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PRESIDENT, 1913 [Read at the annual meeting of the
Nebraska State Historical Society, January 16,
1913.] |
Europe, yet these Indians did not know that there was a Europe. They could not have had a conception that in a later day a white race should come across the big waters and take possession of these lands which had been the homes of the Indians through the countless ages of the dim and mysterious past. Yet we have on Nebraska soil a remnant of that ancient tribe of people, a living link connecting that remote past with our self-glorious present. I mention these incidents as a subject of more than passing interest and as an inviting and stimulating subject for historic research by our people. Afterward there came the pioneer days of the white man following in the wake of the Omaha Indian invasion of this western country. It may be said of the Indians and pioneers alike, that they both loved the serene quiet of the open expanse of the prairies; that they both sought happiness from nature and enjoyed the peace and harmony of the wilderness as if it were a celestial garden set apart for them when the work of the creation was finished. Those days have now passed into history. They have become the subject of romance. By reason of changed conditions they are impossible of repetition. Their history is only to be gathered from relics and traditions and manuscripts. Yet those days have for us a fascinating interest. They were at the beginning of the history of the progress of our people and the formation of our state. In 1878 a few of the strongest and most honored citizens of this state, prompted by a strong desire to see that these historic relics and traditions and manuscripts of the past should be collected and housed and preserved for the present and future ages, issued a call for the formation of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Among that group of men were Thomas W. Tipton who had been United States Senator from '67 to '75; Alvin Saunders and Algernon S. Paddock who then were United States |
senators; Robert W. Furnas who had been, and Silas Garber who then was governor; J. Sterling Morton the father of Arbor day, and who became a cabinet officer under Grover Cleveland; and George L. Miller the public spirited and forceful editorial writer of the Omaha Herald. These, with others who became associated with them, were men who cherished the remembrance of these Indian and pioneer days as memorable events in our early history, very dear to their hearts, and who were always prompted by a desire to do the most and the best that could be done for the general welfare of the people of our state. So they formed the Nebraska State Historical Society with the purpose, hope and expectation that all legends and traditions of the original inhabitants should be collected, and the relics and material evidence of their lives, habits, customs and manner of dress, should be collected into its museum; and that biographies and memorials and historic materials of every character and sort relating to the pioneer days should be acquired and preserved under the auspices of the society. Their worthy aim and purpose was that there should be created and fostered a historic society, as an independent and self-controlled organization, which should be the custodian of the historic archives and a place to collect and give out information relating to the early history of these regions and of the passing and current events which have gone along with the making and development of our state. They believed, as Macaulay once said, that "a people that take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants." This society is still engaged in carrying on the work which its founders originated. How well, and how successfully this has been done may be illustrated by a comparison taken from its records of some things it has accomplished. |
The minutes of the society in January, 1879, show that sixteen dollars was appropriated for the purchase of a single bookcase, presumably sufficient to contain all of its books and manuscripts. A report of 1885, seven years after the organization, states that the books and pamphlets of the society, catalogued and uncatalogued, all told, were four hundred and twenty-eight, and that the catalogue of Indian documents and relics which bad been collected to that date was so limited that it covered less than two pages of printed matter. To-day the society is in possession of fifty thousand books and pamphlets indexed according to titles, and has thirty-three thousand relics and implements and articles of interest of various sorts on display in the cabinets in its rooms, and has about an equal number stored away in boxes for want of space to exhibit them. The enumerations given above do not include a vast number of letters, memorials, correspondence, and other valuable material relating to our early history. A large part of the society's collections are stored in the underground apartment of a building east of the capitol grounds, which is awaiting the erection of a superstruction, and the remainder which are on exhibition are in the basement of a building on the university grounds, the entrance to which is uninviting and so limited in accomodations that the property of the society cannot be shown to visitors with advantage. This collection of historic material is priceless to our people. If you ask me how I measure its worth, I answer,-- "What is knowledge worth? what is education worth? what is history worth?" Take them all in all history is worth more than all the others, for without it the others could not exist. The days of our pioneers stand out as bright spots in our western history. The day will come when the memories of their adventures, their hardships and their successes |
will be as dearly cherished by us as are the memories of the settlers at Jamestown to the people of Virginia, and the lives of the Pilgrims and Puritans are to New England. The West offered to the young pioneer opportunity for the most abundant gratification. There was ease in acquiring lands; there were unsettled modes of life; there was opportunity for adventure; there was a free field for struggle. The West was filled with alluring promises and bright hopes for the future. The young pioneer bid adieu to home--to its settled, prescribed, regular, inflexible modes of life, and its constrained, contracted promises and slender hopes for the future--with a sense of relief. He preferred to try the new life of unformed society, to assert himself among the new forces, to impress them with his personality, to guide them by his intelligence, and to help in the making, and to be a part of the new state. At that time all of this western country, half the area of the continent, remained to be populated--land to be tilled, mines to be opened, prairies and uplands to become cattle ranges, cities to be built, arts to be cultivated and new states to be formed. That which was a waste, or a solitude, he made a part of the empire of man, ruled by the supremacy of law. The early Nebraska pioneers were men who possessed the indomitable Anglo-Saxon spirit of courage and adventure which irresistibly impelled them to cross the expanse of the prairies and plains, to search every solitude, to roam over lands that had rarely been moistened by rain. There had been no storms they did not encounter, and no hardships which they did not endure. On their travels westward they have sat by the camp fire at night, and while smoking in silence, lived again in memories their life at home. The husband, through the white moonlight that fell on the faces of his wife and child, thought of their wealth of heart and deemed them as fair as the children of |
Eden. Our records tell the story of these pioneers when they camped on the hilltop, and when the shades of evening fell upon them they saw the Indian camp fires flicker in the valley below, their slender, ghostlike columns of smoke rising heavenward and floating away in a white cloud against the dark blue sky of the evening. They heard the soft, plaintive notes of the nighthawk and prairie owl which mingled with the prolonged cry of the wolf in the distant foothills. The night breeze sprang up, fanning the parched prairie with its cool breath. The stars came forth and the silver rim of the moon emerged above the dark clouds, outlining the crests of the hills in broken silvery lines as its full disk swept into view, flooding the valley and plains with strange ethereal light. The pioneer then learned the wild man's secret--that the stars sang to him as of yore, that the winds and the waters, that the animals, and rocks and trees spoke in harmonies not known to modern civilized man. The volumes of historical papers and manuscripts in the rooms of the society tell substantially all that is known of the rivers, of the uplands, and of the prairies, beautiful in their wilderness and impressive, as they are boundless, when they were the homes of the American Indians. They tell of the time when the territory west of the Missouri river was a solitude, save when here and there on its eastern fringe there was an embryo settlement, or a trapper's hut, or a missionary's abode. They tell of a time when the Nebraska territory extended northward to the British possessions and westward across the prairies, and over the mountains to the western limits of the Louisiana Purchase. They tell of the lives and the hardships of the pioneers who lived to see law and order, and the white man's civilization spread silently but steadily over this immense territorial realm, following the peaceful communities whose aggressive industry had conquered and settled localities along the |
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