Its motto: Equality Before the Law.

Its nicknames: Antelope State, Bug-Eating State, Cornhusker State.

Clear Skies, Rolling Hills, and the River Road West

Nebraska sweeps to the horizon in broad, gently undulating hills and open, sun-drenched vistas. These treeless expanses perplexed some of the first white people who ventured onto the prairie in the 19th century. The first explorers were astonished by the immense herds of elk and antelopes they saw. Prairie potholes - shallow basins filled intermittently with water — supported untold numbers of ducks and geese, and the nutritious native grass fed enormous herds of bison, or American buffalo.

This land developed into the Cornhusker State, a realm of farms and ranches. Livestock feedlots and towering grain elevators, where 95 percent of the terrain is given over to the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, sorghum, and other crops, and to the raising of beef cattle and hogs.

North-central Nebraska remains uncultivable, a 19,000-square-mile region of ancient sand dunes. These Sandhills of Nebraska, as they are called, were once the domain of nomadic Great Plains Indian tribes. Today the Sandhills are a kingdom of cattle ranches.

The name Nebraska comes from the Oto Indian word nebrathka, which means flat water. This is what the Otos called the great river that flows west to east across the state. French traders called it the Platte.

The river led the way west for the tide of overland migration that began in the 1840's. An estimated 350,000 people headed westward through the Platte Valley between 1840 and 1866.

Migration to Nebraska has not been limited to humans. Every year in late March half a million sandhill cranes converge on the Platte in the central part of the state, pausing here on their northward migration to their mating grounds in the Arctic. The convocation of cranes is one of the great wildlife spectacles in North America.

In 1867 Nebraska joined the Union as the 37th state.

(”The USA Diversity of 50 States”)