Chapter 31: Stafford Through The Years

Stafford Through The Years Chapter Thirty-One Stafford, once a convenient trading point on the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad, was some eight miles northwest of Ewing. According to historian Sarah O'Donnell Michaelis, no records of the little town can be found. She presumes that her grandfather, Dan O'Donnell, must have had a good deal to do with locating and platting the village, as the original map or plat of the place was found among his books and other effects at the time of his death. Mr. O'Donnell named the town in honor of his friend, Mike Stafford, first roadmaster on the railroad out of Norfolk.

Mr. O'Donnell built and operated the first store in the town, which also boasted a stockyards and scales (for it was centered in the great hay and cattle country of southeastern Holt County). There was a post office, of course, and a blacksmith shop. The later operated by Swedish born Peter Walstrom, who also mended shoes and wove rugs. In the early days there were three big hay barns in Stafford. Of the two located on the east side of town, one belonged to Watson of Inman, the other to Golden of O'Neill. The hay office, managed by Albert Hopkins, stood near these barns. The third barn, on the far west side of town, belonged to John Carr. The depot stood just west of the hay office. From a large wooden platform in front of the depot numerous passengers and dozens of cream cans left town on the six daily passenger trains, three each way. Returning, or arriving, passengers and empty cream cans were unloaded onto the same platform. A like number of freight trains, three each way, twenty-five to thirty-five cars to a train, hauled hay, cattle and other produce out of town and supplies into town. In hay shipping season one to three extra freights also departed the little station daily.

A "fair-sized" building in the southeast part of town housed the thirty- five or more students who came to school in Stafford, traveling by team and buggy, on horseback or on foot. Sunday school, church and community activities took place in the schoolhouse, too, except for Catholic Mass which was celebrated in Peter Ryan's home until the Stafford church was built.

When all-weather highways replaced the early dirt roads, cattle and hay began to be trucked out of the valley and its residents drove to larger towns to shop. Within a few short years Stafford had dwindled to the status of a ghost town.

Only four family histories, naming Stafford as post office and trading point, came in— those of the Carney, Moor, Morgan and Brittell households. John Carney and his wife, Susan Boyle Carney, came in 1878 or 1879, ahead of the town which was probably founded by Mr. O'Donnell about 1881 or 1882. The Carney homestead was a little southwest of the later location of the town. The Carneys, born in Ireland, migrated to Philadelphia. Three of their six children were born there, three more on the homestead. When Mrs. Carney died in 1901 her youngest son, Patrick, was only five years old. The Carneys then moved to a place at old Frenchtown. Later, when the older children were grown and gone, Patrick and his father moved north of Inman, where the boy, at twelve years of age, worked for the Gallaghers and other ranchers and farmers of the Inman area.

The period he spent with Jim and Mary O'Donnell seems to have been the most memorable of his early years. "Jim, being mechanically inclined," he wrote, "rigged up a kerosene light on the front of the boat we used on the Elkhorn. With a tin reflector behind it, this light would shoot out a long way ahead of our boat. During the season when the river was open a bunch of young fellows would gather at O'Donnell's in the evenings. We'd take our boat by team and wagon to the Marley bridge. Generally it was Jim and I that went down the river, spearing fish by our headlight, until we reached O'Donnell's Lake. George Keefer and Tom Hartigan used to come down, too, with a tramble net and a seine and get a lot of fish. Some people around there fed wagon loads of non-game fish to their hogs. "We had a good baseball team, too. We called ourselves the 'River Rats.' In our lineup was Rupert Ark- feld, Jim Gallagher, Eddie Boyle, Lyman Arkfeld, Hugh Bittner, Henry Fowler, Delbert Sholes, Lafe Tague and myself." In 1915 Pat left Holt County for Norfolk, where he worked at various jobs until he went into the Army during the first world war. After his discharge in 1919 he worked on the railroad until he retired in Norfolk, where he now lives.

George Ezra Moor, born in 1872, at nine years of age came with his parents from Indiana to a homestead about four miles southwest of Stafford. The mother, Frances Moor, died soon afterward and was among the first of those buried at Inman. She left her husband George, five sons and a daughter.

Ground for the trees on the Moor timber claim, south of their home, was broken with a team of oxen and the lumber for the house was hauled from Neligh by the same means. In 1894 young George married Margaret Alice Davis, a teacher in the Ewing school, and took her to live on the original homestead, the family home for a total of sixty-four years. George and Margaret had three children, William, Evadna and Lois. This ranch is now owned-operated by the Walter Fick family.

John Morgan, born in County Ros-common, Ireland, in 1840, married Catherine Fallon in 1867 or 1868. Catherine, a little girl during one of the terrible famines of Ireland, had stood on the banks of the Shannon River, watching an American ship sail toward Athlone, bringing food from that great land across the sea. She resolved, then and there, that one day she would go to that land herself. Catherine was unable to fulfill that promise to herself for many years, for she married before she was sixteen and set about raising a family. In the meantime her sister, Mary Fallon married Patrick McGrane and went to live in Boston. When Catherine's oldest son, Andrew, was old enough to strike out for himself, Mary McGrane who, by now, with her husband had settled on a farm southeast of Inman, sent him transportation money to her Holt County home.

From then on Catherine gave her husband no peace until the rest of the family arrived in Holt County in 1887. The parents and six children came to America on the steamship Rome, and to Stafford by train, arriving only a short time before the youngest son, Peter, was born in September. The family was living in a sod house when the blizzard of '88 descended upon them the following January. John, the father, was choring at the barn when the storm swooped across the prairie. He made it to the house only because Catherine stood in the doorway of the home, ringing a cowbell with all her might.

The family moved to the Drake ranch in 1894. This was later the Lee and Prentice ranch, and finally the Lee ranch. Six years later John and Catherine Morgan bought the Patrick McDonald farm, west of Atkinson. One of the sons, Joseph, earned his law degree at the University of Nebraska in 1900, and eventually became the Justice of Arizona. Another son, William, in 1914 married Mary Catherine Bauman and built a new home across the road from his family. Their first car was a "seven seater" Reo which, along with a Model T, served the two families until 1929. Peter, the youngest son, married Lily Golden in 1926, farming in the Atkinson-O'Neill vicinity for many years.

Catherine died in 1931, after nearly forty-five years in the good land of her childhood dreams. A strong willed woman all her life, she must also have been a striking looking woman. After her death a relative who had known her when she was young, looked closely at her twenty-one- year-old granddaughter and remarked. "She's a good looking girl but she can't hold a candle to her grandmother." Vera Brittell Morsbach, who wrote the Brittell family history, records that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Brittell located on a farm a mile and a half southwest of Stafford in the summer of 1920. The rugged pioneer days were history by then, but living conditions were far from modern. "The weeds and grass had grown high," Vera wrote, "and we could hardly walk for stepping on toads and frogs. Dad soon cleaned up the outside and Mother made the inside ready for our large family. A girl from Ewing helped out for awhile, for Mother's thirteenth child was born that August." When Vera first went into the little town, that same summer, there were two stores, the post office, Catholic church, school, hay office, two hay barns, depot, stockyards, section house and the same old blacksmith shop— with the shoe shop and the rug loom. There were only two or three homes, and that was the town— some forty years after its founding. Mr. Brittell had been a butcher in O'Neill before moving to the farm near Stafford. He continued the butcher trade. In the winters, when he could keep the meat longer, he peddled it, by team and buggy, to Stafford, Inman and Page. In the summer he delivered the freshly butchered meat to hay and harvest crews.

"Mother baked bread every other day," Vera remembered, "big ovens full, and we broke it into chunks and smothered it with fresh churned butter. I remember the many little picnics we had in the garden with the fresh bread and butter, and the green onions we pulled to complete our lunch. On the Fourth of July we had relatives come for a picnic in the yard and we made ice cream with ice that Dad put up in an ice house he dug in the side of a hill. The pond was close by.

"Dad always did the Christmas shopping. One time he took us three girls to Inman with him to do the shopping— but we stayed all the time in Mrs. Goree's store. Inman was quite a bit bigger than Stafford and we were afraid we'd get lost if we ventured outside. One thing— each of us was supposed to remember our own shoe size, which I'm afraid crippled me for life as my memory was poor.

"We had one room in our house (the parlor) that was used only when we had company. We didn't have company very often, and it seemed to me we needed that room for everyday family living. My brother enclosed a sled with a cardboard covering and we surely enjoyed the comfort of that covered sled for our 284 trips to school.

"For entertainment we used to draw designs in the thick frost on the window panes with thimbles on our fingers. And our grandmother gave us an old Edison talking machine. For a few nights we were allowed to stay up late, taking turns winding up the phonograph and listening to the records.

"One time Marva Conard, my niece, came to stay a few days with us. We were about the same age and were always thinking up new things to do. One day my older brother caught us just as we were about to hitch a horse to a rig and take a ride. He scolded us something awful. That horse, he said, was a runaway pony and would have strung us out for sure.

"One day Dad was called to pull a couple of young fellows out of a mud hole they were stuck in. They were driving an old Oakland and had a couple of girls with them. Later one of those fellows became my husband. He was working across the hills about five miles from our place at the time, but I didn't meet him until we moved into Inman in 1927.

"I remember one season when my mother had to put up twelve lunches every day. Six were for school, three were for our men working on hay balers, two were for my brothers working on the section, and one for our boarder, Gerald Butterfield. The house we lived in at Stafford burned down sometime after we moved away in 1927." The story of Inman, how it was settled and named, has already been told in the first chapter of Before Today. Shortly after William Inman had settled on what later became the Chas. Boyle place, the Judd family also halted their wagons on the land later to be known as the Gannon farm. The Judd log cabin still stands. The parents were William and Sarah Judd. Alvere C. Judd, the youngest of their thirteen children, was born in 1864 in Iowa and was nine years of age when the family came to Inman. The move was made to improve the health of one of the children and Alvere, known as Al, stated that his parents did not think the barren prairie land would ever be worth much, so claimed only one quarter. Al, however, lived to see the land become the green and fertile expanse it is today.

As a young man Al freighted with oxen from Norfolk to the west and worked as section foreman when the railroad built through Antelope and Holt counties a decade later. A member of the schoolboard in the early 'nineties, he attended a school meeting at the Conard home in Inman, and there met Ellie Conard. He and Ellie were married in December, 1893, at Inman by the Rev. Dela-mater. Ellie's parents, Catherine and Daniel Conard, were Pennsylvania Dutch. They had lived in Pennsylvania and in Minnesota before coming to Holt County where they had heard the land was level and free of rocks. Five children were born to Al and Ellie and Al supported his family by doing masonry work and by operating a shoe shop in Inman. "Many families were as hard up as we were," wrote their daughter Lucy, "and some were worse, but we owned our little home and we never went hungry. The harder times were, the more work my father had, as people had to have their shoes fixed instead of buying new ones. Our vacation was a week at the country home of our aunt and uncle who lived at Ewing. They came for us with a horse and buggy, and brought us home the same way.

"Grandma Clark was our first postmaster. She always sent each of us a beautiful card at Christmas, Easter and other holidays. Otherwise we received no mail. Just the same, as we grew older we always met the trains, then rushed to the post office to wait for a letter, which never came because we knew no one outside of Inman.

"Each night our family gathered around the table for family worship. Then my father and sister Mary, who who had very good voices, would sing together. Dad played the voilin, too, and he could really make a Jews harp ring. Later we had a bell-horned phonograph and Dad made a recorder and a 'shaner.' We used to make our own records, then 'shone' them off and start over. We were very proud when we learned that Inman was the largest hay shipping point in the world.

"The first car in Inman, a White Steamer, belonged to Ed Clark. I had Baling from the stack, 1920. Elwin Smith on stack. Bill Stevens feeding. Lew Morris tying. Courtesy C. Elwin Smith. my first ride in that car when I was a pallbearer for a young friend, Amelia Colman, and Mr. Clark took us to the cemetery in it. The church played an important part in my life. I taught a Sunday school class of little boys, not much younger than myself.

"I think the high light of my life was when, at the age of sixteen, I was voted the most popular girl in Inman. I still treasure the diamond ring I was given then. When I graduated from high school in 1917 my beloved teacher, Nora Hayes Harte, had me stay in town as the sand ditch south of Inman had overflowed and she was afraid I wouldn't be able to get in for the exercises that night." Al and Ellie lived in Inman until 1928, then moved to Neligh and continued to run the shoe shop until Al's death in 1942. Lucy writes that all four of her grandparents, the Judds and the Conards, are buried in Inman, and her grandfather Judd's marker bears the earliest date in the cemetery, 1881. Lucy Judd married William Schwinck in 1926. Lucy, who has lived her entire life within thirty miles of Inman, now lives at Neligh.

George Geary, the son of Daniel Geary, was born in England in 1854. He was twelve when his parents brought him to America in 1866. He remembered that many of the passengers on the sailing vessel were Mormons, who spent the winter at Omaha before continuing on to Salt Lake City.

The Gearys came by rail to St. Joseph, then took passage on a river boat to Omaha, where they, too, spent the winter. The next spring they homesteaded a hilly quarter of land near Herman, Nebraska, and George and his father dug wells for the surrounding settlers. They were overjoyed when a neighbor offered them a milk cow for "peeling" a thousand poles. Later George worked for a 285 neighbor who had formerly hauled freight to Denver and to the Black Hills.

He next worked for a Dr. Rice of Logan, Iowa. The doctor had a fine herd of Shorthorn cattle and George became interested in good livestock. Hoping to own a herd of his own someday, he came to the future site of Inman in the late 'seventies and filed on a timber claim and a homestead nearby. His sister, Lizzie, filed on another quarter, which she later sold to George.

The young man then went to South Omaha, bought a band of ewes and walked them all the way home to his homestead. He soon added a small herd of cattle and began to prosper. In 1879 he married Sarah Bovee, a New England lass of Washington County, Nebraska. A daughter, Jessie, was born and Sarah died in 1881. Seven years later George married Anna Babcock. Four sons were born to them before Anna passed away in 1903. The following year he married Mary Etta Hopkins in Columbus, Indiana.

The Gearys were well-known for their fine Poland China hogs, Perch- eron horses and Shorthorn cattle. For his horses George built a barn that would stall twenty-two head.

George died on February 12, 1936, on a day when the temperature stood at twenty degrees below zero. With the help of neighbors and friends, Biglin's mortuary was able to get over the roads to pick up the body. However, the winds blew so strong and steadily that snow closed the roads as fast as they were opened and they were unable to hold the funeral until ten days later, February 22, when the weather had warmed up to eight degrees below zero.

Several of the Geary children and grandchildren still live in Holt County. William Harte was born in Ireland in 1846. He married Elizabeth Lynch on May 21, 1865, and left with her for America the same day. They lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for twelve years, then moved to Holt County in March, 1878.

There was no town of Inman when the Hartes stopped their wagon on the prairie on the north bank of the Elkhorn River and decided to make their home there. No trees either, just empty miles of grassy land. The railroad ended at Wisner at that time and all mail and supplies for points everywhere north and west came by stagecoach and freight wagon. Mail for anyone living out in that area was left at Harte's place by the stage driver or by freighters. By 1880 Mr. Harte had become the appointed postmaster of Harte, Nebraska. In 1910 Mr. and Mrs. Harte moved to California, stayed for seven years, then came back to Holt County and made their home in O'Neill. Their sons, Harry, Bill and Jim, grew up and stayed on in the Inman community. Harry and his wife, Nora, lived on the homestead for many years.

Bill Harte married Mayme Gallagher. Harry married Nora Hayes of Atkinson. Jim married Ruth Donnelly. Mary joined the Mercy order and taught school in Omaha for most of her life. Sadie took care of her parents until they passed away, Mr. Harte in 1921 and Mrs. Harte in 1930, then went to Omaha, and from there to California.

John Morsbach and his eight-year- old son Charles pulled in at the Harte homestead later that year of 1878. From there Morsbach looked the country over and decided to take land somewhere nearby. Leaving Charles with a Mr. and Mrs. Bert Laney who lived on north a few miles, he returned to Iowa and brought the rest of his family to Holt County.

The party that made the trip by covered wagon consisted of Sarah Morsbach and children and a Mr. Riley, brother of Sarah, and his wife and children. The wagons were so loaded with furniture that Jane and Abbie Riley had to take turns walking behind the wagon. The Morsbach homestead was five or six miles south of Inman.

In 1880, when Charles was ten years old, he planted the first tree in the newly established town of Inman. The cottonwood tree now measuring over 16 feet in diameter is still living Atkinson t T O ( YANKTON M M avinia 1t Pierce Deloit NW cssup oGlenalpin !— Ogden ,Warren GillesP sel oakdale Santee Oto / Hersic Stuart s Walnut Grove 7 . sBazil e Mills Veey yr 0.

