Nuclear Nebraska

The Remarkable Story of the Little County That Couldn’t Be Bought

Author: Susan Cragin
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0814474306
Format: Hardcover

• Nuclear Nebraska
• Praise for this book
• Sample Chapter
• Table of Contents
• Request an Evaluation Copy, INSTRUCTOR ONLY!

Chapter 1

It Can Happen Here

It didn't look like land worth fighting over. It looked like any land within a couple of hundred miles. The undulating contours of treeless plains, divided by barbed wire fencing and covered with a checkerboard carpet of green-and-brown cowfeed, mostly alfalfa and corn, stretched for miles and miles north to arid South Dakota, and south to the featureless flatness of Holt County. Flyover country.

Up close, it looked poor, with few farmhouses, half of them empty, and all covered with peeling paint or fading whitewash; poor farms, where the death of one cow could mean a hard month for a farm family and debt could be carried for generations.

Surely, among this sparse vastness there was room to spare, room for one modestly sized nuclear waste dump?

That was the question one blue-capped stranger pondered as he drove his small pickup along Route 12, the only paved east-west road in Boyd County, Nebraska. Too soon, he turned left onto a gravel-covered path, past a local farm station and a faded blue sign saying "Welcome to Bristow Nebraska." He didn't need to slow down to read the short list of Bristow's attractions: "Gas, Groceries, Food, Bait, Tackle and Camping" or its promise that Bristow was "The lil' town with a BIG Heart!" It all lay just beyond a rusted railroad bridge.

Across the bridge he pulled over, where he could see the whole town of Bristow, stretched in front of him like a handful of toy building blocks scattered amongst the crops.

On a normal day, he suspected, Bristow's big heart beat only faintly. It had the look of a near-ghost town, its main street lined with tiny, one-story brick and corrugated steel buildings, once bravely painted red, aqua-green, and blue, but now faded and soft, their signs obscured. The businesses they housed showed no signs of life but were not boarded up or padlocked, just empty, as if the storekeepers had gone on vacation in 1960 and never bothered to return. The washhouse, the bank, a couple of hardware stores, the fuel station, the volunteer fire department-surely some are open a few hours a week, or by appointment.

This was not a normal day. On this day, the tiny town bustled. Its broad gravel street, built wide to accommodate parked farm wagons and the horses and oxen that drew them, was crowded with vehicles, mostly big old trucks once painted brown or blue and now a patchwork of rust and faded earth tones. Each had a stocked gun rack. The trucks were parked, slant-in, filling both sides of the street, and then, when there were too many to park legally, abandoned higgledy-piggledy, blocking the main street as it went north, away from Route 12, and the couple of east-west side streets. More trucks were arriving. There were at least three behind him and more coming from the dirt track that led north. Farmers hopped out onto the gravel street, the men wearing what they had worn to work in the fields, mostly denim and farm caps, the older women wearing less denim, more polyester. Many wore black armbands. They swarmed around a white, clapboard building called Bristow Hall, where Bristow's hopeful motto was repeated, and where, if the signs could be believed, the Bristow Lions and Rotary clubs met weekly.

But this was not a market day, a celebration. The crowd was in an ugly mood; it didn't take much to see that.

They made noise. They revved their big truck engines. They talked roughly and gesticulated, in the way frustrated, angry people do when the source of their anger and frustration isn't reachable.

A young farmer drove in with his radio turned up. Someone hollered, "Turn the damned thing off." More honking. Everyone looked up. A school bus drove in, a 1950s-era Superior painted sloppy red-white-and-blue stripes with something that could have been house-paint, and decorated on the side with the notice "nuke rat patrol" and "dump the dump." Above the driver, "kooks" was printed in large letters. The driver honked again and gestured to indicate he wanted parking space. Several vehicles moved, very slowly, and the milling crowd accommodated their movement and that of the bus.

The Kooks' driver, a wild-eyed man in his fifties, jumped out, followed by a dozen or so elderly women and a few men, many wearing T-shirts that read "Boyd County Hostage." A thoughtful-looking man with a determined jaw yelled, "Hey, Paul," to the wild man, but Paul had melted into the crowd, talking to at least three other people, working the crowd like a politician on speed, and waving his fist in the air.

