Chapter 45: Atkinson - Stuart - Nielsen Family History

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

Atkinson— Stuart Chapter Forty-Five The story of Patrick Smythe, brother of Father Smythe of O’Neill, and his family, tells of one of the first families to settle east of Atkinson. This history, as told to Arlene Trombley by Alice Smythe, who was nine years old when the family came to Holt County, is extremely interesting.

Patrick Smythe, born in Ireland in 1830, came to Connecticut in 1858. While fighting in the south in the Civil War he met Mary Galligan, also born in Ireland. Mary, fourteen years younger than Pat, married him and returned to New Haven with him, where they lived until 1879.

Father John Smythe had been sent to O’Neill the year before and it was through his letters of persuasion that Patrick moved his family to Holt County, where the priest had taken a homestead for him.

The story begins with Mary, the young mother, riding on a bed in the back of the covered wagon with the toddler, little Mary. They had been days on the road across the treeless prairie under an endless hot wind, and Mary wondered why she had ever consented to the journey. It was true they hadn’t had much in New Haven, and Pat wanted land of his own, but they had been secure, sure of their next meal and with church and school close by. The wagon halted and Mary lifted the canvas flap. The hot wind struck her face and as far as she could see there were no trees or hills, just tall green grass rolling in waves beneath the whistling wind.

On the wagon seat her older girls, Rose and Alice, sat with their father. Their faces and arms already looked like old leather from the sun and wind. How could they ever grow up to be presentable young ladies in this country! As Pat jumped from the wagon young Tom came to stand beside him, such a handsome lad and so like his father.

The boy and his father unhitched the team and led them, the spare horse and the cows to water in the river. They had bought the cows from a homesteader near Neligh who was selling out and going back east. The black cow gave good milk and a large steer calf followed her. The brindle would freshen in about three weeks. The girls ran to the river’s edge and waded into the cool water, laughing as it lapped their ankles. That evening Pat told his family they would be in O’Neill by this time tomorrow. Mary had heard that O’Neill was like a little Ireland, the land of dreams come true. But Father John had written that the land did not resemble green tree and vine covered Ireland. However, he said, the land was free and good and, with hard work, one could have a fine home there.

Pat had been so excited about it all, selling off the furniture they could not bring along, giving up his job, packing their kitchen wares and personal things. Then there was the long train ride to the Missouri. There had been many people on the train going west. A couple on their way back to their home in Iowa told of the fine gardens there, and so much land to plant, or to raise stock on. A couple of Germans, who had relatives at Beatrice, had only praise for Nebraska. But a man from the Black Hills didn’t much like Nebraska, too flat and windy, he said. Mary was ready to agree with him.

The next day they reached O’Neill and Mary wondered truly how anyone could call it little Ireland— these few little buildings on the flat prairie! The two wagons traveling with them stopped at the “Grand Hotel.” What a name for a long, low soddie! Mary was thankful that they were going on to the church at the end of the street, and its new frame rectory nearby. Pat and his brother were so happy to meet again, and Father John’s housekeeper, a plump, bustling woman, gave the tired travelers a warm welcome. Her name was O’Brien and her family had come to O’Neill with the second colony. Not 451 caring for farming, Mr. O’Brien had built the Grand Hotel and a livery stable.

Father John went with Pat and his family to the homestead the next day. It was a long day’s drive, fifteen miles. They passed a few soddies on the way and folks waved at the travelers or called greetings to the priest. They nooned at Judge Mal-loy’s, and discovered that they had come from . the same county in Ireland.

That evening they pulled in at the new home site, a higher part of the land along the bank of the Elkhorn. They could see for miles and Mary’s hopes rose a bit at the sight of soddies dotting the prairie. Some day she would neighbor with these people. There were no buildings, as yet, but Father Smythe assured them the neighbors would help them build a soddy of their own.

The family camped out that night, then returned to O’Neill the next day, where a house was found for Mary and the girls to live in while Pat and Tom bought a few supplies and went back to the homestead to build the house. Three weeks later they came back to town to report a new house and two small sheds completed. They had already bought a stove, beds, table and chairs for the rented house in town, and by then their money was almost gone.

Pat and Mary decided it would be best if they stayed in town for the winter, while Pat got a job on the railroad, then building from Wisner to Neligh. Young Tom got a job with the local livery stable and the family settled down for the next few months— a good decision, for Mary was pregnant again and a winter alone on the homestead with the little girls could have led to difficulties. During that winter Mary came to be very good friends with Father John, who heard regularly from Ireland so that Mary began to feel Irish again for the first time in years. On St. Patrick’s Day twin girls were born to Pat and Mary, a great surprise to all concerned. Margaret and Anna were several days old before their father, away on the railroad, got home to see them.

“We have been blessed double-fold,” he said, and then to Tom, “You’re greatly outnumbered my boy, t’won’t be easy.” With the coming of spring the family of eight moved to the new home on the Elkhorn. Pat hadn’t yet managed a door for the soddy and a buffalo hide served that purpose the first summer. It was a difficult season. Pat was still working on the railroad. Rains came and the dirt roof leaked. Mary was not strong and the care of the twins and the chores were too much for her.

Now and then a neighbor came by for a visit. Once, as Mary sat feeding the twins, the buffalo skin lifted and a brown face framed in black hair peered in. The Indian grunted and dropped the flap. With the babies in her arms Mary rushed to the door and looked out. Haifa dozen Indian bucks were staring at her three blond girls in the yard. Rose, clutching a kitten Mrs. Malloy had given her, stepped forward and offered it to the Indians, who turned away in disgust.

Pat had told Mary that any Indians who came around would be friendly, and usually only wanted food. So Mary, fearful that they had their eyes on the horses back of the shed, hurried inside and brought out the cottage cheese and Johnny cake that was to have been her family’s supper. The Indians ate every crumb, then rode away as quietly as they had come.

The next four years were hard but satisfying. They had raised good crops and their cattle herd had grown to ten head. They had good neighbors and the new town to the west, Atkinson, was only five miles away and growing fast. Best of all, they had a new frame house.

Pat had worked for the railroad until it reached Long Pine, and with his savings had bought lumber for a two-story house and a new wooden privy. The old sod house was now the chicken house.

Then Father John stopped in one day to see if Alice could go to O’Neill to work for an ailing mother with small children. Pat said she could go for the winter. She stayed two years. By then Tom, a tall handsome nine- teen-year-old, decided to strike out on his own. He hired on as a brakeman for the Northwestern and liked the job. Now and then he was able to stop at home when the train went by. One day he showed them his thumb, smashed while coupling two cars together.

His mother warned him to take good care of it, but a few days later a telegram summoned Pat and Mary to Norfolk, where Tom was seriously ill with lockjaw. Pat brought Alice home to look after the younger children and he and Mary boarded the train for Norfolk. Tom died a few hours later and they brought his body home to the new Catholic cemetery at Atkinson. Neither of his parents ever got over the loss of their only son, and Mary was so ill afterward that Alice did not go back to O’Neill to work.

Life seemed dull to the young lady, after her stay in town, but with Rose she took part in church affairs in Atkinson, and now and then the Nightengale boys warmed up their fiddles and put on a dance in one of the schoolhouses, or in some neighbor’s new frame house. At one of these dances a portly gentleman of about thirty kept his eyes on the young Alice. He remembered her as a little girl who had come to Mass at his parents’ home with her folks, before Atkinson had a church. Now here she was, “a devilish good-looking girl.” He wasn’t much of a hand to dance, but that evening he danced many dances with the lass. He also paid due respect to her parents.

All of this was pleasing to Patrick Smythe, for Nick O’Connell was a well respected man in the community. His parents had been among the first to build, in 1875, where Atkinson was later to arise. So Pat didn’t discourage Nick when he came to call the next Sunday. Neither did Alice.

The wedding took place in the winter of 1889, following weeks of excited preparation. Alice bought the material, blue worsted, for her wedding gown in O’Neill, and yards and yards of muslin and lace for her under garments. Then she and her mother and sisters stitched until their fingers were sore. Mrs. Malloy made the wedding cake. The only flaw was that Father John could not be there to say the Mass, for he had been in Wyoming Territory since ’85.

Ninteen-year-old Alice was stunning in her high-necked blue gown and, even though it was a bitter January night, all the community was there to take part. After the wedding all the guests gathered at Nick’s cabin for the all night dance, with the Nightengales furnishing the music. Nick’s good two-room cabin was only six miles from Alice’s home and two from Nick’s.

Alice’s romance and happy marriage, together with her expectations of a baby the following fall, brought back to Mary, now in failing health, memories of her own romance a quarter of a century earlier. She had arrived in South Carolina just before the war between the states. Fresh from Ireland, she had expected to join her two brothers there.

A Mr. and Mrs. Crawford had met her with the news that both her brothers had recently died of yellow fever. The kindly couple had then taken the eleven-year-old girl home with them. They lived on a small but elegant plantation and had several small children, so could use Mary’s help. Mary enjoyed her life there and learned to love beautiful things such as the Crawfords had in their home. Then came the war. They had to evacuate the home several times, but 452 each time the fighting passed over them and they were able to return, unharmed. Mr. Crawford came home from the war with a bullet in his leg and Mrs. Crawford lost a brother. When the war was nearly over and a part of the Union Army was stationed only half a mile from the Crawford home, some of the officers used the home for a meeting place. On one occasion, when the Blue and Grey met to parley there, a young private stood guard outside.

Mary, then sixteen, noted that the young soldier was Irish and dared to speak to him. They met several times after that, and when the war was over Pat had come back for Mary. And her memories ever turned to Tom, her first baby. Such a good baby, too, and Pat had strutted like a peacock. How her own mother would have enjoyed little Tom. And then Mary would realize that Tom was gone and that it had been many years since she had heard from home.