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Plainveiw 286 and growing beside the Inman hardware store, ninety-six years later. John, too, helped throw up the grade for the railroad as it pushed westward through Holt County in 1881. His foreman was young Al Judd and the grade was built with wheelbarrows, horses and scrapers. Sarah Morsbach's sister, Cora Riley, was the young school teacher who froze to death on the South Fork of the Elkhorn in the blizzard of '88 and was found, days later, by young George Moor. Jane Riley married a Hoxie and Abbie married a Sanford. Charles Morsbach met and married his wife in Kansas, then brought her back to Inman in 1910, where their first daughter was born on the old Riley homestead. Eight more children were born to them in Inman.

Years later Rena Morsbach Johnson, Charles Morsbach's daughter, wrote her recollections of life in Inman during the Depression. "Times were very hard and we weren't always sure where our next meal was coming from. Mother used to take in washings— and I don't believe I've ever seen clothes any whiter than the ones she washed on the board and boiled in a boiler. My father carried the water for her from a pump. "Father was several years older than Mother. To me he was great. He worked on the section until he was too old, then he did painting or whatever he could find to do. When he unloaded coal from coal cars on the tracks I have seen him come home so exhausted and sick he'd lie down on the ground. Mom would try to help and comfort him.

"The Inman businessmen used to show free open-air movies on Main Street. People came in from all around to see them. They were silent, and mostly Westerns." A few brief facts about George Laney state that he was born in Minnesota in 1866 and came to Holt County in 1878. No doubt he was the son of the Mr. and Mrs. Bert Laney who kept young Charles Morsbach while his father went back to Iowa for the rest of his family. George worked on the section and lived in Inman from 1895 to 1903. He married Mary Harte in 1895 at St. Patrick's Church in O'Neill. Mary had been only six years old when she came with her parents, the William Hartes, from Pennsylvania in 1878. George and Mary had two children.

The Laneys moved to Spencer in 1903, where George carpentered until 1931, when the family moved back to Inman. He died there at the age of ninety.

Dan O'Donnell and Mike Gallagher also came to the Inman area in 1878. This is the same O'Donnell who platted the village of Stuart and for a time operated a store there. Since Dan O'Donnell was Sarah O'Donnell's grandfather and Mike Gallagher her uncle, it is likely that the two men were brothers-in-law.

O'Donnell homesteaded south of the Elkhorn and Gallagher north of the stream, although later he moved his home to the present site of the Gallagher ranch. Mr. O'Donnell developed the stream that flowed through his land into a good sized lake and planted many trees around it. It became a favorite picnic spot for the neighbors for miles around; fishermen, hunters and swimmers all enjoyed it and Dan O'Donnell stated that no one was ever to be charged for the privilege of fishing in its waters.

The two men returned to Philadelphia in 1879, married their sweethearts and brought them west to their new homes. The O'Donnell marriage certificate, kept in the family Bible, shows that Daniel and Sarah (Boyle) were married in Omaha on 9th St. on October 27, 1879.

The two men made several trips back east and returned from one of them driving a herd of cattle, presumably Galloways, and crossing the Missouri River with them at Nebraska City. Mr. O'Donnell bought cattle throughout the territory and took them home to his Elkhorn range. He herded these cattle himself, using a team and buggy and two cattle dogs. Each dog worked the cattle on its own side of the buggy.

The original home of the O'Don-nells was made of three small buildings put together. Mrs. O'Donnell, in addition to mothering her own brood of seven, took on the duties of midwife and nurse to her community. In time the O'Donnell ranch had a six hundred feet long cattle shed with divided pens, dehorning chutes and yards, also a cattle scales. The neighbors brought their cattle there to be weighed, dehorned and vaccinated. When Jim, the eldest son, was old enough to help, he soon took over these later tasks. The younger children, Dan, John and Katie, then had to herd the cattle, often crossing the river with their charges. Quicksand was an ever present danger but the cattle usually knew where the safe fords were and the children followed on their ponies. The elder O'Donnells died within a year of each other— in 1910 and 1911.

Jim O'Donnell finished the fourth grade at the Stafford school, then dropped out to help his father run the ranch. So small that he had to stand on a box to harness his team, even then he made a good hand and, with his mother's help, often hauled hay and fed their cattle. An avid reader, he was a self-educated man. In 1910 he married Mary Krier in St. Patrick's church in O'Neill and, for their honeymoon, they drove to Holt Springs, South Dakota, to visit his mother who was hospitalized there. Three weeks later she passed away.

The young couple returned to make their home on the original homestead, where they lived until 1943. Jim, handy with almost anything mechanical, rigged up an Oldsmobile engine on a wagon and attached a buzz saw to the motor. With this contraption he cut great quantities of wood for himself and his neighbors, pulling the saw from place to place with Jenny and Polly, his team of mules.

in later years he built himself a shop, hard by his granary. Installing the Olds engine in the shop, he rigged pulleys, rods and belts so that he could grind feed in the granary. Very early he and Preston Riley ordered radio parts from Sears Roebuck. He spent many an evening at the Riley place in Inman, where the two of them put their radios together. A wet battery and a pair of dry cells were needed to run the homemade radios and Jim arranged to charge the wet batteries with his ever handy Olds engine.

Jim and Mary's daughter Sarah was born in 1911. When the little girl was about five years old she went with her father across the creek to get a load of cobs. Driving the mules to the wagon they set out. The creek was frozen and, for some reason known only to themselves, the mules decided to lie down on the ice. And there they lay, for few animals can be more stubborn than mules.

Sarah's mother "was a believer in having plenty of food on hand." She raised huge gardens and at least five hundred chickens every summer. Anyone who stopped by was always Archibald Tompkins. Courtesy Harvey Tompkins.

287 invited to come in and eat. Since the O'Donnells lived near the railroad tracks many of their guests were the "bums" who followed the rails. One summer day, Sarah related, she and her mother were in the garden when they saw something unusual down the tracks toward Stafford.

They went home and got the spy-glass. The sight they saw was, indeed, surprising. Some twenty-five or thirty bums were walking up the tracks in a body. They locked their doors and waited. To their great relief the men went on by, toward Inman. About forty-five minutes later a lone bum walked into the yard. He was young and clean looking and wanted a drink of water.

He said trainmen had thrown them all off a train because some of the men were "unruly." As the group walked on some of them began arguing and fighting, and when they came to a bridge they threw the young fellow off into the water. He stayed under the bridge until the men had gotten a good distance ahead of him, and said he was going to take care not to meet up with them again. A "bum" who worked for the O'Donnells several summers said he took care of steam bdilers in a big building in Omaha during the winters, then in summer headed for the country and ranch work. When traveling he wore two suits of underwear, with his money concealed between the suits. He was clean and a good worker and the O'Donnells enjoyed him.

Gypsies were other occasional visitors at the ranch. One summer a large band of them camped at the lake. Each day, after the O'Donnells had finished eating, a girl about twelve years old came up from the camp to beg for scraps and left-overs. She didn't look like a Gypsy and Mrs. O'Donnell was sure she had been kidnapped, as it was the common belief in those days that Gypsies kidnapped white children at every opportunity.

Sarah was then about four years old and the Gypsy girl often begged her mother to let her come to the camp to play with her. Of course Sarah's mother refused. Another time the O'Donnells came home from a trip to town and found a Gypsy band camped at the lake. Right away two women came to beg for food and anything else they could get. One was very crippled. Sarah watched them as they left, crossing the creek to the far side. There the crippled woman picked up her shoes and put them on, then walked on as straight as her companion.

As their neighbors did, the O'Don-nells always went to town on Saturday evenings— until an epidemic of chicken stealing hit the community. For the rest of the summer they had to stay home on those special nights to watch over their chicken flocks.

Each fall Sarah's family, and most of their ranch neighbors, sent a big order for crackers, beans, dried fruit, clothing and many other necessities to Sears Roebuck. All these staples came in bulk, many pounds to the box or sack. Coffee beans came in large sacks from Earl May's at Shenandoah, Iowa. The sacks, ripped open and hemmed, made fine towels.

Another source of income for this family was the milk, cream and eggs they sold to picnickers, fishermen and campers at the lake. On the Fourth of July the crowd that celebrated at the O'Donnell Lake was fully as large as that in attendance at any other spot in the county.

When Sarah was old enough to go to school her parents sent her to St. Mary's at O'Neill. If she had gone to the nearer country schools she would have had to follow the river to the Gallagher school, or the railroad if she went to Stafford. Either was too dangerous for a young child. She graduated from the Academy in 1929 and married Melvin Michaelis in 1942. Her husband's family had moved from north of Chambers to Stafford in the 1920's.

The couple lived in Iowa for five years, where their daughter was born, then moved back to Holt County. A widow now, Sarah still lives in Inman. Mike Gallagher also did well in Holt County. He and his wife, Ellen, became the parents of ten children. When the ten were grown some left the ranch and started homes of their own but Bea, Dan, Jim and Joe stayed on in the old home and built up their herds and land holdings. When the ranch was sold in 1973 the Norfolk Daily News of February 16 reported Gypsies in town. This picture was taken in Chambers about 1920. Clay Johnson Collection.

the sale price at $1,132,530 for the 7,221 acres of Holt County farm and ranch land, and that the twenty-eight heirs of Joseph F. Gallagher shared proportions from one-seventh to one- eighty-fourth of the sale price. Joseph Gallagher of Inman bought 2,538 acres of his late uncle's land for $482,286. Most of the rest of the land was purchased by Atkinson, Page and Ewing residents.

Of the other Gallagher sons and daughters, Frances became a nurse; Mayme married William Harte and lived near the Elkhorn River; John married Jean Craig and lived east of Inman. Their son Jack lost his life in the second World War. Jim married Alice Kivett and built a new ranch home near the original homestead. Ed did not marry. Helen worked in the Inman bank for a few years, then married and left the state. Anna married Neal Chase, manager of the local lumber yard.

Levi Van Valkenburgh lost his Catskill, New York, home and property in the depression that followed the Civil War. In 1879, with his brother Tremain, he decided to go west and look for land. Traveling by rail to Sioux City, they crossed the Missouri at Yankton, then journeyed south some ninety miles to the Valley of the Elkhorn. Levi brought his wife, Rachel, and their three children by wagon and mule team a little later.

Tremain had built a shack on his claim and the entire family spent their first night on the Elkhorn rolled in blankets on its dirt floor. Cornelius, four years old at the time, never forgot his first morning in the new home. It was the spring of the year and the wild blue-stem was already knee-high. As far as he could see to the south there was nothing but waving grass, and a hundred yards from the shack a herd of antelope was grazing.

288 Levi was soon hauling supplies from Norfolk and Neligh to Pat Hagerty's store in O'Neill, while Tremain, a carpenter, had all he could do helping new settlers build homes on their claims. After the coming of the railroad the hay business grew by leaps and bounds. By 1888 the Van Valkenburgh brothers were also baling, hauling and shipping hay. Levi was one of the leaders in organizing the Methodist Church in Inman and calling the Rev. John DeLos Wilson, a circuit riding Methodist minister and a homesteader east of the present site of Inman, to pastor the new church. Rev. Wilson was buried in the Inman cemetery. Later Levi also helped establish the Presbyterian church in the town. In 1887 he persuaded his brother, Ben, who knew the creamery business, to come out from New York and establish a creamery in Inman.

Cornelius, in his own account of life on the homestead a mile southeast of the site of Inman, remembered that the railroad right-of-way not only crossed his father's homestead but went right through the family shack. The company paid Mr. Van Valken-burgh one hundred dollars to move the home. "This was a big help to us," Cornelius wrote, "for we came to Nebraska with no money. The neighbors helped us move our house and we shared the money with them." In the spring of 1880, when grading started on the right-of-way, Rachel Van Valkenburgh served meals to one of the grading gangs. When the work was finished the gang boss left without paying the board bill, a severe blow to a family that could barely feed itself.

When the railroad was completed the town of Inman was established and William Inman moved his general store to the new location. Although the town was platted in 1881 it was not incorporated until January, 1914. The first school house was built about the same time, 1881. Cornelius attended this school but "when I had gone through the arithmetic book several times I quit school," he wrote. "I had planned to be an engineer but I had to help on the farm." "When I was twenty-one my mother became ill. She had cancer and it was too late to operate. She died at Christmas time, 1895. My oldest brother had married and had a family, my other brother had moved to Kansas, and Mother asked me to promise to take care of my father, who was not well. I gave up my plan to be a railroad engineer.

"After my mother's death my father completely gave up, leaving all the farm work to me. My oldest brother and I then went into the hay business together. Each of us owned a hundred and sixty acres of land and we rented an additional section. In all we hayed ten quarters of wild hay land, producing about a thousand tons of hay a year.

"We operated with a crew of nine men. It took twelve weeks to cut, cure and stack the hay. My brother did the baling, I hauled the bales to town and loaded them into the cars. Each bale weighed about eighty pounds and I hauled about ten tons a day. We averaged four to six dollars per ton for the hay and it cost us about two dollars a ton to cut, stack and bale it. We started cutting grass the first day of July and finished baling and hauling around April first.

"The hay averaged about 235 bales to a ton and I handled around 235,000 bales each season; handling each bale twice, first loading it onto the wagon, then off-loading it into the railroad car.

"There were about one hundred people living in Inman when I was sixteen. That year a rough bunch of young fellows would go up to O'Neill every Saturday night, get a keg of beer and a gallon of whiskey and come back to Inman. By midnight the town was wild. These older fellows tried to get all of us teenage boys to join them and all but two of us did. Bert Walker and I were the two that stayed out of it, but we had to fight to hold our own.

"So we started a Good Tempter Lodge. There were about a hundred members. Many were older people and we held weekly meetings in a large room above the store. The women and girls brought food for lunches after the meetings and we played party games. Bell Wisdom, the school teacher, was leader of the girls, I was leader of the boys. "As the attendance of the older members dropped, I was elected president of the Lodge. Then Bell and I made plans to gain a hundred percent attendance. We wanted to commend Miss Bell for all her work in the Lodge, so we made a charter in her praise and one of the boys made a wreath of roses to hang on it; for she had personally visited every single member to urge them to come to the meeting we had planned. "I had a pig that weighed about a hundred pounds. He was so fat he could hardly walk but he didn't get any taller or longer. Several of the boys helped me butcher him and my mother and another lady roasted him whole. I wired his legs so we could stand him up on a board. On the night of the meeting, after we had paid tribute to Miss Bell, the wreath was taken from the charter, carried outside and placed around the pig's neck.

"Then there was a rap on the door and the guard informed me there was a stranger outside who wanted to enter. I told the guard to let him in. He opened the door and the pig (the stranger), standing in the center of a table on wheels, was rolled into the room. The girls had brought other food, but after that they stopped bragging that they could outdo the boys.

"We were having such good times at these meetings that some of the other teenage boys stopped going with the rough bunch and started coming to our parties. At about this time I became interested in a girl I considered better, socially, than I. Her name was Edith Smith and she was quite well educated, had taken piano lessons and did oil paintings. She was a school teacher and, while I took her to parties and dances, I had no chance to improve myself socially; for I had to stay on the farm and work from early morning to late in the evenings.

"We went together for about eight years. All this time her mother did not want her to marry me because she thought I would be a drawback to her. My father had given up completely and the future did not look good for me, so we decided to quit going together.

"By then most of the farmers were getting ahead and many were building big barns with roomy hay lofts. A lot of square dancing was going on in these lofts and I learned the calls and began calling for the dances. People called on me from as far as twenty miles away to do their calling. "Then one evening, awhile after Edith and I had stopped keeping company, she asked me to go for a walk with her. She told me she'd like to go with me again, if I wished to. I told her it would be a pleasure, but that I had promised my mother that I'd care for my father and it would be very difficult for her. She said she'd like to help me care for him. In September, 1898 we were married. She was twenty-one and I was twenty-three." Cornelius and Edith had four children and the family worked very hard, what with the farm and the hay business. Then Cornelius was offered the opportunity to buy the Inman general store. All he knew was the hay business but the demand for wild hay was decreasing with the increasing use of tame hay and alfalfa. He bought the store and his brother, Horatio, took over the hay business. Cornelius did fairly well in the store for a few years, then sold it and moved to the higher climate of Colorado for the sake of his young 289 daughter's health. After four years in Colorado the family returned to the farm at Inman in 1914. On May 27, 1923, Levi Van Valkenburgh, then eighty-seven years old, was struck and killed by a Northwestern train. For many years he had walked up that track to town, but this time he did not hear the train.

Cornelius sold the homestead the following year and moved to Kansas. After Edith's death in 1948 he married her sister, Mrs. Gertrude LaRue, in 1950 and moved to the LaRue farm south of O'Neill.

Cornelius' daughter, Lois, takes up the tale of the family's life in Holt County here, following the return to the farm in 1914. "When I was nine my father built a horse propelled merry-go-round for us. He fastened a hay rake wheel on each end of a plank, which he mounted on a stake in the middle. He fastened old rake seats to the ends of the plank, near the wheels, then hitched our pet horse, old Dan, to the plank. As Dan walked or trotted the wheels turned and we went round and round.

