Hell, I thought I was dead too. Turns out I was just in Nebraska.
- Gene Hackman in Unforgiven

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.  TOP

Eastern Nebraska
The silt-laden Missouri River separates Nebraska from Iowa and Missouri to the east. There are few natural ports on this stretch, and Omaha remains the only riverfront community of any size. Lincoln , 58 miles southwest, is the state's capital and seat of its university.

Western Nebraska
After the unerringly flat journey across eastern Nebraska, the far west comes as a refreshing change. In the Panhandle , as it's often called, wave upon wave of rumpled sandy hills, thinly coated with prairie grass, back off toward the horizon like a sea in constant turmoil. Early pioneers wrote the area off as unproductive, and it remained barren until massive irrigation work at the start of the twentieth century enabled agricultural settlement. In the northwest the sand hills yield to classic John Ford-style Western scenery: pancake-flat valleys, crisscrossed by dry meandering riverbeds and corraled by crusty, contorted bluffs under the constant shadow of fast-moving clouds. Emigrants on the Oregon Trail used the bizarre outcrops which sprout along the way as "road signs" as a way of knowing that their trek across the plains was coming to an end.  TOP