Indian Cave State Park History — The Planning Lady

Path leading to the cave, closed at the time of my visit in June 2020

A few weeks ago my husband and I went camping with some friends just south of Nebraska City at Indian Cave State Park. It was the first time we had been to this campsite, but was clearly a favorite park for many as nearly every campsite was filled. The parks draw is its location along the Missouri River which provides shady tree cover for the campsites, plenty of hiking trails, and beautiful views. The only feature its missing is a place to swim. In addition, the areas history is celebrated through the preservation of several early structures, the cemetery, and plenty of informational signs. One of the main features and the reason for the parks name (not currently open to the public due to a washout of the path up to the site) is the sandstone cave estimated to be over 12,000 years old. The walls are adorned with a number of petroglyphs (carvings in the soft walls) estimated to be several thousand years old. The petroglyphs are the only ones in Nebraska and their origins remain a mystery.

My curiosity was triggered after hearing from one of our fellow campers that the park was originally home to the descendants of mixed blood settlers who were not welcomed by either their white or Native American families and retreated here to live in peace. I wanted to know more about what this park was and how it became a park so here it is.

Starting from the beginning, the area now known as Nebraska was home to a number of Native American tribes including the Otoe, Missouri, Omaha, Pawnee, Lakota, Kansas, Ponca, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Many of the tribes along the Missouri River farmed along the rich sediment lands of the river bottoms while those further west were hunter gatherers. When the French arrived in the 17th century the tribes began trading with them.

In 1803 the United States gave the French $15 million to buy what is now Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the eastern half of Colorado, most of Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, half of North Dakota, and the south half of Minnesota. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, this basically doubled the size of the country. Just two votes kept the House from formally denying the request to purchase the land. Imagine how different the United States would look today if the Federalists had won the argument against Jefferson’s campaign to purchase the land.

But that is not how history wrote itself and therefore we went ahead and bought a sizable chunk of land once known as the Great American Desert. Having lived in West Texas I take issue with this early assessment of Nebraska, but I digress. After several expeditions through the newly acquired land, settlement began. Fearless easterners, immigrants, and capitalizing entrepreneurs moved west to make something of themselves. Settlement started first in Iowa, then pushed further into Nebraska around the 1820s. Early settlements were mostly fur trading posts and government forts as the land still technically belonged to the tribes originally living in the area. While some areas on the southern boarder of the state were secede early in the 19th century, most were still in control of various tribes until about 1854 when the Nebraska Territory was created.

Visit http://www.nebraskastudies.org/1850-1874/native-american-settlers/ for the interactive map which links to the original treaty documents

Getting to the specifics of Indian Cave State Park however, the land which it now encompasses was secede to the United States in 1830 according to the treaty with the Otoe. The U.S. government designated the 140,000 acres as Half-Breed Tracts in the Half-Breed Reservation to help the children of mixed marriages (children of white men and tribal women) get settled in society. They lacked support systems from their families because of tribal rules of descent and membership and discrimination from European-American society.

The area was largely ignored by settlers until 1853 when Joseph Deroin, son to a French Canadian fur trader and Otoe woman, and Robert Hawke drew up a plat for the village of Deroin on a portion of the 320 acre grant he received in the early 1840s. It was later named St. Deroin which was in fashion at the time for towns along the Missouri such as St. Louis and St. Joseph. The post office opened in 1854, challenging the strong held notion that Brownsville is the oldest townsite in Nebraska.

Luck came to the community in 1854 when the townsite became a steamboat landing. Steamboats were the fastest form of transportation at the time, the train not having arrived yet in Nebraska. It provided access to goods and a way to ship products across the nation. This however led to white settlers moving into the area, slowly encroaching on the settlement. Reported population numbers are varied, but it seems the town peaked in 1870 with somewhere between 200 and 300 residents. The town had a hotel, blacksmith shop, flouring mill, school and many small businesses. The park still maintains the school, broom shop, and blacksmith shop with living history displays on weekends in the summer.

Growth was short lived in St. Deroin. The population dropped to just 90 people ten years later. Flooding on the Missouri began washing away buildings and making steamboat landing difficult. In 1910 erosion forced the brick school building to be moved to higher ground and in 1915 the ferry landing officially closed. The final blow to the community was the arrival of the railroad just north at Nemaha, bypassing St. Deroin completely. Without a steamboat landing or a railroad hub the town could not survive. The only building that continued operation past the 1920s was the school. It was operated by Nemaha County as District 56 from 1909 until its closure in 1944.

Following the closures, the area became an unofficial picnic spot for residents in Richardson and Nemaha counties. In 1962 the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission purchased 1,300 acres of the former Half-Breed Reservation and formed Indian Cave State Park. The Commission eventually purchased another 2,700 acres of land and built out 30 miles of trails and several campsites. In 1978 the school building was reconstructed which sits adjacent to another wood frame building housing a replica of the early broom shop. Nearby is the original cemetery, where its believed the towns founder was laid to rest in 1858 after he was killed by a neighbor who did not want to pay his $6 debt.

While I enjoyed my time at the park, despite the very brave raccoons attempts to steal my dog food and successfully ransack the nearby garbage cans, I couldn’t help but think about the origins of the land I was sleeping on. Like all of Nebraska, it once belonged to a Native American tribe who gave it to the U.S. in exchange for a small sum of money. It also seemed a little strange to be grilling hamburgers and going for hikes in an area that once was set aside for people who were unaccepted by two different groups in society. I did appreciate the parks attempts to honor this history through the interpretive signs and displays throughout the park which sought to educate visitors.