Paul stopped at the side of a tall man all in black, wearing a big black cowboy hat out of place with the farm caps the others wore. He called him "Doc," as in Holliday, and the two laughed roughly at some shared joke. A tiny woman stood next to them, scowling at their levity and brandishing her third, or maybe thirty-third, cigarette of the day while irritably thrusting a shopping bag toward two young men she seemed to select at random. The men grabbed the bag and ran through the crowd, pulling bunches of bright-red leaflets from it, pressing them on people scattered throughout the crown, urging them to pass the leaflets on. The leaflets spread like a stain.

With such a hullabaloo, the authorities could not be far behind, and here they were, a fleet of four state cruisers, sirens blazing, turned onto the Bristow road with a flourish of dust, slowed with a screech, and parked where they wanted. Doors opened and the troopers jumped out, two or three to a cruiser.

They'd be no match for the mob, but each carried a regulation pistol and looked serious, even as they waved to the man with the firm jaw, who didn't wave back, and then to another man, standing in the middle of a group of women, who did.

In the troopers' wake, the bad guys pulled up, their short rental-car caravan pulling as close to the Bristow Hall as the mob would allow. They waited in their cars for the troopers to clear a path to a side door. Then they rushed in, revealing business suits and nice haircuts, and carrying little that would have to be carried out-no handouts, graphs, or flow charts.

The blue-capped stranger got out of his pickup and followed them in, using the same door and speaking to no one. He staked out a small space near the door.

Inside, the bad guys huddled together, a small group of US Ecology and Bechtel International engineers. It was their job, he knew, to convince the people that the low-level nuclear waste dump being planned for Boyd County was safe. He also knew this was only the latest meeting of many, and not much new information would come out. The engineers put their briefcases and a few papers on the table in the front of the room. Half stayed at the table as the other half went to the bathrooms in small groups of two or three.

The police had followed them into the hall, and looked around. The crowd was shuffling the seats, pushing the few folding chairs toward the center of the room to allow room for as many standees at the side as possible. The elderly women from the bus walked in and took the chairs, reserving places for their friends and pushing the chairs together even closer. Some opened bags and took out knitting. One giggled and pointed up, and they all looked.

Several pillow-sized papier-mâché cows and a crashed black-and-white, made by local women, decorated the ceiling. At a meeting just like this one, the police had issued a distress call, and a police cruiser, speeding from distant Valentine, had taken out a half-dozen cows.

Several farmers detached themselves from the crowd and came forward to sit at one end of the table. They too had clipboards and charts. A chubby local man, sad-faced with a Pagliacci smile, took the microphone, announced that his name was Loren Sieh, and called the meeting to order. The crowd cheered him and then booed as he introduced the US Ecology representatives who would be speaking, boyish Vice President Rich Paton with his graying blond curls, and balding John DeOld, who looked like he'd prepared for the meeting by pasting on a smile.

The meeting had started.

Now the farmers standing outside pushed their way inside. The police stood in a line, three men on either side of the back door, backs to the wall, watching as much of the crowd as they could.

Suddenly there was a gasp from outside, and the crowd near the entrance rushed out. The police stayed where they were, facing the crowd and the engineers, but the blue-capped stranger followed the crowd out.

Another school bus had arrived, this one sporting pastel camouflage, as if the Rangers had prepared to invade the Sears bedding department. Its double doors cranked open, and out swag­ gered four men dressed in hunting fatigues, their faces painted in matching cammo, their features obscured. Slung over their shoulders were repeating rifles that could have been AK-47s. Around their belts were clips of ammunition, and their pockets bulged with more.

The four men spoke to no one. They heel-toed through the doors and headed for chairs in the back of the room, sitting down noisily just in front of the row of state troopers.

The room went briefly quiet.

"Who're they?" asked one woman loudly, in a false, stagy voice.

"I've never seen them before in my life," said another, not bothering to look up from her knitting.

"Couldn't recognize them if I'd known 'em for years under all that stuff," said a man.

The four cammo'd men smirked. One leaned forward to place his rifle at his feet, and dropped some of his ammunition. Loosely stored in a side pocket, the clip fell to the floor with a loud thud that first silenced the room, and then brought murmurs of excitement from the crowd.

