Brief City History:

Omaha, city seat (1855) of Douglas county, eastern Nebraska, U.S. It is situated on the west bank of the Missouri River opposite Council Bluffs, Iowa. Omaha is Nebraska’s biggest city and a regional manufacturing, transportation, trade, and service hub. From the 1890s through the mid-20th century Omaha emerged as one of the top livestock markets in the world and a leader in the meat-processing industry. Founded in 1854, it soon became known as a “gateway to the West.” Omaha’s location near the juncture of the Platte and Missouri rivers provides access to the wide, flat valley of the Platte, which has become a vital transportation artery. The city derives its name from the Omaha Indian word meaning “upstream people.”

An area that had been visited by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 on their exploratory journey to the Pacific coast and where the pioneer fur trader Manuel Lisa established a trading post during the War of 1812. Westward-bound Mormons spent the winter of 1846–47 there at an encampment that they named Winter Quarters, later called Florence, which was subsequently annexed by Omaha. From 1847 to 1848 Winter Quarters witnessed the beginning of the Mormon migration to what became the state of Utah, but because the west side of the Missouri River was closed to permanent “white” settlement, the Mormons moved the point for subsequent departures to the nearby community of Kanesville, Iowa (renamed Council Bluffs in 1853).

By the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the area to settlement, Kanesville had become the largely non-Mormon community of Council Bluffs, where a group of entrepreneurs created a company for developing Omaha City, Nebraska Territory. The promoters wanted the capital of the newly created territory to be located directly across the Missouri River, in part at least to influence the builders of the then-projected transcontinental railroad to lay their tracks through or near the new city. Omaha’s backers won the territorial capital for their town, despite the aspirations of Bellevue, a long-established trading post, mission, and Native American agency just south of Omaha.