In spite of her poor health Mary lived on until 1912. In the meantime Rose became a school teacher, then married John Sullivan of O’Neill. Mary, the baby when they came to the homestead, died in 1903. Anna married Tom Campbell of Atkinson. Margaret clerked in Gollogly’s store and lived with her parents (who retired to Atkinson in 1900) until their deaths, then married Tom Grady of O’Neill.

Pat died in 1908. When Mary died four years later her obituary stated: “She was attacked with creeping paralysis in the region of the stomach and bowels. Its deadly work was eventually accomplished and at eleven o’clock Sunday evening she ceased to be.” Henry E. Henderson was born in Galva, Illinois. His wife, Belle Sower-by, descendant of a long line of well educated professional people, was born in Philadelphia. She was teaching school in Galva when she met and married Mr. Henderson in 1874. News of cheap land and unusual opportunities had reached Henry from a relative who had homesteaded near Emmet, so he and Billy Bowen, a cousin, rode to Atkinson, the end of the railroad, on the train in 1882. Both filed claims about eight miles east of Atkinson, built one-room sod houses, then returned to Illinois for their families.

Maude Henderson was a year and a half old when she came with her parents to the Nebraska homestead. She was one of several brothers and sisters. She and a sister and brother were “out-door minded,” consequently they herded cattle and helped with the field work, leaving the household chores to the others. While still a very young girl Maude rode and guided the lead horse on the binder teams, a job she enjoyed.

The Henderson children went to the “Bowen School,” just across the road from the Bowen’s house. When the blizzard of ’88 struck all the pupils, “around fifteen,” made it across the road to the Bowen home, where they spent the night. For the children it was fun— sleeping four and five to a bed.

In the spring of 1895 Daisy, almost fifteen, and Maude were stricken with diphtheria. Daisy died, Maude barely survived it and was a long time in recovering. During the summer of 1894, when only thirteen years old, Maude drove a cream route. With her horse and cart she made the rounds of the neighbors, picking up the cream and delivering it to the Kane farm, where the route man from Amelia met her, tested the cream and gave her a check to deliver to the owner on her next trip around. For this work she was given a check for six dollars at the end of the summer— and felt like a millionaire! Henry Henderson and Jess and Albert Purnell were among the good debaters at the meetings of the Literary Society in their community, which met every two weeks during the winters.

Maude stayed in Atkinson at the Peter Greeley home the year she was in the eighth grade. She had three years of high school in town, too, and graduated with the six members of her class in 1901.

Myra Henderson married Tom Maring of Emmet and they lived the rest of their lives on what had been a part of the Henderson farm. Frank Henderson married Anges Winkler and lived in the Phoenix community until he sold his farm to Fritz Naber a few years before he died. Mr. and Mrs. Henderson enlarged their farm by buying land from Peter O’Donnell, then moved into Atkinson where Mrs. Henderson died in 1914. Mr. Henderson later sold his land to A. J. Barnes, then died in 1940.

Maude Henderson taught three terms in the Gettert and Pleasant View schools, then married Robert O. Clifford. The Cliffords lived in the ranch country southwest of Atkinson until Mr. Clifford’s deathg in 1933. Nils Christenson, born in Sweden above the Arctic Circle in 1836, twenty years later married Bangta Monson. After thirteen years of marriage Bangta died. In 1873 Nils married Pernilla Anderson. About 1879 he left his wife and four little girls, Bessie, Emma, Matilda and Jennie, in their home village, Finja, and came to New York.

He worked there for two years before he had enough money to bring his family to America. The Christen-sons lived in New York until 1883, then moved to Wahoo, where they lived for a year in a nearby village called Swedesburg. The next year a son, Charles, was born to them, and shortly afterward they moved to a homestead thirteen miles southwest of Atkinson. Three more girls were born to them there, including a set of twins. Esther lived but her twin died in babyhood and was buried on the claim. The little grave site has long been lost. The third girl, Edith, born in 1890, was the last of the family. As so many other children did, the young Christensons earned money by herding cattle on the open prairie. Their wages were ten cents a head, per season. The drouth of 1894 dried the prairie until the inhabitants lived in daily fear of fires. When smoke heralded an approaching fire Nils hurried out to widen the fireguard around his buildings. In his haste he somehow broke a plow handle, which jabbed him in the stomach. The fire did not jump the plowed strip, but Nils never quite recovered from the wound.

Because of the drouth Nils and Pernilla sold the homestead and moved to the Morgan place, four and a half miles northeast of Atkinson. In the new community Emma Christen-son met George Ries and Bessie met Charles Olson. They were married in a double wedding ceremony in August, 1895.

Later Nils bought a nearby school lease, land which is now owned by George Ries, Jr. Nils and Pernilla worked hard on this place and built fourteen good buildings. Shortly after they had the farmstead just about the way they wanted it a- tornado ripped through the place, leveling everything except the house. Although still in poor health due to the accident with the plow. Nils built the place up again.

In 1903 Jennie Christenson married John Whitman in her parents’ home. To their union one son, Donald, was born. Nils and Pernilla sold out in 1907 and moved to Iowa, where Nils died the next year.

Matilda Christenson married Herman Tower the year before her parents moved to Iowa and had one daughter, Iris. Charles, the only son, married Margaret Edmunds in 1909 and had three children. In 1934 he married Elsie Miller. Esther married Peter Blom in 1913 and Edith married Harold Harkness in 1917 and had three children. After Esther died in 1954, her widowed sister Edith married Peter Blom in 1956. George Ries, husband of Emma Christenson, was born in Germany in 453 1854, where two of his sisters died of the Black Plague. A blacksmith and an orchardist by trade, he was highly skilled at grafting and budding fruit trees. He came to Seward County in 1879, lost his crops to grasshoppers and in 1883 moved up into Holt County and took a homestead six miles northeast of Atkinson. By this time he had sent to Germany for his brother Adam, who homesteaded next to him.

Adam, a shoemaker by trade, never married. Instead he devoted his life to helping raise George and Emma’s family. For years he owned and rode a white mule, Jenny. Antelope were still plentiful in the ‘eighties and Adam, walking in a dense fog one night, was nearly scared to death when an antelope ran into him. Eight children were born to George and Emma, two on the homestead in a one-room frame house. Later George sold the homestead and bought three quarters of land not far away from the original claim. Their third child was born there in a two- room house. George then bought a five-room house and moved it onto his place. The last five children were born there.

George and Adam continued to improve the farm, especially after 1912, when Adam sold his homestead and moved to George’s farm. George first ground grain with a windmill, then with a gasoline powered engine. He was one of the first in his area to own a car, a Jackson automobile which he purchased in 1913. It was a big car, a two-seater that held five people and had large chain-driven wheels. “The family enjoyed going for a little ride on Sunday afternoons— when they could get the car started.” When anything went wrong George called on “the blitzen (lightning) to strike it.” Along in the early ‘twenties it seemed that the “blitzen” had struck the Ries family. George began suffering with severe stomach pain. A Tilden doctor who was associated with the Mayo Clinic came to examine him, found him to have a bowel obstruction and performed the necessary operation on him on the kitchen table. Minnie Freed was hired to nurse him back to health.

At this time, while everyone was concerned about George, all the horses on the farm contracted distemper and died. A woman less strong than Emma Christenson Ries might not have been able to weather the trouble but, some how, she did. When George died of cancer in 1923 she continued to operate the farm, with the help of Adam, and maintained one of the finest farms in the vicinity, producing some of Holt County’s best shorthorn cattle. The Ries children attended the O’Donnell or Pleasant View school. Their aunts, Tillie and Edith Christen-son taught for awhile. When Miss Edna Griffin was the teacher she had twenty-seven pupils; six boys from the Barnes family and six from the Tro- shynski family among them. These boys were more than Miss Griffin could handle, so the Barnes boys’ father went to Plainview and hired a Professor to teach the school. The new teacher was very strict and, after a few whippings, the boys tamed down and attended to their lessons. When Emma’s health began to fail she moved into Atkinson, where she died at the age of sixty-three years. Her death, in 1939, was also due to cancer. After Emma died Walter and Cecelia Ries operated the farm until it was sold to John Keogh.

Bessie Christenson Olson had seven children and died in 1956. Edith, the only one of Nils and Pernilla’s children still living, is eighty-four years old.

Thomas Jefferson Hickman, a veteran of the Civil War, was born in Ohio in 1846. In 1868 he married Mary Ellen Clark, a Quaker lass, in Illinois and settled in Missouri where their only child, Samuel Albany, was born in 1871. They were living in Nemaha County, Nebraska, by 1893 when Sam married Vera May Bantz, daughter of pioneer settlers of that county. The couple had four daughters before they came to Holt County in 1902. Sam’s parents, Tom and Vera Hickman came with them. Sam and his family bought the Smith place, four miles east of Atkinson, Tom and Mary lived on the Jack Hayes farm, one mile south of Sam’s across the Elkhorn. In 1911 they bought the Dibble home, a short distance southeast of Atkinson, the property now owned by the family of Tom’s only grandson.

During a nighttime thunderstorm in the spring of 1905 John Fleming, a mile south of the Sam Hickman home, saw lightning strike the trees overhanging the house. When flames sprang into the night sky he rushed to help the family save their house. A mattress and a trunk were all that were saved. While the four girls sat on the mattress, watching, John, Sam and Vera pumped water by hand in a futile attempt to save the house. They built a new home near the site of the old one.

A son, Thomas Franklin, was born to Sam and Vera in 1909. The family, though busy and industrious, had many pleasant times. Their grove, northwest of the buildings, was the gathering place for many a neighborhood and Fourth of July picnic. The Hickmans specialized in chickens and turkeys; hatching, raising and shipping both market and breeding types, as well as eggs, to every state in the Union and to Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippine Islands.

For many years Sam was prominent in Farm Bureau and Farmer’s Union work, and served as a member of the Holt County Board of Supervisors. At one time he operated a creamery in Atkinson. Mrs. Hickman made and sold fine butter for years and raised flowers in great profusion.

