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South Dakota

The Black Hills

The United States ceded South Dakota’s Black Hills to the Sioux in 1868, in the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The government intended that the Fort Laramie Treaty would settle the disposition of rights between the US, the Sioux, and the Arapaho, but what the government got was a mess. The Ponca, for instance, were not invited to Fort Laramie, but the reservation that the government had already ceded to the Ponca by treaty in 1858 was re-ceded to the Lakota without Ponca consent. Ultimately the US forcibly removed the Ponca to a new reservation in Oklahoma. It’s estimated that one in four of the Ponca died during the removal.

Photograph of General William T. Sherman and Commissioners in Council with Indian Chiefs at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 1868, National Archives and Records Administration.

The Lakota1 didn’t actually live in the Black Hills. That was holy ground, and their claims to the Black Hills were relatively recent. Until the late 16th century the Lakota were concentrated in the upper Mississippi Valley–eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa–but were pushed west by the Anishnaabe and Cree, who in turn were being pushed west by Europeans. The Lakota took the Black Hills from the Cheyenne in 1776.

The geology of the Black Hills is complex. There’s some volcanic stuff, and some sedimentary stuff, and some metamorphosis going on, and layers of rock were deposited horizontallly beginning about 1.8 billion years ago. Beginning about 80 million years ago there was a period of North American uplift, known helpfully as the Laramide Orogeny.2 The uplift raised portions of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico, and also raised the Black Hills (which are a kinda Rockies’ distant cousin) so that all those horizontal layers were now tilted upwards. What we’ve all seen of the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, is carved from the oldest granite core.

The granite core of the Black Hills.

The highest peak in the Black Hills, Black Elk Peak, is 7,242 feet, which is pretty tall, but not above tree line, and roughly half the height of the tallest peak in the Rockies.3 It’s a smidgeon taller than the highest peak in the Applachians, Clingman’s Dome, at 6,643 feet.

In the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty the US gave the Lakota the Black Hills forever. The Lakota naively thought that “forever” meant forever. They didn’t know that the US were Indian givers.

Kmusser, Great Sioux Reservation as established in 1868 by the Fort Laramie Treaty, from Wikipedia.

In 1873 the US and Europe suffered a major economic depression. Before the Civil War, the US was principally a farming economy, and economic downturns weren’t so hard on localized farm economies. By 1873 railroads were booming, and they were the nation’s second largest employer. Railroad speculation was rampant, and then the railroad speculation economy crashed. It’s estimated that following the crash unemployment in New York City reached as high as 25%.

The 1873 Panic was caused in part by the conversion from a silver and gold monetary standard to a gold standard, which resulted in less money in circulation and higher interest rates.4 Suddenly there was no money to invest and railroads began to fail. Gold was rumored in the Black Hills, and President Grant believed that exploration for gold in South Dakota could both put the unemployed to work and increase the government’s gold supplies, resulting in more money in circulation and lower interest rates. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition of somewhere north of 1000 men, including the 7th Cavalry, geologists, biologists, photographers, and journalists, into the Black Hills to, among other things, explore the possibility of mining for gold.

View of General Custer’s Camp, Black Hills, S.D., postcard printed 1947, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pcrd-1d06527.

It’s unclear if the Custer expedition found any significant gold, but true or not rumors of gold finds leaked. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty prospectors poured into the Black Hills. The flood of Americans annoyed the Lakota greatly, because they had those silly notions about forever. The US offered to buy the Black Hills, but not for what the Lakota thought it was worth, so the US took the hills without payment. The Lakota learned that in the context of the Black Hills, “forever” meant less than ten years. The Lakota went to war, and Custer was one of the big losers. The Lakota were also one of the big losers.5

Charles M. Russell, The Custer Fight, 1903, Library of Congress.

Population and Geography

South Dakota, with a 2024 population of 924,669, is the fifth-least populous state. At 77,116 square miles, it is the 16th largest state by area, and with 12 people per square mile it’s the fifth-least densely populated state.

With seven Sioux Reservations spread across the state, about 8.5% of the South Dakota population is Native American. Anglos are the largest group, at 80.5%. Hispanics are 5.1%, Blacks 2.6%.

File:National-atlas-indian-reservations-south-dakota.gif

Sioux Falls in the state’s southeast, roughly where Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota meet, is South Dakota’s largest city, at 209,289. Rapid City in the Black Hills has a population of 79,894. There are no other South Dakota cities with populations greater than 50,000. Pierre, the state capitol, has a population of 13,788. Pierre isn’t on an interstate highway.

The Black Hills are South Dakota’s only mountains, and they’re an isolated range in the state’s far west.6 Tourism has replaced mining as the Black Hills’ principal industry, and towns like Deadwood, Custer, and Keystone are tourist destinations.

