The Nebraska House was a hotel completed in 1857 in Brownville, Nebraska, and became linked to the escape of three freedom seekers from Missouri and a bloody shootout with slave catchers. During the fall of 1857, the three men escaped enslavement in Missouri and, after traveling from Kansas into the Nebraska Territory, were seen in the willows a few miles south of Brownville. Four men, J.R. Davis, Thomas Williams, Archie Handley, and William Myers, pursued them hoping to profit by capturing runaway slaves. According to the Nebraska Advertiser of September 10, 1857, the freedom seekers sprang from hiding places, heavily armed, and opened fire, and Myers was shot down by two of them. Myers died of his wounds, and one unnamed freedom seeker was shot in the arm. The other two escaped, but the wounded man was held at the Nebraska House and placed in the custody of deputy sheriff Ben Thompson. His injured arm was amputated to save his life. As he recovered at the hotel while awaiting trial for murder, a mob besieged the Nebraska House and demanded that he be hanged, but Thompson protected him and turned them away. While in custody, the wounded freedom seeker told the Nebraska Advertiser that he had been owned by a widow Todd of Platte County, Missouri, and that all three men had escaped slavery the previous fall, gone to Lawrence, Kansas, and then traveled north into the Nebraska Territory on their way to freedom. Charges against him were eventually dropped after it was determined that one of the other two freedom seekers, not he, had shot Myers. After his release from the Nemaha County Jail, his owner reclaimed him and returned him to slavery in Missouri. The hotel continued operating, passed in 1860 to Peter G. Hendgen, who renamed it the American House, and was destroyed by fire in 1903 before a flood eventually washed away the remains.