The Capital Ring: Power of the Platte

For thirteen years, two sides of the Platte River fought over the same prize: Nebraska's capital city. The stakes weren't just political — whoever held the capital held the federal payroll, the railroad route, and the future. Omaha had won every fight. Then statehood changed everything.

In this episode, we follow the fight from its rigged beginnings in 1854, through legislative brawls, land schemes, and a midnight wagon heist, to the afternoon of July 29th, 1867 — when three men sat down in a private home in Lancaster, Nebraska, and changed the map forever. Along the way, we meet a land speculator who knew too much, two senators who tried to be clever and got outmaneuvered, and a group of ladies in Yankee Hill who produced ice cream on the open prairie and still didn't get what they wanted.

This is Part Two of the Iron & Power series. If you missed Part One, start with The Cheyenne Ring: Cattle Country's Power.

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

Want to learn more?

• Berens, Charlyne, and Nancy Mitchell. "Parallel Tracks, Same Terminus: The Role of Nineteenth-Century Newspapers and Railroads in the Settlement of Nebraska." Great Plains Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2009): 287–300.
• Crowe, Rebekah. "A Madman and a Visionary: George Francis Train, Speculation, and the Territorial Development of the Great Plains." Great Plains Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 35–61.
• Davies, Russ, and Robert E. Gallamore. "On the Spur to the Dome: How the Mile-Long Lincoln, Haitch Street & Capitol Railway Helped Build Nebraska's Monumental Tower on the Plains." Railroad History, no. 204 (2011): 52–63.
• Hayes, A.B., and Samuel D. Cox. History of the City of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln, NE: State Journal Company Printers, 1889.
• Potts, James B. "The Nebraska Capital Controversy, 1854–59." Great Plains Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1988): 172–82.