The state troopers didn't move. There wasn't much they could do, any more. They were both out-manned and out-gunned.

"Smooth move," one trooper sniggered.

This was too much for the blue-capped stranger. He bolted. He wasn't a coward but there was no reason for him to be brave here. It wasn't his war. He ran to his small pickup, started the engine, and turned it so it faced Route 12. He knew that police radios and cell phones didn't work in Boyd County. It didn't matter who was right, if those policemen needed help, he was ready to drive for help, all the way to O'Neil if need be. He waited and listened for the sound of gunfire.

After a half hour or so, he got tired of waiting, and put his pickup in gear. He turned right onto Route 12 and drove west, through Spencer Village, a small but busy town, and on past the entrance to Butte Village.

The old barn with a hand-painted sign reading "dope pusher, dump pusher, same thing" made him smile for the first time that day. The hundreds of little white signs that he didn't read bothered him. There was something obsessive about how many there were. He didn't look again until he reached a certain unused field about a mile west of Butte, on the north side of the road.

He pulled over. Just a piece of land. Didn't look too wet from where he stood. No lake, like they was saying. Not to be seen from the road anyways.

He passed another sign, this one in the shape of a cross. "REMEMBER RUBY RIDGE," it said.

They never thought Ruby Ridge would explode, he thought, never thought Waco would explode. Never understood that even a friendly dog will bite when he's cornered.

Now, they didn't think Boyd County would explode. Well, if it wasn't exploding now, it would soon.


Boyd County Tinder: How It Began

Boyd County has been explosive since its founding in 1882, the year after the gunfight at the OK Corral. By then, the Wild West was being tamed, and moving from tawdry reality to legend. Annie Oakley, symbol of the legend, was already twenty years old.

But Boyd was just getting started. Until then, Boyd belonged to the Dakota Territory, divided between the Rosebud and Ponca Indian settlements. The federal government under President Chester Arthur voided the Indian claims, pushed the Indians back into what is now South Dakota, and gave the land to Nebraska.

Once open to settlement Boyd filled quickly with eager homesteaders, drawn to the fertile, pretty land lying between the Missouri River and the Ponca Creek.

By 1920, the population had swelled to over 8,000 inhabitants. Fifteen tiny trading posts had become boomtowns, several with over 600 permanent residents. Boyd developed an intricate and varied economy to meet the needs of its homesteaders, most of whom arrived with little and needed much. The larger towns-Anoka, Spencer, Butte, Lynch, and Bristow-sold everything a farm family needed and then some: farming and building supplies, housewares, clothing, and books and newspapers in English, German, and Czech. You'd have found a saloon, hotel, and several boardinghouses. Some towns even had a small factory or two that made soda pop or furniture, ground flour or milled wood. Even the smallest village had a postal drop, a dry-goods store, a grain elevator, a church or meetinghouse, a bar, and a boardinghouse or hotel.

On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, the farmers came to town and stayed until nightfall. They sold their milk and cream, purchased items they needed, attended a livestock auction, and then looked around for entertainment. They waltzed or polkaed at a dance hall to a live band; they attended a lecture; they went to theaters to see a traveling show, vaudeville acts, or newsreels and movies. If they desired, they could earn extra money, exchange gossip, get drunk in a bar, and settle minor disputes by brawling in the streets. But the following morning, on Sunday, most came back in to church or sokol.¹

Boyd County was also a magnet for transients. It lay on one of the great east-west migration routes, and travel was expensive and very slow. Hotels were filled with better-off folk: gamblers, horse thieves, and commercial travelers. Boardinghouses took in seasonal workers, old-age pensioners, and high school students whose parents lived far from town. Fields near town became temporary camps for Native Americans, Romany gypsies, and hobos.

With so much activity and so little law enforcement, horse and cattle thieves found Boyd County a pleasant and tolerant place to work, and many called it one of their homes. The tree-lined inlets along the Ponca Creek hid the rustled livestock.

The thieves hid their horses, but had no need to hide themselves, and they didn't try. They spent money lavishly in Boyd County's towns, buying entertainment, popularity, and protection, and lost it gambling with their old friends, and with some of the savvier of Boyd County's new arrivals.

