THE BAR OF OMAHA. FOR nearly thirteen years after the settlement of the city no railroad reached it from the east. The homesick emigran toiled sadly with his team or rolled slowly in the stage-coach across the billowy prairies and muddy bottoms of Iowa. Some, however, preferred the monotonous trip up the Missouri in the frail stern wheel steamers of the day, the length of the voyage depending on the stage of the river, the skill of the pilot and the luck of the boat. The financial depression which followed the panic of 1857 and the outbreak of the Civil war interfered greatly with the growth and development of Omaha. The prospects of the legal profession in these days were not bright. Many adventurous spirits tired of the irksomeness and want of variety in their lives, and escaped from them to Pike's Peak and the Pacific coast, or sought excitement in the stirring scenes of battle. Still from time to time during those years a lawyer wandered out to this new and unknown region, and either growing speedily disheartened with the prospect before him soon found his way home again, or captivated with the life and climate concluded to cast in his lot with the struggling denizens of the frontier city. Of the former class were the late ex-President Arthur and his partner, Henry D. Gardiner, who spent some time in the city without finding encouragement to establish themselves II. permanently; also ex-Judge Conkling, the father of the late distinguished senator of that name, who practiced his profession in Omaha for several months before he discovered that his advanced age, his previous habits of life and the refined associations of his old home had unfitted. him for the petty strifes, the wild, irregular practice and the freedom of manners which he found here. Among the latter were many names still honored and respected throughout the state, such as those of George B.Lake, for seventeen years justice of the supreine court of the state; George W. Doane, now judge of the district court; John I. Redick, afterwards a territorial judge in New Mexico; the late John R. Meredith, Honorable Charles H. Brown, B. E. B. Kennedy, Clinton Briggs, who at the time of his accidental and lamented death* was a prominent candidate for the seat in congress now occupied by Senator Manderson; Chief-Justice Daniel Gantt, James G. Chapman, the late Senator Phineas W. Hitchcock, who practiced his profession in 1860, and George I. Gilbert, who was prosecuting attorney in 1861. Remarkable among them, and noted *On a trip eastward in 1882, he was missed by his fellow-travelers, and found dead on the track, having been run over by the train. Whether the accident was caused by sudden dizziness or a misstep will never be known. all over the state, as he would have been in any western commonwealth, was William A. Little, or, as he was universally called, Bill Little. Coming to the territory in 1856, from the state of Illinois, he took from the first and kept a place in the front rank of the Omaha bar. Genial to a fault, of winning manners, familiar with all classes, careless in his attire, with superabundant energy and vitality, the idol of his clients, whose causes he made his own, possessed of a ready and fascinating eloquence, keen wit and charming conversational powers, he captivated juries and bewitched the younger members of the bar, who looked up to him with fond admiration. For years after his death his influence among the latter could be perceived in a studied negligence of dress and violent, sometimes grotesque gesticulation in their speeches. At the election of 1866, in anticipation of the admission of Nebraska to statehood, he was chosen chief-justice. It is doubtful if his habits of mind and life, or his legal attainments would have enabled him to maintain his reputation in this exalted position. But the rough life of the frontier and the temptations to which his generous nature exposed him proved too trying to a constitution never very strong, and he died early in the year 1867, before he had taken the oath of office. Another brilliant meteor which shot across the firmament about this time and speedily disappeared beneath the horizon was Milton H. Parks. He was a young man, indifferently educated, not deeply versed in legal lore, and of pronounced convivial habits; yet those who were here in 1867 remember to this day the florid and effer vescent eloquence of his address to the jury in the defence of one Otway G. Baker on his trial for murder in the first degree. It was a marvelous exhibition of skillful rhetoric. The tones of his voice were peculiarly musical, his words well chosen, his illustrations pertinent and his power over a jury marked and evident. But his career virtually began and closed. with that single speech, and the extravagant and erring spirit soon betook himself to other fields, leaving behind him only the memory of his solitary effort. The fixing of the initial point of the Union Pacific railroad, by President Lincoln, at a point "on the western boundary of lowa, east of and opposite to the east line of section ten in township fifteen, north of range thirteen, east of the sixth principal