The Settlement Peak Chapter Twenty-Three During the ‘eighties, the years of heaviest settlement in Holt County, a great many people poured into the community south of O’Neill. Among the first families who came to stay were the Biglins and the Pribils. Timothy Biglin, born in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1832, in 1887 married Mary Culkin of the same county. They came first to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, then to a homestead five miles south of O’Neill. Of their eleven children Owen, the oldest, was twenty; Patrick, the second son, was eighteen.
Owen soon left the farm to work for a few months as a brakeman on the railroad, then took a position in Patrick Hagerty’s big general store. When Timothy Biglin died in 1887, only six years after coming to the farm, Patrick also came to town and went to work in the Mann and Hecker grocery store. In 1895 he married Catherine Dailey and, with his brother-in-law, opened a grocery store on lower Fourth Street. Later he served as a Pure Food Inspector for the State Agricultural Department. A few years before his death he took over the operation of a coal yard in O’Neill.
Patrick and Catherine were the parents of two daughters, Marie Biglin O’Neill and Helen Biglin O’Donnell. A well loved man, Patrick had been a resident of O’Neill for sixty-four years at the time of his death in 1945. Owen Biglin had soon transferred to the McCann store, which he later purchased and operated until his death. In February, 1884, he married Margaret Ann McCann, whose parents had lived in O’Neill since 1879. He built one of the first frame houses in the town, then moved a few years later into one of the finest homes in O’Neill, the one in which F. N. Cronin now lives.
Always prominent in the affairs of the town, Mr. Biglin was its second mayor, following John McBride in 1891 and later serving several more times in that capacity. His ornate, glass sided black hearse drawn by the fine matched black team, “Fly and Kitt,” were well-known in the community for many years, as was Mr. Biglin’s sympathy and kindness to those who needed the services of his mortuary.
When not needed for funeral duty, the high-stepping black team took the Biglin family around the town and countryside in a handsome carriage. Owen and Margaret Ann were the parents of eight children. One of their daughters, Irenaeia, married Francis Cronin, the banker. Two of their sons, Frank and Bill, carried on the mortuary business after their father’s death in 1918. Mrs. Biglin, at the time of her death twenty-one years later (1939) was the oldest resident in O’Neill.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Pribil were among the first to settle in the lowlands south of O’Neill, for the land, a swampy wilderness, had been bypassed by the earliest comers as too wet to be any good. The passing years vindicated Mr. Pribil’s judgment, for this section has long been one of the finest in the county.
Frank and his wife, Mary (Cermak) O. D. Biglin, First undertaker in O’Neill. The gentleman with him is his part time helper, Chauncey Keyes. Picture taken in front of the new Golden Hotel about 1911. Courtesy Karl Keyes.
Pribil, were both born in Moravia. Mary was a young widow with a little son, Fred Vitt, at the time of her marriage to Frank, following his discharge from the army. They had a son of their own, Casper, by the time they decided to leave the hard conditions of the coal mines in their native land and come to America.
They came first to Linwood, Nebraska, where their second son, Frank Jr. was born. In the spring of 1881 they came on, by ox team, to the homestead. Nine more children, including a set of twins that died in infancy, were born there. Their nearest neighbors were the John Peter family and the family of Mrs. Peter’s brother, a Mr. Korinek, whose daughter Mary married John, one of the Pribil boys.
With the passing years some of the settlers moved away, and as they did so Mr. Pribil bought their claims, settling a farm upon each of his sons as they married. Fred Vitt married Mary Erychleb, Casper married Ann O’Donnell, Frank married Mary Sobot-ka, Jacob married Catherine O’Donnell, Mary married James Peter, 207 Frances married Cyril Erychleb, Josephine married Walter Stewart and Hattie married John Shoemaker. Ann died in her eleventh year. All of these families have descendants still living in Holt County.
Mary Pribil’s father, Joseph Cermak, a widower, and his two youngest children, also came to America and homesteaded a half mile northeast of the Pribil place. He sold his land to Frank, Sr. in 1901, then made his home with the family. The children attended the annual three-month terms of school and the family traveled to town by team and wagon to Mass on Sundays.
The Pribil’s first home was a soddy, thatched with prairie grass. Frank and most of his neighbors took tree claims, and all of them went north to the Niobrara to haul home wagon loads of seedling trees for planting. All this soon changed the looks of the land.
Frank Pribil, Sr. died in 1939, his wife in 1943. Of the decision of these sturdy pioneers to cross the ocean to america, their children and grandchildren were always to say, “We are grateful that they came.” Another neighbor of the Pribil’s was Daniel McCarthy. Born in County Cork in 1851, he had come with a group of friends to Michigan in 1872. Daniel went on to Montana for a few years, then came to Holt County to visit friends who had immigrated to the Michigan Settlement. Following this Frank Pribil, Sr. and his wife Mary. Courtesy Frances Pribil. visit he intended to go back to Ireland for awhile, but during his stay he learned of a good farm for sale in the Pribil community, so bought it and gave up the trip to Ireland.