Transcript

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Last time, we were in Wyoming, where a small circle of cattle baron and railroad men ran an entire state government out of Cheyenne, dispatching hired gunmen north by Union Pacific train when small ranchers got too close to what they considered theirs. And I told you that the same railroad showed up in a vastly different fight 600 miles east. Here's that story. And fair warning, it involves mosquitoes, ice cream, a legislative brawl, and a secret midnight wagon heist. And a naming trick that Nebraska's capital city still carries today. Welcome to Rooted in the Plains, a podcast about the people, places, and moments that shape the Great Plains. I'm Nicole, and in each episode I take you back to a time when sod houses lined the prairie, railroads carved through the tall grass, and community meant survival. For photos, maps, and glimpses of Plains life, be sure to follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. December 1854. The Nebraska Territory has just been organized. And already someone is making sure the rules work in his favor. The territorial governor, Francis Burt, died just days after arriving in Nebraska. That put the job of setting up the new government entirely in the hands of the acting governor, Thomas Cumming, a territorial secretary with a financial interest in where they looked to place the capital. With no territorial governor above him to counteract his decisions, he moved fast. He ordered a census. Then he divided the territory into eight counties and assigned them legislative seats in a way that gave the north side of the river twice the representation of everyone south of the plat. Then he announced that the first legislative session would be held in Omaha, the city where his financial interests lay. By February of 1855, the assembly made it official. The capital belonged to Omaha. From that moment on, the Nebraska Territory had two parties, North Platte and South Platte. Everything that followed, every election, every legislative session, every territorial appointment ran through that fault line. The Platte River wasn't just a geographical boundary, it was a political one. North of the Platte was Omaha's domain. South of the Platte was everyone else. Nebraska City, Plattsmith, Brownville, and a growing population of settlers who felt with considerable justification that the game had been rigged against them from the first day of territorial government. The stakes were enormous. Whoever held the capital held the federal payroll, the government printing contract, the political patronage, and almost certainly the route of the Pacific Railroad, which most boosters expected would pass through the seat of government. That wasn't a minor prize. In a territory where towns lived or died based on whether a railroad showed up, having the capital was as close to a guarantee of survival as anything on the plains. Both sides of the plat fought hard, and not always cleanly. Elections brought accusations of fraud. Town companies traded favors and land interests for political support. Courts were drawn into disputes. Money and influence flowed freely. But through it all, Omaha managed to hold on to the Capitol. By 1857, things had gotten violent. During a session considering a capital removal bill, a pro-Omaha man leaped from the gallery onto the assembly floor, grabbed the Speaker of the House by the back of the neck, and laid him under the Speaker's table with great force. Adjournment was eventually achieved in the midst of what one account described as an uproar and confusion and a bringishing of dirks and threats of shooting. The next day, the anti-Omaha faction walked out and tried to reconvene in Florence, where they passed their own removal bill. The governor vetoed it. Omaha held on. It wasn't for a lack of trying, it was for a lack of votes. And the people who kept losing knew that the only way to beat Omaha was to make the fight about something bigger than just moving a building. While all of this was happening, someone was already profiting from it. George Francis train had inside connections to the Pacific Railroad and its financial arm, the Credit Mobilier of America. That gave him advanced knowledge of where the Transcontinental Railroad would go before most other investors. He knew the line would run through the Platte Valley. Most importantly, he knew the eastern terminus would be fixed at Omaha. President Abraham Lincoln favored Omaha after meeting with Engineer Grenville Dodge in Council Bluff in 1859. Three years later, the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 designated Omaha Council Bluffs as the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad, formally authorizing what became known as the Union Pacific Railroad and tying California to the Union during the Civil War. And Train used that knowledge to buy up Omaha real estate while prices were still low, declaring himself the prophet of Omaha's future greatness. Railroads, newspapers, and land speculators reinforced one another. Railroads needed settlers. Newspapers wanted growing communities. Together they painted Nebraska as agricultural paradise, encouraging settlers to move westward and helping to fill towns that would support the rails. Train was one of those singing slightly off-key in a choir that was already loud enough. The insider knew exactly where the railroad was going before anyone else did, making money on that information the public didn't have yet. Nobody could quite ignore him, but nobody was entirely sure he belonged there either. Train's story didn't end well. His real estate empire in Omaha collapsed. He got swept up in the Credit Mobilier corruption scandal. A New York court later declared him legally insane. He died in 1904, still claiming he owned 5,000 lots in Omaha, worth 30 million. But the important thread here isn't Train's fate. It's the railroad underneath his story. Omaha's entire power, the thing that made the capital fight worth every one of those 13 years, rested on one presidential decision made in 1862. The irony of what finally happened would have been hard to predict. Nebraska became the 37th state on March 1, 1867. And almost immediately, the Capitol fight was back on the table, louder than ever. The new state legislature authorized a Capitol Commission. Three men, Governor David Butler, Secretary of State Thomas Kennard, and Auditor John Gilletsby to tour a four-county area south of the Platte and to select a permanent site for the seat of government. They set off on July 18th, and what followed was less a grand civic process than a traveling roadshow with real consequences. All of them except for Governor Butler, who was given a lower room and a bed surrounded carefully with mosquito netting. According to one commissioner, the governor slept soundly. The rest of the party spent the night as one of them