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The
Gandy Pioneer gives the following as among the first happenings in the history
of white men in Logan County.
Although
possessing a fine body of rich, black, table land and splendid water, the Logan
County region was flanked by sand hills and out of the beaten path of land
seekers.
It
was not until the middle eighties, after the construction of the Burlington Road
across Custer County,
that homesteaders settled in considerable numbers in Logan.
This
record of the earliest settlement deserves wider knowledge and additional
detail. It would be quite worth while to know something of the life of Thomas
Kirby, the pioneer hunter and trapper:
Thomas
Kirby, hunter and trapper, in the summer of 1873, built the first house in
Logan County.
It
was built on the north bank of the Loup River, three quarters of a mile north
of the town of Logan. This house was part dug and part made of cedar logs,
there being a big grove of these in the canyon near by.
The
canyons surrounding the Clark table were a favorite place for black tailed deer
and wild horses ranged on the table land.
In
the early days beaver were plenty, also a few otter. They did
not bother to trap musk rats as there were plenty of the more valuable and
larger fur bearing animals.
In
1876 Charlie Ewing, as part of a cattle company organized at Columbus,
Nebraska, brought in a car load of Texas cattle and built a frame house on the
north side of the Loup one mile east of Logan, on the land now known as the M.
Laughler farm.
This
was the first frame house built in Logan County.
Nebraska History and
Record of Pioneer Days Volume 4 - 1922 – No. 2
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