Badlands National Park, parts of which are in the Pine Ridge Reservation, is located south and west of the Black Hills. The badlands are the product of deposition of horizontal layers of soft sedimentary sandstones, siltstones, limestones, shale, and other stuff that are eroded by wind and water into magnificent layered displays of time. The oldest formations are from the Western Interior Seaway and date from 75-69 million years ago. The most recent formation includes a layer of volcanic ash from volcanoes in Utah and Nevada, and are 34-30 million years old.

South Dakota is divided roughly in half by the north-south Missouri River. The east of the state is plains: the Dissected Till Plans (which also covers parts of Iowa and Nebraska, and which is an excellent place to grow corn), the Couteau des Prairies (which also covers parts of Minnesota and Iowa and is an excellent place to grow corn), and the James River Basin which cuts eastern South Dakota north to south.

Other than the Black Hills, South Dakota west of the Missouri River is arid, and is part of the Great Plains.

In addition to the Missouri River, the James and the Big Sioux Rivers cut the eastern half of the state north-south and meet the Missouri at the Nebraska state line. The east-west Grand, Moreau, Cheyenne, Belle Fourche, Bad, and White Rivers are spaced fairly evenly through the western half of the state, and they also feed the Missouri. All of the state’s best-known trout streams, Rapid Creek, Castle Creek, and Spearfish Creek, are small, relatively isolated creeks fed from springs and runoff in the Black Hills.

Black Hills Fish

The Black Hills are not only geologically isolated, they are biologically isolated as well. During Custer’s expedition, William Ludlow, the chief engineer for the Corps of Engineers’ Department of the Dakotas (and an angler), declared that there were no more suitable streams for trout anywhere than those of the Black Hills. He also noted that, in fact, there were no trout. He was right on both counts. There were the important game species of chub, suckers, and dace,7 but no trout.

We have spread more trout to more places than any other species of fish. I can now fish for trout in Texas, Chile, New Zealand, and Costa Rica. I have fished for non-native trout in non-native habitat from Argentina to Utah, and have fished for non-native species of rainbow or brown or brook trout just about everywhere. We love to move the various species of trout around, and they often thrive with changes in scenery.8 By the 1880s we were introducing trout into the Black Hills.

The Black Hills trout streams are now managed with reproducing wild fish supplemented by stocking, but none of the trout are native.

Politics

All of South Dakota’s state officials, from Governor on down, are Republicans. Even Kristi Noem’s dog was a Republican, for all the good it did her.

South Dakota has only a single member of Congress,9 and he’s Republican. Both US Senators are Republican.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump received 63.43% of the South Dakota vote. The \counties that didn’t vote for Trump were either Clay County, where the University of South Dakota is located, or majority Native American.

Wikipedia, 2024 South Dakota presidential election results by county.

Kristi Noem’s Dog

The character of some places is forever shaded by a single moment: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, David Crockett died at the Alamo, Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, North Dakota fracked . . . In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem shot her dog. Then she bragged about it.

If you have a German wirehaired pointer and it has messed up your pheasant hunt, you don’t have to shoot it. There is a national rescue just for GWPs. I don’t think Kristi Noem is on the board. For a good discussion of what went wrong with Kristi Noem’s dog, All Things Outdoors did a nice job.

German Wirehaired Pointer, the State Gun Dog of South Dakota. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
  1. Lakota is one of two closely related Siouan language groups, Dakota and Lakota. The Dakota are further divided into the Eastern Dakota (the Santee) and the Western Dakota (the Yankton and the Yanktonai). The Lakota people are also known as the Teton Sioux. ↩︎
  2. Sarcasm. Geologists can be baffling unintelligible when they name things. I might bet that orogeny means the process by which mountains originate, but I wouldn’t give my odds at better than 50-50. ↩︎
  3. Mount Elbert, Colorado, 14,440 feet. ↩︎
  4. It’s often said that Nevada silver had paid for the Civil War, but banks far preferred a gold-based currency. The conversion from a silver/gold currency to a gold currency was also happening in the newly united Germany. Germany pretty much mirrored the US during the depression. ↩︎
  5. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980), the Supreme Court awarded the Lakota a $108 million judgment against the US for the uncompensated taking of the Black Hills. The Lakota refused to accept the judgment, wanting not compensation but return of the Black Hills. The damages were set aside in an interest bearing trust, and are now valued at close to two billion dollars. Seems like a lot, but I’d guess that buying the Black Hills would cost more. ↩︎
  6. There’s also a sliver of the Black Hills in Wyoming. ↩︎
  7. Sarcasm. Chub, suckers, and dace, whatever their excellent personalities and ability to dance well, are not considered important gamefish. ↩︎
  8. The only game animal we’ve moved around as much as trout may be the pheasant. Pheasant hunts in South Dakota may be common, but they ain’t natural. Pheasants originate in Asia. ↩︎
  9. There are currently seven states represented by a single congress member, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. ↩︎

