EARLY DAYS AT ODESSA

Myron Scott, lawyer, military intelligence, genealogist and world traveler, did not forget his roots in Buffalo County, although he left Kearney at the age of eighteen. He was born April 9, 1898, in Kearney, and was a 1915 graduate of Kearney High School. After one year at Kearney State College, he went to New York City, graduated from Columbia University School of Law, and practiced law in New York and Washington until his retirement in 1968. He also served in Military Intelligence during World War II and was a member of the Air Force Reserves from 1944 to 1965.

When he died in Washington, D.C. on August 4, 1972, he left his estate in trust, in memory of his father and mother, Thomas Jefferson Scott and Mary Estelle Grant Scott, pioneers and early settlers of Buffalo County. The distribution and benefits of the trust funds are designated to the "fostering of the arts and sciences in the community of Kearney and in Buffalo County," particularly scholarships, community drama club, historical and genealogical societies. The Buffalo County Historical Society has been the recipient of several gifts from the trust fund in the last few years.

Genealogy was the avocation of Myron Scott. In compiling his book, Ten Generations of Grants, Myron visited relatives in all parts of the nation for their remembrances of pioneer days. The following account of early life in Odessa is from that book, and was narrated by John Marshall Grant to Myron at Marysville, Washington in September of 1925. John Marshall Grant was an uncle, the brother of Myron's mother, Mary Estelle Grant Scott.

That was glorious country when we first came there. You could get on your horse and ride for miles and miles with no fences to bother you. At night you would just picket your horse, take off your saddle and saddle blanket and lay down to sleep.

I was the first of the family to come West. I came to Nebraska in 1872 on the Union Pacific with my younger brother Silas and Tom Maloney, brother of Maggie Maloney whom Silas married. Tom was later in the Arizona legislature. When we came west there was no bridge across the Missouri and we came in a ferry from Council Bluffs to Omaha.

We settled at Odessa. We each took out a preemption on land which we could patent as we improved it. The boys and I dug down about four feet and put up some old railroad ties, putting them up log fashion, and then put a roof on it. We slept in that dugout about six months although, as the other two boys were away most of the time, I lived there the most.

Meanwhile we built a sod house - took a plow and just plowed up the sod. We plowed about three inches thick and cut the sod in strips about three feet long. For this we used the sod of the blue stem grass which grew in the swales, not the buffalo grass which grew about four inches high. There was another grass there that grew waist high on the bottom land along the Platte. We built the sod house on the side of the ravine. When finished it measured about 20 by 35 feet. We plastered it on the inside to give it a smooth surface and then put on a shingle roof - not a grass roof like most of them. It would leak a little here and there but it was snug and comfortable in the winter and didn't heat up in the summer.

The only trouble with our sod house was in keeping the vermin out of it. Those sod houses were great places for mice to work in. We lived in that house about two years and then a flood came. Whenever there was rain in the hills above us the water would come down the ravine. One day there was a cloudburst in the hills. We could see it in the hills although there was no rain on the plain where we were. Soon a wall of water came down the ravine and overflowed everything until the water stood two feet deep in the house. It was an unusual storm. It lasted only about half an hour. It was the only time it happened like that. Mother and the girls, Dess, Adah, Helen and Stelle had come only just that spring and were in the sod house at the time. It was enough for them.

So that summer we went to work and built a frame house on the other side of the ravine. We went to Kearney for the lumber. It was the first frame house in that community and was the most conspicuous house around there for several years. Sister Adah who married Richard Webb later lived there and still later Milton Webb's family. We used mud plaster in it but it was a good solid house. We kept the old sod house for several years and for a long while we used it for a barn.

Stelle brought a candle mold from Indiana with her but we didn't use it. We used kerosene lamps even in the old sod house. The day of candles had passed by that time. We had two spinning wheels, a little one and a big one about six feet in diameter. We didn't use these in Nebraska. All of our spinning was done during the War back in Indiana. We generally hired a couple of German girls to do the spinning. We had our own sheep and carded our own wool. The small spinning wheel was used for spinning flax. We never did any spinning after the Civil War.

