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it was known also as the "safety bicycle." At one time, Earle Pearsall won a diamond stickpin offered by Ed Niewohner's jewelry store for coming in first in a three-block run down Eleventh Street.

All his life, Pearsall remained keenly interested in the power resources of Platte County. As a boy of fifteen or sixteen, he had been a rodman in a surveying crew that was mapping the terrain all the way from Genoa to Fremont, as groundwork for the Great Eastern Canal. Former County Surveyor L. F. Gottschalk was the head of the surveying party, which worked through the blistering heat of a Nebraska summer in cornfields and prairie grass. Pearsall traveled barefooted most of the time, carrying the heavy surveying chain. This project, promoted by a group of eastern capitalists to harness the Loup, failed to materialize. Its original purpose had been to take water out of the Loup River near the site of the present headgates of the Loup District Canal west of Genoa, and to pour the water back into the Platte near Fremont.

All references to the Loup River Public Power District Canal in later years, therefore, found an avid audience with Pearsall, who considered himself one of the pioneers in the attempts to harness this famous Nebraska River.

MILITARY CAREER

On June 22, 1888, Earle Pearsall was graduated from the Columbus High School, then located in the Second Ward School building. Eleven boys and five girls were in the graduating class, the third twelfth grade group to be graduated in Columbus. Of the 1888 graduates, two were in Columbus in 1949: A. J. Galley and C. C. Sheldon.

For six years after he finished school, Pearsall worked in the Theodore Friedhof general merchandise store. In 1894 he took a position as bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Columbus, under Andrew Anderson, president. He held this job for two years before becoming a clerk in the store operated by S. C. and Clinton Gray, at 1264 Twenty-fifth Avenue.

Joining Company K, the volunteer group organized in Columbus at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1889, he saw service in the Philippine Islands, and was mustered out the following year. It was the beginning of his military career. After moving from Nebraska, Pearsall became company commander of a state militia unit in Wisconsin, and later was made judge advocate of the state. For years he acted as military instructor in army camps, universities and schools throughout the middle west.

In 1937 he retired from the reserve officers' corps, and turned his attention to the problems of traffic safety. In this connection he worked as a consultant in numerous large cities in the United States.

BARTERING

One of the Columbus settlers who drove through the valley of the Platte was James H. Galley. As a boy, James Galley accompanied his parents on an immigrant pilgrimage to Utah in 1852, and stayed there seven years. He was schooled in the primitive method of bartering used by pioneers in that country; one commodity was always exchanged for another, and during those years Galley never saw even a ten-cent piece in actual coin.

Dissatisfied with the Utah region beyond the mountains, the Galleys returned to Platte County and settled on the old Galley homestead southeast of Columbus in 1859. There, like the other settlers, they ground their own corn for bread, parched barley for coffee, and other grains for different purposes, using a single small coffee mill.

Mr. Galley describes the early day pastimes as being spontaneous and gay. Every settlement had its fiddler, and when a dance was given, one family took a ham, another a bag of meal, and others brought different contributions with which to pay the fiddler. Then the entire community would dance till morning at the home of one of their number who was centrally located in the valley.

INTRODUCTION TO PLATTE COUNTY

Jackson C. Echols, father of Louise Echols Whitney, was two years old when the soldiers from the North came down into Georgia during the Civil War. They swarmed over the Echols' plantation, taking what they pleased. The family and slaves were unharmed and no property was destroyed, but the Yankees took all of the meats from the smoke house, where a year's supply had been stored at the end of the butchering season.

When Jackson C. Echols, then a boy of two, saw the soldiers, he ran and hid in a chicken house. A Northern soldier found the child there, took him by the hand and led him back to the house, saying---"I guess you don't have to be that scared!"

Nine years after the close of the Civil War, in the summer of 1874, his father, Phillip

Whitehead Jackson Echols (who had been known as a"Northern sympathizer" during the war), was asked by his son, Samuel A. Echols, to make a trip for him to Nebraska. Samuel Echols was connected with the Union Pacific Railroad at that time. The results of that trip brought Phillip Whitehead Jackson Echols to Columbus, and shortly afterward he wrote to his wife in the South:

"I have found God's Country. Here a white man can talk with a black man, a Protestant can converse with a Catholic, and a Democrat can discuss politics with a Republican. Sell the home and come."

