Nebraska Authors

Brothers Frank and Alfred Rinehart moved to Colorado sometime in the 1870s and found employment in a photography studio there. In 1881 they formed a partnership with the great western photographer William Henry Jackson. Frank was fascinated by Native Americans and is said to have learned much from Jackson. In 1885, Frank Rinehart married Anna Ransom Johnson, Jackson's receptionist. The couple then moved to Omaha, where, in 1886, Frank Rinehart opened a photography studio in the Brandeis building in Omaha. He operated the Omaha studio until his death in 1928.

In 1898, Frank Rinehart was the official photographer for the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, and the concurrent Indian Congress, held in Omaha from June to November 1898. The Indian Congress (August through November 1, 1898) was a fascinating affair, a kind of final re-union and last dance for Native Americans that had lived in the traditional ways and fought in the wars against the United States. It was managed by a Captain of the 8th Infantry, acting under the ultimate authority of the Secretary of the Interior, and even Geronimo, officially imprisoned at Ft. Sill, was allowed to attend. Frank Rinehart and his assistant Adoph Muhr photographed over 500 individuals of the various tribes. The quality of their work has impressed generations of critics. It seems generally agreed that Rinehart managed to leave behind the by then somewhat stilted conventions of ethnographic portraiture, and any remaining temptation to portray Native Americans as savages, and capture with sympathy the dignity and individual personalities of his subjects. The sales of the Indian Congress photographs made Frank Rinehart wealthy and famous, and gave him the money to make a grand tour of Indian Reservations, where he made an additional 1,200 portraits. His assistant Muhr later became an assistant for Edward S. Curtis.

The Museum of Nebraska Art has a small Rinehart collection and a more extensive online biographical sketch of Rinehart.
The Nebraska State Historical Society has Rinehart items, an online biographical sketch, and a collection of photographs from the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.
The Boston Public Library has an extensive collection of images which are available online.

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The author worked throughout his life to preserve his grandfather's ranch in northern Rock County, NE. Hutton and his wife Lucille left their 4,919 acre ranch to the Audubon Society of Kansas, together with a one million dollar endowment that will help maintain the ranch for both conservation and grazing. Paul Johnsgard wrote an appreciation of the Hutton Ranch sanctuary for the Prairie Fire newspaper (July 2014 issue) that explains how the sanctuary came to be cared for by the Kansas Audubon Society. Hutton was also an early opponent of the Norden Dam project which, if built, would have flooded a biologically diverse and especially scenic portion of the Niobrara.

Doc Middleton, the horse thief, outlaw, and gambler spent a night at the Hutton place in 1883 after being released from Prison. Hutton wrote about Middleton, and other outlaws and vigilantes in several widely admired books. Hutton's research for his book on Middleton included travel to Phoenix, AZ to meet Middleton's 98 year old brother-in-law, Tom Richardson. His biography of Middleton is especially well regarded, both for the quality of its research and for being locally informed.

The River That Runs takes its title from an Native American name for the Niobrara river, and is an anecdotal history of the region.

See also: Will Spindler

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Christianson was a distinguished historian of science who taught at Indiana State University. He is probably best known for widely admired biographies of Isaac Newton, Edwin Hubble, and Nebraska's own Loren Eiseley. In writing his Eiseley biography, Fox at the Wood's Edge, he tracked down and interviewed or corresponded with all the surviving family members, writers, fellow students, and colleagues in Anthropology who knew Eiseley at just the moment when they were passing from the scene.
All of Christianson's research materials for the Eiseley biography are in the Heritage Room's Christianson-Eiseley Collection. He corresponded or spoke with Nebraska literary figures who knew Eiseley, such as Rudolph Umland, Wilbur Gaffney, Wright Morris, and Dorothy Thomas, as well as with writers like W.H. Auden and Ray Bradbury.
Christianson is not a Nebraska author by the usual criteria, but became so closely connected with so many Nebraska writers that he has to be included in the database. After finishing his biography of Eiseley, he returned to the state to write a history of a 1912 Nebraska State Penitentiary jailbreak that Eiseley remembered in All the Strange Hours. Christianson's book is The Last Posse: A Jailbreak, a Manhunt, and the End of Hang-'Em-High Justice, 2001.

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