Nebraska Summary

Nebraska is known as “The Cornhusker State,” reflecting its status as one of the nation’s principal agricultural producers and the large proportion (95 percent) of its territory devoted to farmland. It is the 15th-largest state and the 38th most populous. Its inhabitants are chiefly of German, Irish, English, Czech, and Mexican descent. Omaha is its largest city, and Lincoln is the state capital.

One of the most popular activities for tourists is following the pioneers’ footsteps along the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. Other historic attractions are the state’s many museums and historic sites such as Fort Robinson, Homestead National Monument, Scotts Bluff, and Chimney Rock. Nebraska is also a state with many natural attractions, such as the forests and striking rock formations of Pine Ridge and the northwest Badlands, its canoeable rivers, the bluffs along the Missouri River, paleontological sites such as Agate Fossil Beds, the wildlife refuges, and the Sandhills.

In the colonial era the region was explored by the French and the Spanish, and both laid claim to it. At that time it was inhabited by the Omaha, Oto, Ponca, Missouri, and Pawnee peoples, although the Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux all hunted in western Nebraska. Until 1854 white settlement was forbidden. European visitation was limited to licensed fur traders, missionaries, Indian agents and, beginning in 1843, settlers following the Oregon Trail to the nation’s West. A land rush resulted from the combined effects of the declaration of the Nebraska Territory in 1854, the availability of free land under the 1862 Homestead Act, and the construction of the railways starting in 1865.

Nebraska is the birthplace of Arbor Day (1872), the rodeo (1882), the United States’ first and only unicameral (single-chamber) legislature (1934), and such notable figures as Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, John J. Pershing, Willa Cather, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, Gerald Ford, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X, and Johnny Carson.