"When we were a little older my father built another thriller. He fastened one end of a heavy cable above the window in our hay loft, and the other end to the windmill post. A pulley with a large hook ran on the cable. All we had to do was climb to the loft, take hold of the hook and swing out of the window. We really sailed down that cable, but when we hit the ground with our feet we had to let go of the hook and RUN, or we'd fall hard on the ground. "One time Alta Butler was riding the cable when it came loose. She fell, but not very far, and cut her foot a little. But my mother would not let our father put the cable up again. "Thanksgiving was the big day for us. We always spent the day with my mother's sister, Gertrude LaRue, who lived across the sandhills eighteen miles south of Inman. This was before the days of automobiles and we made the trip in a two-seater, closed cariage. In 1915 we had a snow storm just before Thanksgiving and the weather turned very cold. It looked like we might not get to go and my two brothers, my sister and I were very disappointed.

"Thanksgiving morning was cold but clear, so Mother heated soap stones on the cookstove and fixed a big kettle of ham and beans in our fireless cooker— an insulated box in which food, set on the hot soap stones, cooked over a period of hours. We put the rest of the hot soap stones, in the bottom of the carriage. We all wore long underwear and long black stockings, also leggings. It took about four hours to make the drive to Aunt Gertrude's. She had three children and we played in the upstairs part of their home.

"We started at six in the morning, had a full day of fun from ten until three, and arrived home about seven in the evening, in time to do the chores and, about nine that night, enjoy our kettle of ham and beans. "Father, who was president of the Inman school board, worked hard to get a four-year highschool established in our town. This was accomplished about 1917. A small country schoolhouse was moved into town and set up near the two-story, four-room frame school. This was used for our high school science room. Our science teacher, with the permission of the school board, put a stray dog to sleep. We then boiled the dead dog in a large kettle on the school ground. To learn how bones served human and animal bodies we put all the bones together again, using wire, and when finished had a perfect skeleton of a dog for classroom study.

"Another time our class took the engine of a car all apart, then put it back together again, learning the parts and how they worked. When we had the engine assembled again, it ran. We no doubt lacked the equipment of larger schools but we had creative teachers and, even though our high school was not accredited, when I graduated in 1923 I felt that I had had a very good education. I had to enter the University of Nebraska on probation that fall, due to having graduated from an unaccredited high school, but I had no trouble making good grades there.

"From 1919 through 1923 Inman had a winning girls basketball team, for girls played the game then, and played other schools, just as the boys did. We played Clearwater, Ewing, O'Neill, Atkinson, Orchard and Chambers, all much larger schools than ours, and won over all of them." As in other parts of the county, the year 1880 brought a flood of settlers to the Inman community. By then the railroad through the area was assured and prospective homesteaders wanted to locate as near to it as possible. Among the 1880 newcomers was the Edgar Smith family of New York state. Edgar, born in 1816, married Martha Meddagh in Michigan in 1843. In 1850 Martha died, leaving three young children, Ruth, Albert and Laura. The next year Edgar married Caroline Thompson and had another son, Arthur. All were again living in New York when they decided to move West.

Edgar's oldest daughter, Ruth, had married Tremain Van Valkenburgh in 1865. They had two children when they came to Holt County. Two more were born at Inman before Ruth died in 1885.

Albert Smith had married Ellen Delameter and fathered two children. He pre-empted land just west of Ruth and Tremain's, then shortly sold it to the Townsite Company, which located the town of Inman there. Albert then moved a mile west of the town. Laura Smith, Edgar's third child, in 1866 married Archibald Tompkins. When they came to Holt County in 1883 they had four children of their own and a foster son, Charlie. Arthur Smith had married Lola Tompkins, cousin to Archibald, in 1873. They brought two children, Forrest and Eva, with them to Inman and homesteaded next to Edgar southeast of Inman. Grandson Kenneth now operates both of these homesteads.

Most of the Edgar Smith family were charter members of the Inman Methodist Church and the first Methodist Sunday school was organized in the home of Tremain Van Valken-burgh in 1881. Both Tremain and Arthur Smith, carpenters, helped build the first church in Inman.

Chauncey Keyes, a Pennsylvanian and a farmer at heart, arrived in Holt County in March, 1880, seeking a farm where he wouldn't have to pick rocks from the soil. A March blizzard held him up ten days in Stanton. He came on to Oakdale by rail, and by stage to Neligh. There he hitched a ride with Bill Inman on a load of lumber to the Harte post office. From there he walked to Inman, where he boarded with Albert Smith for a month. Mr. Keyes made the tenth person living in the twelve feet square shack that spring.

Smith walked with Keyes until they came to the first area of unclaimed land that suited the new settler. The quarter was one mile south of the new town of Inman and Keyes filed on it the next day. Mail still came twice a week to the Harte post office. Edmund Clark had selected a homestead two and a half miles from Arthur Smith's place the previous summer. In November after Chauncey Keyes settled on his claim, Matilda Clark, her mother and her brother, Merritt came to Neligh, and then by stage to Harte. The ladies were quite discouraged by the treeless state of the prairies and a lurking fear of Indians.

Matilda Clark and Chauncey Keyes were married September 13, 1882 in the bride's home. They set up housekeeping in Chauncey's twelve feet square home, and lived on the homestead most of their married life. Many trees and other improvements made the place quite attractive as the years went by. Of their five children one died in infancy. When their second 290 son, Karl, married the parents turned the farm over to him and moved to town.

Chauncey served his community long and well, as county assessor, a member of the county board and an official of the Inman Telephone Company. Their four children and twelve grandchildren all resided near Inman while Chauncey and Matilda lived.

Karl Keyes, after completing high school in 1917, returned to the farm and married Hazel Edwards of Meadow Grove in 1921. Of their three children only their son Donald remained in Holt County. When he had to go into the service in 1942 Karl moved to Omaha for four years, then returned to the farm with his son when he came home from the war. Donald married Carol Pruss in 1955 and took over the operation of the farm. Karl, widowed in 1954, later married an old friend, Elsie Krueger, and now lives in Inman.

Another of the 1880 pioneers was William Stamp, also a New Yorker. During his first year in the valley he and three friends, Ed Bundy and a Mr. Locks and a Mr. Curt, walked several times to the Niobrara to gather tree cuttings. Carrying their guns for shooting game, they lived off the land on these trips.

Mrs. Stamp and their son, Emmett, came to Inman in 1881, riding from Neligh on freight wagons belonging to Bill and Charlie Sheldon. One of the brothers drove an ox team, the other a team of mules. Emmett and a friend, Frank Strong, set out trees on various homesteads for twenty-five cents a day.

The Stamps lost a boy and a girl to diphtheria in 1883. The little graves are still in a corner of the place where Glen Sholes now lives. Indian women sometimes came through the valley, gathering herbs, which they carried in big sacks on their backs. Until they lost their fear of the Indians the Stamps kept a wagon backed up to a window of their home, ready for a quick get away should an attack come.

Emmett Stamp started working on the railroad in 1904, helping maintain the roadbed. Later he worked the night shift, filling the engines with coal at the yard chute. His wages were $1.50 per night.

Isaac Baldwin, a Civil War veteran, his wife Susan and his daughters Cora and Ella, also came to Inman in 1880. Although he came to Holt County from Iowa, his ancestors had been in the United States for years, some of them having fought in the Revolution. Mr. Baldwin taught in the first school for awhile, then filed on a homestead one mile north of the town. The house he built there is still standing and in use.

When the railroad approached the. town the Baldwins opened an eating house for the crews. Later Isaac worked for the railroad at Inman. After ten years or so the Baldwins went back to Iowa for awhile, then returned to the Inman farm. In the early 1900's they sold the homestead, moved to Chambers and ran a general store for a good many years, finally retiring and moving to Lincoln. Horace Bradley, also an Iowan, came to Wisner in the spring of 1880, farmed there that summer, then came on to Inman in the fall, settling on what is now the Wilbur Brown farm. Horace's father-in-law, Ozis Root, and his brother-in-law, E. O. Root, came at the same time. Ozis located on the Joe Kalina farm and E. O. on the Frank Shefl farm. The following spring they moved to their own homesteads. The Bradleys had six children and Depot, water tower and coal chute in Inman about 1912. Courtesy Elwin Smith. The Fair Store, 1912. The Community Hall was above the store. Courtesy Elwin Smith.

IIIBIB998909098UH12.351 Mr. Bradley helped support them by working on the railroad grade with his team of horses. They went after their mail at the Bill Inman home until the post office was moved into Inman a year or so later.

George Conard, born in Minnesota in 1867, came to the Inman area in 1880. After the railroad came through he worked at the Inman coal chute for awhile. In 1904 George married Elizabeth Liddy and moved to the Liddy homestead on Eagle Creek, north of O'Neill. At the close of the first World War they moved to a farm on Redbird Creek. Five children were born to the couple. Two, Nate and Warren, are still living and both make their home on the old Redbird farm.

Albert J. Clarke, his wife and three children, came from Minnesota to Inman in 1881, traveling in a covered wagon and bringing their livestock with them. They built their home on a homestead and tree claim four miles 291 southwest of the new village of Inman. Albert had been wounded in both legs in the Civil War and one leg never healed. After a few years he and his wife moved to Inman, where they ran the general store and post office for many years.

When the elder Clarkes moved to town their son Edgar took over the farm and built the house that still stands on the original site. Edgar married Anna Green. The couple had five children. Anna's old friends and neighbors still remember with gratitude the faithful years of work and devotion she gave to the Inman Methodist church.

Edgar and Anna's son Gene was the mail carrier who wore out twenty- three automobiles on his route during the thirty-four years he carried the mail, and who made some of his deliveries by plane during the frightful winter of '48 and '49. Edgar remained on the farm until 1901, then moved his family into Inman and hauled freight from Inman to Chambers for Isaac Baldwin and other merchants. The first Inman telephone switchboard was installed in the Ed Clarke home and tended by Mrs. Clarke. Later Ed took over the Fair store. Then, in 1913, both the Albert and Ed Clarke families moved to Minnesota for two years. When they returned to Inman, Albert moved into his former home, north of the Methodist Church, Ed and family went back on the farm.

Two of Ed and Anna's sons, Arthur and Eugene, were veterans of World War I.

Idilla Ann and Elias Brumbaugh settled on a homestead two and one-half miles south of Inman in 1882, They had been married in Valparaiso, Indiana in 1876 and had lived there until coming to Holt County. They raised extra fine fruits and vegetables and lived by the motto, "pay as you go and trust your friends." The Brumbaughs had two children, Maysie and Ezra. Their mother looked after the health of her neighborhood, their father specialized in raising better seed corn. He also made violins, about one hundred and fifty of them— some from wood from the trees he had planted on his place when they first came to Inman. Maysie married William C. Kelley in 1896 and had nine children. Seven of them are still living. Mr. Kelley was a carpenter and bridge construction foreman and the family made their home in Inman for many years. Ezra helped his father on the farm until he married Nellie Garnet and moved to Stuart, where he owned a lumber yard. He and Nellie had seven children.

James and William Kelley, grandsons of Elias and Idilla, still live in Inman, James on the pioneer farm and William in the home place in town. William married Willamette Park in 1935. Four children were born to them. James married Marjorie Park and raised one son.

Two families destined to be long time prominent residents of the county come in 1883, the Archibald Tompkins end the Lewis Lamberts. As mentioned earlier. Archibold and Laura (Smith) Tompkins had four children and an adopted son when they arrived at their new home. Two more children were born on the homestead, Leon and Drusilla.

Archibald bought the Thompson homestead and an additional 240 acre pasture. He also obtained a half section a half mile east of his place. This was later taken over by his son Leslie, who sold it to the Gallagher brothers. He also owned the Sperry place which adjoined the homestead on the south.

About 1885 Archibald and Laura began operating a business in Inman. In 1896 they moved into town, as Archibald had broken his hip in an accident caused by his horse stepping in a prairie dog hole while riding to a prairie fire. Ever afterward he walked with a limp and used a cane. Mr. Tompkins bought and sold large quantities of baled hay. After his hay barn burned in 1904 he piled the bales where the I.O.O.F. Hall now stands. His office was located north of the Hall, where he also operated a livery stable, a feed and flour store and an implement business. He operated this business until his death in 1916.

Known to his friends as Art or Arch, he smoked cigars for many years. As the result of a challenge from one of his neighbors he stopped smoking. In his later years he wore a well- groomed full beard. At one time he and Charles Morsbach, who lived in a house back of the livery barn, had a minor disagreement. Mr. Tompkins shook his cane at Charles and said, "Get home, you dog," the strongest language he was ever known to use. Very active in the Methodist Episcopal church, the Tompkins' home was always open to circuit riders, itinerant ministers, presiding elders or anyone else. He was church treasurer for many years and in some way always found funds to pay the ministers' salaries. When Rev. Neiman, a newly married English minister died while postering the Inman church, Mr. Tompkins provided the means for the bride to return to her people in England. An English made oval occasional table she left behind is still used in the Harvey Tompkins' home. Laura Tompkins often served as mid-wife for her neighbors. On one occasion a Negro homesteader came to her door asking for assistance. Of course she went to the aid of his wife— and always said afterward that this one was the cutest, prettiest and nicest baby she ever helped bring into the world.

From 1893 to 1896 Ethel, the Tompkins' second daughter, and her husband, Ed Loucks, operated the ranch. From 1900 to 1909 George Keefer managed the land. Leslie Tompkins, the baby when the family came to Inman, lived on the homestead in 1905-06, assisting George. From 1916 to 1923 the youngest daughter, Drusilla, and her husband, Ed Miller, operated the home place. George Keefer, born in Pennsylvania in 1874, was a young man when he first came to Inman, where he met and married Luella Tompkins, Arch's third daughter, in 1895. In those days many businessmen who had loaned money to hard-up homesteaders ended up taking over their land or personal property instead of cash. One such venture left Mr. Tompkins with some land and a herd of sheep in Wyoming.

George Keefer went out to Wyoming, early in the spring of 1907, to care for the sheep during lambing season. His wife stayed on the homestead with her two daughters, Marie and Lorena, to care for their own livestock. As she was leading a team into the barn the door blew shut against one of the horses, causing it to lunge ahead and entangle her in the halter ropes. She was pregnant at the time and the injury caused her death in May, 1907.

George continued to work for the Tompkins until 1930. In 1929 he shipped his cattle to Omaha, sold them and came back to Inman on the afternoon train. He deposited his check in the Inman State Bank. The next morning the bank closed and George, along with many others, only received a small part of his account when the bank "settled up." He then went to Wilcox, Nebraska and lived with his daughter, Marie Romig, and her husband until his death ten years later.

Leon Tompkins, born in Inman in 1887, formed the T & K company with George Keefer during George's early years with the Tompkins. While attending business college in Norfolk, Leon met Ethel Doughty. They were married in 1909 and returned to the farm, where Ethel, a town girl, began housekeeping for Leon and George (now a widower). Her duties included baking bread, churning butter, dressing chickens, canning vegetables, beef and pork, washing clothes on a 292 washboard and cooking for hay hands and threshers. One of her early mistakes was made in putting a kettle full of dry beans on to cook. By the time they were done she had beans in every kettle on the place.

The hired man, young Elmer Kruse, gladly helped Ethel with the supper dishes in return for her playing the piano until bedtime. Elmer later married Hazel, Leslie Tompkins' daughter.

From 1895 to 1900 Ethel and Ed Loucks ran the Loucks Hotel in Inman, then moved to Norfolk. Ed and Drusilla Miller moved to California in 1923. In 1916 the T & K partnership was dissolved and Ed and Ethel took over the business. They had two sons, Charles and Harvey.

When Charles, the elder brother, started to school at Willow Lake he came home with such grand tales of all the things he was learning that Harvey made up his mind there was no use for him to go to school at all, as he could not possibly learn all those things. In the fall of 1918, when his father took the two boys to school, Harvey put up a "heart-breaking bawl" and his father took him home again. The same scene worked on the second morning. By the third morning he was convinced that he could put off starting to school indefinitely by "pulling the same stunt." To his amazement and bewilderment, his father picked him up that morning, lifted him over the Model T steering wheel, set him on the ground and drove off. Then an eighth grade girl, Lena Riley, a sister of the teacher, took him into the schoolhouse, put him in the double seat with her and entertained him.

During his first year in school Harvey had an attack of acute appendicitis. Dr. W. W. Noyes, the Inman physician, recommended an operation. He and his mother took the evening train for Norfolk. The train was delayed at Neligh because of a hot box. Dr. Campbell, the Norfolk surgeon, met the train when it finally pulled in, took the lad to the hospital and operated immediately, as the appendix had already burst.

Some years later Harvey went to a school picnic a half-mile west of Inman. He was barefooted, as the weather was warm. He took part in the sack race, and won it, but had to run through a patch of sandburrs to do it. A few days later his feet were a mass of infection. At the same time he developed a severe case of canker sores in his mouth. Dr. French of Page was called in and, after examining the boy, said to his mother, "My gosh, Ethel, this kid's got hoof and mouth disease." While still a young lad, Charles Tompkins took a great interest in "doctoring." The old family Shepherd, Sandy, would lie down by the hour while Charles bandaged his legs and head and administered medicines. When Sandy was struck and killed by a car, the grieving boys buried him in the hills. The marker above his grave stood for many years.

