PRIMITIVE ISLAND'S PAST IS KEY TO ITS FUTURE
THANKS TO OMAHA WORLD HERALD AND AUTHOR PAUL HAMMEL FOR THIS ARTICLE FROM THE NOVEMBER 28, 1999 EDITION

IN THE MISSOURI: Duck hunters speed past Goat Island off Ceder County. The National Park Service is pressing for the island, thought to be one of the last unsurveyed plots of land in Nebraska, to be set aside for the public.
 

Wynot, Neb. - Homesteaders, tax collectors, and even Lewis and Clark have passed by Goat Island. So, too, for the most part, has time, leaving the 3½-mile-long spit of sand and cottonwoods to grow into a natural tangle of dogwoods, cattails and trees. Now, someone is trying to legally claim Goat Island 200 years after is is believed to have formed in the Missouri River off Cedar County. The National Park Service is going though complicated and expensive steps to have the island near a camping area called Brookey Bottoms officially declared as public domain. While at least one local farmer says he may press a claim on the island federal officials are confidant that by this time next year. Goat Island will be a primitive playground for the public to search for mushrooms, hunt deer, hike and picnic. The island is thought to be one of the last unsurveyed plots of the land in Nebraska and South Dakota, which were crisscrossed by surveying crews prior to homesteading days. It also could provide a recreation windfall - a large and low-cost public area in the midst of one of the few remaining unchanged portions of the Missouri River. Goat Island lies midway within a 59-mile stretch of the river between Gavins Point Dam and Ponca Neb. In 1978, Congress declared that stretch a national recreational river. While a few local residents question why the federal government needs to get involved, supporters say a National Park Service takeover would guarantee that a nearly unspoiled island remains open to the public. "My feeling is that if you don't protect it, someone is going to spoil it," said Mark Wellenstein, the co-owner of Sportsmen's Steakhouse and Lounge, which sits just across a river channel from the island, a popular spot for hunting, fishing and playing on its beaches. "It's unique,” Wellenstein said. "This is a place that is as close to what it was like when Lewis and Clark came through as you can find."
The history of Goat Island goes back to the days of the fur traders. It includes chapters about an attorney who claimed it was deeded to him by an Indian chief and about a farmer who has ferried cattle to the island to graze in the past 20 years. The island's location was first recorded on a map made in 1796 by a fur trader. It also was indicated, but not named, on a map drawn by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. That map showed campsites above and below the island on Aug. 25 and 26, 1804. Paul Hedren, superintendent of the Park Service's Niobrara-Missouri National Scenic Waterways office in O'Neill, Neb., said it appears that the island began forming as a sandbar 200 years ago and stabilizing as an island around the time of Lewis and Clark. Establishing when it became an island, Hedren said, is critical. If Goat Island existed before Nebraska became a state in 1867 and was never surveyed or homesteaded, then it is part of the public domain and is available to be transferred to the Park Service. If it were formed after statehood, then state laws would govern its ownership. In that case, landowners on both sides of the Missouri probably would have a claim to the land. Hedren said old maps indicate the island existed before 1867. But, he said, there is no evidence that a legal deed was ever recorded. No one ever paid property taxes in Nebraska or South Dakota, which would be critical to prove ownership. There also is no evidence that anyone ever lived on the island. In recent decades, though, at least three private claims have been filed on it. The first was by Jack Jaquith, an attorney from nearby Vermillion, S.D., who raised goats and watermelons on the island, according to Jim Peterson, a former law professor at the University of South Dakota and who owns a cabin near Goat Island. The goats spawned the name, though some South Dakotan's call the island "Jake's Island" after Jaquith, who once produced a deed indicating the island, was given to him by an Indian chief.  Peterson said that when Jaquith died, the island was abandoned. He said about 20 years ago signs were posted on Goat Island declaring that it was the property of the "Robert A. Suddick Trust of Omaha, Neb."  "The signs were gone within a couple of hours," Peterson said, "Local people tore them down." Robert A. Suddick, an Omaha businessman, acknowledged that he and a group of hunters obtained a quit-claim deed to the island and were hoping to get a legal declaration that they owned it. But a couple of the hunters died and the interest in the claim faded, Suddik said. The latest claimant to Goat Island is Glenn Foster, a Newcastle, Neb. farmer who has ferried cattle to the island over the past 20 years. Foster built fences, dug a well and erected a windmill, the only traces of development on Goat Island. He used a primitive ferry, built with 55-gallon drums, weathered wood and corrugated steel, to transport about 70 cattle for summer grazing. The ferry is docked at a low point on the mostly high-banked island. Then years ago, Foster said, he tried to obtain a legal deed to Goat Island. But the Cedar County Board told him he would have to pay 10 years of back property taxes to do it. That made it unrealistic, he said. That effort, though, may have led to the Ceder County Board in 1998 to suggest a Park Service takeover. Such a move, it is believed, might lead to paving of the winding, gravel road from Nebraska Highway 12 to the county-owned Brookey Bottoms area. An attorney representing Foster wrote the Park Service to press the farmer's claim of ownership. But Foster said he's not sure how far he will fight. It would be an expensive legal battle, he said. "It's pretty hard to right City Hall, there ain't no doubt about that," Foster said. Peterson, the retired law professor, said another complicating factor in establishing ownership is determining to which state Goat Island belongs. While Hedren said the federal government believes the island sits in Nebraska, Peterson, who once served on a Nebraska-South Dakota boundary commission, said the boundary between the two states has not been established in that area. It would be expensive, he said, to get that determined so that a claimant would know which state in which to file a deed to Goat Island. Peterson opposes the Park Service's plan, calling it a "loony idea" and a "land grab." "If the Park Service does take it over, pretty soon they'll have 700 pages of regulations on who should use it and when they can use it," Peterson said. Hedren dismissed that view, saying that the only plans for the island, if it becomes Park Service property, are to clean trash, fences and other signs of human development, and possibly clear a crude trail that already runs across the island for hiking. Eden said the Park Service is compelled to take steps to preserve such land if it is discovered within a stretch of river, like the Missouri, that is designated for presumption or protection. Archaeologists from the Bureau of Land Management have examined the island, and a team of surveyors has marked Goat Island for aerial mapping in the spring.
 

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