Our earliest records describe the Nebraska Sandhills as “a great desert of shifting sand” unfit for settlement. The great desert sands do not shift. They are stabilized by grasses. On the question of fitness for settlement, however, were they correct? Europeans settled the Sandhills over the last three decades of the 1800s. Populations peaked in the 1920s. Since then, depopulation has been precipitous. Questions of sustainability remain.
On May 9, 1869, the last spike was driven on the first transcontinental railroad, opening access to markets on both coasts of the United States. Records from the same year show the Lonergan brothers raising a small herd of cattle they had driven from Texas to the lower Sandhills in upper Keith County. To the surprise of many, the cattle flourished. Over the next decade, massive herds of Texas cattle were driven to Nebraska, arriving gaunt from the long trail. More ranchers settled in the Sandhills, fanning out east and west from where Kingsley Dam now blocks the North Platte River. They fattened beef over the winter, then trailed south to a new Union Pacific Railroad line. From the new terminus of the Texas Trail at Ogallala, the rail line followed the Platte Valley east to Omaha and transected west across the lower Panhandle, through Kimball County, toward developing western markets.
Some of these early Sandhills cowboys had given up the trail after driving from Texas. They pushed cattle farther north into Arthur and McPherson Counties. By 1873, the year barbed wire was invented, ranchers were also filling up the South Loup valley upstream of Kearney into Custer County, while others began moving into the Sandhills from the north into Brown County. Before long, Nebraska was producing its own beef for the rest of the country. Ranchers settled in the valleys scattered among the Sandhills. Herds roamed unfenced open range, land in the public domain. Branding was critical. During blizzards masses of cattle drifted southeasterly across the open range into homestead land along the rivers. Ranches consolidated and grew. Opportunities for ranching were promoted in advertising and books, including Gen. James Bisbin’s 1881 bestseller, Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains. New railroad lines expanded access to market. By 1882 the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Railroad, curving across northeast Nebraska, had reached Valentine. Before the end of the decade, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad had sliced its way through the center of the Sandhills from Grand Island to Alliance.
The cold, snowy winter of 1880–81 was a harbinger of a tumultuous decade. Relentless blizzards drove off many cattle ranchers, especially the smaller operations, during much of the decade. Weather was not the ranchers’ only adversary. While larger ranches prospered, the economic and cultural landscape changed. In 1882 a lower Sandhills rancher saw the “trickle of homesteaders into the big North Platte Valley” as a portent of things to come as Nellie Snyder Yost wrote in The Call of the Range. Like all cattlemen, he “feared the plowman.” Before the middle of the decade, grangers were “flocking in by the hundreds . . . plowing up little patches of land for corn, picketing out their milk cows, sending complaints against the cattlemen to Washington.”
Throughout the early settlement of the Sandhills, cattlemen and farmers fought over loss of livestock and crops, the battle lines haphazardly drawn in fence laws at the local, state, and federal levels. Separating livestock and crops was a challenge in the Nebraska plains. The stone walls of New England were not possible. There were few rails to be split; fence laws had little value without fence. Many a farmer found satisfaction in eating a good beef cow that had strayed through his crops. On occasion a granger corralled a few head and trailed the collection to town for sale. The story of Print Olive hanging cattle rustlers who killed his brother resounds through the Sandhills today.
In his 1931 Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb wrote: “Barbed wire made the hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead both possible and profitable on the Prairie Plains; it made the homestead possible in the dry plains, but it did not make it profitable. The farmers took the homesteads there, but they did not and could not always hold them. Conditions were still too hard.”
Good fences did not guarantee good crops, nor did they necessarily mean good neighbors. Fights continued between granger and cattleman. Wire cutters were deployed by both sides. Ranchers became notorious for fencing the public domain to build cattle empires. The war for the Sandhills took on epic scale when a former rancher named Teddy Roosevelt used the power of the U.S. presidency to lock up Bartlett Richards of the Spade Ranch on charges related to illegal fencing. In 1911, before his one-year sentence was served, Richards died; he was the last of the cattle kings.
Richards outlived the other cattle kings because he fought the longest. Most of the range was “stitched up with fences” before the 1880s were over. The last roundup in Cherry County was in 1885. The finale, conducted with great fanfare in Cheyenne County, followed three years later. As Yost wrote, “By the end of 1888 the cattle kingdoms were virtually gone. . . . In time, the ranches would be big again, never as big as in the fabulous ’80’s, but good-sized outfits; and they’d be managed after a new fashion, under fence, with winter feeding.”
