History of Dorsey, Nebraska
Dorsey’s shifting names — Mineral, Steel Creek, Apple Creek, Omeral, and finally Dorsey — only hint at the richness of the families who actually built the place. Behind the storefronts and the post office ledger were immigrants and Yankee homesteaders whose personal histories, passed down through the county’s old-timers, give the vanished town its real texture.
Few of them lived a stranger life before settling down than John Emerson, the town’s founding storekeeper. Born in New Hampshire in 1829, he had, as a young man, filed a claim on the very ground where the city of Chicago would eventually stand, then abandoned it for Minnesota, prospected for gold in the Black Hills, and run a grocery in Deadwood before deciding to move his family west for good. The journey from Blue Earth, Minnesota, was made in a covered wagon pulled by four milk cows, with each of his children carrying a tin cup to be filled fresh at every supper stop; at one point a band of Indians offered two ponies in trade for his daughter Jeanette. Rumors of an uprising in Dakota forced the family to change course near Yankton, and they finally reached Niobrara in October 1879.
The following spring Emerson bought a claim on Apple Creek and moved his makeshift lean-to home there from Niobrara, only to have a flood drive the family out in the middle of the night — he woke just in time to snatch his children off the floor as the water rose. He rebuilt on higher ground, added rooms until he had a full four-room house, then built four more rooms on top and opened the whole structure as a hotel, the “Emerson House,” complete with its own livery stable next door. For a time his was the only store between Niobrara and O’Neill, and he served as the settlement’s first postmaster as well.
Bohemian settlers gave the neighborhood one of its earliest tragedies. Mathias Hrbek arrived from Czechoslovakia with his wife and five children, traveling with the Prasek and Brabenec families to a stretch of the Niobrara farther west than any other white settlers had yet ventured, despite warnings about unfriendly bands in the area. One spring morning, while the men were cutting timber near the river, they heard gunfire and hurried back to find Mrs. Brabenec shot through the thigh and her son shot in the chest; her daughter was found dead the following day. The frightened settlers nearly abandoned their claims until a meeting at the Niobrara courthouse secured a promise of military protection. The Hrbeks stayed and prospered, hunting game for the O’Neill market and hauling young trees pulled from the river bottom to sell to other settlers.
The Binkerds brought a different kind of color to Dorsey. Pennsylvania Dutch by background, Judith Binkerd was said to be a cousin of President Andrew Johnson, and her husband John’s mother came from the Studebaker family of wagon and, later, automobile fame. The extended Binkerd clan milked as many as fifty cows by hand and processed the cream with a separator powered by a dog-driven treadmill. Their family band, made up of James Binkerd and several of his children, was in steady demand for Fourth of July celebrations and Memorial Day observances for years. James eventually traded his tree claim outright for the Lynch telephone company. Two generations later, Binkerd descendants served in the Second World War; one grandson, John Benton Binkerd’s son, was killed on Omaha Beach.
The settlement’s first winter tested everyone who stuck it out. The Tomlinson family arrived from Wisconsin in October 1880, just ahead of a three-day blizzard, and kept a wash boiler on the stove all winter melting snow for drinking water since they had no well yet dug. When a neighbor’s stranded pile of cut logs became the target of a desperate midwinter fuel run, about a dozen men and their teams set out together to break a trail to it — and returned empty-handed at sundown, unable to get within half a mile of the pile through the drifts. Later that winter two young Shaffer boys walked in from three and a half miles away simply looking for two sacks of corn for their starving family; Mrs. Tomlinson fed them a hot meal, filled their sacks, and sent them home with a fresh-baked “flat cake” and two gallons of milk besides. The following February, Joseph Tomlinson himself was killed instantly in a cave-in while digging a well.
The Reverend David Rosenkrans, the circuit-riding Presbyterian minister who organized churches across the region, added his own share of stories to the Dorsey record. He was known to put up cattlemen driving herds toward the railroad or Omaha, including one drover who, unbeknownst to the reverend, turned out to be trailing stolen stock and was later arrested trying to sell it. A cousin, Martin Stratton, once buried several hundred dollars in gold coin somewhere in the Rosenkrans yard for safekeeping — a common precaution in a region with few banks — then was unable to relocate it when he came back to dig it up. The whole family turned the yard over searching, without success, and the buried gold was never found.
The Carsons, Bradys and their many intermarried relations formed one of the largest family networks around Dorsey. Identical twin daughters Mary and Lizzie Carson amused themselves as girls by trading seats in the schoolroom and switching partners at square dances just to confuse their suitors. A grandson, Clifford Wolfe, later wrote fondly of the ranch’s more difficult horses — a buggy gelding named Rueban who fumbled his gait trying to switch from a trot to a pace, and a saddle pony who reliably scraped her young riders off under low tree branches at the same two spots on the trail every time. Two of the family’s sons-in-law, Guy and Harry Johnson, ran a horse-dealing operation prosperous enough that in the mid-1930s they contracted to supply a hundred horses toward building the state park at Niobrara, worked alongside Civilian Conservation Corps crews; Guy’s standing line to buyers, that his word was as good as a contract, stuck with the family for generations.
Smaller, homelier details rounded out ordinary Dorsey life: the Wade family’s homemade “giggle sled,” a forked tree branch fitted with boards, that hauled neighborhood children to school through deep snow and got its name from how often they tumbled off it laughing; Delos Miles’s habit of naming his milking cows’ calves after his own sons, regardless of the calf’s sex; and the town’s suffrage campaigners, who paraded through the streets wearing their husbands’ coats and hats while keeping their own long skirts underneath.