Both were ever ready to help a neighbor in need and Vera, often officiating as mid-wife for Dr. McKee, earned the accolade of “She’s one of the best I ever worked with.” The children attended the Grand Prairie school. The teacher stayed at their home and drove the four miles to school with them with their horse and buggy. Ethel, Leila, Mary and Sylvia all commuted by horse and buggy for their four years in Atkinson High. Leila and Sylvia had a runaway on the day they went to town to have their graduation pictures taken. All the girls were expert photographers in their own right, having their own dark room and developing equipment at home.

Mary, Leila and Sylvia all taught various schools in the county. Ethel, an accomplished pianist, married Custer Johnson. Mary married Guy Beckwith and Sylvia married her father’s hired man, Wilbur Coleman. Tom Hickman died in 1923 at the age of seventy-six years. Mary died in 1930 at the age of eighty-four. Their only living great-grandson and great- great-grandson bearing the name of Hickman are both named Thomas, as was Tom, Sr., making four Thomases in a line.

Leila Hickman died in Lincoln in 1935. Her father, Thomas Franklin Hickman died in 1972. Of his seventeen great-grandchildren, three live near Atkinson: Mrs. Vernon Beach (La Nae Hickman), Vernon Beckwith and Mrs. Victor Frickel (Alta Irene Coleman). Wibur Coleman was born in 1908 to Elec and Alta Coleman of Geneva, Nebraska. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all carpenters, descendants of Colemans who came from England before 1800 and settled in Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio and Missouri. They were among the first to homestead in Cass and Otoe Coup- ties, plant the first trees, build the first bridges on Salt Creek and establish the first churches and schools of the First Christian denomination. A great uncle was killed by Indians while freighting by ox team across southern Nebraska.

At the age of six Wilbur moved with 454 his parents and two brothers to Colorado for the health of his mother who was ill with tuberculosis. She died the following year and Bill and his older brother, Mac, lived with their maternal grandparents. Later the three boys and. their father went to Taylor, Nebraska, to live with their father’s parents for a year. In 1907 Elec married Dora Shelton and had six more children. When he moved his family to Rock County Bill stayed at Taylor with his uncle, Art Coleman, and completed the tenth grade, the highest offered at that time.

Bill then struck out on his own. For two years he worked on ranches in Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. For awhile he worked on the ranch of George McGinley (uncle of Dan O’Connell) at Keystone, Nebraska. Then he went down to Lincoln and completed the eleventh and twelfth grades at the Technical School of Agriculture, later located at Curtis, Nebraska.

In 1918 Bill bought a team of horses and rode one, leading the other and picked up his cousin, Vernon Cheuv- ront, in Lincoln. The two young men and the team came by train to Holt County and batched for a year on a place four miles east of Atkinson along the railroad.

For the next three years Bill farmed on the shares with Sam Hickman. In July, 1920 he married Sam’s daughter, Sylvia. Two years later they moved to a farm owned by John Kee, five miles northeast of Emmet and a quarter of a mile (across the road,) from his brother-in-law, Guy Beckwith.

At Emmet, Bill, Carl Lorenz and the seven Beckwith brothers made up a base ball team of their own. Bill and Sylvia had a two-seated carriage with a top, side curtains and an isinglass windshield which they and the Beck-withs enjoyed. Later Bill bought a Ford Runabout for $150.00.

In 1926 the family moved to the Phoenix neighborhood and bought 160 acres from Frank Damero. They had two little girls when they moved there and the next year a son was born to them. Two more daughters completed the family.

During the following years Bill added to his cattle herd, acquired more teams and machinery and became prosperous. The Phoenix community was well known for its lively social life and the Colemans joined in enthusiastically.

As soon as their haymow was empty, or nearly so, the family scrubbed the floor, shaved paraffin wax on it and moved the organ up the stairs. Then all the neighbors came. The Coburns furnished the music and everybody else danced the night away.

The depression, drouth, dust storms and crop failures made times tough enough without the series of major operations Sylvia underwent at this time. In February, 1936, Bill was gored by a bull he was loading to take to market. The bad thigh wound became infected and Dr. McKee had all he could do to pull him through.

Irene Coleman married Victor Frickel in 1941 and had nine children. Her first two were twins, the first great-grandchildren for both sets of grandparents, only Bill Coleman’s father passed away one month before the twins, Harold and Garold, were born.

In 1962 Bill and Sylvia moved to Atkinson to live in the home formerly owned by Sylvia’s grandparents, Tom and Mary Hickman. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of her graduation from Atkinson High, Sylvia was escorted to the head table by her twin grandsons who, by that time, were also graduates of the same high school. Bill and Sylvia celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1970. Joseph Franklin Murray and Augusta Millsap were both born in Missouri. They were married in 1905 by a lady minister at Rock Port, Missouri. They had three children, Helen, Lula and John. The little son died a few months after birth. Frank and Gussie, with their daughters, livestock and household goods, came to Atkinson by train in March, 1920. During the next nineteen years they lived on seven different farms in the Atkinson and Emmet area. In 1941 they bought 400 acres about nine and a half miles northeast of Atkinson in Pleasant View Township, where they finally settled down.

Helen and Lula went to school at District 36, east of Atkinson, for two years. Their transportation was a buggy pulled by a stubborn old mule. The girls had to use “a good sprout from the plum thicket” to get their mule started on her two-mile jaunt to school in the mornings. About 3:30 in the afternoons she began to bray, letting them know she was ready to go home— and she needed no urging for the return trip. The girls graduated from Atkinson high school in 1926.

The following year Lula married Lewis Van Humphrey. The couple has six children. Helen married David Adams in 1938 and had two children. Frank and Gussie Murray observed their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1955, their sixtieth in 1965 and their sixty-fifth in 1970. At the time this history was written they had celebrated their sixty-eighth year together. Early settlers to the northeast of Atkinson were the Chambers, O’Donnell, Bruder, MacLachlan and Henning families. Hezekiah Chambers was born in 1858 in New York State. When a small boy he moved with his parents to Darlington, Wisconsin. Hannah Shea, born in the same town in 1855, married Hezekiah in 1876. Three years later (1879) they drove a covered wagon through to a homestead on Turkey Creek, northeast of Atkinson. Eight years later they moved into town where Mr. Chambers went into the implement business, and then operated a store. Of their four children two died in infancy. William, the oldest, died at the age of forty- four. No mention is made of his marriage.

Arthur Chambers, the second son, in 1907 married Ava Williams, one of the three orphaned sisters who came from Florida in 1901 to live in a little house near the home of their uncle in Atkinson. In 1914 Hez and Hannah, with Art, Ava and their five children, moved to a ranch in the Tonawanda territory, south of Atkinson. After eight years on the ranch Hez and Hannah moved back to Atkinson and Art and his family moved to Randolph, Nebraska. In their old age Hez and Hannah made their home with Art and Ava in Columbus, where Hez died at the age of eighty in 1938. Hannah lived to be ninety-two, passing away in 1947. Her son died the following year. Hezekiah and his parents, his wife, Ava and Art’s daughter, Rita, are all buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Atkinson. None of Art and Ava’s children live in Holt County.

Michael O’Donnell, born in 1824, was forty-two when he married Anna Gallagher in Pennsylvania. Anna, born to Irish born parents in Pennsylvania in 1852, was one of a family of fifteen children. When she was six her parents, with three children at the time, returned to Ireland, intending to stay. Financial conditions dictated otherwise and they soon returned to Pennsylvania.

Anna was only fifteen or sixteen when she married Michael, who was nearly three times her age. According to the family biographers, “Girls of those days had little choice of whom or when they should marry. It was considered better for them to marry while very young, to someone a great deal older than themselves, so they would be cared for and the burden of their support shifted from the parents shoulders.” Anna’s brother, James Gallagher, went to Nebraska a short time after the O’Donnell wedding. There he took a homestead for Michael eight and a half miles northeast of Atkinson. In 1879 the O’Donnells, with four children, Mary, James, Andrew and Michael, rode to Neligh on the train, 455 then by stage to O’Neill, where they hired a team to take them to the homestead. They brought only part of their money with them and had the rest mailed to them. When it reached Oakdale Michael had to drive from O’Neill to that place to get it. Four more children, Anna, Bridget, Anthony and Ellen were born on the claim. Eight years after coming to Nebraska Michael died. Six months later the ninth child, Margaret, was born. Mary, the oldest, was seventeen. She worked away from home most of the time to help support the large family.

The home on the claim was crude and furniture almost nonexistent. They had no choirs at all end large pumpkins often furnished such seots as they had. They didn’t even have a mirror— “and if anyone wanted to see herself awfully bad, she filled a tub with water.” For years Anna did the family washing in the stock tank, then a kind sister sent her five dollars and she bought a wash tub and a frying pan.

For a long time the children had no shoes and never went any place. In the summer time they didn’t need them and in the winter they stayed indoors to keep their feet warm. For herself Anna cut the tops off her late husband’s old boots and wore the boot portions. During the blizzard of ’88 she had to put the children to bed to keep them from freezing, after she had burned the straw from the bed ticks, the only fuel she had.

During the drouth of ’94 Anna depended on Father Smith of O’Neill for help to feed her family and for spiritual consolation. The closest Catholic church was then in O’Neill and Anna walked six miles on Sundays to ride to town with a neighbor who had a team. When they began to have shoes and “good sunbonnets” they put them on only when they were within sight of the church. Anna O’Donnell married Bert Diehl and had one son, James. When the little fellow was five years old his mother died. He then made his home with his grandmother and his aunts and uncles. Anthony, Andrew, Ellen and Margaret stayed on the farm and took care of their mother until she died in 1936. James now lives alone on the old O’Donnell homestead. Joseph Bruder, born in Germany in 1840, came alone to America in 1862. Settling in Illinois, he met and married Elizabeth Gatz. With their three small children they came on to Seward in 1872, in a covered wagon drawn by oxen. Joseph was a blacksmith by trade. When a Mr. Nightengale of Holt County sent word to friends in Seward County that tree claims could be had up there by anyone willing .to plant and care for the trees, Joseph made up his mind to acquire land and a home in this manner. In 1880 the parents, with five children by then, loaded the covered wagon again. In addition to the children they had two cows, a pig and a few chickens. Their new home was a dugout five miles northeast of Atkinson. After a winter in the dugout the neighbors helped Joseph build a frame house. One of the head branches of Eagle Creek ran through the farm. When Joseph, Jr., saw a trout in the creek and had no way to catch it, he did some quick thinking, then took off his overalls, tied knots in the ends of the legs and used the trousers as a seine. He caught the fish.