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Wyoming

It’s an All-Star roster of Western names: Casper, Lander, Laramie, Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, Wind River, Bighorn, Medicine Bow, Cheyenne, Platte, Bridger, Teton, Flaming Gorge, Shoshone, Sioux, Green River, Sacajawea, Arapaho, Sublette, Fremont, the Oregon Trail, Butch Cassidy, Tom Horn, Cody, Coulter, the Pony Express, Sheridan . . . Oddly, it’s the name Wyoming that’s the outlier. Until European settlement nothing in Wyoming was ever called “Wyoming. ” The word was imported from Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, named from a Delaware Indian word that means “open plain. ” Open plain fits well enough for parts of Wyoming, but it’s not a natural fit. Open Plain was tagged onto the new territory in 1865 by an Ohio congressman who drafted the territorial legislation. Wyoming the territory was 2000 miles from anywhere where anyone had ever said “Wyoming.”1

Baker and Johnson, Washakie (a Shoshone Chief), Smithsonian.

Early in Wyoming’s history, say roughly 100 million years before statehood, the East Coast was separated from the West Coast not by flyover country but by the great inland sea, the Western Interior Seaway.2 Wyoming was the home of both massive marine life in the sea and dinosaurs on the land. There were giant sharks and giant marine reptiles and prehistoric fish, and not one angler ever fished for any of them. There were giant clams that were never poached in wine. Roughly one in five of the fossil specimens in New York’s American Museum of Natural History came from Wyoming. Wyoming was a fossil factory.

The Western Interior Seaway, attributed on Wikipedia to PLOS.org.

In Thermopolis, where we’re heading, there is the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, which advertises itself as the best dinosaur museum in Wyoming. Not, note, the only dinosaur museum in Wyoming. In a small, focused way, it is one of the best natural history museums in the world.

Wyoming’s rivers are geologically young. John McPhee in his book about Wyoming geology, Rising from the Plains, says that rivers are always young, but Wyoming’s mountains are relatively young as well, postdating the inland sea. Wyoming’s mountains are the product of plate tectonics, except that the Absaroka Range that surrounds the Yellowstone Caldera is volcanic.3 Throughout the state mountains jut and twist into the plain. North American mountain ranges should run north-south, but at least one Wyoming range, the Owl Creek Mountains, runs east-west. There’s always got to be one troublemaker.

https://www.freeworldmaps.net/united-states/wyoming/wyoming-geography-map.jpg

Lewis and Clark missed Wyoming, but beginning in the 1820s, Wyoming was a hotspot for our leading fashion industry workers, the mountain men. Jim Bridger, John Coulter, Kit Carson, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Joseph Meek, Ceran St. Vrain, the Sublettes, all of them were in Wyoming. All of them were collecting beaver furs for hats.

After the mountain men, the Emigrant Trail, known at various times and in various places as the Mormon Trail, the Oregon Trail, and the California Trail, passed through Wyoming and then split for separate final destinations. The Emigrant Trail is the nation’s longest graveyard. It’s estimated that 65,000 emigrants died on the trail from disease, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, hostile encounters with plains tribes, weather, wild animals, and plain ol’ mishaps. Accidental shootings were a big favorite. Graves along the trail would, if evenly spaced, have left a grave for every 50 feet of travel.

Currier and Ives, The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1866, Courtesy of UC Berkeley Bancroft Library via California Digital Library.

After Nebraska, the Union Pacific’s eastern portion of the Transcontinental Railroad entered Wyoming, crossed the Rockies and moved on toward Salt Lake City. The eastern and western halves of the railroad linked in Utah in 1869, and the settlement encouraged by the trains upped the ante on the Indian Wars.

The plains tribes were violent, and even before the Europeans they spent a good bit of energy battling each other for territory. The Sioux, for instance, migrated into the Dakotas and Wyoming from Minnesota, pushing for territory all the way. Private land rights may have been a foreign concept for Native Americans, but tribal claims for territory were not. They did not share well with others. The childhood of a young Sioux or Shoshone or Crow or Cheyenne boy has been compared to the childhood of a young Spartan boy, with the skills of war trained from first breath. A boy would be on horseback from childhood. Apparently an infant’s feet could be tied to a horse’s mane.

Washakie led the Shoshone in both peace and war for a good bit of the 19th Century. He was Jim Bridger’s father-in-law, and negotiated the designation of the 2.2 million acre Wind River Reservation for the Shoshone.4 That’s about where we’ll be fishing. The Crows and the Shoshone fought over the Wind River Valley, and the story goes that Washakie, already in his 50s, faced the Crow chief Big Robber in solo combat for control of the valley. Washakie killed Big Robber, removed his heart, and took a bite. Crowheart Butte in the reservation memorializes the battle.