meridian," was the first act which promised permanence to Omaha, and the digging of the first spadeful of sand on the river bottom in the prosecution of that adventure was the signal for a gradual increase in the values of real estate, which has continued, with but temporary interruptions, to the present day. The somewhat vague and contradictory wording of the President's proclamation left a doubt whether the eastern terminus of the road was to be in Iowa or Nebraska, and some years subsequently gave rise to litigation which was finally settled by a decision of the supreme court of the United States, declaring Council Bluffs, in Iowa, to be entitled to that valuable distinction. The actual commencement of the road, however, was at Omaha, and for four years it pursued its way up the Platte under adversities, perplexities, tribulations and disappointments which might well have appalled its projectors. Every pound of material and supplies had to be brought to Omaha by way of the tortuous and capricious Missouri; its route lay through what was then thought to be an uninhabitable wilderness, infested by hostile tribes, and yielding nothing for the support of man or the construction of a road; and envious rivals north and south were eagerly pushing towards the hundredth meridian in the hope of becoming entitled to the subsidy promised by government to the corporation which should first reach that coveted point. When the authentic narrative of that gigantic enterprise comes to be written, the historian will dwell more largely on the sublime faith and courage of its promoters and more leniently on their errors and transgressions than competitors and demagogues will now allow him to do. In the year 1867 three circumstances combined to give Omaha an assured growth, and to point to it as a desirable spot for the emigrating lawyer: the Union Pacific had reached and passed the hundredth meridian, and thus insured the aid of the National government towards its completion; the Chicago & Northwestern railroad had pushed its way across the state of Iowa, reaching the Missouri river at Omaha, and on the first of March Nebraska ended its era of pupilage and became a state. Any one of these events would have assured a rapid growth to a city so eligibly situated as is Omaha. Coming together they produced an influx of inhabitants which was limited only by the capacity of the city to house and feed them. Thousands unable to find sustenance or shelter pushed on to less crowded places. These places soon themselves felt the inflation, and the wave rolled on, rising and falling, till it reached the Pacific. The following are among the names of attorneys admitted to practice at the term of the district court held in Omaha on the sixteenth day of April, 1867, being the first term held after the admission of the state: Henry G. Worthington, George W. Ambrose, Champion S. Chase, James W. Savage, Charles W. Monroe, John P. Bartlett, William L. Gross, Milton H. Parks, Albert Swartzlander and John C. Cowin. Omaha in the summer and fall of 1867 was a busy hive. Buildings of all sorts and values were rapidly rising on all sides, streets were laid out, grades established, manufactories started, public improvements gotten under way and new industries of all sorts begun. The sound of the hammer and the saw never ceasing by day, the thronged streets, the heaped-up masses of building material, the trains of wagons loaded with merchandise might well have recalled Virgil's stirring description of the building of Carthage, if anyone had had leisure in the midst of the turmoil to recall early studies or classical authors: Instant ardentes Tyrii: pars ducere muros, Molirique arcem, et manibus subvolvere saxa; Pars optare locum tecto, et concludere sulco. Jura magistratusque legunt, sanctumque senatum. Hic portus alii effodiunt: hic alta theatris Fundamenta locant alii, immanisque columnas Rupibus excidunt, scenis decora alta futuris. Whenever a city starts with such vigor and grows with such rapidity there will be litigation, and Omaha was no exception to MAGAZINE OF WESTERN HISTORY. tice had to be settled; all legal points upon which state tribunals have differed in opinion had to be taken to the supreme court for an authoritative exposition of the law. The license and freedom of a frontier city produced their usual result; crimes of violence and assaults were of frequent occurrence. It was a fact worthy of notice that the meaner crimes -burglary, pocket-picking, injuries to women and the like-were comparatively unknown. Such offenses seem to require a higher degree of civilization for their development than is usually afforded by a newly gathered community. The first term of the district court under its new dignity as a state tribunal opened with a criminal docket comprising three cases of homicide and a very promising array of assaults with deadly weapons, and it was several years before this average was seriously diminished. The case of Smiley vs. Sampson, which arose out of a preëmption in what is now the northern portion of the city, was investigated and argued before different state and United States tribunals ten