Three more children were born to the Bruders on the homestead. The neighbors had children, too, and the families banded together and organized District 155, where all the Bruders received their grade school education. The drouth of the ‘nineties set in for the Bruders in 1892. Its effects were felt until the end of the decade. Lawrence Bruder herded cattle for two weeks and received an old hen and eight chickens in payment. During the winter of 1895 Joseph, Jr., herded cattle for another neighbor for $8 a month, and in the spring worked for the same man for $12 a month good wages for the times, only he wasn’t able to collect anything until the following October.

Joseph, Sr., and Elizabeth left the farm in 1913 and moved into Atkinson. Mrs. Bruder died there two years later and Joseph went to live with his oldest son, William, where he died in 1919. Both are buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery.

Lawrence Bruder took over the homestead, raised turkeys and potatoes and put in a dam on the creek which made a fine fishing pond. He also put up a tall silo which may have been the first in- the country. Lawrence, who never married, died in South Dakota in 1972, the last member of the family.

Donald A. MacLachlan, with his parents and brothers, left Straith Lachlan in Scotland in the 1870’s. The seminary training he had begun in Edinburgh was completed in Union Seminary, New York City. He later married Laura W. Hutchinson who had just completed her college training in New Wilmington College near her home.

Rev. MacLachlan held his first charge in Wisconsin, where his four sons, David, James, Robert and John were born. In 1880 he was called to the country United Presbyterian Church northeast of Atkinson. Some of the settlers in that area, discouraged by the hardships they encountered, sold out and left during the ‘eighties and Rev. MacLachlan bought some of their land for two dollars an acre and planted trees. Some land, marshy and with quicksand areas on it, he got for nothing.

By 1884 the family was living about eight miles northeast of Atkinson. In 1886 a daughter, Mary Louise, was born. There two of the MacLachlan boys, while herding cattle on the open prairie decided to get rid of two stray dogs by tying their tails together and fastening a lighted firecracker to them. In their flight the dogs set a prairie fire— convincing the boys there were better ways of ridding the country of stray dogs.

David, the oldest son enlisted in the first World War and returned a captain, after fighting through some of the conflict’s worst battles. Robert married Johanna Brethawer in 1913 and moved into the first modern house in the community. Their daughter, Laura spent thirty-five years in missionary service in India and West Pakistan and expects to retire in 1979. In the mid-teens Rev. MacLachlan built a new home near his first crude homestead dwelling. David and James went off to Tarkio College (probably in Tarkio, Missouri) and Robert studied for awhile in a Veterianarian school in Lincoln. In 1921 James MacLachlan married Ruth Brethower and they began farming four miles west of Atkinson, living in their chicken house while awaiting completion of their home.

James and Ruth had one daughter, Roma, who relates a somewhat darker picture of the lives of the Mac- Lachlans than did Laura, who wrote the account given above.

The early struggle to make a living on the homestead was grim, Roma wrote. As soon as the boys were able to sit on a horse they were lifted up, with a lunch tied to them, and sent out on the prairie to herd cattle. Their year’s spending money was a nickel on the Fourth of July. The mother was not allowed to light the lamps in the house until her husband came in. The year Mrs. MacLachlan lost her mother and two brothers, “back home,” she was unable to go back, due to lack of money and to the birth of the daughter, Mary. Hardship and loneliness took their toll and she had a nervous breakdown. After she died Mary suffered from mental depression (they called it “melancholia” then) and was finally institutionalized in Norfolk, where at last she was happy because she had people to talk to. For the son James the opposite was true. He had a nervous breakdown and had to quit college because he 456 could not talk to people. Although he married and became an avid reader, he remained a semi-recluse the rest of his life.

Roma remembers the Depression Years when her family sold a ten- gallon can of cream each week for $4.00, which was all the money they had for groceries. Because of lack of feed her father sold a flock of young pigs for a total of $13.00 and could hardly give his calves away.

In 1956 the elder MacLachlan sold his home and his land. Where he went is not recorded.

John Henning and Sophia Jennings were born in Germany and crossed the Atlantic at an early age. Both families settled in Illinois, where John and Sophia grew up and were married. Two sons, Henry and Albert were born to them there. While the boys were small their parents heard glowing accounts of fine free farms near a new town in Nebraska.

In 1881, when Albert was only three years old, the Hennings set out in covered wagons for the new Eldo-rado. John filed on a claim twelve miles northeast of Atkinson. The move was a difficult one for Sophia, as her third son was born not long after they reached the new home. To make things even harder, she had to set up her cookstove out of doors that summer, for they had been unable to buy stovepipe in Holt County.

That fall John had to drive all the way to Neligh to buy the pipe and other supplies; for the great influx of settlers in 1881 created such a demand for all necessities that the O’Neill and Atkinson stores could not keep up. Many a settler, trying to buy lumber, was turned away from the lumber yards with empty wagons. Sophia’s parents, Chris and Louise Jennings came with the rest of their family to Atkinson in 1883. In 1885 John Henning bought more land and on this new addition built his permanent home, one of those comfortable old frame houses that looks as if it had been aded to each time the need arose. In time it had four bedrooms, kitchen, pantry, dining room and parlor. There were several springs nearby and one was channeled through a milkhouse, where the cold water cooled the family dairy products.

Trees, orchards and numerous outbuildings improved the farm site. Wild fruits were plentiful along the nearby creeks. Sophia made full use of the latter— and often laughed about the time a stranger walking through the country stopped for dinner. A bowl of plum preserves, placed near his plate, was not passed during the meal. At the end of his dinner the stranger said “I don’t know if I can eat all of this dessert or not, but I’ll try,” and he downed the whole bowlful.

The Hennings socialized with the Swedish families of the Celia community. One of these families, that of Nels and Anna Stromberg, came from Illinois to a homestead near Celia and planted a sizable grove of silver maples near their sod house. Although the buildings are long gone the maples are still a landmark. The Strombergs raised seven children and three of the daughters, Laura, Nina and Alice, became brides of the Henning sons. Henry and Laura were married first. After many years of marriage she passed away, leaving five daughters. Henry later married his wife’s sister, Nina Stromberg Jenson, a widow. In 1901 Alice Strom-berg and Albert Henning were married. For a few years they lived with Albert’s parents, then moved to one of the father’s other farms. When John, the third son, married in 1904, he lived on still another of his father’s farms.

In time John and Sophia moved into Atkinson. Sophia died there in 1920 and John moved back to the farm home of his youngest son. Albert Henning died in 1921 and his father in 1922.

Delia Henning Enbody, daughter of Albert and Alice Henning who made their home on the old home place after the parents moved into town, remembers that her mother boarded the school teachers in the big old farmhouse, and that there were always young men flocking around to see the teacher.

During the influenza epidemic a neighbor came to use the Henning telephone to call the doctor. After he left her mother fumigated the house by burning red pepper on the kitchen stove. The only result of the fumigation was to drive them all out of the house until the air cleared— and afterward they all had the flu and were very ill.

Albert Henning bought a 1913 Ford touring car with a cloth top. The car held up pretty well except for a bad habit of dropping its wishbone frequently. However, wrote Delia, “a piece of baling wire would usually hold the Ford together until it could get us home. Later Dad bought a second-hand Overland, and it was a lemon. It was always breaking an axle, and new ones had to be ordered, usually with a long delay. “Somewhere around 1919 a strange single light about the size of a car headlight began to appear. It seemed to be bouncing as it moved along the ground. Sometimes it seemed far away and other times near the springs below our house. Some people met the light on the road and turned out, thinking it was a car. It had everybody worried, but after a few years it disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.

“I don’t have many memories of my brother Bert during our growing up years. To him I was a nuisance who came to our house when he was ten years old. I broke up his toys that he had kept in perfect order, and tagged after him, to his disgust. But some of the things that DO stand out in my memory are the glow of the fire in the big base burner and the prisms shining on the big lamp that hung above the dining table.

About 1918 Dad built a big new two-story house with a full basement. It was good to have all the extra room, as we always had lots of relatives and friends visiting us. Mother loved to cook and she didn’t care how many extra came at meal times.

“Our dad died of a heart attack in the hayfield in the summer of 1921. Brother Bert was only nineteen years old and there were trying times ahead for him and Mother, attempting to operate the big farm without Dad. In 1924 Bert married, so Mother had a sale that spring, and turned the farm over to him. She and I then moved to the state of Washington. She spent the rest of her life there and died in 1967.” Delia still lives in Washington.

William Rossman was born in Luxemborg and came to America at the age of twelve years. A sister, Secenia, had come over earlier and earned enough money to send for him. William was twenty-five when he and his sister took a tree claim and a homestead sixteen miles northeast of Atkinson in 1882. They built a one-room sod house and burned grass and buffalo chips for fuel.

William and Secenia were the children of a fisherman. One day the father and an older brother had gone out to sea, fishing, and had never returned. The brother and sister had lived in Iowa before coming on to Nebraska, and William had met a girl named Anna Fetrow there. The family history does not say whether the Fetrows came to Holt County, too, or whether William sent for Anna. At any rate they were married in O’Neill in 1895.

The couple had eleven children and lost one at the age of five. Their post office was Celia and there were from two to six of the Rossman children in school for quite a few years. Two of the boys, Russell and Wilson, played on the Rock Falls base ball team; the ball diamond was in Pete Duffy’s pasture.

