Before the Beginning

On the morning of June 26th, 1843, a hot early summer sun inched toward the mid-day mark while a small group of horsemen topped a sandy ridge where they paused to look down on a sluggish stream winding through a broken, desolate landscape. Although it would be more than three decades before political boundaries were drawn to give the land before them a local name, the explorers were viewing the main valley of the Republican River along the southern edge of an area which would one day be marked on maps as Dundy County, Nebraska.

The man sitting astride a sweat-stained horse at the head of the column was a U.S. Army Brevet Captain of Topographical Engineers named John C. Fremont. He and his little band of civilian assistants were not the first non-natives to enter Southwest Nebraska, but they were the first to make an official reconnaissance and give a detailed report on what they found. Under directions issued by Congress, Fremont had been charged with the job of preparing a first-hand report on the development potential of vast stretches of western land. His diary provides an interesting account of the appearance of Dundy County in the years before settlement.

The County Changes

In reporting his entry into Southwest Nebraska, Fremont wrote: "Shortly after leaving our encampment of the 26th, we found suddenly that the nature of the country had entirely changed. Bare sandhills everywhere surrounded us in the undulating ground along which we were moving; and the plants peculiar to a sandy soil made their appearance in abundance. A few miles further we entered the valley of a large stream afterwards known to be the Republican Fork of the Kansas, whose shallow water with a depth of only a few inches was spread over a bed of yellowish-white sand 600 yards wide.

"With the exception of one or two distant and detached groves, no timber of any kind was seen, and the features of the country assumed a desert character, with which the broad river, struggling for existence among the quicksands along the treeless banks, was strikingly in keeping. On the opposite side, the broken ridges assumed almost a mountainous appearance, and, fording the stream, we continued on our course among these ridges, and camped late in the evening at a little pond of very bad water, from which we drove a herd of buffalo that were standing in and about it.”

From this badwater camp, Fremont led his men through an arid and sandy region which is now northwest Dundy County, passing near a well-known county landmark called Old Baldy. The explorer summed up his negative impressions of northwest Dundy County with very few words when he wrote: "We traveled now for several days through a broken and dry sandy region where there were no running streams; and some anxiety was constantly felt on account of the uncertainty of water, which was only to be found in small lakes that occurred occasionally among the hills."

The Cattlemen Arrive

A half-century after Fremont crossed the Republican, hundreds of drought-stricken homesteaders would echo the opinions of Dundy County which the explorer recorded in his journal. Before that would happen, however, there was another era which was to indirectly bring about the circumstances which led to the great pioneer boom and tragic homestead bust. That was the fabulous, but short-lived, heyday of the cattlemen.

In June of 1876, almost 33 years to the day after Captain Fremont had passed through the territory, another rider moved west, following the banks of the Republican River. He was a tall, full-bearded forty-year-old bachelor named Jacob R. Haigler and he was planning to start a cattle ranch.

For years stockmen had realized that if the Great American Desert supported millions of buffalo it could likewise support large herds of longhorn steers. There had been two major drawbacks in trying to develop this potential cattleman's paradise. First had been the buffalo themselves. Cattle could replace buffalo on grazing lands, but not even semi-wild and tough Texas longhorns could compete for grass when their shaggy wild cousins occupied the range.

Other drawbacks which held ranchers in check were the tribes of plains Indians who took a dim view of anyone who wanted to replace buffalo with anything. In June of 1867, the same year Nebraska became a state, troopers of the Seventh U.S. Calvary under the command of a flamboyant officer named George A. Custer camped for several days at the forks of the Republican River, a site just south of the present city limits of Benkelman.

Soldiers Under Attack

At dawn on the morning of June 24th, the soldiers found themselves under attack from a large force of Indians. The skirmish ended with no serious damage inflicted on either side when the Indians finally withdrew. A few days later the Indians tried again with an ambush against a column of forty troopers who were scouting about seven miles northwest of the river fork's campsite. The troopers escaped the ambush, leaving two dead attackers at the scene. It was a loss the Indians soon avenged. On July 12th, after moving out from their river junction campsite, the Custer command found the mutilated bodies of 11 missing soldiers and a scout.

There is another report, sketchy in detail, of a survey party being ambushed by Indians in 1869 on the Dundy/Chase County line. And in 1879, during the last major Indian raid in Northwest Kansas and Southwest Nebraska, cowboys headquartered at a ranch in southeast Dundy County were chased home by a band of Cheyenne. This same band of Indians, who had fled the reservation in Oklahoma, camped for several days near Benkelman at a location which still bears the name Cheyenne Canyon.

As for the buffalo, they had fallen before a fad for buffalo lap robes which swept the eastern United States and much of Europe. Professional hunters armed with heavy, long-range .50 caliber Sharps Rifles swarmed across the Great Plains year after year to supply the needless demand for buffalo hides. A few of the beast would still be found in northwest Dundy County as late as 1888, but the last great buffalo hunt in the county during the summer of 1873 eliminated the native bison for all practical purposes. That same year Texas ranchers began running herds in Southwest Nebraska, fattening steers for fall shipment.

By the time Jake Haigler began to set up headquarters for the Three Bar Ranch in 1876, several other ranchers were in business along the Republican. In most ways Haigler and the Three Bar are typical of all those who were responsible for opening Dundy County to future settlement.