Mrs. Echols disposed of the plantation and brought her two youngest children. One of them was Jackson C. Echols, then twelve years old. They settled on a farm northwest of Columbus, but in September, 1876, Phillip Whitehead Jackson Echols died, and was buried in the Columbus Cemetery in the new country he had learned to love so much.

Jackson C. Echols' sister, Martha Ella Echols, had married Charles L. Hill, a teacher, in 1875, and they remained in Platte County. However, Mrs. Echols returned to the South with Jackson, to be near their relatives and friends. Like his father, Jackson C. Echols was unhappy in Georgia, and when he was fifteen he returned to Columbus, where he lived for a time in the home of Sheriff and Mrs. Dan C. Kavanaugh. Columbus remained his home and the center of his business interests until his death on February 27, 1938.

THE FIRST WHITE GIRL IN COLUMBUS WAS CAROLINE RICKLY DALE

In 1875, a small personal notice in the Columbus newspaper announced news of a family very well-known to many in the community. Courtney Dale's mother, Mrs. Will B. Dale, and her sister, Carrie, left for Columbus, Ohio, on November 17. It was the first trip east which Mrs. Dale (Caroline Rickly) had made in nineteen years; she expected to return six weeks later on New Year's, 1876.

FOUR HAPPY YEARS

In 1876 the Paynter family moved into Columbus to operate the Lindell Hotel. Winfield Scott Paynter, then ten years old, received a vivid impression of the Nebraska town, in spite of the fact that he only remained in Columbus for four years before his family moved on to Omaha. Twenty-five years before they came to Columbus, the Paynter family and Mrs. Paynter's brother, Jesse Lowe, had emigrated from Selm, Indiana to Nebraska, where Lowe and Paynter each pre-empted eight hundred acres of land near the present site of Omaha. After a quarter of a century, during which seven children were born to the Paynters, the farm was sold and Mr. Paynter drove overland with his cousin in a covered wagon to the sand hills on the Niobrara River, where they each took up another eight hundred-acre claim.

On his way back to get his family, Mr. Paynter came through Columbus and bought the Lindell Hotel. He never returned to the Niobrara ranch in the Black Hills, possibly because of the famous Indian fight which was Custer's last battle on the Little Big Horn in June, 1876.

When the Paynter family finally reached Columbus, ten-year-old Winfield Scott Paynter thought "Eleventh Street was the longest street in the world," for at that time the railroad tracks split the village in two, and almost all the stores were on the south side of the tracks.

Among his early memories is that of awakening early one Fourth of July morning and hearing Bun Turner's silver cornet band playing the "Red, White and Blue" in the basement of the old brick courthouse.

He also remembers the dramatic occasion when the well-known train robber, "Doc" Middleton, was brought into Columbus strapped to the bottom of an overland stage coach in 1879. He was kept all night at the Hammond House, and taken to prison the next day. Paynter describes the scene with John Hammond riding on the running board of the stage coach, "his white hair and whiskers blowing to the four winds.

W. S. Paynter used to go swimming under the Loup bridge on hot afternoons, and came near drowning once when another boy threw him into the river before he had learned how to swim.

Young Paynter also participated in the prairie dog traffic.

In 1879, Winfield and his brother, Jack Paynter, attended the monastery school until the former was expelled for shooting paper wads up to the ceiling when the Sisters had their backs turned in the schoolroom. After that he went to the old red schoolhouse down on the south side of town.

His classmates included such well-known Co-

lumbus people as Frank, Rose and Ed North; Gus, Milt and Bont Speice; Sam and Johnny Curry; Johnny, Anna, Stella and Willie Becher; the Arnold boys; Charley Pearsall, Sadie Hudson, the Schroeder boys, Frank Cleary, Bob Saley, Lillie Ragatz, Emma Early, Frank and Susie Wake, the Phillips girls, and Minnie Meagher. These were only a few of the children who attended the little old red school with Paynter.

