African-American

German-Russian

Greek

Japanese

Mexican

Native American

 

The Southern Panhandle of Nebraska is home to residents with varied cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

According to www.nebraskahistory.org, the earliest Europeans were Spanish and French explorers and traders in the early 1700’s. Fur trade, military, and missionary efforts began in the late 1700’s and continued through the 1800’s. The Oregon Trail was one of the major routes west, and there are many landmarks in Western Nebraska that settlers and travelers used for direction.

Nebraska was originally claimed by both France and Spain, but it became property of the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  Soon thereafter President Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the land, which was predominantly populated by several groups of natives, known as the Pawnee, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Indian Tribes.  Many cities, counties, rivers and other landmarks bear the name of these native groups today.

Following the expedition, the lands remained inhabited by Native Americans for the first half of the 19th century (until near statehood).  A few fur traders and trappers penetrated the native lands, some living with the Indians, even adopting their ways.  Fur trading posts were set up near the Missouri River.  Trading with the natives brought prosperity and therefore peace to both sides.

According to The History of Scotts Bluff Nebraska by Dr. Donald D. Brand, when these northwestern Plains Indians were first visited by Europeans in the 19th century, they possessed a nearly uniform culture. This culture was based on use of the horse and hunting of the bison, and conditioned to an exceedingly nomadic life. Agriculture was practically unknown (except among the Pawnees and other tribes to the east); very little pottery was made; and the bison provided everything from fuel and food to shelter and raiment. These nomadic hunting horsemen naturally became great horse stealers and far-raiding warriors. Such were the inhabitants of the Scotts Bluff area when the white man arrived. In numbers they may have approached a total of 40,000-50,000 souls, divided: Dakotas , 25,000; Pawnees, 10,000; Cheyenne , 3,500; and Arapaho, 3,000.

Active exploration of the Scotts Bluff area began with the western extension of the fur trade into the upper Missouri and Rocky Mountain regions. With trappers and traders came the beginnings of the history for western Nebraska.

In 1848 Marshall discovered gold in California , and by the spring of 1849 thousands from all over the world were hurrying to this newest and greatest of Eldorados.  The American migration favored the old Oregon-California route, as it was shorter, cheaper, and took less time.  In the region between the North and South Platte there were a number of alternative routes that varied in difficulty of river fords, steep descents, and water supply. All of these routes, however, were united south of the North Platte by the time Chimney Rock was attained. Therefore, the bulk of the gold-rush emigration passed by Scotts Bluff.

The position of Scotts Bluff blocking the route along the river margin forced the trail southward, away from the river for some thirty miles, and through the Scotts Bluffs by a narrow pass that went by several names: Scotts Bluff Pass, Roubidoux Pass (not to be confused with the pass by that name a few miles to the south), and finally Mitchell Pass. The exact route of this trail, in modern terms, would be skirting the city of Gering on the southwest corner, up the long slope (now badly dissected) to the spring at the base of Scotts Bluff, on by the National Monument headquarters building, and over Mitchell Pass.

As a result of the movement through this locality, an enterprising Frenchman set up the first European post in the immediate area.  The accounts left by travelers of this Frenchman agree only that he was a blacksmith and trader, known as Basil Roubidou (variations include Roubidoux, Rubedo, Robidoux, Rubidere, Rouberdeau, and even Thibbadoux),

A series of great movements through the Scotts Bluff area resulted in the passage of countless thousands during the period 1810-1870. Most of the migration took place between 1824 (when the Great Platte route was adopted by the fur traders) and 1862 (when Indian troubles forced the Overland mail and stage south into the South Platte " Overland Trail " proper). The extent of these movements prior to the coming of the railroad, 1866-69, has been estimated at many thousands.

As military posts grew and land was acquisitioned, soldiers were needed to construct sites and keep peace in the territories. In 1866, African-American soldiers from the 9th and 10th Calvary Regiments were organized as the “buffalo soldiers” and garrisoned Fort Robinson, where they served for the next 18 years. 