The family experienced many 457 prairie fires. One big fire, they record, lasted nine days and nights. It came within a mile of the Rossman home and the smoke darkened the sky in mid-afternoon until the chickens went to roost and the cows came home to be milked.

Another neighborhood tragedy happened during a thunder storm when a man by the name of Al McMain was driving home from the Phoenix store and was struck by lightning. His shoes were burned off his feet and both his horses were killed. After lying in shock for weeks the man recovered. During another storm thirty-seven head of cattle, horses and a colt were killed by lightning only a mile from the Rossman place.

“The Gypsies came several times a year,” Izetta Rossman (AArs. Charlie Tasler) wrote, “and we would run and hide in the bushes down along the creek. We were afraid they would steal one of us. If they didn’t see anyone around they would go in the henhouse and take eggs, and any hens that were on the nests. There were tramps, too, that sat on the cement porch while AAother made them sandwiches. They had lice and kept scratching all the time. After they were gone AAother poured boiling water over the place where they sat.” The Bokhofs came to a homestead ten miles northeast of Atkinson in the fall of 1882, two years after their marriage in Illinois. His name was William, hers was Rose. The grandparents of both had come from Germany early in the nineteenth century. In December after they came to the homestead their only child, AAabel, was born.

In 1900 William and Rose left the farm for a home in Atkinson, where they were both active in church and civic work, William being a member of the volunteer fire department when the equipment was a man- powered cart with a hose on it. He was a member of the city council for a long while and, with him, politics was serious business. The only thing he ever had against his daughter’s husband, Connie Funk, was that he was a Democrat.

On the way home from a winter spent in Florida in 1920 Rose Bokhof took ill and died in Illinois. Twenty years later William died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-six. Joseph Tushla and Mary Odstricil were married in Czechoslovakia in 1877, where they lived with the groom’s parents under very crowded conditions. A year later their son Peter was born. In 1881 they decided to come to America to join relatives already there.

Mary, pregnant again, had a miserable time during the ocean crossing, and on the dock in New York, while she was looking after three-year-old Peter until her husband could collect their baggage, the little boy and his mother became separated. Neither of the parents could speak English and it was some time before they found their son, down by the water, crying to go home to his grandmother in Czechoslovakia. AAary’s brother joined the family on the westbound train in Iowa and all came on together to Oakdale. There they bought a few household items, hired a team and a covered wagon and came on to Holt County. They took a homestead and built a sod house before the baby, Mary, was born in October. Four more children, besides several who died in infancy, were born on the claim.

Joseph did his first farming with a plow and one ox. By working on the railroad he made enough money to buy more equipment and a few cattle, which the children herded on the prairie. The four older children managed only eighth grade educations— and Peter hardly that as he had to miss too much school in order to help with the farm work. Sylvester and Rose, the two youngest, were sent to school in town and both became teachers.

AAr. and AArs. Tushla sold their farm to their son John in 1913 and moved into Atkinson for their declining years. With the aid of two wives, AAathew Elder of Alpha, Iowa, became the father of twenty-two children, eleven in each family. One of his sons, Alexander, married Mary McKisic and had four sons, Thomas, Perry, Fred and Charles, and one daughter, Carrie.

Early in the ‘eighties Thomas Elder and his father loaded their livestock and farm implements and headed for Nebraska. It was the spring of the year and there was not yet a bridge over the AAissouri. The railroad track was laid on the ice, which was beginning to give way, and the weight of the train caused the track to settle enough that the engine was unable to pull the cars out of the river. It took two hours to get another engine there to help pull the train out, and shortly afterward the ice broke up and carried the track down the river. At Neligh the Elders unloaded their possessions and headed for Holt County, settling six miles northeast of Atkinson, each man taking a homestead and timber claim, one of the half-sections east of the section line and the other west of the line. That summer they built a house and a sod shed on Alexander’s land and a small sod shack on Thomas’ place. In the fall Thomas went back to Iowa to help the rest of the family move to Nebraska.

The Henderson Fullerton family friends of the Elders, came from Iowa that same summer and homesteaded a mile south of the Elders. Henderson and AAartha Fullerton brought two daughters, Jennie and AAable, and three sons, Earnest, Wallace and Jim, with them. Jennie took a homestead adjoining her parents on the north. A few years later Thomas Elder married Jennie Fullerton and Jim Fullerton married Bertha Gates, daughter of Charles and Katherine Gates who, with their three sons and one daughter, had homesteaded five miles northeast of Atkinson in 1884. All of the families lived near each other until 1894 when Jim and Bertha bought a farm on Eagle Creek. They were the parents of five children. Jim died in 1946 but Bertha, who moved into Atkinson that same year, lived to become the town’s oldest resident, passing on in 1971 at the age of ninety-eight.

Jennie and Thomas had three sons and a daughter. The baby daughter died and they later adopted a little girl, Frances. School for these children was a problem. Raymond, the third son, writes that they had only a three months term the year he started and that the longest term he attended was eight months— “and I walked three miles for half of that.” Nevertheless he graduated from Atkinson high school in 1913.

The Fullertons and Elders were United Presbyterians and the Rev. Donald AAacLachlan lived nearby, so the Presbyterian families organized and built a small church on Thomas Elder’s tree claim. But times were hard and the church soon “folded.” Bill Sterns then bought the building, moved it to his farm and made a home of it for his family. There was also a small cemetery north of the church site. One of the six or eight bodies buried there was that of a boy who died in the ’88 blizzard.

After a few years on their claim all of the Elder family except Thomas and Jennie sold out and moved to California. In the meantime the Elder children were growing up. On Christmas Day, 1917, Raymond married Anna Haigh at the Presbyterian manse in Atkinson. They had a son, Raymond, and a daughter, Evelyn. Neither their children nor their grandchildren live in Nebraska. Leonard V. Humphrey was born in AAassachusetts in 1830. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday he went to Ohio and there met and married Samantha Brodley in 1855. The couple moved to Wisconsin and while there Leonard served in the War of the Rebellion with the Wisconsin Infantry. 458 Five sons and a daughter were born to the Humphreys but they lost their two oldest boys to diphtheria in 1863. The remaining sons came with them to Atkinson in 1884, where they homesteaded nine and a half miles northeast of the town. Their farm was on a hill overlooking the treeless prairie and from their house they could see ninety little homestead houses and shacks like their own. On May 1, 1905, Leonard and Samantha celebrated their Golden Wedding Day. All their neighbors and friends came to congratulate them and to present them with “an elegant couch.” Mr. Humphrey was also the recipient of a heavy, gold.headed cane. The following year they went to Wisconsin to visit their daughter and Mr. Humphrey died there in 1907. Mrs. Humphrey lived on there to the age’ of ninety-two.

Van Humphrey, one of Leonard’s sons, continued to live on the homestead. In 1906 he married Bessie Klotzbach at Sioux City, Iowa, and became the father of five children. In 1910 he was appointed a rural mail carrier out of Atkinson. He immediately sold his livestock and farm equipment at auction and two days later made his first trip on his thirty- four mile route. He used horses and a buggy the first four years, changing teams half way around the route. In the spring of 1915 he bought his first Model T, but it was a good many years before he could rely exclusively on an automobile to travel the route. In 1917 the Postal Department began lengthening his route until it totaled fifty miles and served one hundred families. In 1940 Van retired at the age of sixty-five, after thirty years of service.

The farm originally homesteaded by Leonard Humphrey is now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Murray, father- and mother-in-law of Van’s son Lewis. At the age of five Ferdinand Siebert, born in Illinois in 1870, moved with his parents from Iowa to Lincoln. In 1895 they came on to Holt County. His wife, Anna Alfs, came from Germany with her parents and brothers when she was six years old. From their first home in Iowa they came to Nebraska in a covered wagon. After a few years near Lincoln they set out again and settled on an Eagle Creek homestead in 1884. Anna Alfs and Ferdinand Siebert were married at Mariaville, Nebraska, in 1891. They made their home northeast of Atkinson, where four sons were born. Later Ferdinand became the neighborhood thresher, using a “Rumbly oil pull.” After a time he acquired a steam engine. Leaving home very early in the mornings, the shrill whistle of his engine echoed across the prairie for miles, causing horses to run away and cows and chickens to scatter all over their various barnyards.

When Mr. Beck was the mail carrier he ate dinner and changed teams at the Alf place. Later, when Van Humphrey carried the mail he changed horses and ate dinner at the Sieberts’ until he bought his car. The Siebert boys, William, Orville, Louis and Harold, all went to country schools. Orville, the first to marry, in 1925 took as his wife Elzine Gouldie. Eight years after their mariage they moved to the William Bokhof place, there they still live. The remains of an old water wheel, about which the Sieberts have no information, can still be seen east of their buildings. When Purdy and Malone owned the ranch they used the big barn to stable their work horses. The hired men were required to clean every stall and harness all the horses each morning, regardless of the weather.

Orville remembers the trials of the “dirty thirties” as a time that taught them to be conservative and “to do with what we had, which sometimes wasn’t much. Everyone was equal in the ‘thirties. Eggs were ten cents a dozen and we traded a thirty dozen case, plus a small amount of cash, at Bainlins’ store for one pair of men’s Oshkosh overalls.” Henry M. Banks, an early settler on the head of south Eagle Creek, was born in Indiana in 1849. He and two brothers were adopted put at an early age, each to a different family. Henry’s first wife, Sarah, died in 1887, leaving two young daughters. She is buried in the Atkinson cemetery. Henry later married Belle Miller of Missouri. Of their six children only three are now living, none in Holt County. Indians on their way from the Niobrara to the Elkhorn stopped at the Banks place in the early years. Henry died in 1927 at the age of seventy-eight. Belle lived to be ninety-one and died in 1962.

Stanley Rzeszotarski, born in Poland in 1871, came to Chicago at the age of twenty-one. He engaged in the bakery business there, then met and married Antonia Bednarek, also Polish born, who had lived in America most of her life.

