Groundwater
Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated deposit is called an aquifer when it can yield a usable quantity of water; the depth at which soil pore spaces or fractures and voids in rock become saturated with water is called the water table. Groundwater is recharged from and flows to the surface naturally. Groundwater is often withdrawn for agricultural and industrial use by constructing and operating extraction wells; the study of the distribution and movement of groundwater is hydrogeology called groundwater hydrology. Groundwater is thought of as water flowing through shallow aquifers, but, in the technical sense, it can contain soil moisture, immobile water in low permeability bedrock, deep geothermal or oil formation water. Groundwater is hypothesized to provide lubrication that can influence the movement of faults, it is that much of Earth's subsurface contains some water, which may be mixed with other fluids in some instances.
Groundwater may not be confined only to Earth. The formation of some of the landforms observed on Mars may have been influenced by groundwater. There is evidence that liquid water may exist in the subsurface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Groundwater is cheaper, more convenient and less vulnerable to pollution than surface water. Therefore, it is used for public water supplies. For example, groundwater provides the largest source of usable water storage in the United States, California annually withdraws the largest amount of groundwater of all the states. Underground reservoirs contain far more water than the capacity of all surface reservoirs and lakes in the US, including the Great Lakes. Many municipal water supplies are derived from groundwater. Polluted groundwater is less visible and more difficult to clean up than pollution in rivers and lakes. Groundwater pollution most results from improper disposal of wastes on land. Major sources include industrial and household chemicals and garbage landfills, excessive fertilizers and pesticides used in agriculture, industrial waste lagoons and process wastewater from mines, industrial fracking, oil field brine pits, leaking underground oil storage tanks and pipelines, sewage sludge and septic systems.
An aquifer is a layer of porous substrate that transmits groundwater. When water can flow directly between the surface and the saturated zone of an aquifer, the aquifer is unconfined; the deeper parts of unconfined aquifers are more saturated since gravity causes water to flow downward. The upper level of this saturated layer of an unconfined aquifer is called the water table or phreatic surface. Below the water table, where in general all pore spaces are saturated with water, is the phreatic zone. Substrate with low porosity that permits limited transmission of groundwater is known as an aquitard. An aquiclude is a substrate with porosity, so low it is impermeable to groundwater. A confined aquifer is an aquifer, overlain by a impermeable layer of rock or substrate such as an aquiclude or aquitard. If a confined aquifer follows a downward grade from its recharge zone, groundwater can become pressurized as it flows; this can create artesian wells that flow without the need of a pump and rise to a higher elevation than the static water table at the above, aquifer.
The characteristics of aquifers vary with the geology and structure of the substrate and topography in which they occur. In general, the more productive aquifers occur in sedimentary geologic formations. By comparison and fractured crystalline rocks yield smaller quantities of groundwater in many environments. Unconsolidated to poorly cemented alluvial materials that have accumulated as valley-filling sediments in major river valleys and geologically subsiding structural basins are included among the most productive sources of groundwater; the high specific heat capacity of water and the insulating effect of soil and rock can mitigate the effects of climate and maintain groundwater at a steady temperature. In some places where groundwater temperatures are maintained by this effect at about 10 °C, groundwater can be used for controlling the temperature inside structures at the surface. For example, during hot weather cool groundwater can be pumped through radiators in a home and returned to the ground in another well.
During cold seasons, because it is warm, the water can be used in the same way as a source of heat for heat pumps, much more efficient than using air. The volume of groundwater in an aquifer can be estimated by measuring water levels in local wells and by examining geologic records from well-drilling to determine the extent and thickness of water-bearing sediments and rocks. Before an investment is made in production wells, test wells may be drilled to measure the depths at which water is encountered and collect samples of soils and water for laboratory analyses. Pumping tests can be performed in test wells to determine flow characteristics of the aquifer. Groundwater makes up about twenty percent of the world's fresh water supply, about 0.61% of the entire world's water, including oceans and permanent ice. Global groundwater storage is equal to the total amount of freshwater stored in the snow and ice pack, including the north and south poles; this makes it an important resource that can act as a natural storage that can buffer against shortages of surface water, as in during times of drought.
