Chapter 1, pages 3-10
Ghost Town!
The term brings visions of mysterious ruins in western mountains . . of old saloons from which on dark nights sounds of revelry still emanate although windows are dark and the only movement may be shutters flapping in the fitful breeze…romantic remnants of once lively towns long since abandoned because of fickle fortune.
But Mills County’s ghost towns – and there were two dozen of them plus nearly as many former post offices – have left but dim memories. Only three still have a few houses, now renovated and used, to indicate the locations. One still has a rural church and a few town streets, another has a church and a few little used rural lanes, to distinguish them from the section-line roads which divide the rest of the county. All of the rest have become plowed fields with only an infrequent limestone chunk from the foundation of some abandoned building, turned up in tillage, to give an indication of a different past.
Today Mills County has eight still active towns, all but one of them incorporated with their own municipal governments. Most of these had former names. Perhaps it’s of interest to repeat them: Emerson, Harmony; Glenwood, Coonville; Henderson, Potter; Malvern, Milton; Mineola, Lewis City; Pacific Junction, the same since its start; Silver City, Ward.
The towns that flourished but later faded were of varying populations. The largest was Hillsdale which had nearly 300 residents at its peak. Some had only a house or two and a store or grain elevator. Convenience in meeting a commercial demand was the common denominator that started a town. Growing towns were lively and optimistic and their residents had dreams of great future development. When they declined there were disappointment and depression – and sometimes financial loss.
The earliest towns were on the Missouri river, the first artery of travel which brought the white man to this land. Then the great Mormon trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, toward their promised land in Utah, established some overland trails which later influenced stage coach routes. When the railroads came, delayed almost a decade by the Civil War but with a substantial subsidy of lands and taxes, Mills County took its great leap in growth. Malvern, which started in late 1869 with a single store building, had a population of 800 four years later. Other towns grew almost as rapidly. The railroad also brought new inpetus to Glenwood which had been started seventeen years earlier, largely to furnish supplies and equipment for the wagon trains heading for the west coast gold fields.
Actually human settlements in the area of Mills County pre-dated the coming of the white man by a millennium. Archeologists studying Indian cultures with equipment for dating artifacts believe that the first evidence of human occupation was left in 900 A. D. A number of pit-houses have been discovered in the bluffs that line the Missouri River flood plain west of Glenwood. State archeologists who directed the excavation of some of these – several such sites were turned up during the construction of relocated Highway 34 a few years ago – have given us a good description of them. They were relatively large, perhaps twenty feet wide and from forty to sixty feet long. They consisted of a pit from three to six feet deep which was lined with saplings which were bent together at the top to form an arched roof. Stronger supporting poles went down the center of the room to give the roof rigidity or provide partitions and maintain suitable height. There were a fire pit and other pits for refuse and storage.
Such pits yielded many Indian artifacts- shards of pottery, stone tools, arrowheads, hammerstones, flint axes or hoes, metatas or grindstones, bone objects. Mr. Paul Rowe, who’s unusually large extensive Indian collections were purchased by the Mills County Historical Society Museum, obtained many pieces for his collections from such places. He found his first arrowhead when he was three years old and continued to collect relics and artifacts until he had well over 10,000 pieces.
Folsom man may have lived in this area 10,000 years ago. But the last Indians to occupy Mills County – and the only ones of which we have modern record - were the Pottawattamie who originally were Algonquians from the Great Lakes region. They were given five million acres of land in southwestern Iowa, reported the Iowa Journal of History and Politics in its July, 1913, issue, in exchange for all their lands east of the Mississippi River. The first Pottawattamie arrived on the steamer, Kansas, at near the present site of Council Bluffs on July 18, 1837. Their number never exceeded three thousand.
Waubonsie, called the ablest of the four chiefs who came with the tribe to Iowa, left his imprint on the area with the name of a creek, the bluffs along the Missouri, and a state park. He located his village some ten miles southwest of Glenwood on the creek that bears his name, just north of the Fremont county line. Before he died there in 1848, the Pottawattamie had relinquished their claim to their Iowa lands in a treaty signed June 5, 1846, for a thirty-mile square tract in Kansas and a money settlement, so they had lived in Iowa scarcely ten years.
