Annotations from the Archives: The End of an Era for the Chief
Last week, we received the last edition of the Red Cloud Chief, a newspaper that had a 150-year history. It was Webster County's first newspaper, and it outlasted several other papers that came along later. Founded and edited by C.L. Mather, the Chief was an outspoken booster for the new town of Red Cloud, even though it didn't shy away from reporting the hardships that befell Webster County's early citizens.
Volume I, No. 15, is the first surviving issue of the Red Cloud Chief. The work of organizing the county is evidenced in these early pages, as the paper printed a number of ballots, charters, and constitutions. But they also served as a sort of directory—long before the Yellow Pages or Google—of providers of goods and services in a country where goods and services were hard to come by.
When newspapers began to be scanned for preservation and research, the Red Cloud Chief was the first of our local papers to be digitized in this way. It initially became available on microfilm and later, thanks to the wonders of the internet, in searchable databases like Newspapers.com or Chronicling America. It's hard to overstate the utility of having a newspaper with a long, continuous run like the Chief if you're interested in interpreting local history or, in our case, exploring the life of Willa Cather.
We know that Willa Cather held a warm place in her heart for newspapers. Her career began there, and she was a regular subscriber to the "Red Cloud papers," as she wrote to friends. She particularly called out the Argus and the Commercial Advertiser, but it stands to reason, since Cather's personal activities and even her writing were featured in the Chief, that she was also a regular reader of that newspaper. Decades later as Cather Studies were just beginning, it was through those preserved newspapers that we were able to follow along with Red Cloud happenings, just as Cather had from her apartment in New York. Countless researchers have read these papers and posited theories of how Cather's work was influenced by or in conversation with the events that the Chief documented.
As timing would have it, a few weeks ago, NWCC staff saw an intriguing post on the Blue Hill Leader Facebook page sharing some historic photographs taken through the years that were “up for grabs.” Melissa Lounsbury from the Leader was contacted right away, because many images had Red Cloud or Bladen interest, and several were taken by Bradbrook and Wegmann, photographers who had studios in Red Cloud’s Moon Block (where the NWCC is located) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries..
Now we know that the Blue Hill Leader and Red Cloud Chief are to merge and move operations to Red Cloud, prompting the clean-out of the Leader office; some of the photos found there were bound for museums collections at the Webster County Historical Museum and the National Willa Cather Center, while others were simply looking for new homes—perhaps with descendants or interested community members.
A few days later, Melissa and NWCC archivist Tracy Tucker met at the Chief office to transfer the photos. Though not much was known beyond the names of the subjects of the photos, they add to our knowledge of the Bradbrook & Wegmann Moon Block studio and expand our collection of their images. Teresa Young, director of the WCHM, received a file folder of images from her museum's opening, as well as photos of Red Cloud High School students in the late 1980s.
“We received a wonderful donation of several photos from the late 1960s and early 1970s of the interior of the museum,” Young said. “It was such a delightful surprise to see what the museum looked like back in the beginning! The museum is very grateful to the Blue Hill Leader for their generosity in donating these photos and others.”
Among those images gleaned from the Facebook exchange for the NWCC was an early twentieth century photograph of “Seb Johnson” from Blue Hill. “Seb Johnson interested me because he was wearing a WW1-era Army (or National Guard) uniform; knowing that Grosvenor P. Cather was a part of Blue Hill's Company K Guard unit, I wanted to see what I could find out about Seb,” Tucker said.
“As it turns out, he played an important role in Company K history: on Johnson's farm two miles east of Blue Hill, Company K built their federal regulation rifle range. It was completed in October 1915 as the Nebraska National Guard began preparing to send men to Lincoln to train for deployment to the Mexican Border," Tucker said. G.P. Cather, the main character of Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours, would have spent a great deal of time on that target range, where he became well-known as a sharp-shooter. Much of those preparations for war were reported back to our local papers.
A generous donation like this one from the Blue Hill Leader is just one example of the considerate reciprocity that repositories like the National Willa Cather Center rely upon to bolster and preserve their historic collections within the community. It also highlights the important role that our local newspapers have played in the preservation of our community's history—imagine the difficulty of interpreting the early history of Red Cloud without the newspaper files to refer to!!
Red Cloud and Webster County are fortunate to have not one, but two, archival collections available to the public. Their presence and careful curation assures that important historic photographs, images, documents, and other materials from the past will not be lost to time—or eBay and antique shops—but rather carefully preserved and shared with anyone interested in investigating the past. We're fortunate, too, to have had a dedicated local paper like the Chief. We're thankful that the new local paper, the Webster County Sun, will continue the legacy of sharing local news and being a partner in the preservation of local history. We're sorry to say goodbye to the Chief, though; it feels a little like saying goodbye to an old colleague.
Do you have an item of interest related to Willa Cather or greater Webster County? Would you like to visit the NWCC Collections & Archives? Please contact Tracy Tucker at ttucker@willacather.org.