When their bakery burned Stanley and Antonia decided to come to Nebraska, since a salesman from whom they bought bakery supplies had relayed stories, told him by friends at Atkinson, of grand opportunities there. The Rzeszotarskis bought a farm nine miles northeast of Atkinson through Fred Mlinar, a land agent at that time. Stanley and Antonia, with their four sons, Zigmund, Ed, Teddy and Gaines, came to their new home by train in 1907. Since there were no buildings on the land the family stayed with the Tushlas while Stanley built a shed to house them. When finished, the family lived in one end of it, their cow and calf in the other end.

Mr. Rzeszotarski shipped some horses from Chicago to Atkinson but they did not survive the change in climate and he had to buy native stock. The following spring the family moved into a new dugout on their farm, then later into a proper house. Two more children were born on the farm. Their first and nearest neighbors were the Beckers and Hennings. Atkinson was their post office and trading point. Since the trip to town took all day they didn’t make it very often. Although they were Catholics, they didn’t get to church often until after Stanley bought a two-seated carriage, and then they “rode to church and town in style.” Teddy Rzeszotarski died on the farm at the age of seventeen. On one occasion some men, driving about forty head of horses stopped at the farm to stay overnight. Shortly afterward Peter Duffy came asking about them. The horses, he said, were stolen. Duffy, however, caught them down in Kansas.

Stanley died in 1931, Antonia in 1951. Zigmund lives in Chicago, Ed in Omaha, Natchel on the home place and Gaines near Emmet Chestera, the only daughter, is now Mrs. Felix Laible.

Both John Schrunk and his wife, Mable Gull, were born in Iowa. Married there, they moved to Wheeler County in 1902, where they lived on a ranch southwest of Ewing until 1907, when they bought the Sam Becker place on Eagle Creek. The couple had fourteen children, two stillborn. The children walked a mile to school, carrying their lunches in tin pails. A youngster’s hands can get mighty cold, hanging onto the bail of a dinner pail in the winter time, so Earl, the fifth child, invented a wheel with a handle on it to hold the pails. Pushing the wheel, their hands did not get so cold. The schoolhouse burned down while the two youngest Schrunks were still going there. Mable Schrunk, just younger than Earl, and historian for the family, remembers their mail carrier, Van Humphrey, who carried the mail all the years she was growing up. At first, she said, he used a closed-in cart pulled by horses. In the winter times he used a little oil heater to keep the cart warm.

In the winter, Mable wrote, they often skated up the creek to the old Bokhof place, carrying a lantern for 459 miserable time during the ocean crossing, and on the dock in New York, while she was looking after three-year-old Peter until her husband could collect their baggage, the little boy and his mother became separated. Neither of the parents could speak English and it was some time before they found their son, down by the water, crying to go home to his grandmother in Czechoslovakia. Mary’s brother joined the family on the westbound train in Iowa and all came on together to Oakdale. There they bought a few household items, hired a team and a covered wagon and came on to Holt County. They took a homestead and built a sod house before the baby, Mary, was born in October. Four more children, besides several who died in infancy, were born on the claim.

Mr. and Mrs. Tushla sold their farm to their son John in 1913 and moved into Atkinson for their declining years. With the aid of two wives, Mathew Elder of Alpha, Iowa, became the father of twenty-two children, eleven in each family. One of his sons, Alexander, married Mary McKisic and had four sons, Thomas, Perry, Fred and Charles, and one daughter, Carrie.

Early in the ‘eighties Thomas Elder and his father loaded their livestock and farm implements and headed for Nebraska. It was the spring of the year and there was not yet a bridge over the Missouri. The railroad track was laid on the ice, which was beginning to give way, and the weight of the train caused the track to settle enough that the engine was unable to pull the cars out of the river. It took two hours to get another engine there to help pull the train out, and shortly afterward the ice broke up and carried the track down the river. At Neligh the Elders unloaded their possessions and headed for Holt County, settling six miles northeast of Atkinson, each man taking a homestead and timber claim, one of the half-sections east of the section line and the other west of the line. That summer they built a house and a sod shed on Alexander’s land and a small sod shack on Thomas’ place. In the fall Thomas went back to Iowa to help prairie fires. One big fire, they record, lasted nine days and nights. It came within a mile of the Rossman home and the smoke darkened the sky in mid-afternoon until the chickens went to roost and the cows came home to be milked.

“The Gypsies came several times a year,” Izetta Rossman (Mrs. Charlie Tasler) wrote, “and we would run and hide in the bushes down along the creek. We were afraid they would steal one of us. If they didn’t see anyone around they would go in the henhouse and take eggs, and any hens that were on the nests. There were tramps, too, that sat on the cement porch while Mother made them sandwiches. They had lice and kept scratching all the time. After they were gone Mother poured boiling water over the place where they sat.” The Bokhofs came to a homestead ten miles northeast of Atkinson in the fall of 1882, two years after their marriage in Illinois. His name was William, hers was Rose. The grandparents of both had come from Germany early in the nineteenth century. In December after they came to the homestead their only child, Mabel, was born.

Mary, pregnant again, had a the rest of the family move to Nebraska.

The Henderson Fullerton family friends of the Elders, came from Iowa that same summer and homesteaded a mile south of the Elders. Henderson and Martha Fullerton brought two daughters, Jennie and Mable, and three sons, Earnest, Wallace and Jim, with them. Jennie took a homestead adjoining her parents on the north. A few years later Thomas Elder married Jennie Fullerton and Jim Fullerton married Bertha Gates, daughter of Charles and Katherine Gates who, with their three sons and one daughter, had homesteaded five miles northeast of Atkinson in 1884. All of the families lived near each other until 1894 when Jim and Bertha bought a farm on Eagle Creek. They were the parents of five children. Jim died in 1946 but Bertha, who moved into Atkinson that same year, lived to become the town’s oldest resident, passing on in 1971 at the age of ninety-eight.

The Fullertons and Elders were United Presbyterians and the Rev. Donald MacLachlan lived nearby, so the Presbyterian families organized and built a small church on Thomas Elder’s tree claim. But times were hard and the church soon “folded.” Bill Sterns then bought the building, moved it to his farm and made a home of it for his family. There was also a small cemetery north of the church site. One of the six or eight bodies buried there was that of a boy who died in the ’88 blizzard.

After a few years on their claim all of the Elder family except Thomas and Jennie sold out and moved to California. In the meantime the Elder children were growing up. On Christmas Day, 1917, Raymond married Anna Haigh at the Presbyterian manse in Atkinson. They had a son, Raymond, and a daughter, Evelyn. Neither their children nor their grandchildren live in Nebraska. Leonard V. Humphrey was born in Massachusetts in 1830. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday he went to Ohio and there met and married Samantha Brodley in 1855. The couple moved to Wisconsin and while there Leonard served in the War of the Rebellion with the Wisconsin Infantry. 458 Five sons and a daughter were born to the Humphreys but they lost their two oldest boys to diphtheria in 1863. The remaining sons came with them to Atkinson in 1884, where they homesteaded nine and a half miles northeast of the town. Their farm was on a hill overlooking the treeless prairie and from their house they could see ninety little homestead houses and shacks like their own. On May 1, 1905, Leonard and Samantha celebrated their Golden Wedding Day. All their neighbors and friends came to congratulate them and to present them with “an elegant couch.” Mr. Humphrey was also the recipient of a heavy, gold.headed cane. The following year they went to Wisconsin to visit their daughter and Mr. Humphrey died there in 1907. Mrs. Humphrey lived on there to the age of ninety-two.

When Mr. Beck was the mail carrier he ate dinner and changed teams at the Alf place. Later, when Van Humphrey carried the mail he changed horses and ate dinner at the Sieberts’ until he bought his car. The Siebert boys, William, Orville, Louis and Harold, all went to country schools. Orville, the first to marry, in 1925 took as his wife Elzine Gouldie. Eight years after their manage they moved to the William Bokhof place, there they still live. The remains of an old water wheel, about which the Sieberts have no information, can still be seen east of their buildings. When Purdy and Malone owned the ranch they used the big barn to stable their work horses. The hired men were required to clean every stall and harness all the horses each morning, regardless of the weather.

Stanley died in 1931, Antonia in 1951. Zigmund lives in Chicago, Ed in Omaha, Natchel on the home place and Gaines near Emmet. Chestera, the only daughter, is now Mrs. Felix Laible.

In the winter, Mable wrote, they often skated up the creek to the old Bokhof place, carrying a lantern for 459 light. She, too, remembers seeing the remains of the old wooden water wheel as they skated by. The young Schrunks went to Sunday school at the Albert Henning home, two miles distant from their own. Now and then the family went to Inman to the Latter Day Saints church, riding down on the train from Atkinson.

This family, like most of the others, worked long and hard to make their farm pay. “Many times,” Mable wrote, “during haying season my sister and I milked twenty cows, as we were too small to work in the hay field. And when any of us had the earache, Dad, who kept a few cigars for the purpose, would blow smoke in our ears. I can’t remember that it ever helped any, and Dad, who never smoked otherwise, was generally sick afterward.” The Schrunks usually kept a hired man and once, when they needed a man, Mr. Schrunk left word in town to call him if an available man showed up. When the call came one of the small boys was sent to town with the wagon to bring him out. The man was a Negro and the little Schrunk boy, who had never seen a black man before, didn’t know what to do. He brought him home, however, and he stayed quite awhile, proving to be a good worker.

Whenever Mr. Schrunk went to town, Bill, the black man, ordered a big sack of candy. He always passed it around to all the family first, then took it to his bunk and ate the rest of it during the night.

Mable, too, remembers the “Ghost Light.” It was not unusual, she said, to see it off in the distance in the hills of Eagle Creek. It looked like a car light but where it was no car could go. Paul Roth, who married Mable’s oldest sister, Ina, said that he and his brother were going to a dance in their buggy one night when he looked back and saw a light coming. He told his brother to pull over, as there was a car coming. Then they saw the light pass through a fence and go bouncing off across a field.

