Council Bluffs is a city in and the county seat of Pottawattamie County, Iowa, United States. It is the most populous city in Southwest Iowa, as well as the third largest and a primary city of the Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan Area. It is located on the east bank of the Missouri River, across from Omaha, Nebraska. Until about 1853 Council Bluffs was known as Kanesville. Kanesville was the historic starting point of the Mormon Trail. Kanesville is also the northernmost anchor town of the other emigrant trails because there was a steam-powered boat which ferried the settlers' wagons and cattle across the Missouri River. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad to California was connected to the existing U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs.
Interstate 80 (I-80) is an east–west transcontinental freeway that crosses the United States from downtown San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area. The highway was designated in 1956 as one of the original routes of the Interstate Highway System; its final segment was opened in 1986. The second-longest Interstate Highway in the United States after I-90, it runs through many major cities, including Oakland, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Des Moines, and Toledo and passes within 10 miles (16 km) of Chicago, Cleveland, and New York City.
Interstate 480 (I-480) is a 4.9-mile-long (7.9 km) auxiliary Interstate Highway that connects I-80 in Downtown Omaha, Nebraska, with I-29 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The portion of I-480 in Nebraska has been named the Gerald R. Ford Expressway, named in honor of the former president, who was a native of Omaha. For most of its length, I-480 is overlapped by a US Highway; for two miles (3.2 km) with US Highway 75 (US 75) and for one mile (1.6 km) with US 6. I-480 includes the Grenville Dodge Memorial Bridge over the Missouri River.
The Mormon Trail is the 1,300-mile (2,100 km) long route from Illinois to Utah on which Mormon pioneers traveled from 1846–47. Today, the Mormon Trail is a part of the United States National Trails System, known as the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail.
Winter Quarters was an encampment formed by approximately 2,500 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as they waited during the winter of 1846–47 for better conditions for their trek westward. It followed a preliminary tent settlement some 3½ miles west at Cutler's Park. Members of the LDS faith built more than 800 cabins at the Winter Quarters settlement. Located in present-day North Omaha overlooking the Missouri River, the settlement remained populated until 1848.
The National Register of Historic Places in the United States is a register including buildings, sites, structures, districts, and objects. The Register automatically includes all National Historic Landmarks as well as all historic areas administered by the U.S. National Park Service. Since its introduction in 1966, more than 90,000 separate listings have been added to the register.
Forgottonia, also spelled Forgotonia, is the name given to a 16-county region in Western Illinois in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This geographic region forms the distinctive western bulge of Illinois that is roughly equivalent to "The Tract", the Illinois portion of the Military Tract of 1812, along and west of the Fourth Principal Meridian. Since this wedge-shaped region lies between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, it has historically been isolated from the eastern portion of Central Illinois.
Interstate 680 (I-680) in Nebraska and Iowa is the northern bypass of the Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area. I-680 spans 16.49 miles (26.54 km) from its southern end in western Omaha, Nebraska, to its eastern end near Crescent, Iowa. The freeway passes through a diverse range of scenes and terrains—the urban setting of Omaha, the Missouri River and its valley, the rugged Loess Hills, and the farmland of Pottawattamie County, Iowa.
The Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge was a Whipple through truss bridge that was the first road bridge to cross the Missouri River connecting Omaha, Nebraska and Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was replaced in 1966 by the Interstate 480 girder bridge.
The Plattsmouth Bridge is a truss bridge over the Missouri River connecting Cass County, Nebraska, and Mills County, Iowa at Plattsmouth, Nebraska. Until 2014, it carried U.S. Highway 34 across the river.
The South Omaha Veterans Memorial Bridge was a continuous warren through truss bridge over the Missouri River connecting Omaha, Nebraska with Council Bluffs, Iowa via U.S. Highway 275.
