Leaving Omaha, the Overland Limited passes through South Omaha, third place in the United States in the packing of meat products. Just beyond may be noted to advantage the block safety system, in operation on the Overland Route all the way to San Francisco.
Fremont, well situated at the junction of the Platte and Elkhorn valleys, is a prosperous and beautiful city of ten thousand people. The next stop is Columbus, a place of four thousand people, junction point of the Norfolk branch. Citizen George Francis Train, the irrepressible, decided that Columbus was the geographical center of the United States, and announced that the capital should be removed there at once; but so busy was the country with the Civil War at the time, that the idea was seemingly overlooked and has remained unadopted.
From Columbus the passenger is carried over a way that does not waver from a straight line for forty-one miles. On every side is unrolled a pastoral panorama as splendid as any in the world. To view it, when the headers and binders are at work in the golden fields interspersed with stretches of green growing corn, is to grasp the greatness of agricultural Nebraska.
From Omaha westward to the first glimpse of the white summits of the Rockies, the way is through visions of country loveliness. As the Limited ascends on its journey westward and rises above the corn levels nearer the Missouri, meadows join the grain fields. Stacks of hay are deployed over the plains as are soldiers on a battlefield. The homes of farmers are impressive with evidence of a prosperous and proper pride. The fences are straight and symmetrical, the houses all well painted; there are great red barns to remind you of Pennsylvania, and active windmills tower over all as landmarks. The scene is given life by high grade cattle, sleek horses, and flocks of well kept sheep. Above is bent over the landscape a sky of clear blue, where troop the vagrant clouds amid its arches, and all is permeated with air pure and sweet beyond description. Such is Nebraska.
HERDS OF HIGH GRADE CATTLE HAVE USURPED THE PASTURES OF THE BUFFALO
The agricultural area along the line of the Overland Route, east of the Rockies, from producing nothing fifty years ago, now yields annually a half billion dollars, and this apart from and in addition to the immense livestock and mineral output. Nebraska alone has a property value exceeding two billion dollars.
CATTLE NOONING AT NORTH BEND, NEBRASKA, NEAR THE PLATTE RIVER
Grand Island is a thousand feet higher than Omaha. Here Robert Stuart of the Astor party camped in 1812 and called the island in the river Le Grande Isle. On Independence Day, 1857, a little company of Germans from Davenport, Iowa, named their newly started town after the island, now grown to a prosperous city of ten thousand people. Among other things they do here is to make a thousand pounds of beet sugar annually for each inhabitant. Grand Island and the section immediately to the west to old Fort Kearney and beyond were the scene of many Indian fights when the Overland Route was being built.