Another time one of the Schrunk girls was sent on horseback to see about some cattle that had gotten out. On the way home she looked back and saw the light coming after her. She put her pony into a dead run, but when she looked back again the light was floating off across the pasture. She was so frightened she could scarcely talk when she reached home. “Some people,” wrote Mable, “claimed the light was caused by gas. I don’t know. I only know that I saw it ata distance many times.” Mr. Schrunk was one of the Holt County settlers who bought some of the stolen horses from the South Dakota rustlers and had to go to Deadwood to be a witness at the trial described by Guy Beckwith in an earlier chapter.

Of the big Schrunk family several still live in Holt County; Ina Roth in Atkinson; Ethel, who married Gaines Rzeszotarski, in Atkinson; Earl in Ewing; Mable (Mrs. James Banks) in Inman and Ralph in Atkinson.

“Dad’s first car, an Oakland, didn’t seem to be too good, as we walked home many times,” Mable concluded, “but the next was a seven passenger Hudson and we were real proud of that car.” In 1910 the families of Oscar and Vienna Fullerton decided to move from Iowa to Atkinson, where their cousins, James, Wallace and Ernest Fullerton lived. The party included the parents, Oscar and Vienna, their sons, Martin and Robert, with their wives and children, and their daughter Lulu, her husband Leon Hall and their children.

Oscar and Vienna moved onto a farm three and a half miles northeast of Atkinson, where they lived a few years before moving into town. Martin and his family settled on a farm three and a half miles north of town, where they raised their family before moving into Atkinson where Martin ran a combination cream and filling station. The Hall family returned to Iowa after a few years. Robert Fullerton bought a farm twelve and a half miles northeast of Atkinson in 1913 and lived on it until 1950. He and his wife Mary raised eight children there. After they bought a car in 1914 it was much easier to get to Atkinson for church and trading. Even so plenty of wraps, robes and foot warmers were necessities when starting out in the winter time, as it was considered impossible to make the drive to town in less than forty-five minutes. Anyone who drove faster than that was sure to be killed. Robert, a lover of horses, broke many to work and liked nothing better than to dicker over a good horse trade. He never got over the thrill of sending twenty-two head of fat cattle to market in the early ‘twenties, after feeding them all winter, and clearing $1049.50 on them, at seventeen cents a pound. In 1950 Robert and Mary retired to Atkinson, where Robert served as police judge for nine years, took an active part in civic affairs and was the town’s perennial Santa Claus for many years. Now a widower of ninety-one, he enjoys the distinction of having had his name on the books as a member of the United Presbyterian church of Atkinson for sixty- three consecutive years.

From 1916 to 1929 Robert Moore, born at Wahoo in 1882, and his wife, Anna, born at Valley in 1884, lived on a farm five miles northeast of Atkinson. They had three children, Frances, Leonard and Ruth, and were members of St. John’s Lutheran Church. No doubt the children went to school in this vicinity but no other information on this family or the thirteen years they lived there is given. From the Atkinson farm they moved to Pierce County.

A few family histories that came in too late to be used with others of the same section of the county, or that were inadvertantly grouped with some other section are here recorded. Among the earliest settlers in this group is Robert John (Jack) McAl-lister, born in Illinois in 1868. When he was a small boy his parents and their seven children came to the Redbird area in the early ‘seventies. Jack grew to manhood on the Redbird and, at twenty, married Margaret Ernst, daughter of Jacob and Teresa Ernst of the Rock Falls district. Jack and Margaret lived on a Brush Creek farm and had ten children. After the birth of the fifth child they moved to Atkinson where Jack became a successful realtor and bought a large two-story home for his family. After Margaret died in 1930 Jack went to California. None of his children now live in Holt County.

Delia Goodsell was only five when she came with her Scottish born parents, Adam and Lucinda Goodsell, and her seven brothers and sisters to the home of an older sister, just across from the Midway store. The year was 1883 and the country was settling fast. The family soon moved to a farm now owned by Bill Langan.

Delia first went to school in a log building just west of Pleasant Valley Church. Jim McAllister, Jack’s brother, was the teacher. Jim lived on the Martin place and walked the six miles to his school. There were no legs on the big old pot bellied stove, so it had to sit on a big rock in the middle of the room.

In 1895 Delia and Orville Harrison were married in her home by Rev. DeWitt, the Baptist minister. The next day the couple moved to the groom’s homestead, a half-mile south of the Old Settlers’ Picnic grove. In 1907 a frightful hailstorm destroyed their crops and broke the windows out of their house. The tornadic winds that followed blew the beaten pulp of corn and grass through the openings and plastered it to the inside walls. When the storm was over Delia picked up her dead chickens in bushel baskets.

The Harrisons experienced both floods and drouths, and in the 1930’s grasshoppers ate everything, even the 460 leaves from the trees.

The Harrisons had two daughters, Nellie and Pearl, then in 1904 Mary was born. She weighed two and one-half pounds and Delia could slip her wedding ring over the baby’s tiny hand. Her mother constantly carried her on a pillow, and while she prepared the meals the father held the pillowed baby. Three more daughters were born to the Harrisons. Delia remembers a special Fourth of July observance the Blackbird people enjoyed. A cannon on top of a hill was fired each Independence Day morning— until the day someone put in too much powder end blew up the connon. The Blockbird Creek wes a worry to the mother as the girls once broke through the ice and came home wringing wet.

Mr. Harrison died in 1938, and Delia went to the hospital for the first time in her life in 1960 at the age of eighty-two. She died ten years later in the hospital at Lynch.

John P. McNichols, son of Mary and John McNichols, was born in New York State in 1857. His family later moved to Wisconsin and then to Iowa. In 1880 young John went to Colorado to work in the mines. Three years later he came to O’Neill and took a homestead three miles west of the town. His first residence was a dugout, then a sod house roofed with “Nebraska shingles,” or sod.

The rest of his family came to Holt County in 1884 and homesteaded four miles east of O’Neill. John P. married Mary Wynn in 1886. Mary and her parents had come from Pennsylvania in 1878. After his marriage John moved to O’Neill where he served as marshal for five years and also ran a livery stable.

He then spent two years in the stockyards at Omaha, but gave that up to return to Holt County and open a bakery-restaurant-meat market establishment in Atkinson. Another branch of his business enterprises there was the operation of three large ice houses. The McNichols were the parents of seven children. They were also the owners of the first automobile in Atkinson, a Stutz. John Balloon owned the second car, a Reo. A very brief history states that Oscar Witherwax was born August 25, 1885, at Redbird. Bessie Darr, born in Holt County in 1893, became his wife at O’Neill in 1911. They lived in Holt County all their lives and had three sons, Robert, Clayton and Richard, all born at Redbird.

Edward Skrdla, who married Margery Hebbard, lived in Holt County for some time. They had four children, Edward, Jr., and three daughters. Edward, Jr., served in General Mc-Arthur’s Army as his special aid in Japan. While there he studied the Japanese language and went back after the war as a missionary. Edward and his wife had seven daughters, including a set of identical triplets. None of them now live in Holt County.

Isaac Davidson was born in England in 1838, his wife, Mary, was born in that country in 1834. Both died in Nebraska and are buried in the Leau Qui Court Cemetery at Niobrara. The exact date of their coming to Holt County is not given, but it was early and the history notes that the family did much to help the country “get settled.” Their home was a haven for weary travelers through the empty land and they fed and housed many a passing traveler.

The Davidsons had five children, William, John, Isaac, Joseph and Jane. William had a store at Dorsey for quite a few years and was the postmaster for a time. Jane married a Mr. Graham in England and had two children, Mary Sarah and Thomas James. In 1887, following the death of her husband, she came to America with her children and one of her brothers. They came directly to the home of her parents, then living at the “Armstrong post office place.” Jane soon took a homestead two and a half miles from Dorsey and moved there with her children.

Tom Crowe, one of seven children, was born in England in 1862. His father, a farmer, gave six of his children a fine education, but Tom, caring little for school, in 1887 headed for Canada in charge of fourteen head of cattle and two horses. Landing in Quebec, he was employed on a large Shorthorn farm for three months, at which time he bought a ticket as far south as the railroad ran. This took him to Running Water, South Dakota.

The next morning he crossed the river to Niobrara. On his second day in Nebraska he hired out to Isaac Davidson for fifteen dollars a month. Some time later he traded a pony and saddle for a pre-emption, the start of the 7,000 acre ranch he was to put together in Holt County. He raised sheep for several years, and people who knew him told that he gathered wool from bushes and fences as he herded his sheep. He later sent it away and had it made into his first good suit of clothes.

After some two years in Holt County Tom discovered Jane Davidson and her children. He and Jane were married in her home in November, 1890, she in her calico dress and he in his overalls. It was a Sunday morning and she stayed home from church to prepare food for the guests who were— coming to the wedding.

Tom then built a new house (he had been living in a sheep herder’s shack) and moved his new family into it. The whole family then herded sheep, as coyotes were a constant menace. The new home was crude and bare at first. As has been noted in a previous chapter, Tom Crowe changed over to raising cattle after he lost his best sheep herder— when Mary Sarah married George Tuch in 1901. Mary had been the “right hand man” on the ranch ever since her mother married Tom.

During his sheep raising years Tom sold wool for eight cents a pound while Grover Cleveland was president. After turning to cattle he sold grass-fat steers for prices ranging from $2.75 a hundred up to $14.00 a hundred. The latter price was paid in 1918, during the first World War. Mary Sarah’s brother, Thomas Graham, worked for Tom Crowe on the ranch, went to school in District 26 from 1890 to 1902, and married Pauline Tuch in 1904. After his marriage Thomas took a homestead but continued to work for his stepfather. Thomas and Pauline had two children, Mary and Howard, both born on the ranch. Mary married Harold Osborn in 1929; Howard married Melva McColley Zoubek in 1938. After Tom Crowe’s death Thomas operated the ranch. His mother continued to live on the ranch until her death in 1948, thirteen years after Tom passed away.

