It Won't Go Through Skin: Stories and a little history of the Favorite Bar and the Magic City of Chadron, Nebraska

By Mark M. Peyton

Mark M. Peyton is a naturalist with multiple advanced degrees; however, he would describe himself as more of a storyteller and teacher. He is an essayist who blends his personal experiences with information to both entertain and educate the reader. This collection of essays and trips down the rabbit holes of history is a collection of stories involving his experiences working his way through college as a bartender during the 1970s. The multiple trips down the rabbit holes of history help place this time and this bar in the wider context of the history of an amazing place and an amazing people: the Oglala Lakota. As you read this book, you'll laugh, you'll cry, and hopefully, you will learn as Peyton takes you on a history journey to the Favorite Bar of 1972 and the magic city of Chadron, Nebraska.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645444596

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It Won't Go Through Skin

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Stories and a little history of the Favorite Bar and the Magic City of Chadron, Nebraska

Mark M. Peyton

Copyright © 2019 Mark M. Peyton

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64544-458-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64544-459-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

The Prelude

A couple of things. First, this is not a history of Chadron, Nebraska, the Lakota People, or anything else presented in an academic fashion. This is a narrative, a recounting of things that happened to me. In association with telling my experiences, I find myself chasing down the rabbit holes of history to try to put those experiences into some kind of wider-range context.

I used various sources, mostly online, in an attempt to ensure my rabbit hole moments are accurate. A few examples are the Nebraska State Historical Society, the US50 Website, the History Channel, City of Chadron, excerpts from the Chadron Record, the Legends of America website, Indians.org, and also publications by the Museum of the Fur Trade and the Dawes County Historical Museum, multiple texts about Crazy Horse, and yes, I looked at Wikipedia. In addition, I had help from Phyllis Carlson at the Dawes Country Historical Museum and Jim Hanson at the Museum of the Fur Trade. Any mistakes are honest, unintended ones. This is not an attempt to rewrite history, but just to talk a little about the history of a very special place where I had the joy of growing up.

Second, political correctness has positive and negative aspects. The origin of this correctness is an attempt to not offend people by calling them names they find insulting and derogatory. I understand that and respect it. It is also wrong to promote various stereotypes that are also insulting. However, if you want to go back into history to a time that predated the realization that certain terms and names were insulting and write about that time with honesty, well, PC aside, you may insult people. For that, I’m sorry, but in 1972 in Chadron, Nebraska, Native Americans were called Indians.

They were called Indians by the government, the white folks in town, and the Indians themselves. They belonged to the Oglala Camp of the Lakota Tribe, but they never, at that time, referred to themselves as either Oglala or Lakota, and today most still don’t mind being called an Indian. In fact, some would tell you they don’t like the name Native American. They may also tell you that the more offensive term would be to be called Sioux.

The name Sioux is entrenched in the upper Great Plains. You have Sioux County, North Dakota, as well as Sioux County, Nebraska, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa, Sioux City, South Dakota, and South Sioux City in Nebraska. There is a Sioux Center and Sioux Rapids in Iowa as well. The Big Sioux River acts as the boundary between South Dakota and Iowa before it joins the Missouri near Sioux City. There is a Cut Foot Sioux Reservoir in Minnesota.

The name Sioux was given to a collection of many camps that spoke three different dialects of a particular language: the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota people in Minnesota. The term Sioux has multiple translations, but little snake is the most common, and it was given to the entire collection by their enemies. It was not a friendly term!

Sioux is still the technical name for the various tribes and camps located on reservations in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska; thus, I use the term Sioux throughout the book as well as Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota.

Sadly, the Lakota that most of the people in Chadron ever had contact with were those individuals that spent time between two bars located between First and Second and Main near the railroad tracks. Most of these individuals were Oglala, Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation, located seventeen miles north of Chadron. Many had no place to stay while in Chadron, so they just lived on the street, and yes, there were times when they were drunk. They would be sitting on the steps to the old skating rink or in a playground the railroad built. Not sure why the railroad built a fenced-in playground right next to the tracks, but it made a great place for the Indians to congregate. Sadly, the drunk Indian was the stereotype most of the folks in Chadron had of these people. I was no different!

