Keith County, Nebraska, January 1895
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The man had looked around the property but hadn’t seen any sign of John or Ida. He thought it was a little strange not to see them out doing something. There was always something to do on a homestead, regardless of the weather.
Animals needed feeding, firewood needed to be cut or collected. He figured that he would see John out and about, but there was nothing. It didn’t even look like anyone had been outside in a while.
Silence pressed against his ears, his own footsteps the only sound to break it. While that wasn’t necessarily unusual, the man was hoping to hear something, some sound that would indicate that someone was around.
Now there was only one last place to look.
The snow crunched under the man’s feet as he walked toward the dugout house. As he neared the door, he noticed something dark red in the snow. It looked like blood.
Worried now, he called out again as he walked forward and opened the door.
For a moment he couldn’t move, his mind not quite able to process what he saw inside that house. Almost involuntarily he took a step back, then another. He half turned and started to run back to his horse.
The images of what he had just seen were burned into his memory, and he knew that he would never forget it. Climbing into the saddle, the man rode away to get help.
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Keith County, Nebraska, Late 1894
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John Harris pushed open the door to his new home, letting the light shine inside. Smiling, he put his arm around his wife, Ida. They couldn’t have been happier.
They knew that it wasn’t much right now, but they knew that they were going to make it their home. The couple smiled and laughed as they went inside, talking about what would go where, and how they would gradually upgrade their homestead.
In many ways, they were like many of the pioneers who had come to the Midwestern Prairies in the 19th century. They were full of dreams, hoping for a better and brighter future for themselves and their families.
But life could be hard, and before they could make their dreams come true, they first had to survive the dangers that the wilderness posed to them. To do that, they needed the basics: water, food, and shelter.
Winters were harsh and deadly, the summers hot and unrelenting. Storms could come out of nowhere any time of the year, bringing raging thunderstorms and furious blizzards. Weather could be unpredictable at best, and settlers needed a shelter they could go to in case conditions turned bad.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for conventional shelter in Nebraska in 1894. The young state was miles and miles of open prairie. There were few trees, if any, and little stone to be carved into blocks for homes.
But pioneers were resourceful, and what they did have was dirt. Lots of it.
Settlers would make bricks out of the sod, held together by the thick root system of native prairie grass. These were then stacked together into sod houses, became perhaps the most famous dwelling type on the prairie. They even gave these homes a cute little nickname: soddies.
Another popular type of house was the dugout.
A dugout is almost exactly what it sounds like: a dug-out house.
Contrary to popular belief, Nebraska isn’t all flat. There are gently rolling hills across the landscape, and if you had one of these hills on your homestead, then you could build a dugout instead of a soddie.
Essentially, the settlers would be living in a cave dug into the hillside. You simply take a few friends, give them a shovel and a few beers, and you dig a hole into the side of the hill.
You rough it out, dig down a chimney to the outside to vent out the smoke from your fireplace, tamp down the dirt into a floor, and slap a door on it. Voila! Instant house.
They generally had one room, and were not the most comfortable – or cleanest- places to live in. But for settlers like John and Ida Harris, they were a beginning. You live there for a few years while you got your homestead built up, and then you could upgrade to a wooden frame house with multiple rooms.
You didn’t even need to get rid of the dugout. You could turn it into a root cellar that could double as a storm shelter in the spring and summer months.
As John and Ida walked around their own dugout in 1894, they could have very well talked about doing something like that. Maybe they had a place set out for where they would build their future wooden house, and how it would be filled with the happy sounds of their children helping with chores or playing in the yard.
And that bright future was going to start right there in a dugout on the Nebraska prairie.
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Keith County, Nebraska, January 1895
—
Edward Lind couldn’t believe what he had heard.
When his son had come riding home from the Harris place there was an almost haunted look on his face. Edward immediately knew that something was wrong. But whatever he had expected, it hadn’t been what he had been told.
