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About The Falls City tribune. (Falls City, Neb.) 1904-191? | View Entire Issue (Feb. 5, 1909)
REAViS & ABBEY The Great Furniture Store We announce to our trade that we have laid in a hner stock oi lurniture tor our patrons this spring than we have ever done heretofore. Our trade in our carpet and furniture line the past year was more than satisfac tory, and we have gone a step further this year. There never was a better assortment of Rugs, Carpets, mattings and Linoleum in r alls Lily tnan we are now showing. We have facilities for laying and sewing, and want your visits before purchasing. This Streit genuine leather Davenport is the best article for home need. For use 24 hours in a day. Frame solid oak, simple in construction. OPEN CLOSED — Reminiscences of a. Wayfarer Some of the Important Events of the Pioneer Days of Richardson County and Southeast Nebraska, as remembered by the writer, who has spent fifty one years here. The Death of Ahcfeu. Falls City was made a possi bility by the death of old Archer, not perhaps by the process the Greeks called metempsychosis, by which it was believed by them, and by the Brahman phil osophers in an older age, that the soul of one dying would pass into the body of one about to be born, in other words and in plain United States, the trans migration of souls, but from the fact, that Archer had become untenable as a site for a town and the Falls City location af forded better facilities for the purpose. Certain it is, there was a pret ty large transmigration of souls on foot or otherwise, from the wreck beyond the Muddy to the new town to the South. Archer was laid out as a town by a man of that name on what he supposed to be public lands of the United States, shortly after the erection of the terri torial government, in the fall of 1854. The western line of the Half Breed tract, a body of land be tween the two Nemahas, that had been reserved for the half breeds and mixed bloods of cer tain Indian tribes, as then lo cated, was about one and a half miles east of the site of the pro posed town. That line had been surveyed and established sever-1 al years before, and was known as the “McCoy line.” After the Congress had cre ated the territory of Nebraska, a move was made to have the treaty of Prairie du Chie/i, made in 1880, under the provisions of which, among others, the reser vation was made, executed by allotting the land in severalty among the beneficiaries named in the treaty. To that end the Indian officer caused a census to be taken of the half- and mixed bloods of the tribes named, which were, as I now recollect without consulting the recovd the Yankton and Saute Bands of Sioux, the Omahas, Otoes and Iowas. While this was going on, some enterprising land grabber, or may be several of them, induced the authorities at Washington, to cause a resurvey of the boun daries of the Reservation, and the mischief was done. By the provisions of the treaty, the boundaries of the reserved tract were to be ascertained by sur veyiug ten miles up each river, from its confluence with the Mis souri, to points thereon, and then by a straight line between those points, which would mark the western boundary, while the Missouri would form the eastern. The McCoy survey was made by following the river in its sinuosities, which w as the j only way a sensible and fair surveyor could execute the calls ] of the treaty. When thus made the western initial point on the Great Nemaha, was locate d about the mouth of the Muddy; and a line drawn f r om that point to a like point ten miles west of the mouth of the Little Nemaha, left Archer about a mile and a half west of it. The new survey wa~ made on . an entirely different basis of operation. Instead of follow .....j Mrs. W. M. Maddox ___i ingthe meanderings of t ie river, j the surveyor, whoever he was, j started at the mouth (or some- j where thereabouts) a n d r a n a straight line up the valley, to a point ten miles west, which! moved the initial point on the i Great Nemaha for flit l ine to a : corresponding point northwest' on the Little Nemaha, about four miles further vest and when that line was run t o I cated Archer on the Half-Breed , tract. That gave the Half Breeds a slice out of the public ; domain four sections wide and 1 some thirty miles long Not a bad land grab. Of course, that survey was a ; fraud and a wicked one. and though it failed of success in the end, it nevertheless mined Ar cher, and wrecked the hopes- and plans, as well as the fortunes of many worthy people. This occurred sometime in the latter part of the year 1850, and , at the session of tin legislature1 that convened shortly tl < real’ ter in 1857, the final death ! low ' was given Archer by tin re moval of the county seat, ]o-: cated there by an act of the first territorial legislature . ,J" to, Salem, seven or e.gbf ir ' ' - s : further west. Charles McDonald, , citizen of Salem, and a member of the legislature, introduced bill providing with apparent delic acy, that if the commissioners of the county should ascertain that Archer was in fact located on the Half-Breed tract, they would at once move the county offices to the town of Salem; and immediately afterwards, without waiting developments under the first bill, he intro dnced another, removing the county seat bodily and at once, from Archer to Salem. Both bills were probably passed the same day, as the record shows that they were both approved on the same day. That was “the most, the unkindest cut of all,” as those people of Archer were largely instrumental in electing McDonald to the office, the pow ers of which he used for the de struction of their town. From that hour Archer was lost. The most prominent of the men living there at the time were John C. Miller, Ambrose Shelly, William Level, W. M. Maddox, John Welty, A. D. Kirk, Frank Goldsberry, Wil liam P. Loan, and a greater number of other persons than I have space to name here. They were all involved in the wreck and injured correspondingly. Kirk and Goldsberry went to IIulo, which had been started the year before, Loan went to St. Stephens, another town on the Missouri, some miles above IIulo, but as I recollect, he passed most of hi> time at the house of William R. Cain, his brother in-law, who was then engaged in opening a farm in the near vicinity. William R. Cain was long a leading citizen in this part of the country. The others wandered off in one