The Old Skating Rink

One of the two bars frequented by the Lakota was (and still is) called the Favorite Bar. I spent about a year working there as a bartender, and in that year, I probably learned more about life than at any other time in my life. I write about that year in these stories. The people are real, the situations real, nothing is exaggerated. I have changed some names because the people I talk about, Lakota and white, have children and grandchildren still living in the area.

A History of Chadron, Nebraska, the Magic City, and the Favorite Bar: 125 Years and Counting

The Wild, Wild West. Every town west of Omaha claims to have a history dipped in the wildness of the nineteenth Century west—cowboys, Indians, outlaws, sly land deals, and horse races. The town where I grew up, Chadron, Nebraska, is no different.

Unofficially, Chadron was founded on November 6, 1884, when the first edition of the Sioux County Journal was published from Chadron, Nebraska, a town that quite frankly didn’t even exist! Officially, the town we now call Chadron wasn’t founded until the summer of 1885, and on the very first day of its existence, it had a population of over five hundred people, hence the nickname the Magic City. However, to trace back to the very beginnings of the community, you have to go back to 1834, to Wisconsin, and the vision of a young lieutenant.

In 1834 Colonel Henry Dodge set out from Iowa County, Wisconsin, on a 1,645-mile ride with the First United States Dragoons, a company of 120 mounted soldiers. The purpose of the ride was specifically to "awe" the Plains Indians so as to establish peaceful communications and trading with them. Dodge crossed Iowa to the Missouri River and then followed the Missouri down to the mouth of the Platte River. He then made his way up the Platte to the confluence of the North and South Platte Rivers and then along the South Platte to the Front Range of what is now Colorado. From there, he followed the Arkansas River southeast to the Santa Fe Trail and then back on up to Wisconsin. Were the Indians awed? Who knows?

One of the Dragoons was a young lieutenant by the name of Lancaster P. Lupton. He looked around and saw a chance at prosperity. There were trappers and traders in the area but few trading posts. Lupton resigned his commission in the Dragoons and opened up a trading post on the South Platte River north of what is now Denver, Colorado.

The fur trade was big business. John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest man in the world at the time, was the founder of both the Pacific Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. These two companies employed literally thousands of individuals who participated in trapping and trading with the various Indian tribes of the new world.

In 1834, Lupton, working for Astor and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, established his trading post, which he called Fort Lupton. Franchising and expanding were as successful at growing a business in the 1800s as they are now. The competing American Fur Company had a trading post called Fort William located 150 miles north of Fort Lupton at the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte Rivers in what is today Wyoming. In order to compete with the American Fur Company, Lupton established a second trading post, which he called Fort Platte, just north of Fort William.

In 1840, to better protect Fort William, adobe walls were put up, and the name changed from Fort William to Fort John. Fort John was then sold again in 1849, this time to the Army, and it became Fort Laramie.

In 1837, the American Fur Trading company, which was made up mainly of French trappers, set up another satellite trading post about one hundred miles north of Fort William in the White River Valley home to the Oglala and Brule Lakota tribes. Five years later, in 1842, Lupton sent some workers north to establish a competing Rocky Mountain Fur Company trading post in the same area as the American Fur Company trading post.

Lupton’s new trading post was located along a freshwater creek that ran northward down the slope of the Pine Ridge toward the White River, which has its beginning thirty miles west of present-day Chadron in Northwest Nebraska. The agent Lupton hired to run the post was Louis B. Chartrand. The post soon came to be called the Chartrand Trading Post. The creek was then named after the post. Pronunciation of Chartrand’s name by the French trappers in the area was Shattron.

Years later, the Half Diamond E. Ranch petitioned the government for a post office and called the area Chadron, both mispronouncing and misspelling Chartrand’s name.

Chartrand operated his trading post for only three years, from 1842 to 1845, but it was long enough to entrench his name upon the creek and thus, eventually, the community. The competing American Fur Company’s trading post was located about ten miles northeast of the Chartrand location. The agent of the American Fur Company’s post was a trapper by the name of James Bordeaux; thus, the post and the creek upon which it was located were soon known as the Bordeaux Trading Post and Bordeaux Creek. I lived in Chadron for fifteen years at a house on Bordeaux Street…named for James Bordeaux.