Even though Native Americans represent less than 1 percent of the Scottsbluff/Gering population today, they have left multiple contributions to the community.   Native American culture continues to make itself known in Scottsbluff through performances of Native American dancers at community events and Native American cuisine offered at local craft and county fairs.

Five years after Scottsbluff became an established village, in the early 1900's, Nebraska became a destination point for many Japanese immigrants, “Issei,” who migrated to America in 1900.  With arrival of the railroad, they came to the North Platte Valley and helped develop the Valley’s fertile soil, settling around the Scottsbluff and North Platte areas. .

It was the beginning of a Caucasian, Japanese, Native American, and Mexican cultural blend that still exists today.

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The sugar beet industry was a new start for Japanese people who joined others pursuing agricultural interests in the Valley.  In 1918, there were two-hundred Japanese sugar beet farm operators in Scotts Bluff County.  During the 1920’s, most towns in Nebraska had a café or restaurant operated by Japanese Issei, and Scottsbluff had a fair share of the finest Japanese restaurants. The tradition of oriental food can still be found at several local Chinese restaurants.

According to the Nebraska State Historical Society, very few Mexicans lived in the Central Plains states prior to 1900.  An early study of Mexican immigration to the United States reports that there were only seventy-one Mexicans living in Kansas in 1900, and twenty-seven in Nebraska . By 1910 the Mexican immigrant population had increased enormously to 9,429 in Kansas , and 3,611 in Nebraska.

This growth in population can be understood in light of far-reaching and complementary changes occurring in both Mexico and the United States . In one country these changes "pushed" people out; in the other the changes "pulled" them in.  The powerful event in Mexico that pushed people to the north was, of course, the Mexican Revolution, which during the period of 1910 to 1920 caused an extraordinary amount of suffering, upheaval, and confusion.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, but its root causes had existed in the country for decades. The Porfirio Diaz dictatorship in Mexico (a period that lasted thirty-one years, twenty-seven of them consecutive) brought about peace, prosperity, and opportunity, but only for a select few-and that at the expense of the peasants, the workers, and the poor. At the end of the Diaz regime in 1910, probably less than three percent of the total rural population owned any land at all. There were 834 hacendados (land owners) and approximately nine million landless peasants living under a miserable debt peonage. Of the 834 hacendados, fifteen owned more than 100,000 acres each; the hacienda of San Blas in the state of Coahuila, for example, contained almost a million acres. Despite higher prices of basic necessities, the income of the peon in 1910 was about the same as a hundred years earlier.

That revolution is often described as a peasant civil uprising, in protest of the existing economic and social conditions pressing, for the most part, on the working classes, the poor, the campesinos. With the actual beginning of the armed conflict, living conditions for many became intolerable. Many became participants in the conflict.  Many who lacked work, food, and medical services fled their place of birth in search of those most basic needs.

The major attracting force that "pulled" the Mexican immigrant to the north was the economic development in the southwestern part of the United States at this same time, and its corresponding need for cheap labor. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw the dramatic growth of agricultural enterprises and railroad construction in the Southwest.  Demands of New England cotton mills, New York garment manufacturers, and the export market stimulated cotton growing in Texas in this period. The Reclamation Act of 1902 and the construction in 1904 of the St. Louis , Brownsville , and Mexican Railways encouraged ranchers in the lower Rio Grande Valley to create huge irrigation projects to grow table vegetable crops that could be shipped to large metropolitan areas on the new railroads' refrigerator cars.

In 1897 the U.S. Congress had imposed a 75 percent tax on the importation of foreign sugar, thus encouraging the development of the U.S. sugar beet industry. Hence, by 1906, sugar beet acreage in the U.S. had more than tripled from the 135,000 acres planted in 1900. By 1920 that acreage had increased to 872,000, with the Great Plains region (which includes the North Platte Valley in Wyoming and western Nebraska ) producing 64 percent of the total crop grown in the U.S.  From 1923 to 1932 Nebraska ranked second in the U.S. , behind Colorado in annual sugar beet acreage (74,000 acres), and first in the nation in yield per acre (12.7 tons).  The increased need for beet laborers, which these developments required, were met by the regular and methodical recruiting of Mexican agricultural workers. Additionally, many Mexicans, on their own initiative, entered the U.S. during this period, legally and otherwise.

