th Union. Therefore, after twentyfour years of statehood, civil government within these borders is thirty-seven years of age. And this society (Neb. Historical) has been organized for the proper purpose of truthfully recording in part, the causes and effects of the governmental expedients and policies which have been evolved, and failed or proved partially successful during that period of time.

On January 16, 1855, the first legislative assembly of the territory of Nebraska convened at Omaha, then a hamlet of between three and five hundred persons. A biography of the dominant members in that assembly would be in part a history of Michigan, New York, Iowa and New England; for in all those sections individual members of that first legislature of Nebraska had been prominent and some of them distinguished. In proportion to its numbers, twenty-six members in the lower and thirteen in the upper house, it contained more men learned in the law and experienced in legislation than any of its successors down to this day.

The message read to those pioneers of civil government on the west bank of the Missouri was equal in cogency of statement, purity of diction and perspicacity of style to any similar paper which has been adopted by Nebraska law makers in all these

thirty-seven years. It was delivered on January 16, 1855, at Omaha, by the Hon. Thomas B. Cumming, secretary and acting governor. In it I find

the words--which I heard so elo quently spoken-"The first official act within our territery has been indeed a mournful one-the transmission to a bereaved wife and orphaned children in South Carolina of all that was mortal of your late lamented Governor, Francis Burt. In his death you have suffered a severe loss-the loss of a man peculiarly qualified by his public. experience and capacity, his private virtues and his energy and firmness for the satisfactory and courageous discharge of his official duties. He spent a few weeks of suffering among us, and his grave in a distant State is only another tie of union between. communities widely severed, who will revert to his character with fraternal pride, and to his untimely decease with sympathetic sorrow. There were no unpleasant discriminations to subtract from the universal esteem in which his manly and amiable traits were held by an enlightened people."

By the decease of Governor Burt, Secretary Cumming, under a provision of the Nebraska bill, became the acting governor of Nebraska. Up to and at the time of his death, Governor Burt made Bellevue the territorial capital, and there kept the executive office. Had he lived, the first legislature assembly of Nebraska would have been there convened, and there would have been located by the legislature, the permanent capital, and there built up the commercial city of this commonwealth. There would have crossed the trans-continental railroad, and

Omaha would have been only a name, for Bellevue is the natural gateway, ready graded for the railroad, to the valley of the great Platte.

But Governor Burt's views were not those of Governor Cumming who convened at Omaha a legislative assembly which was so made up by his proclamation apportioning the members that the capital would be there located by law, as well as by his proclamation. Therefore, the death of Governor Burt-whose official career is to-day unknown to most of the million of citizens of this State-established Omaha and obliterated Bellevue. In fact the death, at the time of that now almost forgotten man changed the railway system for a continent. What Bellevue is Omaha would have been, and what Omaha is Bellevue would have been, had Francis Burt lived out his term of office. "Upon a breath that ceased to come and go how much of the web and woof of history hung.' How like the wind, the cloud, the variableness of the moods of a mere child are the upbuildings of cities and states and the social and political positions of persons. The death of a man unknown to fame-merely the governor of a frontier territory, three hundred miles beyond the terminus of the fartherest westward reaching railroad, on a calm sunshiny day in October, 1854, at the old log mission house in Bellevue, changed the course of the commerce of a continent from its natural to an artificial channel. Some of the contented and comfortably well-to-do

farmers of Sarpy county, in country in the vicinity of Bellevue, would have been millionaires to-day, and some of Omaha's millionaires would have been now comfortable and wholesome armers upon the very lands which are covered with pavements and the beautiful creations of a modern architecture had Governor Burt only lived a few years more. Then the vast blocks of buildings, the paved streets, the puff of the engine, the music of the forge, the glare of the furnace, and the constant hum of contented industry would have embellished and animated Bellevue. And from Omaha farms the golden corn would have been garnered, while the hymns of tranquil enjoyment ascended from its rural homes. But history will make no record illustrating the mere ceasing of a breath, the mere stopping of the pulsations of a single heart, which made plowmen of possible plutocrats at Bellevue, and plutocrats of possible plowmen at Omaha. History will only assert the foresight, the sagacity, the superiority of those whom a single death made fortunate, never at all writing down with effects, thesolicitudes the aspirations and hopes of those to whom that one death came like a vast ocean of disaster stretching from the morning of their lives to their very graves. History gives little consideration to circumstance.

"That all-pervading atmosphere, wherein

circumstance

Our spirits, like the unsteady lizard, take The tints that color, and the food that nurtures."