Writing sixty years later, Winfield Scott Paynter recalled such business houses and business and professional men as McAllister, the "suave, immaculate" dentist; Rickly's butcher shop, Anderson's bank, R. H. Henry's bank, Carl and Louis Kramer's clothing store, J. C. Echols' paint shop, Vincent Mackin's bar, whose proprietor "was probably the best dressed man in town."

He also remembered Israel Gluck's clothing store, Arnold's jewelry store, Schroeder Brothers foundry, the Gass' combination furniture store and undertaker's parlor, the Speice and North coal yard, the old Maennerchor Hall managed by William Bucher, Vogel's bakery, and the Hammond House.

In addition, there was the Clother House, the Grand Pacific on the south side, and his own father's Lindell Hotel, Heinz's Drug Store, Stillman's Drug Store, Phillips' Shoe Store, Herman Oehlrich's Grocery Store, Ragatz' Grocery Store, George Scott's Livery Stable -- the old checkered barn on the south side; Fitzpatrick's ninety-nine-cent Store, Galley's Clothing Store, George and Dan Clother; Sam, Al, Charlie and John Rickly; L. M. Saley and the Stengers.

During the four years between 1876 and 1880, when the Paynter family lived in Columbus, Sarah Fitzpatrick married Charles Brindley; Bridget Gentleman married Dan Kavanaugh; and Winfield Paynter's sister, Laura, married "Ottie" Baker.

"Well do I remember, too," he wrote, "Bun, Judge, and George Turner who bass-drummed his way all over the world with the Buffalo Bill Show"; Clint DeMoss, the hack driver; J. B. and his son Joe Wells; Dave Anderson, the stock man; Barney McTaggert, furiously driving his dray wagon up and down the streets and backing up in front of a store; Ide Brindley and Spence Rice, who used to run "Ottie" Baker's farm just outside of town.

Others whom Paynter knew as a child were Sam Irwin, the Whaley boys, George and Charles, Frank and Lute North, and Will Dale.

It was during those years that Columbus residents saw Judge Post and Judge Hensley walking down the street, arm in arm. When P. T. Barnum's circus came to town young Paynter, like many boys before him, agreed to carry water for the elephants in order to gain admission to the sideshow.

He recalled the old opera house with Blind Tom, the "world's greatest colored piano player," and many other entertainers of that time.

"Anyone who has never seen an emigrant train," wrote Mr. Paynter sixty-five years later in 1941, "in the early days when Europe was sending over peasants to settle up the American continent, has missed an inspiring sight."

He described, also, a trip he made to California in 1922, concluding with the statement that, "the prettiest thing we saw on the trip was the bluegrass sticking its head out of the snow in our own front yard."

After four years spent in Columbus, James Paynter -- Winfield's father sold the Lindell Hotel, or traded it for a hotel in Omaha, and the family moved from Platte County. The memories, however, were lasting for his son who recalled both scenes and personalities from his early days spent along the banks of the Loup.

EARLY WOODVILLE SETTLERS

The first early settlers to locate on a homestead in Woodville Township were Mr. and Mrs. William Finch, who had been married in Green Lake, Wisconsin, in 1878 and started out immediately for their new home in Nebraska.

The Finches traveled in a covered wagon loaded with all their household and personal possessions with the exception of two heirlooms which they shipped to Columbus, at that time the end of the railroad. To transport this furniture, a mahogany table and a cherry dresser, from Wisconsin to Nebraska, they paid ten dollars freight.

It took the couple almost one month to reach the farm along Beaver Creek near the present site of Woodville, which was to be their home. Other relatives were already located there, living in "soddies," until they became prosperous enough to add a frame lean-to to the original one-room sod dwelling.

Their next move was to purchase a homestead. They bought one from a Civil War soldier, who had enlisted under a name other than his own. They paid the owner, William Baxter, known as Job Fitzgerald, six hundred and fifty dollars for the quarter section of land

on which a small grass-roofed frame granary was the only building.

