Though modern
transcontinental travelers tend to see NEBRASKA
in much the same light as did the early
pioneers, heading west during the Gold Rush
– as just another dreary expanse of
prairie to get through as fast as possible
– this flat and sparsely populated state
in fact encompasses quite a few places of
interest. However, its most appealing
cities, commercial Omaha and the
livelier state capital, Lincoln, are
separated by a good three hundred miles of
underwhelming, livestock-rearing flatlands
from the western Panhandle, where the
landscape finally erupts into giant sand
hills and valleys, broken by towering rocky
columns and hemmed in by sheer-faced buttes.
Western Nebraska was still embroiled in
vicious and bloody battles against Native
Americans long after the east had been
settled; from the first serious uprising in
1854, it was 36 years before the US Army
could make white control unchallengeable.
Close to the South Dakota state line, Fort
Robinson, where Crazy Horse was
murdered, remains one of the West’s most
evocative historic sites.
Without navigable rivers, Nebraska had to
rely on the railroads to help
populate the land. During the 1870s and
1880s, rail companies, encouraged by grants
that allowed them to accumulate one-sixth of
the state, laid down such a comprehensive
network of tracks that virtually every
farmer was within a day’s cattle drive of
the nearest halt. Thus the buffalo-hunting
country of the Sioux and Pawnee was turned
into high-yield farmland, which today has
few rivals in terms of beef
production.
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