Middle America’s Natural Paradise : Nebraska Sandhills Are an Unlikely Home for a Startling Variety of Wildlife

I’d never seen a wild turkey do a double-take.

But as I sat in my car on a little-traveled dirt road in the Nebraska Sandhills, one emerged from the brush ahead of me and ambled nonchalantly across to the thick bushes on the other side, giving no evidence it had noticed me. Halfway in, it stopped suddenly, backed out, turned and stared at me for a long moment, and then plunged headlong out of sight.

Farther along the road, I stopped to photograph a field of blazing golden black-eyed Susans. A horse grazing alone promptly came galloping to the fence to look me over. I exchanged greetings with him, then turned back to the car and saw that what had been a random cluster of two dozen cattle munching grass on the other side of the road now were lined up side-by-side, staring at me.

In a wildlife refuge later that day, I drove carefully through some bison and Texas longhorn cattle, several of which lumbered laboriously to their feet to acknowledge my presence and leave the roadway where they had been snoozing. Nearby, five elk grazed along a stream, knee-high in a blanket of yellow and purple flowers.

I had wanted solitude when I went to northwestern Nebraska early last August for a few days’ relaxed enjoyment of the wildlife and magnificent scenery that few outsiders realize is there. From the surprised reaction of the turkey, the imploring attention of the livestock and the patience of the beasts I stirred from the road, I decided I had reached one of the dwindling number of nature’s beauty spots where human beings are still the exception.

When I was a child growing up in Nebraska, the 100th Meridian, a few miles west of our town, became a magical frontier for me. An ornate arch straddling U.S. 30--in those pre-Interstate times a major transcontinental highway--proclaimed the line, and while to most people it was simply a part of geographers’ meticulous carving up of the globe, to me it was the beginning of the West.

On one side of the 100th Meridian were farmers, who grew corn and raised dairy cattle, and people who had jobs in town and thought of themselves as Midwesterners. On the other side were ranchers who considered themselves Westerners, who grew hay and pastured beef cattle on whatever land hadn’t been buckled into buttes and ravines by ancient upheavals and erosions.

Even today, the differences remain strong; while you might see people wearing Stetsons while they eat in cafes east of the 100th Meridian, it’s only to the west that it passes unnoticed. I didn’t have one, but was able to blend in by wearing a cap--though not one from a seed company, which seemed the headgear of choice after a Stetson.

Valentine, 25 miles west of the 100th Meridian, was the start of my tour, and after a weekend of family visits in Omaha I made the 300-mile trip northwest nonstop, zipping through Norfolk (“He-e-e-re’s Norfolk! Proud Hometown of Johnny Carson!”), Atkinson (a 20-foot-tall Hay Man proclaimed the annual “Hay Days”) and Ainsworth (where sagebrush and sunflowers took over the roadsides). They all looked inviting and offered tempting stops--but not for this time.

Between Ainsworth and Valentine, the Sandhills, the Western Hemisphere’s largest tract of dunes, begins. The rolling, grass-covered terrain was dismissed by early explorers as desert, and federal surveyors warned that the plains west of the 100th Meridian were unsuited to normal habitation. But by the late 19th Century, the Sandhills--which covered a dozen or more counties, one of them five times the size of Rhode Island--had become one of the nation’s prime cattle-raising regions.

At Valentine, a town of 2,800, the Niobrara River, Nebraska’s prettiest, carves through the Sandhills, providing a lush setting for the Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge. South of town is the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, encompassing prairie grasslands, hills and dozens of the small lakes that dot the Sandhills and provide nesting areas for numerous species of birds and feeding sites for migrants and other wildlife.

I found a motel and headed for Fort Niobrara refuge. My chief target there was a burrowing owl--which, unlike most birds I know, lives underground. I’d looked for the fluffy little owl in Florida and Texas without luck, but knew that they are often found in prairie dog colonies, where they take over abandoned burrows and blend in so well that, seen casually from a distance scurrying around or standing possessively on mounds next to their burrows, they are assumed to be prairie dogs themselves.

Just inside the refuge entrance was a prairie dog colony and I quickly spotted some burrowing owls among the gregarious little rodents. With binoculars I could see that more than a dozen of what I would have taken to be prairie dogs were actually owls--but they blended in so well that I was glad when a couple of them rose into the air, providing confirmation.

On the placid refuge’s looping dirt roads, I found mule and white-tailed deer, elk and the slumbering bison and longhorns, and all would have drawn a gridlock of attention in most national parks.