Boyd County's new farmers were surrounded by danger, from the displaced and potentially hostile Indians to the north, horse and cattle rustlers to the south, and transients arriving daily from the east and west along the river. There was no effective law enforcement, and it fell to Boyd's fearful and inexperienced farmers to assure their own safety. They became cohesive and intolerant because they had to. "Self-help"-that is, vigilantism-was their only option. Jack Engelhaupt's grandfather-in-law gambled with the rustlers, and Jack has heard all the stories firsthand.

"Army couldn't catch the criminals. Federal marshals they sent in disappeared. But the local vigilantes cleaned them up. I don't know how many they shot and hung. There's many an old cottonwood tree standing yet today, just go south of town, across the Niobrara River, that had decorations hanging in it.

"The vigilantes even hung the old county treasurer. They took him out and hung him because he was stealing money from the county. And that's a whole 'nother subject we could talk all night on. Kid Wade and Doc Middleton and people that violate the public trust."

And that is the collective social memory of Boyd County. Hard work, community, and "self-help."

This memory is alive today in Boyd County. Boyd has had little in-migration since its homesteading days, and most residents trace themselves back fewer than four generations to a European settler. Residents have a collective and very personal memory of the European history of Boyd County.

That memory is dear and bittersweet. Since Boyd County's optimistic founding, and within the memory of many of its residents, life has changed in dramatic and mostly unpleasant ways. Economically, of course, life got better. Much better. Socially and structurally, life got worse. Much worse.

Farms have become more isolated and stark. They have approximately sextupled in acreage while what they produce has been streamlined. Gone is the variety that made farming a varied, complex business. The horses, sheep, ducks, chickens, and kitchen gardens are no more. The farms now produce beef cattle and beef cattle feed. And they do it as efficiently as possible. At the same time commodity prices dropped and the amount of cultivated land needed to feed even a small family rose. Soon the 160-acre homestead wasn't enough to support a family, then 320 wasn't, and then 640. Today, 1280 rarely does the trick, even though farm family size has shrunk to the national average of three or four.

Today's farmers, these grandchildren of homesteaders, are now in late middle age. They are capable, sturdy folk, who will drive their John Deeres, unassisted, into their seventies and even eighties. They own a snug, easy-care ranch house with central heating, comfortable furniture, and a washer-dryer. If they want a new or bigger house they order one prefab from Omaha and, within weeks, it is trucked up to them. Their barns are built of rustproof aluminum. Their cows are fat and demanding, and their haystacks line up in cylindrical precision, courtesy of a single baling machine.

They have six to ten brothers and sisters, but only two or three children of their own. These children, now in their thirties and forties, have a university education and live in Omaha. They remember the farm as a childhood home, a place to come for Christmas and holidays. Their children's children, now in their late teens, are the right age to take over their grandparents' farm, but they are a generation away from knowing how to do it, and the 1280-acre farms that now supports their grandparents will not in future support them.

The farmers will sell or lease their land to a neighbor, and the farm-consolidation trend will continue. Nothing on the farming horizon will either retain young people or reduce farm size. No llamas, no alpacas, no racehorses, no asparagus, no fruits, no grape vines. Not even controlled substances. The ubiquitous hemp that overruns Boyd County's roadsides is THC-free and smells worse than a fart when lit, as any Boyd County resident will tell you.2

The infrastructure has decayed. The public access roads that formed a grid pattern every mile are no longer kept up or end at one lonely farmer's driveway. And the rivers, which seemed such a blessing to the early settlers, are now a curse, as many of the small bridges that held Boyd County together have collapsed, and the few lonely roads dead-end at a ruined bridge over the Ponca Creek or Niobrara River.

The Spencer Centennial Book and the 1897 Centennial Atlas show a total of eighteen boomtowns and settlements in Boyd County. Today there are five struggling towns and three hamlets.

Naper is (and always has been) the westernmost town; its current population is about 110. Butte is the next active town, with a population in the three hundreds. Anoka is still there, population four. Spencer is the largest town, with a population in the five hundreds. Bristow's is in the low two hundreds. Gross's population is four if the Finnegan kids are home from college. Lynch's population is in the two hundreds. Monowi's current population is Elsie Eiler.