Groundwater is replenished b
Alexander William Doniphan
Alexander William Doniphan was a 19th-century American attorney and politician from Missouri, best known today as the man who prevented the summary execution of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the close of the 1838 Mormon War in that state. He achieved renown as a leader of American troops during the Mexican–American War, as the author of a legal code that still forms the basis of New Mexico's Bill of Rights, as a successful defense attorney in the Missouri towns of Liberty and Independence. Doniphan was born near the town of Maysville, near the Ohio River, he was natives of Virginia. His father had been a friend of Daniel Boone, both of his grandfathers had fought in the American Revolution. Doniphan graduated from Augusta College in 1824, was admitted to the bar in 1830, he began his law practice in Lexington, but soon moved to Liberty, where he was a successful lawyer. Doniphan always served as a defense attorney, never as a prosecutor, was noted for his oratorical skills.
He served in the state legislature in 1836, 1840, 1854, representing the Whig Party. Doniphan's friend and partner, David Rice Atchison, was a member of the Liberty Blues, a volunteer militia company. In June 1836 he persuaded Doniphan to join them. Doniphan took part in the so-called Heatherly War as an aide to Colonel Samuel C. Allen; as the Liberty Blues moved toward the Missouri border, Stephen Watts Kearny a lieutenant colonel, joined them from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kearney discovered that the Heatherly brothers had sold whiskey to a hunting party of Potawatomi Indians stole their horses; the Potawatomis killed three of them. The brothers' mother sought revenge by claiming that the Potawatomis had gone on the war path, while the remaining Heatherly brothers robbed and murdered two white men, trying to place the blame on the Potawatomis; the "war" ended with the Heatherly family being arrested and convicted. Starting in 1831, Jackson County, Missouri had become home to several members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a religious organization founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York a year earlier.
By 1833 1200 Mormons lived in Jackson County, where they aroused the ire of many earlier settlers by their belief that American Indians, whom they called "Lamanites", were the descendants of ancient Israelites who had migrated to the New World centuries earlier. Other fundamental differences between Mormons and non-Mormons exacerbated the situation a belief that the Mormons were abolitionists, who planned to foment uprisings among Missouri slaves. Denunciations of abolitionism in the church press did nothing to allay their neighbors' fears, matters came to a head in late 1833, when the Mormons were forcibly expelled from the county. Following these events, Joseph Smith and other church leaders petitioned the governor of Missouri for protection, but were ignored; this led them to hire Atchison, among others, to defend their rights in court. Doniphan assisted in the creation of a special county in northwestern Missouri for the Mormons, but continued friction between Mormons and non-Mormon settlers in that region led to the outbreak of the 1838 Mormon War.
Following a clash between Mormons and state militia at the Battle of Crooked River, governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous "Extermination Order", directing that the Mormons be "exterminated, or driven from the state". As a brigadier general in the Missouri Militia, Doniphan was ordered into the field with other forces to operate against the Mormons though he had worked diligently to avoid the conflict, believed that the Mormons were acting in self-defense. After the surrender of Far West, General Samuel Lucas took custody of Joseph Smith and other Mormon leaders, instituted a drumhead court martial, which declared Smith and the others guilty of treason, ordered Doniphan to execute them. Doniphan indignantly refused. I will not obey your order.... F you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God"; the Mormon leaders were accordingly sent to Liberty Jail during the winter, to await trial during the following spring of 1839, at which trial Doniphan was appointed as their defense attorney and energetically defended them at the risk of his good reputation and, in all probability, his life.
