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About The Falls City tribune. (Falls City, Neb.) 1904-191? | View Entire Issue (March 5, 1909)
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 Packs From hi t tiik Shadow. Within a week after 1 came to Falls City 1 made two discover jes. First, that the little em brio town had commenced its municipal life under a cloud. This resulted from the circuits stance that < Jen. .lames II Lane, the notorious free state leader in Kansas, where the first phy sical shock occurred between those antagonistic ideas, free dom and slavery, in their strife for control in that new territory early in its settlement, was one of its founders and proprietors The prevailing sentiment in the county was not in accord with Lane and his principles, and Falls City and its people were called by a name very largely in use among politicians, “black republican." 'Phis had the effect to create a pretty wide spread prejudice against it in the minds of people, who, , though not active participants ( in the struggle, were still, on i account of early education and association, political and other, wise, favorable to the other side. This prejudice had to be overcome, and was. to a great extent, by the shrewd efforts of one man. My second discovery was that .John A. Burbank was the ablest man I had met in the country, and 1 was not slow to see that the success of the town depend ed largely on him, his superior fact, good judgment and com mon sense methods. The tirst thiug he did was to eliminate the Kansas statesman from the business, anti the trouble from I that source was ended. The survey of the town site was finished about the tirst of | July, lsr.7, and on the 1th, the| people then on the ground and from settlements in the near vi 1 cinity, gathered for an old fash ioned celebration and (Jen. Lane! made them a speech and that was his last appearance at this city. In the time to come, and be-i lore that mightier collision be tween those irreconcilable fur j ces in 1*01, the prejudice] against our little town gradu ally died out, but it was, as l have said, the result of the splendid management of Mr Burbank, supplemented by tin strong support of the people and his associate s. Nebraska has had few abler men than he, 1 if indeed it has had any, though it has had some as noisy as a flock of guinea chickens, or coy otes, and about as valuable to the general public. He never made, or attempted to make a speech in his whole life. It was| not his way. He came here to build a town near the Nemaha falls, the most | distinctive point in the county, j and selected a -pot where he1 thought the seat of the countyj government ought to be. In I this enterprise he enlisted a! corps of the strongest men in j the county, among them Isaac j and Jesse Crook, two brothers from the far south, unlettered so far as book It arning goes, but level-headed, thorough go ing men who knew how to look the world in the face and give battle to it. on its own terms. They were a host in themselves. Isaac had been county treasurer since the organization of the county, and held it till 1-01, when he refused to allow the people to elect him any more. Jesse was a typical southerner and dispensed more generous hospitality, and fed more hungry people out of sheer goodness of heart and love of his kind, than any man who ever crossed the Missouri river in any direction. They both rest from their In bors. Isaac died a quarter of a century ago, but Jesse has been ! so lately on these streets, that ! I feel somehow that 1 would not be surprised to see him at any moment, walkingas usual, down Stone street, lie died the day before Christmas last Decern her, and the day following that greatest of all birthdays we laid I him away to his long sleep in i the beautiful cemetery on the high ground to the west: and of all the men I have ever known, he is the only one among them to go out of this world, without leaving an enemy behind him. It would have been a sorry day indeed for Falls City with these two men, their wide influ ence and hosts of friends, ar rayed against it. (»ov. Burbank was not only an able man, but he was as true as steel and thoroughly reliable in all his relations with his fel lows, lie was a politician of a high order without a single trait of Jhe demagogue, and as a friend, could always be depend ed upon. There was nothing visionary about him, and he took no part in the wild schemes and air castle building that was rife among our people in those early days, and what new country has been without a similar ex perience'' Hope, it was said, “springs eternal in the human breast,'’ but when* that is the only fund to draw against, (and that was about our condition at the time) the drafts made upon it are fre quently returned, “payment de ferred,” and whether it maketh the heart sick, as such deferred payments are said to do, we go on hoping (or drawing) just the same. That is what we did tor years in this little, out of the way place, but in spite of all opposition and adverse circum stances. success came and main ly through the early efforts of the men 1 have mentioned, sec onded by a united community of earnest men and women acting in their several subordinate ca pacities, and all struggling for tin* accomplishment of a com mon purpose. Whatever would conduce to that end was done willingly and cheerfully, everybody doing his or her part without question or protest. We were all together and worked together without stopping to settle the question of which was the great or little man in the business. That we did many absurd things goes without saying, but we waited a good many years before we took time to laugh about them. Many of the incidents as well as many of the actors have gone out of my memory entirely, but enough remains to give a gen eral idea of what was done and how it was done. And though the shadows of titty years have fallen darkly between the events of that distant past and the