Will and his historical bent

I've been researching Will Leverett, my great grandfather, who was in Council Bluffs/Omaha at a very crucial time in its history, and was interested in that history.

He arrived in Council Bluffs in 1893 and began working in his brother-in-law's bank. In his free time he started a magazine, the Trans-Mississippian, which highlighted the exposition that would be held in Omaha in 1989. That name, of both the exposition and of his magazine, reflected a feeling at the time that the new country would spread out to the coast and that Omaha would be the new Chicago: in the center of a bustling commercial empire. Well, a depression happened and it never quite worked out that way, but that was the spirit behind the Trans-Mississippian Exposition of 1893.

As a historian he included history in his magazine, as if showcasing the region included teaching people about its history. Unfortunately its history was grisly and relatively recent. Council Bluffs' counnty, Pottawattamie, was named for a tribe that had been marched out west in the "Trail of Death" as the governnment had removed all native tribes from Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. Many of these tribes were now in "Indian Territory" or what would become Oklahoma. Some lingered in the area but not many. Will did not sugarcoat it but told the history the best he could, as far as I can tell. Soon when Europeans heard about the forced removals they wrote to Will asking how they could contact some of the remaining chiefs. People were around and willing to talk about it. The chiefs for the most part were bitter. The Trail of Tears and the Trail of Death were not pleasant experiences.

The pattern that had been set back in Indiana and Illinois would have continued, but there were no more places to go, and the remaining tribes were now confined in some of the West's less arable lands, a reminder that "Manifest Destiny" and the "Trans-Mississippi" empire had come at a cost. In his lifetime auto cars came around and people were able to drive out there, to placds they'd only seen by train before.

A look at newspapers in the late 1890s is instructive. It could be that he found out more than he was prepared for. The Trans-Mississippian didn't last long, didn't continue past the Exposition, and the idea of Omaha as the center of the new empire kind of died a natural death.