The church leaders were permitted to escape from custody, they subsequently made their way to the new Mormon settlement in Hancock County, where Joseph Smith was killed in 1844. In Doniphan's honor and Emma Hale Smith named a son Alexander Hale Smith. In 1843, Orrin Porter Rockwell, a controversial Mormon figure known as "the destroying angel of Mormondom", was arrested in St. Louis and accused of carrying out a failed assassination attempt on governor Boggs. After 9 months of being imprisoned in poor conditions, he was able to hire Doniphan to defend him. Rockwell made his way to Illinois later to Utah, where he achieved fame as a lawman and Wild West figure. Forty years after the events of 1838, an aged Doniphan visited Salt Lake City, which had become the nucleus for the largest body of Mormons following the death of Joseph Smith, he received a hero's welcome, was fet
St. Joseph, Missouri
St. Joseph is a city in and the county seat of Buchanan County, United States. Small parts of St. Joseph extend into Andrew County, United States, it is the principal city of the St. Joseph Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Buchanan, DeKalb counties in Missouri and Doniphan County, Kansas; as of the 2010 census, St. Joseph had a total population of 76,780, making it the eighth largest city in the state, the third largest in Northwest Missouri. St. Joseph is located thirty miles north of the Kansas City, Missouri city limits; the city was named after the both the town's founder the biblical Saint Joseph. The city is located on the Missouri River, it is the birthplace of hip hop star Eminem as well as the death place of Jesse James. St. Joseph is home to Missouri Western State University. St. Joseph was founded on the Missouri River by Joseph Robidoux, a local fur trader, incorporated in 1843. In its early days, it was a bustling outpost and rough frontier town, serving as a last supply point and jumping-off point on the Missouri River toward the "Wild West".
It was the westernmost point in the United States accessible by rail until after the American Civil War. The main east-west downtown streets were named for Robidoux's eight children: Faraon, Francois, Edmond, Charles and Messanie; the street between Sylvanie and Messanie was named for Angelique. St. Joseph, or "St. Joe", as it was called by many, was a "Jumping-Off Point" for those headed to the Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s; these cities, including Independence, St. Joseph, were where pioneers would stay and purchase supplies before they would head out in wagon trains; the town was a bustling place, was the second city in the US to have electric streetcars. Between April 3, 1860, late October 1861, St. Joseph was one of the two endpoints of the Pony Express, which operated for a short period over the land inaccessible by rail, to provide fast mail service; the pony riders carried along with the mail, a small personal Bible. Today the Pony Express Museum hosts visitors in the old stables. On April 3, 1882 outlaw Jesse James was killed at his home located at 1318 Lafayette, now sited next to The Patee House.
In the post-Civil War years, when the economy was down, the hotel had served for a time as the home of the Patee Female College, followed by the St. Joseph Female College up to 1880. James was living under the alias of Mr. Howard. An excerpt from a popular poem of the time is: "...that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard has laid poor Jesse in his grave." The Heaton-Bowman-Smith Funeral Home maintains a small museum about Jesse James. Their predecessors conducted the funeral; the museum is open to the public. His home is now known as the Jesse James Home Museum, it has been relocated at least three times, features the bullet hole from that fateful shot. St. Joseph is identified by the slogan, "Where the Pony Express started and Jesse James ended." Among properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places are the Patee House, a former hotel now maintained as a museum of transportation, the Missouri Theatre, an ornate movie palace. St. Joseph's population peaked in 1900, with a census population of 102,979.
This population figure is questionable, as civic leaders tried to inflate the numbers for that census. At the time, it was the home to one of the largest wholesale companies in the Midwest, the Nave & McCord Mercantile Company, as well as the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, the C. D. Smith & Company, which would become C. D. Smith Healthcare; the Walnut Park Farm Historic District near St. Joseph was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. In 1997, St. Joseph was named an "All-America City" by the National Civic League. St. Joseph was voted the top true western town of 2007 by True West Magazine, in the January/February 2008 issue. Saint Joseph is located at 39°45′29″N 94°50′12″W, on the Missouri/Kansas border in northwestern Missouri close to Nebraska; the nearest major metropolitan area to St. Joseph is the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, which begins 30 miles to the south; the nearest major airport is Kansas City International Airport, 35 miles to the south. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 44.77 square miles, of which 43.99 square miles is land and 0.78 square miles is water.
