travel musings

The Real Old West - Nebraska Panhandle

From Crawford, NE

The Old West is in northwestern Nebraska!

Tucked between Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota, the Nebraska Panhandle is a land of high plains, buttes, ranging cattle, prairie dogs and mammoth fossils. Remember "High Plains Drifter" with Clint Eastwood? This is the high plains.

Once part of the great inland seas that remained after the Ice Age, northwestern Nebraska has a gently rolling hills landscape, surrounded by mountains to the north and west. At some high
points on Route 71 between Kimball and Scott's Bluff, you can see the entire basin - it goes on for miles and miles and miles. The wind is pretty constant at about 5-10 mph, further shaping the land. It's a dry land - even though Nebraska has more rivers than any other state, they don't fill until the rains come in winter and the snow melts in spring. Beef cattle graze on the natural grassland before they're sold at the Crawford cattle sales to middlemen who fatten them up with corn - hence the term "grass-fed, corn-finished" beef.

This is the land of Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane and all the other great western icons. And it is the home of the Lakota native Americans. You can visit the Crazy Horse memorial in the nearby South Dakota badlands - the largest stone statue in the world and it's still under construction. For those interested in the area's history, the High Plains Western Heritage Center in South Dakota is a five-state regional museum founded to honor the old west pioneers and the Native Americans of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska.

When you visit the Nebraska Panhandle, you're also close to Mount Rushmore, historic Deadwood, and Devil's Tower, Wyoming. But don't miss attractions closer to Crawford - Toadstool Geologic Park, a bison-filled and prairie-dog infested "badlands" in the Oglala National Grassland that also boasts one of the last remaining sod houses; Agate Fossil Beds National Monument where a natural "depository" of prehistoric Miocene mammals was discovered (they got stuck in the mud!); Fort Robinson where Crazy Horse was killed while in Army custody; the High Plains Homestead where you can stay in the Bunkhouse, and the Cookshack serves "cowboy cooking" amid old west buildings that make up a slowly evolving high plains town; and the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD, the world's largest ongoing paleontological dig of Pleistocene-era mammoths.

There is SO much more to see and do! Stay in the area around Crawford and Chadron as your central spot to see the real old west.

posted by julieannerickson @ 1:58 PM