Howard and Melva Graham had two children, Marlyn Faye, who married Bruce Miller; and Leslie Howard, who married Janice Anderson and had one daughter. Leslie and his family live on the ranch, where he helps his father operate the big spread. Both Marlyn Faye and Leslie went to school in the same schoolhouse where their father, Howard, and their grandfather, Thomas, received their educations. Frank and Maria Tuch of Czechoslovakia came to Illinois very early. After two years in a coal mine there Frank brought the family to Knox County and established a mill on Steel Creek, where he supplied flour and meal for the Dorsey store and for many Holt County settlers.

Frank and Maria had seven children. Their son George, who married Mary Sarah Graham in 1901, the next year bought the mill from his father and ran it for eight years. George and Mary Sarah had five children and one of their daughters, Pauline, herded cattle for her father, who worked for a time for Tom Crowe. During that time Pauline met Thomas Graham, who later became her husband.

Anton Jirak was born in Czechoslovakia in 1884. He grew up there and 461 brought his wife and three small children from Iowa to his parents’ home in 1890, where they lived in a small house until Peter made a home for them on the Boyd County claim. A son Frank was born to them there. After selling out to Charley, Peter moved his family back to Holt County, where his wife died six months later. The grandparents raised the children. Peter’s three sons are now dead. His daughter Dolly spent all her life on the ranch with her grandparents, father and uncles.

Frank Reiser, son of Nicholaus, married Barbara Englehaupt and raised a family of eleven children. The family lived in Boyd County. Joe Reiser married Mary Mlinar in 1892. They and their four children are now all deceased. Adolph married Lena Hoeger. Their daughter, Rena, is now Mrs. Lawrence Englehaupt. Adolph was one of the few men of northern Holt County who witnessed the signing of the treaty by which officials from Washington D. C. took over the Indian lands in Boyd County.

Charley Reiser never married. After selling his land in Boyd County he worked on the Dick Wright place, later the White Horse Ranch. Ben and James Reiser, with their niece, Dolly, remained on the family ranch. Jim later bought the Frank Ellis ranch, eight miles southwest on Brush Creek, moved there and married Lena Bausch. He died in 1931.

Ben spent all his life on the home ranch, enlarging it to almost 3,000 acres. In 1927 he built a new, modern house, replacing the original log and frame building. After his death in 1965 Dolly moved to Butte and sold the ranch.

In the early years a Ganley family lived south of the Reiser ranch. When one of their sons was killed by lightning while herding cattle the family sold out to the Reisers and left the country. It was on1 the Reiser ranch that Captain Dodge was murdered in pioneer times. In 1920 a John Mize, driving through with a team and wagon, was also murdered on the ranch— by a couple who wanted his outfit.

Both Henry Hartland and his wife, Elizabeth Good, were born in England. They were married in their native land, then came to Iowa in 1862. The family came to Chelsea with ox teams in the ‘eighties. Later they moved to Redbird, living on the George Lamoureax place where a son, William, one of nine sons and daughters, was born.

William, born at Chelsea in 1883, in 1906 married Martha Mellor in the Golden Hotel in O’Neill. The couple had seven children, six of them born in the Redbird community. The family came to New York in 1900, then on to Holt County. His stepfather’s brother, a farmer south of O’Neill, had paid his passage to America. In return for this and one hundred dollars, Anton was to work for him for one year. The next year he went to Omaha and worked in a packing plant for a dollar a day. He then returned to O’Neill and settled on a farm south of town. His mother and sister left the old country to join him there in 1901. In 1905 he married Mary Musil. They had two daughters, Frances, who married Joe Soukup; and Mary who married James Havranek.

Anton and Mary Jirak celebrated their fifty-fifth anniversary with an open house at their farm home northwest of O’Neill, then retired and moved into town. Mary died in 1962, Anton in 1972.

Greenberry and Sarah Haynes, married in Illinois in 1866, came to Page in the 1890’s. They had lived on a claim on Eagle Creek for awhile before coming to Page where, in 1900, Mr. Haynes was killed when thrown from a horse. Both Mr. and Mrs. Haynes are buried at Page, beside their youngest son who died there in 1896 at the age of five. William Haynes, oldest of the Haynes children, married Adda Johnson, who died in 1894, leaving him three small children. Five years later he married Miss Melinda Ord at Page. With his first three children and the two by his second marriage, William moved to Wyoming.

Allen Haynes, youngest son of Greenberry and Sarah, in 1899 married Susie Reed at the home of her parents, the Pulaski Reeds. They lived on a nearby farm for more than sixty years, then moved into Page. Allen died in 1963, Susie in 1972. Both are buried at Page, with two of their five children. Of the other three only Laurence lives in Holt County, at O’Neill.

Nicholaus Reiser came from Luxem- borg at the age of eighteen. For five years he worked in the summers and went to school in the winters, then returned to Luxemborg and married Susanna Putz. Returning to America they settled in Iowa. Seven sons and four daughters were born to them there.

In the fall of 1883 Nicholaus came to Holt County and bought a piece of land from Ben Gillespie, south of the Niobrara and about a mile east of where the Parshall bridge is now located. The next spring his family came by train to Atkinson.

In 1891 two sons, Joe and Adolph, took adjoining claims in Boyd County. Peter, another son, took a ‘ claim beside them in 1892, but later sold it to his brother Charley. Peter had lived on various farms in the Redbird and Blackbird communities until William died in 1954. Martha sold out then and went to live with her daughter Alice at Niobrara. None of their children live in Holt County today.

When one of their sons, Lloyd, and his wife and family left Redbird for a home in South Dakota, times were hard. With $5.00 in cash they sat out on the four-day trip, with wagons and livestock, camping out on the way. Lloyd still had a $1.50 in his pocket when they reached the end of the trip.

That year, 1933, was a bad one. Remembering it afterward, the family said they didn’t have a rag to their names at the beginning of the year at its end they had nothing but rags. It gave them kindred feelings to the hard times Henry and Martha Hartland had experienced a generation earlier. Henry had driven oxen at first, living for the day when he could afford a team of horses. The day finally came and he even slept with that team, guarding it from Kid Wade and other horse thieves. When one horse died he had to drive the other with one of his oxen until he could afford another horse. Henry was the man who freighted the first set of millstones to the Mill on Eagle Creek. Harry Simpson came to Holt County in the early 1900’s from Chicago, he married Emma Getter in 1902 and lived on her homestead for a time. He also helped build the Kasper Hoerle house and the S. E. Honeywell barn. The couple left the farm in 1915 and moved into Chambers where they ran a cream station. Later Henry engaged in a short lived banking operation with R. J. Starr, C. H. Stowell, William Lell and D. L. Johnson. The bank was known as the South Fork State Bank. Many children, now grown old, probably best remember Harry Simpson because of his many kindnesses to them.

John Pinkerman, son of James and Sarah, was born in 1893. Married in 1916 to Nora Doty of Iowa, the couple lived on various farms in the Meek and Scottville communities until 1931 when they moved back to John’s boyhood home near Scottville. In 1949 they retired to Lynch. John died there in 1954 and Nora in 1959. Both are buried in the old Scottville cemetery. Their children were Zelda, Doris and Virgil. Zelda married Claude Pickering and lived near Dorsey. Victor, one of their eight children, now farms the Pickering place. Doris married Edwin Tuch and had three children. Their farm home is near Niobrara. Virgil married Lucille Cooper of Lynch and lived for a time on the Roy Pinkerman place, now owned by 462 Veldon. In 1946 they moved to the Dollie Simmons place south of O’Neill and ran a dairy.

When John and Nora retired Virgil and Lucille moved back to the home place near Scottville. Rick, one of their five children now operates a dairy on the farm originally owned by his great-grandparents, James and Sarah, making the fifth generation to call this place home. Virgil and Lucille today live on the farm originally owned by Barrett Scott.

William G. Jamison, the son of Robert and Mary Frost Jamison, moved with his parents to Holt County as a small boy. They lived on Gravel Ridge north of Stuart. His mother was the daughter of Luther Frost of Ohio. Luther married Zilpha Duer of Pennsylvania and lived to be ninety-seven. William Jamison married Amanda Robertson and lived in and near Stuart, finally locating in the Clay Creek community.

Luther Frost had a son, Sam, who married Drucilla Ann Harvey and homesteaded near Cedar Creek, north of Stuart. Rose and Charlotte Jamison married Michael and Robert Gray, sons of George and Harriett Cearns Gray of Badger Creek, who had six other children. After George died in 1918 Harriett married Mitchell V. Rock and had four more children.

Bill Sharpe, foreman of the Overton Ranch, southwest of Atkinson, for many years was nearly fifty when he married a widow, Cynthia Lane, and moved to a quarter of land he owned near Bassett. Mrs. Lane had two children. After the death of a neighbor, Freed Boettcher, the Sharpes took his little son and raised him as their own. The boy, Don Boettcher, now lives in Washington state near his mother, Mrs. Freed Boettcher.

Walter Armstrong, a half brother to Robert Davis, came to Holt County from Bear Valley, Minnesota, and was the first teacher in the “little red schoolhouse” four miles west of Atkinson. For many years he lived in a little cottage on North Main Street in Atkinson.

John Dahms and his wife Mina, born in Germany, came to Emmet from Illinois. In the east John worked in a factory which made flour mills. It was hot, hard work and the factories of that period were poorly ventilated, adding to the misery of the men who worked with the molten metal poured into the mill forms.

John had owned a piece of land northwest of Emmet for some time, so in 1903 sent his older son, Gustan, to Emmet to look at the land. Gustan stayed a year or more, and liked it, so the rest of the family decided to build a home on the land and live there. They got off the train at Emmet on May 20, 1905. There was only a caboose for a depot in the village. Mrs. Dahms brought her big oleander in a tub, George brought his tame rabbits, otherwise their furnishings and livestock were much like their neighbors’— except that the Dahms had the only piano in the neighborhood. For this reason the. neighbors often gathered at the Dahms home to sing.

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Chapter 45: Atkinson – Stuart

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