National Geographic's photograph today, "Amidst the Glow," was made near Crawford, Nebraska.
Screenshot: National Geographic Photo of the Day · Original page
The composition is simple: an unoccupied house on open ground, with a luminous night sky behind it. The caption locates it near Crawford, Nebraska, but says nothing about who built it, when, or why it was abandoned.
Those questions have answers more revealing than the photograph itself.
Why Is the House Empty?
The easy answers are that the owner left or the land was too hard. Both are true, but neither reaches the root, which lies in 1862.
That year, Congress passed the Homestead Act. Any citizen who was at least 21 or the head of a household could pay a filing fee, claim 160 acres, live on and cultivate it for five years, and own it.
The number came from agriculture in the rainy eastern United States, where 160 acres could support a family. It was then printed on forms distributed across the continent. From Missouri to Wyoming and Minnesota to New Mexico, every form said 160.
One Man Calculated the Failure in 1878
In 1878, geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell, the one-armed man who navigated the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, submitted his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States to Congress.
Experience, he wrote, showed that farming on rainfall was unwise where annual precipitation fell below 20 inches, or 508 millimeters. That boundary could broadly be represented by the 100th meridian west. West of it, he calculated, a viable ranch homestead required at least four square miles, or 2,560 acres.
That was sixteen times the Homestead Act allotment. A quarter-section of 160 acres, Powell wrote, had no value by itself because its forage could not support even the poorest person's herd.
Congress did not listen.
This House Stands More Than 300 Kilometers West of Powell's Line
Crawford lies in Dawes County at Nebraska's northwestern corner, at roughly 1,120 meters above sea level and 103.4 degrees west. Powell's line is 100 degrees west.
NOAA's 1991-2020 climate normals make the dryness plain. Crawford's own station has incomplete, less reliable records, but Fort Robinson four miles away receives 425 millimeters annually, and Scottsbluff airport in the Panhandle's core receives 401. Omaha, in the same state's east, receives 778 millimeters, nearly twice as much.
One number is almost eerie. North Platte sits at about 100.67 degrees west, almost exactly on Powell's meridian. Its 1991-2020 annual normal is 20.23 inches. The 20-inch line Powell drew in 1878 from fieldwork, experience and observation was confirmed 148 years later by an automated weather station.
The Line Is Moving East
In 2018, Richard Seager's team at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published two papers in Earth Interactions titled "Whither the 100th Meridian?" The first described the history; the second said the meridian was moving east.
Lamont's account said the climatic boundary had shifted about 140 miles, or 225 kilometers, toward the 98th meridian since around 1980. In Texas, that is a move from Abilene toward Fort Worth.
Rainfall has not fallen. Warming has increased potential evapotranspiration, so more of the same rain evaporates. Because evapotranspiration was lower in the east to begin with, warming-induced drying is more pronounced there, flattening the east-west gradient and moving the boundary east.
The studies projected larger farms, a shift from corn to wheat on the northern Plains, and expansion of ranching eastward. Today, 70 percent of cropland east of the boundary grows water-demanding corn; drought-tolerant wheat dominates to the west.
The claim of a 140-mile shift since 1980 comes from Lamont's release; the papers themselves emphasize model projections of future movement.
Powell's line was drawn in weather, not carved into the ground. When weather changes, the line walks.
Congress Admitted the Error, but Only One-Quarter of It
Congress eventually conceded that 160 acres were insufficient, and did so in western Nebraska.
On April 28, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Kinkaid Act, named for Sixth District Representative Moses Kinkaid. It allowed claims of one full section, 640 acres, in 37 counties of northwestern Nebraska: four times the earlier allotment. History Nebraska explains that 160 acres were far too little for farming and ranching in the relatively arid Sandhills and High Plains.
Powell had said 2,560 acres. Congress admitted the mistake by one-quarter.
Between November 1910 and 1917, the government issued 18,919 patents covering 8.93 million acres. Many Kinkaid homesteaders ultimately failed to grow crops and sold to large ranchers. Farm numbers in Holt County fell from 377 in 1913 to 144 in 1914.
Before That Came Outright Pseudoscience
The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains records the doctrine that "rain follows the plow," popularized by Charles Dana Wilber in an 1881 book and championed by University of Nebraska professor Samuel Aughey. Breaking the sod, they claimed, made soil absorb water, which evaporated, raised humidity and increased rain.
