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The system's opponents argue that there is no check such as, that occurring between the houses of a bicameral legislature, and fear that the smaller body is more susceptible to outside influence than the orthodox legislative structure. Regardless of the controversy, the unicameral system has attracted students of government from all over the United States and other countries.

LOCAL

The governmental structure of Platte County when it was first organized was a simple and direct affair under which three members of a board of commissioners made up the leading force of the electorate. Laws, in the form of resolutions, were enacted by the board. Matters under its administration included: taxation, the poll tax, laying out and building of roads, building bridges, issuing licenses for the establishment and maintenance of ferries and issuance of liquor licenses.

The first board created voting precincts, and the incorporation of towns, villages and cities within its jurisdiction. In 1878, this system was changed to permit the election of a board of supervisors, one from each township and a member to represent Columbus.

After several years, in 1895, the latter system became too unwieldy and expensive, and the people voted to establish supervisor districts, changing the government of Platte County to what is known as the "district plan." Seven supervisor districts, each represented by one member, were created and the electors of the county voted upon these representatives and made their political wishes known through them.

The first seven men elected to represent the county's townships within their respective districts were: D. A. Becher, District 1; Charles O. Moore, District 2; Peter Bettinger, District 3; James Kiernan, District 4; William Schreiber, District 5; and Charles A. Speice and E. J. Ernst, Districts 6 and 7.

In Platte County, the political developments have not always been bitter, feuding affairs, but frequently expressed the sentiments of the settlers that their town and county be improved. Noncontroversial matters handled by the board of commissioners extended even to the beautifying of public property, and the following is evidence of one citizen who received a governmental nod for his contribution to civic improvement:

CERTIFICATE OF MERIT

"Columbus, Platte County, Nebraska. This is to certify that Jacob Ernst, Sr., planted on the morning of July 4, 1876, two cedar trees at the west entrance to the courthouse yard, one to the right and one to the left after passing the entrance.

John Stauffer, County Clerk"

The early or three-man board of county commissioners had been confronted by a totally different state of affairs than its successor, the board of supervisors. Approximately one hundred persons lived in Platte County when this initial organization took place. There were no roads, no improvements; settlers had scarcely any cash and the resources of the body politic were few and insecure. The men elected were honest and intelligent men but completely lacking in the political sophistication necessary to meet the demands of their offices. In the beginning, there was no specified meeting place and no funds with which to procure records. "Receipts none" reads the county treasurer's report a few years after the founding of Columbus. However, the county did not go into debt.

Bond issues, sinking funds and other financial safeguards were soon instituted, however, and through the practical ability and integrity of the region's elected representatives, Platte County soon became one of the soundest and most efficient governing bodies in the state.

The first courthouse was erected in Columbus in 1870, and the first meeting was held on February first of that year. H. J. Hudson, county clerk at that time, had this to say about it:

"The offices of the probate judge, sheriff, treasurer and county clerk are refreshing to enter; neatly furnished, lofty and roomy, in marked contrast with some of the dingy holes too many of our county officials are required to burrow in, undermining their health, laying the foundation for dire disease, because of the parsimony and worse than dotage of the guardians of public trusts. Eighteen thousand dollars was the contract price to build the courthouse, and it stands out in bold relief as another beacon of Platte County enterprise."

The county jail was part of the courthouse and it contained what one early writer discreetly referred to as "cells for the incarceration of malefactors." For several years after its construction, part of the courthouse was occupied by the sheriff and his family.

Provisions for the poor and indigent were handled by the county on a farm-out basis in the first years of colonization. Applicants for food, shelter and medical attention were turned over to willing citizens who committed themselves to care for the helpless at a stated stipend per day.

This early practice ended when, after many years of discussion, the county board voted to purchase a farm for this purpose. On November 6, 1896, two hundred forty acres of land were bought in Section 29, Bismark Township, from Orson and Margaret L. Butler, for which the taxpayers paid seventy-five dollars per acre.

The following year, Butler was awarded the contract for maintaining the "Poor Farm." He received in compensation two dollars twenty-five cents for each inmate weekly. At the time of its initiation, the farm housed not more than half a dozen people, but later years saw the erection of additional structures, including a home for the superintendent, separate buildings for the men and women, and several barns. The farm developed into an outstanding example of a modern social agency, maintained by the county for the benefit of those whom age, ill health or circumstances prevented their caring for themselves.