The real history of a people can be

written only by one who knows that people's condition in the formative period of the social, political and economic foundations. And that history must ignore, utterly and absolutely, all sentiment, all ideas of what ought to have been, and record what was with cruel and unrelenting fidelity. If a city was located, established, built up because legislators were bribed to vote it the capital of the commonwealth, history should so state, notwithstanding moralists and mothers. have been teaching for generations that nothing thus created can continuously thrive and grow.

In a paper prepared so hastily as this, I cannot, without violence to the rules of propriety, pursue the mist hidden paths of the territorial past to weariness. Yet we will venture a little farther into the records of that first legislative assembly, and find that on the 16th day of February, 1855, just one month after the convening of the legislative assembly-the council committee on corporations submitting -and it will be found on page 65 of the Council Journal-a very elaborate and interesting report. chartering the Platte Valley and Pacific Railroad. Company, and commending a route for its road. This report, which clearly and forcibly pictures the route, and enumerates the possibilitios of the commerce of the continent from ocean to ocean, is made by Dr. M. H. Clark, whom I well remember as a strong and sturdy man, attired in the buckskin raiment of a hunter and frontiers

man, but intellectually equipped by nature and by careful study to cope with the best armed of schoolmen and doctrinaires. His was a broad and generous nature. With a strong emotional organization, he combined stalwart reasoning powers. He stated a proposition so that it proved it in the statement. He closes this report on the railroad to the Pacific thus: "In view of the comparative cost, to the wonderful changes that will result, your committee cannot believe the period remote when this work will have been accomplished; and with liberal encouragement to capital, which your committee is disposed to grant, it is their belief that before fifteen years have transpired the route. to India will be opened, and this way across the continent will be the common way of the world. Entertaining these views, your committee report the bill for the Platte Valley and Pacific Railroad, feeling assured that it will become not only a basis for branches within Nebraska, but for surrounding states and territories.

M. H. CLARK, Chairman."

That prophetic paper, read with the ernest enthusiasm of a real seer—a zealous believer in his own utterances -made a profound impression upon the youth of then which the old man of now cannot hope to transfer to your understanding with its fervor and eloquence all uncooled and gleamingafter an intermission between the acts of thirty-six years! Dr. Clark lived

only three years after that when, by sudden sickness, he was gathered to his fathers. But in 1869, before the fifteen years of his prophecy had expired, the track of the Union Pacific had been laid, and now through those veins

"Of your vast empire, flows in strengthening tides

Trade the calm health of nations."

Ten of the thirteen men who constituted that upper house have passed out of this into another existence. Hiram P. Bennet, A. D. Jones and Samuel E. Rogers, the former in Denver, and the latter two at Omaha, are the only survivors of the body to whom Dr. Clark made that report. But I have clear and well defined, the mental image of that little two-story brick building at Omaha, which in 1855 we called the capitol. There on the first floor, sure enough, are the twenty-six members in session, called legally and literally the lower house; and Major Paddock-then only a middle-aged man-dignifiedly doing duty as chief clerk, and Andrew Jackson Hanscom, of Omaha, discharging with great mental and physical muscularity, and in a most masterfal manner, the functions of the speakership. His eye was always alert to recognize, and his ear to hear Andrew Jackson Poppleton, who then, as now, was among the foremost lawyers, thinkers and speakers in Nebraska. The two men by their intellectual force and courage wielded great influence, and Andrew Jackson never had, in any house of

representatives, a yoke of namesakes which better reflected his own ability, will, pluck and strength of purpose.

Of the eight members of the first house of representatives from Omaha, Messrs. Hanscom, and Poppleton are the only ones now residents of the established metropolis which they each individually did so much to create. And then, upstairs, the council of thirteen-Joseph L. Sharp of Richardson county, president; Richard Brown of Famey (now Nemaha) county, Hiram P. Bennet, Charles H. Cowles, and Henry Bradford, from Pierce. (now Otoe) county, and Samuel E. Rogers, O. D. Richardson, A D. Jones, T. G. Goodwill from Douglas, J. C. Mitchell from Washington county, M. H. Clark from Dodge, B. R. Folsom from Burt and Lafayette Nuckolls from Cass-with my still youthful friend Dr. George L. Miller for chief clerk, is as plainly before my eyes as though the veil of years had never fallen, nor graves intervened between that "then," and this "now." I knew each member personally and well, and did time permit I would roughly sketch each, so that you too might know the mental and physical peculiarities of those argonauts who first navigated the rough, tempestuous sea of Nebraska politics. Had I the wierd and mysterious power of the phonograph I would have you hear their voices in the speeches I heard. You should listen to O. D. Richardson of Douglas, who, previous to becoma Nebraskan, had achieved eminence