The arrival of the annual Sears, Roebuck fall order was a big day on the Tompkins' ranch. George Keefer included his order with the Tompkins' and Mr. Tompkins brought the huge box out from town in the lumber wagon and unloaded it by the door. Before it could be opened the chores had to be done, supper eaten and the dishes washed. Then, while the two small boys waited, breathless, George pulled the nails from the box and straightened each one before he laid it aside. Then the packing was carefully removed and laid aside, for nothing was wasted.

Finally, one item at a time, the contents were taken from the box and checked off the invoice: leather lines, bits, lampwicks, winter clothing, overshoes, blankets, towels, safety pins, shoe strings, pans and kettles, shells, screws. The licorice sticks and hard candy, it seemed, were always in the bottom of the box.

In the summer time the neighbors gathered at O'Donnell's lake with a long seine. One man would wade to the far side and hold that end of the net while others drove the fish into it. Two or three pulls filled a wagon box. Then each man put a washtub by the wagon and took turns picking out a fish for his tub until the wagon was empty. There were always a few fish left over for the cats.

"Dad traded a fine team of mules for his first car, a 1918 Model T." wrote Harvey Tompkins. "Mother was so anxious to ride in the new car that she and Charles and I walked quite a distance up the road to meet Dad as he drove it home. Finally the horse-less carriage came in sight. Then it passed us and went on down the road. Indignantly we walked home again, where Dad said, 'You didn't expect me to try to stop that thing until I got it home, did you? I was afraid I couldn't get it going again and I didn't want it sitting out along the road to scare all the teams in the country.'" Years later that first car was replaced by a newer Ford with balloon tires. Mr. Tompkins drove the new car home from Norfolk during the Christmas season. The whole family had gone after it, but when a snow storm moved in on Holt County Mrs. Tompkins and Harvey stayed in Norfolk and came home later on the train. Mr. Tompkins and Charles took the new car home, and did all right until they reached Stafford, only four miles from the ranch. From there on the roads were drifted shut.

"So Dad checked with the depot agent at Stafford," Harvey said, "and found that no trains were running over that stretch for a few hours. They pulled the new car onto the tracks and down the rails they went, about to the O'Donnell Lake, where they could cut across country for home. They really tested out those balloon tires, bouncing over the ties." In 1923 the Tompkins built the big barn that still stands on the ranch. Mrs. Tompkins' father, C. E. Doughty of Norfolk helped, as did Harry McGraw and Charles Goree. Gilbert Noring was head carpenter. When they were shingling the vast roof Charles Goree would walk up the ladder with a bundle of shingles on his head and another under each arm. Harry McGraw would double up his legs in front of him and walk on his knees like a begger— very impressive to ten-year-old Harvey. Charles Tompkins grew up, became the doctor he had always wanted to be, and married Carita Gifford in 1934. In time he became one of the midwest's leading child specialists. He served in the U. S. Medical Corps from 1942 through 1946 and, for the past twenty-five years has lived and practiced in Tucson, Arizona. He and Carita are the parents of four children.

Harvey graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan, married Lois Caldwell and became the father of four children. Their daughter, Linelie, married her highschool sweetheart, Ned Kelley, son of Wm. Kelley, Jr. One son, Allen, is now a doctor of medicine in the Omaha area; Roger is making a career of the Air Force and was awarded several medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with sixteen Oak Leaf Clusters during his service in Vietnam. Neil, a graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Agriculture has joined his parents as a partner on the Tompkins' Corners ranch.

In the spring of 1883 Lewis and Evaline Lambert and their four children moved from Butler County, Nebraska, to a homestead east and a little south of Chambers in the vicinity of a post office called "Little," later called Martha. Mr. Lambert had sold his Butler County land for $2,500, bought two covered wagons and loaded them with furniture, tools, personal belongings and provisions for the family and horses. Four days later they reached Oakdale on a Sunday evening. They started on a Monday morning but were held up until Friday at Antelope Creek be- 293 cause of heavy rains. Their next stop was Deloit, a post office in the far southeast corner of Holt County. On Saturday, April 28, they traveled on some twelve miles northwest to the farm of a man named Cleveland, only two miles from the claim Lewis Lambert had filed. Nearby was the new homestead of Henry Trussel and another belonging to Mr. Cox. Mrs. Cox welcomed Mrs. Lambert and the smaller children into her home for the night and Mr. Cox helped Lewis haul lumber from Ewing for the new home. Mr. Cleveland helped the newcomer locate his claim, the NW%2 of Section 5, Township 25N. The land had but recently been surveyed and they had difficulty finding the survey stakes. Having used his homestead right in Butler County, Lambert claimed his new farm by pre-emption, at $2 per acre, then filed an additional tree claim.

George Lambert, nearly fourteen years old that spring of 1883, recalled seventy-three years later that the treeless plain was an awesome, yet beautiful, sight. The meadows were greening and wild flowers blooming. Lambert put up a hasty and ill-built frame shack, a temporary structure until such time as he could build a permanent home. He also built a sod chicken house. In June the two boys, George and Frank, were sleeping there when a violent thunder storm came up. The frame shanty shook and leaked so badly in the storm that the parents and two younger children had to join the boys in the chicken house for the rest of the night.

The next morning there was no sign of the frame shanty of the Urban family, a mile to the southeast. Alarmed, the Lamberts and the other neighbors went to see what had happened. The high wind had blown the frail shack down and the Urbans had spent the rest of the night in their wagon. By evening the neighbors had brought their plows, rebuilt the shanty and surrounded it with a solid sod wall.

The first few years were hard, then the development of the wild hay industry began to bring cash incomes to the settlers and living conditions improved. For some thirty years, George Lambert recalled, the baling and hauling of hay across the hills to Inman continued. Long after it had become history old timers liked to get together and talk about their experiences, some of them tragic. For it was on a hay hauling trip in 1895 that twenty-four-year-old Frank Lambert took seriously ill with "inflammation of the bowels" and died.

Weather patterns varied considerably in the county. The 'eighties were fairly wet years, '90 to '94 very dry, '95 to the early 1900's variable. Then came 1915, the "granddaddy" of all wet years, when many of south Holt County's beautiful meadows abounded with carp, pickerel, ducks and mosquitos.

George recalled one time when Rev. Lowery, an early minister of the little Bethany Presbyterian church that stood on the Miller Porter land, paid a visit to the Lambert home. The boys' mother had told them to put their fiddles away, as it might not be seemly to play them when the minister was present. They were, therefore, elated when the old preacher volunteered to join them in their "fiddlin'." Joshua Porter, Mrs. Lambert's father, with his wife and two younger children, had followed the Lamberts to Holt County and settled on a preemption a half-mile to the west. The following year Lewis and his father- in-law went back to Oakdale for a load of cottonwood cuttings and other tree stock for planting on their tree claims. In addition, Lewis planted a sizable apple orchard, as well as various berry bushes and strawberries. He also kept honey bees and harvested good crops of honey. Those early orchards, put out before diseases and parasites had caught up with the frontier, became virtual prairie Edens, a joy and delight to the pioneers.

George remembered that there was little regard for grade levels in the early schools. "You took what you could get," he said, "or what the teacher could teach." Pupils provided their own text books and few of them matched. Surprisingly, however, a fairly broad course of subjects was taught and most of the pupils had good, or at least practical, educations. Carl Lambert, born in 1888, after the family came to Holt County, at his mother's death in 1930 became the owner-operator of the family farm. He married Ida Dailey (who still lives on the old homestead) and the couple had six children. Of these only two still live in the county, Luceil (LaRue) near Ewing, and Stanley, a veteran of World War II and prisoner of war, who now owns and operates his grandfather's farm.

Robert Conard, brother of George, was born in Pennsylvania in 1863 and came to Inman in 1884 at the age of twenty-one. He married Mary Katherine Liddy in 1891 and moved onto a farm at Page. A few years later he returned to Inman and worked for many years on the night shift at the coal chute. He came home each midnight for lunch, and now and then he brought a hungry bum home with him.

The family had a little dog and one night, while Bob and his "bum of the night" were eating the dog made a frightful fuss, running from the kitchen to the bedroom and then to the children's beds, barking all the time. The family wondered afterward if the dog may not have known that the stranger had had sinister intentions but had probably been deterred by the dog's actions. After fifty-four years in the county, Bob passed away of a heart attack at his home in Inman. He and Mary Katherine had nine children. Four of them still live in the county, two, George and Mike, in Inman.

Jonathan P. Hancock, who married Mary Frantz in Bourbon, Indiana, came to his homestead, seven miles northeast of Inman, in 1884. Mr. Hancock, a direct descendant of Joseph Hancock, brother of John who signed the Declaration of Independence, was a veteran of the Civil War. When they drove into Inman, that April, there was from one foot to eighteen inches of water everywhere. The whole valley seemed to be a huge swamp. Accordingly Mr. Hancock sought higher ground— and found it seven miles north of the town. Since 1884 was such a wet year the land he chose looked very good. The following years proved him wrong.

After putting up the customary shack, the family broke ground for a crop and set out trees. The dryer seasons made blowouts of all the plowed land. At that time the Han-cocks had no horses of their own and, with the failure of their crops, no prospects of getting any— except by sacrificing Mrs. Hancock's sewing machine.

The machine was brand new at the time the family moved from Iowa and Mrs. Hancock was very proud of it, as few pioneer women owned sewing machines. After long deliberation and some tears, she consented to let her husband trade the machine for a horse. Mr. Hancock built a dugout stable for the horse— and a few days later went out to feed it one morning and found it dead.

This happened in the month of November, during a cold, snowy spell, and at the same time the Hancock's second son was born. The doctor was summoned but, not knowing just where his patient lived, got off the trail, wandered fifteen miles out of his way in the storm and never reached the homestead at all.

Without horses or machinery to cut hay for fuel, Mrs. Hancock cut the long dry grass with her scissors and, with the help of her children, carried it in for the stove. Later, when their father plowed, the three children followed to gather sandcherry and 294 other coarse roots. These, dried in the sun, made fuel for baking and ironing. The only year that they raised a fair crop of corn it sold for ten cents a bushel. Much of it was used for fuel. By deducting the time he had served in the Civil War, Jonathan was able to prove up on his claim in two and a half years. During much of this time he walked the seven miles into Inman, worked there for seventy-five cents a day, and walked home at night, carrying a sack of flour or other provisions on his back. As soon as he proved up he sold the quarter for $25 and moved into town.

After moving into Inman the Han-cocks ran a hotel for a number of years. Their daughter Robinetta married Clarence Malone in the hotel in November, 1895. Another of their seven children, Claude, married Stella Smith of Inman. After forty years spent in the county, Jonathan Hancock died in Inman in 1924. John Carr, mentioned earlier in connection with "Big Bill" Thompson, was born in County Donegal, Ireland in 1856. At age twenty-four he came to Pennsylvania, worked at anything he could get to do and, in his spare time, furthered his education in the city schools. In 1884, after going to see a "cowboy show," he and a friend, George Thumball, headed for Nebraska with a few hundred dollars in savings.

John took a claim in the Ewing- Inman area at the present junction of Highway 20 and 275 and began building up a cattle herd and increasing his land holdings. Before he was done he was known as the Railroad Hotel, 1894. Proprietors were Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Hancock. Courtesy Sarah Michaelis.

"Cattle King of Holt County." In 1893 he returned to Ireland and married Bridget Gallagher of Litterkenny. He brought her back to his Holt County ranch where fifteen children blessed their union. Two of his nephews, John and Hugh Carr, also came from the east in 1913 to work on the ranch. Hugh died in O'Neill in 1971, John a few years earlier.

Rancher John Carr died in 1930 at The Lambert family, 1895. Seated: Will, Lewis, Carl, Evelyn the mother. Standing: Ella, George, Frank. Courtesy Ida Lambert. 295 _eeomed Mrs. Lambert and the smaller children into her home for the night and Mr. Cox helped Lewis haul lumber from Ewing for the new home. Mr. Cleveland helped the newcomer locate his claim, the NW%2 of Section 5, Township 25N. The land had but recently been surveyed and they had difficulty finding the survey stakes. Having used his homestead right in Butler County, Lambert claimed his new farm by pre-emption, at $2 per acre, then filed an additional tree claim.

George Lambert, nearly fourteen years old that spring of 1883, recalled seventy-three years later that the treeless plain was an awesome, yet beautiful, sight. The meadows were greening and wild flowers blooming. Lambert put up a hasty and ill-built frame shack, a temporary structure until such time as he could build a permanent home. He also built a sod chicken house. In June the two boys, George and Frank, were sleeping there when a violent thunder storm came up. The frame shanty shook and leaked so badly in the storm that the parents and two younger children had to join the boys in the chicken house for the rest of the night.

The next morning there was no sign of the frame shanty of the Urban family, a mile to the southeast. Alarmed, the Lamberts and the other neighbors went to see what had happened. The high wind had blown the frail shack down and the Urbans had spent the rest of the night in their wagon. By evening the neighbors had brought their plows, rebuilt the shanty and surrounded it with a solid sod wall.

The first few years were hard, then the development of the wild hay industry began to bring cash incomes to the settlers and living conditions improved. For some thirty years, George Lambert recalled, the baling and hauling of hay across the hills to Inman continued. Long after it had become history old timers liked to get together and talk about their experiences, some of them tragic. For it was on a hay hauling trip in 1895 that twenty-four-year-old Frank Lambert took seriously ill with "inflammation Rayresoyterian church that stood on the Miller Porter land, paid a visit to the Lambert home. The boys' mother had told them to put their fiddles away, as it might not be seemly to play them when the minister was present. They were, therefore, elated when the old preacher volunteered to join them in their "fiddlin ." Joshua Porter, Mrs. Lambert's father, with his wife and two younger children, had followed the Lamberts to Holt County and settled on a preemption a half-mile to the west. The following year Lewis and his father- in-law went back to Oakdale for a load of cottonwood cuttings and other tree stock for planting on their tree claims. In addition, Lewis planted a sizable apple orchard, as well as various berry bushes and strawberries. He also kept honey bees and harvested good crops of honey. Those early orchards, put out before diseases and parasites had caught up with the frontier, became virtual prairie Edens, a joy and delight to the pioneers.

George remembered that there was little regard for grade levels in the early schools. "You took what you could get," he said, "or what the teacher could teach." Pupils provided their own text books and few of them matched. Surprisingly, however, a fairly broad course of subjects was taught and most of the pupils had good, or at least practical, educations. Carl Lambert, born in 1888, after the family came to Holt County, at his mother's death in 1930 became the owner-operator of the family farm. He married Ida Dailey (who still lives on the old homestead) and the couple had six children. Of these only two still live in the county, Luceil (LaRue) near Ewing, and Stanley, a veteran of World War II and prisoner of war, who now owns and operates his grandfather's farm.

Robert Conard, brother of George, was born in Pennsylvania in 1863 and came to Inman in 1884 at the age of twenty-one. He married Mary Katherine Liddy in 1891 and moved onto a farm at Page. A few years later he returned to Inman and worked for many years on the night shift at the coal chute H- mnownthat the sranger had had sinister intentions__ but had probably been deterred by the dog's actions. After fifty-four years in the county, Bob passed away of a heart attack at his home in Inman. He and Mary Katherine had nine children. Four of them still live in the county, two, George and Mike, in Inman.

Jonathan P. Hancock, who married Mary Frantz in Bourbon, Indiana, came to his homestead, seven miles northeast of Inman, in 1884. Mr. Hancock, a direct descendant of Joseph Hancock, brother of John who signed the Declaration of Independence, was a veteran of the Civil War. When they drove into Inman, that April, there was from one foot to eighteen inches of water everywhere. The whole valley seemed to be a huge swamp. Accordingly Mr. Hancock sought higher ground— and found it seven miles north of the town. Since 1884 was such a wet year the land he chose looked very good. The following years proved him wrong.

After putting up the customary shack, the family broke ground for a crop and set out trees. The dryer seasons made blowouts of all the plowed land. At that time the Han-cocks had no horses of their own and, with the failure of their crops, no prospects of getting any— except by sacrificing Mrs. Hancock's sewing machine.

The machine was brand new at the time the family moved from Iowa and Mrs. Hancock was very proud of it, as few pioneer women owned sewing machines. After long deliberation and some tears, she consented to let her husband trade the machine for a horse. Mr. Hancock built a dugout stable for the horse— and a few days later went out to feed it one morning and found it dead.

This happened in the month of November, during a cold, snowy spell, and at the same time the Hancock's second son was born. The doctor was summoned but, not knowing just where his patient lived, got off the trail, wandered fifteen miles out of his way in the storm and never reached the homestead at all.

Without horses or machinery to cut hay for fuel. Mrs. Hancock cut the 1004, Uel y< _ , raised a -id for ten cents a JT it was used for fuel.

