Omaha & the Lower Missouri

This is Umóⁿhoⁿ country, and the largest city in Nebraska carries their name. The Omaha signed away their land west of the Missouri in an 1854 treaty, and that July residents of Council Bluffs crossed the river to picnic on the hill where they laid out a town. Eight years earlier the Latter-day Saints had wintered a few miles north at Winter Quarters, on Omaha land, with Big Elk's consent, and buried hundreds of their dead there.

The region divides along the river and the Platte. Downtown Omaha holds the Art Deco Union Station, now the Durham Museum, and the Joslyn, a free museum that keeps Karl Bodmer's watercolors of the upper Missouri from 1833 and 1834. North Omaha has the lot where Malcolm X was born in 1925 and the Mormon cemetery at Florence. Up US-75 at Fort Calhoun, Fort Atkinson has been rebuilt on the bluff where more than a thousand soldiers and civilians lived from 1820 to 1827, the first army post west of the Missouri.

South and west, where the Platte comes in from the prairie, the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland keeps the bombers of the command that ran the nation's nuclear force from Offutt for forty-four years.

What to See in Omaha & the Lower Missouri

6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Architecture

The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station)

Omaha

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.

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Stories from Omaha & the Lower Missouri

Omaha & the Lower Missouri rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.