There was little promise of what was to come on that spring day in 1856, when thirteen men stopped in their march across the prairie and dedicated the ground on which they stood as the townsite of Columbus. These were the founders who built a city, beginning with their bare hands.

First, the crude sod houses began to appear. Then came the lean-to --- the lumber hauled across the plains for the rough frame dwellings, next came schools and churches in which to feed the deep spiritual hunger of the pioneers. Finally, the railroad stretched its great steel arms across the broad valley of the Platte, bringing with it the rest of the buoyant, expansive, nineteenth century world.

Out across the Overland Trail they journeyed until they came to a point approximately eight miles east of the present site of Columbus. It was near McPherson's Lake that this scouting party set up a marker early in March, 1856, to establish the first location of a town.

It took days for them to carry word back to their companions that they had found the location for a new townsite. Finally the thirteen men were equipped and ready for the trip. Calling themselves the "Columbus Town Company," they set out for their new home. After several days of travel, toward evening on May 29, 1856, the tired, weary caravan of thirteen men with their ox teams, halted at a point on the north side of the Loup River near Buck Island.

When they came to the open spot on the prairie where they intended starting a town, the eldest of the group was forty-one years old, two were only twenty-two. They were builders as well as dreamers, for they set about building log cabins and sod houses, planting groves and developing timber claims. Some ran ferries and freighted and put in crops. And, as Columbus began to grow into a full-fledged pioneer town, these were the men who erected sawmills, grist mills, and breweries. Most of them had received good educations and, in addition, they possessed the pioneer's "knack" of carpentry, brick-laying and all the thousand odd jobs attendant upon building a home and a community.

The original town plot of Columbus was one mile square. The grove of trees on the Jacob Louis farm property marked the eastern boundary, and the landscape, as far as one could see in any direction, was unbroken prairie. There were numerous trees on the banks of the Loup at that time. Nearly every member of the original Columbus Company had an ox-team, and during the first summer, they broke ground and planted. Grasshoppers later destroyed their crops, but in the winter of 1856-57, wild game was abundant and the pioneers kept from starving by eating deer and elk.

"The day on which Columbus was born was cloudless and calm" Mr. Louis said, when interviewed almost half a century later. He described a herd of one thousand elk he saw the first winter, driven before a prairie fire until stopped by the river which was running "bank full."

Only about sixteen people lived in the entire area of Platte County that first winter. Four of these resided outside the settlement of Columbus.

Margaret Curry