Omaha

Omaha stands on the west bank of the Missouri River in eastern Nebraska, across from Council Bluffs, Iowa, at a historic crossing and steamboat landing. Chosen as the eastern starting point of the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, it boomed as the railhead where the rails met the river, and its vast stockyards made it one of the great cattle and meatpacking centers of the country.

The Missouri River divides Omaha from Iowa, and the surrounding country is the rolling farmland and bluffs of the eastern Great Plains, where the wetter prairie begins drying toward the west. The largest city in Nebraska, Omaha grew on rails, cattle, and grain, and it anchors a metro of nearly a million on the river that marks the state's eastern edge.

• Nebraska
  The Cornhusker State, gateway to the Great Plains located in