History of Redbird, Nebraska
The post office ledger and the school rolls only hint at what really built Redbird. Behind the postmasters and the cream station stood dozens of homesteading families who broke sod along the creek bottoms, buried their own dead on the home place, and raised children who walked to a one-room school between hayfields and the Niobrara bluffs. Their stories, preserved in the memories of grandchildren decades later, fill out a settlement that the record books reduce to a handful of dates.
The first family to stake a claim in the Redbird country arrived well before there was a village to speak of. Wallace Sprague brought his wife Della and four children out from Chicago in 1876, settling five miles south of where the town would eventually take shape. Widowed and remarried, Sprague raised a second set of children on the prairie, and most of the family eventually drifted away to other opportunities. One son, Henry, stayed and married a neighbor girl, May Belle Phillips, in 1899; the young couple went on to homestead near Star, raise an astonishing fifteen children, and farm another place east of Redbird before finally retiring to Valentine in 1937 — a Holt County marriage that outlasted the settlement itself.
Few Redbird pioneers carried a heavier past onto the prairie than Charles Wrede, Sr. Born in Prussia in 1842, he had already buried one wife and remarried by the time he brought his growing family to Redbird Creek in 1881, filing on a homestead plus a pre-emption and timber claim that together gave the Wredes 480 acres of bottomland. What the neighbors eventually learned was that Wrede had enlisted in the Union Army in August of 1860, months before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and went on to fight in eleven major engagements, including Bull Run and Gettysburg, before being captured and held for sixteen brutal months in the Confederate prison at Andersonville. He survived to farm Redbird Creek for more than three decades. When he finally retired to O’Neill in 1913, he was, by his final years, the last living Civil War veteran in the town, still carrying the colors at the funerals of other old soldiers into his eighties.
The Enders family’s arrival at Redbird in 1876 carried its own quiet drama. Isaac and Martha Enders crossed from South Dakota with ox teams, Martha only fourteen at the time, and settled into a dugout before building a log cabin the following year. It was that same year the government resettled a band of Oklahoma Indians directly across the river from their cabin, and the two peoples fell into an uneasy but workable neighborliness. One evening the Enders’ daughter Priscilla walked down to the river to fetch the milk cows and found herself followed home by a young man from the camp, who calmly offered her father a generous price in ponies for her hand. The offer went nowhere, and Priscilla instead married Joseph Witherwax, the Redbird justice of the peace, in 1879 — a union that tied two of the settlement’s founding families together and put a Witherwax in the post office for the next generation.
Down at the mouth of the Niobrara, Ben Akin’s store did steady business trading with families from that same reservation, and it was Akin’s son Dell who found himself at the center of one of the region’s most harrowing nights. Only twenty years old and living at Niobrara during the catastrophic flood of 1881, Dell woke to floodwater already ankle-deep on his cabin floor and had barely pulled on his soaked trousers before it reached his knees. He and a neighbor, a Mr. Moore, commandeered a boat and spent the night pulling stranded residents from rooftops and tabletops. At one house he found a woman perched above the rising water with her child and dog, refusing to leave either behind for a second trip — so Dell hauled all three across his back at once, slipping at the boat’s edge and dumping the whole load in with a force that nearly capsized them. He later ranched near Atkinson and eventually bought and ran the Atkinson Graphic newspaper, but the flood rescue stayed the story neighbors told about him longest.
Not every Redbird settler came from nearby. Swan John Peterson left Sweden in 1881 as a twenty-year-old, the oldest of eleven children, having spent two years saving $125 for passage after a tearful goodbye to his mother at the kitchen door. He mined coal in Iowa for two-and-a-half-dollar days before riding the rails to Holt County in 1884 with a team, a wagon, and what savings remained. One by one he sent for his younger brothers and sisters as money allowed; his youngest brother Gust, orphaned by their mother’s death and raised for a time by sisters in Omaha, eventually bought a ten-dollar horse at age twelve and rode it alone all the way to the Niobrara homestead, the first time the brothers had laid eyes on each other since Gust was a toddler. The family lived largely on cornbread through their leanest early years before Swan John married and settled permanently near the river he’d come so far to find.