More than half a century later, Mrs. Finch wrote from her diary an account of their honeymoon trip by covered wagon and of their early life together in the one-room sod house on the open Nebraska prairie. The pioneer bride, whose maiden name was Cornelia Pomeroy Clark, was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and brought with her to Nebraska some of the original manuscripts of the novelist who did so much to dramatize the early days of American history.

"We traveled by the covered wagon route," she wrote, "and drove a span of three-year-old mares ... the apple of Will's eye. One was a dappled grey called Flash; the other was a white-faced sorrel called Bess."

Mrs. Finch described the small oil stove they carried to use for cooking. The roads were so rough, however, that the stove was soon shaken to pieces and they were forced to cook by campfire. They picked up all the fuel necessary for fires and managed to put their team in a barn almost every night of the trip, although they slept in the wagon. It would take an hour or two each evening for Mr. Finch to curry and rub down the horses.

Their horses were "sharp shod," and the first night of the journey, Flash kicked Bess almost to pieces. William Finch's father was a blacksmith and had shod the horses just before they started out. By using some smartweed, which grew along the road, they were able to steep the leaves and dress the injured horse's wounds.

At Madison, Wisconsin, they found the State Fair in progress. The horses were so frightened by the noise and confusion that they did not dare hitch them, but continued through the town, stopping only long enough for Mr. Finch to buy a pair of boots which a storekeeper brought out to him. He was fitted while sitting in the wagon holding the reins in his hand.

"We passed everything on the road," Mrs. Finch wrote years later, "except the trains and gave them a close second. Later the team was called the 'Denver Express' by the neighbors."

The honeymoon couple crossed the Mississippi at Dubuque, Iowa, on the ferry. This frightened the horses so that they had difficulty in handling them. They traversed the state of Iowa and crossed the Missouri at Council Bluffs on a transfer. There were other wagons with them as well as live stock, cattle and hogs. The fee for crossing was one dollar.

One night in Iowa, the Finches experienced a fierce wind and rain storm. They had to sit up most of the night holding the bows to keep them from blowing in. The next day they were forced to lay over to dry themselves and the bedding. Sometimes they would travel all day without seeing a house, a farm or another human being. The night they reached Columbus, the pair camped at Steven's Lake, now known as Shady Lake. A relative, Tom Finch, met them at Tom Dress' "Swallow Bank," and told them that many in the vicinity were sick with the ague.

Of the twenty-five dollars which the two had when they left Green Lake, Wisconsin, two dollars and fifty cents remained when they arrived in Woodville, their new home. They had already purchased the quarter section of land for which they paid six hundred and fifty dollars. It had no buildings on it, but only a small frame granary.

That winter the Finch family built a sod house similar to others in the neighborhood. Although the first winter was mild, there was a great deal of wind which hindered building, since the dirt blew in their eyes from the sod blocks. On the first day of February, they moved into their new home. The building was twelve by twenty feet, and contained one room. Part of the plank floor had been taken from the old sod house on the Byron Millett quarter, but six or eight feet remained dirt floor -- a new living experience for Mrs. Finch. The Byron Millett land was later bought by the Gillett brothers at Woodville.

The mechanics of building a sod house were well established in that area. First the sod, being virgin soil, was plowed with a breaking plow. Then it was cut with a spade and laid up like brick. The sod bricks were twelve inches by fifteen inches, and four inches thick. Frequently they would break in the process of building.

The walls of their "soddy" were about three feet thick, the gable ends being somewhat higher. A ridgepole ran through the middle on which rafters rested which connected with the side walls. Brush was laid on the rafters, followed by coarse grass from the slough. Over all the roof was covered with a layer of sod, bottom side up and finished with clay. The Finches erected a ridgepole which was several feet too long and protruded. It was here that they hung hogs when they butchered.

The first winter in Nebraska, Mrs. Finch taught the first school in District 59. The school

term began January 2 and lasted three months. (She was paid twenty-five dollars per month). Several of the pupils whom she taught later settled around St. Edward, Nebraska.

