Iowa & Nebraska (crossing the Mighty Missouri):

DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge

After spending the night with cousins in Omaha, I backtracked slightly to DeSoto National Wildlife Preserve, on the Iowa side of the Missouri river. It was a lovely day, and while I didn't see any ducks, I did see a very impressive pheasant run across the road in front of my car.

In the visitors' center of the refuge, they have a museum that includes cases upon cases of the contents of the steamboat Bertrand, which went aground on a mudbank in 1864 and was subsequently buried in the mud until 1969 when the site (no longer at the bottom of the river) was excavated.

While all the people got out, and took with them immediate necessities such as firearms, there were huge quantities of supplies left behind that had been originally destined for sale to colonists in Montana. The museum contains vast quantities of everything from cannon balls to buttons to bottles of patent medicines. They also had several token boxes of matches; they found hundreds of them, which after being buried in the mud for over a hundred years were still so flamable that they nearly burned down the conservation lab and set the pants of one of the excavators on fire. So they put most of them back in the dirt.

Historic Pottawattamie County (Squirrel Cage) Jail

The squirrel-cage jail is a giant rotating drum with pie-shaped cells that can be turned so that only one column of cells at a time has access to the door, thus allowing a single sherrif and deputy to guard large numbers of prisoners at once. This design was patented in the 1800s and the patent holders travelled around the west marketing their design. This is the only remaining example of a three-story model, sandwiched in a tight one-way block in the center of Council Bluffs, IA. (note my car... their parking area is essentially a double-wide driveway)

Constructed in 1855, the jail was in use until the 1960s, when the community outgrew the cell capacity, and they built a new facility next door. During its entire history, there were only two escapes.

University of Nebraska State Museum (Morril Hall) in Lincoln, NE

If you are ever trying to get here, be aware that the signs say "Morril Hall" on them, with no reference to the museum. After driving around several blocks of downtown or university style Lincoln, I finally found a parking space and got out to ask someone where I was going. As it happened the parking space I fould was outside a frat house; it took five frat boys to identify that the museum was the building with the elephant outside, and give directions for how to get there by car. The museum's star attraction, directly in front of you after you walk in and pay your admission fee, is the "Hall of Mammoths," which signs tell you you can rent after museum hours to host your coctail hour or reception.

About half of the museum is devoted to paleontology, and they have a large collection of North American ice-age mammals, a good Mesozoic seas exhibit, and several interesting curiosities: (left) A little burrowing rodent, fossilized in the cast of its burrow (below left) a pregnant deer (pseudoprotoceras), fossilized with its unborn fawn

(below) the skull of a sabre-tooth cat with its tooth still embedded in the leg of another cat. Apparently somebody wrote a poem about this which they kept quoting (furtunately small) excerpts of on the signs. Something about catfights enduring through the millenia, I think.

The rest of the museum had a small plains Indian section, an exhibit on the various different ecosystems found in Nebraska, lots of stuffed exotic animals (including a dodo) and a pretty good discovery room with varous activities.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: the Missouri River