Pioneer Steamboated Up Rivers to Settle on Nebraska Plains
Mrs. Helena Stough Has Lived in Ponca since 1858.
By Harvey L. Peterson.
Ponca, Neb., Dec. 18.—Perhaps Mrs. Helena E. Stough, 83-year old pioneer, of Ponca, has witnessed more of the history of Dixon county in the making than any other woman in the county, for she has lived in Ponca for the greater part of 68 years.
As a girl of 15, Mrs. Stough came to America from Germany with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Ernst, on a sailing vessel, in 1858. She and her parents landed at New Orleans and took a steamboat up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to Sioux City, which then was but a frontier village. The party was met there by Mrs. Adam Smith and her husband, who had settled here in 1856, being the first white settlers in Dixon county. Mrs. Smith was an older sister of Mrs. Stough’s and the party traveled to Ponca in a covered wagon by oxen.
The year 1858 was a memorable one for Dixon county. In August of that year, shortly after her arrival here, Mrs. Stough witnessed the first visitation of grasshoppers. They came by the millions and ate the growing crops in garden and field. At that time such a misfortune was little short of disaster for the struggling pioneers and foreshadowed hungry days and hard times. That winter many a good farm could have been purchased for a dollar. The main difficulty was in obtaining the dollar.
In November of that year the county was organized and could boast less than 300 persons. On the second Monday in December the first election in the county was held. There were only four polling places in the county and each place intended it should be the county seat. On election day the polls were opened at Ponca, Galena, Ionia and North Bend. The latter villages were located on the Missouri river bottom in the northwestern part of the county, and are only memories now, having been swallowed by the greedy river years ago. The election was a lively affair and Ponca won by a small majority. In size it was the largest town, having eight buildings and a dozen families.
Mrs. Stough was married in 1860 to Dr. Solomon B. Stough, the man who surveyed and laid out the townsite of Ponca and was one of the county’s first dozen settlers. For years, Dr. Stough had a leading part in county affairs. He was its first surveyor and also its first doctor. He built and operated the first sawmill in Ponca and donated the lumber for the first Lutheran church built here.
Mrs. Stough shared the settler’s anxiety over the Indian scare of 1862, when the fierce Sioux went on warpath. She felt the pinch of the drouth of 1864, saw the relentless grasshoppers come again and for the last times in 1874, ’75 and ’76. She knows the horrors of early day blizzards, especially those of 1873 and 1888. She has watched Ponca develop from a handful of log houses into a modern little city. She has seen oxen give way to the horse and automobile—the prairie turnpike transformed into a hard surfaced gravel highway.
The pioneer woman makes her home with her daughter, Mrs. Cassie Williams, in a brick house built by her husband, the second one in Ponca, 55 years ago. Besides Mrs. Williams, she has two other daughters, Mrs. S. K. Bittenbender, of Seattle, Wash.; Mrs. O. I. Newton, of Ponca; and a son, Charles of Spokane, Wash.; and nine grandchildren.
Source: The Sioux City Journal, December 19, 1926
