Nebraska dates back to its formation
as a territory by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, passed
by the United States Congress on May 30, 1854. The
Nebraska Territory was settled extensively under
the Homestead Act of 1862 during the 1860s, and in
1867 was admitted to the Union as the 37th U.S.
state. The Plains Indians were descendants of
succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples who have
occupied the area for thousands of
years. Several explorers from across Europe
explored the lands that became Nebraska. In 1682,
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed
the area first when he named all the territory
drained by the Mississippi River and its
tributaries for France, naming it the Louisiana
Territory. In 1714, Etienne de Bourgmont traveled
from the mouth of the Missouri River in Missouri
to the mouth of the Platte River, which he called
the Nebraskier River, becoming the first person to
approximate the state's name.
In
1720, Spaniard Pedro de Villasur led an overland
expedition that followed an Indian trail from
Santa Fe to Nebraska. In a battle with the Pawnee,
Villasur and 34 members of his party were killed
near the juncture of the Loup and Platte Rivers
just south of present-day Columbus, Nebraska.
Marking a major defeat for Spanish control of the
region, a monk was the only survivor from the
party, apparently left alive as a warning to the
colony of New Spain. With the goal of reaching
Sante Fe by water, the pair of French-Canadian
explorers named Pierre and Paul Mallet reached the
mouth of what they named the Platte River in 1739.
They ended up following the south fork of the
Platte into Colorado.
In
1762, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau after
France's defeat by Great Britain in the Seven
Years' War, France ceded its lands west of the
Mississippi River to Spain, causing the future
Nebraska to fall under the rule of New Spain,
based in Mexico and the Southwest. In 1795 Jacques
D'Eglise traveled the Missouri River Valley on
behalf of the Spanish crown. Searching for the
elusive Northwest Passage, D'Eglise did not go any
further than central North Dakota.
A group
of St. Louis merchants, collectively known as the
Missouri Company, funded a series of trading
expeditions along the Missouri river. In 1794,
Jean-Baptiste Truteau established a trading post
30 miles up the Niobrara River. A Scotsman named
John McKay established a trading post on the west
bank of the Missouri River in 1795. The post
called Fort Charles was located south of
present-day Dakota City, Nebraska.
In
1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana
Territory from France for $15,000,000. What became
Nebraska was under the "rule" of the United States
for the first time. In 1812, President James
Madison signed a bill creating the Missouri
Territory, including the present-day state of
Nebraska. Manuel Lisa, a Spanish fur trader from
New Orleans, built a trading post called Fort Lisa
in the Ponca Hills in 1812. His effort befriending
local tribes is credited with thwarting British
influence in the area during the War of
1812.
The
U.S. Army established Fort Atkinson near today's
Fort Calhoun in 1820, in order to protect the
area's burgeoning fur trade industry. In 1822, the
Missouri Fur Company built a headquarters and
trading post about nine miles north of the mouth
of the Platte River and called it Bellevue,
establishing the first town in Nebraska. In 1824,
Jean-Pierre Cabanné established Cabanne's Trading
Post for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company
near Fort Lisa at the confluence of Ponca Creek
and the Missouri River. It became a well-known
post in the region.
In
1833, Moses P. Merill established a mission among
the Otoe Indians. The Moses Merill Mission was
sponsored by the Baptist Missionary Union. In
1842, John C. Frémont completed his exploration of
the Platte River country with Kit Carson in
Bellevue. He sold his mules and government wagons
at auction in there. On this mapping trip, Frémont
used the Otoe word Nebrathka to designate the
Platte River. Platte is from the French word for
"flat", the translation of Ne-brath-ka, meaning
"land of flat waters."
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854
established the 40th parallel north as the
dividing line between the territories of Kansas
and Nebraska. As such, the original territorial
boundaries of Nebraska were much larger than
today; the territory was bounded on the west by
the Continental Divide between the Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans; on the north by the 49th parallel
north (the boundary between the United States and
Canada), and on the east by the White Earth and
Missouri rivers. However, the creation of new
territories by acts of Congress progressively
reduced the size of Nebraska.
Most
settlers were farmers, but another major economic
activity involved support for travelers using the
Platte River trails. After gold was discovered in
Wyoming in 1859, a rush of speculators followed
overland trails through the interior of Nebraska.
The Missouri River towns became important
terminals of an overland freighting business that
carried goods brought up the river in steamboats
over the plains to trading posts and Army forts in
the mountains. Stagecoaches provided passenger,
mail, and express service, and for a few months in
1860–1861 the famous Pony Express provided mail
service.
Many
wagon trains trekked through Nebraska on the way
west. They were assisted by soldiers at Ft. Kearny
and other Army forts guarding the Platte River
Road between 1846 and 1869. Fort commanders
assisted destitute civilians by providing them
with food and other supplies while those who could
afford it purchased supplies from post sutlers.
Travelers also received medical care, had access
to blacksmithing and carpentry services for a fee,
and could rely on fort commanders to act as law
enforcement officials. Fort Kearny also provided
mail services and, by 1861, telegraph services.
Moreover, soldiers facilitated travel by making
improvements on roads, bridges, and ferries. The
forts additionally gave rise to towns along the
Platte River route.
