ne, 257 Wayne State College, 257 wbai-fm, 322 weather, 42, 134, 309, 315–16. See also Blizzard of 1888; Easter storm of 1873 Weaver, James B., 136 Webb, Walter Prescott, 311 Webster County ne, 207 Webster, John L., 96, 98 Weeping Water ne, 275 Wegner, Monsignor Nicholas H., 180 Wellesley College, 173 Wells, Emmeline, 373 Western Potash Company, 166 Western Stage Company, 148 Western Trail, 79 Western Women’s Tennis Tournament, 237, 243 West Point Military Academy, 161–63, 215 West Point ne, 115 wheat, 229, 311 Wheeler, Burton, 224, 231 When the Tree Flowered (Neihardt), 260 Wherry, Kenneth S., 268, 329 Whig Party, 28 White, William Allen, 205 White River, 69 White River ne, 318 Whitman, Narcissa, 373 Wigmore, John H., 241 Wilber ne, 117 Wiley, Phyllis. See Devaney, Phyllis Wiley Wilhite, Don, 312 Wilkie, Wendell, 321 Wilkinson, J. A., 19 Williams, Tyrone, 354 Wilson, Denver, 272 Wilson, Rae, 272 Wilson, Woodrow, 141–42, 142, 164, 222, 228, 266

windmills, 41 Window Cleaning (Douglas), 286, 287 Winger, Debra, 333 Winnebago Indians, 181 Winter Thunder (Sandoz), 134 Wistrom, Grant, 354, 355 “With an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius” (Johnson), 285 women’s suffrage, 142, 172 Woodbury, Daniel P., 16 Woodress, James, 207 Wood River ne, 312 Woods, Mark, 221–22 Woolworth Mansion, 317, 318, 319 Workingmen’s Hotel, 176 Works Progress Administration, 254, 286 World Court, 230 World’s Fairs, 107. See also Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (Omaha) World War I: and Charles G. Dawes, 227; economy and industry, 165; effects of, 160; and Fort Crook, 304; George W. Norris on, 266; and hostility toward Germans, 176; John J. Pershing in, 161, 164, 169; and language instruction, 194, 203; memorial, 214; Nebraskans in, 164–66; patriotism during, 166–68; Robert Henri on, 288–89; Willa Cather’s novel about, 204, 206–7, 211; William Jennings Bryan on, 143

World War II: in Bellevue, 14; contributions and support for, 271–79; effect on United States, 301; end of, 278; and George W. Norris, 267; Gerald R. Ford in, 321; and John J. Pershing, 169–70; Loren Corey Eiseley during, 297; Offutt Field during, 305; and science, 290, 294 Wounded Knee Creek, 71 Wounded Knee Massacre, 71, 89, 106, 107 Wydeven, Joseph J., 284 Yale University, 211, 243, 321 Yankee Hill ne, 59 Yanktonai Indians, 63 Yankton Indians, 63 yellow fever, 90 Yellow Hand (Yellow Hair), 104 York County ne, 114 York ne, 199, 278 Yost, Nellie Snyder, 332 Young, Brigham, 15, 77, 373 Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, 66, 83 Zion Lutheran schools, 192–94, 200–201. See also Lutheran Church Zorinsky, Ed, 333 Zybach, Frank, 308, 315. See also irrigation “Zybach Self-Propelled Sprinkler Apparatus.” See irrigation

Index

403