Range War: Boot Hill Lowell Nebraska by G.C. Stevens

Photo courtesy of Darla Hilket-Haight

Nebraska Through the Lens

                                      BOOT HILL                             

                            LOWELL NEBRASKA                      

The wagons rolled west, the sunset in their sites,

a land to settle, hard work from day to night

The land crying to be plowed

A land the cattlemen vowed to take

The fences grew and the anger too

The six gun and the rifle settled the score

Fsist and blood would enter the door

The grave would be dug in boot hills yard

Where ghosts of the old west would regard

-G.C. Stevens

Central States Lawman and Outlaws Historic Assn.

RANGE WAR

Many stories in western novels and actual historic accounts of the wild west, tells the stories of range wars between settlers, cattlemen and feuds that took place between the people who moved into the open interior of the American west. The frontier was indeed a dangerous and lawless place where many people found their fate and ended up buried in unmarked graves in the rolling plains of the American west. Very little is known about the background of what occurred in Lowell Nebraska in the 1870's, but monument sits in a lonely place along a dirt road in Lowell Nebraska. The inscription on the monument tells the tale. The following was found on the website "Nebraska Phantasms" This is where legend and storytelling comes in.

"Boot Hill is located southeast of Lowell, some eight miles south of Gibbon, and came into being in the 1860s or early 1870s. A large stone marker is located east of the hill itself. It is said that a number of men are buried there. The exact count is unknown despite what the marker states. Those buried at Lowell’s Boot Hill are said to have all been victims of violence; be it gunfire or hanging. According to an early settler in the area, encounters between what were called “Pony Herders” and cattlemen in the vicinity of Lowell caused a number of men to be shot and killed. It is also possible that some of the men buried on Boot Hill could have been the first occupants of the hill. A story by an old-timer says that the feud between cowboys and homesteaders is false. He said that, of the first seven buried on Boot Hill, two were killed in a robbery, another due to relations with two young women, and two were killed by neighbors - because their ponies had wandered into their sod-corn. Legend has it, that the final shoot-out in Lowell occurred in 1873 in a saloon where, when the smoke cleared, fourteen men were dead. They were said to be buried on Boot Hill. Another story recalled by a local boy, Art Yensen; in the early 1900s, he remembered seeing as many as twenty-five depressions in the soil in the Boot Hill area. In his curiosity, he dug up one of the graves. He and his friends unearthed a skull which revealed a bullet hole in one side and out the other. Yensen was the artist responsible for the stone monument put in place in 1976."

ref Nebraska Phantasms

Transcription:

1870 – 1876

Somewhere in the rolling

Buried on yonder hill

are approximately 25 men and one woman – killed by cross fire in a range war

 between the cowboys and the homesteaders.

BICENTENNIAL PROJECT

Built by the Adams Co. Hist. Soc. May 1976

Sponsored by Kearney Area Chamber of Commerce

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