The Harris’s were dead, and it looked like they had been murdered. Edward pressed his son for details, but his son explained that he hadn’t even gone inside, so he wasn’t sure what had happened exactly. He just knew that he had seen both John and Ida in the house and that there was a lot of blood.
Taking his coat and hat, Edward left and went to the nearest telegraph office to notify the sheriff what had happened.
Zeph Camp, the county sheriff, along with a few men, rode to the Harris homestead as soon as he got the news.
There was no coroner in the county, so Camp would serve as both the lead investigator and county coroner. That meant that meant that as he looked into what had happened, he would also be determining the official cause of death.
When Camp and his men arrived at the homestead, they were greeted by the same silence that had met Edward Lind’s son. As they got down from their horses and walked toward the dugout, the quiet was made all that much eerier knowing what awaited them.
Inside, the men found Ida Harris lying half-dressed on the bed. She had obviously been pregnant. John was lying near the door. Blood seemed to be everywhere.
The cause of death was obvious: both of them had their throats cut.
As Camp and his companions started to look through the home, it didn’t take them long to find a note left by John.
It said:
Dear Old Parents: We have decided to end our lives together. Ida took sick before daylight, and it is now 7 o’clock. Ida cut her throat, and I cut mine. I would give the world to see my poor old father and mother. It seems like a year since I saw any of my folks.
Your Beloved Children
The writing was steady and straight, indicating that John was calm and rational when he wrote it. The couple had apparently decided to commit suicide.
Camp found a bloody straight razor on the floor. After examining the scene, the sheriff concluded that Ida must have ended her life first, using the razor while lying on the bed.
After she had died, John picked up the razor and used it on himself. However, he had lived for some time.
It seemed that he had fallen to his knees. Still alive, he then crawled around the house, blood pumping from his neck and causing the horrific scene that Edward Linn’s son had seen. At one point, John must have gone outside, leaving the drops of blood in the snow.
Going back inside, he had finally expired, falling to the floor near the door.
The question that Camp and his men had was why? Why had the Harris’ done this?
Looking through the home, the men discovered that there was barely any food. There wasn’t any preparations for the baby, either. It quickly became apparent that the Harris’ were on the verge of starving to death.
Something had gone seriously wrong on the Harris homestead. What exactly that had been, Camp couldn’t be sure of. But he knew firsthand that life on the prairie could be hard. If something happened to your livestock or your crop, settlers could find themselves in deep trouble very quickly.
Whatever it was, the Harris’ found themselves in the middle of winter without enough food. Ida was sick and there was a baby on the way that they couldn’t feed. They must have felt that it was either starve to death slowly or end their lives quickly.
Regardless of his conclusion, Camp conducted a thorough investigation. He interviewed everyone who might have a connection to John and Ida, including the Lind’s. There was no evidence contrary to his initial findings, and the official cause of the deaths were that the couple had chosen to end their lives in the face of impending starvation.
The family came and collected John and Ida’s remains. They were later interred in Riverside Cemetery in Hershey, Nebraska.
Like many settlers who came through Nebraska, our knowledge of John and Ida Harris is limited. We don’t know how they met and fell in love, or why they decided to move to Keith County. Outside of a few details here and there, we are ultimately left knowing more about how they died than how they lived.
Many pioneers and settlers who came to the prairie were much the same way. We know a few things about them – often just enough to prove that they actually existed- but after that, virtually nothing. Like the sod houses that they built, these individuals have mostly vanished from the world.
And yet, their legacy lives on.
These men and women dared to brave the unknown and make a new life for themselves. While many won, others, like the Harris’, lost.
But, whether through triumph or tragedy, their lives are deeply interwoven with the fabric of American History.
Sources
Cut Their Throats. The Nebraska State Journal, 1/15/1895
Sad Nebraska Suicide. Fremont Tri-Weekly Tribune, 1/17/1895
Deaths from Destitution. Omaha World-Herald, 1/15/1895
Nebraskastudies.org