Southwestern Nebraska

Two more Nebraska stops on the way to Colorado - Kearney and Ogallala.  Kearney is an interesting place.  For a small city (population 34,000) in the middle of nowhere, it boasts quite a few significant things to see.  There are seven or eight museums, a branch of the University of Nebraska, and more restaurants than we expected.

The number one attraction in Kearney is the Great Platte River Road Archway, a massive structure sitting across Interstate 80.  The archway contains a museum dedicated to the western expansion of America by settlers who passed through the area between about 1840 and 1860.

Fort Kearney, an army post way back then, was an important stop on what is known as the Emigrant Trail, through which passed wagon trains going west to Oregon, California (gold rush), and Utah (Mormons).  Fort Kearney was also a pony express station.  Here is a tableau of Mormon emigrants pulling handcarts on their way to Salt Lake City.

Kearney also has an impressive Classic Car Collection museum.  Not only does it display over 200 automobiles but it has realistic recreations of a 1950's gas station, a drive-in theater, and other scenes from that era.  The automobiles shown are pretty much from the beginning to the end of the last century.  All are beautifully restored, with detailed page descriptions of each.

Included were examples of several cars I owned during my misspent youth - a 1963 Corvette Stingray (the one that had a divided rear window), an Austin-Healy convertible, and a Daimler SP250 sports car of around 1965.  Ah, memories.

The downtown of Kearney showed that the city fathers had worked hard to make it a happening community.  Multiple streets had been paved with bricks, which looked very nice but made for an uncomfortable ride.  Still, there was too much of a strip mall look to the city overall for it to entice a couple of travelers from California to think about settling down there.

The drive on I-80 to our next campground stop in Ogallala, Nebraska was an especially boring one, pool-table flat, with cornfields and grasslands as far as we could see.  Ogallala was a cowboy town during the early 19th century.  It was a stop on the Union-Pacific Railroad, and cattle drives ended there.  Ogallala was one of the towns featured in the great TV series Lonesome Dove.

In spite of its interesting history, Ogallala itself is a dreary little town, but there are quite a few points of interest.  There's a little museum of petrified wood sculptures by two local brothers, now 90 years old, and other works by local artists.  And there's a recreation of an old Western street.  (Unfortunately, most of the businesses were closed, as we're headed into their offseason.)

A highlight was our visit to Ogallala's Boot Hill, where cowboys, desperados, and frontier families were buried.  There were old tombstones among the weeds and a sculpture of a cowboy on a horse.  Are you jealous yet?