Nebraska: The Flat Water State

Nebraska sits at the center of the North American continent, in a place where the eastern hardwood forests give way to open grassland, where the rainfall becomes unreliable, and where the sky starts to matter more than it does anywhere east of here. The state extends from the Missouri River bluffs in the east to the high plains and sandhills of the west, covering a range of landscape that is wider than it looks on a map.

The name comes from a word in the Otoe and Omaha languages that described the Platte River: flat water, or broad water. The Platte became the spine of American westward migration. Between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty-nine, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail all converged on this shallow, braided channel and followed it across the plains. Somewhere near five hundred thousand emigrants passed through what is now Nebraska during those three decades. Many of them wrote in their diaries that it seemed like the whole country was moving at once.

The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty-two opened the land to settlement in a different way, offering a hundred and sixty free acres to anyone willing to live on them for five years. Hundreds of thousands of families came, most of them from Europe, and most of them discovered that farming the Great Plains required different knowledge and different tools than farming anywhere they had come from. Some failed and left. Many stayed and adapted.

The result is a state that has been remade several times, by generations of immigrants who farmed sod and hauled water from wells, by the center-pivot irrigation systems that now draw ancient water from beneath the ground, and by the railroads and the meatpacking industry and the ethanol plants that have followed. Each transformation built on the one before it and changed the landscape again.

Nebraska has the only unicameral state legislature in the United States. It has the largest concentration of cattle ranches in the contiguous forty-eight states, in the Sandhills. And it has some of the most productive farmland in the world, in the loess-soil counties along the Missouri River. It is a place that rewards closer attention than it usually gets.