Bøger af Ryan Roenfeld

Missouri River floods washed Peter Sarpy out of Traders Point, the old fur trade outpost from the days of Spanish Louisiana. Sarpy instead found the only dry crossing on that stretch of the river and established St. Mary. Sarpy's new town boomed with the steamboats from St. Louis and Nebraska's first town of Bellevue right across the river. By the end of the Civil War the river had washed away St. Mary and nothing of the town remains today.

The meat-packing industry changed significantly during the late 20th century and questions over profit, labor, and the byproducts of industry played out in Council Bluffs, Iowa after the opening of Beefland International. Beefland was the first, but not last, name the facility operated under while core contentions continued.

Gambling, prostitution, and confidence games in the frontier community of Council Bluffs, Iowa

The park in the heart of Council Bluffs was meant for a courthouse that was never built. The surrounding homes of the city's elite where Abe Lincoln once ate lunch were gradually replaced by commerce as the public space provided a platform for Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, and many more.

In old Omaha, the scent of opium wafted through saloon doors, while prostitutes openly solicited customers. When the St. Elmo theater ran short of the usual entertainment, the residents could always fall back on robbing strangers. Tenants of the Burnt District squirmed under the extorting thumb of a furniture dealer dubbed the Man-Landlady. The games of chance and confidence and outright municipal graft all played a part in a wicked city where gambler Tom Dennison ran politics and Madam Anna Wilson drove philanthropy. Join Ryan Roenfeld for a stroll along the seamier side of Omaha s past."

Covering 440 miles, "Queen Mills" stretches from the Point aux Poules and Five Barrel Islands on the Missouri River east through the loess hills to the West Nishnabotna watershed. Once the center of the Glenwood culture, the area later became the hunting grounds for the Otoes and was then included as part of the Potawatomi Indian reserve. The first Mormon refugees from Nauvoo arrived in 1846, and the California Gold Rush then brought new people west. Mills County was organized in 1851 as Mormon control faded and chaos filled the mud streets of what became Glenwood. Speculation ran rampant as farmers from Ohio, Kentucky, England, and Germany spread across the prairies. New towns and businesses appeared alongside the tracks of the railroads, and the Iowa Institution for Feeble-Minded Children grew into a major institution. One-room schoolhouses dotted the countryside as the county emerged as one of the country's major fruit-growing regions with orchards covering the hills around Glenwood.