Railroads promoted it to European immigrants, saying the rain line was moving west at about 18 miles a year. Severe drought in the 1890s largely killed the theory, though believers insisted the plowing had simply not gone deep enough.
The Timber Culture Act of 1873 offered another 160 acres without a residency requirement if claimants planted trees, ultimately at least 2,700 trees per ten acres. History Nebraska calls it perhaps the least successful and most abused land law. Crawford itself was built on land acquired from a claimant's timber-culture tract.
At Least Half Failed
The National Park Service says the Homestead Act distributed 270.2 million acres, 10 percent of US land, across 30 states. It remained in effect for 123 years, with the final patent issued in 1988. In Nebraska, 45 percent of all land passed through homesteading, the highest share of any state.
Two Park Service pages conflict on success. A lesson-plan PDF says 1.6 million of roughly 4 million claims succeeded, or 40 percent. Its "Homesteading by the Numbers" page says more than 50 percent earned patents. Either account leads to the same conclusion: at least half failed.
The house in the photograph belongs to that half.
Failed Homesteads Became National Grasslands
North of Crawford lies Oglala National Grassland, 94,520 acres, or about 383 square kilometers, managed by the US Forest Service across Sioux County and northwestern Dawes County, where Crawford stands.
The Forest Service describes the country's four million acres of national grasslands as rolling seas of grass that witnessed the frontier advance, the Dust Bowl, and dramatic recovery. Land divided into 160-acre squares, unable to grow crops and finally abandoned, came full circle and became grass again.
Now Look Down Thirty Million Years
About an hour south of Crawford is Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. The Park Service dates its Miocene fossils to roughly 20 million years ago. Carnegie Hill, University Hill and Bear Dog Hill have yielded thousands of bones from rhinoceroses, horses, chalicotheres, camels, entelodonts and bear dogs.
Agate's best story, however, concerns holes.
The Devil's Corkscrew
In 1891 and 1892, paleontologist Erwin Barbour found enormous spirals descending vertically through western Nebraska rock. Their tightly wound sections reached about 2.1 meters down, then rose at roughly 30 degrees; some ran 4.6 meters in all.
He named them Daimonelix, Greek for "devil's corkscrew." Their symmetry was perfect, but he did not know what they were. Plant tissue inside led him to identify giant fossil roots.
In 1893, paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope proposed that they were casts of burrows dug by large rodents. Austrian paleontologist Theodor Fuchs independently reached the same conclusion. Barbour joked that such a gopher would stand as a permanent monument to animal genius.
Then Carnegie Museum collector O. A. Peterson found the skeleton of the extinct dry-land beaver Palaeocastor inside one spiral.
Larry Martin and Deb Bennett closed the case in 1977 by comparing grooves in the burrow fill with Palaeocastor incisors. They matched perfectly. The animal excavated with alternating left and right teeth, spiraling downward. Claw marks appeared only on the sides and floor, where the feet cleared soil.
Barbour's plants had entered later. In the seasonally arid climate, roots seeking water filled the burrow walls. Silica-rich rainwater from volcanic ash mineralized them and eventually filled the tunnel into a solid stone spiral.
Barbour never accepted the explanation. The case took 85 years: a wrong hypothesis, a correct conjecture, one decisive skeleton and grooves that matched teeth.
Agate has a one-mile Daemonelix Trail where the spirals remain embedded in their original rock.
A Thirty-Million-Year-Old Chase Still Has Footprints
North of Crawford, Toadstool Geologic Park lies within Oglala National Grassland. Its White River Group rocks are about 30 million years old, from the Oligocene, and share an origin with Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
The Park Service describes a 0.75-mile trackway recording an ancient chase: a hungry entelodont pursuing two kinds of rhinoceros along a river channel. A pursuit from thirty million years ago left prints for 1,200 meters. A Forest Service guide adds brontotheres, camels and early horses.
The park is free, with a one-mile interpretive loop and self-guided booklet. Fossil and artifact collecting is prohibited.
One Necessary Piece of History
Crawford was founded in 1886 when a railroad reached Fort Robinson and was named for a lieutenant once stationed there.
At Fort Robinson, Crazy Horse was killed on September 5, 1877, while attempting to escape confinement. On January 9, 1879, Dull Knife led Cheyenne people out of the fort's barracks; the episode ended January 22.
Crawford was founded only seven years after the Cheyenne breakout. The land entered by homesteaders had only recently been taken. That sentence needs no adjective.