It was in the year 1882 that he settled on Dry Creek, so named because it went completely dry during times of severe drouth. At all other times it carried water and, when in flood, was a dangerous and vicious stream. In sheltered areas it seldom froze over in winter, thus providing water for livestock the year around. Henry Washington Shaw, born in Breckenridge County, Kentucky and his wife, Della Knott Shaw, born in 1859 in the same county, were married there and came to Holt County with their baby son, William Rafe, in 1882. Their homestead was six miles south of O’Neill. Grover Cleveland Shaw, born in 1888, was the third of the five children born on the homestead.
Grover elected to stay in Holt County where, in 1907, he married Julia Carney. As late as 1911 he was still able to find a quarter of unclaimed land, twelve miles southwest of O’Neill, which he filed on. Later he bought another quarter from John Carr and, after renting a half section from Neil Brennan for thirty- four years, bought that also.
All the formal schooling Grover ever had was four three-month terms in District 65. The Shaws and their first four children traveled in a horse-drawn carriage, but the fifth child, Ralph Edward, was never to ride in the carriage for, by the time he was born in 1916, his parents had owned a Ford car for nearly a year.
“As the result of a feud of several years standing, Mr. H. W. Shaw lies in the cold and silent grave and Edward Slattery is in the county jail charged with murder,” the Frontier for March 12, 1903 stated dramatically.
On March 6 Mr. Shaw, his son Rafe and a hired man, J. T. Thompson, were on the way to O’Neill with three loads of baled hay. Near the Michael Slattery house, five miles south of town, a recent storm had so drifted the public road that all travelers had to pull over onto the Slattery land for a short distance to by-pass the drifts. As Shaw turned onto his neighbor’s land, eighteen-year-old Edward Slat-tery came out of the house with a shotgun and ordered Shaw to keep off their place. Shaw and Thompson got down from their loads and started toward the youth, who fired, killing Shaw instantly.
Thompson hurried on to town to report the killing. Coroner Trueblood immediately assembled a jury and went out to the Slattery place. The jury next morning reported that Shaw “came to his death by the felonious discharge of a gun in the hands of Edward Slattery,” who gave himself up later that day. At a hearing held the next week he was bound over for trial in April and held in jail without bond.
Then began a series of trials and postponements. The first trial was held in June, with M. F. Harrington and M. P. Kinkaid appearing for the defendant and County Attorney Arthur Mullen and R. R. Dickson for the State. Young Slattery’s attorneys pleaded self defense. The trial lasted a full week and huge crowds of men and women attended every day. On the eighth day, after the jury had deliberated fifty-two hours and taken several votes, it ended with a vote of eight for acquittal and four for conviction. The case was then remanded for a retrial and Slattery was released on bail.
Following another postponement, the case came up for trial again in January 1904. By then Kindaid was in Washington and Harrington handled the retrial alone. The Frontier stated that “The defendant sits between his white-haired father, Michael Slattery and his attorney, betraying no signs of concern at the outcome of the trial.” After more hours of deliberating and voting, this jury, too, could not agree. The first majority, this time, was for conviction. Hours later all agreed on acquittal, “to save the county the cost of a third trial,” and so 208 the case ended and Edward Slattery went free.
The Sobotkas, John and Karolina, came to Omaha shortly after their marriage in Hulbek, Moravia in 1883. John found work in the smelting plant and they moved into a shack, furnished by the company, down by the railroad tracks. One of a line of men who pulled carts of molten iron along a track, he worked at night. One night he saw the man in the lead stop suddenly. The man next in line didn’t see the leader stop and kept on moving, stumbled against the halted cart and fell into the seething metal. The next day John went looking for a less dangerous job. He found it in a meat packing plant, where he worked until some time the next year. With their few personal belongings they came to O’Neill in 1884 and filed on a homestead. While the neighbors helped them build a sod house, they lived with their old-country friends, the Pribils.
By 1888 John owned an ox team and a wagon. On that mild morning of January 12 he yoked his oxen and sat out to haul a load of hay. Before he reached the hay stack he saw the strange cloud bank in the northwest and, suddenly fearful, turned his team about and headed for home on the run. They barely made it to the barn before the blizzard blotted out everything. Although the house was only a few yards from the barn door, he almost missed it as he groped his way through the smothering storm.
The Sobotkas had fourteen children. Some were born on the homestead, some on a farm in Boyd County where they lived for awhile, some on another farm southeast of O’Neill, and the last four on a farm two miles south of Inman. The parents died on the Inman farm. Three of their sons, John, Lewis and James, still live in the Inman area.