Leducting the time he had served in the Civil War, Jonathan was able to prove up on his claim in two and a half years. During much of this time he walked the seven miles into Inman, worked there for seventy-five cents a day, and walked home at night, carrying a sack of flour or other provisions on his back. As soon as he proved up he sold the quarter for $25 and moved into town.

After moving into Inman the Han-cocks ran a hotel for a number of years. Their daughter Robinetta married Clarence Malone in the hotel in November, 1895. Another of their seven children, Claude, married Stella Smith of Inman. After forty years spent in the county, Jonathan Hancock died in Inman in 1924. John Carr, mentioned earlier in connection with "Big Bill" Thompson, was born in County Donegal, Ireland in 1856. At age twenty-four he came to Pennsylvania, worked at anything he could get to do and, in his spare time, furthered his education in the see a " cowboy show," he friend, George Thumball, heac Nebraska with a few hundred in savings.

John took a claim in the Inman area at the present junc Highway 20 and 275 and building up a cattle herd a creasing his land holdings. Bet was done he was known ( Railroad Hotel, 1894. Proprie-Sarah Michaelis. the age of seventy-four years. One son, Charlie, was dragged to death by a horse while his father was still alive. Only three of John's children, all girls, are now living. Sheila Wanser makes her home in O'Neill and Agnes and her husband, Dr. Suttcliff, a dentist in Ewing and O'Neill for many years, now also lives in O'Neill. The other daughter, Loretta Shatto, lives in Pennsylvania. Mr. and Mrs. Frank Colman came to Inman, also in 1884, and settled on a section south of the cemetery. Both were born in England. At the age of thirteen the girl who was later to be Frank Colman's wife lost both her parents and had to make her own way in the world. She became a weaver in a cotton factory in Manchester and there became noted for her unusually fine singing voice. At one time she was one of three girls selected out of the 1,800 women employed at the mill to sing at a public reception given in honor of Queen Victoria.

The Colmans were married May 26, 1866, the bride's birthday, in Manchester. They came to America in 1873, lived two years in Brooklyn and nine years in Green County, New York. After a few years on the place south of town they moved into Inman and opened a railroad eating house east of the lumber yard.

Mrs. Colman's motherly ways and her fine food were extolled from Omaha to the Black Hills and she was affectionately known to many as "Mother Colman." At the big oval table in, her dining room she served her meals "thresher style," setting big plates and bowls of food on the table for her guests to serve themselves. Of their eleven children one son, Frank, born in England, lived the rest of his life in Inman, where he was section foreman during the hey days of the railroad. Two other sons, James and George, also lived out their lives in Inman. George, who married Maude Miller in 1902, was a local veterinarian for many years.

In 1886 William Watson, his widowed mother Cynthia and several brothers and sisters left Wisconsin for Holt County. They first settled on a place near Mineola. Two years later William came to Inman to run a store for a Mr. Lamont. After a time he bought the store and his mother then moved to Inman to live with him. His uncle, Emery Downey, owned a lumber and hardware store and the three businesses went by the firm name of "Downey and Watson." The partnership was later dissolved, with Watson moving the dry goods and grocery store to the northwest corner of Inman's main intersection, and Downey continuing the rest of the business on the southeast corner of the intersection.

Since then the lumber company has been operated by several different owners. Eventually, as the town faded, the last owner closed it out. Today the buildings stand empty and Inman no longer has a lumber yard nor a hardware store.

In November, 1890, William Watson maried Ella Baldwin, daughter of Isaac Baldwin, and set up housekeeping in a little house across the street west of the school house. Of the five children born to them all are still living except a girl who died in infancy. The two daughters, Anita and Verna now live in O'Neill.

In the fall of 1902 William Watson, Ellsworth Mack and William Froelich formed a partnership and bought the Thomas Shufflebotham hay business. In January, 1905, Watson bought out his partners and organized the Watson Hay Company— owners William Watson and Henry J. Abrahams. Not long afterward he sold his store and devoted his full time to the hay Clothing for the naked, Glasses for the blind; Shoes'for the barefooted, Gloves that are lined.

Curtains for the windows.

Shoe strings and laces; Lamps, wicks and oil To light the dark places.

Dried fruits, canned goods, Everything to eat; Caps for the head And socks for the feet.

Calico of the finest That never fades; Woolen goods for dresses.

Ribbons for old maids.

Tobacco for menfolk; Hats for the ladies; Toys for the children; Bottles for the babies.

Queensware, Glassware, Plaster and coal, Leather for harness And leather for soles.

Downey & Watson General Merchants, Inman, Neb.

business. In 1908 Watson moved his family to Lincoln but kept his business interests in Inman and spent much of his time there, in the country he loved so deeply.

In 1913 Earl Watson, William's eldest son, married May Mossman, daughter of an Eagle Creek pioneer. After two years in Lincoln Earl and May moved to Inman where Earl went into the general merchandise business. Of their four children, one, Virginia Tomlinson, lives in O'Neill. Ira, the Watsons' second son, married Ruth Chenowith in 1918. The following year Ira came back to Inman as the manager of the Watson Hay Company. Of their five children, John is president of the First National Bank of O'Neill.

In 1950 Earl sold his store and joined Ira in the hay company. Seventeen years later the brothers sold out to Clifford Sobotka. By then, 1967, the business had been in the Watson name for sixty-two years. It is now known as the Inman Hay Company.

Straps and strings, Buckles and screens; The finest of silks.

And the coarsest of jeans.

Potatoes and apples, Lard and meat, Butter from the country Fresh and sweet.

Tea and coffee, Sugar and rice, Beans and crackers, Cheese and spice.

Oysters and salmon, Flour and meal.

Mouse traps, and cats To make the mice squeal.

Powder for faces, Powder for hunters; Axes for choppers, And remedies for grunter.

Chewing gum, candy.

Corset and bustle; The people come trading And how we do hustle.

Medicine to make you sick.

Medicine to make you well: In fact, we have everything That the best stores sell.

296 Charles Mantz Fowler, who came to Holt County in 1885, was born in Ohio in 1860. His Grandmother Fowler, a Duvall, came to the United States from France with her brother, an aide to General Laffayette, during the Revolution. An Ohio country boy, Charles worked hard, saved his money and eventually came West. During the winter of 1882 he worked on the farm of William Heaton, near Randolph, Iowa. While there he met Kate Martin at a party given by his employers. After their marriage Charles came on to Holt County and filed on a claim near Star, in the far northeast part of the county, then went back to Iowa. He returned in July with a team of mules, built a sod house and broke out a hundred acres of prairie. Back in Iowa that fall he picked 3,350 bushels of corn for the Heatons in thirty-two and a half days.

In January, 1886, a son, Frank James was born to Charlie and Kate. The following month they left Iowa for their new home in Nebraska. Charles farmed his place that first year, then his team died. The next spring he secured a job on the section in Inman, working ten hours a day on the railroad for $1.10 a day. They lived on the farm until they had paid for the land at the rate of $1.25 per acre. Their second child, Jesse James, was born on the homestead. Since "James" was an old family name, it is likely that the boys were given the name for that reason, rather than for the notorious outlaw brothers. After three years on the section, Charlie bought the Inman blacksmith shop. A few years later he sold it and began building houses in the town. During the next seventeen years, while his family grew to number six, he built several new houses for his wife and children— but each time sold them shortly after the family moved in.

On Christmas Day, 1907, he started laying the foundation for a house just across the street west of the Inman schoolhouse. The Fowler family made their home in this house for as long as they lived in town, possibly because Mrs. Fowler may have refused to move again.

Shortly after this Charles bought the blacksmith shop again, but the demand for houses was so strong at this time that he went into contracting again and built many houses and barns in the vicinity. In 1920 he bought the blacksmith shop back for the third time, and made smithing his trade for the rest of his working years. About this time he bought his first car, a two-seated Chevrolet touring job. The older boys knew how to drive but Chet, the youngest, about thirteen years old had to be taught. However, according to the family chronicle, it was a much greater ordeal for his father to learn than it was for the boy. As a lad Charlie had learned to play the fiddle, and the instrument was as much a part of him as was his anvil and forge or his hammer and saw. He and his wife sang in church choirs, took part in school and church activities and Lodge meetings. The two oldest sons, Frank and Jesse, worked for the railroad and finally left Inman to work on other railroads, Frank in Kansas and Jesse in California. Henry and Mark, younger sons, both worked in the Fair store for Earl Watson, then went into the wholesale grocery business. Henry married Nell Walker of Page; Mark married Hyldred Davies, daughter of George Davies, president of the Inman State Bank. Chester married Hyldred's youngest sister, Geraldine. Lena, the Fowler's only daughter, married Andrew Butler, the second son of Mr. and Mrs. N. S. Butler of Inman.

Kate Fowler died in 1921, Charles in 1945. Both are buried in the Inman cemetery beside three baby daughters who died in the 1890's.

Edward and Mary Baker left Iowa in 1888 with their three small children and traveled by covered wagon to Cody, Nebraska. Mr. Baker took a claim on the outskirts of the town, but blizzards, prairie fires, Indian scares and drought forced them to leave. Traveling southeast, they came to Inman, where there was no grocery store. (Either the date of their arrival is wrong, or else the town was temporarily without such a store, for there had certainly been grocery merchants in the town before 1888.) Edward Baker rented a two-story building, opened a grocery down-The Inman Town Herd on its way to pasture. stairs and installed his family upstairs. Later he bought lots on Main Street and built a store and a home. He also bought a farm southeast of the town. The place is still known as the "Baker Quarter." Edward operated his store until his death in 1939.

The Bakers saw the town grow until it boasted two stores, two banks, a lumber yard, hay station, hotel, blacksmith shop, shoe shop and the depot. Three more children were born to Ed and Mary in Inman and four of the six grew up and married. One daughter died in infancy, another little girl helped herself to some pills in the drug section of her father's store and died before the nearest doctor, from Page, could reach her.

One son, Robert, with only an eighth grade education, became a depot agent in Brown County, studied law at night and went down to Omaha for his bar examination. He passed, then returned to Brown County and became a banker and a judge. He married Laurel Wolfe of O'Neill.

Fred Baker, the oldest son, married Alice Sindlinger of Southfork, a settlement south of Inman. Mable, the oldest daughter, married Bert Green of Inman. All are now dead.

Blanche, one of the younger girls, remembers the Gypsies who used to come to Inman, frightening all the youngsters. A Gypsy told her father's fortune one day, she said, and foretold a very serious illness for him. Her brother Robert came in just then and the woman pointed at him and said he, too, would be very sick. Soon afterward both became dangerously ill with appendicitis and had to go to Norfolk for surgery.

She remembers the hoboes, too, stopping over at the stock yards not far from the Baker home. They often 297 the age of seventy-four years. One son, Charlie, was dragged to death by a horse while his father was still alive. Only three of John's children, all girls, are now living. Sheila Wanser makes her home in O'Neill and Agnes and her husband, Dr. Suttcliff, a dentist in Ewing and O'Neill for many years, now also lives in O'Neill. The other daughter, Loretta Shatto, lives in Pennsylvania. Mr. and Mrs. Frank Colman came to Inman, also in 1884, and settled on a section south of the cemetery. Both were born in England. At the age of thirteen the girl who was later to be Frank Colman's wife lost both her parents and had to make her own way in the world. She became a weaver in a cotton factory in Manchester and there became noted for her unusually fine singing voice. At one time she was one of three girls selected out of the 1,800 women employed at the mill to sing at a public reception given in honor of Queen Victoria.

The Colmans were married May 26, 1866, the bride's birthday, in Manchester. They came to America in 1873, lived two years in Brooklyn and nine years in Green County, New York. After a few years on the place south of town they moved into Inman and opened a railroad eating house east of the lumber yard.

Mrs. Colman's motherly ways and her fine food were extolled from Omaha to the Black Hills and she was affectionately known to many as "Mother Colman." At the big oval table ini her dining room she served her meals "thresher style," setting big plates and bowls of food on the table for her guests to serve themselves. Of their eleven children one son, Frank, born in England, lived the rest of his life in Inman, where he was section foreman during the hey days of the railroad. Two other sons, James and George, also lived out their lives in Inman. George, who married Maude Miller in 1902, was a local veterinarian for many years.

In 1886 William Watson, his widowed mother Cynthia and several brothers and sisters left Wisconsin for Holt County. They first settled on a place near Mineola. Two years later William came to Inman to run a store for a Mr. Lamont. After a time he bought the store and his mother then moved to Inman to live with him. His uncle, Emery Downey, owned a lumber and hardware store and the three businesses went by the firm name of "Downey and Watson." The partnership was later dissolved, with Watson moving the dry goods and grocery store to the northwest corner of Inman's main intersection, and Downey continuing the rest of the business on the southeast corner of the intersection.

Since then the lumber company has been operated by several different owners. Eventually, as the town faded, the last owner closed it out. Today the buildings stand empty and Inman no longer has a lumber yard nor a hardware store.

In November, 1890, William Watson moried Ella Baldwin, daughter of Isaac Baldwin, and set up housekeeping in a little house across the street west of the schoolhouse. Of the five children born to them all are still living except a girl who died in infancy. The two daughters, Anita and Verna now live in O'Neill.

In the fall of 1902 William Watson, Ellsworth Mack and William Froelich formed a partnership and bought the Thomas Shufflebotham hay business. In January, 1905, Watson bought out his partners and organized the Watson Hay Company— owners William Watson and Henry J. Abrahams. Not long afterward he sold his store and devoted his full time to the hay Clothing for the naked, Glasses for the blind; Shoes'for the barefooted, Gloves that are lined.

Curtains for the windows.

Shoe strings and laces; Lamps, wicks and oil To light the dark places.

Dried fruits, canned goods, Everything to eat; Caps for the head And socks for the feet.

Calico of the finest That never fades; Woolen goods for dresses.

Ribbons for old maids.

Tobacco for menfolk; Hats for the ladies; Toys for the children; Bottles for the babies.

Queensware, Glassware, Plaster and coal, Leather for harness And leather for soles.

Downey General Inman, business. In 1908 Watson moved his family to Lincoln but kept his business interests in Inman and spent much of his time there, in the country he loved so deeply.

In 1913 Earl Watson, William's eldest son, married May Mossman, daughter of an Eagle Creek pioneer. After two years in Lincoln Earl and May moved to Inman where Earl went into the general merchandise business. Of their four children, one, Virginia Tomlinson, lives in O'Neill. Ira, the Watsons' second son, married Ruth Chenowith in 1918. The following year Ira came back to Inman as the manager of the Watson Hay Company. Of their five children, John is president of the First National Bank of O'Neill.

In 1950 Earl sold his store and joined Ira in the hay company. Seventeen years later the brothers sold out to Clifford Sobotka. By then, 1967, the business had been in the Watson name for sixty-two years. It is now known as the Inman Hay Company.

Straps and strings, Buckles and screens; The finest of silks, And the coarsest of jeans.

Potatoes and apples, Lard and meat, Butter from the country Fresh and sweet.

Tea and coffee, Sugar and rice.

Beans and crackers, Cheese and spice.

Oysters and salmon, Flour and meal, Mouse traps, and cats To make the mice squeal.

Powder for faces, Powder for hunters; Axes for choppers, And remedies for grunter.

Chewing gum, candy, Corset and bustle; The people come trading And how we do hustle.

Medicine to make you sick.

Medicine to make you well: In fact, we have everything That the best stores seli.

& Watson Merchants, Neb.

296 Charles Mantz Fowler, who came to Holt County in 1885, was born in Ohio in 1860. His Grandmother Fowler, a Duvall, came to the United States from France with her brother, an aide to General Laffayette, during the Revolution. An Ohio country boy, Charles worked hard, saved his money and eventually came West. During the winter of 1882 he worked on the farm of William Heaton, near Randolph, Iowa. While there he met Kate Martin at a party given by his employers. After their marriage Charles came on to Holt County and filed on a claim near Star, in the far northeast part of the county, then went back to Iowa. He returned in July with a team of mules, built a sod house and broke out a hundred acres of prairie. Back in Iowa that fall he picked 3,350 bushels of corn for the Heatons in thirty-two and a half days.

In January, 1886, a son, Frank James was born to Charlie and Kate. The following month they left Iowa for their new home in Nebraska. Charles farmed his place that first year, then his team died. The next spring he secured a job on the section in Inman, working ten hours a day on the railroad for $1.10 a day. They lived on the farm until they had paid for the land at the rate of $1.25 per acre. Their second child, Jesse James, was born on the homestead. Since "James" was an old family name, it is likely that the boys were given the name for that reason, rather than for the notorious outlaw brothers. After three years on the section, Charlie bought the Inman blacksmith shop. A few years later he sold it and began building houses in the town. During the next seventeen years, while his family grew to number six, he built several new houses for his wife and children— but each time sold them shortly after the family moved in.

On Christmas Day, 1907, he started laying the foundation for a house just across the street west of the Inman schoolhouse. The Fowler family made their home in this house for as long as they lived in town, possibly because Mrs. Fowler may have refused to move again.

