MIKE MOOLICK
Michael Moolick was once described in a newspaper article as “the
last of the rugged individualists.” His story merits more space than
we have here, for he was an unusual person.
Son of James and Honorah, he was born at Interlaken, New York, on
June 21, 1854. As a boy in Mahoney City, Pennsylvania, he worked in
the coal mines until the family came west in 1871.
By February, 1876, he was in Sidney, Nebraska, and hired out to an
old freighter named John Ingersol to drive the Sidney route into the
newly-opened and still dangerous gold rush country in the Black
Hills. “I put every dollar I had ($12) into a secondhand blanket and
started out to cross the raging plain on the hurricane deck of a
four mule team.” They went to Deadwood.
Sometime in the 1870s his brother, James, with whom he was very
close, mysteriously disappeared. Mike was to have joined Jim in
Wyoming Territory and was waiting to hear just where. No word ever
came.
Among the colorful frontier characters Mike told of meeting were Kid
Wade “buried with his boots up,” Calamity Jane, and Old Jules Sandoz
whom he described as a “dirty old desperado.”
In the early 1880s Mike was homesteading in Bohemia Township, Knox
County, Nebraska. The claim he filed on at the Niobrara Land Office
on March 3, 1883, by Application 5193 was: “the North Half of the
Northeast Quarter and the North Half of the Northwest Quarter of
Section 27 in Township 31, North of Range 7 West of the Sixth
Meridian in Nebraska, containing 160 acres.” He received a patent on
it July 18, 1889. The land is rolling prairie with hayfields of
wildflowers and grasses rippling with the winds. It is seven or
eight miles from Verdigre. The former settlements of Armstrong and
Jelen are nearby. He traded at Belsky’s Store.
On March 12, 1884, he and Luella Etter, 19, were married. She was
born in December, 1864, one of the five children of Jacob and
Suzanne Richards Etter. Perhaps, in this year when Abraham Lincoln
was still president, they lived in Indians. Her grandparents are
buried in the Center Cemetery near Walton, Indiana. Or perhaps the
family had already moved west. Whatever and whenever in the years
between, Luella was in Knox County, Nebraska, by the 1880s. Her
brother, Frank, lived in Niobrara.
From 1885 to 1894 Mike was blacksmithing in Verdigre, some of the
time in partnership with his brother, Terrance. Fees were low --
they sharpened plows for 25 cents, shoed horses for prices ranging
from .25-$1.80 and repaired machinery, wagons and stagecoaches.
Receipts were meager. For example, the account book for 1888 shows
56 customers doing $136.30 worth of business. However, only $44.25
was paid for -- $34.50 in cash, $9.75 in trade: potatoes, coal
drayage, green onions.
In Niobrara, Nebraska, on a hill overlooking the Missouri River
there is a peaceful little cemetery. The prairie winds blow there
almost constantly, sough through the pine trees, moving bridal
wreath bushes, and whistling around the old headstones. Here lies
Luella Etter Moolick, “Died March 31, 1894. Aged 29 yrs. 4 mo.” She
left three children -- Geneva, Honorah (LeNore), and Luella.
In the years following Michael Moolick married young Nellie Jones.
They had two children, Esther and Harry. They moved to Norfolk where
he found work as a railroad blacksmith for the Chicago and
Northwestern line. Here he worked for 30 years and 4 months until
retirement on a pass and a pension in June of 1924 when he was 70.
With that pass, pension, and a small black satchel he began
globe-trotting, ranging through out the continent, visiting all the
states, Alaska, Canada, Hawaii, Mexico, and Cuba. He wrote up his
adventures in a little black book.
This sturdy 5’ 3-or-4” small Irishman had a soft voice, an extensive
frontier vocabulary, and a lively sense of humor. He made violins
and played them, taught himself taxidermy, worked as a “cowboy,”
cooked Mulligan stew and apple pancakes, kept pet squirrels, went
fishing, wrote verses, learned to drive a Model T early one morning
in Hampton, Iowa, and hurtled it to Norfolk, Nebraska, that same
day, built houses, developed and printed his own pictures, and…
He died on May 24, 1940, at the age of 85 and is buried in Norfolk.
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