Nebraska GenWeb Project
Resource Center
Pioneers
Isaiah William Bryant was born in Ohio to John and Sophia (Darr) Bryant. While still young, his family moved to Muscatine, Iowa were Isaiah and his siblings, Abraham, John, Conrad, Rachael, Harriet, and Daniel, grew up. On April 20, 1853 Isaiah joined a caravan and headed west. He reached Drytown, California on November 14 of the same year. Isaiah spent three years farming in California before allowing his claim to lapse by moving back to Nebraska. Spending his first years moving around the state, Isaiah lived near the present towns of Omaha, Nebraska City, Ashland, Yutan, and other smaller settlements. He made a living farming, logging trees for timber, and working for other settlers. Isaiah also wrote, a poem about a Nebraskan storm is below:
Dark rolling clouds and dread alarms
And frozen tempests sweeps
Imprisoned still in icy arms
Sweet spring and summer sleeps
Yet soften o'er the clouded skies
Does a warmer light appear
As recording in each mornings vise
Returning spring and summer nere
Resounding notes are on the wing
And speeding through the air
As harbingers of comeing spring
And summer rosey blushes there
Soon shal the flaming sun
Its silvery treasures pour
Through skies now dark and dun
Above this wide extend shore
That in snowy winter time
With frozen tempests prest
In springs sweet flowry prime
In wavy gold is dressed
And edens breath resides
In summer radient bloom
Where the sunlight gleams forever
There no shadows ever gloom
Soon shal the restless winds
An balmy gales convey
To heaven their holy incense
Along the pleasant way
From many a blooming bower
Whoose exhalations greet
The sense of weary mortals
With a more than mortal sweet
May heaven be then attoned
And the frosen earth restore
And old borelius dart
His icy frozen shafts no more
BACK to the Pioneer Registry © 2012 for NEGenWeb Project by Abbie Harlow, T&C Miller