Nebraska

Nearly every pioneer who kept a diary on the Oregon Trail wrote about Chimney Rock. Rising 300 feet above the Nebraska plains, the towering spire told travelers they'd reached the end of the flat prairie and the mountains were coming next.

Up to 97% of westward migrants mentioned it in their journals, making it the most talked-about landmark on the entire trail.

The Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, and Oto peoples had lived across this land for thousands of years before European explorers arrived. By the 1840s, the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails all crossed Nebraska, turning it into a highway for hundreds of thousands of people heading west.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, offering 160 acres of free land to anyone willing to farm it for five years. A man named Daniel Freeman claimed the very first homestead near Beatrice, Nebraska, on January 1, 1863. Many of the new arrivals came straight from Europe.

But all that settlement came at a cost. The government forced native peoples off their land through one broken treaty after another. In 1877, the Ponca were marched more than 500 miles from their Nebraska homeland to Oklahoma. Nearly a quarter of them died.

A Ponca chief named Standing Bear walked back to Nebraska to bury his son. He was arrested, but he sued the government. In 1879, a federal judge ruled for the first time that Native Americans were "persons" under the law and could not be held without cause.

Nebraska became the 37th state in 1867. It's also the only state with a one-house legislature, called the Unicameral.

Visit Chimney Rock National Historic Site near Bayard to see the same landmark that awed pioneers 180 years ago. At Homestead National Historical Park near Beatrice, you can walk the land where the very first homestead was claimed.

Every spring, more than half a million sandhill cranes land along the Platte River during one of the largest bird migrations on Earth. And near Alliance, Carhenge is a full-size replica of Stonehenge built entirely out of old cars.