Country United States of America | ||
Gibson Bend of the Missouri River is a meander located in Pottawattamie County, Iowa and Douglas County, Nebraska, located at 41°11′15″N 95°55′15″W.
Map of Gibson Bend, Highland II, NE, USA
The Gibson Bend of the Missouri River is located at Omaha Nebraska about where Hascall Street would intersect the river. The Gibson yards of the Burlington Northern is also located at this bend in the river on the bottoms. In 1952 the flood was contained by the dike built there from soil taken out of the hills behind the roundhouse of the Burlington, so the dirt they contained is now the dike.
The interstate eventually went over the Missouri River at that point, exactly ten miles above the Platte river and Lewis and Clark placed mounds on their maps and mention them in the journals at that point. They said a few dozen "Indian Mounds" in the area covered a location of about two hundred acres. Clark drew these on his map with x's and triangles suggesting it was the site of an ancient village of the Otoes and some of the crew swam the horses over and examined them for a day.
The dirt in the area is no doubt glacial deposits and those mounds probably built up by some action of the river, and glacier or something else rather than having been built entirely by the natives, although they may have been groomed by them somewhat for funeral purposes as they did in other areas of the country and the journals mention this also. Three of the mounds that were at Gibson can be seen on aerial photo from 1938 of the area at HistoricAerials.com ask for 1st and Hascall streets, they are just behind the railroad roundhouse.
Government aerial pictures from the forties and fifties of the area clearly show mounds at Gibson, along the hillside, and of unusual height, more than fifty feet or so, and of such an angle that they would be almost impossible to climb without assistance of some kind. There was a house between these mounds and when the mounds were taken down it was removed. They were heavily saturated with sand and the ground up rock (loess) from the glacier and dirt, but very few small river rock pebbles of differing colors, not common to the area, again suggesting the glacier. Some of the locals called these "Camel's Humps" and they certainly looked like that.
The Missouri river was a fickle river indeed and the old channels on the Iowa side depict this tendency to meander at its own will, a row of many old channel beds are there just across the river in Iowa and these in the heat of summer blister up into hard clay like gulches. But in other seasons they are a bog, moistened by the river they are gumbo turning into an almost quicksand type substance to pull you down if you jump on it a few times.
Clark placed a lake just south of Gibson on the river bottom he called spring lake with jagged edges suggesting small mounds in that area also. This lake was fed by several springs coming out of the high bank to the west with one or two egress back into the river, the lake was large on the north end tapering off at the other. A small neighborhood in the 1950s called Gibson was located between the humps and this lake mostly on the hills consisting of about eighty homes. A beanery, several other homes a grain elevator and the railroad shops of the Burlington Northern were on the river bottom. The railroad cut through the face of one of the mounds on its way north to the yards at the Burlington and Union Pacific stations in Omaha. Gibson was bordered on the East by the river and the West by Riverview Blvd. the North by Bancroft street and the South by Grover street. The present Henry Doorly Zoo resides right up to Gibson on the Southwest.
The infamous riot of 1919 in which the mayor was hung, the courthouse burned and a young black man lynched started in Gibson.