Jake Haigler was a farm boy from Missouri, born on a Franklin County homestead to a couple who had migrated westward from Virginia. He was 25 years old when, in 1861, he and several other young Missouri men from his neighborhood traveled to New York where they booked passage on a ship to Panama. On arrival in the central American country, they crossed the narrow Isthmus by mule pack train, and on the Pacific side boarded another ship bound for Sacramento, California. For the next 15 years Haigler worked his way through California, Nevada and Idaho as a gold prospector, hired miner, ranch hand and sheepherder.

Jake Haigler Arrives

In 1875 he decided to visit relatives and old friends back home in Missouri. From Idaho, where he had been herding sheep, Haigler crossed the mountains to the boom town of Denver City in Colorado, then he rode east across the plains along a trail which eventually followed the Republican River. It had taken 15 years and a circle of thousands of miles but Jake Haigler finally arrived in the part of the country where he was destined to leave his mark.

It isn't known if Haigler had any intention of becoming a Nebraska cattle rancher when he started east. It seems likely that he didn't. While in Denver he had met two brothers named George and John Benkelman, who with their nephew, also named George, were raising cattle along the Republican River. Haigler rode east with them and it would appear that the Benkelmans’ put the idea of being a rancher into his mind.

At any rate, at the junction of the North Fork of the Republican and Arikaree Creek, Haigler ran across a hillside dugout home occupied by a crusty Civil War veteran named Jimmy Gray. The dugout was in an east-facing bank at the bottom of a hogback ridge which separated the Republican and Arikaree Creek, at the point where the two streams joined. Gray had built a pole corral out into the running water of the creek to hold his one head of livestock, a well-worn mustang pony.

Ranch Headquarters

With a year-round source of good water flowing through thousands of acres of unclaimed grassland, Haigler realized this was cattle country in the purest form. In spite of the fact Jimmy Gray's dugout was infested with a bumper crop of bedbugs, Haigler worked out a deal to use it as a temporary ranch headquarters when he returned from Missouri. As part of the deal he offered Gray a job as a ranch-hand.

Jimmy Gray was one of those people who can only be described as a colorful character. After service with the Union Army during the Civil War, Gray had worked as a laborer on the Union Pacific Railroad until 1869. For reasons known only to himself he then chose to live in near total isolation in his Southwest Nebraska dugout. He set himself up along the banks of the Arikaree about 1870 or '71, though it isn't known how he supported himself during his first years there. In his later years he was well known throughout Dundy County and was remembered as an outgoing person with a highly-developed sense of humor. A small man, he sported a long, full beard and was always seen wearing a battered hat with the front brim turned up in the style of Pony Express riders. While riding for the Three Bar Ranch, Gray suffered severe frostbite in his feet which caused the amputation of several toes. He is seldom remembered in Dundy County today, but as far as can be determined he was the first person to become a permanent settler in Southwest Nebraska. Well into the 20th century he was a well-liked resident of the Haigler community, justifiably proud of having been the first permanent Dundy Countian.

When Gray and Haigler met in 1875 there was nothing to the Three Bar Ranch but an idea. A ranch needs cattle and money to become a successful operation and Jake Haigler had no cattle and apparently very little money. What he did have was an honest reputation supplemented by what must have been a gift of gab that could put a snake oil salesman to shame.

Backing for the Three Bar

From the junction of the Arikaree and the Republican, Haigler continued his trip to Missouri where he spent the winter of 1875-76. His time with the home folks was not all spent in visiting and catching up on family news; he was also promoting the cattle-raising possibilities out in the prairieland he had just crossed, By the spring of 1876 he had convinced enough people in Missouri of the rich prospects in Southwest Nebraska to have the financial backing he needed to launch the Three Bar Ranch with himself as manager and foreman.

Thus it was that in June of '76 he was headed back to set up headquarters at Jimmy Gray's dugout. Like the ranches organized by the Benkelman brothers and other stockmen along the Republican, the Three Bar was a successful business in a remarkably short time. Haigler soon moved out of the old dugout and into a more substantial residence nearby from where he supervised the herding of thousands of longhorns.

Cattle grew sleek and fat on the nourishing sea of grass which covered Dundy County. As long as water was available Southwest Nebraska was the cattle paradise ranchers had dreamed about. Anyone who could get the money for a herd of cattle could be successful as a rancher. And with their success the pioneer stockmen in Dundy County sealed their own doom.

The glory-days of the great ranches in Dundy County only lasted about ten years. In that decade their presence bridged the gap between a time of open prairie, populated by buffalo and Indian, to the days when land-hungry sodbusters by the hundreds would begin sinking plows and stringing barbed wire across the prairie.

Potential Railroad Profits

The end of the cattle days came about simply because the thousands of steers grazing on the plains had no value until they reached eastern markets, and there was money to be made in getting them there. In the early days shipment to market in Kansas City started with long trail drives to the railroad, but as ever-increasing numbers of steers kept coming out of the grasslands railroad promoters realized there could be profit in taking the railroad to the cattle.

Far away from the banks of the Republican River, well-dressed men met in paneled offices and discussed the potential of a railroad through the heart of High Plains cattle country. Not only would there be stock to haul to market, but the government, in an effort to stimulate railroad construction, offered vast amounts of land along a right-of-way when a new line was constructed. The railroads could claim thousands of acres as a right-of-way grant every time a few miles of track was completed

The route chosen by the promoters started from the existing line at Culbertson, Nebraska and ran west along the banks of the Republican River then on across the plains of Colorado to Denver. Within three years after it was completed, cattlemen in Dundy County were forced to face the fact that they had brought the railroad and the railroad was bringing the homesteaders.

The railroad was called the Burlington and it changed the face of Dundy County forever.

Continued in II. A Handful of Pioneers