It is 8, with a wind chill of -6, very much January, so it is appropriate that I have this old postcard of, as it says, "Winter Scene on the Niobrara River, McLains Bridge." I presume that's the bridge in the foreground with the team and buggy on it, not the one in the background. We also have two of Carns Bridge and Carns, Neb., the latter addressed to "Jos. Koftan, Bassett, Nebr." They are so dim, I will have to have a better day to photograph them. I found the approximate spot of long-ago Carns, on the border of Keya Paha and Rock Counties, northwest of Newport, slightly northeast of Bassett, obviously on the river. Supposedly it's where the Black Hills Trail crossed the Niobrara. Doc Middleton's gang of horse thieves allegedly headquartered near Carns. Google Earth shows apparently a farm at the spot Lat. 42.73472, Long. -99.48194. Where McLains Bridge was, I cannot find.
Any Nebraskan knows the Niobrara is now a National Scenic River, noted in camping/hiking magazines as the meeting area of four distinct ecological zones east of Valentine, an extremely popular canoeing and rafting stream in the Sandhills (one of the world's largest stabilized dunes area, a recent question on Jeopardy, Nebraska a long ways from most of the world's deserts). Tourism on it is hotly contested by the ranchers along it. Beginning in Wyoming, it runs across the top of Nebraska until it empties into the Missouri, a Lewis & Clark camping site, near the original Niobrara town site. That's the biggest dip South Dakota takes into the top center of my home county on the map of northeastern Nebraska. The French trappers' name for the Niobrara, as I've mentioned in Knox County history, was L'eau Qui Court [low key coor], the title over the Niobrara (town) cemetery and the original name of my home county (Knox), usually translated, as by the little South Dakota town across from the old Missouri River ferry site, as Running Water. Niobrara is the same, a Native American word for "running water." I relish early territorial maps because they use the French name. My French tells me it is literally The Water Which Moves Swiftly. Why do I make such a point of it? Because Laurence and Fern Koftan first lived in a little place on the river, where Velma was born.
I don't know that there's much difference in the two photos above, except that the first has Fern's handwriting and the second seems clearer. The pictures below have, first, Fern and her sisters and then one with Audree in the yard. Between the two pictures, siding has been put on and a kind of boardwalk built over the barren ground. I'm presuming the barrel was to catch rain water, which people still did when I was little. I don't know who the two women are up by the house in the second photo, but I'd guess one is Gramma K. What I remember is that Mom said they lived there until she was three, which doesn't explain Audree's being in the photo. The house was clearly identified as Velma's birthplace, and it was considered part of the Mariaville community. Where the river is, I don't know, though Mom said the place was right on the river, and she contended they had to watch out for water moccasins, which I found strange because that snake hasn't been sighted farther north than southeastern Nebraska. Rattlesnakes are still found in the area, of course. On the Peters homestead, for that reason I was very wary of the west pasture and a long hill so covered with whitish crumbly rock that it was called Sugar Loaf, though Sugar Loaf was where Mom found arrowheads as a child and said Indian pipe grew. Cousins Denny and Mike Ellingson had to contend with rattlers when they stayed summers in the 1940s-50s with Gramma and Grampa and were out in the fields, shocking grain and such.
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