The Platte River Road

The river does not look like much. Standing on its bank in central Nebraska, you might mistake it for a wide sandbar with a thin film of water running over it. Pioneers crossing the Great Plains in the eighteen forties described it as a mile wide and an inch deep. They drank from it anyway.

The Platte River Road was the central corridor of American westward expansion. Between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty-nine, somewhere near four hundred thousand emigrants followed it west. The Oregon Trail used it. The Mormon Trail used it. The California Trail used it. The Pony Express ran alongside it. They all converged on this shallow, braided channel because the Platte offered something the Great Plains rarely provided: a gentle grade, reliable water, and a navigable route through otherwise featureless grass.

The emigrants came in wagons pulled by oxen, in handcart companies pushing their belongings by hand, in loose columns that stretched back farther than a person could see. They left ruts in the land so deep that you can still find traces of them in places where the prairie has never been broken by a plow. The graves of those who did not make it line the route for more than a thousand miles.

When the transcontinental railroad was surveyed in the eighteen sixties, the engineers followed the same logic the emigrants had already proved. The Union Pacific laid its tracks along the Platte Valley corridor. Interstate Eighty follows the same line today. The great migration chose this path not from imagination but from necessity, and every road that came after it has been following the same river ever since.

The Platte is unglamorous. It floods in spring and nearly vanishes in late summer. Cottonwoods lean over it and sandhill cranes stop here by the hundreds of thousands each March, their calls filling the valley from horizon to horizon. It is not a dramatic river. It simply points west, and for a century and a half, that was enough.