Omaha: The Reuben, the Meatpacking, and the Starting Line

Omaha sits on the west bank of the Missouri River, which is the eastern edge of the Great Plains and the beginning of the agricultural Midwest. Or the end of it, depending on which direction you are traveling. The city was established in eighteen fifty-four as the eastern terminus of what would become the transcontinental railroad, the point where the Union Pacific began its push west.

The railroad made Omaha the gateway to the Nebraska and Wyoming territories, and the stockyards that followed processed the cattle that came off the range to the west. At its peak, the Omaha stockyards were among the largest in the world, handling millions of cattle and hogs a year. The industry that grew around those stockyards, the meatpacking plants and their labor force, shaped the city's ethnic geography in ways still visible.

The Reuben sandwich is, by persistent local tradition, an Omaha invention. A grocer named Reuben Kulakofsky allegedly asked for it at a weekly poker game at the Blackstone Hotel sometime in the nineteen twenties. The story is disputed.

Competing claims exist. The sandwich consists of corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on rye, which is a combination that sounds accidental and tastes deliberate. The Omaha tribe, Umonhon, in their own language, have lived along the Missouri River for centuries.

They ceded most of their territory through a series of treaties in the nineteenth century and retain a reservation in northeastern Nebraska. The city that bears their name is not on their reservation, which is perhaps the most American sentence in the sequence of things that happened in this river valley.