Florence is a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, United States on the city's north end and originally one of the oldest cities in Nebraska. It was incorporated by the Nebraska Territorial Legislature on March 10, 1857. The site of Winter Quarters for Mormon migrants traveling west, it has the oldest cemetery for people of European descent and oldest standing gristmill in Nebraska. Florence was the site of an illegal territorial legislature in 1858. Given the high concentration of National Register of Historic Places in the neighborhood, it is regarded as "the historic front door to Omaha as well as the state."
Fort Lisa (1812–1823) was established in 1812 in what is now North Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska by famed fur trader Manuel Lisa and the Missouri Fur Company, which was based in Saint Louis. The fort was associated with several firsts in Nebraska history: Lisa was the first European farmer in Nebraska; it was the first settlement by American citizens set up in the then-recent Louisiana Purchase; Lisa's wife was the first woman resident of European descent in Nebraska; and the first steamboat to navigate Nebraska waters, the Western Engineer, arrived at Fort Lisa in September 1819.
Interstate 80 (I-80) in the US state of Nebraska runs east from the Wyoming state border across the state to Omaha. Construction of the stretch of I-80 spanning the state was completed on October 19, 1974. Nebraska was the first state in the nation to complete its mainline Interstate Highway System.
Interstate 80 (I-80) is a transcontinental Interstate Highway in the United States, stretching from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey. In Iowa, the highway travels west to east through the center of the state. It enters the state at the Missouri River in Council Bluffs and heads east through the southern Iowa drift plain. In the Des Moines metropolitan area, I-80 meets up with I-35 and the two routes bypass Des Moines together. On the northern side of Des Moines, the Interstates split and I-80 continues east. In eastern Iowa, it provides access to the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Northwest of the Quad Cities in Walcott is Iowa 80, the world's largest truck stop. I-80 passes along the northern edge of Davenport and Bettendorf and leaves Iowa via the Fred Schwengel Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River into Illinois.
Transportation in Omaha, Nebraska, includes most major modes, such as pedestrian, bicycle, automobile, bus, train and airplane. While early transportation consisted of ferries, stagecoaches, steamboats, street railroads, and railroads, the city's transportation systems have evolved to include the Interstate Highway System, parklike boulevards and a variety of bicycle and pedestrian trails. The historic head of several important emigrant trails and the First transcontinental railroad, its center as a national transportation hub earned Omaha the nickname "Gate City of the West" as early as the 1860s.
The Great Platte River Road was a major overland travel corridor approximately following the course of the Platte River in present-day Nebraska and Wyoming that was shared by several popular emigrant trails during the 19th century, including the Trapper's Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the California Trail, the Pony Express route, and the military road connecting Fort Leavenworth and Fort Laramie. The road, which extended nearly 370 miles (600 km) from the Second Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie, was utilized primarily from 1841 to 1866. In modern times it is often regarded as a sort of superhighway of its era, and has been referred to as "the grand corridor of America's westward expansion".
James C. Mitchell (1810-1860) was an early settler of Bellevue, Iowa and went on to the found the town of Florence in the Nebraska Territory in 1854.
U.S. Route 75 is a part of the United States Numbered Highway System that runs for 1,239 miles (1,994 km) from Dallas, Texas to Kittson County, Minnesota where it ends just short of the Canada–United States border. Within the State of Nebraska it is a state highway that enters Nebraska on the Kansas state line about 9 miles (14 km) south of Dawson and travels north across the extreme eastern portion of the state, to the Nebraska–Iowa border in South Sioux City where it crosses the Missouri River along a concurrency with Interstate 129. The northern 210 miles (340 km) of the route generally travels parallel to the Missouri River. The 87.32-mile (140.53 km) section between the I-680 interchange in Omaha and the Interstate 129 interchange is designated the Lewis & Clark Scenic Byway, one of nine scenic byways in the state.
The historic 2,170-mile (3,490 km) Oregon Trail connected various towns along the Missouri River to Oregon's Willamette Valley. It was used during the 19th century by Great Plains pioneers who were seeking fertile land in the West and North.
I-680 
