NEBRASKA TIMELINES . . .
Christmas for a Nebraska Soldier Andrew S. Wadsworth in 1898 went with the First Nebraska Regiment to the Philippines as a soldier in the first phase of the Spanish American War.
He had previously been employed in his uncle’s jewelry shop in Beatrice and while overseas corresponded regularly with his Nebraska relatives.
The First Nebraska arrived in Manila on July 17, 1898, after a stopover in Honolulu. December of that year found Wadsworth and his fellow soldiers in the field and waiting for some promised Christmas boxes from home.
However, the troops were disappointed; no Christmas boxes arrived.
Andrew wrote on Jan. 2, 1899, to his sister and brother: “The Christmas dinner we had was the only thing worth mentioning on that day.”
The dinner must have been a sumptuous one; it included, according to Andrew, “oyster stew with olives and pickles, baked chicken with dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, bread, butter, jam, cakes, cookies, chocolate, oranges, bananas and cigars.”
The failure of the Christmas boxes to arrive was due to the changing political and military situation in Washington and in the Philippines.
Optimists at first thought that Ameri can troops would be brought home quickly, and the shipment of boxes was halted.
But as it became clear thatAmerican troops would remain in the Philippines far longer than anticipated, the boxes were sent after all.
Andrew wrote on March 8: “We had a Christmas last week when our boxes came and say, it was good to see the things that tumbled out of themeverything from pins to night dresses.
I got candy, jell[ied] preserves, papers, books, needles, and little things that helped to fill up, and fruit cake-was common stuff but so good.”
Andrew was wounded in April of 1899 and returned from the Philippines to Nebraska in early 1900.
Rosewater’s Christmas
Edward Rosewater, longtime edi-tor and publisher of the Omaha Bee, and a force to be reckoned with in Nebraska politics from the Bee‘s founding in 1871 until his death in 1906, came to America in 1854 at the age of thirteen. By the time the Civil War broke out he had become a telegrapher and served with the U.S. Army telegraph corps. He was brought to Nebraska by Edward Creighton to serve as Omaha manager for the new transcontinental telegraph line. In Nebraska he became immediately interested in politics. A member of the state legislature in 1870, he was the key figure in impeachment proceed ings against Governor David Butler. After he established theOmaha Beein 1871, it became his major interest and one of the state’s great newspapers.
Rosewater’s reminiscences of his first Christmas in the United States appeared in the Bee on December 25, 1904, several years before his death: “On Christmas morning, 1854-just fifty years ago today-I first set foot on American soil. Parting with kindred, friends and schoolmates at my native village in Bohemia, in the middle of September, and accompanying my parents to the seaport of Bremen, we traversed the ocean in the packet ship ‘Cleo,’ a three-mast sailing vessel, and landed in New York harbor after a voyage of forty-two days. Emerging from the ship, which landed in the neighborhood of Castle Garden, we, that is, my father, mother and seven children-five boys and two girls- marched up the middle of Broadway in Indian file, to take our first view of America’s metropolis.
“The sky was clear and the air quite crisp on that memorable Christmas morning, and the streets were crowded with people arrayed in their holiday apparel. . . . The streets of New York of 1854 were very unlike the streets of New York in 1904. Broadway was paved then with square blocks of stone and on business days the rush of omnibuses, drays and other vehicles that choked the street from dawn to dusk was simply deafening. The most rapid locomotion was by ordinary carriage.
The street railway had not made its appearance. The elevated road had not even been imagined and a bridge across the East river was an iridescent dream. The tallest building in New York was not over seven stories and the office building had not yet been invented.”
Rosewater also recalled his first American Christmas gift, “a pea green jacket bought at a ready-made clothes shop for the munificent sum of $3, which I proudly donned and wore for two years thereafter, when it was transmitted for further wear to one of my younger brothers.” He noted in conclusion, “These reminiscences are . . . a forceful reminder that my first Christmas in America was also the first Christmas that a handful of pioneers celebrated in the newly founded city of Omaha.”
Soldiers at Christmastime 1890