The monthly weather averages listed below are taken from National Weather Service 1981-2010 Normals. Snowfall is not recorded at the St Joseph weather station; as of the census of 2010, there were 76,780 people, 29,727 households, 18,492 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,745.4 inhabitants per square mile. There were 33,189 housing units at an average density of 754.5 per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 87.8% White, 6.0% African American, 0.5% Native American, 0.9% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 2.0% from other races, 2.7% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 5.7% of the population. There were 29,727 households of which 32.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 42.0% were married couples living together, 14.5% had a female householder with no husband present, 5.7% had a male householder with no wife present, 37.8% were non-families. 30.7% of all households were made up of individuals and 12.2% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older.
The average household size was 2.43 and the average family size was 3.01. In the ci
Nomad
A nomad is a member of a community of people without fixed habitation who move to and from the same areas, including nomadic hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tinker or trader nomads. As of 1995, there were an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world. Nomadic hunting and gathering, following seasonally available wild plants and game, is by far the oldest human subsistence method. Pastoralists raise herds, driving them, or moving with them, as if with an Apuzzo, in patterns that avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover. Nomadism is a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals. Sometimes described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services to the resident population.
These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads". A nomad is a person with no settled home, moving from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living; the word nomad comes from a Greek word. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic peoples traditionally travel on foot. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Most nomads live in other portable shelters. Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, water. Australian Aborigines, Negritos of Southeast Asia, San of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and gather wild plants; some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads make their living raising livestock such as camels, goats, sheep or yaks; these nomads travel to find more camels and sheep through the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa. The Fulani and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa.
Some nomadic peoples herders, may move to raid settled communities or avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to serve customers, they include the Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Romani traders, the Irish Travellers. Most nomads travel in groups of bands or tribes; these groups are based on formal agreements of cooperation. A council of adult males makes most of the decisions. In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year; these two movements occur during the summer and winter. The winter location is located near mountains in a valley and most families have fixed winter locations, their winter locations have shelter for the animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area. Most nomads move in the same region and don't travel far to a different region. Since they circle around a large area, communities form and families know where the other ones are. Families do not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently.
A family can move on its own or with others and if it moves alone, they are no more than a couple of kilometers from each other. Nowadays there are no tribes and decisions are made among family members, although elders consult with each other on usual matters; the geographical closeness of families is for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies do not have large population. One such society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history; the Mongols consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which stretched the length of Asia; the nomadic way of life has become rare. Many governments dislike nomads because it is difficult to control their movement and to obtain taxes from them. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements. Nomads move from campsite to following game and wild fruits and vegetables.
Hunting and gathering describes early people's subsistence living style. Following the development of agriculture, most hunter-gatherers were either displaced or converted to farming or pastoralist groups. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers. Pastoral nomads are nomads moving between pastures. Nomadic pastoralism is thought to have developed in three stages that accompanied population growth and an increase in the complexity of social organization. Karim Sadr has proposed the following stages: Pastoralism: This is a mixed economy with a symbiosis within the family. Agropastoralism: This is when symbiosis is between clans within an ethnic group. True Nomadism: This is when symbiosis is at the regional level between specialised nomadic and agricultural populations; the pastoralists are sedentary to a certain area, as they move between the permanent spring, summer and winter pastures for their livestock. The nomads moved depending on the availability of resources. Nomadic pastoralism seems to have
Kingdom of France
The Kingdom of France was a medieval and early modern monarchy in Western Europe. It was one of the most powerful states in Europe and a great power since the Late Middle Ages and the Hundred Years' War, it was an early colonial power, with possessions around the world. France originated as West Francia, the western half of the Carolingian Empire, with the Treaty of Verdun. A branch of the Carolingian dynasty continued to rule until 987, when Hugh Capet was elected king and founded the Capetian dynasty; the territory remained known as Francia and its ruler as rex Francorum well into the High Middle Ages. The first king calling himself Roi de France was Philip II, in 1190. France continued to be ruled by the Capetians and their cadet lines—the Valois and Bourbon—until the monarchy was overthrown in 1792 during the French Revolution. France in the Middle Ages was a feudal monarchy. In Brittany and Catalonia the authority of the French king was felt. Lorraine and Provence were states of the Holy Roman Empire and not yet a part of France.
