March 2025 • Nebraskaland 39
ball" for incoming Territorial Gov. Mark Izard. It was at
Omaha's City Hotel, a single-story frame building at 11th and
Harney streets. The weather was so cold and the building
so drafty that ice formed on the fl oor after it was scrubbed.
Few women lived in Omaha at the time, and only nine ladies
attended the ball. The band consisted of a solitary fi ddler
from Council Bluff s. During the dancing, several people
slipped and fell. Gov. Izard was from Arkansas and not used
to Nebraska winters. He "stood around shivering with the
cold, but bore himself with amiable fortitude."
By the latter 1850s, Omaha still "looked as though falling
down from the skies onto the bare plains," in the words of
Emily Doane, wife of the new district attorney. The streets,
she recalled, were "mostly a sea of mud" with only one
sidewalk in town, but Doane also wrote of social events at
the Herndon House, the city's fi nest hotel:
"At the dances and evening parties, it was most unusual to
see a man not in full dress suit, while women wore spreading
skirts containing yards and yards of material, and the
Twentieth century interior of the Kennard House, furnished in the style of the 1870s. NSHS RG2158-0-1251-A
Even a nice end table was worth showing off . George Copsey
and family, Westerville, Custer County, 1886. Photo by
Solomon D. Butcher. NSHS RG2608-0-1008