Another family that moved in with the hospitable Pribils while establishing a home of their own was that of John Peter. John, born in Austria, and Mary, a Bohemian by birth, were married in Austria in 1871. With four John and Karolina Sobotka. Picture taken in 1897. Courtesy James Sobotka. children, they made the six weeks long ocean crossing in 1885. This family, too, came first to Omaha, where John worked in the smelter until he contracted blood poisoning a few months later. They then headed west to join their friends, the Pribils. Leaving the train at O’Neill, they walked the eight miles to the Pribil soddy, each member of the family carrying some of their possessions. The most prized piece they owned was a tall wooden clock, an heirloom still cherished by their descendants. The house the neighbors helped the new comers build was also a hay- thatched soddy. In this humble home four more children were born.
After establishing his family on the claim, John walked thirty miles south to work for a settler who needed a hand. When the work was done his employer told him to select a cow from his small herd, as he had no money for wages. He did, and walked home leading his cow. By the time he had been on the homestead three years he had two cows and a team of oxen. Until he acquired the oxen he had walked to O’Neill and carried flour and other necessities home on his back.
One fall John, Grandpa Musil and some other men of the community walked to Stanton, quite a distance to the southeast in Stanton County, to pick corn. John had never shucked corn before and his hands and wrists became swollen and painful before they were “broken in” to the work. With some cash for the winter in their pockets, the men made the long walk home again.
A few years later when some of his neighbors “proved up” and offered their land for sale, John and his sons bought the quarters. Joseph Peter bought the Erychleb claim, James bought the Dowd place, John bought land from a Mr. Small and Frank bought the Elwood quarter. The other son, Charlie, died at the age of twenty.
On one occasion during the hard early years on the homestead the Peter family had found a neighbor woman ill. Upon learning she had been starving herself in order to give her children what little food she had, Mary Peter at once shared her family’s food with the destitute family. When their own little Frances died John made the little coffin in which they buried her.
The main road from Chambers to O’Neill went directly past the Peter’s homestead in those days and a stretch of the road about four miles north of their house was known as “Devil’s Lane.” A part of the swampy area, travelers bogged down in it and had a “devil of a time” getting through. Even today, with a paved road traversing the tract, most area residents know the section referred to if “Devil’s Lane” is mentioned.
Cyril Peter, John and Mary’s youngest son, at eighty-two still lives on the original homestead where old John Peter died in 1924. Mary lived on with Cyril for another twenty years, passing away in October, 1944. The Grandpa Musil mentioned above was Joseph Musil of Czechoslovakia. His wife, a sister of Karolina Sobotka, had come over from the old country with her father, Mr. Fanta, and the Sobotkas. Married in America, the Musils, too, had lived in Omaha where Joseph worked in a slaughter house. A skilled shoemaker, he had made the shoes his bride wore for her wedding.
The Musils came on to O’Neill where “a man from the homestead office,” (probably the U. S. Land Office) transported them and their three trunks to the claim they had filed on, southwest of town. Their land was only empty prairie, with no improvements or shelter of any kind yet built, so they walked to the “nearest house,” where they were taken in until they could build a soddy. The family history does not say how far they walked, or whether or not their hosts were the Pribils. A helpful neighbor, a Mr. Smith whose location is not given, plowed their garden site and loaned them a milk cow. In the meantime Joseph worked for Mr. Smith until he had earned a team of horses. Ten children were born to the Musils. Four died, and neighbor John Peter, Sr. made two little white caskets for the Musil twins.
As their herd of cattle grew, small Anna Musil became the herder, following the cattle and keeping them out of their own and the neighbor’s fields. The job was not easy. The child was barefoot on the stickery prairie and she had to stay out all day, often dinnerless, for food was very scarce for awhile. On winter evenings her father tied the long, tough slough grass into tight bundles which he carried to town on his back to sell for fuel to people too poor to buy coal. The few cents he made helped the Musils through the first hard winters. One winter, during a bad snow storm the weight of the snow on the grass roof made it sag, threatening a cave-in. The household benches, stacked on top of the table, propped up the roof and staved off disaster. The Musils, too, finally began to prosper, as did most of those who managed to stay, and in 1906 they built a new house. Mrs. Musil, though “only in her forties,” died three months after moving into the new 209 educated, did not want his wife signing her name with an x, so taught her to read and write their native language. She then read her prayer book regularly.
After some ten years at Schuyler Frank Jonas moved to Holt County and George soon followed him.
Purchasing a quarter of land, he built a fairly good house and bought some livestock. Although most of their neighbors were Bohemian, Elizabeth did not like the new country, especially during the years of grasshoppers, drouth and crop destroying hail storms.
Neither George nor Elizabeth ever learned to speak English very well, but they were determined that their children should be well educated in the tongue and ways of their adopted land. To this end they gave an acre of their land for a site for the schoolhouse and helped their neighbors build a soddy on it. This was District 143 and school was held there continuously until 1965.
George subscribed to many Bohemian papers and read aloud to the family in the evenings— a large family of eleven children. As the years passed they bought more land and cattle and became quite prosperous. At threshing time the men of this Bohemian community helped each other in the fields and the women sent their dishes and tableware along to whichever farm had the threshers, as no one family had enough to set the table for so large a crew. Dancing and singing were always the favorite form of entertainment, and there were always those who could play an accordion, violin or mouth harp. Though some had to dance barefoot, no one sat out the merry whirls.
