Joseph E. Johnson and The Huntsman's Echo

Johnson kept printing in Utah. Born in Pomfret, New York, in 1817 and baptized a Latter Day Saint in 1833, he had published the Omaha Arrow in 1854. He went west in 1861, started the Farmer's Oracle at Spring Lake Villa in 1863 and was elected to the territorial House. Moving to St. George in 1864-65, he kept a nursery, published Our Dixie Times in 1868-69 and began the Utah Pomologist and Gardener in 1870. His church sent him in 1882 to settle what became Tempe, Arizona, where he died on December 17, 1882.

What the plaque says

Joseph E. Johnson and The Huntsman's Echo In April 1860 Joseph E. Johnson, a Mormon, established a road ranche at Wood River Centre, today's Shelton, and began publishing The Huntsman's Echo, the first newspaper in Nebraska west of Omaha. He had earlier edited papers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha. Johnson was a keen observer of the Nebraska scene, which he discussed in a vigorous and breezy style suggested by his paper's motto, "Independent in Everything, Neutral in Nothing." Johnson's Ranche was an important supply point serving Mormons and other travelers on the Council Bluffs Road (Mormon Trail). It included a general store, blacksmith shop, post office, mill, and a farm that grew crops and vegetables. Buffalo and elk roamed the area and the Pawnee Tribe lived nearby. Johnson strongly favored preserving the Union and was appalled by the coming bloodshed of the Civil War. On the grounds that "this Republican reign of terror...is too much for our democratic style of free thought, free speech, and freedom," he decided to move west to join his fellow Mormons in Utah. The last issue of The Huntsman's Echo was published August 1, 1861. Wood River Valley Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rowe Sanctuary — 11 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.
• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 17 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer — 20 mi
  Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.

More markers nearby

• Original Townsite of Wood River — 4.6 mi
• Gibbon — 6.2 mi
• Nebraska Centre-Boyd Ranche — 7.5 mi
• 1871 Gibbon 1971 — 7.6 mi