Although the Finches had no cow, and therefore, no butter or milk, they picked the wild plums on their land, and made four gallons of wild plum preserves which they used as a spread in place of butter. That fall they bought their first cow from Billy Duncan. "She was so wild that we could scarcely get near her to milk," wrote Mrs. Finch.

Tom Apgar, Sr. worked some of their land, but since he had no money to pay rent, Will Finch -- following the custom of the frontier --accepted two shoats which they later butchered. They then bought one dozen hens from Mrs. Jim Hudson, who lived on the farm later owned by John Fonda. The price of the hens was one dollar fifty cents and Mrs. Hudson "threw in" the rooster. "She was a real neighbor," the former pioneer recalled years later. She told how they would often wait breakfast until some of the hens had laid, in order that they might have eggs.

Even in the sod house there was a touch of comfort! Mrs. Finch had brought a bedstead with her in the wagon and added a white bedspread of which she was very proud. The family bought its first stove from Will Winterbotham, a brother-in-law of Jim Hudson, who owned a hardware store in Columbus. They paid nineteen dollars for the stove with wash boiler, iron tea kettle, iron kettle, three dripping pans of different sizes, three lengths of pipe and an elbow.

They ate from the mahogany table which had belonged in Mrs. Finch's family. A priceless heirloom, it stood with the rest of their belongings on the dirt floor. When the first Finch children were born, a large, yellow rocker was purchased which later "rocked them all." One dramatic incident which Mrs. Finch described was the prairie fire which struck their second week in Nebraska. Tom Finch, who was threshing when the smoke was first noticed in the north, rode to the top of the hill to see the direction taken by the flames. Galloping back, he said, "Unhitch from the machine and get ready to fight fire!"

The men hauled the machine onto the breaking and took teams to plow around the different settings of grain. In this way they saved five settings. Later the fire reached the Jim Hudson homestead and all the men climbed into a wagon and went to their rescue. Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, who had been fighting to save their home, dropped from exhaustion, and the others stepped over them and continued to fight the fire with wet sacks. They saved the house, but several tons of hay were completely destroyed.

When the fire came down the gulch from the north, the Finch's frame granary was endangered. William Finch and True Mahon worked to save it since seventy bushels of wheat were in it which had just been threshed that morning. Water was carried from Spring Creek to wet the sacks and when Mahon, sick with the ague, collapsed with a chill, Will Finch saved not only the granary but his neighbor, as well.

Every winter the Omaha Indians would come down from their reservation to trap for beaver and mink up the Beaver Creek. (The Pawnees had been moved from their reservation in Nance County to Oklahoma by that time.) Frequently a member of the Omaha tribe would come across the Beaver Stream and walk into their home. They never knocked before entering and one time, Mrs. Finch recalled, a buck came in when her husband was ill with quinsy. He asked for tobacco but was refused; then the Indian looked over their abode carefully and said, "Heap good house. Tepee cold."

The Indians called calves "little cows," and when Cornelia Finch's uncle, Henry Clark, came to Nebraska, he had a carload of the animals shipped to Platte County. Many of them died the first winter and were hauled into a gulch and left there. The Indians later came and took them away for food.

In the winter, the squaws would climb the trees and cut the dead branches to make firewood. Mr. Finch used to cut green wood and haul it up the Beaver by hand, since the snow was too deep for the horses. However, the green timber made very bad fuel. One time, Otis Clark, a neighbor who lived with Mrs. Finch's brother, Roy Clark, was visited by a squaw who asked for corn. Clark got a bag and began scooping up the shelled corn, but the Indian would not let him stop. In spite of his doubts as to her ability to pick up the bag, the squaw walked the full half-mile back to camp carrying a one hundred and twelve-pound sack of corn.

Vivid scenes from her prairie life were pictured by this early pioneer who had come to the frontier from a comfortable middle western town. In the severe Nebraska winters, the Finch family would walk up the Beaver Creek on the ice to Hooker's place, later owned by Homer Peterson. Their neighbor, Jim Hudson,

would play his violin while everyone danced. "They had a frame house of one room joined to their sod house," she wrote, "so we had lots of room."