Bordeaux was French and was from the St. Louis area. He worked for the American Fur Company at Fort William and Fort John in present-day Wyoming, and he also ran the Bordeaux Trading Post in the White River Valley. In 1849, when Fort John was sold to the Army and renamed Fort Laramie, Bordeaux quit the American Fur Company and went independent. He built his own trading post just downriver from the Fort Laramie location in present-day Wyoming and kept his post along Bordeaux Creek located east of present-day Chadron. Bordeaux was a major participant in almost every significant event that occurred over the next thirty years.

Bordeaux was married to Marie, the daughter of Long Dog, chief of the Corn Band camp of Brule Lakota’s. He later married Annie, either the younger sister of Marie or her cousin. He had four children with Marie and two with Annie.

The close association with the powerful Brule chief gave him not only a ready customer base but the protection of the Indian camp at a time when there was a lot of unrest in the area.

Bordeaux and his son ran the trading post on Bordeaux Creek until 1872, turning the trading post over to Francis Boucher. Boucher was the son-in-law to Chief Spotted Tail, another powerful Brule Lakota chief who ran the Spotted Tail Agency located about ten miles east of the Trading Post.

Boucher commonly sold alcohol, guns, and ammunition to the Lakota, but in 1876, shortly following the Battle at the Little Big Horn and the death of George Custer and two hundred plus of his men, the US Army caught Boucher with forty thousand rounds of ammunition and closed his operations and the post. The post was abandoned and fell into disrepair until 1956 when the Museum of the Fur Trade reconstructed it in exacting detail.

The Museum of the Fur Trade is presently located on the site of the Bordeaux Trading post three miles east of present-day Chadron.

The reconstructed Bordeaux Trading Post at the Museum of the Fur Trade near Chadron

Eight years after the abandonment of the Bordeaux Trading Post, the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad began its trek westward from Valentine. An enterprising woman by the name of Frances Fannie O’Linn, said to be the first woman lawyer in Nebraska and the second woman on record to be recognized before the Nebraska Bar, moved to western Nebraska, where she homesteaded at the junction of the White River and Chadron Creek. She chose that location because she guessed that it would be where the new railroad would split with one line going north to the Black Hills gold country and the other one to Wyoming and cattle country.

Others soon followed, and the community of Dakota Junction soon materialized. Upon the death of her son, Fannie renamed the town O’Linn in his honor, and she secured a post office there with herself as postmaster. By that summer, 1885, the small town advertised that it consisted of multiple stores and five saloons.

No pictures were ever taken of O’Linn because no one owned a camera. The site of the town was approximately where this farmhouse now sits.

At the same time that O’Linn was founding her community, a group of settlers from Missouri filed claim on land in the Bordeaux Creek valley. They filed without ever seeing the land. The group loaded everything they had onto the train north of present-day Omaha and traveled as far as the line went to Valentine, Nebraska. From there, the colony took wagons for the next 135 miles to their claims. Traveling along with what was called the Sweat Colony was a young newspaperman, Ed E. Egan. Egan didn’t want to farm; he wanted to publish his own newspaper. When he got to the Bordeaux location, he wasn’t that fond of it, and when some folks from O’Linn suggested he come to O’Linn and establish a paper and post office in O’Linn, he decided to do just that.

First, however, he needed the printing machinery in order to publish and print his newspaper. He went back to Chicago and bought the materials he needed. Egan knew of the Chadron post office on the Half Diamond E. Ranch, so he decided to convince the folks at the Ranch to give up their post office and allow him to move it to O’Linn. He planned to be the postmaster, and he thought that once there was a post office, it would be simple to rename the town after the post office. With this grand scheme in mind, Egan had the typesetting made to say Chadron, Nebraska.

When Egan got to O’Linn with his new and expensive equipment, he discovered, much to his dismay, that the Half Diamond E. Ranch had already abandoned their post office and that Fannie O’Linn had