Some of the Jonas grandchildren remember the two big trunks Elizabeth Jonas brought to Holt County with her, and the lovely glass dishes she kept in the bottom of one of them. “As children we used to take them out on rainy days to play with. We broke a few, but buried the pieces and never told.” Although the family had a telephone, Elizabeth never used it. Neither would she ride in an automobile. She died in 1917. George lived on for nineteen more years and died at the age of eighty-one. James Franklin Shoemaker and his fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, rode into O’Neill on a C.&N.W. freight train in 1885. They brought with them a few cattle, some farm machinery, household goods and a very little money. Mary Coday Shoemaker and the seven younger children came on the train a few weeks later.
Mr. Shoemaker was born in Maryland in 1840, his wife in Ohio in 1845. home. Joseph lived on until 1917. The house still stands and a Musil, another Joseph, lives in it.
Elizabeth Mares was born in Czechoslovakia in 1853 and orphaned six years later. In her country when the parents died the estate went to the eldest son, who was obligated to raise the minor children. Sons were usually apprenticed to a shopkeeper and taught a trade. There were no provisions for girls, except that at age twenty-four they were to receive a very small legacy from the estate. Elizabeth, the youngest of ten children, was early put to work by her brother, spreading lime in the fields, milking cows and cleaning stalls. She was not allowed to attend school, even for a day, so could neither read nor write. At twenty-four, when she was paid her legacy, she at once set out for America with some people she knew. The year was 1877 and her passage took all her money. At Hamburg they took ship for America. The board furnished by the ship’s company was very poor and the passage, hampered by contrary winds, very long. Elizabeth fell ill and nearly died. Eventually they disembarked in Baltimore. Her friends, a family named Svo-boda, were going to relatives near Schuyler, Nebraska, so she went with them, as she had nowhere else to go. There she found work and learned to sew, cook and keep house.
George Jonas, also born in Czechoslovakia, near Prague, in 1855, was the youngest of seven children. He learned carpentry but found it an unprofitable trade in his homeland. His older brother, Frank, had worked his way to Hamburg and stowed away on a ship bound for America.
Although discovered and beaten, he had reached Baltimore and found a job. From then on he wrote letters home, urging George to come to the United States, too.
By the time George came of age and received an inheritance, Frank was farming near Schuyler. Upon arrival in America, George went at once to his brother’s farm to help in the harvest— and there met Elizabeth Mares. Soon afterward he bought eighty acres of land from the Union Pacific railroad company at five dollars an acre. He built a dugout there, then borrowed a ring for his bride and a pair of boots for himself. Thus outfitted, they were married in a Catholic ceremony.
Elizabeth grieved so much over having to give back the ring— and talked of it for long afterward. Years later her daughters gave her a fine ring for Christmas— but she never wore it, just kept it in the cupboard to look at. George, who was fairly well They were married in Ottumwa, Iowa, in 1869 and farmed near Villisca until they came to Holt County. The family lived for awhile in a rented house on the corner of Fourth and Everett streets, then moved to a small farm four miles directly east of the First National Bank. Two years later the mother died following the birth of a daughter, Clara Teresa.
When it was seen that Mrs.
Shoemaker was near death, fifteen- year-old George ran the five miles to the rectory to bring Father Smith to his beloved mother’s bedside. Mrs. Shoemaker’s sister took the baby back to Iowa to raise and the rest of the family moved to a claim six miles southwest of O’Neill, on Dry Creek. The little girl, Clara Teresa, did not know until years later that “Uncle Frank from Nebraska” was her real father and the Nebraska Shoemakers her brothers and sisters. In 1907 she came to join her family in the hay country. Although the Shoemaker children had to finish growing up without a mother, they had many good times. Dry Creek had that fine baseball team with its own uniforms, and the family took part in many community activities. Charlie Shoemaker married Mary Cavanaugh and lived a mile east of his father’s place, where he built a large platform near their house and held “bowery dances” on it.
Bert and John Shoemaker and Jim Cavanaugh played violins, Charlie Cavanaugh played a bass viol and Lucretia Shoemaker a guitar. Josephine and Hattie Pribil chorded on the piano and everybody else danced. The Shoemakers did well on Dry Creek and had a rather luxurious home for those times. Very early they owned a “gramophone” and made recordings of their own music. They had a good piano and a big “base burner” the acme of splendor in parlor heating stoves. Their first fine rug was purchased by Lucretia with the $25 she got from the sale of a runty pig, given her by her brother John, which she had raised to a fine big porker.
Before his death in 1919 the father, Frank Shoemaker, had put together 1,920 acres of Holt County land and had become a man of substance. When O’Neill opened its first little hospital in Novemer, 1933, in the Warner home on the west side of the city, it was Lucretia Shoemaker and her sister Clara, both graduate nurses, who administered it.