Fort Robinson is now a Nebraska state park. After absorbing a neighboring ranch in 1972, it covered more than 22,000 acres.
What Did Plains Settlers Use to Build?
The pictured house is clearly wood-framed, not sod. Sod houses nevertheless show what building materials meant where trees were scarce.
A settler's 1876 diary published by History Nebraska gives exact dimensions. A breaking plow cut sod bricks two feet long, twelve inches wide and four inches thick. Walls grew two feet thick. Bark-on elm, ash or cottonwood poles made rafters; willow branches, a thin layer of sod and roughly six inches of soil formed the roof.
The settler complained of loose dirt in the nose, eyes, mouth, ears and hair. One two-story sod house built around 1884-85 stood until 1967, more than eighty years. Timber had to arrive by rail, and Crawford itself was born from a railroad.
The age, material and owner of the house in the photograph cannot be confirmed. The caption gives only "near Crawford," without a place name or coordinates, so no private history is invented for it.
Why Is the Sky So Dark?
Nebraska has some of America's darkest skies, but precision matters. Merritt Reservoir State Recreation Area became an International Dark Sky Park on September 12, 2022, the world's 200th and Nebraska's first. It is in the north-central Sandhills, about 300 kilometers from Crawford, not in the Panhandle.
The Nebraska Star Party meets there each late summer and had reached its 29th edition by 2022. Its slogan says the sky is dark enough for the Milky Way to cast a shadow.
Toadstool and Oglala National Grassland have no dark-sky certification, and the dark-sky organization's Merritt page gives no sky-brightness measurement. Any specific Bortle rating should therefore be treated cautiously.
The Photographer
Erik Johnson is a lifelong Nebraskan. He bought his first DSLR only at the end of 2013 and says rural scenes in his home state are his favorite subject. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission's official publications, and channels associated with NASA and the Smithsonian; Nikon has profiled him. On social media, he recalled first seeing an aurora that bright while camping in Nebraska in the summer of 2017.
China Has a Line Like This One
America has its 20-inch, or 508-millimeter, line. China has a 400-millimeter line.
China's National Development and Reform Commission officially defines it as the boundary between annual precipitation above and below 400 millimeters, and climatologically between semi-humid and semi-arid regions. It runs roughly from the Greater Khingan Mountains through Zhangjiakou, Lanzhou and Lhasa to the eastern Himalayas. To its west lie parts of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Xinjiang.
It also divides farming and pastoral regions, and closely follows the Great Wall. The American and Asian lines were both drawn by rain, not people.
Is China's line also moving east? The evidence is more complex. A 2023 World Meteorological Day feature from China Weather, run by the China Meteorological Administration, used National Climate Center data from 1951 through 2022 and found the line broadly stable but highly variable from year to year. It moves west and north in wet years and east and south in dry ones. In 1997 it pushed south to eastern Shandong, central Henan and south-central Shaanxi; in 1998 its eastern edge retreated to central Inner Mongolia.
A 2017 Acta Geographica Sinica study measured the farming-pastoral ecotone centered on the line. Over several decades, its maximum east-west variation was 278.5 kilometers and its maximum north-south movement 271.3 kilometers.
The American 100th-meridian boundary is being pushed one-way eastward by warming. China's 400-millimeter line mainly oscillates year to year, although the associated ecotone has moved two to three hundred kilometers over decades. The shared fact is not that both lines move in the same direction, but that both can move.
Human property lines, villages and laws are drawn on paper and cannot.
Sources
National Geographic Photo of the Day, August 27, 2026; John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878/1879); NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, 1991-2020 Climate Normals; Seager et al., "Whither the 100th Meridian?" Parts I and II, Earth Interactions (2018), and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; History Nebraska land-law, Fort Robinson and sod-house records; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, "Rain Follows the Plow"; National Park Service Homestead National Historical Park data and archives; National Park Service Agate Fossil Beds and Daemonelix Trail materials; Smithsonian Magazine on the devil's corkscrew; Martin and Bennett (1977); US Forest Service materials on Toadstool and national grasslands; National Park Service Toadstool trail materials; DarkSky International's Merritt Reservoir announcement; Nebraska Star Party; Erik Johnson's website and Nikon profile; China's National Development and Reform Commission; China Weather's 2023 World Meteorological Day feature; Acta Geographica Sinica (2017) on the northern farming-pastoral ecotone; Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records; the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture government and Hezheng Paleozoological Museum; and the Paleozoological Museum of China.