Flatwater Explains: Omaha was once known as ‘Omaha City.’ Why did it change?

Editor’s note: Flatwater Explains is an occasional series during which FFP reporters explain the people, places and things that make Nebraska what it is while answering questions that both longtime residents and first-time visitors might have.

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The Council Bluffs businessmen who founded a town across the Missouri River in 1854 employed a common frontier convention to name it. 

They added an anglicized Indigenous word to a term signaling metropolitan size and came up with “Omaha City.” 

For other settlements in the region — Kansas City, Sioux City and Iowa City — the “city” appendage stuck.

But as Omaha City grew from a collection of shacks to a booming railroad town, the qualifier in its name fell by the wayside.

Where did the name come from? 

When a group of Iowa investors devised Omaha City, their initial goal was to boost Council Bluffs’ fortunes. 

Council Bluffs’ leaders figured that having an up-and-coming settlement across the river would improve their city’s odds of landing a major stop along a planned transcontinental railroad, said David Bristow, associate director of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

In spring 1854, the Council Bluffs Bugle newspaper boasted that the “embryo city … will eventually be second to none in the West” except Council Bluffs. Newspapers from New York to Nashville reprinted the statement.

Some historians and newspaper writers credit the naming of “Omaha City” to Jesse Lowe, who would later become its first mayor.

Months before Lowe and other Council Bluffians formally claimed land in the new settlement, the Omaha Tribe ceded through treaty what would become much of northeastern Nebraska to the U.S. government.

There’s “deep irony” in “naming a place after a group of people that you have just made sure cannot live there any longer,” Bristow said.

Attaching “city” to the name was nothing more than a marketing ploy to make prospective settlers think Omaha was a prosperous and substantially sized community, when in reality it was little more than “a few shacks and dugouts,” he said.

Land speculators used the same branding tactic to name other places in the nascent Nebraska Territory, including bona fide settlements such as Nebraska City and “paper towns” that never fully materialized, such as Oreapolis.

Omaha emerged from the pack, Bristow said, because it served as the Nebraska Territory’s capital and later became a major point on the transcontinental railroad. By 1870, the city had outgrown its progenitor, Council Bluffs, as Union Pacific built shops and offices in what is now downtown Omaha.

Tacking “city” onto Omaha’s name likely didn’t have much to do with its early growth, Bristow said. 

“To me, what makes it interesting is not the effect, which I think was negligible, but the intent,” Bristow said. “None of these people wanted to live in a frontier village. Their intent was to turn that raw village into a new Chicago as quickly as possible.”

How did ‘Omaha City’ become just ‘Omaha’? 

The “city” addendum to Omaha’s name didn’t disappear all at once. 

Early official documents and newspapers refer to the town alternately as “Omaha City” and just “Omaha” throughout the mid-1800s. 

Though the original 1857 city charter formally incorporated “the City of Omaha,” an ordinance passed four years later used the old term interchangeably with the newer one. The post office didn’t drop the “city” until 1871, according to a newspaper blurb.

Omaha’s rapid rise into the Nebraska Territory’s premier city meant that it didn’t need the qualifier in its name anymore, said local historian Ryan Roenfeld. 

The gradual change to the simplified name probably reflects how common people spoke, and one word is easier to say than two, Bristow said. He noted that many South Dakotans have begun referring to Rapid City as just “Rapid.” 

Crafting a place’s name to sell it to prospective residents still happens, too, Bristow said. New Omaha neighborhoods such as Blue Sage Creek, Prospect Village and Heartwood Preserve carry names that evoke nature, wealth and warmth.

The difference is that marketing is much more professionalized now than it was in 1854, Bristow said. The men who founded Omaha City probably came up with the name at a tavern across the river, he said. 

“When they put ‘city’ on the end of the name, that was a marketing decision, but it wasn’t a professional marketing decision,” Bristow said. “It was just, ‘Yeah, this sounds good. What do you think, boys?’”