America's pivotal move West

As a photographer in late 19th-century Nebraska, Solomon D. Butcher was a rarity. Mack Downey Ranch in Georgetown, Custer County, Nebraska, 1903. | (Nebraska State Historical Society) Born in Virginia in 1856, Butcher moved West with his family in 1880. Although he quickly failed as a homesteader himself, he recognized early on that what his fellow settlers were doing represented an important moment for America. Settlers moving into the North Loup River Valley of Nebraska in 1886. | (Nebraska St...