Over the three decades from the 1880s through the 1910s, grangers and ranchers fought over the edges of the Sandhills, until the matter was mostly settled. The 1904 Kinkaid Act, by granting up to 640 acres, allowed the homesteader one last fighting chance at making a go of farming in the Sandhills. This act brought one of the few ethnic settlements into the Sandhills. Two dozen African American families claimed about fourteen thousand acres in Cherry County and established a town they named after one of the business owners, DeWitty. Like nearly all homesteads in the Sandhills, the DeWitty settlement failed. Yet, it is not the homesteader who was unfit for the Sandhills; rather, it was the Sandhills that were unfit for the homestead.
Beyond grangers pushing the limits of the Sandhills, other industries critical to the business of livestock have defined the Sandhills with different edges. The establishment of the Union Stockyards in 1883 linked Omaha to the Sandhills. The stockyards brought immigrants flooding into South Omaha from Europe. Omaha, of course, is 250 miles east of the Sandhills. As the days of the Omaha stockyards waned, meatpacking plants were established along the edges of the Sandhills. As the stockyards of Omaha once did, the meatpacking plants of Schuyler and Lexington draw immigrants. Yet immigrants have not moved into the Sandhills. They remain on the edges.
Nearly all academic literature on immigration in Nebraska is devoid of information about the Sandhills. Rare anecdotes—such as DeWitty and a small group of Japanese laborers who slept in holes dug in the ground while helping build the potash factories near Antioch—only emphasize the lack of ethnic and racial diversity in the Sandhills. The statistic that perhaps best paints the picture is that 2.8 percent of the populations of Sandhills counties is Hispanic, compared to 33.3 percent in Dawson County, where a meatpacking plant has operated since the 1980s.
A year after the Union Stockyards were built in Omaha, T.B. Hord shipped 235 cattle from range in Wyoming to a farm north of Central City, where he put them on feed, and a separate industry was spawned on the edges of the Sandhills. Today, stockyards and feeders remain largely on the edges of the Sandhills.
Over the decades, the granger invasion abated. By 1920 populations in most Sandhills counties had peaked. The Depression chased the hardiest homesteaders from their claims, and farmland retreated to better soils. Today, tilling the Sandhills has taken on its own ethos, although eight-dollar corn squeezed the edges in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Current estimates indicate the average population loss since the peak in all Sandhills counties is 59.3 percent. Over the past hundred years, the Sandhills have experienced economic stagnation, ranch consolidation, and population loss. Certainly, there are exceptions. Entrepreneurs, who understand the need for diversification in both attraction and audience, are creating authentic local experience in breweries, premium beef, canoeing wild rivers through backcountry more remote than the Rockies, bird-watching tours, star-gazing parties, and world-class golf.
Barbed wire, the windmill, the revolver, and the railroad were essential to the early settlement of the Sandhills. Continued infrastructure development has been important to the long-term settlement of the Sandhills. Rural electrification made life more bearable for the isolated rancher. Paved highways, blacktopped roads, and telephone lines allowed ranchers more connection with the rest of America. Modern broadband infrastructure offers affordable access to markets around the globe. All such infrastructure is critical to diversification of life in the Sandhills.
Although the foregoing instruments give shape to the human settlement of the Sandhills, they do not altogether define the Sandhills. Humans themselves are, of course, part of the Sandhills—part of the grit felt by outsiders—but humans are more defined by the Sandhills than they are a defining agent. The Sandhills are not Broadway; they are not subway graffiti.
Who, by definition, is a Sandhiller? A sampling tells of one made independent, tough, stubborn, self-reliant, innovative, and perhaps wealthy by the nature of their place of life and business. We might roughly define humans and their assorted constructions and agree they are all part of the Sandhills, but, still, what then are the Sandhills?
To answer that, return to the question the first correspondents reporting from history asked and answered. Are the Sandhills fit for habitation? Is settlement in the Sandhills sustainable? Perhaps, rather, the inquiry should now be, what is this that we want to sustain? Or, is it even for us to ask, what do we want the Sandhills to be?
The Sandhills are remnants of antiquity, treeless deserts, vast grasslands, pristine landscapes, largely undisturbed by people. Our attempt to tame them with the plow backfired. These lands were meant to be wild, wilderness, backcountry, the range of bison and cattle.