The first issue of a magazine created by a native Nebraskan and devoted to the nature of Nebraska welcomed its new readers with a hearty Nebraska headline.
Howdy!
The state’s first game warden, Frank O’Connell, was launching Outdoor Nebraska for two reasons, he wrote.
To inform citizens and sportsmen about the work of the state Bureau of Game and Fish. And to instill an appreciation for Nebraska’s natural beauty and wildlife.
Future issues would carry cover stories on Johnny Carson and UFOs, updates on the state’s growing parks system, poems about chiggers, first-hand accounts of cold deer hunts and the answer to a gnawing question: What did biologists find inside 143 coyote stomachs in 1947?
O’Connell couldn’t know that yet. He started humbly, printing 7,000 copies of the 16-page pamphlet and distributing them, free, to permit-holders and schools and libraries.
People are also reading…
O’Connell filled the issue with stories on pheasants in eastern Nebraska, the Valentine Fish Hatchery, the Halsey Forest Preserve, “Notes on Fins, Feathers and Furs.”
And a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson.
There's no music like a little river's. It plays the same tune (and that's the favorite) over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers ...
Finally, the rookie editor included a personal wish: “It is hoped that our first efforts meet with the approval of all citizens.”
They must have, because 94 years have passed, and the Game and Parks Commission is still publishing Nebraskaland — now a full-sized, full-color, 76-page magazine with a press run of nearly 20,000.
But it’s evolved over the years, said the commission’s Jaclyn Cruikshank Vogt.
Like a new name in the 1960s. A changing publication schedule: Quarterly at first, then monthly, then 11 times a year and now 10. And a vision shift — its original hunting and fishing focus broadened to all things Nebraska before narrowing again, back to the outdoors.
Cruikshank Vogt is familiar with its history. The commission’s photo librarian has spent much of the past six years diving into the archives for her own research and while fulfilling reader requests: They remember seeing a how-to on finding morel mushrooms, they tell her, or they’re trying to track down a story from the ’70s that included their grandfather.
Some of the information was already at her fingertips, but other searches took her down into the commission’s basement, opening filing cabinets to leaf through crumbling early issues.
She knew there was a better way. Before she started working for Game and Parks, she was on the team at UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, which is in the business of making historically rich documents easily accessible online.
And in 2017, she delivered eight boxes of magazines to the center, where a team of staffers and students spent the next three years scanning, transcribing, encoding and uploading thousands of pages.
What they created was a virtual rabbit hole of Nebraska’s wild history: The first 50 years of Outdoor Nebraska and Nebraskaland, all 353 issues, available free.
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You can search the by keyword. Try Platte, for example, and you get 1,557 results. Catfish: 732. Bob Devaney: 15. Tom Osborne: 0.
Or you simply can browse by issue, turning the virtual pages for simultaneous lessons in Nebraska geography, biology, history and lore.
Like this, the results of a recent and random click-through tour:
June 1926: Today, eastern Nebraska is a checkerboard of splendid farms, dotted here and there with growing cities. Within the span of half a century the breaking plow has wrought wonders … But, unfortunately, there were some things which the breaking plow took from us that can never be returned. One of these things was the prairie chicken.
October 1926: Franklin's Gull — when the grasshoppers were gone one stomach was found to contain 984 ants, 327 dragon-flies, 82 beetles, 87 bugs and 42 cut-worms.
Spring 1934: Each winter in Nebraska, especially during that of 1934, there have been dozens of wolf hunts. While most of these hunts are properly organized and its members law abiding, there are some of them that are nothing short of unorganized mobs shooting every living wild thing that runs or flies.
Winter 1938: Accomplishments of 1937 — A new State Game Farm; Another Recreational area; Completion of Wild Cat Hills Recreational area; Improvement Chadron State Park; Opening of Ponca State Park; Introduction of Chukar Partridge; Better regulation for hunting and fishing; Stocking of three million fish.