Mary Shoemaker died in 1906. Six weeks later Charlie, her heartbroken husband, was buried beside her. Their deaths orphaned three small daughters. Many years later John Shoemaker’s wife, the former Hattie Pribil, 210 died suddenly in 1961. John followed her in less than a week.
Another 1880 homesteader in the Michigan settlement was Daniel D. Murphy, an Irish Catholic. With seven other young men he left Ireland in 1873. Since England denied her Irish subjects the right to an education, none of the young men could read or write. Their passage to America, at $25 per head, was paid by Marcus Daly, formerly of County Cork, a hiring boss for the Summit Mining Company of Hancock, Michigan.
During the two years that he worked for the Summit Mines, Daniel sent passage fare to Ireland for his three brothers and two sisters. Michael Murphy became a miner in Butte, Montana, Denis in Colorado, where he lost his sight in a mine explosion. John, the youngest brother, spent eight years as a cowboy, then returned to Ireland.
When the Michigan mines closed down in 1876 Daniel and some friends left on foot for Montana. After four years in the Butte copper mines the young Irishman headed for Nebraska to have a look at the free land everybody was talking about. There, in 1880, he filed on a homestead five miles northeast of O’Neill. Two years later he married Irish born Bridget Dwyer, daughter of a former Michigan miner John Dwyer, who had taken a homestead two years earlier. A few years later Daniel moved his family to a ranch ten miles southwest of O’Neill. A plague of locusts the first year almost put him out of business, the blizzard of ’88 did, wiping out all his livestock except a bull and a team of horses. He had barely restocked when a prairie fire wiped out his range.
In 1892, after a year spent helping his sister and her family get settled on a homestead he had filed for her, Daniel bought his father-in-law’s timber claim on the Redbird. His four youngest children were born there. By the year of his death (1937) he had seen the country change from the treeless plain to a land of comfortable, well-shaded homes, and had watched the trackless prairie give way to railroads and highways. Where he and his neighbors had walked miles, or driven plodding oxen, to visit friends, or go to town or to church, automobiles sped over good graveled roads, and O’Neill, the little prairie town he had known nearly sixty years earlier, had become a modern metropolis.
Back in 1888, after the big January blizzard, Daniel and his hired man had struggled through the snow to a hay stack in his nearby meadow to get a load of hay. As they worked they heard a weak voice calling “Is that you, Mr. Murphy?” It seemed to come from inside the stack and the men kept digging until they found the nearly frozen body of the school teacher Etta Shattuck, who had lost her way in the storm and burrowed into the stack seventy-two hours earlier. Search parties had been out looking for her since the storm cleared, now Daniel took her to his house where he and his wife worked over her for several hours, trying to thaw her out.
They sent word to her parents at Seward, but it was several days before they could make their way to the Murphy farm by team and sled to take her home, where, following the amputation of her frozen legs, she died a few weeks later.
The community to the north and west of O’Neill was also building up during the influx of homesteaders in the 1880’s. One of its members was Thomas Simonson. Born in Norway in 1841, he came to America twenty years later and volunteered for service with Company B of the 22nd Wisconsin Regiment at Beloit. Mustered into service at Racine in 1862, he was later taken prisoner and spent some time in Libby prison. He was released in time to march with Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, and to pass in review with his regiment before President Lincoln.
After the war he returned to Wisconsin and married Caroline Lewis (also born in Norway) in 1866. In 1878 the Simonsons came by covered wagon to Clay County, Nebraska, and in 1881 to a Holt County homestead fourteen miles north of O’Neill, where they remained for the rest of their lives. They lived for several years in a dirt-floored sod house. As they prospered they were able to build an attractive shuttered frame house, after which their sod house was used for a school house for a few years.
Thomas and Caroline became the parents of five sons and a daughter, all of whom grew up and settled on valley farms adjoining the home place, making quite a colony of Simonsons. Although none of the Simonson boys acquired much of a formal education, as they all had to help herd cattle and farm, all prospered and eventually became “well off.” Caroline, or “Grandma Simonson” as she was affectionally known for miles around, was midwife and nurse to her whole community, never refusing to answer a call for help at any time of the night or day, no matter what the weather. A devout Christian, she read her Norwegian Bible daily, refused to allow a deck of cards in her home and would not cook or prepare game killed on Sunday. Her sons, all excellent hunters in a game-filled land, respected her wishes.
Simon, the eldest son, never married and remained at home with his parents. The daughter, Sena, was an invalid most of her life. In 1931 Simon, Sena and their mother all passed away within a few months. After filing on his homestead, Loren, the second son, went back to Wisconsin for a visit, and there renewed acquaintence with a schoolmate, Annie Gullekson. They were married in 1894 and came back to Loren’s homestead to live.
