My latest book also deals with ancestors, in this case my great grandfather and his sister. Will and Belle were 4th and 1st in a family of six surviving children, with Belle's older sister dying on the windswept prairie of southeastern Nebraska before Belle was born. Another child died after Will was born; they were living on a farm in central Wisconsin when that happened.
Belle and Will ended up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, working for a bank that her husband had bought controlling interest in. Council Bluffs was a thriving town up until 1893, when, after the Chicago Columbian Exhibition, there was a severe crash and then three-year depression. The crash most strongly affected the Dakota Territories, because the railroads had extended partway into the Dakotas, and the railroads were the first to crash. Settling the Dakotas was contingent on railroads being able to serve the market, and now they not only stopped what they were building, but the ones that were there shut down. People had to give up and move back out of the Dakotas.
In addition, winters were brutal, and the price they could get for their wheat crashed. It was not a winning proposition.
The banks in Council Bluffs were affected, even though the Dakotas were up the river a ways. Money dried up and there was a depression for three years, 1893-1896.
The First National Bank, where Belle's husband was president and Will worked, suffered with the other banks. But it had another problem - one teller was actively working against the president. He managed to make it so that her husband had to sell out at a huge loss. The buyer was a local guy, involved in another bank, who was widely disliked. It was generally considered a terrible thing to have to sell out at a loss to a local rich man who, nevertheless, was very unpopular.
His selling out had a lot of lasting consequences. The husband was dead within a few years, heartbroken probably as his life work and hopes for a prosperous future were all dashed. His father, who had come to live with him and Belle, had also died. Belle was left alone with their two sons in Council Bluffs, and had to make it on her own. She had no one to turn to, though her brother Will was still in town. She took to writing for a living.
The local newspaper sent her out on assignments, namely writing sketches of famous worthy people who passed through Council Bluffs regularly. They were just getting used to the idea that if you came right through at Council Bluffs/Omaha, and kept right on going, you would eventually make it all the way out to California, if you weren't set upon by angry Sioux or terrible weather. Since Council Bluffs/Omaha was the last civilization for something like 500 miles - if you could call Denver civilization - people got good and stocked up before they set off across the prairie and so they would often lay over in Council Bluffs or Omaha until they were good and ready to go any farther. Of course, this being the Wild old West, sometimes they would get good and drunk or shoot up some bar before they had a chance to leave also. Things happened. It was a lively river town, and one could do a shrewd business if one could sell alcohol, or guns, or some other kind of useful supplies.
Things weren't that great for writers, though. At least the newspapers paid good money for content, and that's because people actually used them; they read them; they wanted to know what was happening in the area. It was a different time then, than the ones we have now. They hadn't even really mastered cars yet.
The Transmississippian Exhibition was in 1897 in Omaha, and the depression had lifted. But all those years of hard times, of banks going under, had taken a toll ont he people of Council Bluffs and Omaha. It was not as grand and smashing as the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago had been, back in 1893. The world did not come out one step farther from Chicago, and out across the Mississippi and out to the Missouri, to see the new center of the world. On the contrary, Omaha-Council Bluffs had already proved that just beyond them, it was pretty wild and unsettled, and that the high northern plains would get settled and farmed much more slowly than, say, Indiana and Illinois. They just weren't ready to be the center of the world out in Nebraska yet. And they may never be ready. Even today, the wind howls, and it gets mighty cold, and the tribes are still mad that they got run out of their buffalo-hunting country, not only that, but they got totally cleaned out of buffalo. Transmississippi, my foot, some people would say. No wonder nobody's heard of that exhibition today. It's all gone in the dust, just like all those herds of buffalo.
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