West Frankish kings were elected by the secular and ecclesiastic magnates, but the regular coronation of the eldest son of the reigning king during his father's lifetime established the principle of male primogeniture, which became codified in the Salic law. During the Late Middle Ages, the Kings of England laid claim to the French throne, resulting in a series of conflicts known as the Hundred Years' War. Subsequently, France sought to extend its influence into Italy, but was defeated by Spain in the ensuing Italian Wars. France in the early modern era was centralised. Religiously France became divided between the Catholic majority and a Protestant minority, the Huguenots, which led to a series of civil wars, the Wars of Religion. France laid claim to large stretches of North America, known collectively as New France. Wars with Great Britain led to the loss of much of this territory by 1763. French intervention in the American Revolutionary War helped secure the independence of the new United States of America but was costly and achieved little for France.
The Kingdom of France adopted a written constitution in 1791, but the Kingdom was abolished a year and replaced with the First French Republic. The monarchy was restored by the other great powers in 1814 and lasted until the French Revolution of 1848. During the years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule, the Vikings made advances along the northern and western perimeters of the Kingdom of the Franks. After Charlemagne's death in 814 his heirs were incapable of maintaining political unity and the empire began to crumble; the Treaty of Verdun of 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three parts, with Charles the Bald ruling over West Francia, the nucleus of what would develop into the kingdom of France. Charles the Bald was crowned King of Lotharingia after the death of Lothair II in 869, but in the Treaty of Meerssen was forced to cede much of Lotharingia to his brothers, retaining the Rhone and Meuse basins but leaving the Rhineland with Aachen and Trier in East Francia. Viking advances were allowed to increase, their dreaded longships were sailing up the Loire and Seine rivers and other inland waterways, wreaking havoc and spreading terror.
During the reign of Charles the Simple, Normans under Rollo from Norway, were settled in an area on either side of the River Seine, downstream from Paris, to become Normandy. The Carolingians were to share the fate of their predecessors: after an intermittent power struggle between the two dynasties, the accession in 987 of Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris, established the Capetian dynasty on the throne. With its offshoots, the houses of Valois and Bourbon, it was to rule France for more than 800 years; the old order left the new dynasty in immediate control of little beyond the middle Seine and adjacent territories, while powerful territorial lords such as the 10th- and 11th-century counts of Blois accumulated large domains of their own through marriage and through private arrangements with lesser nobles for protection and support. The area around the lower Seine became a source of particular concern when Duke William took possession of the kingdom of England by the Norman Conquest of 1066, making himself and his heirs the King's equal outside France.
