Chapter 6: Holt County’s Who’s Who

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

Holt County’s Who’s Who Chapter Six Holt County was, at one time or another, the home of many famous people. The fame of some was easily nation wide, others were well-known across the state and some, no less important, were of consequence mostly in their own county. At any rate Holt Countians are proud to claim them all.

Probably of first importance was General O’Neill himself, but since his story has already been told it will not be included here. There follows a long list of others: congressmen, state senators, politicians, airmen, athletes, educators.

Holt County’s congressman was Moses P. Kinkaid, a gentle man who genuinely liked people. Since he was “touchy” about his age we are not sure just when he was born. The event took place in West Virginia around the middle of the nineteenth century. After attending the public schools of his native state he went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for his education in law, graduated in 1876 and was admitted to the bar. He practiced in Illinois and in South Dakota, then came to O’Neill in 1882. He was described as a polished gentleman and an able lawyer.

He was elected to the state senate in 1882, where he won passage of a bill removing the limit on the number of notaries in the state. Previously, some Nebraskans had had to travel as far as one hundred miles to find the nearest notary public. After the one term in the senate he went back to private practice for a few years, during which time he helped break up the outlaw forces of the county and adamantly turned a deaf ear to any thieves who sought his aid as defense council.

In 1887 he was appointed by Governor John Thayer as judge of the newly created Twelfth Judicial District, which covered ten big counties. For the first five years he was the only judge in the district. The voters kept him in that office for thirteen years and he held court in each county at least once a year. He often travelled . his district by stagecoach, making many friends on the long drives who would help him later when he decided to run for congress.

During the 1890’s a Republican had a slim chance to win in the “Big Sixth” Congressional District, which embraced thirty-seven counties in northwest Nebraska, more than half the entire state’s area. For this was the decade of the big drouth and hard times, when the Populist party was riding high. But when Congressman W. L. Greene of the Sixth died in office in 1899 Moses P. Kinkaid threw his hat into the ring for the partial term. Judge William Neville of North Platte was also running— and won the race by 2,354 votes. Kinkaid lost to Judge Neville again in 1900, but by only 209 votes. Nominated for a third try in 1902, he was the victor and took office on March 4, 1903. He was elected nine more times and died in office on July 6, 1922.

In Washington he was usually the first to reach the House, often arriving ahead of the elevator boys and climbing the stairs to his office. He seldom left until after the House ad-Moses P. Kinkaid had long hair, unusual in his day. Moses P. Kinkaid. Courtesy Nebr. State Hist. Soc. journed. Mr. Kinkaid was a bachelor and had no inclination toward a social life. It is said that he had once greatly admired a young woman but was defeated in the race for love by a member of congress, after which he vowed to get himself also elected to that august body. He never sought another woman’s hand.

The name of Congressman Kinkaid lives on in the history of the United States because of one bill he introduced into Congress— the “Kinkaid Act” which became a law on April 28, 1904. The Act vitally affected a part of Holt County and a vast scope of Sandhills to the northwest. It was designed to help settle a region which was too dry for farming but valuable as grazing land. Since one hundred and sixty acres of such land was not enough on which to maintain sufficient numbers of grazing animals to support a family, many thousands of 28 acres of these semi-arid lands were still unclaimed at the turn of the century. Early settlers, unaware that the land could not be farmed, tried it, and thereby ruined vast acreages for many years to come. For wherever the plow broke the thin topsoil, held in place only by strong grass roots, “blowouts” resulted. All across much of the Sandhills these blowouts dotted the rolling lands until their scars were finally healed by intelligent, and often expensive, use of grass seeding practices that eventually returned the bulk of the lands to grazing— all it was fitted for in the first place. Because the cattlemen, the first users of this type of land, knew this and tried to keep it safe from the ruin of the plow they were soon branded as “arrogant cattle barons,” “land hogs,” and the like. Historians have had a field day with the alleged troubles that erupted between cattlemen and homesteaders, with the former always the villains and the poor struggling homesteaders the victims of his greed and dishonesty. Eastern newspapers and people outside the grazing country took sides against the ranchmen, causing the early rancher, J. M. Hanna of Cherry County to ask, “In the development of the vast inland empire from Mada- gora Bay in Texas to the Milk River in Montana, why has the man with the plow always been given legislative preference over the man with cows? Certainly the cowman was the trail blazer, and history has proved he had the better judgment. But for half a century he was followed by the plowman, always being pushed farther and farther into the desert or mountains, while the plowman arrogantly tore up the good buffalo sod, finally to create that national headache known as the dust bowl.”* There was trouble to be sure, but there has always been trouble between some landowners, or users. Between ranchmen and ranchmen, or between farmers and farmers, and the socalled “range wars” between the cattlemen and the settlers have been distorted out of all semblence to the truth, a practice which goes on, even today.

For years the cattlemen had attempted to get a government lease act passed. This would have given them a legal right to the range they had been using, and would have put a stop to many of the difficulties then prevalent. Their petition asked that 1,520,000,000 acres of semiarid lands be leased them at one cent per acre. This would have brought twelve and a half million dollars into the public treasury, from lands that were bringing in nothing as it was. In 1901 the “lease law” finally passed both *Yost, Call of the Range, p. 187 houses, only to be vetoed by newly elected President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt has been lauded by historians as conservation minded, and his veto was supposedly in the interests of “the people,” and against the greedy land barons. Actually it was the reverse. The President, a politician through and through, knew where votes and prestige lay. His act was praised by eastern newspapermen who looked on the ranchmen as wicked land-grabbers. To them all land was alike, for none of them had ever seen a sandhill, or a blowout. Roosevelt had, but he conveniently forgot how dry and unfitted for farming those high plains were. Nevertheless it was necessary to come up with some plan whereby this vast domain could be placed on the tax rolls. This was the situation when Kinkaid went to Washington in 1903. His predecessor, William Neville, had into- duced a bill (H.R. 13,393) which would have permitted a claimant to take up 1,280 acres of non-irrigable land. If enacted, it would have given homesteaders the potential to become cattlemen. But, to the Easterners, the bill still looked like a vast land-grab. Hadn’t 160 acres always been a great plenty since the beginning of U. S. settlement! Aware of the strong opposition to granting two sections of free land, Kinkaid cut the amount in his bill to one section, 640 acres, and pushed its passage through Congress in the early spring of 1904.

On the floor of the House he said, “Mr. Speaker, it is my sincere conviction that if experience shall demonstrate that a mistake was mode as to the amount of land allowed for a homestead by this bill it will be determined that the mistake was that the number of acres was not too large but too small. I feel confident, too, that if my constituents would patiently wait for another session of Congress, during which I might be afforded further time to familiarize the Committee on Public Lands and the Members of Congress in general with the genuineness of the claims I have been making, and make, for a larger homestead than 640 acres, that I would succeed in promoting the passage of a bill for a larger acreage for a homestead. But my constituents are anxious to have the question settled and most of them are willing to venture the experiment of a 640-acre homestead and I bow to their will and accept with many thanks the favorable report of the committee for the one-section homestead.” Mr. Kinkaid went on to point out that all lands adjacent to lakes and streams, as well as all lands fit for haying, had long ago been claimed; and that, after fifty years, with at least twenty claiments for every quarter-section of free land, “there is something radically wrong with these lands,” else they would already have been taken. He made his point, the bill was passed by the Fifty-eighth Congress and signed into law by President Roosevelt.

Although Moses P. Kinkaid accomplished other worthwhile things for his state, the Kinkaid Act is the one by which he is remembered. Thousands of settlers poured into the Sandhills to take up the 640 acre homesteads, called “Kinkaids.” Within a few years time there was no more “free” land in Nebraska. The Act had accomplished its purpose but the title deeds did not come easy. As the cattlemen and Kinkaid had foreseen, one section of land was not enough. Many settlers gave up before they had lived on the land the five years required for “proving up,” throwing the land open to a new claimant. It often took two or three attempts before a Kinkaider with enough fortitude to stay long enough to gain possession made the try. Others “toughed it out” the first time and stayed the five years, usually because the father and/or older sons worked elsewhere for wages while the wife and younger children held down the claim.

Many women came to the Sand-hills, took Kinkaids, then taught in the nearby schools to make a living. Some of these women married bachelor homesteaders, thereby putting two sections together, enough to run sufficient cattle to get a start. There were even instances in which a husband and wife secured a divorce until the wife, too, could take a Kinkaid. A married woman could not file on land, but once the filing was accomplished the couple married again and went into the cattle business. Most of the Kinkaiders who managed to prove up sold out to adjoining ranchmen and headed for greener lands.

Congressman Kinkaid kept a finger on the pulse of his people in many ways. He promptly and courteously answered every one of the bushel of letters he received daily. When congress was not in session he hurried home to mingle with his constituents and ask about their needs. Every spring he mailed collections of garden seeds to the voters of the big Sixth, and many a hard-up Kinkaid woman depended on that packet for her summer’s vegetables and flowers. To his people he was known affectionately as “Judge,” or “Uncle Mose,” and many a boy baby was named “Moses” for him. Strangely enough, he never carried O’Neill in an election. He was, however, instrumental in preserving Fort Niobrara 29 and Fort Robinson in his district, and did all in his power to gain further help and advantages for hard pressed Kinkaiders, such as getting extensions on the time allowed for improvements on the claims. He voted against entering the first World War in 1917 and voted for the Prohibition and Women’s Sufferage amendments. He gave generously to churches and charity and helped with educational expense for a number of young men. Judge Kinkaid was a part owner of the first brick building in O’Neill. Located on the southeast corner of Fourth and Douglas streets, the building housed the Holt County Bank on its first floor. The judge had his offices on the second floor, three large rooms all in a row. He designed the rooms himself, each with a door opening into the room next to it. These were double doors, one in front of the other with an air space between, ostensibly to insure silence and privacy for the lawyer and his clients. Each room also had its own chimney and heating stove.

Mr. Kinkaid died on July 6, 1922, following an operation in a Washington hospital. When his death was announced in the Senate of the United States, the presiding officer apointed Senators Norris, Hitchcok, Jones, Ashurst, Johnson and Norbeck as a Senate committee to attend the funeral. Numerous Congressmen and state officers also attended, and the funeral was one of the largest ever held in Holt County.

The services were to have been held on the lawn of the Holt County courthouse, but it rained and the funeral had to be moved to the Knights of Columbus auditorium, the largest in the town. Senator George Norris delivered one of the funeral addresses and burial was in the O’Neill cemetery. On Tuesday, August 15, a resolution was introduced in the House that, “as a further mark of respect to the memory of the late Representative Kinkaid the House do now adjourn.” This was agreed to and at 12:25 p.m. the House adjourned until Wednesday noon. The following January a small hard-bound black book was issued in his memory. It contained the memorial addresses delivered on the floor of the House by four Nebraska Representatives and one each from Wyoming, Louisiana, Idaho and Illinois.