The first of the Mexican railroad section-hands responded to railroad recruiters and crossed the border at El Paso in 1900. Living in boxcars, they began to establish small boxcar and tent communities that since have become the community barrios throughout the Southwest and the Midwest . By 1906 several carloads of workers a week were moving into southern California, establishing colonias, and then reloading for movement to locations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska.    In 1908, 16,000 Mexicans were recruited in El Paso alone for railroad work.  By 1910, 2,000 were crossing the border every month for railroad work.

To this day there remain a few Mexican elders who, in fact, came to Nebraska through Kansas City as railroad workers for the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe. Across the breadth of the state - Sidney, Scottsbluff, Ogallala, North Platte , Kearney , Grand Island , Lincoln , and Omaha - one can find Mexican Americans whose grandfathers or other male relatives worked as railroad section-hands. Others came to the slaughter and meat-packing plants in Omaha . In 1920 there were 682 Mexicans in Omaha ; in 1923 there were about 1,000. They lived in South Omaha , close to the three packing plants of that time.

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Still others, particularly in the western part of the state, began work in the sugar beet fields around 1914, more than a decade after original experimentation with the raising of sugar beets in Hall County by the University of Nebraska . In 1905 there were only 250 acres of sugar beets in the entire North Platte Valley . In 1906 the Great Western Sugar Company started raising beets in that part of the state, and in just two years the increase in acreage warranted the building of a factory. It was at then that the Ames , Nebraska , factory was moved to Scottsbluff and enlarged.   After that, Scotts Bluff County became the top sugar beet- producing county in Nebraska .

Many of the beet workers came originally to the North Platte Valley as railroad hands, then, for a variety of reasons, changed jobs as more and more field work became available. After 1920 many came unassisted as betabeleros (beet workers). Many more (particularly after 1916) were recruited to this work by the Great Western Sugar Company. In 1915 the Great Western Sugar Company recruited and transported 500 workers into its Colorado , Wyoming , Montana , and Nebraska sugar beet territory. By 1920 this figure had increased to more than 13,000. In 1926 the Great Western Sugar Company provided transportation for 14,500 persons, employed fifty-five labor agents, and sent out advertising materials consisting of thousands of booklets, cardboard posters, hand bills, and calendars-all in Spanish. Additionally, it ran advertisements in fifteen newspapers.

In Scottsbluff, a community developed near the Great Western Sugar refinery on land formerly owned by the factory and later sold to individual families. To this day, that area remains predominantly Mexican American, bordered on the north by East Overland Drive, and on the south by South Beltline Road between Fifth and Fifteenth Avenues.   Acceptance of Mexican cuisine, ranging from tacos, burritos, and enchiladas to pork chile, has generated a scattering of Mexican restaurants in the Valley.

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German-Russian families also made a sizable impact when they arrived in the North Platte Valley and became successful farmers. Most of these families left that legacy to their second and third generation farm operators. They established a small community known as “Roosha Stadt” (Russia Town), located in the southeast part of Scottsbluff.

The Germans were the largest ethnic group to settle in Nebraska from 1854-1894. They began to immigrate to the United States in 1830.  The topic of German immigration is not unlike the immigration of many other cultures. Like any other culture, Germans immigrated from Germany because of the pull factors of another country and the push factors of its own.  A great number of these immigrants came to Nebraska , partly because the prairie was not so much different from the land they had left in Russia . In 1880, before the largest influx of Germans from Russia into the U.S. , nearly two thirds of the 5,000 already in the country lived in Nebraska.

There were a multitude of push factors that caused Germans to want to leave Germany from inside the country. One of those is that during the time of World War One, Germany 's government started having mandatory military service. Basically, this meant that any male over the age of 15 would either have to serve in Germany 's military or they would have to leave the country. Many people did not want to serve, and as a result they left. Some other push factors were crop failures, inheritance laws, high rents, high prices, and the effects of the industrial revolution. These things led to widespread poverty and suffering.

 

One of the pull factors that caused Germans to want to leave Germany originated from outside the country.  Many advertisements in foreign countries promoted cheap land in Nebraska . This was due to an abundance of land for a small fee under the Homestead Act and was an ideal solution for the German farmers who lost their jobs. They could migrate to Nebraska and start farming here.  Also, industrial jobs played an important role in the promoting of Nebraska.  An example of this was the railroads, who would often offer incentives to large groups of immigrants. These railroads even kept free hotels. This was ideal for many immigrants because they usually came into the country with barely any money.  Another pull factor was that relatives and friends of German natives who migrated first would write back and encourage others to follow. This led to "chain migrations" and group settlements.

 

n 1943 a German P.O.W. Camp was established at Fort Robinson. The prisoners were allowed to work on farms and ranches in the area. Following the closure of the camp in September 1945, many prisoners found sponsors among their captors and became U.S. citizens and made the area their homes..

The German heritage today may best be recognized by the traditional foods like Blenna (thin pancakes), Grebel (sweet roll), Kartaeffel mit Glase (potato dumplings), Kraut Soup (vegetable soup), and Kraut Burok (krautburgers). The tasty foods would not be complete, however, without German weddings, captivated by lively traditional sounds of the accordion and hammered dulcimer.

Greek Influence:

The Greek Festival, sponsored by the Assumption Orthodox Church in Bayard, has been held every year since the church’s origin in 1926. It is always held on August 15 (or the first weekend following that date) to commemorate the feast day of the church.

It began as a small picnic for the church parishioners, as several members would donate a few lambs and the church members would gather for a lamb feed. As the years progressed, members began inviting a few non-Greek friends and a free-will offering helped defray expenses. The event began to grow, so church members who lived near Bridgeport and Bayard hosted the event on their farms. In 1998, the Festival moved to its current location at Prairie Winds Community Center in Bridgeport.

The Festival is now a two-day event and always draws hundreds of people to taste authentic Greek foods, listen and dance to Greek music, and sample the Greek culture. It begins on Saturday night at 5:00 pm with ala-carte food booths and Greek music. Foods available include calamari (squid), tyropetas (cheese-filled phyllo dough triangles), loukoumathes (Greek donuts), authentic pastries, Greek salad, gyros, souvlakia (lamb or pork kabobs), loukinako (Greek sausage), and beverages. Tickets can be purchased the night of the event.

On Sunday from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, a traditional Greek dinner is served, including lamb (baked fresh that morning), beef, Greek potatoes, salad, spanakopita (spinach-filled phyllo), feta cheese, a hard roll, karithopita (walnut cake), and a drink. Meal tickets are available at the door or from any church member. In the afternoon, an auction and a raffle are held. The event usually ends at about 4:30 pm on Sunday.

Those in attendance at both events are entertained by the church’s youth dance group, the Athenian Dancers, as well as by Greek music and dancing. A souvenir booth is also open for those who wish to take memories of the weekend home with them. All proceeds of the Festival are used to support the Assumption Orthodox Church.

Today, cultural activities and celebrations abound in Western Nebraska. Cinco de Mayo festivals are held each year in May, with assistance from the Scottsbluff/Gering Chamber of Commerce’s Caminos Crusados Committee, and several communities host traditional German Oktoberfest activities. Native American Pow Wows are held in Chadron and at Fort Robinson annually, and many different ethnic dance groups perform locally throughout the year.

If you are interested in more history as it relates to the Native Americans and Nebraska in general, go to More Nebraska History!

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