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017
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bago, Omaha, Otoe, Missouri, and Sacs and Foxes. The government had assumed control of them sometime before, for the protection of the immigrants. As for national affairs, at the close of the decade Andrew Johnson was in the president's chair, to be succeeded by General Grant.
The University was established in the fifteenth year after the admission of Nebraska to territorial government, in the second year after its admission to statehood, four years after the close of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln, and seven years before the centennial of the foundation of the republic of the United States. The city of Lincoln, at which the University was located, had been fixed upon as the state capital hardly two years before. It had few more than a thousand inhabitants, no water except well water, few or no sidewalks; a gas plant was not yet begun, and the campus where the university building was to be built was raw prairie, far out of town. Legislatures had hardly begun to meet at Lincoln, as state legislatures, when the first bills for the establishment of a normal school and for a university were passed. Already in the territorial period many bills of this nature had been introduced but owing to the outbreak of the Civil War they had not borne fruit in tangible results.
It is good to see in retrospect early conditions, for the state and for the city of Lincoln, if we are to realize the expansions of fifty years. In the first moment of its self-consciousness, the state planned for its sons and daughters an institution which, within a half-century, more than realizes the dreams of the pioneers who founded it, and is a monument to their courage and prevision.
LOUISE POUND.
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