Author: Minnie Prey Knotts

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-19

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 9781331837305

Excerpt from Nebraska Territorial Pioneers' Association: Reminiscences and Proceedings I came to the territory of Nebraska with my parents in April, 1864, from the state of Kansas, where my father, Samuel W. McKesson, had been sent by the conference of the Evangelical church for the state of Iowa. My father was an itinerant preacher, and our moving anywhere was not specially for the purpose of settlement, but for the purpose of being as near and convenient to such religious charges and missionary work as might be laid out for him. During the two years previous to moving into the territory the field of his labor was largely marked out for him by a missionary department of the conference, and in this case was not confined to comity or statewide boundaries. And so, prior to our moving into the territory, father had made frequent circuits within its boundary. We moved to Arago, in Richardson county, on the banks of the Missouri river. It is not now an organized town, having been abandoned and its place taken by the town of Fargo. Altho the town was situated on the banks of the river, it had no ferryboat connection with the Missouri side of the river. The manufacturing industries were a brickyard, a shingle sawmill and a brewery. The town was quite prosperous and progressive. The bluffs had been dug down half for the cutting thru of streets, and the ravines were filled and leveled. Besides the manufactures and residences, many of them mute respectable wooden structures, the town supported a public school, an Evangelical church, a Catholic church and school, and several saloons. Not much of interest to me occurred during the first year of our residence at Arago. I remember seeing boats travel up and down the Missouri river and stop to load and unload their cargoes of merchandise and to let off and take on passengers. The names of some of these river boats were the "Denver," "St. Mary's," "St. Joseph," and "St. Louis." They were of various sizes, some side-wheelers, some stern-wheelers, some with single smokestacks and some with double smokestacks, bid all with fog horns whose noise was anything but musical. It was in this year also that I saw and tasted my first cherries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.