Marking Time: Nebraska's Historic Places
By Bobbi & Steve Olson
With text by David L. Bristow
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(Below is an excerpt from the book)
Explorers and Soldiers
Before Nebraska was settled, it was visited by explorers and traders, and crossed by half a million pioneers bound for points farther west. For Nebraska’s Native population, the days of independence were coming to an end.
In 1541, Francisco Vasquez Coronado
searched for cities of gold on the Great Plains of North America. He’d
been told that in the Kingdom of Quivira, even the poor ate from gold dishes.
Coronado was apparently the first
European to be hoodwinked by tales of easy wealth on the Plains. He would not
be the last. His infamous wild goose chase was long reckoned to be the opening
chapter of Nebraska exploration.
But it really doesn’t matter that Coronado likely got no farther north than central Kansas. The notion that the first white men to set foot in Nebraska were drawn by outrageous lies about cities of gold is just too good of a story to let go. It’s a true story about the Great Plains, and that’s close enough.
And the truth is that for many years,
Nebraska’s visitors were Spanish or French soldiers and traders who also
harbored ideas of easy wealth, but who never figured out how to make this strange
land pay. The best they could do was to scheme and build shaky alliances with
Native peoples in hopes of keeping their European rivals out.
In 1803, the complex rivalries of
European politics resulted in the United States getting the opportunity to buy
Louisiana – which at the time was reckoned as the entire region between
the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. The following year, a group of
American explorers ventured from St. Louis up the Missouri River. They were
sent to report on this new Louisiana country, and if possible to find a water
route connecting it to the Pacific.
Lewis and Clark
The storm whipped the Missouri River into whitecaps that pounded the keelboat’s
starboard bow. The waves “would have thrown her up on the sand island,
dashed to pieces in an instant,” William Clark wrote later that day, “had
not the party leaped out on the leeward side and kept her off with the assistance
of the anchor and cable, until the storm was over.”
It was July 14, 1804, and Clark was
writing from camp near present-day Indian Cave State Park in southeast Nebraska.
A few days earlier, the Corps of Discovery had entered that portion of the Missouri
River that borders Nebraska. From here up to Lynch, the Nebraska border is now
dotted with markers showing their campsites.
The markers can’t convey how
difficult it was for 30-some men to move a 30-ton keelboat and two smaller boats
day after day against the current. They rowed in deep water, poled in shallow
water. Some days they raised the sail. Other days the only way to make headway
was to haul the boat by rope from shore. They entered present-day Nebraska on
July 11 and left it on September 8.
It was a busy two months. Near present-day
Fort Atkinson, Lewis and Clark held their first council with Native Americans
to convince an Otoe and Missouri delegation that the Great White Father really
had the Indians’ best interests at heart.
The company’s first deserter,
Pvt. Moses Reed, received about 500 lashes while running a gauntlet through
the company near Sioux City, Iowa. Sgt. Charles Floyd died of natural causes,
Capt. Lewis accidentally poisoned himself with mineral samples near Ponca State
Park, and Pvt. George Shannon got lost and went hungry for two weeks.
Out in the wilderness, the margin
between life and death was a thin one. And if some of the men didn’t understand
that when they set out, the events of August certainly made it clear. Their
long adventure was only beginning.
The Fur Trade
In the early 20th century, a young poet living in Bancroft, Neb., decided that
the story of the West from the fur trade through the end of the Indian Wars
was as worthy of epic treatment as anything from the world of Homer or Virgil.
Fur traders and trappers were usually
considered too rough and uncouth to be fitting subjects of literature. But John
G. Neihardt, who became Nebraska’s Poet Laureate, spent 29 years writing
A Cycle of the West. Three of the cycle’s five book-length poems are about
“mountain men” of the fur trade era. Of one important Missouri River
expedition he wrote,
“One hundred strong they flocked to Ashley’s call
That spring of eighteen hundred twenty-two;
For tales of wealth, out-legending Peru,
Came wind-blown from Missouri’s distant springs,
And that old sireny of unknown things
Bewitched them…”
They were men like Coronado, in other words.
The Western trade began because fur
was valuable – particularly beaver, which was used to the make expensive
top hats for gentlemen. Companies sent trappers out into the wilderness, and
opened isolated posts for trade with Indians. In 1820, the government built
Fort Atkinson at Lewis and Clark’s “Council Bluff” to protect
the growing Missouri River trade. At the time it was the Army’s westernmost
outpost.
Trading posts existed in various locations.
In Nebraska, for example, the city of Bellevue began as a trading post, and
the site of James Bordeaux’s 1846 post near Chadron is preserved today
as the Museum of the Fur Trade. These and others were important points of contact
between Americans and Native Americans in the pre-settlement era.
The trappers, meanwhile, roamed the
wilderness in search of beaver. Regarding exploration, government-backed expeditions
like that of Lewis and Clark were the exception – most of the West was
discovered by mountain men. Among other things, their knowledge led to the establishment
of the Oregon Trail.
Epic stuff, indeed.