David McGary, sculptor, Cheif Washakie at the Battle of Crowheart Butte, 2005, University of Wyoming. Photo from Library of Congress. Wyoming also placed a statue of Washakie in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection.

There were cattle drives from Texas to Wyoming. Of course there were cattle drives. There was a range war in Wyoming. Of course there was a range war. There was gold in the hills, and there was desert and there were mountains and there was forest. Owen Wister’s The Virginian was set in Wyoming. Shane is set in Wyoming. If it was done in the West, real or myth, then like as not it was done more than once in Wyoming, from dinosaurs to range wars. It’s a lively past, and it’s like Mr. Faulkner said (more or less), it ain’t even past.

Geography and Population

The state’s boundaries form a square, easy enough, and there aren’t any major cities, but the US Geological Survey has recorded 109 named mountain ranges and sub-ranges in Wyoming. It’s really not enough to say that as you head north through central Wyoming, the Rockies are on the left. The right third of the state includes more than a little of the High Plains, continuing into Western Nebraska along the North Platte River, except that Eastern Wyoming is not all Plains. In the northeast there are the Black Hills, and in the southeast below the plains there are the Laramie Mountains and Medicine Bow Mountains. The Big Horn Mountains run north-south through the upper center of the state to the right of the Bighorn River, connected to the Absaroka Range by the east-west Owl Creek Mountains.

Yellowstone National Park is a huge square in the northwest corner, bordered on the east by the Absarokas. Below Yellowstone are the Tetons, the Wind River Range, and the Wyoming Range. Those are all part of the Rockies.

https://www.freeworldmaps.net/united-states/wyoming/wyoming-rivers-map.jpg

For fly fishing, the rivers in and around Yellowstone are among the most famous rivers in the world, and in addition to the Yellowstone include the Lamar, the Firehole, the Gardner, and the Gallatin. The Snake also exits Yellowstone Park, but instead of east towards the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, it goes west until it ultimately joins the Columbia and then the Pacific. The Green River runs southwest into Utah, and from the center of the state the North Platte flows north out of Colorado then takes a hard right into Nebraska.

The Bighorn/Wind River (where we’ll fish) ultimately runs north dead center to the Yellowstone River in Montana. Then it joins the Missouri, then the Mississippi, and finally the Gulf of Mexico.

At 587,618, Wyoming is the least populous state, with a population even smaller than Alaska’s. At 97,814 square miles, it’s the tenth largest state by area. That makes six people per square mile.5 Wyoming’s population is 83.1% Anglo, 1.2% Black, 2.8% Native American, and 10.8% Hispanic.

There are no cities with more than 100,000 people in Wyoming. The largest city, Cheyenne, has a population of 63,957, which is certainly large enough for a Walmart, but not large enough for professional baseball. The Cheyenne Symphony shares its conductor with Dubuque, Iowa. The last time I drove through the state, some 30 years ago, we drove down the left-hand side from Yellowstone to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and I don’t remember passing through a single town after Jackson Hole. I’m sure there were some, but all I remember as we drove south were the long stretches of straight flat highway paralleling the Wind River Range. Even for a kid from the Great Plains, that was a memorable lot of empty.

In Thermopolis, the average high temperature in June is 77°, and the low is 51°. In the coldest months, December and January, the average high is 34°F and the low 15°F. There are about 12 inches of rain annually, but that probably doesn’t include snow. I have read that highways have been closed for snow in Wyoming every month of the year except July and August.

Politics

Everybody in Wyoming is Republican, and I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any vegetarians, either. Donald Trump received 72.3% of the Wyoming vote in 2024. The only exception was Teton County, which must be jam-packed with California expats and federal employees. That’s the only way to explain it.

Wikipedia

Longmire and Pickett

There are actually two fine series of mystery novels set in Wyoming, which for a population of 587,618 makes it only slightly less deadly per capita than Oxford, England. Oxford, of course, leads the universe for fictional murders per capita. I have, I think, over the course of the last 20 years, listened to all of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels, and have watched all of the now-canceled series. The television series got a wee bit bleak towards the end, but the novels never have. I am sure that I will drink a Ranier beer once I reach Wyoming, because that’s what Longmire drinks.

The other series of novels, C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels are also fine bits of Wyomingania. Box’s politics intrude from time to time, and I find his politics grating, so I like Pickett less than Longmire. That doesn’t mean that I ever miss listening to one when it comes out.

