USA Guide
The Great Plains
Nebraska
Though modern transcontinental travellers tend to see Nebraska in much the same light as those heading west during the Gold Rush did – as just another dreary expanse of prairie to get through as fast as possible – this flat and sparsely populated state in fact holds a few places of interest. However, a good three hundred miles of underwhelming, livestock-rearing flatlands separate its most appealing cities, commercial Omaha and the livelier state capital, Lincoln, from the western Panhandle, where the landscape 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 thirty-six 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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