Deer Park Hotel

The congressman whose votes were gathered here had come a long way to the Niobrara. Edward K. Valentine was born in Keosauqua, Iowa, on June 1, 1843, learned the printing trade, enlisted at seventeen and served under Grant on the Mississippi before leaving the Army in 1866. He studied law in Omaha and was register of the land office at West Point. Elected to the House in 1878, he won again in 1880 and 1882, chaired the Committee on Agriculture and declined a fourth term. From 1890 to 1893 he was the Senate's Sergeant at Arms.

What the plaque says

Deer Park Hotel Deer Park Hotel was located near this site. Established in 1880, the roadhouse was a large building made of native logs. It was built just opposite the Niobrara River from the Fort Niobrara cantonment. The fort, also established in 1880, served the Sioux Indian reservation north of here in Dakota Territory. In November 1882 the hotel was the site of the first election in what is now Cherry County. Congressman E.K.Valentine was in a race for reelection. Arrangements were made to solicit votes from railroad workers who were building Sioux City & Pacific rail line in the area. Men at the camp were sent to the polls by being offered transportation and time from work. Valentine won the election. That fall, about four miles west on Minnechaduza Creek, a new town was named in his honor. Deer Park Hotel soon faded from memory. When Cherry County was organized in 1883, Valentine became the county seat. That year, the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad arrived and the town boomed. Cherry County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society, 2017

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge — 0.8 mi
  An army post built in 1880 to watch the Sicangu Lakota at Rosebud, turned in 1912 into a refuge where bison and elk graze above the Niobrara east of Valentine.
• Smith Falls State Park — 8.8 mi
  Nebraska's highest waterfall, a spring-fed creek dropping 63 feet into a shaded canyon off the Niobrara, where Ice Age birch and an aspen hybrid found nowhere else still grow.
• Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum — 27 mi
  A Jesuit's half-century of Lakota words, plants and photographs, gathered with Lakota catechists on the Rosebud and kept where the objects were made and used.
• Spotted Tail Gravesite — 30 mi
  The grave of the Sicangu leader whose killing by Crow Dog in 1881 went to the Supreme Court and ended with Congress taking criminal law away from the nations.

More markers nearby

• Bryan Bridge — 4.6 mi
• Norden Dance Hall — 21 mi
• Midair Collision of P-47 "Thunderbolt" Fighter Planes, 1944 — 22 mi