Boyd County, Nebraska

Land Between Two Rivers

Boyd County sits in the far north of Nebraska, bounded by the Niobrara River on the south, the Missouri River on the east and South Dakota on the north. It is long and thin: about 48 miles from east to west, but only about 15 miles across at its widest. Ponca Creek and the Keya Paha River also cross it on their way east to the Missouri, and two landmarks, the Twin Buttes and the Harvey Buttes, rise out of the prairie near Butte.

People lived here long before homesteaders arrived. Near Lynch, archaeologists have studied the remains of a large village of round earthlodges dating to roughly 1450 to 1550. In September 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition camped along the Missouri within what is now the county, and a highway marker north of Spencer remembers the stop.

Ponca and Sioux Lands

For generations the Ponca made their home where the Niobrara meets the Missouri. An 1865 treaty set aside about 96,000 acres for them in what are now Knox and Boyd counties. Only three years later, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 drew the boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation so that it took in the same Ponca land, apparently because the commissioners overlooked the earlier treaty. That mistake led to the forced removal of the Ponca to Indian Territory in 1877 and, in time, to the famous trial of Chief Standing Bear.

Most of present Boyd County was not part of Nebraska when the state was admitted. The land north of the Keya Paha River was added from Dakota Territory in 1882. Then, in 1889, Congress broke the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller reservations and opened the rest to settlers. Local accounts describe Native families choosing allotments, with many moving north into Gregory County, South Dakota. President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the land open in February 1890.

Homesteading in the 1890s

Settlers came quickly, and many claimed land as squatters before the surveys and filings caught up with them. Building materials and supplies came by wagon from Niobrara, from Fort Randall, or from railroad towns in Holt County such as O'Neill. Early homes were often dugouts or sod houses, and the first schools and churches were sod as well.

The newcomers were a mix of American-born families and immigrants. Czech families formed large colonies around Lynch and Spencer, Swedish families founded churches near Bristow, and Danish, German and Norwegian families settled among them. Our own Danish immigrant ancestors were part of this wave, taking up land and farming it for generations.

Those first years were hard. Settlers often arrived with very little money, and the summer of 1894 brought a crushing drought: a late frost on May 20 and only about three inches of rain left families with no crop at all. Communities sent men east to ask for help, and Czech settlements in Iowa and Minnesota sent grain and money back. Settlers along the northern edge faced another puzzle: the line between Nebraska and South Dakota was not surveyed until 1895, so some did not know for certain which state they lived in.

A County Takes Shape

The Nebraska Legislature approved a bill creating the county on March 2, 1891, naming it for Governor James E. Boyd, and Governor John M. Thayer proclaimed it organized on August 1, 1891. Butte, then a busy new town of a few hundred people near the center of the county, became the temporary county seat and was later confirmed by voters. More land opened when the old Fort Randall military reservation was released to settlers in the 1890s, and towns such as Gross grew up on it.

The railroad finally came in 1902, when the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley line was built west from Niobrara along Ponca Creek toward Bonesteel, South Dakota. It became part of the Chicago and North Western in 1903 and served Monowi, Lynch, Bristow, Spencer and Anoka. Towns the tracks missed, such as Gross and Baker, began to fade. By 1910 the county had 8,826 people, its highest count ever. In 1935 there were more than 1,100 farms, most raising corn, oats and cattle.

Hard Winters, Floods and Today

Weather has always shaped life here. The winter of 1948-49 brought storm after storm across Nebraska, and older residents of Spencer remember the blizzard of 1949 as "the big one." The Army's Operation Snowbound eventually plowed out roads statewide so that families and livestock could be reached. In March 2019 floods struck again, when the Spencer Dam on the Niobrara failed and Ponca Creek flooded Lynch.

Like much of the rural Plains, Boyd County has grown smaller as farms got bigger and young people moved away. The 2020 census counted 1,810 people. The railroad was abandoned in 1978, but the villages, churches and well-kept country cemeteries still mark the places where homesteading families like ours built their lives.