The
wagon trains gave way to railroad traffic as the
Union Pacific Railroad—the eastern half of the
first transcontinental railroad—was constructed
west from Omaha through the Platte Valley. It
opened service to California in 1869. In 1867
Colorado was split off and Nebraska, reduced in
size to its modern boundaries, was admitted to the
Union.
Governor Alvin Saunders guided the
territory during the American Civil War
(1861–1865), as well as the first two years of the
postbellum era. He worked with the territorial
legislature to help define the borders of
Nebraska, as well as to raise troops to serve in
the Union Army. No battles were fought in the
territory, but Nebraska raised three regiments of
cavalry to help the war effort, and more than
3,000 men served in the military. Capital
changes
The
capital of the Nebraska Territory was at Omaha.
During the 1850s there were numerous unsuccessful
attempts to move the capital to other locations,
including Florence and Plattsmouth. In the
Scriptown corruption scheme, ruled illegal by the
United States Supreme Court in the case of Baker
v. Morton, local businessmen tried to secure land
in the Omaha area to give away to legislators. The
capital remained at Omaha until 1867 when Nebraska
gained statehood, at which time the capital was
moved to Lincoln, which was called Lancaster at
that point.
A
constitution for Nebraska was drawn up in 1866.
There was some controversy over Nebraska's
admission as a state, in view of a provision in
the 1866 constitution restricting suffrage to
White voters; eventually, on February 8, 1867, the
United States Congress voted to admit Nebraska as
a state provided that suffrage was not denied to
non-white voters. The bill admitting Nebraska as a
state was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, but
the veto was overridden by a supermajority in both
Houses of Congress. Nebraska became the first–and
to this day the only–state to be admitted to the
Union by means of a veto override.
The
history of slavery in Nebraska is generally seenas
short and limited. The issue was contentious for
the legislature between the creation of the
Nebraska Territory in 1854 and the outbreak of the
American Civil War in 1861. There was apparently a particular
acceptance of African Americans in the Nebraska
Territory when they first arrived en masse.
According to a publication by the Federal Writers
Project,
In the Territory of Nebraska
the fight to exclude slavery from within the
territorial boundaries spread from the Senate to
the press and to the pulpit. Even among the slaves
in the South the word spread that here was a place
where the attitude toward Negroes was tempered
with tolerance.
Railroads played a central role in
the settlement of Nebraska.[11] The land was good
for farms and ranches, but without transportation
would be impossible to raise commercial crops. The
railroad companies had been given large land
grants that were used to back the borrowings from
New York and London that financed construction.
They were anxious to locate settlers upon the land
as soon as possible, so there would be a steady
outflow of farm products, and a steady inflow of
manufactured items purchased by the farmers. The
also built towns that were needed to service the
railroad itself, with dining halls for passengers,
construction crews, repair shops and housing for
train crews. The towns attracted cattle drives and
cowboys.
In the
1870s and 1880s Civil War veterans and immigrants
from Europe came by the thousands to take up land
in Nebraska, with the result that despite severe
droughts, grasshopper plagues, economic distress,
and other harsh conditions the frontier line of
settlement pushed steadily westward. Most of the
great cattle ranches that had grown up near the
ends of the trails from Texas gave way to farms,
although the Sand Hills remained essentially a
ranching country.
The
Union Pacific (UP) land grant gave it ownership of
12,800 acres per mile of finished track. The
federal government kept every other section of
land, so it also had 12,800 acres to sell or give
away to homesteaders. The UP's goal was not to
make a profit, but rather to build up a permanent
clientele of farmers and townspeople who would
form a solid basis for routine sales and
purchases. The UP, like other major lines, opened
sales offices in the East and in Europe, advertise
heavily, and offered attractive package rates for
farmer to sell out and moved his entire family,
and his tools, to the new destination. In 1870 the
UP sold rich Nebraska farmland at five dollars an
acre, with one fourth down and the remainder in
three annual installments. It gave a 1ountie0 percent
discount for cash. Farmers could also homestead
land, getting it free from the federal government
after five years, or even sooner by paying $1.50
an acre. Sales were improved by offering large
blocks to ethnic colonies of European immigrants.
Germans and Scandinavians, for example, could sell
out their small farm back home and buy much larger
farms for the same money. European ethnics
comprised half of the population of Nebraska in
the late 19th century. Married couples were
usually the homesteaders, but single women were
also eligible on their own.
A
typical development program was that undertaken by
the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad to
promote settlement in southeastern Nebraska during
1870–80. The company participated enthusiastically
in the boosterism campaigns that drew optimistic
settlers to the state. The railroad offered
farmers the opportunity to purchase land grant
parcels on easy credit terms. Soil quality,
topography, and distance from the railroad line
generally determined railroad land prices.
Immigrants and native-born migrants sometimes
clustered in ethnic-based communities, but mostly
the settlement of railroad land was by diverse
mixtures of migrants. By deliberate campaigns,
land sales, and a vast transportation network, the
railroads facilitated and accelerated the peopling
and development of the Great Plains, with
railroads and water key to the potential for
success in the Plains environment.
Lafayette Nuckolls, a member of the first
Nebraska territorial legislature; and his
brother, Stephen Nuckolls, a pioneering Nebraska
settler, businessman and banker
Named for a towering bluff located in the
Scotts Bluff National Monument; the bluffs
themselves are named for Hiram Scott, a fur
trapper who is alleged to have crawled 75 miles
with a broken leg before collapsing and dying at
the foot of the formation