direction or another and to one place and another, but most of them to that land starward. It ivas a cruel thing to de stroy that young community, and especially when no substan constantly in their relations with each other, upon the the ory of equivalents and compen sations? It appears so to me. But take the case in hand. Three years afterwards, that same legislature, by the same arbitrary power passed another act to take effect in the same | month of the year and almost on the same,day of the month, removing the county seat from Salem, and locating it at Falls City. The reader can make any application of this philosophy pertinent in his judgment. Judge Miller was probably the hardest hit of them all. lie was among the first settlers, had invested his all in the town, and expected to reap the reward | of a frugal and economic life in the anticipated prosperity of the town and country. He had all his family about him: was the first probate judge of the county, with every pros pect of holding the office as long as he desired it. But in an evil hour everything was swept away, and he was a ruined man in his bid age. It broke his spirit and in all probability shortened his life. He died in lMtjit, and is buried with others of his family in the cemetery near where the old town stood. One of his daughters, Mrs. W. M. Maddox, is a citizen of this city. She was married to Cap tain Maddox from her father's house in Archer in the year 1855. They came here about forty years ago, and helped to build the town. Captain Maddox was one of the first settlers of Ne braska, was twice a repre sentative in the legislature, was sheriff of the county and held other offices of trust and confi dence. He died several years ago. Nearly all of his children live^with and near their mother. over the ravine to the north, in which many of its early settlers lie buried. There is nothing in the prospect suggestive of the fact that a town of three him dred people or more, ever stood there, or that it had ever been anything but the corntield if now is. The cemetery mentioned, is now Archer; the once living vil lage has vanished, and is 1ml a memory. Most people have an unex plainable desire to visit a grave yard, and the party that went over that beautiful Sunday af ternoon were no. exception to the rule. I had in mind the fear that the place might have been neglected and become overgrown with weeds and underbrush. Such things happen sometimes t o these places, especially where they aue isolated from a town and left for whoever may be willing, to give them attention and care. In this case 1 was agreeably disappointed in my expectations. We found the cemetery in good presentable order, finely located on ground gently sloping to the west and south, with a thick covering of grass over which the lawn mower had recently passed. There was no sign of neglect anywhere, but just the reverse. What interested me most was the community of the dead who lie buried there, Some have been there two to my knowl edge for more than half a cen tury. Dr. D. X. Hutchins was one. McMullen the other. Dr. Hutchins died in the summer or fall of 1 m',h. | never met him but once, and then I knew he was going slowly down to his grave, with that fell disease, consumption. He left a little i/> r-, •_ ■*' The Old Archer Cemetery tial benefit accrued to anybody or any locality. I heard a great preacher say once he was si no. e rated to the Kpi-scopacy of the Methodist church, but is now deceased,— that in h!s judgment, whoever does another a grievous injury, sometime some other man will do him a like injury i t sounded a little like fatalism, but are we not all to a greater or lesser ex tent fatalists? Do men not act On a bright Sunday afternoon last summer while John W. Dor rington, of Yuma, Arizona, an old timer in Falls City, was here on a visit, he proposed that we; go out to Archer, that is to say, where it once stood, and take a look at the old place. It was agreed and we went. There were four of us; three had seen the town in its decadence, the other had seen only its aban doned site, and the cemetery I daughter, ten or eleven years old, who grew to womanhood in the county, and is with ns yet, the wife of our respected towns man, F. M. Harlow. Passing from one grave stone to another 1 found that 1 had known all those people when in life, and L regret to say though T have lived in the near vicinity of this out of the way G od’s acre, for more than fifty years, that was my first visit to it It was like a revival of old ac quaintance, ffoinp amontf those silent heralds, each announcing' the resting place of some one I had known in days of yore. Each one of them, as 1 read the names on the jfrave stones, was present to my mental vision, as I last saw him or her in life, and the times in which they lived. With Jud^e Miller and Dr. Hut chins, I saw the spreading, va cant prairie ajjain, and the crumbling town they helped to i „ \ \ ■niH'fWift n»«n.mv ■ > n —.»-« Mrs F. M Harlow build. The old vanished life and surroundings, came back to me like ghostly visitations; and so with all the others. A little to the west on the south side of the creek, is the old cam]) meeting ground, where the pious Methodists of Archer and surrounding country, used to repair every year to worship God in one of his first temples, according to the poet, a beautiful grove of young timber, but that too was gone. Without the grove the camping ground could not be located, or at least we could not do it, and so that, with the shadowy congregations that worshipped there in »Me long ago, hate become mere misty and confused memories. We finally stood on the spot where the town once was. Tile plow share had passed over it. and in all the wide e \ p a n s e about us, there was nothing that even whispered of the time when a bustling and energetic people lived there, except the graves of some of their dead. Hut what of the other.- of the three hundred or more (and that was a considerable population for a town in those days), who inhabited, hoped, and wrought here? Gone, in their several and restless. . anderings about the world and out of it, with only the two ladies I have men tioned above, remaining. The story of Arche i- both pathetic and tragic. Magnetic Healing Miss Lizde Heitland. a gradu ate of the Weltmer School of Magnetic Healing, of Nevada, Mo. 1 am prepared to treat dis eases of all kinds. Phone 27'*. Located at Mrs. Burris' residence south of the convent. 4t •