The River Elkhorn-Recollections Of A Farm Boy Of The 1940s

By Curt Iden

The River Elkhorn is a vivid recollection of life as experienced by a young farm boy. The family farm, situated along the banks of the Elkhorn River in northeastern Nebraska, provided ample opportunity for excitement. Home-made entertainment and witnessing farming failures were all part of the boy's young years in the 1940s.

Riding calves in a barnyard rodeo, cruising down the river on a log raft, and riding a horse bareback at full gallop are examples of fun at full tilt. Coyote pups and Lassie, the pet raccoon, were some of his companions. Slopping the hogs and milking the cows by hand were chores turned into mischief by young Curt. Stealing a ride on his dad's river trolley became excitement beyond the boy's intent. The author's love of the dusty hay loft was pure pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649523846

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The Quarrel

Two stubborn ol’ fools, my dad called them when he was telling me about the quarrel my grandfather, Iden, and old man, Charlie Schademann, got into over a fence separating their pasture/timberland. As Dad told the story that the two men were good friends early on as neighbors in the 1890s. Young at that time, both men pastured cows and horses where their lands were separated by a single fence. At some point later in the 1890s, Schademann’s bull and some cows broke down the fence and ended up on Grandpa’s land. Charlie refused to fix the fence by himself, and Grandpa wasn’t willing to help, so they had some pretty tough words between them. As Dad recalled, They never spoke again. Grandpa put up his own fence a few feet on his side of the original fence. So now these two stubborn ol’ fools had to each maintain their fences. How crazy was that! Foolhardy crazy, according to people in the area. I heard this while fixing that fence with Dad and Orville in the 1940s, a good forty to fifty years after the quarrel started.

It’s helpful to understand the lay of the land of these two farms. Grandpa’s farm consisted of 180 acres, with half the land on high-level ground and perfect for raising corn, oats, and alfalfa—very nice tillable land. Half of the acreage was timber and rolling pasture that gradually dropped to the bottomland along the Elkhorn River. It was along this part of the acreage that the fence quarrel festered. Old man Charlie Schademann’s farm lay in a similar manner, with upper farmland and bottomland along the Elkhorn.

Charlie was a large man, tall and broad, with an aggressive point of view on how to farm. He would do it his way, no discussion, no matter other’s opinions. It is said that Charlie was born on his farm in the 1860s in a log cabin built by his father in the 1850s. Legend has it that the first log cabin was burned in 1858 by Pawnee during a hunting expedition, finding, to their surprise and anger, settlers in the Elkhorn River Valley. A second log cabin would have been Charlie’s birth home. One can see how Charlie viewed his land with a personal point of view when considering his history.

Grandpa was also quite a sizable man and was a fairly new immigrant from Germany in 1885. He moved onto his farm in the late 1880s, when he married Bertha Stark. Grandpa Iden was determined in his own way to succeed in his new country and was not going to be told what or how to do his farming either. So there you have it, two thirty-year-old tough farmers not giving an inch—a quarrel was born that lasted two lifetimes.

The Beginnings

One of my fondest memories of Grandfather’s farm was The Timber. A winding wagon trail led down to the river where the cattle-watering tanks were nestled against a steep hill within a few feet of the riverbank. A spring flowed quietly from clay banks, releasing a cold refreshing drink for all of nature to partake. Dad directed the spring water into these tanks some time during the 1930s. I was always so fascinated by the never-ending gush of water about the size of my fist. It was pure and untouched. The setting of fairy tales where young Indian boys made pools in the mud as the spring water found its way to the river.

My grandfather, Iden, built his farm along the Elkhorn River in the late 1880s when he immigrated to America from Germany. He followed the original homesteader of several years earlier. It must have been an extremely satisfying find. There was one hundred acres of level upland with most of the prairie sod already broken and under cultivation by his predecessor, and eighty acres of woodland—we called it The Timber—with the Elkhorn flowing through the northeast corner of his land below the Iden Bluffs, as they were called, some of the highest in the valley.

Who I am and where I’m from is a fairly unique scenario compared to my many friends and acquaintances that have entered my life following my farm years along the Elkhorn River. My values and concerns had their beginnings in that Nebraska community. The habits and customs of a transplanted German culture took root during my childhood and continued to grow into my everyday life.

When my great-grandparents and great-great-aunts and uncles arrived from Germany in the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s, they were among the early settlers, homesteading on these plains and in the valleys of eastern Nebraska.

Travel in those days was mostly by covered wagons, pulled by oxen or horses. The settler’s first homes were typically sod houses without windows and having earthen floors. This set the background for how desperate and serious these migrating foreigners were.

Here they came with their dreams of a new life, a fruitful place to settle in, the Elkhorn River Valley being a rich mixture of bottomland, high bluffs along the west side of the river, and higher plains of quality prairie land above and west of the bluffs. Numerous creeks also flowed into the Elkhorn, which provided an additional attraction to the settlers and to the Indians who were basically still in possession in the mid-1800s.