Henry II inherited the Duchy of Normandy and the County of Anjou, married France's newly divorced ex-queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ruled much of southwest France, in 1152. After defeating a revolt led by Eleanor and three of their four sons, Henry had Eleanor imprisoned, made the Duke of Brittany his vassal, in effect ruled the western half of France as a greater power than the French throne. However, disputes among Henry's descendants over the division of his French territories, coupled with John of England's lengthy quarrel with Philip II, allowed Philip II to recover influence over most of this territory. After the French victory at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the English monarchs maintained power only in southwestern Duchy of Guyenne; the death of Charles IV of France in 1328 without male heirs ended the main Capetian line. Under Salic law the crown could not pass through a woman (Philip IV's daughter
Barge
A barge is a flat-bottomed ship, built for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Some barges are not self-propelled and must be towed or pushed by towboats, canal barges or towed by draft animals on an adjacent towpath. Barges contended with the railway in the early Industrial Revolution, but were outcompeted in the carriage of high-value items due to the higher speed, falling costs and route flexibility of railways. Barge is attested from Old French barge, from Vulgar Latin barga; the word could refer to any small boat. Bark, "small ship", is attested from Old French barque, from Vulgar Latin barca; the more precise meaning "three-masted ship" arose in the 17th century, takes the French spelling for disambiguation. Both are derived from the Latin barica, from Ancient Greek: βάρις, translit. Báris, lit.'Egyptian boat', from Coptic: ⲃⲁⲁⲣⲉ bāri "small boat", hieroglyphic Egyptian and similar ba-y-r for "basket-shaped boat". By extension, the term "embark" means to board the kind of boat called a "barque".
The long pole used to maneuver or propel a barge has given rise to the saying "I wouldn't touch that with a barge pole." On the British canal system, the term'barge' is used to describe a boat wider than a narrowboat, the people who move barges are known as lightermen. On the UK canal system, boats wider than seven feet are referred to as widebeam. In the United States, deckhands are supervised by a leadman or the mate; the captain and pilot steer the towboat, which pushes one or more barges held together with rigging, collectively called'the tow'. The crew live aboard the towboat as it travels along the inland river system or the intracoastal waterways; these towboats travel between ports and are called line-haul boats. Poles are used on barges to fend off the barge as it nears a wharf; these are called'pike poles'. Barges are used today for low-value bulk items, as the cost of hauling goods by barge is low. Barges are used for heavy or bulky items; the most common European barge can carry up to about 2,450 tonnes.
As an example, on June 26, 2006, a 565-short-ton catalytic cracking unit reactor was shipped by barge from the Tulsa Port of Catoosa in Oklahoma to a refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Large objects are shipped in sections and assembled onsite, but shipping an assembled unit reduced costs and avoided reliance on construction labor at the delivery site. Of the reactor's 700-mile journey, only about 40 miles were traveled overland, from the final port to the refinery. Self-propelled barges may be used as such when traveling upstream in placid waters. Canal barges are made for the particular canal in which they will operate. Many barges Dutch barges, which were designed for carrying cargo along the canals of Europe, are no longer large enough to compete in this industry with larger newer vessels. Many of these barges have been renovated and are now used as luxury hotel barges carrying holidaymakers along the same canals on which they once carried grain or coal. In primitive regions today and in all pre-development regions worldwide in times before industrial development and highways, barges were the predominant and most efficient means of inland transportation in many regions.
This holds true today, for many areas of the world. In such pre-industrialized, or poorly developed infrastructure regions, many barges are purpose-designed to be powered on waterways by long slender poles – thereby becoming known on American waterways as poleboats as the extensive west of North America was settled using the vast tributary river systems of the Mississippi drainage basin. Poleboats use muscle power of "walkers" along the sides of the craft pushing a pole against the streambed, canal or lake bottom to move the vessel where desired. In settling the American west it was faster to navigate downriver from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, to the Ohio River confluence with the Mississippi and pole upriver against the current to St. Louis than to travel overland on the rare primitive dirt roads for many decades after the American Revolution. Once the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads reached Chicago, that time dynamic changed, American poleboats became less common, relegated to smaller rivers and more remote streams.
