A local anniversary that deserves recognition

This past Friday, April 19, marked the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord—those first fateful skirmishes in Massachusetts that launched the American Revolution. A day earlier, April 18, marked Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, immortalized by Longfellow and woven deep into the fabric of our national story, whether or not the details match the legend. These moments remain embedded in our collective memory, even if they pass quietly out here where the Revolution never reached.

In Southwest Nebraska, the anniversary passed with little fanfare. The Revolutionary War seems a long way off—and indeed, it was. There were no redcoats marching through McCook. No musket fire echoing over the Republican River. Our local history runs on a different clock.

While the eastern colonies were ablaze with revolution in 1775, the tribes of the central plains were navigating their own shifting landscape. Pawnee villages dotted the river valleys of what is now Nebraska, keeping a wary eye on Lakota and Cheyenne movements to the west and north. Trade, territory, and survival depended on horses, guns, and fragile alliances. It was a different kind of revolution—unfolding far from the battlefields of the East. So perhaps it makes a certain kind of sense that we feel more distance than duty when it comes to those hallowed April dates.

Still, if we’re looking for an anniversary worth observing—one that hits closer to home—we might turn our eyes to a different April milestone.

April 30 marks 222 years since the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, finalized in 1803 in Paris at the Hôtel Tubeuf. That transaction, carried out between Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte, doubled the size of the young United States and gave us the land beneath our feet.

It is easy to forget, especially as we think about property taxes or the timing of spring lawn treatments, that the very lawns we cultivate once belonged to empires. The soil underneath our humble homes was once part of a deal between two of the most consequential leaders in world history. In real estate terms, it was a headline-making deal—828,000 square miles and Nebraska was right in the middle of it.

Without the Louisiana Purchase, there would have been no Homestead Act in 1862, no mass settlement across the Great Plains, and no admission to the Union in 1867. Without it, the idea of Southwest Nebraska as we know it—its communities, its farms, its school districts and street names—would be a very different story.

In a sense, the Louisiana Purchase gave us the ground on which all those later American ideals could take root. It is, quietly, the story behind our national origin.

So while the Revolution may feel like it happened a world away, we’re sitting squarely on the results of another pivotal chapter. This Wednesday, April 30, take a moment to consider the significance of a land deal struck on the far side of the Atlantic—and how it brought this part of the world into the American story.

As former McCook mayor Phil Lyons would say: “Celebrate in an appropriate fashion.”