Theirs was a lively home, filled with seven energetic sons and daughters. When Loren brought home a hand-cranked phonograph with a morning glory horn and cylinder records, his youngest daughter, Edna, recorded that “the whole family went into ecstasies and neighbors came from miles around to see and hear it.” Loren’s son McKinley married Catherine Donlin, daughter of pioneer Thomas Donlin, and spent a good many years on his father’s farm, finally selling it in 1972 and moving into O’Neill.
To Holt County in 1883 came a young Amish couple, John and Barbara Boshart, and their two small children, Drusilla and Edward. They came from Ontario, Canada, by way of a stopover at Milford, Nebraska, and finally halted their covered wagon on a quarter section relinquished eleven miles north of O’Neill. There John built a one-room sod house “with upstairs and basement,” and later filed on an adjoining timber claim.
Thomas and Carolyn Simonson. Picture taken in the living room of their new home about 1890. Courtesy Ben and Dorothy Sanders.
211 Neighbors to the southwest were the James Matthews, a large family, and the Grebes. The Dahlin family, with three children, lived a mile to the northwest. Mrs. Dahlin often came to the Boshart place to gather cow chips, carrying the chips in her big apron to make piles, then bringing their wagon, pulled by their milkcow and a horse, to haul the piles home. Later, when the Bosharts visited the Dahlins, Drusilla saw the results of Mrs. Dahlin’s labor. Across the front of the tiny, two-room, dirt floored house they had built a rough board “lean- to,” which was completely filled with the neatly stacked chips except for a narrow passage from the outside to the only door to the house.
For his own fuel John Boshart paid fifty cents a hayrack load for black and diamond willows, cut from the farm of a settler to the north. Sometimes he was able to get a load of ash limbs, trimmed from fence posts cut on the Mullihan place fifteen miles north on the Niobrara. To stretch this all too scanty supply of wood, Drusilla and Ed hauled cornstalks from the field in their little wagon, and their father twisted the long bluestem hay into “figure eights,” for burning in their hay burner.
A part time minister named Jensen sometimes held religious services in his home. Since most of the members of his church had to drive a long way to attend, the Jensens killed and roasted a young pig and invited everybody to stay to dinner. Another neighbor by the name of Ferich lived in a two-room house southeast of the Bosharts. Drusilla remembers Mrs. Ferich as “a wonderful woman— my first grade and Sunday school teacher.” “When I was about seven years old,” Drusilla wrote, “after a very dry year my father became discouraged and rented his 320 acres to the Neil McMillan family.” While making arrangements to leave the country Mr. Boshart moved his family to a big house some six miles to the southwest. Their fifth child, Aaron, was born there, only a few days after Mrs. Ferich had died in childbirth. “Shortly after Aaron was born,” Drusilla goes on, “the Sorensons, another neighbor family, had a new baby. They had already buried three or four babies on their farm, all of them dying when only a few days old. I remember our teacher dismissing school for two of the funerals.
“Then father came home and told Mother we would have to live with the Sorensons for a few weeks, as the doctor had said that, to save the baby, they would have to have a wet nurse because Mrs. Sorenson had inverted nipples and the baby could not nurse. “So Mother and the five of us children moved into their little house, and I can remember the doctor bringing a small black puppy from O’Neill to nurse Mrs. Sorenson for a few weeks until the baby was stronger. One day the baby had convulsions and its mother was frantic. “That’s the way the others died,” she said, and sent Ed and me running to get someone to go for the doctor. Father was at the farm, two miles north, and no one else was closer. We ran the two miles and were about all in when we got there. The Simonson family in 1900. Back row: Calmer, Loren, Clarence, Simon. Front row: Irvin, Thomas, Carolyn. Courtesy Ben and Dorothy Sanders.
212 Father had to ride eleven miles to O’Neill, but the doctor came and the baby survived.” While his family was staying with the Sorensons, John Boshart bought the Ferich place, as that neighbor was moving back to Wisconsin. The Ferich house was small and in poor condition, so John made it into a chicken house and moved the house from his relinquishment to his new farm. There were three big box elder trees and one ash in front of their new home, and a large grove of box elders and maples north of the house. The Boshart children spent many happy hours climbing the yard trees and sitting in their shady branches. Later the boys cut down some trees in the middle of the grove and built a big bowery in the clearing. Occasionally they held public dances there and the family served homemade ice cream and angel cake, a large helping of each for a dime. Three more daughters were born to the Bosharts on the new “home place,” and Drusilla recalls the occasions when her father took the family to the big barbecue held to celebrate the building of the roundhouse on the arrival of the railroad in O’Neill, and of twice going there at night to hear William Jennings Bryan speak. One of the times she shook hands with him. Afterward, when they went back to their wagon they found that the beautiful lined buffalo robe they sat on in the hay-filled wagon had been stolen.
