Before Creighton

Creighton itself began with a widow's will. Edward Creighton, born in Belmont County, Ohio, in 1820, surveyed the telegraph route from Omaha to Sacramento in the winter of 1860-61, dug its first post hole on July 2, 1861, and saw the line finished on October 24. He died on November 5, 1874, having asked his wife, Mary Lucretia, to carry out his plan for a college. Her will directed that it be founded in his memory, and Creighton College opened on September 2, 1878, with 120 students taught by five Jesuits and two lay teachers.

What the plaque says

Before Creighton Archaeological evidence shows periodic Native American residence in this general area for some 12,000 years. From the mid-1600s to the early 1700s the Omaha, Ponca, Oto, and Ioway migrated from the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes to today's western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. The Pawnee were the only Native Americans then living in the region. In the 1860s the Winnebago and Santee Sioux were relocated to Nebraska. From the 1730s to the 1760s the Oto occupied an earthlodge village extending from today's Creighton campus to downtown Omaha. In 1804 Lewis and Clark recorded the ruins as "ancient village of the Ottoes on mounds." Jesuits began work among North America's Native peoples in the 1600s, and in 1829 opened a mission center in St. Louis. In 1838-39 Father Pierre J. DeSmet and other Jesuits founded St. Joseph's Mission for the Potawatamie tribe across the Missouri River from here. Although the Pawnee, Oto-Missouria, and Iowa nations now reside elsewhere, the Omaha, Northern Ponca, parts of the Winnebago and Santee Sioux, and a significant urban Indian population in Omaha and other Nebraska cities remain Creighton's neighbors and partners. Creighton University Nebraska State Historical Society, 2011

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Joslyn Art Museum — 0.4 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 1.1 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 2.2 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 5.0 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.

More markers nearby

• Creighton University — 0.3 mi
• Capitol Hill — 0.3 mi
• Kountze Memorial Lutheran Church — 0.7 mi
• Captain William Clark and Private Reuben Field — 0.9 mi