Click to view
Page  26

      Nebraska, the youngest State in the American Union, included between the 40th and 43rd parallels of North Latitude and the 95th and 104th degrees of Longitude West from Greenwich, occupies the most favorable geographical position on the North American continent. It extends from the Missouri River Westward to the base of the Rocky Mountains, with an extreme length of four hundred and twelve and a width of two hundred and eighty miles. It has a total area of about seventy-six thousand square miles or nearly fifty million acres of the best farming and grazing lands in America. There are no mountains nor high hills. The surface of the entire State consists of undulating prairie, and vast table lands with rich bottom lands in the valleys of the numerous streams. The principal river is the Platte, a wide shallow stream, which crosses the State from West to East, dividing it geographically into two nearly equal parts. The Northern portion is watered by Niobrara, Loup Fork, Elkhorn, and smaller streams; the Southern portion by the Big Blue, Nemaha, Republican and their many tributaries. The whole State rises from the Missouri River to its Western boundary with a gentle ascent, from one thousand to five thousand feet, giving a dry, clear, bracing atmosphere, and a climate remarkably temperate and healthful.

      Nebraska was organized into a territory in 1854 under the famous "Kansas and Nebraska Act," and in the Spring of 1867 was admitted into the Union as the thirty-seventh State. Since its admission as a State, its progress in population and material prosperity has been rapid and substantial. Seven hundred miles of railroads are already in operation and many more in progress of construction or projected. The effect has been to greatly enhance values, and to stimulate growth, enterprise, productions, immigration, commerce, trade, and every kind of business. The State is free from debt, and is endowed

Click to view
Page  Map

Click to view
Page  27

      with a grand patrimony of public lands to be devoted to internal improvements and the educational interests of the people.

      Nebraska is emphatically an Agricultural State. With its fifty million acres of arable land; its inexhaustible fertility of soil; its delightful and salubrious climate; its central location—midway between the Atlantic and Pacific, and equally distant from the frozen regions of Hudson's Bay and the tepid waters of the Gulf of Mexico, excelling in the production of the cereals and root crops of the Eastern and Middle, and in sorghum, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and the fruits of the border Southern States; its wonderful facilities for stock raising and grazing, the rich verdure of its valleys, the beauty of its magnificent prairies undulating, like the waves of the sea, clothed in luxuriant grasses and spangled with an infinite variety of fragrant and gorgeous flowers, it possesses advantages unsurpassed by any other State.

      The vast extent of its manufacturing facilities; its favorable commercial position, crossed by the Great Continental Railroad over which must pass the travel and commerce of the world, and bounded on the East by the Missouri River with its four thousand miles of navigable waters; the rapid development of its railroad system, intersecting every portion of its territory; the noble plan of Free Education, extending its blessings to every child in the State, all conspire to assure to Nebraska a future of success and prosperity unparalleled in the annals of this country.