"We had grand good times," she continued. Mr. and Mrs. William Finch lived in their sod house for eight years and never failed to entertain the neighbors as well as relatives on New Year's Day. Sometimes as many as thirty people would crowd into the little pioneer dwelling.

Mail, in the 1870's, came to the west end of Platte County by stage from Albion to Columbus. Joe Apgar, the postmaster, was related to Tom Dress. Apgar lived across Beaver Creek from the Finch farm where the mail was informally kept in a dishpan behind his door. There were few bridges across the stream then, so it was necessary to ford the creek or, if the water was too high, William Finch would ride to the ford and shout across to the postmaster who, "good man that he was and an excellent neighbor," would bring the mail to the bank of the stream, tie it to a heavy stick and throw it across. In this primitive way, the Finches received the deed to their farm as well as family news and papers from the more civilized East.

Like other homesteaders, Will and Cornelia Clark Finch shared in the early railroad history of that region when the line went through from Columbus to Albion in 1881. The people had been promised a free ride to Columbus when the track was laid, and many of the young people at Woodville were waiting to get aboard when the train came from St. Edward. However, as it chugged down the tracks, a man was sitting on the cow-catcher, shaking his head to indicate that it would not stop. So infuriated were some of the would-be passengers that they soaped the rails to make it difficult for the train on the return trip.

Financially as well as physically these pioneers knew hardships. The rate of interest on loans was sometimes as high as thirty-six percent, and money could only be borrowed on a short term. "If we borrowed one hundred dollars," Mrs. Finch wrote, "we only received sixty-four dollars, for of course no note could be collected that bore thirty-six percent interest; but if it was not paid by a certain time, it drew ten percent."

Since there was no dentist in nearby St. Edward, she was forced to go to a physician to get dental care. However, later a dentist in Columbus was visited. For this purpose the Finches were forced to borrow five dollars from a banker in St. Edward, and pay him thirty-five cents for its use for one month.

In August, 1938, Mr. and Mrs. Finch celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary by entertaining their friends at their home in St. Edward, Nebraska. Congratulating them on this occasion were their three children: Mrs. Harry Wells, of St. Edward; John Finch, of Valentine; and Mrs. Joe Matter, of Chicago; also eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

AUTOMOTIVE TRAIL-BLAZER STARTED ON FARM

"Men without enough money to buy good school clothes for their children talked about forming huge irrigation companies, coal-boring syndicates, oil-drilling enterprises, and always the agitation for another railroad branch somewhere!"

This is how Max Gottberg, one of Nebraska's early automobile dealers, described his early memories of the West. Max Gottberg arrived in Columbus on February 15, 1881, with his mother, brother and two sisters. He was then twenty years old.

His mother bought eighty acres of railroad land north of Columbus for five dollars an acre, and the family began to farm. Later she sold the property to her son, Max, and moved with the rest of the family to Arkansas.

Max, then began to operate one of the first steam threshing machines in the county and continued this business from 1889 to 1907. It was at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903 that he bought his first car, a two-cylinder enter-in-the-rear model. There were then only two other automobiles in Columbus, one owned by Charles Dack and the other by Howard Clarke. The following year, when Mr. Gottberg drove his car to the State Fair at Lincoln, there were not over a dozen cars on the grounds.

In repairing an early automobile for August Wagner of Columbus, in 1905, Max Gottberg first became interested in automotives as a career. He started a repair shop on his farm and, in 1906, took a contract to sell a small popular make of car.

In spite of ridicule from his friends, he persisted in the business and sold his first car to "Si" Lauritzen of Grand Island, one of the first Nebraskans to enter the oil business.

Max Gottberg worked closely with others in the infant automobile field. He bought gasoline from Park Miller, the first dealer in Columbus. Park Miller used to fill a cream can with

© 2005 for the NEGenWeb Project by Ted & Carole Miller