Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 5-21.
Abstract
Edward McMurty would have been lost to history if it hadn't been for the way he died and for what it meant in frontier Nebraska. McMurty's bloated body was found on 20 June 1869 in a pond on an island in the Platte River, about five miles from the town of Columbus (Fig. 1). He had been missing for six weeks. His body had been tethered to a large log and weighted down in the water. But distant snowmelts in the Rocky Mountains and a torrential Nebraska downpour on June 19th swelled the Platte, which flowed onto the island, flooding the pond, moving the log, and returning McMurty to the light of day.
His body was found by a group of local Platte County settlers who were crossing the island when they spotted the "unfamiliar object in the pond".z McMurty was laying face down in the water, still tethered to the log. One arm extended outward as if he were swimming. The settlers thought it wise to seek help.
Later that day a rescue team of about six men, including brother-in-law George Grant and friend and neighbor Isaac Clark, pulled the log and corpse to the bank and disentangled the two. Although they had all known McMurty well, they could identify him only by his clothes, a strange outfit of a flannel shirt, two pairs of linen pants, and mismatched boots. The body itself was decomposed be" yond recognition, though the multiple wounds that killed him were still evident: there were bullet holes and knife wounds on his back and side, his ears and nose had been cut (or bitten) off, and an arrow was lodged in his throat and protruded about six inches from his mouth.
They loaded what once had been Edward McMurty into a skiff and floated the body just over two miles down the Platte in Butler County, where they had arranged to meet the coroner. The body lay in the skiff overnight. Next morning, the coroner, aided by the rescue team, performed an autopsy. They "laid open" the rib cage and found neat round bullet holes in the liver and lungs. Grant pulled the arrow out of McMurty's mouth, spilling teeth with it. Grant said, and the others agreed, that it was a Pawnee arrow, smaller than the Sioux's (Lakotas'), made of dogwood, and pliable.
McMurty's death set in motion a series of events that reveals much about the uneasy relationship between the settlers and Native Americans in late-nineteenth-century Nebraska. It brought out the settlers' latent hostility toward the original Nebraskans, as well as the paternalism of federal officials who sought to protect their Native American "wards" while at the same time destroying their cultures. It exposed the inadequacies of the judicial system in dealing with crimes involving Americans and Native Americans and focused attention on sovereignty and capital punishment, which are still contested issues today. And it demonstrated the incompatibilities of the two different ways of life that intersected in central Nebraska in the late 1860s: one that had endured for centuries but then was in its final years; and the other, which had barely taken root, but was about to change the entire face of the land.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln