Cheyenne County

The plaque's Dismal River or Plains Apache people are the Ndee, the name Apache people prefer. Archeologists named the Dismal River complex for the Sandhills stream where its first sites were found, date it to about 1550 to 1750, and now widely hold it to be ancestral Ndee. They lived in circular wood-framed houses, sturdier than tipis and lighter than Pawnee earthlodges, hunted bison, raised corn and made smoothed gray-to-black pottery. A camp near Courthouse Rock dates to 1625 to 1670. By the mid-1700s, pressed by mounted nations from the north and rivals for bison, they moved southwest.

What the plaque says

Cheyenne County Cheyenne County was organized in 1870 from lands ceded by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Dakota Sioux Indians. In the panhandle of Nebraska, it is part of the Cheyenne tableland portion of the Great Plains. Some fifteen miles west of Sidney lies the landmark, Point of Rocks. Nearby archeological discoveries confirm the existence of at least two prehistoric Indian cultures -- the Upper Republican (1100-1400 A. D.) and the Dismal River or Plains Apache (1700 A. D.). Once almost entirely covered by buffalo grass, this region for millennia nourished the American bison. Characterized by limited rainfall and swept by strong winds, this has become a land of broad wheat fields and sprawling cattle ranges. Ranching began in 1869, and by 1882 over two hundred thousand cattle pastured here. In the late 1880's settlers found 160-acre homesteads too small to support dry-land farming and extreme drought and grasshoppers of the 1890's forced many to leave. The Kinkaid Act of 1904, granting 640-acre homesteads, resulted in another rush of settlement. Western travelers will follow the valley of Lodgepole Creek, used by the Union Pacific Railroad when constructing the first transcontinental line in 1867. Department of Roads Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Sidney — 3.2 mi
  Three surviving buildings of the post that guarded the Union Pacific at Sidney from 1867 to 1894, where a young army surgeon named Walter Reed found a ward full of ugly cases.

More markers nearby

• Sidney-Cheyenne County — steps away
• Nebraska's Earliest Documented Burial — 2.5 mi
• Fort Sidney — 3.2 mi
• Sidney-Black Hills Trail — 4.5 mi