This summer Kris and I have listened together to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which I reckon is about 40,000 pages long. McMurtry is almost a hometown boy, and Lonesome Dove is maybe our greatest western novel. Captain Call and Gus have not yet reached Nebraska, so our coming road trip will follow parts of their route. As soon as we finish Lonesome Dove (and this trip we will), I plan to slip in The Virginian, just to make a personal judgment as to which Western novel is better. I’m afraid The Virginian will not appeal to Kris, so don’t tell her my plan.

Arthur I. Keller, “When you call me that, smile”, Illustration from The Virginian, 1902, McMillan.
  1. I have also read that Wyoming had been tagged “Wyoming” by persons unknown before the legislation, but it was still a Delaware word about a place in Ohio. I like the legislative story better, so I’ll stick with it. ↩︎
  2. This could quite properly be called the Gulf of America, except that it was a sea, not a gulf.
    ↩︎
  3. Any day now the Yellowstone Caldera will blow and wipe out life as we know it. ↩︎
  4. The Arapaho are also on the Wind River Reservation. The Arapaho and Shoshone were traditional enemies, and the Arapaho had no history in the Wind River Valley. The US, however, messed up, and didn’t designate a reservation for the Arapaho. When asked if they could be parked temporarily in the Wind River Reservation, Washakie was too accommodating to say no. It was a problem then, and it’s still a problem, but likely one that the Shoshone are stuck with. ↩︎
  5. Wyoming’s population is second lowest to Alaska. Alaska has the lowest density per square mile, 1.3, but every Texan knows that Alaska cheats when it comes to matters of size. ↩︎
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Nebraska

Nebraska was a Train Stop

The first eastern track for the transcontinental railroad was laid near Omaha in 1863, during the Civil War. Starting a major construction project in the middle of a war isn’t the most obvious thing, but before his election Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, he believed in the future of railroads, and he wanted to keep California, newly acquired and separated from the East by the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Great American Desert, from leaving the Union. He could have just sent the Californians candlesticks. Candlesticks are always a nice gift.

Currier & Ives, “Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way,” lithograph, 1869.

The railroad was constructed by the Western Pacific, Central Pacific, and Union Pacific Railroads, at a cost in current dollars of $3.5 billion. Construction was funded by stock sales, federal and state bonds, and federal land grants. The railroad wasn’t actually transcontinental. It didn’t go from, say, Baltimore to San Francisco, but there was already a network of trains in the East. The Transcontinental linked the existing eastern network to the West Coast through the largely unsettled West.

Serious talk of a transcontinental railroad began in the 1850s, and there were actually three proposed routes. A proposed northern route went through Montana to Oregon, a Southern route went through Texas, New Mexico, and modern Arizona,1 and the central route went through what would be Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Severe cold presented too many technological problems for the northern route, and the supporters of the southern route kinda lost their influence after secession. You snooze, you lose.

Omaha is now Nebraska’s largest city because of the political maneuvers of Council Bluffs, Iowa. In 1854 the acting Nebraska territorial governor–acting because the appointed territorial governor got to Nebraska and promptly died–figured that if the train took the central route, then it would certainly go through Nebraska’s capital, wherever that might be. Council Bluffs wanted to be the train’s starting point, and Council Bluffians were developing Omaha directly across the Missouri River. The acting Nebraska governor, an Iowa boy, declared Omaha the territorial capital. I’m guessing lot prices skyrocketed, and Omaha and Council Bluffs got the train.

In 1867 when Nebraska became a state, every other Nebraskan wanted to punish Omaha for its hubris, so they moved the capital. Lincoln was chosen as the new site. To defeat the move, Omahaians loaded the proposed move with stuff they thought would kill it. If the capital moved, then the state prison would also be in Lincoln, and the new state University would be in Lincoln. Omaha was betting that if it loaded Lincoln with all the good things the move would fail and Omaha could keep the capital. It didn’t fail. The University of Nebraska is in Lincoln. The Nebraska State Penitentiary is in Lincoln.

Omaha still had the train, and it also has the College Baseball World Series.

Geography

At about 77,200 square miles, Nebraska is the 16th largest state by area, and with a population of about 2 million, it’s the 38th most populous state. That gives folk plenty of elbow room.

It is largely treeless prairie that divides into two sections. To the right of the 98th meridian Eastern Nebraska is part of the Dissected Til Plains. Western Nebraska is part of the Great Plains. As a child of the Great Plains, if I had stood in the front yard and looked due north, only Kansas, Oklahoma, and a bit of Texas would have kept me from walking over to Nebraska, and it’s perfectly possible that there were no trees to hinder my path.2 Of course if it had been February we’d like as not have been sharing a Canadian arctic blast, and in April we’d have shared a dust storm or two and some tornadoes. In summer we would have shared dry heat, wheat, and cattle.