present moment in w h i c h 1 write, the laces of those who t >ok part in the early struggle and have been long dead, come back to me as real as 1 knew them in life, and the scenes of I the conflict in which we were I engaged,extending through four | years, are as present to my men tal vision as though they were things of yesterday. Our first object was to build the town, get the county seat, establish institutions of learn ing. and create a manufacturing center to vie with the best. This necessitated frequent p u b 1 i c consultations in which the whole people could take part, and the general concensus of opinion could be thus obtained. I will here give some specimens of those gatherings farce come dies would be a better designa tion—for the consideration of matters touching the general welfare. I have in mind the first of the kind I attended. It was a.tiled by my sometime friend, Mr, Hamby, to talk over one ot his pet projects, the building of a College on the highest point to the north of town. The meet ing was held in Squire Uorring ton's Carpenter -hop. a small shanty, probably ten bv twelve feet in size, and was attended by ten or a dozen people. It was Hamby's meeting and lie took charge of it in that capa city, made all the motions and three fourths of the speeches. The tirst motion put the squire in the chair the chair was his work bench and he sat upon it with the air of a proprietor as well as the presiding officer of the meeting Hamby t lien stated tlie genera I object in hand, which, he said, was to consider ways and means for the immediate construction of a college building in town. I shall not try to reproduce his speech, but it was much like such discourses usually are, with the difference perhaps, that it was interspersed with much that was impractibale, not to say nonsensical. In the midst j of his tribute to education and tin* great advantage it would be to the town to have a first class! institution of learning estab- : li.shed in it, and the consequent influx of population to receive the benefits afforded thereby in the education of their children, Squ i re Dorringtoii interrupted with the question: "l say Am j ti<m paper was at once written (l>y myself as 1 remember) and each person present, except the chairman, who had exhausted his pre emptiun right in Kansas I and had no cla.m in Nebraska, signed it with a donation of forty acres of land to the col | lege fund. In that way we got something like tour hundred acres, which, to tell the exact , truth about it, \v< re about as I valuable as four hundred acres iof blue sky, as there was not a foot of the land entered from ; the government, and no absu ■ lute assurance that any of it ever would )>*■. by the then claim ants, whose right to do so, might never be o\ rcised in the future. If the metaphysicians postu late, that there is no difference between a thing and the idea of it, could have been realized in terms of physical demonstra tion, there might have been some chance for Hamby's col lege, but not otherwise. The project was talked over from time to time during; the summer till some other crochet took possession of the brain of its originator and it gradually dropped out of the minds of the people and so went to join the shade of the Archer university, created un jmprr by the legisla ture a year or two before. I am not certain that the agitation of the college (piestion ■ as in fact a useless expenditure of breath. It served at least one j^ood pur Ex-Governor John A Burban’t, Principal Founder of Falls City by" (the squire was an English- , man and like .1 good many of his conntrymen, had no use for, or made a wrong use of, the letter “II") “where is the money to come from to build the college"? Hamby stopped and stared at his questioner in a kind of va cant sort of way as though an entirely new element had been suggested and which had never 1 occurred to him before, which l am inclined to think was really the fact, but I will not aver that it so appeared to me then, for my own ideas of ways and means in tile premises, were about as j foggy, and unreliable as Ham by’s. It is not impossible that in some vague wax this enthusiast j had concluded that the college might build itself, or that insti- 1 tutions of the kind might be fashioned from such stuff as E’rospero concluded men xvere made dreams. Eloxvever that may be, Ins eni barrassment lasted for only a moment, for he turned to the assembled company and re marked that lie had no doubt but that every gentleman pres ent would subscribe as much as forty acres of his pre-emp tion claim, to aid in the great work and otherwise contribute of his means to further the en terprise. The suggestion took xvith the crowd, and a subscrip pose, it gave occupation to the uneasy and visionary people about town and served to keep alive the spirit of enterprise among us. Mr. Hamby was a very entertaining talker when any one of his numerous schemes formed the subject for the time being, and he was rather con vincing for a man of his limited attainments. Certain it is, he led me to think there was some thing in every scheme that he hatched out while I knew him and he appeared to be always in the business. 1 have in mind another town meeting held some time during the summer of the same year, which was called by Wingate King, 1 think, to take into con sideration the feasibili t y of building a church for the Metli odists in the vicinity. 