Shortly after this Charles bought the blacksmith shop again, but the demand for houses was so strong at this time that he went into contracting again and built many houses and barns in the vicinity. In 1920 he bought the blacksmith shop back for the third time, and made smithing his trade for the rest of his working years. About this time he bought his first car, a two-seated Chevrolet touring job. The older boys knew how to drive but Chet, the youngest, about thirteen years old had to be taught. However, according to the family chronicle, it was a much greater ordeal for his father to learn than it was for the boy. As a lad Charlie had learned to play the fiddle, and the instrument was as much a part of him as was his anvil and forge or his hammer and saw. He and his wife sang in church choirs, took part in school and church activities and Lodge meetings. The two oldest sons, Frank and Jesse, worked for the railroad and finally left Inman to work on other railroads, Frank in Kansas and Jesse in California. Henry and Mark, younger sons, both worked in the Fair store for Earl Watson, then went into the wholesale grocery business. Henry married Nell Walker of Page; Mark married Hyldred Davies, daughter of George Davies, president of th Inman State Bank. Chester me Hyldred's youngest sister, Ger Lena, the Fowler's only dit married Andrew Butler, the son of Mr. and Mrs. N. S. Bu.

Inman.

Kate Fowler died in 1921, Charles in 1945. Both are buried in the Inman cemetery beside three baby daughters who died in the 1890's.

Edward and Mary Baker left Iowa in 1888 with their three small children and traveled by covered wagon to Cody, Nebraska. Mr. Baker took a claim on the outskirts of the town, but blizzards, prairie fires, Indian scares and drought forced them to leave. Traveling southeast, they came to Inman, where there was no grocery store. (Either the date of their arrival is wrong, or else the town was temporarily without such a store, for there had certainly been grocery merchants in the town before 1888.) Edward Baker rented a two-story building, opened a grocery down-The Inman Town Herd on its way to pasture. stairs and installed his family upstairs. Later he bought lots on Main Street and built a store and a home. He also bought a farm southeast of the town. The place is still known as the "Baker Quarter." Edward operated his store until his death in 1939.

The Bakers saw the town grow until it boasted two stores, two banks, a lumber yard, hay station, hotel, blacksmith shop, shoe shop and the depot. Three more children were born to Ed and Mary in Inman and four of the six grew up and married. One daughter died in infancy, another little girl helped herself to some pills in the drug section of her father's store and died before the nearest doctor, from Page, could reach her.

One son, Robert, with only r- emoducction.-yes 4 judge? _ O'NeillT-Fred Baker, the oldest son, Alice Sindlinger of SouthforK, settlement south of Inman. Mable, the oldest daughter, married Bert Green of Inman. All are now dead.

Blanche, one of the younger girls, remembers the Gypsies who used to come to Inman, frightening all the youngsters. A Gypsy told her father's fortune one day, she said, and foretold a very serious illness for him. Her brother Robert came in just then and the woman pointed at him and said he, too, would be very sick. Soon afterward both became dangerously ill with appendicitis and had to go to Norfolk for surgery.

She remembers the hoboes, too, stopping over at the stock yards not far from the Baker home. They often 297 borrowed a kettle or a frying pan from Mrs. Baker, and begged coffee from Mr. Baker at the store. One of them came to the store one day and asked for a bottle of lemon extract, which he drank. Afterward the Bakers saw him walking the top rail of the high stock yards fence.

Blanche finished the eighth grade in Inman, then graduated from O'Neill High in 1917. Later she married Dallas Gifford. She is now the only living member of her family. George Taylor Davis, born in Missouri in 1867, first came to Holt County in the fall of 1889. His wife, expecting a child soon, stopped with friends in Franklin, Nebraska, while her husband and his two brothers, Bill and Grant, headed on toward Cherry County with a team and wagon.

However the weaher had turned wet and the roads were deep with mud. By the time the Davis brothers reached O'Neill the horses were playing out and the nights turning cold. George stopped there, filed on a homestead and, with the help of his brothers, put up a sod house. Later, when the land was surveyed and section lines laid out, he found that he had built the house on the wrong side of the line, on the Knapp timber claim.

When the Davis' first son was a year old his mother brought him to the claim. In the late 'nineties Mr. Davis hired a carpenter to build a frame house (two rooms downstairs and two up, with a lean-to on the side for a kitchen) for his family, which eventually numbered twelve children. The William Stamp quarter joined the Davis land on the north and the schoolhouse for District 112 was located on the northwest corner of the Stamp land. Because of the many cottonwood trees planted on the school grounds it was known as the Cottonwood School. The first schoolhouse was a small red section building, purchased from the Northwestern Railroad Company, and moved to the site. For several years the school terms began in October and ended in January. At times as many as five of the Davis children attended. By 1907 the term had been lengthened to include the month of May, and that year six of the Grant Davis children also went to the school. In 1912 five of the eighteen pupils enrolled in the little red schoolhouse were Claridge boys. That year George Davis was Director of the school board and Mrs. Davis was Moderator.

Following the term of 1918 the district consolidated with Inman and the schoolhouse (by then a larger white frame building) was moved into town. The country students were then transported to Inman by bus, a horse drawn vehicle.

The Davis children drove a horse and buggy into Inman to high school, where Esther Davis was one of the first class to graduate from the twelfth grade there. "Our class," she wrote, "was the only one to graduate from the school twice. For awhile only ten grades were offered in Inman. Then the eleventh grade was added and graduation exercises held for the class that finished that year, 1919. Then it was decided to offer the twelfth grade the next fall— and five students, Bertha Killinger, Sara Butler, Dale Van Valkenburgh, Leslie Sharp and Esther Davis, graduated again. When the Davis family first had a telephone they had it hung on the wall in the kitchen lean-to. In 1909, when the house was remodeled and enlarged, the lean-to was taken off. Until they got around to moving the phone inside they had to go out of doors to use it, or to answer it when it rang.

For quite a few years George Davis was a county supervisor, an office that required a good deal of driving about over his section of the big county. For several years he resisted purchasing a car for use on his job, "not being all that motor minded." Finally, in 1917, he bought a 1914 Ford. Shortly afterward his brother John from Kansas came for a visit. One Sunday the brothers and the four youngest Davis boys decided to go for a car ride. It got very late, but they didn't come home. Finally one of the boys came walking in to get a team to pull the car home. The trouble was only a minor mechanical difficulty, but none of them knew how to fix it. George Davis' grandson, Bob Davis, and his family still live on the old Rosebud Land Registration, O'Neill, Nebraska. homestead. The other eight living members of the original family are scattered from Iowa to California. James Coventry, a Nova Scotian, was married in Massachusetts in 1865. Four years later he brought his family to -Schuyler, Nebraska, where they lived for twenty years, then moved to a farm six miles south of Inman. Of their six children all are now dead. George, second son of James, went on to Canada instead of stopping at Inman. There, in 1896, he married Mina Jane Smith, a former Schuyler friend. Three of their five children were born in Canada before George moved his family back to his father's Inman farm in 1904.

Due to ill health George left the farm in 1913, moved into Inman and was associated with Earl Watson in the Fair store for some time. He passed away in 1947, after a short illness. His sons, Kenneth and James, still live in the Inman community. His wife and three daughters are dead. The Alfred Gunn family came to a farm six miles from O'Neill and four from Inman in May, 1890. A country school was located a mile and a half south of the farm, with the railroad, fenced with four-wire fences, between the home and the school. A daughter, Hattie, and her brother herded two hundred head of cattle on a school section that summer. Their father had taken the cattle from the "Ditch Company Ranch" to feed until the next spring. His payment to be half the increase. However that was a very bad winter and they had to let the cattle go back, due to lack of feed and shelter, and so gained nothing from the venture.

The family then moved into O'Neill, just in time for Mr. Gunn to get a job 298 helping build the new St. Mary's Academy. Hattie carried his lunch to him at noon each day. The family was still living in O'Neill when the Kinkaid Homestead Act was passed and the big drawing for land was held at the land office.

"Every sleeping place available was full the night before," according to Hattie, "and probably thousands walked the streets that night, meeting trains and shouting for Kinkaid. Few of us could sleep for the shouting and rumble of traffic. We had board sidewalks, lined with hitching posts." Hattie also remembers the "pest house" and the "slaughter house," just south of town and both in use in those days, and the fire that burned the Gunn home in 1911. No one died in the fire but some of the family "were pulled out unconscious." Hattie still lives on East John Street in O'Neill.

The Jason Smith family lived only briefly (seventeen years) in the Inman area. From Schuyler, Jason and his wife Mary, with their four children., came to Inman in 1890, having traded property in the former town for a home and a liverystable in the latter. Two more daughters were born to the Smiths before Jason filed on a tree claim on the South Fork of the Elkhorn in 1900. There he built a six-room house before trading the ranch, in 1907, for a large livery stable business (twenty horses and ten buggies) at Laurel, Nebraska. Bob Bobisud, born in Cisco, Bohemia, in 1877, probably came to Inman about 1900. He and his sister Emma, both of Howells, Nebraska, came together and Bob was just out of college. He opened Inman's first and only drug store.

In 1913 he married Mary Judd who, until her marriage, had worked for her aunt and uncle, Frank and Sarah Conard, in the hotel. The Bobisuds had six children. The youngest, Jackie, was killed in the service of his country.

Lucy Judd, Mary's sister, worked in the drug store while going to high school. Bob later moved his store and family to Verdigre, Nebraska.

William Franklin Conard, brother of Bob and George, was born in Pennsylvania in 1859. He was nine when his parents moved to Minnesota, where he grew to manhood and, in 1881, married Sarah Maust. In 1893 Frank and Sarah, with their five children, moved to a farm, known as the "Gannon place," north of Inman. The children went up the river to the Boyle school.

The family attended the Methodist church in Inman and, other than that, were not allowed to do anything else on Sundays. Lottie, who was seven when she came to the farm, said they sometimes had company on Sundays, when the grown-ups and the guest children were fed first. Very seldom, she remembered, was there any pie left for her or her brothers.

The children loved cucumbers but their parents would not allow them to eat them until they had first been soaked in salt water— for it was believed raw cucumbers were poison and possibly fatal. But, as often as they could, Lottie and her brothers slipped out to the cucumber patch with a salt shaker and ate to their hearts' content. One day they forgot and left the salt shaker in the patch and so were found out. In 1902 Frank bought the hotel south of the depot and built on an addition to accommodate the increasing business. Mrs. Conard did the cooking and Lottie took care of the dining room. Carbide gas fixtures lighted the hotel. At first the laundry for the hotel was done by hand; then the Conards bought a washing machine, powered by a gasoline engine. This was a great labor saver, even though the washing still had to be hung out on the line, winter or summer.

All trains stopped at Inman to take on coal and water and the crews ate at the hotel, as did many of the passengers from the six daily passenger trains. Dr. Johnson, Inman's first doctor, was also a regular boarder at the hotel.

Frank Conard also owned the livery stable across the street to the west. Many country people left their teams and rigs there while they took a train trip somewhere, and salesmen and others coming in on the trains often hired rigs to take them out into the country or to inland towns. About 1912 Mr. Conard sold his livery stable Frank Conard's first car. Frank is sitting in right front seat, holding his granddaughter, Della Thompson. His son Ray is driving. Mrs. Conard and her daughter, Lottie Thompson, are in back seat. Bill Thompson and Sarah and Violet Conard on running board.

and bought a car, which he then used to transport passengers about the country.

In his later years Frank still served his town, carrying the mail from the depot to the post office each morning and evening. During their many years in Inman Frank and Sarah were known as "Ma and Ra Conard" by almost everyone.

In 1906 Plenn Conard, the eldest son, married Georgia Cole. Plenn died in 1908 when his baby son John was only thirteen months old. In 1919 Georgia married Pat McGinnis. She now lives in Emmet, as does her son, John, who married Emma Anspach of Inman in 1931.

Wes Conard married Della Miller and had two daughters. Della died in 1908 and the girls were raised by their Conard grandparents. Wes later married Lena Trowbridge and had two sons. Wes died of the flu in 1917, while an engineer for the Northwestern Railroad. He died in Lusk, Wyoming and his body was shipped back to Inman for burial. Lena then married John Nickel, who adopted her two sons.

Jim Thompson courted and married Lottie Conard in 1904. Jim had come from Iowa to Inman in 1899 and he and Lottie made the little town their home the rest of their lives. They became the parents of four children, all of whom went through school in Inman.

The town barber for several years, Jim sold the shop on account of his health and built and ran a pool hall. Although his hall was a clean and reputable place, a new minister tried to put it out of business. He was unsuccessful, but in October, 1930, a new Methodist minister, a Miss Clute, arrived in town one evening to take up her duties. That night the pool hall 299 caught fire and burned to the ground. The next day Mr. Thompson told her that it surely hadn't taken her long to put him out of business.

Jim Thompson then became a licensed real estate broker, operating in the Inman area for over thirty years. Jim had one of the first cars in the town, and later the first enclosed car. Everyone told him this car, with its glass windows, was a "death trap" and wouldn't last long. For many years Mr. Thompson drove the doctor out into the country on his calls. The Charles Fowler family lived just north of the Thompsons and the two families were close friends. Mr. Fowler built a new house for the Thompsons about 1916. Della Thompson, one of Jim and Lottie's daughters, remembers when Inman had grown to boast three stores, Watson's, Goree's and Baker's; the drug store, two banks, two cream stations, a garage, the lumberyard, two hardware stores, the post office, doctor's office, newspaper office, the hay office and the shoe shop.

When the Thompsons were quarantined for six weeks with scarlet fever, Mr. Thompson stayed at the hotel. Every day he brought groceries and supplies, put them on the porch and asked how everyone was doing and if they needed anything more. Another time the teacher, Alice French, became ill at school with diphtheria. Dr. O. W. French came on Sunday morning from Page, called all the school children together and vaccinated them. No one else took sick.

During one of Inman's periodic floods Della was at her grandparents' hotel. Although a very little girl at the time, the water in the streets was so deep that, when she stepped off a footbridge into a ditch full of water, she went all the way under. And in the 'thirties, when the drouth was at its worst, she remembers a summer when it was too hot to sleep inside and almost every family in town moved their cots and beds outside. And that summer there were no mosquitoes.

Today Della's great-grandmother Fannie Maust, her great-grandmother and great-grandfather Conard, her grandmother and grandfather Conard, her father and mother, Jim and Lottie Thompson, her husband Ralph Brittell and her baby son all sleep in the Inman cemetery.

Alma Lines Ross supplied the following family history. "My grandfather, Levi Lines, came from England to the state of New York about 1880. When my father, George Lines, was nine they moved to Iowa, where Grandmother Lines died. About 1884 my father and grandfather went to Springview, Nebraska, and filed on adjoining claims.

"They worked hard, breaking prairie and planting timber. Father was out in the blizzard of '88 and was badly frozen. After proving up on his homestead he married and moved to Clarks, traveling in a covered wagon. A year later, with their two children, Lloyd and Ethel, they headed back to the homestead. On the way they camped over night at Inman, where they bought some supplies at the Fair Store. Father liked the friendliness of the people and kept it in mind. "Back on the homestead their little son Lloyd died, they had a year of drought and there was no work. Finally, late in October, 1896, Father hitched his team to the wagon, left Mother and Ethel a few groceries and a dollar and a half in money, and set out to find work. He headed toward Inman and, finding nothing on the way, drove into the town about dusk and stopped his wagon by the depot. "Frank Colman walked over to talk to him. 'I'm looking for work,' Father told-him. 'D. L. Pond is needing a man on his hay baler,' Frank said. Father went to work for him the next morning, at fifty cents a day. In November he went after his family. They located a mile and a half west of Inman, then later moved to the place now owned by Harold Pribil. "Father bought a small house of George Geary and moved it to the place, and that is where I was born. Later he bought a horse power baler and baled and hauled hay for years, doing business with the Watson Hay Company. He bought more land and 1915 Inman flood. Courtesy Elwin Smith. The Conard Hotel and Livery Barn. Courtesy Ray Conard. 300 in 1910 built onto the house. In 1914 he built a small barn, and in 1918 a large barn. The big barn burned down two years later. One year the hay was all burned by a prairie fire.

"Grandfather Lines spent the last three years of his life here and was well-known. He died in 1914 and is buried in the Inman cemetery. Sister Ethel died in 1940 and Father and Mother in 1951. All three of us Lines children went to the Willow Lake school. Later some of our children went there." Walter Farewell was born in East Kent, England, in May, 1863. He married Eliza Emily Arnold in April 1889, and the couple set sail from Liverpool in 1891 for America. They came directly to Butler County and lived at David City for five years, then went on to South Dakota. After two years of grasshoppers, drought, and the loss of their home by fire, they came back to Nebraska.

In 1901 they came to Inman, where they farmed, hauled freight and baled hay. Ten years later they moved over to Chambers. In 1913 a tornado struck their home and killed their small son, Jesse. The home they rebuilt on the same site in the east edge of town stood until March, 1973, when it was razed to make way for the construction of the Norman Harley's new home.

The Farewells had nine children and raised all but one, the two-year- old boy killed in the tornado. One son, Frank, unmarried, is a World War I veteran.

