Nebraska's Earliest Documented Burial

The reburial came at a turning point. In the late 1980s, after tribes learned that the State Historical Society held the remains of nearly 1,500 ancestors, they pressed for a state burial protection law, and in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Society has since returned more than 1,400 individuals and nearly 50,000 funerary objects. About 650 could not be tied to any one nation; between 2017 and 2020 staff and consultants agreed to return them jointly to a consortium of 37 tribes, and that reburial ended in spring 2021.

What the plaque says

Nebraska's Earliest Documented Burial A distinct group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers known to archeologists as the Oxbow Complex once occupied the northern High Plains from western Nebraska to southern Canada. About 2500 B.C. a band of Oxbow people interred two of their own near here. The skeletal remains, found eroding from a road cut, were covered with red ocher and buried in a semi-flexed position. This interment of a young adult male and an infant in a single grave represents Nebraska's earliest documented burial. The Oxbow people participated in an extensive North American trade network. Copper from the Great Lakes and shells from the Atlantic Coast have been found at Oxbow sites. Exotic objects accompanying the Sidney burial included a neck ornament made from a turtle shell, raven bones, freshwater mussel shells, a large stone knife of local Kimball chert, and five amazonite pendants. The closest source of amazonite, which resem- bles turquoise, is the Pike's Peak region of Colorado. Jim and Becky Haddix of Sidney are credited with the 1992 discovery and subsequent preservation effort. The remains and associated funerary objects were reinterred in the Sidney cemetery. Cheyenne County Visitors' Committee City of Sidney Nebraska State Historical Society, 2011

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Sidney — 0.8 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

• Fort Sidney — 0.9 mi
• Sidney-Black Hills Trail — 2.0 mi
• Sidney-Cheyenne County — 2.5 mi
• Cheyenne County — 2.5 mi