Nebraska Authors

Jackson, Civil War veteran and a writer, photographer and painter, is considered by many to have been the most important photographer of the American West. Jackson lived and worked in Omaha from 1867 to 1879. While working out of Omaha, he photographed Pawnee and Omaha tribe members from the area, and new settlements and landscapes along the Union Pacific as far as Promontory Point, Utah. In 1870 Ferdinand Hayden recruited Jackson to accompany his Western survey, which included much of the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, and areas as far south as Arizona and New Mexico and lasted 11 years. Thomas Moran was the expedition's artist. The expedition photographs made Jackson's reputation.

Scottsbluff National Monument houses the largest collection anywhere of Jackson's paintings, made late in life, but reflecting real events that he saw along the Oregon Trail in its heyday. Jackson had first crossed Nebraska in 1866 working as a bullwhacker for a freighting company. His photographic survey of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago The White City (as it was) is also very famous. He also photographed the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (World's Fair) held in Omaha in 1898.

See also: Frank A. Rinehart

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Ricker was a journalist, newspaper editor and judge in the Chadron area after the Civil War. Intending to write a history of the settlement of the West from a Native American perspective, he collected over 1500 pages of unique and irreplaceable interviews with Native American informants, frontier scouts and settlers. He was unable to pull the materials together into a book during his lifetime, but the tablets were donated to the Nebraska State Historical Association. They are among the most significant eye-witness source materials on the Indian Wars and western settlement in Nebraska and the broader West.

The Nebraska State Historical Society has the Eli S. Ricker Manuscript Collection [RG1227]. Addison Sheldon recognized the importance of the collection and, as an old Populist Party crony and Chadron friend of Judge Ricker, was able to obtain it for the NSHS. Mari Sandoz was the first person to assess the collection when she was hired to arrange it under FERA, a Depression era aid program.

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Marjorie Saiser is the author of six volumes of poetry, with the seventh to be published in September of 2019. Saiser's "New & Selected" will be published in 2020 or 2021 in Ted Kooser's series at the University of Nebraska Press. She has won critical recognition, including an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Vreelands Award, the Nebraska Literary Heritage Award, the Mildred Bennett Award for exceptional literary contributions, the Willa Award, and several Nebraska Book Awards. Her novel-in-poems, Losing the Ring in the River, served as the basis for Brigid Amos's play of the same title, produced in 2018 by the Angels Theater Company at the Johnny Carson Theater in Lincoln.

Student of Bill Kloefkorn.

Ted Kooser has said that "no contemporary poet is better at writing about love" than Saiser. - Kooser quoted from his column "American Life in Poetry," Lincoln Journal Star 1-15-2017.

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