Mr. Kinkaid died without a will and his $149,000 estate was divided among his relatives.

Holt County’s next most prominent politician was probably big, bluff-faced Arthur Mullen who, as a nine-year-old lad, arrived in the county in 1882 with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. James Mullen, and four * Arthur F. Mullen, Western Democrat, (Wi Ifred Funk, Inc. NY. Y. 1940) brothers and sisters. Originally from Ireland, the elder Mullens had lived in Canada for some years before coming to Nebraska. Irish Catholics, they settled comfortably into the Blackbird community, on the trail between O’Neill and Paddock, on a 320 acre farm. Arthur went to school in a sod dugout heated by a hayburner which, he wrote, “at its best gave heat. At its second-best it smoked so that we were sometimes driven out. At its worst it blew up.” There were forty pupils and, for three terms of four months each, they stayed in school from eight in the morning until five in the evening. The Mullen family eventually numbered nine sons and daughters, seven of whom went on to earn college degrees.

Arthur Mullen At the age of nine Arthur was already reading everything he could find in the newspapers on trials and court cases and had made up his mind to be a lawyer. But first he was a teacher— at sixteen— in the John Cronin school four miles north of O’Neill. Discipline wasn’t much of a problem. He had to throw only one boy out of the window to assert his mastery. After two terms, during which he saved almost all his wages, he set off for summer school in Fremont on June 9, 1890. His board, room and tuition cost him $31.50 for the ten weeks term.

On January 2, 1894, Arthur went to work as clerk in the office of the County Treasurer who replaced Barrett Scott, one James P. Mullen, but no relation. He was not quite twenty-one. There he had a grandstand seat for all the ugly events that followed Scott’s ouster from that office and his abduction on New Year’s Eve, 1894. Young Mullen’s four years as deputy County Treasurer in O’Neill afforded him quite an education in law.

“I watched cases in the county court,” he wrote,* “and learned as much law seeing Judge Kinkaid preside and hearing M. F. Harrington present his cases as I was to learn later at law school. Of all the attorneys I have ever known, M. F. was the best all-around lawyer. He knew every kind of law which might be involved in any case coming within his ken. Where he learned it I don’t know. He had read in Kinkaid’s office but he knew far more law than Kinkaid did. If I have been able to do anything for the aid of my fellow men through my knowledge of the law it is because of what I learned from M. F. Harrington.” Mullen spent two years in law school at Ann Arbor, Kinkaid’s old alma mater, but, frugal though he was, his Holt County deputy treasurer’s wages hardly paid his expenses. By graduation time, after passing his college examinations, he was broke. At this point an unexpected one hundred dollar check from M. F. Harrington enabled him to settle all accounts and buy a decent suit to wear home on the train to O’Neill. At home again (no matter where he lived in the years to come, Mullen always considered O’Neill “home.”) he went into Harrington’s office to practice. Clients did not flock to him so, in 1900 when he was asked to run for the office of county attorney, a position that paid $800 a year, he did so, and won by less than one hundred votes. However he was elected again in 1902 and 1904.

With his wife and children he moved to Lincoln in 1909 where, the following year, Governor Ashton Shallenberger appointed him Attorney General of Nebraska. He went on to Omaha in 1911 and opened a law office. Elected to the Democratic National Committee in 1916 he served his party in that office until his resignation in 1932. During a part of this time he lived in Washington D. C. and practiced law there.

Deeply involved in politics during most of his adult life, he was particularly proud of his part in the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States. He described it thus: “In 1932 at a hot dog stand at dawn, after an all night session in the Democratic convention hall in Chicago, Arthur Mullen and Tom Connally of Texas made the pact that assured F.D.R. and John Nance Garner, of Texas, the nominations that led to the Whitehouse.” After his election, Roosevelt offered Mullen a Cabinet office as Attorney General, which the Nebraskan declined. Soon afterward he came home to O’Neill to write his memoirs. He was a dying man, and knew it, and into his book, Western Democrat, he poured his love of his adopted state. Some of his descriptions of the western prairies he 30 knew so well are almost lyrical. Of his teaching experience before the turn of the century he wrote that pioneer rural teachers, struggling’ always for more education themselves, in the nineties taught in order that they might be taught, earning the money to pay for their own higher education by imparting to younger children the knowledge they already had. Although most of the book’s contents deal with politics, the better portions of it tell of his boyhood and his hard won education, and of northeastern Nebraska as it was in those days.

Of Arthur Mullen, politician, James Pedersen and Kenneth Wald* wrote, “Nebraska’s most powerful, if not premier, Democrat . . . lawyer, national committeeman, Roosevelt floor leader at the 1932 convention and thorough Democrat . . . if the Nebraska party, ever had a boss it was Mullen. Others before and after him . . . held ample power in the party but none built the personal and party organization that Mullen commanded. And command he did. His active political life spanned the ear from Bryan to Roosevelt. With his passing in 1938 the political organization he had laboriously built partially disintegrated and partially passed on. But it altogether ceased to be the personal machine of a six-foot, four-inch Irish Catholic . .

The Nebraska Blue Book lists thirty- five Holt County men who represent- ed their district in the state’s old two- house legislature and, after 1935, in its Unicameral. The district was a large one, made up of several counties, all good sized, and this is an impressive list of representatives from a single county. In several instances two representatives are listed for the same year. Whether one was finishing a term for a predecessor, or for whatever reason, is not given. First on the list is H. W. McClure of O’Neill, elected in 1881, who sat in the lower house. M. P. Kinkaid went from O’Neill to Lincoln in 1883 as a member of the Senate. Alonzo Rice of Stuart was next, elected to the House in 1885. S. W. Green of Ewing followed him in 1887. In 1889 N. B. Bisbee of Chambers occupied a seat in the House and L. T. Shanner of Inman a seat in the Senate. J. M. Hunter of Mineola is also listed in 1889. Whether he served a part of Bisbee’s term, or the other way around, is not disclosed.

In 1891 the voters sent J. P. Mullen of Emmet (no relation to Arthur Mullen) to the House. Again there is a conflict, with H. R. Henry of O’Neill also listed as a Representative for that year. Henry, however, was re-elected in 1893, while Mullen was sent to the *Oedersen and Wald, Shall the People Rule? (Jacob North, Inc., Lincoln, Nebr.) Senate in the same election. G. F. Smith of Ewing was elected to the House in 1893. Both John Crawford of Atkinson and John Robertson of O’Neill are shown as members of the Senate in 1895. Robertson was reelected in 1897. John A. Robertson John A. Robertson was born in January, 1867, in Jackson County, Indiana. His father died when he was three years old. At twelve John was earning seven dollars a month to help his mother support herself and two little daughters. He was sixteen when his mother married Samuel Beavers, a carpenter. An adventurer at heart, John’s mother had long dreamed of “Going West.” Very soon after her second marriage she talked her new husband into filing on a quarter section in Holt County, about fifteen miles northeast of O’Neill.

Mr. Beavers then traded some property in the town of Malvern, Iowa, for an old team and wagon and with his wife, her two little girls and John, joined a wagon train “which stretched as far as they could see ahead and behind,” and headed west. After crossing the Missouri into Niobara, Nebraska, John got a job while the rest of his family drove on to the homestead.

On Christmas day, 1885, eighteen- year-old John Robertson married Rachel Hindman in Niobrara. The following year he took a preemption on eighty acres near his parents’ place in the Joy community. In 1892 he was appointed postmaster of the Joy post office, which was then moved from the James Mullen home to the Robertson place, where it remained for the next forty-five years, and was then “discontinued” in the late thirties.

At an early age John took a keen interest in politics and, at the age of twenty-seven was elected to the House of Representatives in 1895, and re-elected in 1897. From 1913 through 1917 he again served his district, this time in the Senate. No doubt remembering the difficult times his own mother had experienced after her first husband died, in 1913 he introduced and secured passage of the first Mother’s Pension Law in the state. In July, 1917, on the recommendation of Governor Keith Neville, he was appointed a member of the Exemption Board for District One of Nebraska by president Wilson. With the four other members of the board he served throughout the first World War, classifying more than 75,000 men; for District One included all of Nebraska north of the Platte River, or more than half of the big state. Of his work on the board Senator Robertson said, “It was a heartbreaking experience.” Senator and Mrs. Robertson celebrated their Golden Wedding day in 1935, with all of their twelve children present. Mrs. Robertson died the following year, and the Senator on Christmas day, 1940.

M. C. Grimes of Chambers followed Robertson in the House in 1897, and was replaced in 1899 by W. W. Peck of Inez, while Hugh O’Neill, who gave his address as Chelsea, went to the Senate the same year.

Hugh, of the O’Neill’s of County Tyrone, Ireland, came to Holt County in 1879, filed on a claim on Turkey Creek, near the Niobrara River, and taught school for a living. In 1890 he married Mamie Hodgkin, another rural schoolteacher. Farseeing, ambitious and fair, Hugh O’Neill fumed at the injustice so often accorded the poor man who had neither the money nor the education to protect himself. During the 1880’s he organized a semi-political society known as the “Producers of Brotherhood” and drew up its platform. Although his ideas were far in advance of their time, O’Neill lived to see them adopted by the “Peoples’ Independent Party” of later years. And many of them have become the “Progressive Legislation” of the present. To further promote his principles, he ran for the Nebraska Senate in 1899, was elected and served one term.

Realizing that the responsibility of caring for his good sized ranch on Turkey Creek, as well as for his family, which included his mother, his wife and four children, demanded his time, he gave up his efforts to remake the laws in favor of the downtrodden and returned home. Frank Campbell of O’Neill took his place in 1901. Ed Coppoc of Chambers went to the House that same year. And so, apparently, did E. M. Waring of Middlebranch; the latter evidently finishing Coppoc’s term, for he was re-elected in 1903. The dates given for William Coats of Stuart are 1903 and 1905 as a member of the House, while Dr. John P. Gilligan, whose story is told in the following chapter, sat in the Senate for the term beginning in 1905. William Bedford of Meek, a settlement in the Blackbird community, held the House seat for the same term.

H. R. Henry and his grandson and granddaughter, year-old twins. Picture taken in 1907. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. H. R. Henry of O’Neill, after an absence of fourteen years went back again to the House in 1907 for two more terms, while James A. Donohoe, also of O’Neill, took the Senate seat in 1909.

The son of John and NXary Donohoe, who came to Holt County in 1877, James was the first white boy born in Shields Township on the Blackbird. After finishing his elementary education he spent some time at Fremont Normal College, then read law in M. F. Harrington’s office in O’Neill and practiced in that city for twenty- eight years. Although he sat as an elected member of the Senate in 1908 and 1909, he probably was more influential as a leader in the State Constitutional Convention of 1919 and H. R. Henry homestead in Willowdale Township. 1899. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. 1920. Since its inception the state government, like Topsey, “had just growed” for over half a century. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century it had become so cumbersome and unwieldy that some streamlining was a necessity. The clear legal mind of Jim Donohoe, and his Holt County “horse-sense,” were of value in the monumental task that confronted the Convention.

