Joe McDaniel hands the mail pouch off to Terry Browder at the state line during the Lusk Pony Express ride Sept. 13.

For The Herald

The 2008 Lusk Pony Express rode from Harrison, Neb. to Lusk, Wyo. via Van Tassel, Wyo. on Sept. 13, 2008. The Lusk Pony Express rides annually to raise money for the Stagecoach Museum for upkeep and maintenance of the Museum and the artifacts and antiques contained there. The ride is held in memory of Jerry Scott who was involved in the Museum and earlier Pony Express rides before his death.

When the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad was constructed across northern Nebraska, a contractor’s camp was established on the treeless prairie in Sioux County. This became the location of Harrison, Sowbelly Creek, about three miles from camp, supplied water for work teams and human use.

When the rails reached camp in June, 1886, there were no settlers within 10 or 12 miles. By fall immigrant cars containing the possessions of settlers were arriving at “the Summit,” given that name because the railroad traversed a long steep grade to the crest of the hill before stopping. The elevation, 4878 feet above sea level, makes this the highest town in the state.

On Sept. 20, 1886, Governor James W. Dawes signed the documents to organize Sioux County and named Bowen as the temporary county seat. Officially elected to that honor in June, 1887, the village was renamed “Harrison.” The Courthouse, first built of native brick in 1888, was replaced with a modern fire-resistant structure in 1930.

Following the Kinkaid Land Law, passed in 1904, the county was flooded with settlers seeking a full section of land. Harrison’s economy boomed as the town reflected the need for stores, banks, and services. The population reached 500 compared to the 1987 population of 360 residents.

Homesteaders soon learned that they could not make a living on 640 acres of dry land. The demand for goods and services declined and ranches expanded-a trend that still continues.

In 1975 Harrison and Sioux County were the first in Nebraska to be recognized simultaneously as American Bicentennial communities. Citizens of Harrison are grateful to their forebears as well as to the current residents who, through planning, trial and error, and perseverance, have brought the town to its present status.

Van Rensselaer Schuyler Van Tassell did not want a town named in his honor-particularly the small depot village a few miles from what would be named the Wyoming and Nebraska border.

And because of that, the elderly Dutchman-who was among the biggest landowners in the Rocky Mountain region, and a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt-never forgave officials of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad who named the tiny place after him.

Van Tassell had acquired the land surrounding his namesake village by marrying one of his five wives and treated the community like an illegitimate child. He ignored the town and its residents and even insulted it by shipping in supplies for his Van Tassell Ranch from Cheyenne instead of the nearby Van Tassel depot.

In 1886, four years before statehood and in a period of rapid settlement of the American West, the railroad reached Wyoming and opened the territory to the migrating homesteaders. It was now possible to travel be stream locomotive from the major cities of the East, and homesteaders would board trains from cities of lost promises for the bone jarring trek to the newly available homesteads in the budding state of Wyoming.

When the railroad crossed the border into the Wyoming Territory in 1886, officials were quick to recognize that the depot just over the territorial border would soon burgeon into an important community.

It was therefore necessary that the stop-off be given a name, and since Van Rensselaer Schuyler Van Tassell owned everything in site, the railroad people thought it was only proper to name the station in his honor.

In April 1916, the community was incorporated and attained what in those days amounted to municipal status. By 1919, the town would boast of a new hotel, a bank, furniture store, and billiard parlor-and citizens no longer had to travel the long stretch to Lusk or Harrison, Nebraska to find the finer things in life.

The residents of Van Tassell did not let the progress, fun and excitement of the Roarin’ 20s pass them by. In 1920 and 1921, the town could point with pride to its two hardware stores, lumber yard, bank, two churches, weekly newspaper, blacksmith shop, electric light plant, three cafes, hotel and city jail.

The depot and creamery town of Van Tassell, which had a peak population of about 200, also contributed its share to the health, wealth and progress of the decade and the years to follow. In April 1922, O.I. Stenger was the first person in Niobrara County to install a “radio phone receiving set.”

The Van Tassell Cooperative produced 68,972 pounds of butter in the first nine month’s.

The Buckaroo Bar added to the glamour of the community by serving gallons of beer and spirits across what was claimed to be the longest bar in Wyoming. And the “two-year accredited” Van Tassell High School, which had a graduating class of five people in 1936, providing the beginning of the education and development of Dr. John Pendray, a Van Tassell resident who was later to achieve a national reputation for pioneering rocketry and space research.

When the Model T coughed and sputtered up the horse and wagon trails from Lusk and Harrison, radiophone crystal sets pulled in scratchy broadcasts from KDKA in Philadelphia and wall-mounted telephones provided instant communications with the outside world, the close-knit community began to unravel.

The community, which was once the hub of activity in the newly-settled region was now a part of the world beyond the Nebraska state line or the Niobrara River. Van Tassell citizens could now seek health, wealth, and happiness from people and places down the road, through the wire and over the air. The isolation, which had bonded the community together, was gone and many residents were quick to join those on the highway to bigger and brighter places and lives.

Now, as a traveler speed over the buttes and down the hill from Nebraska State line, on the way to Cheyenne, Casper or Yellowstone, the town of Van Tassell will catch the traveler’s eye as a collection of abandoned houses and buildings cast like dice on the rough edges of the Coffee Siding Buttes. The traveler might also be amused at the green and white state highway department sign announcing VAN TASSELL-population 10. And the first impression is that Van Tassell is just another worn out and abandoned prairie ghost town. But looks are deceiving. The 10 citizens who now compose the population have roots as deep and as fast as the fenceposts set by their homesteading ancestors. It is not about to abide by Van Rensselaer Schuyler Van Tassell’s wishes that it dry up and blow away. In 1986, it celebrated its centennial and had then survived the man by nearly sixty years.