NENebraska History

Just after midnight on 1 January 1863, Daniel Freeman talked a clerk at the Brownville land office into opening early so he could file a claim before his unit left. The 160 acres he registered near Beatrice are usually counted as the first entry under the Homestead Act, and the ground is now Homestead National Historical Park. Nebraska's nineteenth century sits inside that anecdote: a place the country spent thirty years crossing, and then gave away.

Earth lodges on the Loup and the Platte

The Pawnee, who call themselves Chaticks si Chaticks, lived in dome-roofed earth lodges in villages along the Loup, the Platte and the Republican, organized in four bands: Chaui, Kitkehahki, Pitahawirata and Skidi. They grew corn, beans and squash on the bottomlands and left twice a year for communal bison hunts. Skidi ritual tracked the stars closely enough that a surviving painted hide star chart is studied as an astronomical record. Downstream, the Omaha and the Ponca held the Missouri bluffs, the Otoe-Missouria the lower Platte, and Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands ranged the western grass.

Smallpox arriving with traders cut the Pawnee roughly in half in 1831 and struck again in 1838, and by 1875 the survivors had been pressured onto a reservation in Indian Territory. Lewis and Clark held their first formal council with any Native nation on this stretch of the river, meeting Otoe and Missouria leaders on 3 August 1804 at a bluff they named Council Bluff, near present Fort Calhoun. The army built Fort Atkinson on that spot in 1819, the first United States military post west of the Missouri, and abandoned it eight years later.

The road everyone travelled and nobody settled

The territory came to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and then sat closed to white settlement as Indian Country for half a century, which did not stop anyone from driving through it. The Platte valley offered the gentlest grade to the mountains, so the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail along the north bank after 1847, the California Trail after the 1848 gold discovery, the Pony Express and the first transcontinental telegraph all used the same corridor. Chimney Rock is the landmark mentioned most often in surviving overland diaries. Fort Kearny was built on the Platte in 1848 to guard the traffic. The Mormon camp at Winter Quarters, on the site of Florence in north Omaha, buried several hundred people during the winters of 1846 and 1847.

The 1854 act that broke the Missouri Compromise

Stephen Douglas wanted a central railroad route, and to get territorial government along it he agreed to language repealing the Missouri Compromise line of 36 degrees 30 minutes. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, signed 30 May 1854, created both territories and left slavery to popular sovereignty. The consequences landed mostly on Kansas, which bled for it, but the act also finished off the Whig Party and directly produced the Republican Party. Nebraska Territory as first drawn ran north to the Canadian border and was cut down repeatedly as Colorado, Dakota and Idaho territories were carved out of it. The slavery question never became a shooting matter here: the 1860 census counted fewer than twenty enslaved people in the whole territory, and the legislature abolished slavery in 1861 over Governor Samuel Black's veto.

Admitted over a presidential veto

Nebraska is the only state that entered the Union over a president's objection. Congress passed its admission bill in 1866, but the proposed state constitution limited voting to free white males, and Radical Republicans attached a condition removing that word. Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill. Congress overrode him, and Nebraska became the 37th state on 1 March 1867 once the legislature accepted the condition. Within months the legislature also moved the capital out of Omaha to the village of Lancaster, which it renamed Lincoln, over furious objections from the river city.

The Union Pacific had broken ground at Omaha in December 1863 and began laying rail west in 1865, so towns appeared along the line that had not existed five years before. J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, a nurseryman and newspaper editor, proposed a tree planting holiday for a treeless state, and the first Arbor Day on 10 April 1872 is credited with about a million seedlings going into the ground.

Standing Bear, and a courtroom in Omaha

The Ponca were removed from their Niobrara homeland to Indian Territory in 1877 through a clerical error in an earlier treaty that had assigned their land to the Sioux. Roughly a third died within the first year, including Standing Bear's son. In January 1879 Standing Bear left with about thirty followers to bury the boy at home and was arrested by General George Crook's soldiers. Thomas Tibbles of the Omaha Daily Herald publicized the case, two Omaha lawyers took it without fee, and on 12 May 1879 Judge Elmer Dundy ruled in Standing Bear v. Crook that an Indian is a person within the meaning of the habeas corpus law, the first federal ruling to say so.

Susette La Flesche, known as Inshata Theumba, interpreted at the trial and then toured the eastern cities with Standing Bear. Her sister Susan La Flesche Picotte earned a medical degree in 1889, the first Native American woman to do so, came home to the Omaha reservation as its physician, and opened a hospital at Walthill in 1913.

One chamber, public power, and irrigated corn

The blizzard of 12 January 1888 struck during a mild afternoon and killed more than two hundred people across the plains, many of them children walking home from country schools, which is why it is remembered as the Schoolchildren's Blizzard. Farm debt and falling grain prices then pushed Nebraska into the Populist revolt, and William Jennings Bryan of Lincoln rode it to three presidential nominations after his Cross of Gold speech in 1896. On 28 September 1919 a mob in Omaha burned the Douglas County courthouse, lynched Will Brown, a Black packinghouse worker, and came close to hanging the mayor who tried to stop them; federal troops under General Leonard Wood occupied the city afterward.

Norris also wrote the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 and the law creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Nebraska took that argument furthest of anyone: since 1949 it has been the only state where every customer buys power from a publicly owned utility. Frank Zybach's centre pivot patent, filed from the village of Valley in 1952, put the Ogallala Aquifer under irrigated corn and drew the green circles now visible from any window seat. Offutt Field near Bellevue built the two B-29s that carried the atomic bombs, then housed the headquarters of Strategic Air Command from 1948 until 1992. Since 1992 Nebraska has awarded electoral votes by congressional district, a rule that has repeatedly put a single Omaha vote in play.

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