Federal Judge James A. Donohoe Hugh Allen, Atkinson, followed H. R. Henry’s last term in the House and was, in turn, succeeded by Dennis Cronin of O’Neill in 1911. Born in Michigan in 1869, Dennis came with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Cronin, to a homestead a mile northeast of O’Neill in 1877. A graduate of the town’s public schools, Dennis, with Clyde King, became co-editor of the O’Neill Item in 1891. The Item was at that time one of four papers competing for business in the town. The next year Cronin and King merged with W. D. Matthews of the Frontier, which absorbed the item. Dennis H. Cronin By 1896 Cronin was sole owner of the paper, which he operated continuously for more than half a century. A lover of baseball, he played on the crack community teams of his youth and was active in the local Dramatic Company through the nineties and into the new century. Thoroughly involved in the affairs of his town, Mr. Cronin served for eight years as its postmaster and for the same length of time as president of the city council. An active Republican, he was elected to the House in 1911, where he succeeded himself in 1913-15 and ’17, then moved over to the Senate for two terms, 1919-21. He also found time to serve one term as president of the Nebraska Press Association and was a United States Marshal from 1921 to 1932.

Brantley Elijah Sturdevant, who took Cronin’s place in the House in 1919, had a long and unique ancestral history that led back to England. There, early in the eighteenth century, his great-great-grandfather, William Sturdevant, as a four-year-old 32 lad was kidnapped on London Bridge by men who hoped to collect a ran- some from his wealthy goldsmith father. When their plan went awry, the abductors fled to America with the boy. William was fourteen before he was able to return to England and locate his parents and a brother, Samuel.

Lover’s Lane in front of Sturdevant home.

After their parents’ death the brothers came to America and took charge of a land grant in Connecticut which their father had received from the King of England in payment of a loan made the King during the Napoleonic wars. One of William’s sons was Samuel Sturdevant, who fought in the Revolutionary war. His pay was a grant of land at Blackwal-nut, Pennsylvania. Two generations later Brantley Home of Brantley Sturdevant.

Elijah Sturdevant was born to James Benedict Sturdevant in Blackwalnut in 1852.

In 1870 James visited some friends who had moved to Fremont, Nebraska, and while there bought a quarter section of land near the town. He returned to Pennsylvania until May, then with his oldest son, Joseph, came back to Fremont to break out some of his land and to build a sod house and stable. In March, 1871, the entire family: the parents, seven sons and an infant daughter, moved to the Fremont farm. Brantley, the second son, was nineteen.

Brantley finished his formal education in Omaha, then spent a few years as a railway station agent in Shelby, Wahoo and David City. During this period he returned to Pennsylvania where, in Silvara, a town some ten miles from Blackwalnut, he married Ellen Olivia Smith in 1876. After the ceremony the couple traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Centennial Exposition, then boarded a train for Nebraska.

In the fall of 1882 Brantley’s brother, Dr. Charles Sturdevant and a partner, A. C. Crossman, purchased a mercantile store in Atkinson from Frank Bitney. Soon afterward Brantley and another brother, Joseph, moved to Atkinson to help out with the store. Known as Sturdevant Brothers and Company, the brothers operated the establishment for nearly twenty years. At one time it employed eighteen clerks.

After leaving the store Brantley was registrar of the U. S. Land Office in O’Neill from July, 1907 to July 1916. He also helped survey the Union Pacific railroad from Columbus to Norfolk. For the remainder of his life he engaged in the real estate and insurance business in Atkinson, except while representing Holt and Boyd counties in the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1919 to 1923. he told his grandchildren, later, that all Nebraska senators who voted for that “extravagant expenditure, the new State Capitol building,” were defeated in the next election. At any rate he terminated his legislative career in 1923.

Brantley also served his home town as mayor and as a member of its school board. He filled the office of Sunday School Superintendent in the Atkinson Methodist Church from 1886 to 1915, was a regular attendant at morning and evening Sunday church services and sang in the choir for nearly fifty-three years. At the age of eighty-six his voice was still rich, firm and true and he sang in the choir on the Sunday before his death on New Year’s Day, 1938.

The Blue Book also lists William Bethea as a Representative in the years 1919 through 1922, the same years in which Sturdevant held a seat in the House. Donald Gallagher, O’Neill, won the election to the House in 1923 and no one from Holt County sat in that body in 1925-26. Edwin O. Slaymaker, who won the 1927 election to the House, was one year old when he came with his parents, the John Slaymakers, from Minnesota to a homestead southwest of Atkinson in 1879. Two or three years later the future Representative, wearing a red coat and walking from the house to where his father and older brothers were planting trees in the spring of the year, was intercepted and thoroughly trounced by a wild gander. In 1888 he and some of the other Slaymaker children spent the night of the big blizzard in the schoolhouse with the teacher. Nevertheless Edwin grew up to serve his district in the House of Representatives in 1927-28, and from 1931 through 1934. The interim term of 1929-30 went to C. E. Havens of Atkinson.

During the last term of the two- house legislature, 1935-37, Frank Brady of Atkinson sat in the Senate and Lloyd Gillespie sat in the House. Lloyd G. Gillespie’s father, Bennett Scott Gillespie, emigrated with his parents from Ohio to Iowa in 1852, then to Dakota Territory in 1870. Lloyd was two years old when the family moved down into Saratoga Township in Holt County in 1877. The following year Bennett Gillespie was elected sheriff of the county. By 1890 the Gillespies were living in O’Neill, where Bennett was appointed Registrar of the U. S. Land Office and where he served as town mayor (1897-98) and also held the elected offices of County Superintendent of Schools, County Surveyor and County Judge.

Lloyd assisted his father in the land office until 1900, when he joined the gold rush to Alaska. How he came out 33 on that venture is not recorded. He returned to O’Neill in 1901 and the next year married Bertha Fawkes of Macon County, Illinois, a young lady employed in the dry goods department of the McManus Mercantile Company. In 1905 Lloyd established the Gillespie Insurance Company and settled into the life and society of the town.

He, too, was a member of that last bicameral legislature in Nebraska, serving in the lower house until the two bodies merged into the Unicameral in 1937. At home he was active in church and lodge. He and his wife attained to fifty year memberships in the O’Neill United Methodist Church and he was also a fifty year member of the Garfield Masonic Lodge and the International Order of Odd Fellows, as well as a member of the Shrine and Past Grand Patriarch of Nebraska Odd Fellows. Lloyd Gillespie died in May, 1960, following an automobile accident. He was eighty-five years old.

Frank J. Brady Frank John Brady was born in Holt County because his father, John Brady, liked to hunt. John and two other young men had first arrived in Atkinson in 1883. The other two went on but John stayed because the Elkhorn Valley was a hunters’ paradise. For several years he made his living as a “market hunter,” shipping quail, ducks and prairie chickens East by the barrelsful. He took a homestead, of course, twenty miles southwest of Atkinson, and in 1887 brought his bride, Ella Shaw of Joliet, Illinois, there to live. By subsequent land purchases he built the ranch to a good size. He also ran a feed store and mill for awhile. It was into these surroundings that Frank John was born in 1894. After graduation from Atkinson highschool, Frank went to the University of Nebraska, then did his bit in the first World War. On his return from the service he helped his father on the ranch and in the real estate office the elder Brady had opened in Atkinson. Becoming interested in politics, he ran for a seat in the senate in the Nebraska bicameral legislature and was elected in 1935. Just in time to help with the monumental task of redistricting the state in preparation for changing over to a unicameral body. In 1937 he was elected to the new one house legislature, and again in 1939, after which he was appointed State Tax Commissioner by Governor Dwight Griswold.

Always busy with betterment projects for his district, he was state president of the Isaac Walton League and director of the National League. As a five year member of the State Game, Forest and Parks Commission he helped establish Atkinson’s park and lake. He was twice a delegate to the National Republican Convention and in 1954 was president of the National Hay Association. He served on the Atkinson school board and on the city council, was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and Mayor of the town. He promoted a number of road and highway projects which greatly benefitted the community and, as. a member of the airport board, helped establish the Stuart- Atkinson airport. Still actively in harness in 1964, he sat on an important committee meeting to promote a TV booster station for Atkinson— and there suffered a fatal heart attack.

Following Brady’s two terms in the Unicameral, Tony Asimus of O’Neill was elected to that seat in 1941 and again in 1943. At the end of his second term seventy-six-year-old Dennis Cronin was sent to the legislature for one more term. Holt County had no representative in the Unicameral from 1947 to 1949 when, in that election, it sent Frank Nelson of O’Neill to Lincoln for his long tenure of nearly eighteen years— longer than that of any other man from Holt County.

Frank, the son of Paul and Mar- gretha Nelson, was born in Omaha on November 15, 1883. His Danish immigrant parents had come to Omaha in the 1860’s, then moved to a farm near Fort Calhoun in 1887. Frank made his first dollar by leading a milk cow his father had sold from the Fort to Omaha, a distance of about ten miles. He attended a rural school near the farm, then walked two and a half miles each way to the Fort to avail himself of the two years of highschool offered there. In time his father came to own a good deal of timberland and Frank became a highly rated woodcutter. Gutzon Borglum, carver of the Picture taken from a portrait of Senator Frank Nelson. Courtesy Mrs. Paul Nelson.

faces on Mount Rushmore, was one of his boyhood friends of the Fort Calhoun years. In June, 1906 the young man made ready to move to a Holt County relinquishment on which he had filed. His traveling outfit was quite pretentious for the times. It consisted of a mettlesome five hundred dollar span of green-broke, four-year-old mules, a good wagon, a larder well stocked by his mother and five hundred dollars in cash. It was raining the day he planned to start his journey to Holt County so he waited two days, until the rain stopped, then set out over very muddy roads.

Nelson made twenty miles the first day, to Tekamah, and slept in the livery stable with his mules that night. The weather and the roads got better and by the third day he could hitch up the lively mules by himself. On June 19 he pulled onto his claim. He spent one hundred dollars for enough lumber to build a stable, then lived in one end of it while he hauled another two hundred dollars worth to build a house. At the end of the thirty-three months required residence on the land he drove into O’Neill on a wintry forty degrees below zero day to pay the $1.25 per acre, or two hundred dollars, that gave him legal title to the land.

In 1912 he married Sarah Ellen Hull at Meek, Nebraska and moved to a farm on Red Bird Creek. In 1915 there were so many floods on the creek that he moved his family to higher land, three miles northwest, and there made his home for the rest of his life. His homestead shack still stands on the first place. For the first five years or so on the homestead he rode his horse bareback. Each time he had saved enough money to buy a saddle he bought a cow instead, and so built up a good herd of cattle.