The next morning, back in Valentine, I sat grimly eating my pancakes at the St. Christopher Cafe and watching more rain than I thought the sky could hold come crashing down outside. But no one else seemed concerned.

“Can’t hurt me--I’m all wet most of the time anyway,” an obvious regular chortled. “I just did my washing a little while ago and hung it out,” a waitress said, laughing. I looked at my watch; it was 6:45 a.m.

All the Nebraska Augusts of my memories had been broiling hot and mostly dry, but now I was hearing that the July that had just ended was the chilliest and wettest in 108 years of record-keeping, and nearly all the interesting driving I had planned for the next few days was on hilly dirt roads that I’d been sternly warned to avoid in wet weather. (This summer’s heavy rains have caused no serious problems for the Valentine area or the Sandhills, refuge personnel say, although lowlands along the Platte River to the south were flooded last month.)

I left the merry crowd at the St. Christopher and headed south under black skies toward the Valentine refuge, 20 miles away. By the time I got there, the torrents had become sprinkles, then the skies cleared, a dry wind began to blow, and soon my car was kicking up dust.

I roamed back roads of the 72,000-acre refuge, stopping to look at flocks of summering white pelicans, colorful nesting shorebirds, wild turkeys and deer. The only time I saw other people was when I returned to the main highway to seek out another gravel road or dirt lane.

There was a crowd at the Home Cafe in Valentine that night, however--maybe for its special of the day: a thick slab of prime rib, served with chicken soup, salad bar with several homemade offerings, a variety of fresh vegetables and rolls--all for $7.50.

“Well, we don’t have to ship it far,” said the owner when I remarked on the low price. I saw what he meant when I got back to the parking lot. Amid great commotion, a young steer was being prodded from a truck into a sturdy pen next door to the Home Cafe.

“What is it you’re scoutin’ for?” asked a grizzled rancher in a pickup truck from his window. He had just arrived in a cloud of dust, and his eyes squinted a shade closer to suspicious than welcome.

I was standing at the side of an otherwise empty dirt road a few miles north of Cody, Neb., and a few feet south of the South Dakota border, binoculars hanging from my neck and a telescope on a tripod aimed at a field that turned out to be my inquisitor’s.

“Birds,” I explained. I asked him about greater prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse, two that I wanted to see but hadn’t.

He said there were plenty of grouse in the fields, but he’d only seen one prairie chicken all year. “Don’t know what’s happened to ‘em. Well, just wondered what you were doing. I saw you from over there,” he said, gesturing off toward South Dakota, and then he was off.

I had left Valentine at dawn, driving west on U.S. 20. Just before meeting the rancher, I’d topped a rise and seen a pair of coyotes scrutinizing me. Hawks--red-tailed and Swainson’s--were perched along the road and when I’d stopped at a pond that was alive with herons, marsh wrens and other birds, an upland sandpiper flew out of the brush onto a fence post to look at me.

The spectacular courtship dances of the grouse and prairie chickens at group sites, called leks, draw crowds of birders and nonbirders in the Plains each spring. But this was August and the birds were silent and out of sight. Lacking the time to tramp fields to flush some, I was left to hope for luck.

A few minutes later, I was lucky. A prairie chicken flushed from the side of the road as I drove by, and the next day, near Chadron, a flock of grouse did the same.

About 15 miles east of Chadron, the Sandhills give way to the higher, rougher terrain of the Pine Ridge. The hills become steeper and topped by pine trees, and the grasslands are broken up by rocky outcroppings. At Chadron, a prosperous state college town of 6,000, I intended to stay two days, visiting Chadron State Park and taking a day drive west to Ft. Robinson, a U.S. Army post in the years of the Plains Indian wars, and to the Wyoming border, to see canyons and dry grasslands that draw birds from the west.

But my first stop in Chadron was the unassuming-looking Museum of the Fur Trade. I usually avoid roadside “museums” on the theory that their primary collections are of tourist dollars. But I had a hunch about this one--no gaudy flags, no highway billboards with sombreros or bucking broncos and, clinching it for me, a $1 entry fee. So what if the Visitor Guide warned that “twice in the past 30 years a rattlesnake has been encountered in or around the buildings. Visitors must be aware of this remote possibility.” The odds seemed pretty good.

The museum, the site of a major fur-trading business in the mid-19th Century, contains well-displayed collections explaining the methods, implements and history of the fur trade in North America. A sod house exemplifies the type of home built by many settlers on the prairie and a garden grows specimens of nearly extinct Plains Indian crops.

