mojotraveler.com

Few sites in the United States fully capture the American dream like a visit to Ellis Island in New York harbor in view of the Statue of Liberty.  It is here that more than 12 million immigrants first stepped foot on American soil and began their lives, for better or worse, as citizens of the United States of America.

Photo courtesy Ellis Island National Monument

Did you know that Ellis Island was opened as a result of the flood of immigrants that came to the United States from Europe after Congress signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862?  That’s the act that gave away more than 270 million acres – more than 10 percent of the U.S. land mass – to anyone who would live on that land for five years, work the soil and make a life.

That was a dream come true for most of those Ellis Island immigrants.  Land ownership was controlled by the wealthy gentry in Europe, so the peasants – possibly your ancestors – dreamed of owning land in America.

Your ancestors may not have made it as far west as many who came through Ellis Island, but many of them came for the dream that my family found.  Yes, I am a descendant of a homesteader, and in Beatrice Nebraska, people like  me - descendant of homesteaders - are welcomed as honored guests.

Courtesy of the National Park Service

Beatrice Nebraska is where Daniel Freeman and his family homesteaded for nearly 50 years.  His 160 acres is recognized as the very first claimed filed in the Homestead Act, and so it is there that Congress located the Homestead National Monument.

The site of the Freeman Homestead was established as a unit of the National Park Service in 1936.  You see the original Freeman Homestead and the graves of Daniel Freeman and his wife.  There’s a one-room school house, and then there’s the interpretive center, one of the things the National Park Service does so well.

The building that houses the interpretive center is shaped like a plow, one of those fundamental tools that broke the prairie, and the backs of many men and women, while creating the most productive agricultural economy in the world.

Inside, you’ll be asked if you are the descendant of a homsteader.  If so, you’ll sign a special guest book, receive a button and then be offered the opportunity to record the story of your family.  But every visitor will learn that homesteading was more than something that happened in the Great Plains states.  My ancestors homesteaded in Kansas and Arkansas, but homesteaders received land in 30 states, from Florida to Alaska.

The interpretive center does a great job of telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, but they don’t overlook the impact on Native Americans.  The Homestead Act was a decisive blow to their lifestyle, particularly the Plains Indians.

So May 20 is the 150th Anniversary celebration.  The original Homestead Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, will be on display.  There will a panel discussion about the impact of the Homestead Act and the U.S. Air Force Band will perform.

The first time I visited Beatrice was during the annual Homestead Days Celebration, which this year is June 10-17, 2012.  They had parades and barbecue contests and lots of costumed interpreters performing tasks of the period.

But the coolest thing I witnessed was a swearing in ceremony for 14 new citizens of the United States of America.  And not a more beautiful place in the country for such an inspiring event to take place.

The Sandhill Crane Migration is underway in central Nebraska and a noisier gathering there surely is not, with the exception most college basketball arenas in the month of March.

I was in the midst of it last year about this time, and in subsequent stories, I described the unmistakable sound as a “throaty rat-a-tat-tat, a profoundly deep trill that when amplified by the thousands in the early morning light creates one of those Bucket List adventures worth getting out of bed for at 5 a.m. and trudging across a frozen cornfield in middle of winter in the middle of Nebraska.”

Diana Lambdin Meyer photo

Like Old Faithful erupting and Niagara Falls cascading, Nebraska’s spring sandhill crane migration is a spectacle of Mother Nature that should not be missed.

From roughly Valentine’s Day to Tax Day, an estimated 600,000 sandhill cranes – roughly 80 percent of the world’s population of these birds – stop on their way north to feed in the corn fields and roost in the shallow waters of the Platte River valley.

Diana Lambdin Meyer photo

It’s a narrow stretch about 60 miles wide along the river between Grand Island and Kearney where these magnificent water fowl are the most happy and spend about four to six weeks hanging out, getting fat.

Central Nebraska’s massive cornfields provide an abundance of space and plenty of food in the left-over waste from harvest.  The Platte River provides the water and the shallow banks, protected by marsh grasses, provide a protected place to roost at night.

But Nebraska guarantees one other key factor that no other state in the bird’s migratory path provides – safety.

Sandhill cranes are protected in Nebraska.  Hunting them is against the law and the birds know it.  They are safe here, so they stay a while.  They sing, they dance, they eat, they make merry.

It’s not absolutely necessary to get out of bed at 5 a.m. to see the sandhill cranes, but there’s something that happens at that hour you won’t see any other time of day.

As the sun peaks over the horizon, the birds become more chatty and noisy. Then as if on cue, but none that is visible to the human eye, all of a sudden, the entire mass will lift to the sky, at times blocking out the rising sun and creating thousands of sleek, motion-filled silhouettes.

Two great places to learn about it all is at the  Crane Trust Nature and Visitor Center in Alda and the Rowe Nature Sanctuary at Gibbon, Nebraska.    The city of Kearney Nebraska hosts a Crane Watch Festival the last week of March that includes guest lectures, art shows, and other special events.  The Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in Grand Island also offers programs and exhibits that highlight Nebraska’s participation in this annual spectacle of nature.

It’s a madness in March with which the NCAA cannot compete.