William Gannon, born in Illinois in 1855, married Rosa Spangler in Fremont, Nebraska, in 1891. They had five daughters and one son when they moved to a farm north of Inman where the children went to a country school, District 174. The three younger girls stayed in O'Neill and worked for their board and room while going to highschool. "It was our first stay away from home," Blanche Gannon wrote, "and we got mighty homesick, as we only got to go home once a month. "We rode down on the Burlington passenger train which left O'Neill about 7:30 in the morning on its way to Page. However, there was a switch at Hay Point, the end of a spur line about two and a half miles northeast of Inman, where the railroad company set off empty box cars to be loaded with hay. Sometimes the conductor would let us off a mile west of Hay Point at "Gannon's Crossing" and this would save our parents driving all the way to the point after us. They would watch to see if the train stopped at the crossing. If it didn't they knew they had to go to Hay Point. In those days one could even stand on the tracks and flag down a train and get on it." Roy and Blanche are the only Gannons to remain in Holt County. Roy married Grace Killinger of Inman and lived on the Gannon homestead. They had three children. Blanche married Fred Lindberg and lived on a farm north of O'Neill. They had five daughters. Roy and his wife recently gave the old log cabin from their farm to the Rainbow Girls of O'Neill. It will be moved to the Court House lawn, restored and preserved.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Knapp came to Inman in the early 1900's and lived in a large square house at the south end of Main Street. Several blocks, platted at this time, were called the "Knapp Addition." Mr. Knapp had an interest in the Inman State Bank and also owned a half section of land a mile northwest of town.

The Knapps had no children. In the 'twenties they made arrangements to leave all their properties to the Nebraska Annual Conference of the Methodist Church. If Mrs. Knapp survived her husband the Conference was to pay her a set sum as long as she lived. This appeared to be a good deal for the Conference until the onset of the Depression. Before it was over they had to take money from other sources to meet the annuity payments because of the non-existant farm income.

Since Mrs. Knapp's passing, however, the estate has appreciated in value and paid off very well. The Log cabin on Roy Gannon's farm north of Inman. Inman Methodist Church, also named in the trust, receives $100 annually as long as it remains active. It was 115 acres of the Knapp meadow land that the Inman church leased, back in 1949, from the Conference and on which they put up the hay as a church project.

Mary Hannah Downey grew up in SiouX City, Iowa. As a girl and young lady she visited her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Emory Downey in Inman every summer. During these visits she became acquainted with Morgan Grosser who had come early to the Inman area from Ohio. Of their five children only Thelma Brittell, a widow, now lives in the county. Estella Grosser, who supplied the family history, lives in Wyoming. "My dad," she wrote, "went to Omaha in 1909 and drove home one of the first Model T Fords. Mr. Sharp and Mr. Cunningham went at the same time and each bought a car. We really thought we were somebody, taking our Sunday rides at about fifteen or twenty miles an hour. I was about six years old then.

"Dr. Noyes came to Inman about 1908 and boarded at our house for a few months. Then he went away and came back with a bride. We went to Dr. Noyes with every little pain. He used to say he couldn't have made a go of it if it hadn't been for Morg Grosser and the monthly bills he paid. "I worked at the Fair Store through my highschool days, after school and 301 on Saturdays. Earl Watson owned the store and Henry and Mark Fowler worked there too. Earl was a kind and considerate boss. During haying season, when the farmers worked until dark and then came to town, we stayed open until about eleven o'clock on Saturday evenings.

"I walked home alone, those nights, and never once was afraid. Our town was a safe place. I wish my grandchildren could grow up in such a town." William and Anne Veale came from England to the United States in 1866. Their two older children were born in England. Seven more were born at Rock Falls on Eagle Creek in Holt County. Mr. Veale ran the mill there for a short time. During the drouth of 94 he gave up and moved to Arkansas.

By 1906 he was back in Holt County, or at least his daughter Lulu was, for in that year she married Jay Butler in the Inman Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints. After his marriage Mr. Butler worked for his uncle, William Watson, in the Fair Store. Later he owned and operated the Inman Hardware store. His younger brother Andrew, married Lena Fowler and was Inman's barber for many years. Their children were twins Rex and Vere, and daughters Gayle and Marjorie.

The Butlers lived in a comfortable, two story, three bedroom home. Shirley Butler writes that they were among the first families in town to have a radio and she can remember her sister Mary, about a year old in 1919, sitting on her father's lap, listening to the set through its ear phones. Shirley also remembers another Inman flood. This one occurred in 1924 or 1925 and the residents rowed up and down the streets in boats.

Stanislaus (Stanley) Chamiel was born in southern Poland in 1884. At the age of seventeen he came alone to Buffalo, New York, where he lived for a year before going to Chicago. He lived in a tenement house there, in an apartment directly above the one where Jennie Zoborowski lived with her parents. Jennie had been twelve when her family came to Chicago.

In 1907 the Zoborowskis moved to Holt County and settled on a farm ten miles south of Inman. When Stanley found that he could not get along without Jennie he followed her to Nebraska, married her in 1908 and returned to Chicago, where he was employed by the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company. Three years later they were back in Holt County.

They settled first on the Trail Ranch, now owned by Leo Lydon. A year later they moved to the Springfield Ranch, where Larry Waller lives today. For sixteen years they lived on this ranch. Their five children went to the Martha school and Stanley was in great demand because of his real skill with a violin.

From the Springfield Ranch the Chamiel family moved to the Lone Tree Ranch, so called because, on all that barren stretch of prairie south of Stafford, along the South Fork River, only this old lone cottonwood broke the horizon. To it came settlers from miles around to cut shoots or "cuttings" to start groves on their own claims. Stanley retired there. He and Jennie had known many hard times and had gone broke, along with most of their neighbors, during the Great Depression, but they had never gone hungry. Stanley had even been able to keep himself in tobacco because he raised and cured his own, a "special brand" which he smoked in his cob pipe. Two of their sons, Alex and Carl, still live on the Lone Tree Ranch.

Dr. William Noyes took over the practice of Dr. Homer Johnson in Inman in 1908 and served the community for fifteen years. During his first five years there he made his calls with horse and buggy when he could. When his own outfit couldn't make the trips he rode the train if his patients lived within walking distance of the station. Once the section men took him on a hand car to visit a patient. Mrs. Lizzie Colman helped him with his baby cases.

The good doctor served on the village board and on the school board. During World War I, when no coach was available for basketball, he took over and coached both the girls and boys teams. He married Hattie Lippincott of Red Cloud in 1909 and the couple had five children. In 1923 the family moved to Ceresco, where he practiced until his death in 1957. His four daughters grew up, married, and continued to live in Ceresco. His son, William, lives in California.

At the age of five George Herold came to the United States from Prussia in 1844. He served in the Union Army, 1861-1865, and made the march with General Sherman to the sea. He met his Scotch-Irish wife, Hilday McThena in Iowa. They were the parents of ten children.

George Herold, Jr., was born in 1889 at Phillipsburg, Kansas. With his family he later moved to Gregory, South Dakota, where the Herolds ran an early restaurant. With a friend, Charley Archer, young George came to Holt County by train in 1900 to work for George Coventry, Harry Harte and Alva Scholz on their hay balers. He later farmed for himself and also worked for Lewis Kopecky in his hay fields.

In March, 1941, George married Viola DeLong at O'Neill. Their first home was on the Elkhorn at what is now known as the "Scout 40" place. In 1946 they moved three miles south of Inman; twenty-one years later they moved into the old Butler home in town.

The Herold's six children attended school at Willow Lake from 1948 through 1967 and obtained their high school educations at the Inman, Page, Ewing and O'Neill schools.

George Fox Kivett was born at Stuart, Iowa, in 1860. His first wife died, leaving him a small daughter. In 1896 he married Mary Emily (Emma) Paxson. For some years the family lived in Burr Oak, Kansas. In the early spring of 1910 George and Emma, with their three sons and three daughters, and Emma's brother, Charles Paxson, his wife and six children, set out for Page, Nebraska in covered wagons and buggies.

When they came to the Platte River the ice was breaking up and piling high against a shaky old wooden bridge. The two men took the outfit across, one rig and team at a time. When all were safely on the other side they went on, but heard that the bridge went out the next day. Near Bartlett they were caught in a snow storm. While camped in a farmyard the farmer's dogs got into their supply boxes and ate all their food. The farmer furnished breakfast the next morning for the four parents and twelve children.

The Kivetts lived at Page for six years, then moved to Inman in 1916, where the parents lived out their remaining years. George and Emma's oldest son, Virgil, served in both World Wars. Their children went to school in Inman. One daughter, Alice, became a teacher, then a ranch wife when she married James P. Gallagher and went to live on the big Gallagher ranch, where they built a new home near the old ranch house. Alice and Jim moved into O'Neill in 1958, leaving their son, young Jim, his wife and five children to run the place. A sister, Edith Rutledge, lives in O'Neill. Another of the Kivett sons, Vaden, and his wife Rose, lived in Inman. Virgil died in 1954; the rest of the family lives in California.

John W. Anspach and his first wife, Mattie Smart, were native Missourians. Three children were born to their union. Later, while running a furniture store in a small Missouri town, he met and married Mrs. Louise Williams in 1903. The family, with a new daughter, Emma, came by train to Inman in January, 1912. They 302 arrived in the night, but "Grandpa" Conard met the train and took the family to his hotel through the deep snow and the cold.

The next day John Anspach's brother-in-law, John Mathews, came with his team and wagon to take his relatives to his place, five miles south of Inman. The family lived there until the first of March, moving time in the country, when they were able to find an empty house in Inman. Another daughter, Helyn, was born in Inman in 1918.

Mr. Anspach worked as a carpenter as long as his health permitted. Later he was janitor at the schoolhouse and the church. Mrs. Anspach helped out by keeping teachers, sewing, taking in washing and ironing and working out by the day. The family life centered around the Methodist church, where John was Sunday school superintendent for many years. In his later years Mr. Anspach operated a produce station in a small building at the south end of Main Street. There he dropped a can of cream on his foot one day, causing an injury that turned into gangrene and necessitated the amputation of the leg. Although on crutches, he continued to operate the business for a time. He died in his home in Inman in 1939. His wife married R. B. South in 1947 and the couple lived in the little town, in a house Mr. Anspach built many years ago.

In 1913 Jason Gifford traded his general merchandise store in Bladen, Nebraska, for a quarter section farm just northwest of Inman. With his wife and their ten children he came by train to the new home. The old farm house was quite inadequate for a family of twelve and Mr. Gifford built a new two-story, four bedroom home, also a large new barn.

Haying was the main business on the Inman farm but, for several years, the family owned and farmed a half section at Randolph, ninety miles away. This meant driving horses and mules from one place to the other, a three-day trip. When the Giffords had finished putting up their own hay they could always work for the Watson Hay Company— at $5 per day for a man and team. A "day" started at seven in the morning and ended at six in the evening. Before and after work in the field the family did the chores, which consisted of feeding and milking twenty-seven cows by hand.

The Giffords had regular dairy customers in town, where the children delivered cream at twenty-five cents a quart and whole milk for ten cents a half gallon. The young Giffords also picked asparagus and sold it from house to house for a nickel a bunch. Nye Gifford, the third son, did a lot of hauling in those days. Of course he hauled a lot of hay, at sixty cents per ton, and when the ice season came on he hauled ice. Bill Crippon managed the job and Nyle, Harold Killinger and Harold Miller did most of the hauling. The cutters left three loads of ice ready at the lake on the Elkhorn, north of Inman, before they quit at night. It was a race between the haulers to see who could be first at the lake the next morning. "I can recall getting up at 4:00 A.M., harnessing my four horses and having a load of ice back into town shortly after 7:00 A.M.," Nyle wrote.

Nyle also worked for Clarence Conger, unloading coal from railroad cars and delivering it to the coal dealers in the town. For sixty cents a ton he shoveled the coal into his wagon, hauled it to the dealers' bins and shoveled it off the wagon. "I remember handling nineteen tons of coal, on and off the wagon, in one day." "I had three brothers and three sisters older than I," Nyle wrote, "but I was the first to graduate from the Inman high school. The others had to work to help make a living. We didn't have enough big boys in our school to play football but we had a basketball team. We played in the Odd Fellows Hall. I was the biggest one on our team one year and I only weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds. We played O'Neill, Ewing and Chambers, towns with players over six feet tall who weighed two hundred pounds, but we seemed to win our share of the games.

"We were generally hauled to our out of town games by Preston Riley or John Reimers in their Model T Ford trucks. If there was too much snow we went by train. I graduated from Inman in 1922, went to Wayne State Normal, then taught the Ezra Moor school term of 1922-1923. After that Harold Killing-er and I went to the Nebraska School of Business in Lincoln. We worked for our board at a restaurant and at an undertaking parlor for our room." The Giffords sold the farm stock and machinery in the fall of 1925 and rented out the farm land. The house had burned down— due to an accident with a kerosene lamp. The big barn was moved to the Boyle place, after the Gallaghers bought it, and the big ash and box elder groves that stood for years on the land have since been bull-dozed out.

Joseph Samuel Jackson, born in Wisconsin in 1877, spent most of his life in the newspaper business. After losing his first wife he married Edith Bittner at Butte, then moved to Bone-steel, South Dakota, where he started a weekly paper and where his son, Robert W. was born. In 1914 the family moved to Inman and published the Inman Leader. From 1922 to 1933 Mr. Jackson was also the Inman postmaster. His son graduated from Inman High with the class of 1932 and in -1935 Mr. and Mrs. Jackson moved to Dow City, Iowa.

Another 1914 newcomer to the Inman community was Eugene Sire. A native of Switzerland, Gene was nineteen years old when he came to Auburn, Nebraska, in 1891. He worked for an uncle and other farmers there for awhile before he met and married a granddaughter of Peter Smith, one of the state's first homesteaders. The couple lived in Elgin for a few years before coming to Holt County. Mr. Sire intended to become a ranchman and his first move in that direction was to make arrangements with Will Graver of Ewing to move onto one of his places.

The Graver ranch extended from five miles southwest of Inman to well into the South Fork Valley of the Elkhorn, east of Chambers. There were several sets of ranch buildings on the place, homes for tenants and ranch hands. The Graver Home Ranch stood on a hill overlooking the South Fork River. The house had originally been known as the Little post office. It was still a post office when the Sires moved onto the ranch, as well as the home of the South Fork Telephone Company switchboard.

Walter Sire was about seven when his family came to the ranch. The place where they lived was bleak looking at first, he wrote, but had been changed into a fine looking ranch by the time the Sires left it in 1924. For Mr. Sire moved abandoned buildings, from homesteads Will Graver bought, to the site he occupied and made them into barns and sheds for the livestock.

From 1914 to the end of the first World War the Kinkaiders moved out of the country, leaving large areas of available pasture land. A large hay ranch south of Atkinson was used as winter feed and bed grounds for the cow herds and, for awhile, it was ideal ranch country.

"The first time I helped work cattle through the chutes at the headquarters ranch," wrote Walter Sire, "there was about a wagonbox full of horns lying by the chute. They had been cut off Texas steers. There was a dipping vat there, too, set up to fight the mange outbreak of the early 1900's. The brandings and trail drives were the high lights of my youth. 'We'd gather cattle for two or three days and work them through the chutes. There were usually seven or eight riders and hands helping. The Graver boys, Russell and Dale, liked 303 the work as much as I did and, although it was hard, we had fun. In the spring and fall we made the drives, with a big horse herd and about four hundred head of cows, to and from the home ranch to the Atkinson ranch.

"On the drive on Armistice Day, 1923, Ray Conard, Al Woods and I got caught in a blizzard between Chambers and Amelia. We made it to the Medlin ranch with the herd by ten o'clock that night. The next morning the snow was two feet deep and it was still storming. We left Al with the cattle and Ray and I rode back, twenty-eight miles, in the blizzard. I still carry the scars of that ride, as I froze my feet and lost my toenails. "The ranch where we lived was on the main trail from Inman to Chambers and, even though we put in auto gates, people still threw the gates open and drove on. Now, at past sixty-six years of age, I can still get into the saddle and ride a long while without discomfort. This is probably due to the days I spent in the saddle— and the blisters I got as a boy sorting cattle and bringing them back to the right pasture after some car driver left a gate open.

In 1932 Walter married an Inman school teacher, Elsie Mulford, whose family had settled near Stuart years before. Between 1931 and 1969 he built up a fine herd of registered Herefords. In 1938 the Sires moved to Eagle Creek, and there dispersed the herd in 1969. However Walter is still a member of the North Central Hereford Association, which he helped organize in 1934. As County Agent of Boyd County, (1945-1952) he organized the Niobrara Valley Hereford Association in 1946. He now serves this organization as president and has been a member of its board for twenty-eight years.

He and his wife live today on the seven hundred acre place he put together on Eagle Creek, at its confluence with Honey Creek, in 1942.