34 The Redbird Creek flood of 1915. Mrs. Nelson died in 1944 and two years later he married Lena Morten-sen of Omaha. In 1948 Frank was elected to the state unicameral, where he served the voters of District 42 for nine consecutive terms, or almost eighteen years. Always active in church and community affairs, he served his Paddock Precinct as a schoolboard member, township clerk, treasurer, justice of the peace and assessor; and was a member of the O’Neill Chamber of Commerce and Four generation picture taken while Senator Nelson was serving in the legislature In 1966. Senator Nelson holding his great-grandson, Brad Nelson. Frank’s son, Paul, on right; his grandson, Paul Arden, on left. Courtesy Paul Nelson. the Sandhills Cattlemen’s Association. The great blizzard of 1949 paralyzed northern Nebraska in January of that year, just after the new senator had gone to Lincoln to begin his first term. Since the storm missed Lincoln and the southeast corner of the state, the people there did not realize its severity and did not immediately become concerned about the serious plight of the isolated northern residents and their starving livestock. To acquaint the state officials with the awful conditions there, Senator Nelson persuaded the Governor and several fellow senators to board a National Guard plane and fly over the area. The flight was Senator Nelson’s first ride in a plane, and with the others he looked down on endless miles of drifted frozen snow, where nothing moved.

Farm homes were out of groceries, cattle were starving because feed could not be gotten to them. Trains were stalled, no roads were open. Everything in all that vast area had come to a standstill. The officials could see that something must be done, and fast. As a result of his bird’s eye view of the snowbound land, Governor Val Peterson was able to get the Fifth Army to send giant equipment to open the roads and rescue the starving people and animals of Holt and dozens of other counties.

A progressive farmer, the Senator was interested in the advent of tractors. The first behemoths to appear in farming communities were useful only for power to operate other machinery, such as threshing machines. When one was made that would plow corn, Nelson said, he’d buy it. And he did— the first Farmall tractor in northern Holt County. He also bought the first radio in that part of the county, but never owned a television set. His first car was a 1917 Model T.

Not long before his death the courageous old senator stood to his feet during the lively debate on whether or not Nebraska was to have an income tax. “For seventeen years,” he said, “I have fought a broadened tax base. Now I am publicly confessing an error— and this is never easy for a proud man.” Waving toward the income tax foes in the chamber, he went on “I have used every one of your arguments for eight terms down here. But times have changed, Nebraska’s population pattern has changed, its economy has changed, … This will be the hardest vote of my life, but I shall vote for the bill.” The hardy old senator had a large percentage of his bills passed and he was not afraid to vote against bills that he figured were bad for his state. His friends said of him that he was one senator that Terry Carpenter never tore apart.* Still robust and actively farming at the age of eighty-two, with another session of the Unicameral ahead of him, Senator Nelson was tragically burned in a tractor fire at his home on July 12, 1966. He died while being Terry Carpenter of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. ‘Terrible Terry ‘ as he was often described. 35 transported to Omaha by air ambulance for treatment by specialists. Funeral services were held in O’Neill and burial was in the Paddock cemetery overlooking the Black Bird Creek, near the Community church he had faithfully attended for many years. The oldest member of the legislature at the time of his death, Governor Frank Morrison paid tribute to him and nine state senators and two former senators were honorary pall bearers at his funeral. Numerous other state officials as well as Edward Miller of Omaha, vice president of Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, made the long journey to the far northern border of Nebraska to attend his funeral.

Francis D. Lee of Atkinson was appointed to fill the unexpired portion of Senator Nelson’s term in 1966. Since that time no one from Holt County has held a seat in the legislature. However, for a period of eighty-six years (1881-1967), with the exception of two terms (1883-85 and 1947-49) a Holt Countian sat in the House or the Unicameral. In the State, between the years of 1883 and 1937, twelve men served a total of thirty years. This is a splendid record by anybody’s standard.

Michael F. Harrington, credited by Arthur Mullen with being the guiding light in his own career and in whose office the budding politician practiced law, gained national prominence in 1895 when he successfully defended the men accused of hanging Barrett Scott. Newspaper men came from New York and other large cities to report the sensational trial and Harrington’s name was known far and wide. Shortly afterward, as a special prosecutor in another case, he convicted Joseph Bartley, Nebraska state treasurer, of misusing upwards of a million dollars in state funds. Romaine Saunders wrote that M. F. Harrington came to O’Neill on the night passenger train “in the middle eighties.” He was a young man “with a serious face and a well shaped head, crowned with black hair.” Striding up the path that led to the Potter House, he deposited his one traveling bag on the floor and registered his name in bold script. For the next half century he was to be one of the city’s most prominent and respected citizens.

Born in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, in 1860, he was the son of farmer parents, John and Margaret Harrington. About twenty-five years old when he arrived in O’Neill, he had attended Canadian country schools, taught school for several years and studied law. In O’Neill he first went into the loan business, advertising one million dollars to loan on Holt County real estate.

A Mr. G. M. Cleveland had earlier established a newspaper, the Banner, in a little white frame building in the town. “Of uncertain circulation,” the paper had been short-lived. After its demise Mr. Cleveland opened a law office in his little building, and shortly after young Harrington arrived he took him in as an associate in his law practice. Before long the young lawyer’s ability had put him far in the lead. Mr. Saunders states that when his law business grew to demand his full time, “probably about a million dollars had been loaned out of his own pocket that was never paid back.” For this was the period of the great drouth in Nebraska. Everybody needed to borrow money, few were ever able to recover their losses. One of Harrington’s important early law suits was an action brought by Brown County against the railroad for taxes that had been paid to Holt County. In the beginning Holt County claimed everything west to the Wyoming line for tax and census purposes. When Brown County, on the west, was organized its officials “didn’t like the idea of some $15,000, paid by the railroad and covering valuations in the new county, getting away from them.” As an attorney, Harrington was soon in demand all over his own and other states. Politically he came to O’Neill a Democrat but later joined the Populists. When those two factions merged he was offered the party’s nomination for governor. Later he became a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican.” But, under whatever banner he happened to be, anything he had to say in political matters was heeded. His townsmen said of him that he planned and executed more projects for the good of his community than any other man or group of men. Saunders wrote that he was generous to a fault and that one of the biggest things he did for his neighbors was to turn over to a failed O’Neill bank a large sum of money he had just received as his fee in a famous case, that the depositors might receive another pro-rata payment. This was probably the fee paid him for defending Barrett Scott’s murderers, and the bank was likely the State Bank of O’Neill, which had closed its doors in 1897.

In 1887 Harrington married Margaret McEnnery in Cornwall, Canada, and brought her to O’Neill. They became the parents of six children. At Mike Harrington’s death in 1932 the June 24 edition of the Omaha World- Herald carried a long commendatory editorial which stated in part: “Independent, clever, courageous, with a winning personality and an incisive eloquence, M. F. Harrington of O’Neill made an impression on his state that will last long. He wore no man’s collar, and no party’s. It was as easy for him to oppose the Democratic party when he thought it wrong as to support it when he believed it right.” Michael’s younger brother, James Joseph, was also an O’Neill attorney. Nine years younger than his illustrous older brother, James, too, was born in Canada, where he received his early education in the Lindsay Separate School. He later attended a commercial college in Omaha and earned his law degree at the University of Michigan. He came to O’Neill in 1887 and married Mary Ellen Daly in 1898, their wedding being the first Nuptial High Mass that Father Cassidy performed in St. Patrick’s Parish. James Joseph practiced law in O’Neill until elected judge of the Fifteenth Judicial District in 1899 at thirty years of age the youngest man ever elected to a Judicial Judgeship in Nebraska. The region over which he presided was later divided into four districts. After two terms he retired voluntarily and returned to private practice in O’Neill. In the early thirties he called on Governor Charles Bryan several times and persuaded him to grant $75,000 for O’Neill’s first paved streets. An active Democrat, he was the titular head of the party in northwest Nebraska, helping elect other Democrats to state and county offices. Giving generously of his time and talents to his town, he was responsible for securing the Grattan Township Library for O’Neill. James died in 1954 at the age of eighty-five years.

Judge R. R. Dickson Another prominent O’Neillite was Judge R. R. Dickson. Born in Wisconsin in 1863, he came to O’Neill by way of Iowa, where he was educated in the public schools. After studying law in the office of L. AA. Ryce of Osage, he was admitted to the bar. He arrived in O’Neill in 1887 and practiced law there until elected District Judge of 36 the Fifteenth Judicial District, then comprising Holt, Boyd, Brown, Keya Paha and Rock counties, which office he held until the date of his death, June 18, 1941, at which time he was Senior District Judge in the state.

R. Dickson Another prominent O’Neillite was Judge R. R. Dickson. Born in Wisconsin in 1863, he came to O’Neill by way of Iowa, where he was educated in the public schools. After studying law in the office of L. AA. Ryce of Osage, he was admitted to the bar. He arrived in O’Neill in 1887 and practiced law there until elected District Judge of 36 the Fifteenth Judicial District, then comprising Holt, Boyd, Brown, Keya Paha and Rock counties, which office he held until the date of his death, June 18, 1941, at which time he was Senior District Judge in the state. During his thirty years on the bench Judge Dickson heard more than twelve thousand cases. Of that number 176 had been appealed to the State Supreme Court and only thirty- nine had been reversed by the higher court. During this period he sat as an associate judge with the State Supreme Court when needed. Romaine Saunders wrote of him, after his death, “He combined in his more than six feet stature the force and fury of the ox and the gentleness of the lamb.” In Dr. Addison M. Sheldon’s Nebraska, the Land and the People, is written of Judge Dickson, “As juvenile judge he seems to understand the youngsters even better than some of their guardians. AAany a boy and a few girls have been before him in bitter tears, and felt the depths of humiliation, only finally to throw back their shoulders and thank a friend, found where they had expected contact with some deadly dragon.” R. R. Dickson was mayor of O’Neill in 1893-’94 and his interests, outside of law, were the homely ones of gardening, flowers and his beloved flock of chickens.

At Judge Dickson’s death D. R. Mounts of Atkinson was appointed to the judgeship of the Fifteenth, where he served for twenty years, retiring in 1961. In 1946 he had moved to O’Neill, where he made his home until his death in 1963.

Dayton R. Mounts was born in 1888 in Coldwater, Kansas, one of eight children. He received his elementary education in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1912. A jovial man, he was very active in all kinds of youth organizations. At his retirement in 1961, Judge Mounts was the fourth in a distinguished line of District Judges from Holt County. Beginning with Judge Kinkaid and continuing with James Harrington and R. R. Dickson, the four of them had spent a total of seventy-four years on the District Judge’s bench.

In the early part of the twentieth century a great deal of attention was focused on Holt County because of the activities of the seven Savidge brothers of Ewing. The old Savidge place, eleven miles southwest of Ewing village, was the showplace of the county when the brothers were growing up and, from early boyhood on, the boys, “all inventive minded,” were continually concocting some unusual or outlandish device for fun, or for saving time. Visitors came from miles around to see the fine farm and to marvel at the boys’ inventions. At the same time that the Wright brothers of Kittyhawk were building their flying machine the Savidge brothers, George, John, Joe, Dave, Matt, Phillip and Louis were also putting such a machine together. The Wright brothers got theirs into the air in 1903, the Savidge brothers first flew theirs in 1907 but did not make an exhibition flight until 1911.

