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Lewis and Clark’s expedition was followed by an expedition led by Zebulon M. Pike in 1806. This expedition was General James Wilkinson’s idea. Wilkinson was a newly appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory. He sent Pike on an expedition towards Spanish territory, possibly to provoke a war or to spy.
The Spanish in the New Mexico territory became very frightened about American plans when Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition because Spain still claimed parts of the Louisiana Territory.
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While Crook watched over the Ponca at Fort Omaha, Tibbles worked feverishly to tell Standing Bear’s story and enlist support for the Ponca cause. He telegraphed the story of Crook’s interview with Standing Bear to eastern newspapers and wrote a very passionate editorial for the Omaha Herald on April 1, 1879. Tibbles enlisted the support of the ministers of the leading churches in Omaha and sent a telegram to Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior, pleading with him to reverse ... Read more
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Major Stephen Long coined the phrase during his expedition to the Great Plains in 1819-20. His journey was only the third major exploration of the Louisiana Purchase since the U.S. bought it from France in ... Read more
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Plains Indians exhibited great skill and ingenuity in turning the natural materials they found around them into tools and materials to help them survive. They used stones, bones, shells, clay, hides, hair, and wood to make tools and implements. But, one of their greatest natural resources was the bison.
The Native Americans of eastern Nebraska in the late 1600s and early 1700s developed a system of seasonal travel carefully planned to put them at the right place at the right time ... Read more
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In the early 1800s, the economic reality of what would become Nebraska was based on trade between the Europeans and Indians for furs and skins. Trading companies gambled fortunes in this high-risk enterprise, but the day-to-day business of the fur trade was done in Indian camps or at far-flung posts.
The fur trade was an international business ... Read more
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Settlers on the Great Plains had to contend, both physically and psychologically, with what to them was a wilderness. They faced a featureless land that many described as "a sea of grass."
Europeans and Americans brought their own way of thinking about land with them, based on a system of longitude and latitude developed in the 18th century. Property lines were drawn on pieces of paper — maps — dividing one ... Read more
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The Ponca were very unhappy with the land and living conditions on the Quapaw Reservation. Much of the land was not suitable for cultivation; sanitation conditions were deplorable. Government agents refused to provide adequate farming equipment, and many of the people died from malaria. Since leaving Nebraska, nearly one-third of the tribe had died. In January 1879, Standing Bear’s son, Bear Shield, died. The distraught chief decided to return to his tribal lands in Nebraska to bury his son. It ... Read more
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The temperance movement in Lincoln of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a good example of how prohibition affected towns and cities across the nation. Lincoln had active temperance groups who believed the saloon was an evil institution that undermined the traditional values of family, thrift, social order and community prosperity. But the city also had groups who regarded alcohol as a normal part of social life and saw nothing wrong with having a drink, now and then.The ... Read more
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There are very few people who have seen an atomic bomb explode — or who would want to. But in 1955, there were several Nebraskans who were among the 5,800 civilian and military witnesses to an atomic test blast. The civilians were there by choice, while most of the military observers had been ordered there. The experiment was known as Operation Cue.
Operation Cue was not the first attempt to test the effects an atomic explosion would have on buildings and ... Read more
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What is it like to be born and raised an American, but to be considered an enemy because of where your parents were born? That’s what happened to many Japanese Americans in World War II.
Racism and war hysteria motivated the U.S. government to forcibly move more than 120,000 Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast to internment camps between 1942 and 1945. Nebraska’s central location kept its Japanese American citizens comparably safe from this process, ... Read more
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In 1844, pressure for more protection for additional whites was growing. The U.S. Secretary of War recommended that a chain of posts be built from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains to protect the Oregon migration. Col. Stephen Watts Kearny was ordered to construct a new fort and he chose a site on Table Creek, now Nebraska City. It would be named Fort Kearny.
The location of the fort in 1846 at Table Creek was a bad decision. The Table ... Read more
