Nebraska marked its birthday as a state this week, reaching the ripe old age of 151, but it still has plenty of vigor. Two days after the official March 1 birthday, let’s reflect on some of the many interesting parts from the state’s earliest decades.
First, the geologists remind us that the variety of landscapes that span the state were shaped by conditions going back deep into history. Massive ice sheets and persistent winds had a huge sculpting effect, for example, during the past 2.5 million years.
Native Americans have lived in what’s now Nebraska for at least 13,000 years. Eleven years after statehood, the 1879 trial in Omaha of Ponca Chief Standing Bear affirmed the legal rights of Native Americans to fundamental constitutional protections.
In the first decades after statehood, Nebraska saw dramatic population growth. The state’s population went from less than 125,000 in 1870 to more than 1 million by 1900. Towns sprang up along railroad lines, with the string of town names following alphabetical order. Homesteaders showed determination with their sod houses. (“It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house,” Mark Twain wrote after a visit.)
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Cowboys crossed the sea of grass to bring up longhorns from Texas. At the end of the trail in Ogallala — dubbed the “Gomorrah of the cattle trail” by trail driver Andy Adams in his memoirs — cowpokes indulged in revelry.
Buffalo Bill Cody took his Wild West extravaganza across Nebraska, to the East Coast and on to Europe. In 1893, the dramatic, 1,000-mile Chadron to Chicago Cowboy Race thrilled Nebraskans.
Farmers and ranchers had to cope with the vagaries of Great Plains weather plus grasshopper invasions and, worst of all, the depression of the 1890s that hit the region hard. Nebraska writers such as Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz and Bess Streeter Aldrich used their craft to describe pioneer experiences.
In pioneer days, scholar Alan Boye notes, the post office at Thedford “delivered mail by horse every day for a number of years. The 50-mile trip required three changes in teams.”
The state’s population displayed a remarkable diversity, with immigration from a wide range of European countries. The Hispanic community put down early roots in the Nebraska Panhandle.
On July 3-4, 1894, black residents in Omaha held the nation’s first African-American fair, “featuring exhibits mounted by Nebraska’s urban and rural residents,” historian Quintard Taylor notes. By 1910, he reports, Omaha’s black population constituted no less than “the third-largest African-American population among the major cities in the West.”
In 1923, Cather, a Red Cloud native, looked back at the state’s pioneers. “The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there,” she wrote in The Nation, “a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration. With these old men and women the attainment of material prosperity was a moral victory, because it was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of a struggle that tested character.”
Amid the technological wonders of the 21st century, it’s appropriate to remember and appreciate what’s come before in our state, now in its 151st year.