After well more than a dollar’s worth of education, I moved on to Chadron State Park. The hilly recreation area south of the city offers cabins, swimming, jeep rides of the Pine Ridge, and from a promontory reached by a gravel road through a national forest, a view of the Black Hills, 60 miles away in South Dakota. I was probably the only person there looking for a “common poorwill,” a cousin of the whippoorwill.

The first one I found was dead--squashed on the gravel road. As dusk came, I saw why. Poorwills, nocturnal birds, sit on the road and watch for bugs flying over, but apparently not for cars. They sit until the last moment before flapping away to dodge the cars--sometimes misjudging. After watching them for a bit, I was surprised there were any left.

Pronghorn antelopes were already up, grazing for their breakfast, when I drove west from Chadron at dawn the next day. I spent the morning north of Harrison in Sowbelly Canyon, a paradise of steep, wooded hills and rushing streams. A pair of Lewis’ woodpeckers, a pinyon jay, a colorful, bluebird-like lazuli bunting--all birds of the West that I had hoped to see--were there.

West of Harrison, I found a ghost of the past: Coffee Siding. Now it’s only a historical marker on the empty plains, but in the 1870s it was one of the busiest places for miles around, with more than 1,000 feet of railroad sidetracks and vast holding pens for cattle brought from ranches in four states to be shipped east.

The pens, the siding and the railroad are all gone now, but when a breeze blows through the cottonwoods with its muffled roar, a visitor standing there all alone can begin to imagine the presence of thousands of head of cattle and hundreds of cowboys and trail bosses and huffing locomotives.

Caught in this reverie, I found it was easy to go into Wyoming by mistake. I drove past the little dirt road I wanted to take just along the Nebraska side of the border, but eventually tracked it down and stopped to study my maps. It had grown hot and still, but suddenly I was aware of a strange rushing of wind. Papers and maps began to fly around in the car and I was enveloped in a gagging swirl of dust. It had been a long time since I’d experienced a dust devil--a harmless whirlwind of the hot plains--and as quickly as it had come, it was gone, eddying across the baked sand and rock, pulling dust hundreds of feet into the air.

I returned to Chadron by way of Ft. Robinson, near Crawford. Seven years ago, with my wife and two young sons, I had visited the fort, a state park since 1955, and found it to be one of those rare historic sites that, through astute management, has been able to combine a richness of the past with modern-day family recreational activities.

The fort was established in 1876 and played a major role in the Plains Indian campaigns. In 1877, famed Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse was killed there in disputed circumstances while under arrest. In the 1890s, the 9th and 10th Cavalries, the U.S. Army’s only all-black units at the time, were stationed there; they mounted missions to rescue white soldiers in the Battle of Wounded Knee.

Now the stately turn-of-the-century officers’ homes and enlisted barracks are rented as guest accommodations. The post headquarters is a museum of the Army’s role on the frontier. Visitors roam the grounds on foot, by horseback or in carriages. Nature and handicraft programs, trail breakfasts and buffalo barbecues entertain them and, where recruits in fatigues once policed the parade ground, flocks of magpies in elegant black and white now do scavenger duty.

It was time to head home after a final night in Chadron, and I chose Nebraska Highway 2. This pleasant route across the lower edge of the Sandhills took me through a tier of the state’s most sparsely populated counties and little towns like Hyannis (pop. 336), where the high-school parking lot had a “No Parking Combines” sign.

I had recrossed the 100th Meridian just west of Broken Bow. The road south, past feed lots holding thousands of cattle waiting to be shipped to slaughter, brought me out of the Sandhills and into the broad Platte River Valley. Then a jog west took me to Cozad, a farming community of 3,800 that straddles the 100th Meridian. The town’s founder, an entrepreneur named John J. Cozad who had visions of a thriving metropolis of the plains at that very spot, put it there in 1872 when there was nothing around but dirt and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Cozad was where the ornate 100th Meridian arch had stood when I was a boy and I wanted to see if time and progress had treated it with respect.

It was gone, replaced by a modernistic, tubular steel affair that would have looked just fine proclaiming rush-hour traffic lanes, but instead, in highway-functional block letters, declared: “COZAD--100th Meridian.” It would have been enough to send John Cozad packing on to the 101st and it sent me straight to the Interstate 80, 247 miles west of Omaha.