The Elkhorn flowed from the northwest to southeast, where it eventually emptied into the Plate River at Fremont, Nebraska. The Elkhorn satisfied the criteria of a mature river with its broad valley and snake-shaped river bed of hundreds of loops, where the river practically turned back on itself, flowing south and then within a half mile or so, flowing southwest, west, northwest, north, northeast, east, southeast, and finally south again. The Elkhorn, which evolved over the past tens of thousands of years, created a haven for fish, fowl, and animal life alike. A wooded paradise of cottonwood, oak, walnut, willow, elm, hackberry, and chokecherry trees lined the riverbank as it wound its way through the mid-western plains. The Elkhorn River Valley clay bluffs rose some one hundred feet or more in many places along the western side for much of its length between West Point and Beemer, looking as if they were made out of solid rock. The bluffs were then dissected by ravines that drained the higher land into the river, creating even more habitat for raccoon, squirrel, fox, rabbit, mink, beaver, deer, and weasel, plus many species of birds like quail, doves, and, of course, the hawk.

The land surrounding the river was a natural draw for the settlers in the mid- to late-1800s when searching out their future in this new, exciting, and still-virgin farmland. I often dreamed of being one of those pioneers, the thrill of staking out a piece of land to call your own and then being so fortunate as to have level ground to cultivate, timber for building your barns and houses, firewood for cooking and heating, and the ever-flowing water of the river. The river, big enough never to dry up in the summer, even during the driest of the dry summers when the corn crop would fail, had those great tasting catfish in such numbers that going hungry would have been nearly impossible, even for the poorest of farmers.

Original occupants of the Elkhorn were the Pawnee and Omaha, two principal Indian nations that hunted the area in the 1800s, though several Sioux tribes frequented the valley, especially when in search of the ample game along the river and woodlands. There appears to be evidence of one Pawnee tribe making their main camp on the Elkhorn near its mouth at the Platte River.

The Pawnee had a mixed lifestyle as compared to other Indian groups. They built lodgepole and earth-dome-shaped houses with several such structures to a village and where they practiced early cultivation methods of gardening. They also frequently hunted, sometimes with the entire tribe following the hunt for weeks. During these hunting cycles, they collected their meat stores for the times while stationary in the lodge homes at the village.

The hunts took them into many areas of which the Elkhorn was often a prime target. When the Pawnee and Omaha were on unfriendly terms, the Elkhorn would have been an area of confrontation since it seemed to have flowed between their respective main territories. In the second half of the 1800s, however, the tribes appeared to have made peace, even shared hunts and combined forces to protect themselves against the invading Sioux. When the Sioux was successful, they stole the Pawnee’s horses and food stores and destroyed anything they couldn’t carry off. The Pawnee were a courageous people, however, and considered superior warriors and fighters, so defeats and-/or successes would almost always depend on the numbers of Sioux and Pawnee.

The German immigrant settlers became the eventual force that displaced the Pawnee and Omaha from their tribal lands, not the Sioux. History is sad when we consider that it was primarily the Pawnee who had befriended many a settler in their new home on the prairie, only to be replaced by the newcomers.

A good example of the settler movement is on my grandmother’s side of the Iden family. My great-great-grandfather, William Stark, emigrated from Germany in 1852. He spent eight years in Wisconsin before joining a caravan of wagons in 1860 bound for the Kansas/Nebraska territory. The westward caravan ended in the Elkhorn River Valley, and then later in the 1860s, he homesteaded the Stark farm along Rock Creek not far from the actual Elkhorn River. My understanding is that they first lived in a sod house, as did many settlers in those early years. By the time his son, August Stark, was raising a family, August was able to give his daughter, Bertha Stark, a wedding present in 1888 that became known as the Iden Farm and timber along the Yellow Banks of the Elkhorn. This then was my grandfather Henry Iden’s farm that I loved and enjoyed for all of my youth.

When my dad and my mom had been married a few years, they purchased the farm I was to grow up on, which was connected by a dead-end dirt road to my grandfather’s farm.

Rodeo Time

Farm boys weren’t always those angels they were supposed to be, like in the stories about Lassie and the Waltons. They had ambitions of danger and glory, which often wasn’t on the approval lists of parents. Such was our barnyard rodeo.

Our farm was quite a lot like the farms where my friends lived. We had about a dozen milking cows, a bull, a few sows and their pigs, chickens, ducks and geese, two horses—Gracey and Beauty, and mules—Jack and Jenny and Bess and Beauty, and not to forget the calves, some young and some older, born yearly from our small herd of dairy cows.

These calves were probably the more fascinating part of the farm from a young boy’s point of view. There would always be a couple of baby calves around the barn that would need feeding with the nipple bucket, morning and night, after milking the cows. Dad always tried to have cows milking at all times of the year, so this meant a new calf or two born every couple of months. As the calves grew older, Dad was able to judge the heifer calves as to their promise of growing into good