The Huttons and the Reimers moved to Inman in 1916. Tom Hutton, the second of seven children, was born in 1891 on a small farm in Virginia. Orphaned while still very young, he was raised by an aunt and uncle. On Saturday nights Tom, with other town boys, liked to go down to the depot to watch the trains come in.

For this lad the attraction soon came to be the telegraph instrument. Standing outside the window, he watched the operator, sending and receiving messages. Listening to the sounders clicking away, he wondered what they were saying— and made up his mind to find out.

Tom worked two summers for an uncle who was a stone cutter and brick layer. By January, 1914, he was able to go to a telegraph school at Valpariso, Indiana. The following October he went to Chicago and hired out to the Chicago and Northwestern as a station helper. His was only a flunkie's job but it gave him the opportunity to watch how the telegraph and station work was handled. He worked seven days a week for a wage of $30 per month, and paid $20 a month for his room and board. From Chicago the company first sent him to Scribner, Nebraska, and then to Lynch, north of the Niobrara, where he spent the winter, snowed in most of the time. This was a relief job and when the regular operator returned Tom was sent to Stanton. He worked there a year, as a helper, and there met a girl named Lucile Burger. After several other relief jobs in small Nebraska towns, he had an opportunity to bid on his first permanent job, an opening in Inman. He got the job and moved to Inman in the fall of 1916. Roy Sharp was agent there and Tom's hours were from midnight to eight in the morning.

On his first Christmas there he received a Christmas card from Lucile Burger. Across the bottom of the card she wrote "Write." They were married in September, 1919, but had to live in the hotel, and later in Mrs. Halloran's two front rooms, as there was no house for rent or sale. From 1920 through 1925 the Huttons lived in various little towns in the area where Tom worked at his trade. In 1927 he bid in the agent's job in Emmet, and the next year got the agent's job in Inman, where Roy Sharp was retiring. By this time they had three children, each one born in a different town. They lived thirteen years in the Inman depot and two more children were born to them there.

In 1946 they bought their present home, close by the home of their good friends, the Gene Clarks. Tom served on the Inman schoolboard for sixteen years and was the board's president for fifteen. During this time, in 1935, the schoolhouse burned down. He was also active in the Methodist church and in various town and community clubs. He was made an Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska by Governor Peterson during the second World War. In all, he worked for the Chicago and Northwestern for fifty-two years, thirty-seven of them in Inman. He died in 1969, his wife in 1972. John Reimers and Ida Pronneke grew up in Pierce County, Nebraska. They met at a dance where John was playing his violin. She was a country school teacher, John was a farmer. They were married in 1902 and farmed in Pierce and Madison counties until they moved to a farm a mile west of Inman in 1916.

The Reimers never had it easy and John worked at many things. In the summers he put up hay for the Watson Hay Company, in the winters he drove the school bus, a glass windowed old hearse pulled by horses. He did, however, have a fine driving team and a good top buggy. With this rig he made many long business trips for some of the men in his community. On one of these trips, made for Mr. Watson, he left two weeks before Christmas. The weather and roads were bad and the drive would take him into southern Wheeler County.

His little duaghter, Dorothy, was very sad about the whole thing, for she was certain he would never make it home in time for Christmas. But, even though he had to drive through a blizzard, her father was home on Christmas morning. The Reimers raised a big truck garden every summer and John delivered wagon loads of melons and vegetables to O'Neill. For the children it was a great treat to get to ride with him on these delivery trips.

Vera Brittell, daughter of Frank and Alice Brittell, married David Mors-bach, son of Charles and Elizabeth, in April, 1930. This was just at the beginning of the great drouth and depression and her account of a young married couple getting a start in such times is most interesting. On the morning of the wedding day David and his brother Levi got their hair cut at the barber shop. Vera and her bridesmaid, Marva Conard, got new marcel waves. They were married in the afternoon, then drove out, in their two-year-old Whippet Coach, to Vera's sisters home for the wedding supper. As they were ready to start on to Inman, where a two-room home rented from a railroad man awaited them, Vera's brother-in-law offered them a runt pig if they would take it home with them that night.

"Since everything was hard to come by then," wrote Vera, "we took the pig." They put it in a sack and put it carefully on the back seat, on top of the "Just Married" sign their friends had fastened to the car, and so got it home without soiling the car. That fall they sold the fat pig and bought a heating stove for their living room. The couple had a few chickens and a cow David bought from the Gearys where he worked. Vera's washing equipment was all new, a washboard, tub and wash boiler, and she heated her wash water on her new little kitchen range, after she had pumped the water and carried in the wood. Two years later, when Mr. Geary 304 could no longer afford to hire a man, David took some of his back pay in a little stock and machinery and moved onto the John Reimers forty acre farm west of Inman. "That was the hardest winter of our lives," Vera remembers. "We both got the mumps and green. wood was our only fuel." David and Vera moved back to their first little home, where a son was born to them. Two years later they moved into town, onto a place David had owned for years and where his parents had been living. As times got better Vera knew the joys of an electric iron, a washing machine and a radio. "It seemed then," she said, "as if I had everything anyone could ever wish for." Their first baby rode in a cranberry box mounted on two wheels with a tongue to pull it. The next baby had a new baby buggy. During the second World War, when buggies were scarce and Vera thought she wouldn't need it any more, she sold it for a good price. That was a mistake, for they had another baby but no buggy. Vera solved the problem by getting a buggy frame and covering it with some blue denim patching she had on hand— and so made a buggy that would do, one that a neighbor used for her baby after Vera's was through with it.

The reminiscences of Ralph Leidy make a fitting conclusion to this chapter in the history of Holt County. The Charles C. Leidy family came to Page from Iowa in 1893. The Leidy's were Pennsylvania Dutch and one grandmother was named Fruit Kitchen. Charles Leidy was a printer, who later moved to Inman and printed the Inman News, then owned by Dwight and Luther Pond, farmers living northwest of town. Clara Pond helped handset the type, fold and wrap the papers. As a lad growing up in the two little towns, Ralph came to know a good deal about the people of the neighborhoods.

In the late 'nineties, Ralph wrote, when fuel was scarce in the winters, settlers used to park their wagons where the freight trains slowed down as they neared Inman. Men climbed aboard the coal cars and threw off chunks of coal, and the crews, knowing the conditions, stayed in the cabooses.

Then there was the religious sect that put up a huge tent in the Gingerrich pasture, east of the depot, and held revival meetings. One preacher, a reformed drunkard, went around the tent, leaping every bench and shouting at the top of his voice. All of us kids enjoyed the show, but afterward I sure scooted home at high speed, trying to outrun the Devil. When I was only four a lady told me solemnly that the Catholics were about to kill us all. I had no idea what a Catholic was; but that evening four of them, Mary, Ellen, Bea and Catherine Boyle came to visit my sister, and I remember that Catherine always went out of her way to entertain me.

No one had screens on their doors and windows then and one hot summer evening while a preacher was holding forth in the Methodist church, someone heaved a rooster through the open window at his head. Feathers flew, pandemonium reigned and the meeting broke up. Though suspicion pointed to a certain character, no one was ever convicted. "Doc" Simmons was a neighbor.

His wife nagged him into building a fence around her garden. So Doc fenced three sides, figuring no hen had sense enough to go all the way around and find the open side. It took about thirty minutes for the hens to do just that. Mrs. Simmons had a special room where she had her burial clothes laid out; four white petticoats and one black one. As a special treat visitors were allowed to view this awesome sight, which they did with "Ohs," and "Ahs." But Mrs. Simmons managed to outlive four more husbands. Another Methodist minister named Wilcox was deviled a lot, but usually managed to break even. One Hallowe'en the preacher heard that his privy was to be tipped over. Just after dark he sloshed it on three sides with thin red paint. Next day Inman had several "redskins," as hardly anyone had more than one pair of overalls to wear.

My first teacher was Elizabeth Harte, followed by Myrtle McDermott, May Blanchard and Tom Gushee. The Colman hotel got afire, the church bell clanged and Tom tried to hold us in school. We shoved him aside with tornadic force. We saw four men gather up chinaware in a blanket and carry it to a safe distance. Then they dropped one end, with a total loss of chinaware.

Demonstrations of Monarch cook stoves were sometimes held at the hardware. A fat salesman always stood on the open oven door to show its holding power. (In those days ovens were used to dry wet feet.) Arbuckles coffee, buscuits and butter were served free. Us kids avoided the coffee but encircled dozens of biscuits.

Inman had a two-room school then and Gene Donohoe was the principal. One day he told the room he taught that after dinner he was going to give a whipping to every boy in his room. Sam Noring solved this by going fishing. But us kids in the lower room, scared stiff, listened breathlessly while the whippings were going on. Lee Donohoe was full grown, and when Donohoe got to him they had a dragout battle.

Our 1911 graduation class was Edith Killinger, Roy Goree, George Wilcox and me. As diplomas were sold by the dozen, the school board decided not to buy twelve for just four graduates. So, to this day, if anyone calls me a "dumb cluck" I have no printed evidence to prove otherwise. Years later I did get a diploma from Dr. Salsbury's School of Poultry Diseases. In 1913, when the Odd Fellows built their new hall, George Wilcox and I staged the first strike in Inman. We were getting $2 a day for carrying mud and we struck for $3. Charley Fowler told us to quit or go back to work. As work was scarce, we did just that.

When the building was done they held a big celebration. Governor Aldrich, who came in by train, gave the address. That evening the Re-bekahs had a banquet in the Hall. At that time Inman had no electricity and the Odd Fellows had bought a direct current generator, powered by a gasoline motor. Somtimes the motor stalled.

We younguns were not invited but Ed Wilcox told me about it the next day. Ed said, "The first course was fried chicken. At home when we have fried chicken we just pick it up in our fingers and chew it off the cob but, with a real Governor there, we was stumped and just tried to get what we could with a knife and fork. We weren't making much headway when, Glory Be, the lights went out. I grabbed that drumstick and had about all of it knawed off when the danged lights went on. I looked up and down the table and every man Jack, including the Governor, had a handful of chicken." D. L Pond, a strict prohibitionist, raised either Shorthorns or Polled Durhams. At his sale he had signs hanging from trees around the barnyard. Under one that read "The best is none too good for us," someone had hung several whiskey bottles. I always blamed Bill or Jim Harte for it. One night Jay Butler invited several of us loafers over to his house to listen to his radio, which was a new thing then. Bill Kelly and I pretended to go home, but sneaked up to Jay's house and looked through the window. The program was going fine, so we disconnected the ground wire. Nothing happened. It was bitter cold but we got a long ladder and Bill climbed up on the roof and cut the lead-in wire. The program came in stronger than ever, so we frustrated Watergaters went home disgusted. 305 Elmer Rogers was a selfmade man if I ever saw one. A top grade butcher, he could skin a hog in minutes. At that time Wayne State Normal and Fremont Normal were the colleges where everyone went for an education. The fare to Wayne was $1.98 and board about $3.75 a week. Rooms were cheap. I went eight weeks for $60. Rogers went to Wayne and taught part time. He was going with Ina Clark at Inman at the time, so she would phone around and get hogs lined up for Elmer to butcher. He got a dollar a head, plus twenty-five cents for the hide. Four hogs would pay his train fare home, plus a $1.08 for carousing. They used Ed Wilcox' horse and buggy to drive to the farms to butcher.

One day I told George Wilcox, my pal and Elmer's half brother, that I'd heard Ina and Elmer were getting married. George said, "Well, I guess they will if Ina can get him four hogs to butcher." They were married for a long time.

I worked in a bank at Inman and opened up at 7;30 every morning. I had to sweep out and, in cold weather, move house plants. Every woman in Inman had to bring in a house plant to cause me misery. (The plants were not likely to freeze in the bank.) The outer perimeter of the bank froze, but we had a hard coal burner inside the railing, so I had to carry all those danged plants inside the railing every night, and outside again in the morning. To this day I detest house plants.

In the neighboring town an Innkeeper noticed that some traveling men were taking local women upstairs (through a side entrance) to listen to the radio. As they were doing this after 10 P.M. it didn't seem moral to the Innkeeper. So, waiting until all were in their rooms, he locked the side door. About one or two in the morning, after the radio stations went off, the couples found the side door locked and had to go by the clerk's desk to get out. Traveling salesmen were charged only for a single room, less a discount, but our Innkeeper, in this case, felt obliged to charge full price— for a double room.

"In the fall of 1915," Ralph related, "Charlie Dawkins and I were working for Curt Terrill, south of Inman. It was all wild hay country and we were driving up a lane between two pastures one windy day when Curt lit his pipe and either threw the match out or let some burning tobacco get in the grass. Anyway a fire started. We leaped out, grabbed anything we could find and fought like mad. Luck was with us and we got it out, but I was never so scared in my life. "Baled hay was the big crop. The tires on the bale racks were four inches wide, otherwise they would have sunk to the hub in the swampy meadows. Baling wire was $1.15 a bundle. It took the owner and two men to run the old horse powered balers and it was a slow way to get rich. Cold, too.

"Charlie Dawkins was from Oklahoma and on December 8 the temperature dropped to three above zero. Charlie said to me, 'Ralph, God is a long ways from here." Soon after he left for home.

"The Terrills had raised three young devils who were always trying to put something over on me. We slept upstairs and used a kerosene lamp. I liked to stay up and read and, quite often, the boys would wait until I started up the stairs, then blow the light out. When I grabbed the glass chimney in the dark (to light the lamp again) it burned my fingers. I didn't dare drop it— and that's when I learned to cuss.

"The snow was deep that winter, drifting as high as the tops of willow trees that lined the road. So no one followed the roads, just drove their sleds wherever they could. If a fence was in the way we pulled the staples, fastened the wires down and drove over them. There was a big grove of cottonwoods northeast of the house and one of the Erskine boys counted over 200 jack rabbits going into it one day in February. No one had ever heard of such a gathering of jack rabbits.

"One night, with the moon shining on the snow with the brilliance of mid-day, we heard the two dogs barking and snarling. I jumped out of bed and saw a lone coyote coming into the yard. Curt saw it about the same time, grabbed a shotgun and ran out in the snow, barefooted and wearing only a long, flapping nightgown. It was impossible to get a shot at the coyote without hitting the dogs, so Curt got up on a short tree stump to wait. As one foot got cold he raised it up and stood on the other. Only a halo was lacking to make him appear an avenging angel, prepared to fight off the Devil.

"He finally shot the coyote, ran in, leaving tracks like a Yeti, and his wife made him soak his feet in hot water. I told him his head needed soaking. The next day, while he was cleaning the shotgun, he shot a hole in the ceiling. Fortunately, no one was upstairs at the time. "Yes, baling hay was hard, cold work. But, as Sam Levensen has pointed out, no one told us we were poor so we endured it and had fun. I guess we were the privileged poor. "Cal Geary, a neighbor, owned a good selection of books. One Sunday I walked over and borrowed Darwin's Origin of Species. This book is full of Latin names familiar to Naturalists. I had a smattering of Latin, but I think Curt was limited to an eighth grade education. We used to kid him by saying that ambitious Kansans moved to Nebraska to learn to read and write. He asked to look at that book, spent about a minute on one page, turned to another and, after a short peek, turned to me and said, 'Ralph, I don't believe a word of it.' "The trapper brothers, Dave and Al Douglas, used to help pitch hay to the baler. Each fall the brothers wrapped parts of grain sacks around their legs and sewed them on. I went to Wyoming in 1918 to homestead.

When I came back they told me Dave had died. Later on Al got extremely sick. The neighbors took him to the hospital in O'Neill where, under protest, he was given a bath. His underwear was removed and he was placed in a tub of warm water to soak. After long soaking and three or four changes of water, they discovered another suit of underwear. This, too, was soaked loose. But the ordeal was just too much for poor Al. He died shortly thereafter from exposure to air." A few notes from Sarah Michaelis' Inman History rounds out the tale of the pioneer town. The first flagpole was raised on the east side of Main Street, about 175 feet north of the present pole, in 1898. The railroad donated three poles to the town, each twenty-five feet long. The poles were fastened together with two iron clamps at each joint. On the evening of July 3, 1908, William Kelley climbed the pole and put a new rope in the pulley. Another time the rope replacement was done by one of the Manchester boys. When the weather was dry and the wind strong, the joints on the old pole creaked loudly, but it served its purpose until 1918. By then a new pole was badly needed. Will Riley led the drive to raise money for the new steel pole. Set in the center of town, where it still stands, it was 110 feet tall and had the distinction of being the tallest pole and flying the largest flag of any town between Omaha and Denver. In November, 1919, a high wind bent and broke the pole. When reset, it was only about 80 feet tall.

The town's treasury books for August, 1913, show the cash on hand to be $290.02. Dog licenses, at $1.00 each had brought in $13.00; peddlers, at $3.00 each, $3.00. J. T. Thompson had paid $5.00 for his pool hall license, and Ray Mossman $3.00 for his dray license.

Hay Point, the end of the spur track from which countless tons of hay 306 were loaded in the Valley's hay the 1930's. Better roads and bigger usefullness. shipping hey day, was discontinued in trucks had destroyed the Point's