From https://www.freeworldmaps.net/united-states/nebraska/nebraska-rivers-map.jpg

The Dissected Til Plains don’t make it as far south as Texas. They basically run from Minnesota down to Kansas, centered on the Missouri/Iowa state line. If you have a yen to grow corn, look to the Til Plains, young man. This is Green Acres country, and it’s the place to be. It was formed by glaciers, and as they retreated the glaciers left plenty of flatness and plenty of rich soil.

It’s a mildly humid region, defined under the Koppen system as a Humid Continental Climate, with four distinct seasons and big shifts in seasonal temperatures. That means in summer, eastern Nebraska gets mighty hot. In winter it gets mighty cold. It would be a great place to see the leaves change, if only there were any leaves. It is not humid like New Orleans, but it’s the last breath of mildly moist air before the Great Plains. Most of Nebraska’s population and its largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln, are in the Dissected Til.

https://unitedstatesmaps.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rainfall-maps-of-us-1536×979.jpg

The Great Plains (and the American West) begin at the 98th meridian, roughly on a line north from Fort Worth, as decreed by Walter Prescott Webb. It is a semi-arid region unique not because of topography or geology but because of the lack of rainfall. Looking north along the 98th, to the right it rains at least 20 inches a year. To the left, stretching to the Rocky Mountains, it rains less than 20 inches a year. It is the beginning of the cultural West, and Webb, who loved the cowboy, says it is the land of barbed wire (bob war, if you want to talk like a native), windmills, and the revolver. It was also the land of the Plains tribes and the great buffalo herds. And the Dust Bowl.

The Missouri River borders Nebraska on the east, and continues north through the Dakotas into Montana, where it and its drainage is one of the great fly fishing destinations.3 The Republican River swerves through southern Nebraska from Colorado and on into Kansas.4 In central Nebraska the North and South Platte descend from Colorado to form the plain ol’ Platte, which then joins the Missouri between Omaha and Lincoln. North Nebraska has the Loup River,5 then the Niobara. We’ll be fishing in the far western Niobara region, just below the South Dakota Black Hills and above and to the left of the Nebraska Sandhills.

Population

As of 2024, the estimated population of Nebraska is 2,005,465. That’s less than the population of any of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or Houston. It is a smaller population than the 35 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. It’s smaller than the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro SMA, but larger than San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland SMSA.

More than 76.2% of the population is Anglo, 5.5% Black alone, and 12.9% Hispanic. Native Americans are 1.7% of the population.6 As already mentioned, it’s a big state without a lot of people, and there are only 25.5 people per square mile. New Jersey, the densest state, has 1,263 people per square mile. Nebraska has fewer people per square mile than Nevada (29) and more than Idaho (24).

Wikimedia Commons

Nebraska’s population is concentrated in the east. Omaha on the eastern border with Iowa has a population of 483,335, Lincoln, just a bit south and west, is 294,757. The Omaha and Lincon SMSAs contain more than half the state’s population. Of Nebraska’s 93 counties, 66 have populations of less than 10,000, and 11 have populations of less than 1,000. Of the smallest ten counties by population, all are located central to west, well west of Omaha.

Farm in Custer County, Nebraska, 1886, Nebraska State Historical Society.

In a European sort of way, Nebraska is ethnically diverse. More than 40% of the population identifies its heritage as German. That’s presumably a combination of railroads advertising Nebraska settlement in Germany in the late 19th century, European economic depression, and available land. There are also sizable populations of English and Eastern European settlers, and I’m certain there’s at least a smattering of Swedes.7

Nebraska is a meat-packing state, and it has a history of foreign-born and African American immigration to man the meat plants. Attitudes toward non-European immigration have been decidedly ambivalent, and from time to time, in the 1930s and the 2000s, immigration of recruited Mexican workers was followed by repatriation campaigns. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Politics

Nebraska gained statehood in 1867, before it had the required population. Presumably statehood was pushed through the Republican Congress to support the 14th Amendment. The same thing happened with Nevada during the Civil War, though there was also silver involved. Nebraska had its own connection to silver, with William Jennings Bryan, a Nebraska boy, electrifying the nation with his Cross of Gold speech at the 1897 Democratic national presidential convention.8

William Jennings Bryan, Grant hamilton, 1896, Judge magazine, New York City.

Nebraska was (and is) an agricultural state, and Nebraska politics were central to the rise and fall of the Populist Party in the 1890s. The Populists were a Southern and Midwestern farmer’s party with mildly socialist leanings, and by 1890 Populists controlled the Nebraska legislature. They passed a bunch of progressive legislation, including secret ballots, mandatory education, free textbooks, an eight-hour day (10 hours for farms), and railroad rate regulation. They pushed for public ownership of the railroads. Bryan coopted Populism, and as the new leader of the national Democratic Party folded the Populists into the Democrats.

