IN THE CITY PARK OF COLUMBUS, THE SEAT OF PLATTE COUNTY, IS A MEMORIAL TO THE CIVIL WAR HEROES
Kearney is the next town of importance westward. Not far from here is the site of old Fort Kearney, where in these early days of progress were acted more stories of desperate fights and literally hair-raising adventures than Fenimore Cooper ever dreamed of, and where Major Frank J. North, with his four companies of Pawnee Indians made history defending the Overland Route against hostile Indians during the construction period. As an Indian fighter he had no superior. It was fun alive for him to take a band of scouts and clean out a whole tribe of hostiles, and he did it so frequently that his name became a terror to the Indians. The Plum Creek, Ogalalla, and Summit Springs campaigns under Major North’s direction did much to prove conclusively to the Sioux and Cheyennes that he was their absolute master. Kearney is now a city of eight thousand people, and is the site of the State Normal School. To the northwest from Kearney runs a branch line through the beautiful Wood River Valley, opening to the city a great tributary territory.
Lexington, now a prosperous town of twenty-five hundred people, was once called Plum Creek. Here in 1867 the Southern Cheyennes, under Chief Turkey Leg, captured and burned a freight train. In the subsequent campaign already alluded to, they were thoroughly subdued and many of them made good Indians. Lexington is now more famous for its great irrigation system than for Indians. Great grain and vegetable crops are raised.
West of Lexington sixty-six miles is North Platte, a place of four thousand people, and much more lively than the North Platte River. Here we have a good view of the river, which in summer time is the laziest thing that moves in all Nebraska. Like Hammerton’s summer air, it “has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace.” North Platte has great agricultural and stock interests; hence have been shipped a million tons of hay per annum. Here is the home of Buffalo Bill, most famous perhaps of all the plains’ scouts. Near by is his famous Scouts’ Rest ranch.
From Kearney westward to Julesburg are little towns, around some of which cluster memories of earlier days. To Ogalalla, for instance, in Texas cattle-driving time were driven thousands of long-horns from the Lone Star State to start by rail for the eastern markets.
THE ROUTE RUNS BY A SEA OF WIND-WAVED GRAIN NEAR SHELTON AND GIBBON, NEBRASKA
The West had many styles of wildness, and the cowboy style was one. It was different from all others. The writer was familiar with them and can discriminate. There was system usually in the frontier wildness; men killed each other, but for some cause great or small. But cowboy wildness was not to be measured by rule or reason. The cowboy was picturesque. He wore a roll around his broad brimmed hat, a red sash around his waist, big spurs, high heeled boots with the Lone Star of Texas embroidered on the top, an open shirt and two six-shooters. In appearance he was one-half Mexican and the other half savage. Opportunity to shoot down a man or “up a town” meant the more fame was his when he should return to the Brazos. His touch upon the trigger was as “light and free” as the touch of Bret Harte’s Thompson and there was no limit, while ammunition and targets lasted, to the “mortality incident upon that lightness and freedom.”