There was a huge barn on the home place and the boys’ workshop was in its capacious haymow, where they built their airship. For a long time they studied hawks in flight, especially when gliding, and carefully examined the birds’ skeletons. From these studies they first constructed gliders. Their first models were built to a scale that was in the same proportion to the weight of a cat as a large glider would be to the weight of a man. In that early period the farm cats did a lot of flying. After tying the animal into the glider they threw the contraption out of the haymow door. When they had perfected the glider to the point where it would land with its live cargo without crashing, the boys made a model large enough for one of them to sit in.

Seated in the big glider, they started it off by rolling it down the long slope of the barn roof. When it “took off” from the edge they guided it over a small creek and landed it in an open meadow. From this start they built an airplane that flew. But, knowing their neighbors firmly believed they were wasting their time on a crackpot, impossible project, the boys kept quiet about the whole business and went ahead improving their machine as well as their skills. Their plane had no cockpit and the pilot sat on a mowing machine seat which they bolted to the framework. The wings were constructed of bass-wood poles, covered with shellaced muslin, and the ribs were made of wood. The whole was braced with wire and hollow steel tubes. The engine was perched between the wings and the propeller was at the rear to “push” the machine. The pilot sat in front of the engine, on a level with the lower wing. A rider sat on each side of him, on the wings, to balance the plane. There was a single wheel in front, holding up a sort of hollow nose which had a horizontal canvas sail at the tip, and two wheels beneath the wings but none on the tail. The tip of the tail was about six feet above the ground and bore another canvas sail. At first the tail fin caused the engineers a lot of trouble. They had to have it for guiding but a light wind against it would keep turning the plane. They solved the problem by cutting square holes in the sail to let the wind through. The boys bought custom-made engines, propellers and rubber tired wheels, but constructed the rest of their flyers entirely from their own ideas. They made their first flights from a take-off point on a meadow on the home place. There was a grove of trees on the meadow and they practiced flying over the trees and landing on the far side. When stories began to get around that the Savidge boys were flying their contraption over the trees, people refused to believe it and dubbed the story tellers Savidge Brothers at Ewing, July 10, 1912. Lett to right: Matt, Phillip and Louis Savidge. 37 “crazy people.” But the boys kept at it until they had improved their machine to the point where they could circle and land on the spot from which they took off.

Then they put a notice in the papers inviting anyone who wanted to see them fly to come to the Savidge farm on Sunday, May 7, 1911. People came from everywhere, even from so far away it took all day to make the trip. The farmstead, the meadow and the road were solidly packed with buggies, wagons and a few cars. The crowd had started arriving early in the morning and many brought their dinners and made a picnic of it. The flight was scheduled for early afternoon but the wind came up and the boys could not take off on time. At once many said they had known all along that the whole thing was a joke. The brothers assured them that, if they would wait until the wind went down in the evening, they would surely fly. Everybody waited, the wind went down and the boys flew. Matt took the plane up, circled the meadow above the trees and came down.

The crowd went wild. They clapped and yelled, they ran and cheered and shook Matt’s hands. Women pinned flowers on him. He had done the impossible and these people had seen him do it. As far as is known he was the first man in Nebraska to fly a heavier than air machine.

The boys went ahead, improving their plane until they were satisfied it was “safe,” and then began a series of mid-states exhibition or “barnstorming” flights. A field man preceded them, advertising the “High Flyers,” while the boys boxed and shipped the plane and equipment from town to town in box cars. At each town they first had to build a fence around the take-off site before they assembled the plane— else curious onlookers tried to take it apart for souvenirs.

For five years the Savidges very successfully flew their plane. Matt, the most daring of the brothers, learned to “loop” the craft and perform other stunts with it. He is believed to be the first pilot in the world to do pyrotechnic or “skywriting.” He did this by mapping out, on paper, a detailed flight plan that would write his name in the air. Then he tied smoke candles to the frame of his plane, went aloft and wrote his name with the smoke.

In the spring of 1916 they shipped their equipment back to Ewing, where they set it up just west of town in a pasture to begin their summer’s work. They finished putting one of the planes together, late on a Saturday afternoon, and John took it up. It did not work to his satisfaction and when Matt decided to take it up for some test stunts, John and the others tried to talk him out of it. For some reason he overrode their protests and went ahead. At a height of five or six hundred feet he started a spiral glide and came down nicely until about one hundred feet from the ground when the plane suddenly plunged straight down, nose first, and struck the earth at terrific speed.

The nose was driven into the ground and the engine, torn from its fastenings, landed on Matt, killing him instantly. Both legs, one arm and his neck were broken. The other brothers could never figure out why the plane crashed, as the engine was running smoothly until it hit the ground. At any rate the tragic accident so disheartened the six remaining brothers that they gave up flying. The planes were dismantled, the engines boxed and the wings and propellers stored in the hay loft of the big barn where they had built their first craft. Parts of the famous planes are now in the possession of various members of the family.

Within a year, however, the brothers, who had lived with excitement most of their lives, had a new barnstorming idea— auto polo. Stripping down enough Fords to form two teams (with extras for replacements), they equipped them with huge steel frames that completely surrounded the car bodies. Each car had a driver and a mallet man. The driver guided the car through the fast and tricky maneuvers and the mallet man batted the ball.

For some time the brothers and their troupe traveled through the midwest, giving exhibitions. They advertised “at least two spills or your money back,” for every game. A heavy steel arch curving over the driver and mallet man’s heads protected them when the cars upset and rolled over.

The brothers were also musically gifted and on many a Sunday evening when they were at home neighbors from all around gathered at the big farm house to sing with the talented family and enjoy the social get- togethers. After the boys became nationally famous as “the flying Savidges from Nebraska,” there was less time for sociability, but the neighbors could still proudly say, “Oh yes, I knew the Savidge boys when …” Another famous early flyer from Holt County was Archie Hoxie. His father, Archibald Hoxie, a pioneer miller in Atkinson, lived on Main Street for several years. Young Archie went to school in Atkinson’s first brick schoolhouse until’ his father’s death. He and his mother then moved away and were not heard of again in Holt County until Alex Hart, a neighbor in whose yard the boy had often played, read in a paper that Archie Hoxie, well-known flyer, had been selected to take President Theodore Roosevelt up over St. Louis for a bird’s eye view of the World’s Fair grounds, near the end of the first decade of the twentieth centruy.

From then on the people of Atkinson were on the lookout for news of their onetime resident, by then nationally famous for his skill in the new profession of flying. All too soon, however, his plane plunged him to his death in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1910. Other daring young birdmen of his day were strongly of the opinion that he had run into a pocket of dead air and so had no control of his machine. At that time the use of planes was limited almost entirely to stunt flying for fairs and carnivals, for the general populace could as yer see no useful future for the new fad The pilots of that day knew little of the medium in which they operated— and probably the pilots of today would be the first to admit that there is still much to be learned. At any rate Archie Hoxie’s remains were cremated and his ashes sent “home” to Atkinson for burial in his father’s grave.

Crashes and other accidents were numerous in those days when men first took to the air. Naturally, passengers who dared to ride aloft in those early planes, frail and fragile as they seemed, were definitely of the adventurous type. One such was Mrs. R. O. Clifford, the first woman in Atkinson to take to the air. The date of her ride is not given but it took place “back in the barnstorming days,” and Edwin Stratton, a former Sandhill neighbor, was her pilot. The plane was the open cockpit kind— about all there was then.

Louise Tinsley Miller, granddaughter of Sanford Parker, one of Holt County’s early clerks, helped carry on the county’s preeminence in early day flying by becoming Nebraska’s first licensed girl pilot. At one time she also held the world’s record for barrel rolls in a plane, having successfully executed 312.

And finally, to bring the record up-to-date, in July, 1963, a United Air Lines jet had a strange experience directly over O’Neill. The jet, already flying high, ran into a line of midnight clouds and attempted to climb above them. But the air roughened and the nose of the plane pitched up uncontrollably, then the whole machine fell into a swift, slanting dive. As its speed passed the limit the airframe was designed to withstand, the controls 38 became “frozen” by the uprushing air.

The pilot then dared to slam on more power. It worked and the nose lifted enough for the controls to take hold. The plane pulled out of the terrific dive at 12,000 feet above ground— but fifty-nine terrified human beings had just fallen, in a plane completely out of control, a distance of five miles.* In August, 1974, Captain Eric “Andy” Anderson, co-pilot on the jet that night, paid O’Neill a bona fide visit. On vacation with his son, the Captain came from his Elmhurst, Illinois home to see the town he had almost fallen into. He said he would never forget O’Neill, Nebraska, for it was the lights of the town that gave him his first indication of/ their altitude, when the plane broke through the clouds that strange midnight.

Mention Father Flanagan anywhere in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, and people immediately think of a kindly priest and Boys Town. But doubtless few people, even in Holt County, know that he was once a resident of O’Neill.

Edward Flanagan’s story began on his father’s farm near Roscommon, Ireland, on July 18, 1886. A frail, sickly child, he surprised his family by growing up at all, let alone becoming the six feet plus, rawboned, craggy individual who founded the Town of Little Men. While he was a schoolboy in Ireland his sister Nellie and his brother Patrick, already a priest, had gone to America to make their homes. At graduation time Eddie’s family, concerned over the lad’s continued poor health and weak lungs, decided to send him to America too, in the hope his health would be better there.

In 1904, at the age of eighteen, the tall young man debarked in New York. His health did improve and that fall he entered college near Baltimore. But hard study and the cold winters aggravated his lung condition and prevented his graduation. He was next sent to his brother Patrick, who was pastoring a church in Omaha. There he rapidly regained his health and, in 1907, his church sent him to Rome to study. However the climate in the Eternal City was almost the worst possible for young Flanagan and, early in 1908, he was ordered back to Omaha at once, else he would die in Rome.

In the Nebraska city he again grew strong. For nearly a year he worked as a bookkeeper for the great Cudahy meat packing company. But all the while he yearned to take up his Readers Digest, March, 1965.

Doubleday & Co., Inc. New York, 1949, pp. 86-87 studies again and become a priest. His health completely recovered, the church then sent him to the Alps, to the University of Innsbruck. There, in the clear mountain air, he finished his courses and became a priest. A week after his return to Omaha in 1912 he was ordered to O’Neill, a village about two hundred miles northwest of Omaha.

