Early Settlers
The Chase County Historical Society, located in Champion, Nebraska, has since it's inception in 1938 collected personal histories of residents of Chase County, Nebraska. These oral histories provides a history of Chase County that goes beyond facts and information about the state. Listed on these pages are transcripts of interviews of many early settlers of Chase County, Nebraska. I am grateful to the Historical Society for the work it's researchers did in preserving these stories, and for permission to share them here with other researchers. These stories and other important historical information about Chase County can be found in their published Histories of Chase County, copies which can be purchased from the Society or viewed in the Imperial Republican Library. The Society welcomes any additional stories about early settlers that you may wish to contribute to their files.
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Lee Family
Wayne Lee provided the following about his family in Chase County:
My Parents,
even up into their eighties, had very good memories of their early days. My mother
came to Chase County while it was still part of Frontier County. She was ten then in
March of 1886. Her father took a homestead in the valley west of Hamilton, which
later became Champion. My father came here in early 1887 and settled with his
widowed mother on a homestead south of Lenox, which later became Lamar. Although he
lived in three different houses, his home was on that section of land for the rest of his
life, over 66 years.
My mother could recall clearly her impressions
of the country and her feeling of an empty land when she first arrived in western
Nebraska. Her father had built a half dug-out and the family arrived tehre one
naight long after dark. The next morning she went outside, expecting to see a
wonderful land after hearing her father describe it. But all she saw as an empty
land, rolling hills, not a tree, not a house. She did see smoke coming up out of the
ground in a place or two where someone else had a dug-out.
The country frightened her and many things that
happened during that first summer added to her surprises. She recalled a hard rain
that stpring when the water poured down the stairway of their dug-out. She and her
mother tried to bail the water off the floor but finally gave up. Her mother got up
on the table and laughed about the whole thing. But my mother saw nothing funny
about it then.
One of the highlights of her first summer here was the Fourth of July celebration.
Sixty years later she gave me a copy of the program presented that July 4th at
Hamilton. One of the most interesting events was the tub rase on the mill pond.
That summer she got the worst fright of her young days. Cowboys, bringing a herd of
cattle through, watered the herd on the nearby Frenchman. These were the cattle on
their way to market at Ogallala. They had made a dry drive from Buffalo Creek to the
south and were thirsty enough that they almost stampeded to the river when they smelled
the water. The cowboys rode along, firing their guns in a effort to turn back some
of the cattle so they wouldn't trample each other to death. Mother hid at the corner
of the half-dug-out and peeked around at the commotion, expecing the cowboys or the cattle
to turn at any minute and run over her and the house.
Although she didn't know it then and probably never realized it, those cattle were amont
the last to make the drive north to market, coming up over the National Trail that ran
along the Kansa-Colorado border after Kansas was quarantined against the Texas herds.
Some of those herds went on north but many turned at the corner of Kansas and
headed for Ogallala, watering at the north fork of the Republican approximately where
Haigler is now, then running north across Buffalo Creek, the Frenchman, and on to
Ogallala.
My Father remembered particularly the hard times the family had when they first arrived
here. He was seventeen, the oldest of four children. His father had died the
year gbefore so it was up to him to make the living for the famiily. He broke sod
for a widow who had homesteaded a quarter of land close by in exchange for schooling for
his younger brothers and sister. He hired out one winter hauling ice from the pond
to the ice house, getting 25 cents a day for himself and his team.
It was a hard life that I'm afraid too many of us tehse days fail to appreciate. If
they hadn't struggled through those early days of setttlement, we wouldn't have the
comparative easy living we have today. (Written for the Historical Society by Wayne
Lee.)
email Linda Banks at: FlorenceEm@AOL.com
