Cowboy Capital

The marker stands on the grounds of the Leonidas A. Brandhoefer house, the Mansion on the Hill. Brandhoefer, a Pennsylvanian, sold his York lumber business in 1885 to become cashier of the Bank of Ogallala, and building began in mid-1887 with brick from Ogallala's first kiln and cut stone shipped from Lincoln. On July 17 he collapsed with a paralytic illness, and the house was finished while he recovered in York. Money trouble forced its sale in 1888. The Keith County Historical Society opened the house as its museum in October 1967.

What the plaque says

Cowboy Capital Named for the Oglala band of Dakota Sioux and located on the Union Pacific Railroad, Ogallala was a lusty cowtown of the Old West. From 1875 to 1885 it was a wild woolly cowboy capital where gold flowed across the gaming tables, liquor across the bar, and often blood across the floor. As farmers settled eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, they destroyed the famous Chisholm Trail, forcing the herds westward, and the Western or Texas Trail through Dodge City to Ogallala was established. From Ogallala, Texas cattle were shipped East or sold to ranchers from Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, and Colorado. Indian agencies and mining camps provided an early market for Ogallala beef. Ogallala, the cowtown, was a lively and colorful segment of the American West and the chief gate- way to the newly opened ranges of the northern plains. By 1884 the trail driving days were virtually ended and the Old West and Ogallala turned to other ways of life. Cattle remain an important factor in the area along with farming, hydro- electric power and industry. Ogallala Chamber of Commerce Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 5.5 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 24 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.

More markers nearby

• Boot Hill — 0.2 mi
• Escape of the Northern Cheyenne — 5.2 mi
• Ash Hollow: Gateway to the North Platte Valley — 6.2 mi
• Ogallala and the Platte Valley — 6.2 mi