Drusilla remembers the names of all nine of her grade school teachers, five women and four men, beginning with Mrs. Ferich and ending with Hugh Donohoe. As many as fifty children went to that one-teacher school, she said. Drusilla married George Reichart in 1905 and lived on the Mineola prairie for the next four years. They sold out then and moved to a South Dakota ranch, where she was still living in 1973 at the age of ninety-three years. Andrew Schmidt and Conrad Wett- laufer, young Germans who married the Paul sisters, had been neighbotrs of the Bosharts in Ontario. May Sophia became the bride of Andrew, who left soon after their marriage to join the Bosharts in Holt County. That December (1884) Conrad married Anna Catherine (Katie) and, early the next year, followed Andrew to Nebraska. He lived with Andrew while building his own house on his claim nine miles northeast of O’Neill. Then both men sent for their brides. Conrad, who had studied medicine in Canada, practiced to a limited extent in the community. Later he went down to Lincoln and worked as a guard in the State Penitentiary while his family ran the farm. The Wettlaufers raised six children on the farm, then retired in 1919 and moved into O’Neill, where Conrad died two years later. Four of their grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren still live in Holt County.
The Lindberg and Widtfeldt families were also members of that early community north of O’Neill. Swedish born Peter Lindberg came to America in 1883 on the same ship with C. A. Widtfeldt, his sons, Adolph, Helmer, Fred and Gustave, and his daughters, Mary, Charlotte, Augusta and Esther. Peter Lindberg and all of the Widtfeldt men took homesteads about seven miles north of O’Neill.
To earn money for improvements on his place, Mr. Lindberg spent the next four summers working on the railroad as it built northwest from O’Neill to Hot Springs, South Dakota. At the end of the fourth summer he walked home through Indian country with a pack on his back, as the trains were not yet running on the new road. That same year (1888) he married Augusta Widtfeldt in the Presbyterian church in O’Neill. As his family grew to number eight children, Peter added to the original two-room house he had built on his claim. Screened windows and doors, curtains and floor coverings were not a part of the first house, but the last home had eight rooms and all of the latter luxuries. In the days before fences stitched the prairies on the section lines, roads ran directly across country between farms and towns. Afterward they had to follow the fences, making it farther between places. But by then some road grading and improving was under way and the Lindbergs bought a 1916 Willys-Overland and covered the distances in less time.
The Lindberg children received their elementary education in District 37. After graduating from O’Neill high school they scattered to Wayne State Teachers College, the University at Lincoln and Boyles Business College in Omaha. Four became school teachers. Two, Esther and Eleanor, worked for many years in O’Neill, where Esther was an employee of the J. C. Penny store for thirty-five years. The sisters and their brother, Harold, still live in O’Neill. Several other descendants of Peter and Augusta are living on Holt County farms.
Another of the neighbors in the settlement north of O’Neill was Phillip Bausch. Born in Baden, Germany, in 1830, he came with his wife, Mar-gareta and their remaining ten children (three had died in babyhood) to Illinois in 1867. Later, in Muscatine, Iowa, Phillip operated a barber shop, then came on to Holt County in 1885 to settle on a homestead, where he at once set about planting trees, eventually maintaining a large apple and cherry orchard and a fine vinyard.
As the six boys came of age each took a quarter section claim near the parental home. The elder Bauschs were living on a farm nine miles north of Emmet when Mrs. Bausch died in 1908. Two years later the sons sold their holdings to Robert Fullerton and scattered to other places. When Phillip died at the home of a son in Iowa in 1929, his body was brought back to Atkinson for burial.
Another German born orchardist was Adam Martin, who came to America as a young man. He met Julia Then in Kansas and married her in 1883. Julia, too, was born in Germany. They came to Holt County in 1889 and settled fourteen miles northeast of O’Neill. In addition to the big orchard from which they sold several kinds of fruit, Adam and his sons raised large acreages of corn and small grains.
A family that loved to “socialize,” the Martins held “Old Settlers” picnics in their grove for many years. The guests came early, with all their children and plenty of food. Ball games, foot and horse races and horseshoe pitching made up the daytime entertainment. After supper a bowery dance under the stars sped the night hours away.
Many a baseball game was played in the Martin pasture and the six Martin boys and their tomboy sister Clara, who loved the game as much as her brothers, made almost a full team by themselves. For years all the neighbors spent summer Sunday afternoons at the Martins, watching or playing ball.
John and Joe Martin never married. After a good many years on the farm, John moved to O’Neill and became chief of police there. Joe was a freighter and drayer in the town. William, after teaching school for a few years, served a thirty-two year stint as postmaster in O’Neill. His seven children all live in or around the town. George and Francis (Kelly) Martin served their country in World War I, then came home and carried mail in neighboring Boyd County. Henry spent all his life on the home farm, raising fine black cattle. Clara, the baseball player, married and moved to Omaha. Ruby, the other daughter, married Francis Bazelman, son of the pioneer chicory factory family, and established one of O’Neill’s first motels, the Sunset. Their son, Ben, still operates the business. A later comer to the community was Marion Augustus Whaley, better 213 known as “M. A.” Born in Marshall-town, Iowa, in 1862, he was living on a farm near Randolph, Nebraska, when he married Edith Maggie Coppie, formerly of Springfield, Illinois. In 1896 they moved to a homestead northeast of O’Neill, where they spent the rest of their lives. They made the trip to the homestead in a ten by sixteen foot frame house on wheels, bringing with them a team, a cow, some chickens and some debts they couldn’t pay at the time. The next spring M. A. and a helper rode horseback to Randolph, gathered a herd of cattle and took them back to Holt County to pasture on the open prairie. When he returned the herd to its owners in the fall he garnered a little cash to see him through the winter. At other times that winter he rode to O’Neill to scoop coal and grain from railroad cars into bins beside the tracks. For his labor he was paid in credit slips on Jake Pfund’s general store. Jake also owned the grain elevator in O’Neill. With the slips M. A. bought groceries and ammunition.
