of persons.

who convened at Omaha a legislative assembly which was so made up by his proclamation apportioning the members-that the capital would be there located by law, as well as by his proclamation. Therefore the death of Governor Burt-whose official career is today unknown to most of the million of citizens of this state-established Omaha and obliterated Bellevue. In fact the death, at that time, of that now almost forgotten man changed the railway system for a continent. What Bellevue is Omaha would have been, and what Omaha is, Bellevue would have been, had Francis Burt lived out his term of office. Upon a breath that ceased to come and go how much of the web and woof of history hung." How like the wind, the cloud, the variableness of the moods of a mere child, are the building up of cities and states and the social and political positions The death of a man unknown to fame-merely the governor of a frontier territory, three hundred miles beyond the terminus of the farthest westward reaching railroad-on a calm sunshiny day in October, 1854, at the old log mission house in Bellevue, changed the course of the commerce of a continent from its natural, to an artificial channel. Some of the contented and comfortably well-to-do farmers of Sarpy county, in the country in the vicinity of Bellevue, would have been millionaires to-day, and some of Omaha's millionaires would have been now comfortable and wholesome farmers upon the very lands which are covered with pavements and the beautiful creations of modern architecture, had Governor Burt only lived a few years more. Then the vast blocks of buildings, the paved streets, the puff of the engine, the music of the forge, the glare of the furnace, and the constant hum of contented industry would have embellished and animated Bellevue. And from Omaha farms the golden corn would have been garnered, while the hymns of tranquil enjoyment ascended from its rural homes. But history will make no record illustrating the mere ceasing of a breath, the mere stopping of the pulsations of a single heart which made plowmen of possible plutocrats at Bellevue, and plutocrats of possible plowmen at Omaha. History will only assert the foresight, the sagacity, the superiority of those whom a single death made fortunate, never at all writing down the efforts, the solicitudes, the aspirations and hopes of those to whom that one death came like a vast ocean of disaster stretching from the morning of

their lives to their very graves. History gives little consideration to circumstance.

"That all-pervading atmosphere, wherein

Our spirits, like the unsteady lizard, take

The tints that color, and the food that nurtures."

The real history of a people can be written only by one who knows that people's condition in the formative period of the social, political, and economic foundations. And that history must ignore, utterly and absolutely, all sentiment, all ideas of what ought to have been, and record what was with cruel and unrelenting fidelity. If a city was located, established, built up because legislators were bribed to vote it the capital of the commonwealth, history should so state, notwithstanding moralists and mothers have been teaching for generations that nothing thus created can continuously thrive and grow. If great estates now contested among numerous heirs—some of them of the highest social and political prominence in the union, originated in the price of a corrupt ancestor in the first territorial legislature of Nebraska, just and good history should show and illuminate the vicious fact. History should record the truth, and should not be what Napoleon the First said it was, “An agreed lie.” History should not sell places within its sacred arena to mere pretenders, however successful socially, financially and politically they have appeared. Real history is not like a theatre, wherein box seats and orchestra chairs may be purchased by the vulgar as well as by the meritorious and refined. But histories, as now written, of counties and states by peripatetic Plutarchs offer, for a pecuniary consideration, to embalm in adulation, to preserve in eulogy, to pickle in perennial acclaim reputations and characters which already nauseate and render tumultuously uneasy the stomach of decent public opinion.

History to-day at times seems a huckster. History to-day tenders in her imperishable annals, too often, the highest places to the lowest mental and moral men, C. O. D. History seems to be dealing too much with reputation, too little with character, too much with the unreal and too little with the real. As the impartial sun tinges with its earliest beams the mountain tops on the Atlantic coast and sweeping to the zenith pours at last the full effulgence of its noonday radiance into all the remotest valleys and gorges of the

earth, lighting up alike the beautiful and the repulsive, so should history--with equal impartiality-light up the good and the bad of every generation, gilding the one, and exposing the other, by the full glare of the blazing truth.

But in a paper prepared so hastily as this, I cannot, without violence to the rules of propriety and the patience of my auditors, pursue the mist-hidden paths of the territorial past to weariness. Yet we will venture a little farther into the records of that first legislative assembly, and find that on the 16th day of February, 1855, just one month after the convening of that body the council committee on corporations submitting,—and it will be found on page 65 of the council journal—a very elaborate and interesting report chartering "the Platte Valley and Pacific railroad company," and commending a route for its road. This report, which clearly and forcibly pictures the route, and enumerates the possibilities of the commerce of the continent from ocean to ocean, is made by Dr. M. H. Clark, whom I well remember as a strong and sturdy man, attired in the buckskin raiment of a hunter and frontiersman, but intellectually equipped by nature and by careful study to cope with the best armed of schoolmen and doctrinaires. His was a broad and generous nature. With a strong emotional organization he combined stalwart reasoning powers. He stated a proposition so that he proved it in the statement. He closes this report on the railroad to the Pacific thus: "In view of the comparative cost, to the wonderful changes that will result, your committee cannot believe the period remote when this work will have been accomplished; and with liberal encouragement to capital, which your committee is disposed to grant, it is their belief that before fifteen years have transpired the route to India will be opened, and this way across the continent will be the common way of the world. Entertaining these views, your committee report the bill for "the Platte Valley and Pacific railroad," feeling assured that it will become not only a basis for branches within Nebraska, but for surrounding states and territories. M. H. CLARK,

Chairman."