From 1894 to 1900, Nebraska elected Populist governors. After 1900 there was a mishmash of Democrats and Republicans, leaning Republican. Since 1994, all of Nebraska’s governors have been Republican.

Nebraska voters now pretty much vote Republican. Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature, and in the current legislature there are 33 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one independent. There are no Populists. Probably leftover from its Populist days, it seems like every statewide office in Nebraska is elected, from Governor down to the university board of regents. A bunch of the elections are non-partisan, but all of the partisan statewide positions are held by Republicans.

Nebraska and Maine are the only states that allocate their electoral votes by Congressional District, which actually makes a lot of sense to me, so while Donald Trump carried 59.32% of Nebraska’s statewide popular vote in 2024, Kamala Harris carried Omaha and Lincoln, and Democrats received one of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes.

Wikipedia, 2024 Nebraska presidential results by county.

Nebraska Pride

I have the sense that no state instills more pride in its children than Nebraska. It’s generally admirable, but it was insufferable when the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers had better college football teams than the University of Texas.

In addition to a unicameral legislature, the University of Nebraska is also unicameral, having rolled both its land grant agricultural college and state university into one campus. Such thrift seems uniquely Nebraskan.

The University of Texas has gone to Omaha for the College World Series 38 times, which is the record. The University of Southern California holds the record for titles, with 12.

  1. And just a wee bit of Mexico, which led to the Gadsden Purchase. In 1854, planning for the southern railroad route, the US gave Mexico ten million dollars and received Tucson, Yuma, and the lefthand side of southern New Mexico. Ten million dollars went a lot further in 1854 than it does today. You couldn’t buy Greenland for that now. ↩︎
  2. This is gross exaggeration. There are often trees on the plains where there’s water, and in shelter belts. In Texas there were mesquites (though they were invasive from South Texas because of over-grazing). ↩︎
  3. I haven’t fished the Missouri in Montana, but I have in North Dakota. I didn’t catch anything. Together with the Mississippi and the Ohio, the Missouri forms the world’s fourth largest river system at over 3,900 miles. I haven’t fished the Ohio, either, or for that matter the Mississippi. ↩︎
  4. The Republican River Flood of 1935 was one of the Nebraska’s worst natural disasters, resulting in 113 deaths. Before the Europeans, the Pawnee farmed beans, corn, and pumpkin along the Republican River with the occasional jaunts afield for buffalo. In Kansas, the Republican joins the Missouri before the Missouri joins the Mississippi at St. Louis. ↩︎
  5. Loup is French for wolf, so French fur traders must have made it to Nebraska. ↩︎
  6. Native Americans in Nebraska included the Sioux, the Pawnee, the Sac and Fox, and the Omaha. Much of the indigenous population was displaced south to Oklahoma. There are eight remaining reservations in Nebraska, for the Ogallala and Santee Sioux, the Omaha, the Oto, the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Sac and Fox, and the Winnebago. ↩︎
  7. This is because my friend Clark, whose family is Swedish, is from Nebraska. I was surprised when at least half of Nebraska’s population wasn’t originally from Sweden. ↩︎
  8. The amount of dollars in circulation was limited by the value of the gold owned by the federal government. Western and Southern farmers wanted silver coinage to increase the money supply, spur inflation, and make their existing debts easier to repay. Bankers didn’t. ↩︎

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Massachusetts Packing List

Gear

I don’t write reviews of gear. Years ago, I gave Kris a new fly rod, an Orvis Helios 3 five-weight–what else does a girl want for Christmas?–and I wrote a review of the rod. I’ve been embarrassed ever since. I think I said that it cast well. Our Massachusetts guide brought along an Orvis Helios 4 nymphing rod, the new top-of-the-line rods from Orvis, and I was excited about fishing with it, but you won’t get a review from me, except that it looks good and it cast as well as I could cast it.

My opinions about fishing gear aren’t worth much. I tend to fish the same brands over and over, so I don’t really have much basis for comparison. From time to time I catch rod fever, or convince myself that I need a new reel to replace a perfectly good reel that I hardly ever use. Some days you just need to go to the store. But my opinions? You don’t need my opinions on fishing gear, or probably anything else.

So be warned: I’m going to share my opinions on fly rods:

  • Most modern rods can outfish me. I have never tested a rod’s limits.
  • If I lose a fish, it’s not the rod.
  • You can’t have too many fly rods in a closet back home.
  • For trout, I fish Winston rods because they’re pretty. Fly rods can always cast better than I do, so they might as well be pretty.
  • I usually decide that I need a new fly rod when I haven’t gone fishing in a while.
  • Someday I’m going to fish that Tenkara rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Euro nymphing rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Winston 3-weight again. Someday I’m going to fish that Sage 12-weight.
  • I think I need a new 10-weight. The new Orvis Helios 4s seem really nice. Maybe Kris needs a new 10-weight? Too bad Mother’s Day is past.
  • When I pick a rod for a day’s fishing, I always pick a rod that’s reasonably heavy. It’s like the start of the baseball season: this isn’t a time for pessimism. Picking a heavy rod affirms my certainty that I will catch a bigger, stronger fish than I can otherwise handle. I won’t, and deep in my heart I know I won’t, but there’s plenty enough opportunities in this life for sad outcomes.