During the 1870's, Platte County undertook another project which must be termed political in character. 1875 was the peak year of local agitation for removal of the state capital to Columbus. Other towns in Nebraska were also bidding for the location, but Columbus was considered the strongest contestant and many meetings were held at the old Hammond House, attended by John Hammond, Samuel C. Smith, Leander Gerrard and John Peter Becker, to accomplish this goal. "A feast of reason and a flow of soul" is the way one early reporter described the series of conclaves participated in by Columbus leaders following the removal of the capital from Omaha to Lincoln, in 1867*.

Arguments in favor of the Columbus location were based on the county seat's geographical position, at the junction of two great valleys, a logical spot for the seat of government for the state. Moreover, Columbus was on the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Although efforts to change the site were dropped when the constitution of 1875 took away from the legislature the power to locate the capital, the tradition still remains in Nebraska politics that one of the United States senators must be from the section south of the Platte River and the other must represent the territory north of the Platte River.

The final determination to move the capital from Omaha terminated a thirteen-year feud between the rival factions and was made shortly after Nebraska became a state in 1867. The south-of-the-Platte region had a majority in both houses of the legislature. It also had the governor. When a commission was appointed to name a new site, Governor David Butler, Secretary of State Thomas P. Kennard and Auditor John Gillespie were named, and the legislature passed an act to re-locate the capital south of the Platte.

An amendment to the bill, however, provided that the capital city be named Lincoln, in honor of Abraham Lincoln, and it was this political move which finally determined the location for the years to come.

When the board of Platte County commissioners in March, 1858, was presented with a petition on behalf of the handful of citizens of the town, praying for the incorporation of the Town of Columbus, the request was granted and the following provision included in the act of incorporation:

"Section 3. The corporate powers of said Town of • Columbus shall be vested in a board of trustees to consist of five members to be elected by the qualified voters residing within said town."

At first incorporated by the Nebraska Territorial Legislature as a city of the second class, the status of Columbus automatically changed on September 25, 1907. On that date, Governor George L. Sheldon of Nebraska issued a proclamation to the effect that all cities of more than five thousand population in the state be cities of the first class.

Columbus, having passed the five thousand mark, was duly placed on record as a city of the first class by order of Mayor George W. Phillips.

*Site of Lincoln selected July 29, 1867.

Some indication of the political temper of the county seat between the 1868-1880 period may be found in the following election figures taken from city's electoral record in presidential votes:

Early city council meetings were dominated by the requests typical of the age and of Columbus' stage of development. Many of these were "ladies' petitions" to the effect that saloons be closed on Sundays; others asked protection against itinerant auctioneers who operated without a license in unfair competition against the town's permanent businesses.

Other legal and governmental concerns of the village in the first two decades of its existence called for the granting of the city hall for Sons of Temperance strawberry festivals; the requiring of owners of horses, mules, and oxen to hitch or secure their beasts; preventing young boys from riding on railroad engines within the city limits; and the appointment of night watchmen in the employ of the town.

Columbus' governmental structure was rudimentary during this period. A mayor, treasurer, clerk, police judge, engineer, marshal and councilmen from the various wards administered the city's business.

Nebraska, in general, and Platte County in particular, have never construed politics in the narrow, negative sense but have persisted in bringing to the people --- the farmers, workers and businessmen of the state --- the benefits of intelligent and forward-looking improvements of a socio-economic nature. This policy was expressed in 1923 when City Engineer John M. Curry returned to Columbus from a convention of the League of Nebraska Municipalities to report on the home rule resolution as it had just been passed by that body. The resolution read, in part:

"We favor the municipal ownership of all public utilities and recommend that the regulation ... be left to the local authorities and not placed . . .  under the control of a state commission.

"We do not approve of the granting of water rights for the purpose of generating current or power, to any private corporation, but that these rights be reserved for public use."

Resolutions also were passed at the convention urging cities and villages to take more civic pride and plant more trees, favoring the tuberculosis eradication work among cattle by the federal and state governments, and the supporting of the pure-water campaign being carried on by the State Health Department.