Spring 1948: 143 coyote stomachs collected in 1947 contained far more rabbit remains than all other food items combined. Less than a tenth of the stomachs contained pheasant remains while over two-thirds contained rabbit and about one-fourth contained mouse remains.
Winter 1954: Game wardens are normal human beings. They're not jut-jawed monsters laden with hatred and spite in their hearts, nor are they outcasts who can't get other jobs nor do they nourish themselves upon the number of people who they make miserable ... Some of them have wives.
July 1959: There is a little chigger / And he isn't any bigger / Than the point of a very small pin / But the bump that he raises / Itches like blazes / And that's where the rub comes in.
January 1962: The Monster of Lake Walgren — That Giganticus existed cannot be doubted. There is hardly a fisherman in northwestern Nebraska who will not vouch for the fact, and everyone knows you can always believe a fisherman ... The terrified fisherman tried to reach shore but a combination of tornado and typhoon roared over the water ... Just as his small craft plunged over the crest of a wave, he happened to glance down through the water and saw a mountainous peak. It was Giganticus, snoozing. Satan's own had twitched his giant ear and the whole lake became a roaring tempest.
February 1965: Johnny Carson cover story — "The boys loved to hike," Mrs. Carson said. "John and Dick would head out in most any direction to hunt or fish or just explore. I could have paved a highway with all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I made for them. They had a special hangout called 'Black Bridge' which I didn't learn about till years later. They use to go down to the railroad trestle and swing on the timbers while trains passed by overhead."
April 1968: I was Impaled on a Stump — I whirled, expecting to see a bird, but lost my footing and went head over heels. My gun went flying and I hit the ground, trying to break the fall with my arms. My chest and neck felt as if someone had hit them with a sledge hammer. A wave of pain engulfed me, as blood started gushing from my neck. I tried to get up, but couldn't. I was impaled on a beaver-gnawed stump which had penetrated deeply into my throat.
March 1970: Nebraska’s UFO’s — Earl Moore and Ed Rowley of Lincoln saw two white or silvery objects over downtown Lincoln one afternoon in 1952 while they were crossing the street. They estimated the objects as 100 feet in diameter.
May 1974: NOBODY estimated the cost of dragging picnic tables out of lakes, of replacing toilet paper stolen from restrooms, or of whitewashing obscenities from various public walls. Even so, the cost of vandalism amounted to more than $16,000 on 23 manned Nebraska park and recreation areas in 1973.
June 1977: Nightmare in Rock — WHEN SATAN details his subordinates earthside for on-the-job training, he probably billets them in the Nebraska Bad lands and Toadstool Park. The apprentices would feel right at home in the tormented geography of this unique spot in the northwest part of the state.
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In the weeks since the Nebraskaland Digital Archive was released, nearly 3,000 users have visited it 4,233 times, Cruikshank Vogt said.
“It’s been really positive. People are writing in with thanks.”
And the project isn’t complete. Students and staff have already scanned Nebraskaland’s next 40 years of magazines, and they and Game and Parks plan to release them, by decade, as they’re encoded, processed and readied for public consumption.
Most should be online by May 2021, Cruikshank Vogt said, though the archive plans to always stay a year behind the most current issue.
Digitization is time-consuming. The two or three UNL students who worked on the project touched every page in the collection — about 30,000 — during the scanning process.
“And we came across all sorts of crazy things,” said Laura Weakly, a metadata encoding specialist at the center who led the effort. “Some pages were cut out, some were torn out.”
The first 50 years are still missing a handful of pages, she said, which Game and Parks is trying to track down.
Weakly and her team found something else during the three-year process — that it was easy to get diverted and distracted by the variety of stories between the magazine covers.
That’s the mark of a good project, she said.
“If you’re not interested in the content, you’re not going to be interested in working on the project,” she said. “If you just view it as text, as something you have to do, you’re going to get bored with it very, very fast.”