Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/296

 288 CLYDE B. AITCHISON. of the Platte, and a little south of it was Bethlehem Ferry. Carterville was three miles southwest of Kanesville, and was a thriving village of some hundreds. Indiantown, at the crossing of the Nishnabotna, on the Mt. Pisgah road, west of the present Lewis, in Cass County, was the center of quite a large trade. Coonvi.lle became Glenwood. We have the names of some forty or fifty other settlements in Southwestern Iowa. Little remains of these, but their names and memory, and a half-rotted squared log occasionally plowed up. Strictly, they were not villages, or even hamlets; merely the collection within easy distance of a handful of farm houses, in a grove on a creek, with a school or church, and perhaps a mill or trader 's stock. They resembled rather the ideal farm communities or settlements of some modern sociologists. The greater part of the Saints, who acknowledged the leadership of Young, left Iowa in 1852, and with the legisla- tive change of the name of Kanesville to Council Bluffs City, in January, 1853, the history of the early Mormon settlements in the Missouri Valley may be considered closed. Council Bluffs remained an outfitting station for Mormon, as well as other immigration, for years, but there was little to dis- tinguish Salt Lake travelers from any others preparing to cross the Rockies. Such immigration continued in consider- able number until the Civil War, as witness the ill-fated hand- cart and wheelbarrow expedition of 1856. Turning now to a few settlements made in Nebraska in later years, a hundred families from St. Louis, under the direction of H. J. Hudson, formed three communistic colonies at Genoa in 1857, called Alton, Florence, and St. Louis. An attempt had been made by them to settle in Platte County. They constructed dug-outs and cabins in the fall of 1857, and the next spring surveyed the lands on which they had located and partitioned each man his share. They enclosed two thousand acres with fences and ditches, and turned the sod of two square miles of prairie. The Genoa postoffice was established with Mr. Hudson, now of Columbus, as postmaster.