That prophetic paper, read with the earnest enthusiasm of a real seer-a zealous believer in his own utterances-made a profound impression upon the youth of "then" which the old man of "now" can

not hope to transfer to your understanding with its fervor and eloquence all uncooled and gleaming-after an intermission between the acts of thirty-six years! Dr. Clark lived only three years after that, when, by sudden sickness, he was gathered to his fathers. But, in 1869— before the fifteen years of his prophecy had expired-the track of the Union Pacific had been laid, and now through those veins

"Of your vast empire, flows in strengthening tides

Trade, the calm health of nations."

Ten of the thirteen men who constituted that upper house have passed out of this into another existence. Hiram P. Bennet, A. D. Jones and Samuel E. Rogers, the former in Denver, and the latter two at Omaha, are the only survivors of the body to whom Dr. Clark made that report. But this evening I have, clear and well-defined, the mental image of that little two story brick building at Omaha, which, in 1855 we called the capitol. There on the first floor, sure enough, are the twenty-six members in session, called legally and literally, the lower house; and Major Paddock-then only a middleaged man-dignifiedly doing duty as chief clerk, and Andrew Jackson Hanscom, of Omaha, discharging with great mental and physical muscularity, and in a most masterful manner, the functions of the speakership. His eye was always alert to recognize, and his ear to hear Andrew Jackson Poppleton, who then, as now, was among the foremost lawyers, thinkers and speakers in Nebraska. The two men, by their intellectual force and courage, wielded great influence, and Andrew Jackson never had, in any house of represen- . tatives, a yoke of namesakes which better reflected his own ability, will, pluck and strength of purpose.

Of the eight members of the first house of representatives from Omaha, Messrs. Hanscom and Poppleton, are the only ones now residents of the established metropolis which they each individually did so much to create. And then, up stairs, the council of thirteenJoseph L. Sharp, of Richardson county, president; Richard Brown, of Forney (now Nemaha) county, Hiram P. Bennet, Charles H. Cowles and Henry Bradford from Pierce (now Otoe) county, and Samuel E. Rogers, O. D. Richardson, A. D. Jones, T. G. Goodwill from Douglas, J. C. Mitchell, from Washington county, M. H. Clark, from Dodge, B. R. Folsom, from Burt, and Lafayette Nuckolls, from Cass-with my still youthful friend, Dr. George L. Miller, for

chief clerk, is as plainly before my eyes to-night as though the veil of years had never fallen, nor graves intervened between that "then" and this "now." I knew each member personally and well, and did time permit I would roughly sketch each to you, so that you, too, might know the mental and physical peculiarities of those argonauts who first navigated the rough, tempestuous sea of Nebraska politics. Had I the weird and mysterious power of the phonograph, I would have you hear their voices in the speeches I heard. You should listen to

O. D. Richardson, of Douglas, who, previous to becoming a Ne. braskan, had achieved eminence at the bar, and as legislator and lieutenant-governor in Michigan. A man of great industry, dignity and learning, whom no man in our whole commonwealth has ever surpassed in capacity for practical wholesome legislation. He was honest. He was dutiful to principles, to family and to his countrya model of good citizenship and high character; and his speeches were logical, terse, lucid, earnest and of a good type of useful oratory.

Yet the opinion generally prevails that the pioneers were, as a rule, uneducated and utterly devoid of ideas as to the possibilities which their future our present-had in store for Nebraska. Nothing could be more erroneous. For in 1854, '55 and '56, was heard portrayed in pyrotechnic verbiage the steam horse on his iron track crossing the Missouri and dashing through the Rockies to the Pacific in pursuit of the teas of China and the silks of India and Japan. Even the numerous employes and agents of the American Fur company at Bellevue, from Colonel Peter A. Sarpy and Stephen Decatur, down to the half-breed cooks and roustabouts, waxed warmly wordy, when the coming cars were talked about. And great cities on these plains were predicted with fervid faith by scores of swarthy long-haired prophets in moccasins and buckskin breeches. They saw with mental vision, well and clearly-as in a mirror-all that our eyes behold to-day of material development of agriculture, commerce and manufacture. As in a crude block of marble the sculptor beholds the symmetry of the finished form of a goddess, so those pioneers had a mental concept of all that now surrounds and animates the stately progress of this queenly commonwealth.

In

In youth the future is filled with joys to be, triumphs yet to come. age the past is stored with the rich and tender memories of joys departed. It is throbbing with the recollections of victories that