The White City on the Prairie

Omaha was barely four decades old in eighteen ninety-eight and already felt the impulse to prove itself to the world. The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition opened on the first of June that year, a world's fair designed to showcase everything west of the Mississippi River, and it spread across one hundred and eighty acres of North Omaha in classical buildings built to look like marble but made of plaster over steel.

The lagoon at the fair's center stretched two thousand feet. Twenty-one major buildings surrounded it, with facades that borrowed from Rome and Greece. At night, arc lights mounted across the grounds turned the whole complex into what contemporaries called the White City, the same name Chicago's Columbian Exposition had used five years before, and the Omaha fair wore it with conscious intention.

President William McKinley opened the exposition officially on June first, eighteen ninety-eight, by pressing a button in Washington that sent current across a telegraph wire to set Omaha's machinery in motion. Over the next five months, two million six hundred thousand people passed through the gates. The exhibits ranged from agricultural machinery to X-ray devices, which were still new enough in eighteen ninety-eight to draw crowds.

Buffalo Bill Cody brought his Wild West Show to the Omaha Driving Park, a few miles from the fair, in August. The post office issued a commemorative series of nine stamps depicting Western scenes, now known among collectors as the Trans-Mississippi Issue, considered among the finest stamps the government ever produced.

By November first the buildings were closed. By the following spring most of them were torn down. What remained was North Omaha's street grid and the memory of a city that had built a world's fair on the high plains.