Will and Fulton Oursler, in their book Father Flanagan of Boys Town,* wrote, “His first parish, as a curate, had a raucous and unruly history. It had been founded in the middle of the last century by an Irish rebel and adventurer, one John O’Neill, as a settlement of a restless and excitable group who called themselves the ‘Irish Colonization Society.’ “In earlier days it had been a typically lawless frontier town, barrooms, gambling halls and quick money. Justice was often a question of who managed to draw first. Brawls, thieving and gunplay had been a major part of the social activities of the community. But by the time Father Flanagan arrived the frontier town was vanished and O’Neill had long taken on the quiet respectability of a farming and cattle-raising area. Many eminent figures in Nebraska and national.life came from O’Neill. “There was a great deal of work for the tall young curate among cattle raisers whose homes were scattered over the most undeveloped section of the state. Parish calls, sick calls, administering the Last Sacrament, straightening out family quarrels, kept the new curate on the go eighteen hours a day. He would make his rounds in an open buggy, sometimes traveling thirty miles a day. In the winter months the snows piled up two or three feet deep . . . Sometimes his legs and arms would be nearly frozen.” His parishioners were good people. Their spiritual needs were simple. A new baby must be baptized, a grandfather buried, a boy and a girl married. The people of the parish grew very fond of their kindly, concerned young pastor, but they had barely gotten to know him well when, after only six months, he was transferred back to Omaha. His superiors had recognized his worth and all the world knows by now that he was the founder and builder of Boys Town, a monument that lives on after him.

The first years were difficult, but the priest persisted in his plan, not only to give homeless boys food and shelter but to teach them trades and skills and provide a well-rounded life for them. Sports were important, too, and music. The first Boys Town band was started in 1918, a year after the home was founded. By 1920 Father Flanagan was ready to take the boys on their first tour— a splendid means of advertising and promoting his project. During the 1920’s the band played in dozens of middlewestern cities and towns.

O’Neill was on the annual itinerary and the dates on which the band came to their county seat were big days for Holt. Not only did his former parishioners and friends have an opportunity to meet their beloved priest again but the band itself was an uncommon treat for the music loving people. Many looked forward to its appearance almost as eagerly as they did to Christmas and the Fourth of July. “It was one of the most enjoyable social events of the year,” wrote F. Roseler. “There was a very young boy who played the drums and sang beautifully. He had a happy, sunny personality and one could hear a pin drop when he was performing with the orchestra. The applause that followed was heart-warming.” Elja McCullough, teacher, superintendent, Dana College Dean of Women, and tour director.

Elja McCullough was another who holds a secure place in the hearts and memories of many still living today. Born in Crescent, Iowa, in 1892, she was the daughter of John Rankin McCullough, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian. The family was one of the first to homestead in Holt County southwest of Ewing. Elja went to school near her home, finished the eighth grade in Omaha and graduated from the Ewing high school in 1909. That same year, at seventeen, she began teaching in local rural schools, where she was affectionally known as “Miss Mac.” By 1920 she was qualified to teach in town and accepted the position of eighth grade teacher in Ewing.

39 ting the Educational Opportunity Program in O’Neill. Then, on August 2, she suffered a stroke, which took her life two weeks later. The pages of her Pleasant Life now live on in the memories of the many her philosophy guided and influenced.

She was buried beside her parents in the Ewing cemetery and the Chapter of the National Honor Society of Ewing high school was named in her honor in 1971. Though she traveled the world over, Miss Mac was always proud to call Holt County home, and Holt County in turn was proud to call her one of its very own. On the sports pages of its ledger, Holt County boasts some important names: Jack and Dan Sullivan and Frank Leahy. In point of time the Sullivan brothers came first. They were the sons of Mr. and Mrs. James Sullivan, who came to O’Neill with the Michiganders in the early settlement years. There were several James Sullivan families in and about O’Neill and this one was distinguished from the others by the name of “Shamus,” Gaelic for James. Shamus held the office of county clerk for a time and seven children, five of them boys, were born to the family. Only one, Jerry, ever married, and none of them drank or smoked. All, however, enjoyed playing cards.

As a teenager Jack would come to town and entertain the kids by turning splendid handsprings on the board walk in front of the First National Bank. The brothers all “natural athletes,” were good at all kinds of gym work, the rings, side horse and bar, as well as at wrestling arid boxing.

Although the available information does not say so, it is likely that one Domineck McCaffrey was a determining influence in the life of Jack Sullivan. Joseph McCaffrey, one of the nine sons of James and Ellen McCaffrey, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, married Elizabeth Kenna in 1878. On their wedding day they left for a homestead eighteen miles north of O’Neill. Later, they owned and operated a grocery store and hotel in Emmet, ten miles northwest of O’Neill.

Their son Emmet (whether or not he was named for the town or the town for him history does not say) related years later that his father’s brother, Domineck, moved his family to Holt County some time in the nineties. Domineck, said Emmet, was an amateur heavyweight fighter in the East who, after he turned professional, commanded high respect among sportsmen there.

When a “Widely heralded gent from San Francisco named James J. Corbett came East to conquer,” She rose rapidly in her chosen profession— two years as assistant to Anna Donohoe, county superintendent of schools, teacher in the Ewing high school, principal and then superintendent of the Ewing schools. Appointed to the office of superintendent of Holt County schools in 1937, she held the office for thirteen and one-half years. During that time she made 3,000 school visitations, covering 65,000 miles, and signed 2,550 diplomas, both eighth grade and high school. She sponsored study centers and correspondence work for Holt County, totaling nearly 4,000 college hours earned by teachers.

In 1950 she enrolled in Wayne State College in northeast Nebraska, where she received her Masters degree. Along with her other occupations, Miss Mac conducted twenty years of college credit tours which included Hawaii, Africa, India, Egypt, Europe, Alaska, Mexico, Cuba and Japan. She often remarked that she had ridden a camel, eaten a picnic lunch between the paws of the Sphinx, eaten with chopsticks, compared the sacred cows of India with the Herefords of Holt County and viewed wild animals in Africa. During the summer of 1966 she conducted the last of her many educational tours— through the country she loved best, Nebraska. Luciel LaRue, a teacher who studied and taught under Miss Mac, said her Nebraska tours were gold mines of home state history and were hugely enjoyed by all who took part. “And how she loved to visit about the accomplishments of ‘her boys and girls.’ She kept track of them and their contributions to society and was always pleased when they looked her up, or called from travel terminals in cities near her home.” Miss Mac summed up her fifty-two years of teaching by saying, “I love teaching, always have and always will. For one pound of knowledge one needs ten pounds of common sense to use it. You must know your subject matter, for you can’t teach what you don’t know any more than you can come back from a place you haven’t been. You must be dedicated.” And she often said, with a chuckle, “I’m partial to boys, but girls are special too.” It was said of Miss Mac by her students that “she didn’t give grades. You earned them.” Upon her retirement from Dana College, Blair, Nebraska, in 1966 Miss McCullough planned to spend her latter years writing a book she intended to title “I’ve Had a Pleasant Life.” This happy interlude in her busy life was to take place in the home she had built for herself in O’Neill some twenty years earlier. But first she devoted the summer weeks to direc-McCaffrey was matched with him in Brooklyn in 1891. Gentleman Jim evidently won the match, then went on to become the world’s heavyweight champion. After that Mc-Caffrey fought the “Boston Strong Man,” John L. Sullivan, World’s Champion, going four rounds with him. The decision was held up three days by the judges, Emmet said, then awarded to Sullivan who, the next year (1892), was defeated by Corbett in New Orleans.

It was shortly after that last fight that Domineck came to Holt County, where he said so little about his prowness in the ring that many people there never knew how high on the ladder he had been. He did not encourage his own sons and nephews to enter the ring, although he did occasionally put on an exhibition match with his brother Joseph, or some other strong man, for local celebrations. After a few years Domi-neck and his family returned to the East. But all of his life Emmet liked to remember his powerfully built uncle helping him in the hayfields where he labored as a lad.

Since Domineck was in Holt County in the early nineties when the big Sullivan boys were seeing what they could do in the ring, it is reasonable to assume that he gave them pointers and advice, and possibly set young Jack on the path he was to follow for a time. As the drouth and depression of the nineties deepened, the Sullivan boys watched their own crops burning up, along with everything else in the stricken land. After awhile, tired of eating cornmeal mush and milk for months on end, they decided to strike out for the copper mines in Butte, Montana.

In the copper town Jack soon found his way to the YMCA gymnasium and became a regular there. One evening, when a professional boxing match was scheduled and the boxer from Butte became too ill to appear in the ring, Jack was persuaded to take his place. He won the match— and that was the start of a new career. A man from Michigan, Stanley Ketchel, was winning fights in Butte at that time and a twenty round match was booked between him and Jack. At first Ketchel had Jack on the floor two or three times but he bounced back and, as the fight went on, seemed to get stronger and stronger. During the last three rounds Jack had his opponent on the mat several times and knocked out two of his teeth. Officially, the match was called a draw, but the sports writers called Jack the winner.

Ketchel, regarded by some as the greatest middleweight of all time, went to California and won the 40 championship in 1907. Jack followed him to California— and then chased him up and down the coast attempting to get a rematch. He also chased the boxer, Papke, from whom Ketchel won the crown, trying to book a fight with him. But Papke was as adroit as Ketchel in evading Sullivan. Jack did, however, manage a match with Jim Flynn, the only boxer who ever knocked out Dempsey. Flynn then beat Papke, after which Jack Sullivan beat Flynn. A few months later Flynn beat Ketchel.

During this time there were five Jack Sullivans in the boxing spotlight and a San Francisco sports writer set Jack Sullivan, formerly of O’Neill and Montana, apart by labeling him “Montana Jack.” There is no doubt that Montana Jack had a good chance to win the championship— if he could ever have caught up with either Papke or Ketchel.

It is interesting to note that Montana Jack never had a manager, which is why he is not listed in the official record book. He always said he couldn’t see why he should do the fighting, then give most of his winnings to a manager. Because he weighed about 156 pounds he could seldom get matches with middleweights, so for the most part had to take on heavyweights. He fought several times in Madison Square Garden and in other noted spots. One of his fights, still famous in Holt County, took place in Crawford, Nebraska, up in the northwest corner of the state. Quite a crowd from O’Neill went up there, that night in 1907, to see their man and a famous Negro fighter, Nat Dewey, fight to a forty-five round draw. Advertised as a twenty-five round match, it went on and on, all night some said, to the point where both men were equally exhausted. “There was a ton of money bet on that fight,” wrote Gene Leahy of Rushville, Nebraska. “My dad had $2,000 bet on Jack.” Two of the O’Neill boys, Jack and Charlie Mc-Kenna, did not see the end— they had to leave before it was over because they could not take the gore. Although he was a professional boxer, Jack Sullivan’s real profession, at least in later years, was that of electrician. In that capacity he wired, or helped wire, Old Faithful Inn and Wind Cave of Yellowstone Park. He was a handsome man, about six feet tall, dark, with black hair and a perfect set of teeth, the latter unusual in a fighter. Of himself, in a letter written from his home in Butte to Romaine Sauders for publication in the 1949 Diamond Jubilee edition of the Independent, Jack said: “My earliest recollection of our prairie home near O’Neill was a wilderness of wild flowers, the habitation of song birds. This early contact with bird life and floral bloom gave me a love of nature. The song of the birds brought daily inspiration, and if I felt any preference for the notes of one above another it was the sweet song of the bobolink.