We took two 5-weight rods with floating lines to Massachusetts–hers was the Helios 3 I’d gifted those many years ago, and mine was a Winston. I didn’t take the Tenkara, nor the 12-weight.

Palmer, Massachusetts

We’ve been to Massachusetts before, so we fished two days, spent three nights, and then came home. Otherwise, we didn’t do anything but eat. It’s just as well because Palmer is not a tourist Mecca. We ate at an Italian place with huge portions of red sauce, a sushi joint that’s pretty good, and a railroad-themed restaurant in the old train station. I think that if I lived in Palmer, I’d eat at the sushi joint a lot. I think if we’d spent four nights, we’d have eaten at the sushi joint twice.

We stayed at the Trainmasters Inn, a railroad-themed bed-and-breakfast owned by the people who own the railroad-themed restaurant. It was nice, there was hot water, and I liked looking at all the train bric-a-brac. The railroad-themed restaurant gave us free bread pudding because we stayed at their railroad-themed inn. At the bed-and-breakfast, the breakfast was always a berry muffin left by unseen hands on a cake plate in the self-service coffee room. They were good muffins, but by the third morning I would have liked some variety.

There was a railroad hobby shop next to the Italian place, but it was never open. That’s too bad. If my life had taken a slightly different path this could be a blog about toy trains. What guy doesn’t love toy trains?

I didn’t see any running toy trains at the railroad-themed restaurant, which seems to me a real oversight.

Donuts

By statute, the only donuts allowed in Massachusetts are Dunkin’s. Does anyone really like Dunkin’ Donuts? The answer to that is yes, Massachusans. I suspect they eat Dunkin’ Donuts three meals a day, 365 days a year. On Thanksgiving and Christmas they have turkey, but they also have Dunkin’ Donut dressing on the side.

I counted six Dunkin’ Donut shops in the Hartford airport, and if I were the Governor of Connecticut I’d call out the national guard to protect the border from illegal immigration.

See that line of cars in the parking lot? That’s the line of cars for the Palmer Dunkin’s takeout window. It was at the back of the building, so that line of car loops around the building.

I made Kris go to Dunkin’ Donuts twice, and in the interest of science I tried several. I thought the Boston creme was the best of the lot, but Kris refused to try it. It did look pretty goopy. The blueberry donuts were ok, and so were the chocolate glazed. I suspect that the plain glazed had never seen hot fat. The donuts were passable, but none of them explained the Massachusetts obsession.

Where We Didn’t Go

We’d been to Fenway a couple of times, and have had good visits to Boston. We’ve been to Nantucket. We didn’t fish there though, and we haven’t fished Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod for stripers. Stripers would be an excellent choice for Massachusetts, but April was a bit early in the season.

We didn’t visit the Emily Dickinson house, which was just up the road in Amherst, and we didn’t visit Walden Pond.

Snow

It snowed the second morning we were there, and on the third day it was still snowing when we reached the airport. As far as I know it snows every day in Palmer, and Massachusettians spend their days standing at the plate glass window at the Dunkin’s watching the snow.

Playlist

Massachusetts makes for a good playlist. You could actually do a great playlist of music by Berklee College of Music graduates, though I didn’t. The first song I put on the list was “Dirty Water” by the Standells, which was a favorite song of my childhood. Apparently the band’s sound engineer wrote it after he was mugged visiting Boston, and the Standells were from LA, but Bostonians made it their own.

On my Massachusetts Playlist, there’s James Taylor, Joan Baez, the Cars, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Aerosmith, J. Geils Band, Marky Mark, Donna Summer (did you know that there’s a 17 minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” that includes at least 15 minutes of heavy breathing?), Boston, the Pixies, and the strangest baseball song ever written, Warren Zevon’s “Bill Lee.” None of it is magnificent (except maybe Jonathan Richman), but it’s mostly good, and none of it is unlistenable (at least in short doses–that heavy breathing goes on a bit too long). Most of it is pretty sophisticated stuff. There’s also New Kids on the Block . OK, some of it is pretty unlistenable.

Bill Lee, From Boston Baseball History, https://bostonbaseballhistory.com/new-bill-lee-remembers-1975/

Guitar

I took a guitar to Massachusetts, but I never took it out of the case.