It was as a direct result of this recommendation that the state legislature a few days later passed a bill, Number 375, which authorized cities to maintain and operate municipal coal yards, ice plants, water plants, gas and light plants, fuel yards, slaughter houses and public markets. This measure, permitting incorporated communities to go into business, was the legal basis for the huge power project undertaken in Columbus approximately ten years later which set the pace for publicly owned and controlled power projects all over Nebraska.

Not all of Columbus' legal history has been orthodox. Offsetting the propriety of later years is the story of the "Bloody Cottonwood," a tale of murder, mob violence and lynching which places Columbus indisputably in the category of the old West.

The story began on a cold winter day in 1867. A man by the name of Bob Wilson who had come to Nebraska and homesteaded in Butler County, not far from the town of Schuyler, was working for a settler by the name of Grant, who lived along the river south of Columbus. Their work consisted of hauling wood from the Loup River forest to the Union Pacific Company, for this was in the days of wood-burning engines and John Rickly, Columbus' saw mill operator, had the contract to supply wood to the Union Pacific.

There are several written versions of the original quarrel which led to the murder. Some contend that "bad blood" arose between Wilson and Ransel B. Grant, the man who was killed. All agree, however, that the victim, brother of George Grant who owned the timber which was being hauled to the saw mill, got into an argument over the measuring or piling up of the wood.

"I was only a few rods away from the wood-pile, near the old Union Pacific depot on Platte Street, when Wilson fired the fatal shot," Pat Hayes later revealed.

Grant's brother and another man were witnesses to the killing. Afterward, according to what seemed to be the correct version of the story, Wilson hurried into town and surrendered himself to John Rickly, who turned him over to Sheriff John Browner.

The murderer wanted to wait until he could secure his lawyer, Leander Gerrard, to defend him, but the crowd was restive and he was compelled to hire a young attorney by the name of Strawn, a new-corner from Illinois. Gerrard was out of town at the time and as one witness related somewhat succinctly:

"Strawn was intelligent but he did not know western men."

Meanwhile, the slain man's brother, George Grant, had been preparing an unofficial "death warrant" which he urged citizens to sign. The town's population was aroused by the cold-blooded killing and feeling ran high partly due to Wilson's boast that he would go free or buy his way out of jail with one thousand seven hundred dollars which he supposedly had on his person.

A preliminary hearing was held before Judge H. J. Hudson, at that time the Justice of the Peace in Columbus. The court remanded the prisoner to the district court for trial on charge of murder, but the prisoner never lived to be tried. Immediately upon the court's announcement, a group of men made a rush for the prisoner. As Sheriff John Browner, Justice H. J. Hudson and Deputy George "Wash" Fulton started to leave the courtroom with him, the mob overpowered the officers, threw a rope around Wilson's neck, and dragged him off to the cottonwood to meet his fate.

Another story holds that guards J. H. Galley and Deputy Sheriff George Fulton were appointed to watch over Wilson on the night following Grant's murder and that Wilson was taken to the Fulton home for safekeeping, where a hole was cut through the kitchen floor to hide him, but that the prisoner was kidnapped from there by the mob.

Regardless of the accuracy of these conflicting reports, it is a matter of history that the accused man was dragged through town to the foot of a huge cottonwood standing near what is now Seventh Street and Twenty-second Avenue. The tree, which was cut down in 1911 for firewood, stood on the old Vincent Kummer lot, two and one half blocks south of the court house. The loose end of the rope was thrown over a big limb and Wilson swung into the air. He wore a blue cavalry coat and made some attempt to pull the cape of the coat over his head before the noose was finally adjusted but the crowd, aroused to a high pitch of vengeance, restrained him, and Matt Cook, a local blacksmith, placed the rope in position.

The murderer lived but a short time, although little sympathy was felt for him. At the time of the tragedy, a telegraph line connected Columbus and Omaha and the best index to the mood of the crowd is in the recorded messages of the Columbus operator concerning the crime.

The Omaha agent received word of the killing of Grant, the trial and the subsequent forming of the mob. "Lots of men are coming in here all the time. They look mad. More men coming," wired Columbus.

Omaha wired: "Are they going to hang him?" Reply: "I think so. They have a rope. Are leading him to a tree. The rope is around his neck. He is dead now. . . . They are going to send him down to Omaha, by water, for trial. They are cutting a hole in the ice. Look for him."

