The plot is straight out of a Jimmy Cagney gangster movie. A small-town sheriff and his constable are lured to a remote spot, gunned down and their bodies left to bake in the hot summer sun. Seven decades later, the murders of the Boone County sheriff and constable remain unsolved.

How the Fremont Dinner Train and the Fremont & Elkhorn Valley Railroad are bringing 1940s-style rail travel back to life.

For the first 16 days of Gerald Ford's life, Omaha was home. There's no hiding Omaha 's affection for her most famous native son. An expressway bears his name, and the city has developed his birthplace with gardens, an exhibit and a conservation center in his honor.

“Life is different in a town that can draw a rodeo crowd as large as its population," write photographer Erik Stenbakken. The photographer spent several years photographing Nebraska's small town rodeos with an old leather-bellows camera made of wood and brass - traditional equipment to match the tradition of rodeo. The result is a set of stunning images that appear, with Erik's stories about them, in our September/October 2005 issue. Presented here is a web-only slideshow of the great photos we didn't have space to print.

“I've rolled two cars,” writes veteran stock car driver Nick Opfer. “Once I was taking a test spin around the track when the right rear axle broke and the car rolled. We had it fixed a half-hour later and finished second that night. That's the kind of stuff that makes it fun.”

You could count America's hat makers on two people's fingers and toes. One of them builds hats in Arthur, population 129. After a nasty encounter with a rodeo bull, James Marshall needed a new line of work. Now, for folks seeking custom-made cowboy hats, he's the man to see.

Photographer Roy David Farris doesn't have to go far from his Fremont home to enjoy the beauty of the Platte River.

With bright, round eyes and a swiveling head that reminds one of the little girl in “The Exorcist,” no creature has a more unsettling stare than an owl. Unlike most owls, burrowing owls nest on the ground, and are becoming hard to find in Nebraska.

Vineyards and wineries in the Cornhusker state? Experts said it couldn't be done. They were wrong. NL tours Nebraska's thriving wine country and learns how it all got started.