Nebraska Territory

It's Friday, October 16th.

On this day in 1854, Francis Burt took the oath as first governor of the Nebraska Territory.

The 45-year-old traveled from his South Carolina home to Nebraska to serve as the territory's first governor.

But two days after he was sworn in, he died.

Picture this.

It's January 1867, and you're standing on the windswept plains of Nebraska Territory.

The temperature has dropped to thirty below zero, and that's before you factor in the wind that cuts through everything like a knife made of ice.

There are no weather apps, no heated cars waiting in the driveway, and absolutely no emergency services coming to rescue you if things go wrong.

Douglas, like Clay and Webster before him, was consumed by a strong passion for the presidency, and to reach his goal it was necessary to win the support of the South.

This he undoubtedly sought to do when he introduced, on January 4, 1854, a bill organizing the Nebraska Territory on the principle of the Compromise of 1850, namely that the people in the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or not.

Unwittingly the avalanche was started.

After a stormy debate, in which important amendments were forced on Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854.

Now, the problem was Southerners wanted one thing out of this and a lot of Northerners wanted another But here was the question.

Which principle will you apply about slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska Territory? Think now of the recent past.

Think of the distant past, in American terms, One, had the Compromise of 1850 already superseded the Missouri Compromise? Think about that.

You had that sacred bargain, they said, of the 36-30 parallel line, dividing free territory from slave territory forever, passed back in 1820.

Douglas, like Clay and Webster before him, was consumed by a strong passion for the presidency, and to reach his goal it was necessary to win the support of the South.

This he undoubtedly sought to do when he introduced, on January 4, 1854, a bill organizing the Nebraska Territory on the principle of the Compromise of 1850. namely that the people in the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or not.

Unwittingly, the avalanche was started.

After a stormy debate, in which important amendments were forced on Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854.

Following the war, he received his first formal degree in geology when he was elected Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania in 1865, a post he held mainly in absentia for seven years.

For the next several years, much of his time was spent studying and reporting on the geology of the Nebraska Territory and Rocky Mountain region.

In 1869, Hayden's activities became officially organized under the Department of the Interior as the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories.

In that same year, he completed a highly successful expedition through the western mountains from Denver to Santa Fe.

We'll come back to this map, but it simply shows you where Indian Territory is.

It shows you the Kansas and Nebraska Territories.

That is everything that's left by 1850 of the original Louisiana Purchase, and it is going to become the most contested, politically contested ground, and eventually violently contested ground in North America.

between Americans who are now becoming polarized.