Mitchell and Ketchum Homesteads

Luther Mitchell was sixty-three when he died, a farmer who had come to Clear Creek from Merrick County, according to A. T. Andreas's history of 1882. Ami Ketchum was a blacksmith who had worked at his trade in Nebraska for some years, and the two men lived together. The canyon southeast of Callaway where Olive's party took them was long known as Devil's Gap. Andreas has the party stopping under a large elm and throwing two ropes over a branch, and Carson Vaughan's 2015 account says Ketchum was hanged while Mitchell was shot and then hanged too.

What the plaque says

Mitchell and Ketchum Homesteads The most infamous Nebraska showdown between settlers and cattlemen began in 1878 on the Custer County homesteads of Luther Mitchell and Ami Ketchum, located one mile to the south. Conflict arose when Ketchum's crops were trampled by cattle belonging to Isom Prentice (Print) Olive, who brought his herds from Texas to Nebraska's open range. After Ketchum had been implicated in stealing cattle, the Buffalo County sheriff deputized Olive foreman Bob Stevens to arrest Ketchum. The sheriff was not aware that Stevens was Print Olive's brother, wanted for murder in Texas under his real name, Bob Olive. On November 27, 1878, Olive and three cowboys rode to the Ketchum homestead, where gunfire erupted. Bob Olive was mortally wounded in the shootout and died three days later. After surrendering to authorities, Mitchell and Ketchum were briefly jailed in Kearney. On December 10, while being taken to Custer County for arraignment, the two were seized by Print Olive and his men and lynched in a rugged canyon near present Callaway. When the bodies were discovered the next day, they were also found to have been burned. Custer County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society, 2015 Jim and Sis Trotter

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park — 26 mi
  A small infantry post of 1874 in the North Loup valley, built of local lime concrete on the raiding road between Lakota and Pawnee country, and kept nearly whole by eighty years of farming.

More markers nearby

• Westerville 1880-1980 — 6.5 mi
• Arcadia Centennial, 1885-1985 — 6.7 mi
• Arcadia Congregational Church — 7.3 mi
• Ansley 1886-1986 — 9.8 mi