Fort Kearny State Historical Park

Fort Kearny stands on land the Pawnee sold for $2,000 in goods. On August 6, 1848, at the new post, chiefs of the Grand, Wolf, Republican and Tappage bands signed a treaty giving up a strip of the Platte valley about sixty miles long near the head of Grand Island, with Jeffrey Deroine, a formerly enslaved man, as interpreter. The post was to aid emigrants and keep peace between the Pawnee and the Lakota, and later served as a base for campaigns against the Plains nations.

Lieutenant Daniel P. Woodbury of the engineers had chosen the site on October 2, 1847, for its slight rise above floods, the timber on the islands and the hay in the bottoms. His soldiers built of sod around a four-acre parade ground and planted cottonwoods on its edges. Woodbury named it Fort Childs; in December 1848 the War Department renamed it for Stephen W. Kearny. On the main trail west, about 4,000 wagons had passed by June 1849. Later it was a stage and Pony Express station and a shelter for Union Pacific crews. The army ordered it abandoned on May 22, 1871, and in 1875 its buildings were torn down and hauled to North Platte and Sidney.

Little was left but the cottonwoods. The park has a reconstructed stockade, powder magazine and blacksmith-carpenter shop, and an interpretive center with an 18-minute film. A hike-bike trail crosses the Platte on an old railroad bridge, a good place in March to watch sandhill cranes at sunrise and sunset.