In 1899 M. A. built a merry-go- round big enough to carry sixty people at one time. The contraption was turned by four horses hitched to a sweep inside the circle of seats. When the first four horses tired of walking their endless path he replaced them with four fresh ones. At a nickle a ride, or six for a quarter, M. A. could take in nearly $3 when all the seats were full.
The Whaleys later added a tent show, housing animals and curiosities— hyenas, lynx, badgers, coyotes, gray wolves, Rocky Mountain goats, Chinese Dragons, a cabiai from New Guinea, a winged pig, a five-footed horse and a man with webbed fingers and toes. They also sent up balloons in the towns where they showed, some carrying dogs, or a man who could cut loose and return to earth with a parachute.
The family left home in May each year and returned in the fall before winter set in. After a few years they replaced the horses with a steam engine to turn the merry-go-round. A little later they put up some buildings on the farm and moved out of the house on wheels. Except for an occasional trip to a neighboring town with the merry-go-round, they quit the road in 1914. Eventually they traded that off, too, and settled down to raising horses and cattle.
A lover of horses and dogs, M. A. trained a lot of them to do all kinds of acts. Edith Maggie was the kind of woman who always had an eye out for anyone in trouble or need. She often rode sidesaddle, day or night, to minister to the sick or help deliver a baby. She used to say there was “nothing sweeter than a baby unless it was two of them.” She loved to be out of doors, and often drove the cows down the lane to pasture, then came back with her apron full of flowers. In later years it was said of M.A. and Edith that “they stood like great trees, offering shelter to all who passed their way.” Their only son, Lloyd, married Bessie Wesely in 1921, stayed on the home farm and added more acres, finally retiring in O’Neill years later. Two of their four daughters, Alice and Twila, married the Sobotka brothers, Clifford and Eugene, and are still living in Holt County.
Two families who came to the community at the close of pioneering times were the Hickeys and Markeys. John Hickey came from Tipperary at the age of sixteen. From New York he made his way to Joliet, Illinois, where he met Annie Maloney. They were married in Hooper, Nebraska, in 1875 but did not come to Holt County until 1907. On their farm three and one-half miles northwest of O’Neill they built a new home that same year.
One of their twelve children, Patrick, married Charlotte McNichols in 1921. Pioneer times were long past by then, but Pat and Charlotte had to endure severe hardships in their time, too. Almost their entire cash income came from milking a large herd of cows and delivering the milk in O’Neill. Dairying is a hard and confining business at best, but when the fierce drouth of the ‘thirties moved in on the land matters became desperate. Fields dried out and feed became scarce. In 1934 they raised no feed at all— and had to sell the herd. They had spent years building up that herd— and they had to watch their fine, expensive animals sell at sacrifice prices. There was tragedy in Pat Hickey’s simple statement, “Our prize milk cow brought $22. Cows, once sleek and fat, now thin and hungry, brought $1.50 per hundred, starving little calves $4 apiece. All purchased by the government, for no one else had any feed either.
The Hickeys and their five children joined the hordes streaming to California, found conditions no better there and returned to Holt County a month later, where they got back into the dairying business again. “Time went on and things got better.” The drouth years passed into history and people prospered again. Charlotte Hickey died suddenly in 1947. Eleven years later Pat married Irene Phillips Martin and moved into O’Neill, where he still lives.
In 1913 Thomas and Delia Markey drove a team and wagon from Pierce to Holt County and settled on a farm seven miles northeast of O’Neill. Both were born in Ireland. At twenty, Thomas “came over” to work for his brother who had paid his passage. Delia came to America a year later at age eighteen. She worked for a time as a maid in New York, and then in San Francisco. They were married in 1896 in Wahoo, Nebraska, but later headed for Holt County, where they had heard one could buy lower priced land.
The Markeys, too, made their living by hand milking twenty-five to thirty cows and selling the cream. When they first came to the county they had to drive into O’Neill to get the mail. The post office was in the new Golden Hotel Annex and Mike McCarthy was the postmaster. The Markeys and quite a few of their neighbors always held wakes when there was a death in the community, with two people keeping all night vigil beside the corpse. They believed it was certain bad luck to open an umbrella inside the house, or to move a cat or a broom from one house to another.