On the Mississippi riverine system today, including that of other sheltered waterways, industrial barge trafficking in bulk raw materials such as coal, timber, iron ore and other minerals is common. Such barges need to be pushed by towboats. Canal barges, towed by draft animals on a waterway adjacent towpath were of fundamental importance in the early Industrial Revolution, whose major early engineering projects were efforts to build viaducts and canals to fuel and feed raw materials to nascent factories in the early industrial takeoff and take their goods to ports and cities for distribution; the barge and ca
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state that lies in both the Great Plains and the Midwestern United States. It is bordered by South Dakota to the north, it is the only triply landlocked U. S. state. Nebraska's area is just over 77,220 square miles with a population of 1.9 million people. Its state capital is Lincoln, its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River. Indigenous peoples, including Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee and various branches of the Lakota tribes, lived in the region for thousands of years before European exploration; the state is crossed including that of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Nebraska was admitted as the 37th state of the United States in 1867, it is the only state in the United States whose legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan. Nebraska is composed of two major land regions: the Great Plains; the Dissected Till Plains region consist of rolling hills and contains the state's largest cities and Lincoln. The Great Plains region, occupying most of western Nebraska, is characterized by treeless prairie, suitable for cattle-grazing.
Nebraska has two major climatic zones. The eastern half of the state has a humid continental climate; the western half of the state has a semi-arid climate. The state has wide variations between winter and summer temperatures, variations that decrease moving south in the state. Violent thunderstorms and tornadoes occur during spring and summer and sometimes in autumn. Chinook winds tend to warm the state in the winter and early spring. Nebraska's name is derived from transliteration of the archaic Otoe words Ñí Brásge, pronounced, or the Omaha Ní Btháska, meaning "flat water", after the Platte River that flows through the state. Indigenous peoples lived in the region of present-day Nebraska for thousands of years before European exploration; the historic tribes in the state included the Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee and various branches of the Lakota, some of which migrated from eastern areas into this region. When European exploration and settlement began, both Spain and France sought to control the region.
In the 1690s, Spain established trade connections with the Apaches, whose territory included western Nebraska. By 1703, France had developed a regular trade with the native peoples along the Missouri River in Nebraska, by 1719 had signed treaties with several of these peoples. After war broke out between the two countries, Spain dispatched an armed expedition to Nebraska under Lieutenant General Pedro de Villasur in 1720; the party was attacked and destroyed near present-day Columbus by a large force of Pawnees and Otoes, both allied to the French. The massacre ended Spanish exploration of the area for the remainder of the 18th century. In 1762, during the Seven Years' War, France ceded the Louisiana territory to Spain; this left Spain competing for dominance along the Mississippi. In response, Spain dispatched two trading expeditions up the Missouri in 1794 and 1795; that year, Mackay's party built a trading post, dubbed Fort Carlos IV, near present-day Homer. In 1819, the United States established Fort Atkinson as the first U.
S. Army post west of the Missouri River, just east of present-day Fort Calhoun; the army abandoned the fort in 1827. European-American settlement was scarce until the California Gold Rush. On May 30, 1854, the US Congress created the Kansas and the Nebraska territories, divided by the Parallel 40° North, under the Kansas–Nebraska Act; the Nebraska Territory included parts of the current states of Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. The territorial capital of Nebraska was Omaha. In the 1860s, after the U. S. government forced many of the Native American tribes to cede their lands and settle on reservations, it opened large tracts of land to agricultural development by Europeans and Americans. Under the Homestead Act, thousands of settlers migrated into Nebraska to claim free land granted by the federal government; because so few trees grew on the prairies, many of the first farming settlers built their homes of sod, as had Native Americans such as the Omaha. The first wave of settlement gave the territory a sufficient population to apply for statehood.
Nebraska became the 37th state on March 1, 1867, the capital was moved from Omaha to the center at Lancaster renamed Lincoln after the assassinated President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. The battle of Massacre Canyon on August 5, 1873, was the last major battle between the Pawnee and the Sioux. During the 1870s to the 1880s, Nebraska experienced a large growth in population. Several factors contributed to attracting new residents; the first was. This helped settlers to learn the unfamiliar geography of the area; the second factor was the invention of several farming technologies. Agricultural inventions such as barbed wire, wind mills, the steel plow, combined with good weather, enabled settlers to use of Nebraska as prime farming land. By the 1880s, Nebraska's population
Doniphan County, Kansas