The Astleford and Wilson families supplied Redbird with some of its most vivid frontier tales. Thomas Dennimore “T.D.” Astleford, who had once carried mail on horseback between Niobrara and Yankton, settled near the far northeast corner of Holt County and raised a family that included daughter Olive, who married George Francis and gave birth to two sets of twins in a home so remote a neighbor had to swim his horse across the river to fetch the doctor — who arrived so late that the first twin was already hours old. One of those twins, Caspar, was killed in action during the Second World War. Nearby, the Wilson family endured its own trial by fire, literally: young Earn Wilson survived a prairie fire that burned the shoes off his feet by wrapping his head in a wet gunny sack, and a doctor drove out from Lynch by team and buggy through most of the following year to dress his burns. Decades later, in an odd echo, Earn’s brother Ray held a farm sale at the old Wilson place on January 24, 1962 — exactly forty-three years to the day after their father William had held his own sale on the same ground.
Neighborhood social life had its own close calls. Anna Ladely Carson and her sister-in-law Lizzie Carson were driving a wagonload of women to a Ladies Aid meeting near Dorsey when the neckyoke snapped going downhill, sending the team into a panicked runaway. Anna and Lizzie hauled on the lines with everything they had while the passengers in back held on for dear life; when the doubletree gave way too, both women were thrown over the dashboard onto the road, though Lizzie never let go of the reins and managed to wrestle the horses to a stop in a nearby farmyard. Dusting themselves off, the whole party simply continued on to the meeting, where their story provided the afternoon’s entertainment.
The Mellor family’s saga stretched across half the state and several generations of hard luck and resilience. George Mellor’s first wife, Rachel Dailey, had crossed the plains with a Mormon handcart company, walking and pushing her own belongings the entire way; she died in 1898 leaving a newborn daughter who did not survive the year. George remarried, eventually built the celebrated Redbird house with its rare indoor plumbing — hauled into shape with lumber his son Leon carted by wagon from O’Neill — and later fathered “Lubber,” the horse billed as the biggest in the world. George’s son Jess, meanwhile, carried the family’s homesteading instinct west and north through Cherry County and beyond, riding out the drought years of the 1930s so severe that even the tumbleweeds refused to grow. When a hailstorm finally flattened the family garden after weeks of hand-carried water, Jess’s family gathered the ice, froze homemade ice cream, and invited the neighbors over rather than mourn the loss — a gesture of stubborn good humor that relatives still recalled decades later.
Other families filled out the neighborhood in quieter but no less determined fashion. William Wells arrived from Iowa in 1899 with nothing but a saddle horse, a shotgun and five dollars, and homesteaded two miles south of town; grasshoppers later stripped the bark clean off his family’s apple orchard during the hardest years of the 1930s, killing every tree. Edwin Huber built his first Redbird home from tarpaper and lost a second house to a stovepipe fire while his wife and children were away visiting relatives, forcing them to extend the trip until neighbors could help rebuild. Josiah Noble sold a Nebraska lake resort that had been named for his own father and moved his family into the Redbird neighborhood, where his son Ray bought one of the first automobiles in Holt County in 1911 and later earned a state Tree Farm Award for the miles of shelterbelts he planted across the drought-scarred land.
Perhaps no single moment captures the settlement’s endurance better than an afternoon at an Old Settlers Picnic, when Sarah Hull — grandmother to a Redbird farming family and, at the time, closing in on her hundred and ninth year — was asked what the worst thing was that had happened to her in a century on the prairie. She didn’t hesitate: it was the grasshopper plague, she said, the summer the insects ate everything down to the onions still in the ground, “leaving us bare ground.” It was the kind of answer only someone who had truly outlasted the country could give, and it says as much about Redbird’s homesteading generation as any post office ledger ever could.