“When we were growing up the national field trials for top ranking upland bird dogs were held annually in O’Neill. The event had all the earmarkings of a present day world series in baseball. Prairie chickens were abundant and the country almost as level as a billiard table, and the bunch grass made ideal cover for the birds.” Of the part of his life that made him famous he wrote modestly: “When I shoved off from O’Neill my wordly possessions consisted of a pair of elastic gaiter shoes, a suit of clothes that would never make the ads in Esquire, a railroad ticket to Butte and a fairly snappy left hook. The latter I found of inestimable value on the journey through life, where the going is rough and steep.” A boyhood friend, Don Gallagher, does better by him: A Tribute To Montana Jack An Old Irishman’s Salute to Jack Sullivan I turn and look down Memory Lane For the gamest guy all the way back And I raise my hat on my blackthorn cane In a salute to Montana Jack.

Only a kid, and at that rather light, They matched him to go, up the Black Hills Line, In a winner-take-all, forty-five round fight With a clever, colossal; Shine. His friends bet plenty on Jack to win, And though he was greatly outweighed, From the opening gong he waded in, And for forty-five rounds he stayed. Now some fellows quit when the going is tough, Some flop with a cheap alibi.

Few will fight on when the battle is rough, Fight on for their friends, or die. But Montana Jack would fight to the death He proved it at Crawford that night. There was courage to burn in his every breath He’s a hero in my spotlight.

I turn and look down Memory Lane For the gamest guy in the pack, And I raise my hat on my blackthorn cane In salute to Montana Jack All we have of Dan Sullivan, Jack’s younger brother, is this brief account: Dan Sullivan left home and traveled in Europe as a wrestler. In 1908 his brother, Montana Jack Sullivan, took him to the Olympics in Greece, where he was a contestant. Since contestants had to be bona fide amateurs to compete, the only other kids on the team were Ivy League school boys. They worked out every day on the ship.” Evidently Dan did not win any medals, but the fact that a town the size of O’Neill can state that one of its sons was a member of a U.S. Olympic team and competed at the games is something to be proud of.

We come now to the most famous of all O’Neill’s native sons, the great Frank Leahy, born in a small frame house at the corner of Fifth and Clay streets in 1907. He attended and graduated from high school in Winner, South Dakota, in 1925 and entered Notre Dame in the second semester of the 1926-27 school year. There he played football under the great Knute Rockne and graduated in 1931.

He coached football at Georgetown, Michigan State, Fordham and Boston College before being chosen as the 1941 coach and Athletic Director at Notre Dame. There he carved out a career unmatched in the nation, except by his old coach, Knute Rockne. And Frank’s record is possibly an even match with Rockne’s for Frank had no “set-ups.” Every opponent was “major,” while Notre Dame under the great Rockne at times had to fill a schedule with teams like Morning-side, Beloit or Creighton. During his two years at Fordham, as Line Coach, he produced the great line known as the “Rocks of Granite,” and one of his pupils, Vince Lombardi, later became the immortal coach of the Green Bay Packers in Pro-football. Frank’s record, however, is barely shaded by Rockne’s: In his thirteen years Rockne’s was .897; Frank’s, also for thirteen years, .892. While both are venerated by sports fans, there are many who claim that Frank was every bit the equal of the great Rockne. He is, of course, a member of the Football Hall of Fame and any mention of football with regard to great coaches would be sacreligious without the name of Frank Leahy at the top.

Tragically, the great Leahy has now been a victim of chronic leukemia for nearly a decade, and has spinal arthritis so severely that he can walk but a few steps at a time. He lives in Oswego, Oregon, but travels out of San Jose, California, for Canteen Corporation as assistant to the company president. Although in constant pain he makes numerous trips to fulfill speaking engagements, constantly warning his audiences against the shocking progress Communism has made in the United States and urging 41 over.” Bill was overjoyed and set out at once, with a string of cow ponies, for Ewing, which he could not find on any map. The ranch was on Goose Lake, southwest of the little town. Its capable foreman, Frank C. Heinz, employed only skilled hands, so feared the worst when told that the son of the new Chicago owner was coming to take over.

Not only Heinz but the other hands soon changed their minds. Young Bill was as western as any of them, and proved it by leading his pack of cowboys on a wild race through Ewing, one Saturday night, firing shots into the air. He was, without a doubt, as hard riding and hard drinking a cowboy as any of them. Baseball was the most popular local sport and Bill quickly put together a team of his own. He hauled the players to games in a four-bronc lumber wagon, handling the reins himself. The rides were wild and rough and when they came to a turn in the road Bill bellowed to his men to lean to the inside to keep the wagon from rol * ling.

Big Bill built a huge stone house, known as the “Headquarters,” on the ranch and kept if filled with vacationing friends and hunters from Chicago. The house still stands today, a monument to “high society.” Its inner hall walls are of solid concrete, a foot thick throughout, running the full length of the house, supporting the walls of the big rooms, each with its own fireplace, the great ballroom on the third floor and the heavy grey slate roof. Among the many guests who enjoyed the hospitality of Big Bill Thompson was Florenz Ziegfeld, later the great American theatrical producer. During his second summer at the ranch Billie had trouble hiring enough extra hands, so hired some away from a neighboring ranchman, John Carr. Carr attempted to get even by circulating a story that Thompson had lured the men to his place by importing a bevy of prostitutes from Omaha and maintaining them in the bunk house during haying season. This made Billie furious and the next time he met Carr in a Ewing saloon he lit into him for spreading the false story. Carr reached for his gun and Thompson hurled a whiskey bottle at him, then knocked him to the floor with a well aimed punch.

Carr’s men charged Billie but he retreated to a pool table, grabbed a cue stick and flailed away, knocking out two or three more men. The “fight” suddenly went out of the rest and the battle was over. There was no further trouble with Carr.

Despite the high jinks Billie tended them to wake up and fight the fire before it is too late.

The remaining personages listed in Holt County’s Who’s Who are like the colorful pieces of a kaleidoscope pattern. The only thing they have in common is their part in the history of the big commonwealth.

First comes Big Bill Thompson, one time mayor of Chicago. Born in 1867 on Boston’s fashionable Beacon Street, he was the son of William Hale and Medora (Gale) Thompson and his full name was William Hale Thompson, Jr. On his father’s side he was descended from Robert Thompson, an Englishman who emigrated to New England in 1700 and became famous for his prowness as an Indian fighter. He acquired great landholdings and was a rich and respected citizen. William Thompson Sr., a wealthy Boston merchant, while serving as a staff officer under Admiral David Farragut during the Civil War, married Medora Gale, member of a rich pioneer family in Chicago. A year after young Bill was born the family moved to the booming young city of Chicago and began the erection of the Thompson Block on West Madison Street. Shortly after its completion the great Chicago fire of 1871 devastated much of the city. Thompson’s buildings were not damaged and he collected premium rentals from his property, but also helped with welfare and with the rebuilding of the burned areas. He was elected as a Republican to the state legislature in 1877.

With this background it was reasonable to expect that young Bill would continue on at. the select Charles Fressenden Preparatory school in Chicago, where his father enrolled him. But at the age of fourteen tall, noisy, high-spirited Billie rebelled and talked his parents into letting him strike out for himself in the West. And so it was that, in 1881, the rambunctious young six-footer boarded the caboose of an empty cattle train and rode west to Cheyenne, the mecca of his dreams.

He got a job on the “101” ranch, helping the cook on the range roundup. He quickly learned the ways of the range but, when winter came, he reluctantly kept his promise to his father and returned to Chicago for three months of schooling. For the next six years he went home each winter for that three months of schooling and spent the rest of each year in the West he loved.

He was in Cheyenne in the spring of 1888 when he was handed a telegram from his father, “Bought ranch at Ewing, Nebraska. You take to business, buying and selling cattle and generally doing a good job. At the end of three years he had turned a $30,000 profit on the 3,800 acre ranch. He had bought well-bred Herefords and built up his herds, improved the ranch facilities and greatly increased hay and corn yields. Had he been allowed to stay, it is impossible to predict what his influence in Holt County would have been As Stanley J. Lambert observed, “Perhaps Chambers would have become the wettest town in the county, maybe the still flourishing Betheny Presbyterian Church would have been “done in” by its riotous surroundings— and maybe Chicago would have been spared twelve years of his flambouyant maladministration as mayor.” For the joyous ranch phase of young Thompson’s life ended abruptly when his father died in 1891 and he returned to Chicago for the funeral. There his mother persuaded him to stay on to take care of the family millions and Hoit County saw him no more. In 1910 the ranch was sold to Joe Fisher, a Ewing banker. Although the Fisher family owned it for more than half a century it was still known as “the Thompson ranch.” In Chicago, although, in his refined mother’s opinion, “Billie talked too loudly, rolled his own cigarettes, sometimes cursed and was awkward in the company of young ladies,” he was invited to join the Chicago Athletic Club. When asked by the club’s water polo coach about his swimming, he replied “I haven’t swam much lately as there isn’t much water in Goose Lake.” He went on from there to build up an amazing career as an all-star athlete. He also had a taste for politics, became an Aiderman and finally Mayor of Chicago. While he was mayor H. J. (Dick) Porter, a player on his old Holt County baseball team, made a trip to Chicago and dropped in at City Hall to see Big Bill. The receptionist told him the mayor was busy and couldn’t see him. “Tell him that Dick Porter from Chambers, Nebraska, is here,” Dick insisted. “Show him in,” ordered the mayor and, cancelling all other appointments for the day, the two old friends had a good visit.

During each of his campaigns Bill promised to run all the crooks out of town in ninety days, but didn’t get around to it after he was elected. He did, however, work hard for street improvement, new city parks and aid and improvements in the poorer sections of the city. Through his influence Chicago saloons were clos- *Some of the Holt Counttans who played on Bill Thompson’s team were: Frank Urban, Dick Porter, Judd Hertel, Bob Starr, Elmer Gibson, Bob LaRue Dan Perkins and John McClenahan.

42 ed on Sundays, causing Billie Sunday to remark, “I can imagine the howl when that news reaches Hell.” In 1918 he spoke bitterly against sending U. S. troops to fight in Europe, for which his enemies dubbed him “Kaiser Bill.” Defeated for a third term as mayor, he bided his time and ran again in 1928. Of the two candidates in the race Scarface Al Capone decided that Big Bill would be least apt to bother him and his rackets, so poured thousands of dollars into his campaign and helped elect him. When the Capone gang murdered seven members of the “Bugs” Moran outfit on Valentine’s day, 1928, Bill seemed little concerned. Although he ran for mayor twice more he was defeated. A feeble attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois was also a dismal failure. He died in 1939, leaving an estate of more than $2,000,000. Two portions of the world will long remember Big Bill Thompson Chicago and Holt County. William J. Froelich O’Neill still boasts among its citizens William J. Froelich, surely the World’s Champion Long Distance Commuter. It is approximately 650 miles from O’Neill to Chicago and Froelich has traveled it almost every weekend since the mid-thirties. For forty years he has driven by car to Sioux City, Iowa, to take the train to Chicago, then reverses the procedure to come home at week’s end.

