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The family of Robert Taylor had successfully prevailed over the difficulties of everyday challenges on their own Nebraska Territory farm a half-dozen years by the time his brother's family moved to the area. Robert and Isabella, too, had left behind the grave of an infant daughter when they moved west to Nebraska; and now the daily experiences of the two families would become increasingly similar. Early settlers of Pawnee county near Table Rock were discouraged by a multitude of troubles and deprivations. The frontier's remoteness, the sicknesses, bad weather, pestilence, crop failure, and lack of provisions drove those unwilling to contend back east to their beginnings. Only the very hardy stayed, along with folks too poor to go anywhere else. Adjacent to Robert's purchased farmland, in 1864, JOHN himself bought 160 acres and later homesteaded a second additional quarter square mile in Sheridan precinct of Pawnee county. Their new home was in a prairie region where buffalo still roamed and the deer and antelope yet played in the meadows and in the woods. And there were large numbers of elk in the area stretching west from the Missouri River. Herds of bison left large dusty depressions in open ground, "buffalo wallows," where the burly animals sought to cool their massive bodies from summertime heat. William Tecumseh Sherman later estimated over nine and a half million buffalo still existed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains at this time. Pawnee county terra firma, long ago leveled by ancient glaciers, was found to be very fertile for crop-raising, even though the productive soil in some localities included a measure of clay commonly referred to as "gumbo." An excess of stones occasionally obstructed the plow in places; however, various locations bountifully provided quarries of limestone and sandstone to satisfy building needs. While nurturing their crops through the warm season, the pioneers saw a new growth of sunflowers, cockleburrs, burdock, pig weed, milkweed, buttonweeds, wild roses, thistles, beggar's lice, poison oak, poison ivy, nettles, and dozens of varieties of other weeds re-emerging annually throughout the whole area. Around Pawnee county, prairie chickens, bob-white quail, red-tail hawks, owls, crows, seagulls, pigeons, thrushes, turtledoves, meadowlarks, blackbirds, bluejays, cardinals, cowbirds, woodpeckers, orioles, finches, swallows, robins, sparrows, chickadees, wrens, and hummingbirds regularly took to the wing with their normal routines of bird life. Migrating cranes, ducks, and geese followed the flow of the Nemaha River and its tributary branches, steadily flapping along as their predecessors had done for a millennium. The clear sandy streams of Pawnee county provided a water supply and a natural home for beavers, turtles, frogs, snails, crawfish, water striders, dragon flies, and varieties of freshwater fish such as carp, sun perch, catfish, and suckers. On Nebraska turf, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, badgers, bobcats, jackrabbits, cottontail rabbits, possums, skunks, squirrels, groundhogs, gophers, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, chipmunks, field mice, toads, salamanders, and a broad assortment of snakes competed with each other for existence amongst the prairie grasses, buckbrush, and woodlands. Settlers contended with pesky mosquitoes, gluttonous grasshoppers, parasitic ticks, stinging wasps, bumblebees, and hornets, singing cicadas, annoying junebugs, crickets, horseflies, and fruit flies. The honeybee seemed to represent a singular beneficial purpose amongst insects. The water table near the streams encouraged the denser concentration of trees, such as willow, cottonwood, oak, elm, maple, cedar, hickory, walnut, mulberry, hackberry, chokecherry, and plum, along with sumac and cattails. Settlers planted orchards of fruit trees and grapevines, and years later they lined out barriers of hedge trees as boundary markers and windbreaks. Growing wild were gooseberry bushes, strawberry plants, and the vines of blackberries, raspberries, and grapes. Nebraska's variable climate could suddenly produce any selection of unforeseen natural disasters, such as an insect plague, blizzard, flood, damaging hailstorm, tornado, lightning strike, high winds, drought, or prairie fire. Every year, however, settlers knowingly came to expect being baked in the stifling summertime heat of July and August, and frozen with the icy bite of deep winter's frigid chill. |
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