The buffalo had been mostly killed off in the Platte valley when we came there. I never saw but one buffalo. He was a stray, a big fellow, who came one fall. There were buffalo up along the Loup River. Sile went over there once hunting buffalo but didn't get any. They would put on a drive of two or three days and would get a few of them. There were deer in the Platte valley, however, right up to the time I left there in 1878.

I left Odessa before I patented my land. I made up my mind that that was not going to be a farming country. Sister Adah took it over and proved up on it. There used to be antelope there too, quite a number the first summer I was there. There were a good many geese. There were not many ducks although there were many in the Platte River two miles away. Sandhill cranes were plentiful. After they got to cultivating broom corn there were a lot of prairie chickens.

I never was a hunter myself - never took any pleasure in it. The gun I had, though, was a good one. It was made by Jack Shrock, a gunsmith about five miles east of where we lived at Goshen, Indiana. All of those old communities had gunsmiths. Jack Shrock had two pretty daughters and he used to have the daughters show the customers how the guns would shoot. He lived to be 95 years old. When I left Nebraska for the State of Washington in 1878 I took the gun with me. I finally gave the gun to a Siwash to clean up some lots I had. I expect the gun is around the reservation yet. It was a double barrelled gun, one barrel a rifle and the other a shot gun. It was an old muzzle loader, made before the breach loaders came into vogue. You could hold it up but usually you rested it against a limb. It shot very accurately, better than a breach loader.

For a while I taught school there in Nebraska and one winter I got snowbound for ten days while teaching a little school up on Wood River. It was impossible to get back to the settlement on the Platte. I had never had much use for Shakespeare but there was a volume of his works there and I started reading it. Before I got through I had acquired quite a liking for him.

There were Indians about there now and then. I was appraising up on the Loup River one summer. I was a State Appraiser for school lands. In those days we had to go over the land section by section, see whether it was level or broken and appraise it. It was lonesome there and there were boys I knew about six miles above me who were trapping. One morning I concluded I would go up and see them. They were living in a dugout, no windows in it. I pushed the door open. One of the boys was lying on the ground face downward, and I thought at first he was asleep and that it was rather late in the morning for him to be asleep. It was about ten o'clock. I turned him over and saw that his head was broken and that he had been shot through the chest. I left the dugout and just over the hill I found another of the boys. He had also been shot and his face slashed with a tomahawk. I didn't stop to look for the other boy. It was 30 miles to the nearest settlement.

I knew enough about Indians to know that they would be camped in the bushes along the ravines following the course of the river. So when I would come to one of the ravines I would get down on hands and knees and look up and down to see it they were there and then run across to the next ravine and repeat the process. Finally I came to a farming settlement on the upper part of Wood River, and there I got a horse and rode on into Kearney. The boys' relatives lived there and they got a posse together and started out after the Indians. I was used up and didn't go with them. The posse went about twenty miles and then camped for the night. In the morning they found the boys and also found the Indians about a mile or so away but couldn't catch up with them until they got back to the Red Cloud Agency in Wyoming.*

They had come down a day or two before and had stolen a herd of government horses and the soldiers had pursued them so hard that they had had to drop the horses and they were mad. The soldiers had gotten between them and the Agency and they had had to turn back. They had killed a few others besides my friends. They were the Sioux from the Red Cloud Agency. A few of the uglier Sioux would come out of the reservation on depredations and then skip back into the Agency and we would never know which ones had left the reservation. A few years before we came there they had killed an entire section gang on Plum Creek. The Sioux, though, were the cleanest Indians on the plains.

The Pawnees were there too. The Pawnees would never commit depredations in a bunch like that but you were not safe if one or two of the Pawnees caught you alone. The Pawnees were great fighters. They could whip the Sioux, given equal numbers, every time they had an engagement.

*The site of the massacre probably was about twelve miles north and east of Amherst on the Loup River near the town of Sartoria.