THE DAILY NONPAREIL.
April 6, 1881.
What a Nonpareil Reader Has to Say of This Part of the
Country in the Pioneer Days of '41.
A Correspondent Who Witnessed One of the First Burials in the
Ancient and Disturbed Graveyard, Forty Year Ago--An Interesting
Letter
Avoca, April 4
Reading in The Nonpareil the account of the old
graveyard at Council Bluffs brought fresh to my mind of seeing
one among the first interments in said burying place, nearly
forty years ago. Soon after the Platte Purchase was opened for
settlement I, in company with another young man a little my
junior, took it in our heads to go west. We left Franklin,
Indiana, on the 25th day of August, 1841; came across the state
of Illinois on horseback, and sold our horses at St. Louis; took
passage on the old steamer "Boldangreene: on the 8th day of
September for Ft. Leavenworth. Landed at the fort on the 22nd day
of September, having been two weeks making the trip on a steamer
from St. Louis to Ft. Leavenworth.
The officers in charge of the fort employed myself and my young
traveling companion to carry a dispatch to the fort on the Block
House at Council Bluffs. It was considered at that time a
dangerous and hazardous undertaking for two boys to make such a
trip alone. After the first forty or fifty miles we had to pass
through a wild, uninhabited country, except by Indians and wild
ferocious animals. No roads except Indian traces.
Although we got captured by the Indians near where Hamburg now
stands and on several occasions we came near losing our lives by
the large gray wolves, we made the trip on foot over two hundred
miles in five days and one night and delivered our dispatch at
the Council Bluffs Fort on the 2d day of October, 1841.
On the next day we saw a United States soldier buried with great
pomp and magnificence with military honors in what is now called
the "old burying ground" at Council Bluffs,. There was
then only three or four graves in the cemetery. I think it would
be well for the Council Bluffs authorities to pay due honor to
those bones, for some of them one day carried the best blood of
our country.
After stopping at the fort four or five days the government sent
a train of wagons drawn by oxen to Heston, the biggest town up
the Missouri river at that day, for supplies for the fort. We
went with the train to Heston (sic), and on the 25th day of
October took passage on the steamer "Ocionna" for St.
Louis, thinking we had seen enough of the "elephant,"
and were ready to go home and be good boys.--(Signed) Geo.
Bergen.
[Transcribers note: 1841 would be only 4 years after the Platte
Purchase was opened for settlement, but the vanguard of pioneers
had poured into this new part of Missouri. By 1846, the
Potowatomi head men and chiefs were complaining that many whites
had settled just over the line on the south side of them, and
were a bad influence on their people. In what would later be
Fremont county, French Village was in existence near Hamburg, and
The Half Breed Farms were being established near Bartlett....The
block house at The Council Bluffs had been erected by a company
of dragoons from Fort Leavenworth at the time the Potowatomi had
emigrated into The Council Bluffs region in 1837....When that
friend of the Mormons, Thomas Kane, came to visit them at Council
Bluffs about 1845, he remarked that the sloughs he had to cross
in the Missouri bottoms had been "bridged" by the army,
which laid tree trunks in the bed of the streams where the bottom
road crossed. (Kanesville was named after this man.)...One more
observation: If the road was but a trace, how could heavily laden
wagons of supplies for Fort Croghan have traveled over them? W.
F.]