Of Boyd County's five towns, all have taken title to most down­ town businesses in foreclosure proceedings. Naper, Butte, and Bristow have each reopened one or two businesses-a couple of restaurants, a movie theater, a community center or two-as town-run cooperatives to provide the town a sense of social cohesion. Mostly the towns are economic shells clinging to the most basic services: gas, groceries, liquor, school, and a church or two with a part-time minister.

If current trends continue, within twenty years only one town will remain. The likely choices are Spencer, the largest town, located at the intersection of the two main roads and with most of the county's functioning businesses, and Butte, home to the (always movable) county seat.

Boyd County's population drops with every census: 1920-8243; 1940-6060; 1960-4513; 1980-3331; 2000-2438. According to the 2000 census, Boyd County had 1014 total households but only 306 with children under eighteen. Boyd County also has 392 vacant homes. Within the next twenty years, Boyd County may further depopulate and become even more isolated.

Yet that might not be its worst problem.

With increased isolation comes increased fear of the unknown. Social skills are lost, and xenophobia increases.

Would it have been hard for Boyd County to turn down any development, even a dangerous dumpsite? Maybe the answer was "yes."

Maybe it was just a question of which tiny town would get there first.


Butte: The Little Town That Could

Competition, and not cooperation, has always been the relationship between Boyd County's dwindling towns. Geographically disadvantaged Butte has a 100-plus year history of fighting against long odds to survive.

Although neither on a river or one of the great overland trails, Butte got itself proclaimed the county seat in 1895. Bypassed by the railroad, it developed close relations with Anoka, the nearest railroad town. It sent some of its people to work there, and positioned itself as a sort of bucolic suburb, adopting the slogan "Prettiest Inland Town in Nebraska," "inland" being a euphemism for "away from the railroad."

During this time Butte managed to hold on to its "county seat" designation and even acquired the courthouse, though local legend insists this was done through trickery. All the towns wanted it, so inspectors from Omaha were sent to decide among them. Butte alone discovered the date of the tour, and told none of the other towns. The inspectors arrived on a non-market day when most of the towns, including the big railroad towns, Anoka and Spencer, were quiet. But in Butte, all the farmers were told to come into town, and Butte's streets were filled with laughing, eager shoppers.

No towns were more bitter about Butte's success than Spencer and a tiny collection of sod houses called Mankato. Mankato was located near the dead center of Spencer, Anoka, and Butte, and thought it was the obvious compromise site. Mankato died shortly after that, and its few residents moved, mostly to Spencer.

Even the fortunate railroad towns weren't fortunate for long. Indian's motorbikes and then Ford's motor cars (most used as taxis and hire-cars) soon surpassed the railroads as the preferred mode of travel.

Now, of course, Boyd County's nerve center is its highway system, or, more precisely, its four paved town-to-town roads (see map in illustration insert). Spencer has the best position on the roads, at the junction of the two most traveled. It is the only Boyd County town on U.S. Route 281, which leads south to O'Neil, a much larger town, and eventually to Omaha, and north to the Yankton (South Dakota) Indian Reservation and its casino in Fort Randall. It is also bisected by Route 12, which goes east-west, linking every viable Boyd town. Spencer's position has earned it the largest population, the most businesses, the biggest school. Butte is at the junction of Route 12 and the little-used State Route 11. The fourth road, a secondary road, runs north-south through Naper, leading to almost-ghost towns in both directions.

Towns remember fighting over the placement of Route 12, knowing as far back as the 1940s that roads would become critical to their survival. Of the then-viable towns, the only town not to get on Route 12 was Anoka.

The omission was critical.

From railroad to road, Anoka was the largest, busiest, most prosperous town in Boyd County, with over 600 residents and thirty-one businesses, including small department stores, hotels, a school, and small factories that made soda pop, milled lumber, furniture, and other essentials. Older Boyd County residents today remember going to Anoka to shop the multiple hardware stores, dry goods stores, feed stores, and a half-dozen specialty shops.

Today a secondary gravel road passes apologetically between two wooden grain elevators, an abandoned and rusting cow trailer, and three modest homes.

And that's all that's left of Anoka.

© 2007 Susan Cragin.
All rights reserved.
Published by AMACOM Books
http://www.amacombooks.org
A Division of the American Management Association
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
To order call: 800-250-5308
Email: pubs_cust_serv@amanet.org

Search the full text of this book