All thought of humanity was thus forgotten and an attitude of grotesque humor gripped not only the telegraph operator but others in the crowd, who were unmindful of the civil liberties they had destroyed. After Wilson had died, his body was tied behind- an ox-wagon and dragged down to the bank of the river where a hole was chopped in the thick ice and the body thrust into the swift water. So intense was the fury of the mob that no one thought to search the man's pockets for the one thousand seven hundred dollars he claimed to possess for "buying" his freedom the following day.

After Wilson's death, a legend grew up about the "Bloody Cottonwood." Children in the town were afraid of the tree and refused to play near it after sundown. One Columbus woman recalls: "Many an evening when mother sent me on an errand to some other section of town, I did not dare walk along the street next to that tree, but would always go out of my way, taking another street."

Attorneys Gerrard and Whaley were appointed to arbitrate the matter of Wilson's property, and they ruled that one half of the six wagons and twelve yoke of cattle he had owned be given to Grant's widow and the other half to Strawn, the lawyer who defended the only man ever to be lynched by a mob in Platte County.

LAW

Fortunately for the city of Columbus, the community has continued to attract members of the legal profession who are understanding of the people as well as wise in the ways of the law. These men have done much to raise the western standards of justice so that no unpleasant repetition of mob rule has ever again been witnessed in the town.

Some of the men who took the lead in Columbus' legal history were: Colonel M. Whitmoyer, who was a delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated General U. S. Grant; E. A. Pinckney, one of the earliest lawyers to practice in Columbus; A. B. Pattison, who issued the first marriage license in Platte County in 1858; Leander Gerrard, who served in the first Nebraska state legislature and whose name appeared on practically every case tried in Platte County in the early years; John J. Sullivan, an outstanding attorney who served as county judge of Platte County and was elected district judge in 1891 and 1895; Patrick C. Duffy, who came to Columbus in 1885 and practiced in the county until moving to O'Neill around the turn of the century; C. A. Woosley, attorney of the Windmill Manufacturing Company, which opened in Columbus in the late 1880's; W. S. Geer, well known trial lawyer who died in Columbus on October 21, 1883; and judge W. N. Hensley, who served as one of the leading political office holders of his day, postmaster under Cleveland's administration, outstanding publisher, orator and the former commander of the Nebraska Soldiers' and Sailors' Home at Milford.

Stephen McAllister, whose first office was on the second floor of a little frame building where the Pawnee Theatre later stood on Eleventh Street, was the son of the Scotch pioneer, James McAllister. Nelson Millet, who came to Columbus in the late 1870's and practiced law with his son and I. W. Hobart, who was a former partner of I. L. Albert.

W. H. Tedrow, an active attorney and worker in the Republican Party, for many years served as chairman of the County Central Committee of that political group. William N. Cornelius, a former railroad worker, studied law and came to Columbus, Nebraska, where he practiced until his death in 1914. John Montgomery MacFarland was a one-time mayor of Columbus and local counsel for many years for the Union Pacific Railroad. A. M. Walker practiced briefly in Platte County and returned to the east in 1888.

Bayard Fuller was former justice of the peace and police judge of Columbus. Richard Cunningham came to Nebraska from Illinois and passed the State Bar examination before a bar committee made up of local justices and attorneys. John Camden Martin was court commissioner for the supreme court of Nebraska. W. B. Backus, a lawyer, was principal of the Columbus public schools for several years, and later became superintendent of the Indian School at Genoa. Patrick O'Rourke practiced in Humphrey in 1886.

Doctor W. A. Hampton, who began the study of law when he was about forty, was one of the counsels in the famous Bridget Murray will case. Maynard Hurd practiced in Platte County before moving to Oregon, where he became a successful attorney and member of the state legislature. J. Dayton Stires was an attorney for real estate and equity litigation; and Charles Brindley, member of a well known Latter Day Saints family, taught school and practiced law in Columbus.

John M. Gondring, a trial lawyer, was elected state senator in 1897. Royal P. Drake, who came to Humphrey in 1888 and was active in most of the cases tried in that area, later practiced in Kearney, Nebraska. P. E. McKillip, who studied law at Harvard University, was born in McCook, Nebraska, and had a land company in Columbus. Lyman R. Latham, who served for many years as a referee in bankruptcy in Columbus, later moved to Scotts Bluff County.

© 2005 for the NEGenWeb Project by Ted & Carole Miller