times before the supreme court of Nebraska finally awarded the coveted land to the plaintiff. The litigation gave fortunes to at least two attorneys engaged in it, and echoes from the heated conflict are still occasionally heard in our courts. The leaders of the Omaha bar in those days were, by common consent, A. J. Poppleton and James M. Woolworth. The latter still holds the place to which his learning, eloquence and shrewdness so long since gave him a title; and if the former can be said ever to have lost it, it is only because the acceptance of a large salary as the attorney and council of the Union Pacific railway withdrew him for many years from the general practice of his profession. confined in those days to the city of The labors of the bar were by no means Omaha. Whenever court was held in either Cass, Saunders, Sarpy, Dodge, Cuming, Washington or Burt counties there were the eagles of the Omaha bar gathered together. It took more than ordinary hardships or dangers to keep them at home. They traversed the prairie, they rickety buckboards and generally appeared forded the treacherous Platte in their litigious, whether anyone else was there or at the opening of court smiling, happy and not. The fifteenth of March, 1870, was the day of the commencement of one of lasted three days. A session of court had Nebraska's most famous blizzards, which ten miles south of Omaha. Such was the been fixed for that day at Bellevue, some severity of the storm that not a single juror and hardly a witness or litigant braved its fury. Seventeen lawyers from Omaha, however, appeared at the opening of court, and as no business could be transacted, had three days of enforced idleness before the tempest had sufficiently abated to enable them to take their frozen ears and chilled bodies home again. complete which should omit all mention of No sketch of the bar of Omaha would be the name of Silas A. Strickland. He was born in Rochester, New York, and came of good family on both the paternal and maternal side, his grandfather having been a cousin of Ethan Allen, and his grandmother an aunt of Millard Fillmore. Left at an early age to make his own way in the world, his youth was marked by all the vicissitudes and struggles which usually fall to the lot of a poor and ambitious young man. Admitted to the bar in the year 1850, his poverty would not allow him to await the slow process of alluring clients and building up a practice, and so he became by turns school-master, pay-master on the Erie canal, railroad contractor, politician and stump speaker. He came to the territory, as in a previous article we have seen, in 1854. Here he remained until the breaking out of the war, when he entered the army as a private and left it at its close with the stars of a brigadiergeneral and the reputation of a brave officer. In 1867 he returned to Nebraska, bringing with him a commission as United States district attorney, which office he retained until 1871. Such are the bare outlines of a life which for many years was full of activity. General Strickland was not a learned or even an ordinary lawyer, but he had qualities which were quite as showy and almost as effective as learning or legal skill. Generous, warm-hearted, sympathetic, genial, eloquent and witty, he rarely encountered a jury without winning them over to his side of a controversy. But his heart was never in his practice. Sweeter to him was the turmoil of the most unimportant ward primary election than the dull details of a lawsuit involving millions. Dearer by far the stump, with its wild freedom, its quick repartee and its loud. applause, than the forum, where, though he might enchant jurors, he could not always control judges. Political life was with him an inveterate habit; he could not exist away from the atmosphere of elections. His droll sayings, the melody of his voice, the quickness of his wit and his numberless acts of generosity still survive in the memories of those who knew him, though it is nearly ten years since the flame of his life, which had always blazed too brilliantly, was extinguished. Within the last ten years the city of Omaha has more than trebled its population. The number of its attorneys has increased in about an equal ratio. There are now two hundred and seventy-two practicing lawyers in its courts and its dockets are continually crowded. Its judges and attorneys are, as a rule, equal at least to those of much older communities. Such names as those of Wakeley, Doane, Manderson, Thurston, Poppleton, Woolworth, Cowin, are not easily confined within state limits. But whether in its stately and beautiful court-house dominating the city from its lofty eminence, there are greater manifestations of eloquence, learning, close reasoning, powerful invective or flashing wit than used to be displayed in the humble, inconvenient and ill-ventilated brick edifice which stood at the foot of the Farnam street hill until 1885, may well be doubted. JAMES W. SAVAGE. JAMES M. WOOLWORTH. Among the crowd of bright and ambitious young lawyers who were attracted to Nebraska in its early days, there was no one who has been so thoroughly identified |