called wild, uncontrollable emotion and vigorous action, fighting off mosquitoes whose musical wings and insatiable appetites kept them awake until dawn. As the party rode out of Ashland the next morning, the preacher in the group broke the silence, saying, There must be one vote for Ashland, but if the governor got any company in that vote, it would be a surprise. Ashland was out. Next came Yankee Hill, backed by Nebraska City interests. The people there were prepared. A table set with the delicacies of everything in season that Salt Creek had to offer. The ladies of Yankee Hill had somehow produced ice cream, what was said to be the first ice cream ever served in Lancaster County, and that no one could quite figure out how they managed that in the middle of the open prairie. It was an impressive spread. The commissioners ate, thanked their host, and rode down the valley to Lancaster. Lancaster was not Yankee Hill. There was no banquet, but what Lancaster had was a central location, salt deposits, good agricultural land around it, and settlers who had been quietly arguing for years that this spot, tucked between Salt Creek and Antelope Creek, south of the Platte, with a few hundred residents at most, was the right place for a capital. It had no railroad, no navigable waterway of any kind. Its chief virtue at this particular moment in Nebraska history was that it was not Omaha. The commissioners had now seen hospitality, scenery, and local boosterism. What remained was deciding where a capital would actually grow. On the afternoon of July 29, 1867, the three commissioners assembled in the House of W.T. Donovan of Lancaster, compared their notes, and proceeded to ballot. On the first vote, Lancaster got two votes and Ashland one. On the second ballot, Lancaster got all three. Governor Butler stepped outside and announced the decision to the people waiting in the yard. The Yankee Hill ladies declined to speak to any of the commissioners for the next six months. Omaha wasn't done. Leading citizens tried everything to stop the removal of taking effect. One man spent hours in Auditor Gilletsby's office trying to persuade him not to file bonds that would seal the transaction, warning that it would disrupt the party. Gilletsby finally told him, I was into it and I would see it through. Back in the legislature, one final piece of drama played out: the naming. The removal bill, as originally written, called the new town Capitol City. Omaha Senator Patrick thought he saw an opportunity. He knew that South Platte Senator Reeves, a former Confederate sympathizer from Nebraska City, despised the name of Lincoln above almost everything else. So Patrick moved to amend the bill, strike Capitol City, and insert Lincoln in its place. His calculation was simple. No South Platte Democrat would ever vote for a town named after Abraham Lincoln. The amendment would kill the bill. Senator Reeves was on his feet instantly, seconding the motion. He'd done exactly the same math as Patrick, reaching the same conclusion. Two men from the opposite side of the fight, both convinced that they had buried the removal bill. That's where they went wrong. The rest of the South Platte men saw what was happening in an instant. They adopted the amendment bill before Patrick or Reeves had time to realize what had gone wrong. The bill passed with Lincoln in it. Two men tried to be clever. Everyone else in the room beat them to it. As an 1889 book documenting the history of the city explains, Nebraska's Capitol bears the name it does as a result of an attempted sharp trick designed to defeat the removal bill, and not owing it to the admiration of the first state legislature for the Great War president. Even after the vote, Omaha wasn't going to let this go quietly. When it was time to physically move the state's property to Lincoln, the library, the furniture, the desks, the official records, Auditor Gilletsby knew the city would try to stop it. He hired a man named J.T. Beach, a Lincoln resident and Civil War veteran, and he told them to keep the whole operation completely secret. Beach drove to Omaha with two covered wagons, crossing the platted Ashland through drifting ice. He met quietly with Gilletsby, and after nightfall on a Sunday, they loaded the library, the furniture, and everything else into the wagons. At 4 o'clock on Monday morning, they slipped out of Omaha before the city was awake. Miles of ground had been covered before anyone in Omaha knew the property was gone. The road home was rough. A blinding snowstorm came down near Plattsmith. They waited for hours to cross the river due to ferry repairs. With night approaching and no shelter visible on the open prairie, Beach knocked on the first place available. The settler said he had no room. After some continued negotiations, they were allowed to sleep on the cabin floor. Five days, two wagons, one blizzard. Days later, a man named Meredith walked into Gilletsby's office at the old capital in Omaha. He noticed the empty shelves and asked where the library was. It's gone to Lincoln, said Gilletsby. Meredith looked around and left. Then General Strickland arrived, considerably louder, declaring that the library was coming back and right away. He would get an order from the Secretary of the Interior to have it replaced. Galletsby smiled and asked if he would be allowed to read it when the general received such letter. The general agreed. A few weeks later, Gletzby asked if the general had heard from Washington. He had. The answer was no. Omaha's claim to the library and the Capitol was settled. The Capitol was in Lincoln. Thirteen years after Thomas Cumming had gerrymandered the first territorial districts to keep it in Omaha. Through the vote buying, the land schemes, the legislative riots, the city that had no railroad, no river, and barely a few hundred residents had won. In the end, this had never been just a fight over a capital. It was a fight over which town would stand at the center of Nebraska's future. The first railroad reached Lincoln's outskirts on July 4, 1870. The Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, running on a congressional land grant, not the Union Pacific. The city named for Abraham Lincoln, whose 1862 railroad decision had made Omaha the most powerful city in the territory, was built by a different railroad entirely. Some things just work out that way. On July 29th, join me to celebrate the anniversary of the day Lancaster became Lincoln in a new episode recorded inside the state capitol itself. Stories and secrets from the building that almost never got built. And follow along on Instagram for a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make this podcast out of the studio and directly into history. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a little glimpse of Plains' life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains. Thanks.