Frontier in Lincoln County

Lincoln was not the first county seat. At the election of November 8, 1870, the rival town of Abram drew 75 votes to Lincoln Center's 58. While a second vote was pending, Ezra Hubbard shot John Haley dead in a quarrel over a stick of timber for the mill he was building below Abram. That night a mob of about forty men, many drunk, broke in on Hubbard's guard and beat him to death with a mallet. Lincoln Center won on February 19, 1872, by 232 votes to 176, and Abram's buildings were moved to the winner.

What the plaque says

Frontier in Lincoln County The 1860s brought ever-growing numbers of travelers and settlers into Indian lands in Kansas. Taking advantage of tribal divisions, the U.S. government negotiated treaties that forced Plains Indians onto reservations and limited their hunting areas. Though relations between travelers and settlers and the Indians were generally peaceful, tensions developed and periodic violence occurred. A fragile peace was shattered in the 1860s when Indians took action to defend their lands and the U.S. military responded. Treaties in 1865 and 1867 temporarily eased concerns. Pressures mounted again as railroad construction moved further onto the plains. In 1868 Northern Cheyenne leader Roman Nose led a retaliatory strike against settlers along the Solomon River, about 20 miles northeast of here. Other strikes, led by the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, occurred along the Saline River and tributaries in Lincoln County and nearby counties. The U.S. government responded in 1869 by dispatching the 7th Cavalry, which inflicted heavy casualties as it forced the Cheyennes out of Kansas. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rock City — 20 mi
  About two hundred sandstone spheres, many as big as a room, crowded into a strip of pasture above the Solomon River south of Minneapolis, where groundwater cemented them inside buried sand.
• S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden — 23 mi
  A Civil War veteran's limestone log cabin in Lucas, ringed by forty-foot cement trees, Adam and Eve, and his Populist sermon on the people who crucify labor, with the builder himself in the mausoleum.

More markers nearby

• Historic Kansas — 12 mi
• Smoky Hills Region — 12 mi
• Ellsworth, the Cowtown and Fort — 22 mi