Historian looks at Cedar County’s early days

Cedar County was founded 500 years after Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean, planted a flag, and claimed the entire Western Hemisphere for the King and Queen of Spain.

Thefollowingyear(1493),PopeAlexanderVIissuedaPapalBullstatingSpain was entitled to everything except part of Brazil which should go to Portugal.

Before putting his seal of approval on the Spanish invasion, the Pope neglected to consult with the British, the Dutch, and the French who thought Alexander’s Papal Bull was “bull” of another kind.

During the coming century, every European power that could build a ship, wanted a piece of the real estate.

The new Spanish landlords didn’t get around to checking out their property in this neck of the woods until 1541. That year an expedition headed by a man named Coronado marched from Mexico to the Republican River valley in southern Nebraska searching for the golden cities of Quivera.

Finding only the dirt lodges of the Pawnee, Coronado decided this part of the New World was of no value and returned to the Southwest. In 1682 — 175 years before Cedar County was founded — an explorer named LaSalle paddled down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, planted a French flag and claimed all the land drained by that river and its tributaries for the king of France.

In honor of King Louis XIV, LaSalle named it Louisiana. The future town site of Laurel was now part of Louisiana but there was no one around to celebrate Mardi Gras.

Louisiana was bounded on the west by the Rocky Mountains and on the east by the Appalachians.

Soon this would result in conflict with the British who were colonizing the Eastern Seaboard and the Spanish who still thought they had a divine right to the whole continent.

Meanwhile, the original inhabitants living in what is now New Mexico were getting sick of all the Spanish-speaking aliens invading their land and changing their Native American way of life.

In 1680 the Pueblo Indians rose up and chased the illegals back to Old Mexico taking over hundreds of horses they left behind. The Indians took to horses like modern teenagers take to cell phones and within a few years mounted warriors were trying to deport the English-speaking aliens who were invading from the east.

If only they had thought of building a wall. The Seven Years War broke out in 1756. In America the war pitted the British and American colonists against the French and their Indian allies and thus became known as the French and Indian War.

When the fighting ended seven years later, the French came out on the losing end. In 1763 they were forced to cede everything east of the Mississippi River to Britain and everything west of it to Spain. Thus if Laurel had been founded in 1792 instead of 1892, the Spanish flag would be flying over the post office and we would be eating breakfast burritos instead of baconand eggs.

But that was about to change. The loss of its American colonies was a national humiliation for France.

In order to avenge their loss, the French sided with the Americans during the War of Independence. But France’s participation in the American Revolution nearly bankrupted their country and may have led to the French Revolution which broke out in 1789.

When heads stopped rolling in the street 10 years later, France had a new ruler named Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1800, Bonaparte forced Spain to return the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi to France.

Napoleon needed cash to finance his plan to conquer Europe so in 1803, he sold Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. Included in that transaction was the future site of Nebraska and Cedar County.