Soon, I was in the full flow of busy, multilane traffic, hurtling along at 70 m.p.h. with what seemed like half the population of Nebraska. I passed the rest stop that marks the now-obliterated site of a battle that my ancestors and the Pawnees, trying to protect the railroad, had fought against the Cheyennes; and I drove over the remains, now buried in concrete, of what had been the farm my mother was born on, with its now-lost traces of Mormon Trail wheel ruts that hugged the Platte River.

For a while, looking north, I could still see the Sandhills, receding from me at a rate that John Cozad and my ancestors could not have comprehended.

GUIDEBOOK: Visiting Nebraska’s Sandhills

Getting there: Several airlines serve Omaha via Kansas City or Denver; $348 is the current lowest advance-purchase fare. Feeder lines fly to Grand Island, in the center of Nebraska, and Scottsbluff, in the west. All are served by car rental agencies. From Omaha, it is 300 miles to Valentine and 440 to Chadron (hilly driving, taking perhaps a total of 12 hours). From Grand Island, it is 200 miles to Valentine and 330 to Chadron; from Scottsbluff, it is 220 miles to Valentine and 100 to Chadron. Or you can go via Denver, Colo., following U.S. 76 to North Platte (4 hours), then north to the Sandhills area; or via Cheyenne, Wyo., and taking U.S. 80 west.

Where to stay: Valentine and Chadron have several motels, and many smaller towns have one or two. When I visited last summer, the Trade Winds Lodge in Valentine (HC 37, P.O. Box 2, Valentine, Neb. 69201; tel. (402) 376-1600) and the Grand Motel in Chadron (1050 W. Highway 20, Chadron, Neb. 69337; tel. (308) 432-5595) both offered rooms for $35.

Cabins are available at Chadron State Park (HC 75, Box 33, Chadron, Neb. 69337; tel. (308) 432- 6167) at the Merritt Reservoir state recreation area near Valentine (Merritt Resort, HC 32, Box 22, Valentine, Neb. 69201; tel. (402) 376-2799), which offers camping, fishing, hunting, swimming and boating; and at Ft. Robinson State Park (P.O. Box 392, Crawford, Neb. 69339; tel. (308) 665-2660). Lodging at Ft. Robinson ranges from $25 for a room with double bed in the lodge to $50 for a 3-bedroom unit in former officers’ quarters, with larger group lodging and camping available.

Camping is not allowed at either of the national wildlife refuges near Valentine, but there are several campgrounds nearby, including Valentine KOA Campground (HC 37, Box 3, Valentine, Neb. 69201; tel. (402) 376-1162).

Other attractions: Arthur Bowring Sandhills Ranch State Historic Park, near Merriman (P.O. Box 246, Merriman, Neb. 69218; tel. (308) 684-3428), is a working ranch donated to the state by the late U.S. Sen. Eve Bowring, whose husband was a pioneer rancher.

Canoeing and inner-tube drifting is available on a rough, scenic 32-mile stretch of the Niobrara River at Valentine. Numerous outfitters offer trips, including weekend excursions for about $75 to $125, including meals and camping. A list of them can be obtained from the Valentine Chamber of Commerce (P.O. Box 201, Valentine, Neb. 69201; tel. (800) 658-4024).

Oglala National Grasslands, north of Crawford, is a 97,000-acre area that includes Toadstool Geologic Park, with soil formations created by erosion. Horseback riding, camping and hiking are available. Contact Nebraska National Forest Supervisor, 270 Pine St., Chadron, Neb. 69337, tel. (308) 432-3367.

Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, south of Harrison, has rhinoceros, giraffe and other fossils dating back 20 million years. Information on this and the two following sites can be requested from Superintendent, P.O. Box 27, Gering, Neb. 69341; tel. (308) 668-2211.

Scotts Bluff National Monument, sits on an 800-foot-high escarpment rising above the North Platte River, with a spectacular observation point at the summit. Chimney Rock National Historic Site, is a 500-foot rock tower. Both were landmarks on the Oregon Trail.

For more information:

Department of Economic Development, Division of Tourism, Box 94666, Lincoln, Neb. 68509; tel. (800) 228-4307.

Nebraska state parks: Parks Division, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, P.O. Box 30370, Lincoln, Neb. 68503; tel. (402) 471-0641.

Fort Niobrara-Valentine National Wildlife Refuges, HC 14, P.O. Box 67, Valentine, Neb. 69201; (402) 376-3789.

Chadron Area Chamber of Commerce; tel. (308) 432-4401.