In 1972 the Shenandoah chapter of the D. A. R. marked the gravesite of Waubonsie, which is on a hillside in the bluffs west of Tabor, with a red granite boulder on which was chiseled the inscription: “Chief Waubonsie, 1756-1848.” Mrs. Blanche Horsfall of Shenandoah wrote a brief sketch of the Chief after and extensive study of his life, which was published in The Shenandoah Sentinel.
He was born near Terre Coup, Indiana, about 1756 and was first given the name of Nah-K=Ses.” After a friend was killed in an Osage raid, the young man sought revenge, going alone one night he killed seven of the enemy tribe, returning to his village as day was breaking. The feat was commemorated by changing his name to Wabonnsee which is translated as “Beginning of Day.”
Indian names when used by the white man at that time were spelled phonetically and Pottawattamie Chief’s name evidently sounded differently to many who tried to spell it, for it is given in a variety of spellings in early records and histories. The Chief and his people were not always treated fairly, especially as the white man pushed the Pottawattamie farther west by new treaties. Perhaps if he had known how much trouble the mere spelling of his name caused the whites he would at least have enjoyed the joke. It was first spelled “Wabonnsee,” and at other times “Wahbonsie,” Wahaboncey,” “Wabaunsie,” and “Waughbonsie, “Waubonchey” and “Waubonsie.” A state Park in Fremont County carries his name and it is spelled “Waubonsie,” so it can be assumed that form is now official.
Waubonsie came to Iowa with the Pottawattamie after the War of 1812, the tribe then pledging allegiance to the United States after formerly fighting on the sides of the French and the British. By the time his tribe reached southwest Iowa he was one of four chiefs, and his leadership was described as “distinguished.” Reports by agents of the government state that he was over six feet tall, well-built, straight and dignified. He was praised for his capacity in business and listed as “cool and sage, a bold orator with the ability to hold the interest of his people with zeal and firmness.”
His portrait was painted by the western artist, George Catlin, and hangs in the Indian Gallery of the War Department in Washington, D. C. The artist included him in portraits of fifty chiefs who attended a conference of tribes in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1843. He traveled to Washington twice on behalf of his people, making the second trip during the term of President Polk and going to the capitol by boat, down the Missouri to the Mississippi and up the Ohio. He was injured seriously while returning when a stage coach in which he was traveling overturned and he suffered from these injuries the rest of his life.
After the Pottawattamie moved to Kansas in 1846 Chief Waubonsie returned to Iowa a number of times. He owned twenty-two acres of land along the border of Mills and Fremont counties. Like the white man, he evidently found it difficult to live within his income and contracted certain debts. A Missouri justice of the peace court record for November 14, 1846, lists a suit in which one Rufus Hitchcock asked for a writ of attachment against the Chief’s “goods, chattels, monies,” in the amount of $22.00. At that time a portion of Fremont County, in which its first capital, Austin, was located, belonged to Missouri.
At the time of that suit Waubonsie was ninety years of age. Moses W. Gaylord, in the Glenwood Opinion-Tribune of Oct. 24, 1946, told of visiting the Chief at his village in south Mills County, just north and west of Tabor. He said that he still resembled his portrait, that he was “a big, strong, burly man and talked very little English, with white hair, no whiskers. He smoked incessantly and wore leggings of elk hide and a brilliantly colored blanket.” When he ran out of tobacco the Chief smoked bark from red willows called “kinne’ke’nick,” and Gaylord recalled that he tried this and found it good.
Mr. Gaylord visited the village again in 1849 and the Indians pointed to a burr oak tree where the body of their Chief who had died that preceding year, reposed on a platform of bark in a crotch of the tree, held there by rawhide strips.
A. L. Wolfe of the Tabor vicinity also recalled that his father, William Wolfe, had told him that Chief Waubonsie died in 1848 when he was ninety-two years old, and remembered seeing his body in the tree burial, covered with a blanket and bark, in a box made of hewn logs, placed in the fork of the tree some twelve feet above the ground. In the box also were a flintlock musket, tomahawk, beads and other ornaments. Later he was believed to have been buried in the grave now marked by the granite boulder.
Although the Pottawattamie Indians officially left Mills County for Kansas in 1846, it took several years before all were gone. Mr. John D. Paddock, the Malvern historian, reported that in 1872, “Little bands of Indians visit us occasionally, selling their wares, begging some, and possibly borrowing some.” After the coming of the railroads and the filling up of the country with white settlers and towns, there was no more room for a nomadic people and in time the only evidence left of these native Americans were some Indian names and a scattering of artifacts.