1 take it, it must have been for the Meth odists because Mr. King was a , very devoted member of that . denomination. The proceed i ings of that meeting are rather shadowy in my recollection, but d am sure that we raised money enough to buy a couple of thou sand feet of lumber, which was obtained from the Hamby saw mill at the lower end of town. Some party interested hauled the lumber on the ground, which, as nearly as [ can tix the spot, was not far from the present residence of Mr. Charles Har grave. I know it was ortli of the present site of 1 central high school. The v e town in that vicinity was ant, but whether the church t ed any lots there or not l am a 'able to say, but I <lo know that 'lie lum her was hauled to tin p 'int in dicated and unloadt i >n the ground. That is all that was ever done towards bu lding the church. The lumber r< mained there until some person or per sons api#opriated it to their own use. That was not ffected by taking all the lumber it once, but by taking small quantities from time to time, mostly at night, until it all disappeared and the church we had built in our minds went the way of Ham by's college. (iov. Burbank never attended any of these meetings, but he was too politic a man to clis courage them or to say anything disparaging about them. They furnished amusement for the people if nothing else, and amusement is one of tlie com pensations for living at all. Seriously speaking, however, these apparently trilling con ventions of the people, have an other and to my mind, a more substantial value, that is not generally taken into account by writers on political history, De Tocqueville, perhaps excepted, as they play an important part in the synthetical evolution of the state in its first inception, if not at all stages of it'- exist ence. They are the natural de liberative bodies of the common every day citizen, and furnish an excellent school for the as similation of opinion among those whose environment in other localities, havt^ not been the same, and whose social and political principies, not to sav prejudices, have not been ac quired from the same sources, nor fashioned after the same model. Every man who goes to a new country carries with him the atmosphere of home, its tra ditions and customs, along v\ itil the social, religious and politi cal principles, which his former affiliations, education and sur roundings have instilled into his mind and become ingrained in his very being, so that in the formation of a public opinion in a community not entirely homo geneous, contact and associa tion become of the tirst import ance, for that public opinion when formed, by the modifica tion and toning down of indivi dual opinions, becomes clirys talized into law as the process of assimilation goes on, and eventually determines the insti tutions of the new common wealth. If I found it impossible, as it certainly is. to write ot Falls City in its swaddling clothes without also writing of the man who made it a possi bility, I find it equally impos sible to write of Nebraska itself without making a similar asso ciation. The revolution that was silently going on in the public sentiment of the nation, was quite as apparent, in its ef fect in Nebraska, as anywhere else. The political administra tion of the government at Wash ington in 1858, was rapidly los ing the confidence of the people, and before that year passed into history, was at war with a con siderable faction of the part that put it in power, and before the next presidential election was had. that same party, om • sii formidable in its arrogant ■ and power, had practical! ceased to exist. The shadow ot : the coming event, the last ami 1 final struggle in the “irrepres sible conflict,” had fallen long ago,and nowhere more portent onsly than in the western terri tories. It was felt all about us,in | social affairs, in political and j business relations, and resis tance became a necessity. I knew the men who took up the gage of battle and entered the lists. 1 saw the fight in its 1 inception, and at its most criti cal stages, and I saw it end in the triumph of the right. Let me pass in review some of the men who assisted in this noble service, “lest we forget.” There was T. M. Marquette, i lovable man, conscientious and brave, but as gentle as a wo man, and as true to his sense of right as the needle to the pole. E. If. Webster, a journalist at Omaha, with his armor always J on and always in the thickest of the tight. O. P. Mason, strong, burly ' and ready, was a rough and tumble tighter of the first order — a politician who might have [realized his highest ambition ! had he been less in debt to his I enemies, and had had a more [scrupulous regard for human friendship, to the extent at lea -t | of appreciating the value of an iold friend in contradistinction from the new one, he was going to make. lv. \Y. Furnas was a little te dy in his enlistment, but when on the roll was a soldier of tried and true metal and faithful .> the end. \Y. H. Taylor, little known o the people of this day, a son of the southland, an admirer of Henry Clay and a native of h h beloved Kentucky, was among the champions of the new cm sade. He was a splendid lav yer and an orator unequalled in Nebraska at any time. He was much maligned, misrepresented and cordially hated by his en • mies. That circumstance proved the man and his work. Noe entities are not so honored. E. S. Dundy was in the rani ■> also, and was known to most of the people hereabouts. He and Burbank were always togethe , and were potent factors in put ting Nebraska in the right co lumn in lKn'd. where she has been ever since, with the exception of two or three slight attacl s of emotional insanity, w h e i some follies were committed ;; s is usual in such cases. Two other faces come befo ■ me, S. G. Daily and John Taffe I knew them well and loved them both. Daily represented the territory in congress ti\< years, while Taffe represented the state after its admission, in the same body, for six year and it would have been infinite! better for both, if they had neve ' seen the federal city. They served their people well and faithfully however, much bett than they served themselves and have gone, along with all the others, to the land of shad ows, wherever that may be, and are at rest. “After the fitful fever of this life, they sleep well.” Food is more tasteful, healthful and nutri tious when raised with The only baking powder made from Royal Grape Cream of Tartar Made from Grapes r . % Absolutely! v Pure j