Bill Froelich came up the hard way. Of German-Irish parentage, he was born in Stromsburg, Nebraska. The family moved to a farm near Inman when Bill was a baby. Four years later they moved to O’Neill, where the elder Froelich went into the hay and grain business. Bill attended St. Mary’s Academy and O’Neill high school, graduating in 1918. Intending to be a medical doctor, he enrolled for a pre-med course at the University of Nebraska, decided after one year that his destiny lay elsewhere and went back to O’Neill. He spent the next eighteen months clerking in a store and, in the summer, selling school textbooks. Then Monsignor Cassidy of St. Patrick’s Church urged him to go on to school. This time he chose law and selected Georgetown University of Washington D. C. as his alma mater.

In the fall of 1922 he set out for the Capital City on a hog train. He had $150 in his pocket when he took the bus in Buffalo, New York, for the last leg of his journey. He was fortunate in getting a job in the Senate post office which paid $150 a month. During his second year Senator Norris of Nebraska named him as clerk of the Senate Agriculture Committee, at $200 a month. He stayed on as clerk during the remainder of his study at Georgetown, finishing among the top three in a class of nearly one hundred and fifty.

He finished school in June, 1926, and, following the advice of Senator Norris, took the Nebraska bar examination in early July and was named Assistant U. S. District Attorney in Omaha on July 15. His monthly salary was $165, a sum he considered adequate to support a wife. Accordingly he and his hometown sweetheart, Irma Stout, were married a week later.

Those were prohibition days and the young attorney soon found himself specializing in the prosecution of liquor and narcotics cases. His talent for turning up evidence and for thoroughness soon attracted attention. A fearless fighter, he handled dozens of cases and lost very few. After two years in Omaha Froelich joined the Attorney General’s staff in Washington D. C., and became a member of the famous “Secret Six” assigned to prosecute the nation’s most notorious cases.

In this role he prosecuted Helen Morgan and Texas Guinan, famous night club personalities, and handled the reindictment of ex-Governor Sidney J. Catts, Sr., of Florida. President Hoover personally appointed him to represent the Department of Justice in its all-out war against Chicago crime, where Al Capone was king. There O’Neill’s Bill Foelich won fame as the man who brought the top gangster to his knees and put him behind bars. Mr. Froelich then resigned from the Department of Justice and for a time was assistant to a Mr. Green, United States Attorney of Chicago. Some time during his career he helped in setting up the FDIC, guaranteeing bank deposits. In 1933 he ended his Washington government connections and set up in private law practice in Chicago. As with so many other O’Neillites, the Holt County town was still “home,” and Mr. and Mrs. Froelich wanted to live there. “We wanted our children to grow up in a small town environment,” they said. “Besides we have our relatives and friends here.” And so Bill Froelich began commuting to Chicago by way of the Milwaukee railroad. A Chicago friend couldn’t understand why the attorney chose to live so far from his job, but after visiting the Froelich home in O’Neill he couldn’t understand why he ever left it.

In addition to his Chicago business and practice, Bill Froelich owns a seven thousand acre Nebraska ranch and various other Nebraska properties. Quite a galaxy of other men, and women, had their start in Holt County before going on to make names for themselves in other parts of the world. There was Miss Mary Mullen, sister of Arthur, an attorney in her own right, who served many years as clerk of the Federal District Court in Omaha. There was John McHugh who worked as an O’Neill telegrapher in his youth, became a banker there, and then went on to New York to become president of the Chase National Bank, second largest bank in the nation. He attained his high office in 1926 and held it until 1934, being both president and chairman of the board of directors at his retirement. There was Tom Kearns, younger brother of the martyred Holt County sheriff, Barney Kearns. Tommy went west and became a Senator, a millionaire, a newspaper publisher and Ambassador to Austria. Mullen, in his book Western Democrat, relates how the posse that captured Reed, the cowboy who killed Barney, gave the boy, Tom, a Winchester and “bade him kill his brother’s slayer. But young Tom looked at the man, bound hand and foot, and said ‘I can’t kill a man this way.’ “* Tom left O’Neill about 1889, on eighteen dollars borrowed from Judge Kinkaid. He landed in Salt Lake City, went into partnership with three other men, prospecting in the mountains, and on Easter Sunday, 1890, uncovered a rich silver mine. He became wealthy, stated Mullen, was elected a U. S. Senator from Utah and was able to lose $7,000,000 on a judgment without going broke.** There was Tom Berry, who grew up on a farm north of O’Neill and later went up into South Dakota and became governor of the state. And James A. Donohoe, born on a farm six *Mullen. p. 26 **lbid. p. 42 43 to do that and she did not want to hurt her feelings.

The problem was that May loved to read “and that took up her time.” Therefore helping May was a formidable job. Every dish, pot and pan in the house was dirty, caked with ancient accumulations of grease and dried food. Chips and bark from her fuel were six inches deep on the floor. Dorothy began at once to wash dishes. Food was no problem. May always had plenty to cook and do with. When the dinner was ready they carried it and the clean dishes to Will’s house, which was in much better shape, set the fable and fed the men there.

One morning Dorothy was called to May’s house. Poor May had had a stroke and was in bed with all her dogs around her. Her hair straggled lankly about her slack face and the dogs would not let anyone touch their sick mistress. Dorothy called another neighbor in and their decision was to take May to the hospital. They called the ambulance, and while a farm worker caught the dogs and shut them in an outside building, Dorothy, the neighbor and, later, the ambulance driver, George Hammond, “moved and moved, frying to clear a way through .the clutter so they could get the stretcher through the house to the bedside.” After some time in the hospital, May was well enough to be transferred to a nursing home for care; “but she was a wonderful person in her way,” neighbor Dorothy concluded.

John Liddy, a former U. S. Army soldier who celebrated his ninety- third birthday in 1917, was the second “character.” John came from Ireland to Michigan at the age of twenty-one. He was a member of the first party of men to reach the Custer battlefield on the Little Big Horn in 1876 and was later stationed at Fort Randall for six years. During all of that time he hauled water from the Missouri River to the fort with six head of mules. Some would say that would be enough to mark any man.

The thing that struck his neighbors was his great admiration for himself. When he was ninety years old he would still look in his mirrow and tell himself, “John Liddy, you are a fine looking man, and a pretty good man yet, too.” Many of the foregoing have stood tall for their courage, strength, fortitude and persistence, but none stands taller then Donne Moe Fuhrer who, in her troubled life, showed more of these traits then all the others in this chopter.

Donna Mae was born in 1932 to Edgar and Anne Fuhrer at Butte. The family moved to rural O’Neill when miles from O’Neill, who become Federal District Judge in Omaha; and his brother Owen, a prominent Detroit attorney. Another O’Neillite was Bernard Boyle, National Democratic Com-mitteeman from 1952 to 1964. Boyle attained his most notable success as fund raiser for his party by the creation of the Century Club and numerous other devices for coaxing money out of the pockets of the party faithful.

W. E. Meals lived in O’Neill between the ages of five and thirteen. His family came from northern Missouri to Atkinson in 1885, and on to O’Neill two years later. From there they moved to San Diego in 1893, where W. E. later became a metallurgical plant designer. His work took him to Nevada, Montana, Arizona, New York, Alaska, Canada, Mexioc, Cuba, Bolivia, Chile, London, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Sarha Hull has a part in this chapter for an unusual reason— her age. She came to Holt County from Iowa in 1879 in a covered wagon, covering three hundred and fifty miles in twelve days and enduring a blizzard on the way. With her husband, two small sons, a team of horses, bad colds and eighty dollars in cash, they pulled onto their homestead. When Sarah died in O’Neill in 1964 she was one hundred and eight years old, the greatest age ever attained by anyone in Holt County.

Every community has its “characters,” and Holt County had at least two who stood out from their fellows. One was May McGowan. May came from Minnesota in the early days with her farmer parents, Mr. and Mrs. George McGowan, She exhibited a great love for flowers, and for dogs and cats, as she grew up on the family farm, often having as many as ten cats and seven or eight dogs about her.

The McGowans also had a hired man, Will Harvey, who lived with them for quite a few years. When the parents died Will stayed on, living in a small house near the main farm house. May had a parrot by then, and the names of some of her dogs were Groundhog, Shirley, Fido and the like. She always went barefoot, except in the winter time when she wore a pair of men’s overshoes. When May and Will went anywhere in the car he drove and she rode in the back seat. On one occasion her neighbor, Dorothy Devall, went to May’s house to help her cook for threshers. Dorothy would much rather have taken the threshers to her own house for dinner, as she was familiar with May’s housekeeping, or lack of it, and knew what to expect. But, she said, she knew May wouldn’t have wanted her Donna Mae Fuhrer with her tutor Mrs. Clay (Elsie) Johnson, Sr. she was three and she entered kindergarten at the age of five, a normal, healthy child. In May of 1940 she was stricken with osteomyelitis, and in the fall, two days after her eighth birthday, she fell a victim to polio, which destined her to spend thirty-three years in bed.

After five years of hospitalization and therapy, at the age of thirteen she came home to live with her parents and sister. Holt County Superintendent of Schools, the beloved Elja McCullough, arranged that different teachers, Phyllis Johnson, Twila Hicks and Mrs. Clay Johnson, Sr., help with Donna’s education at her bedside. At the Rural Eighth Grade Graduation exercises, Donna Mae took part in the program by singing “Galway Bay” from her cot on the stage.

Miss Mac next persuaded radio station WNAX, Yankton, South Dakota, to send “The Neighbor Lady,” Mrs. Wynn Speece, with a crew and a photographer to Donna’s home. As a result the bedfast girl became famous. Governor Val Peterson and many celebrities sent telegrams. She was even honored on Ted Malone’s ABC radio program from New York.

After her graduation her parents encouraged her to take up oil painting. She held her brush in her teeth and became quite proficient. Elsie Peter Adair was her teacher. After the way of small towns, many turned to help Donna in every possible way. Over the years she came to have a host of pen pals. A bevy of friends and relatives were kept busy keeping up her end of the correspondence. On all special occasions the townspeople helped her celebrate and every year the Alpha Club put on a big birthday party for her.

Just after the middle of January, 1974, Donna fell ill with chicken pox. When her condition worsened she was taken to St. Anthony’s hospital, where her brave life came to an end on January 24. Donna Mae’s courage in the face of her affliction and helplessness had brought out the best in those who knew her.

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