A Pipeline Runs through It

Nearly three hours west of Omaha, in the heart of Nebraska’s Antelope County, lies the farmland of Art and Helen Tanderup. The rural property’s bountiful corn fields, sitting atop the Great Plains water source of the Ogallala Aquifer, are the very picture of idyllic Nebraska prairie. Yet this land has also been the scene of conflict, past and present. The Ponca Trail of Tears, memorializing the state’s Native Americans who were forced to walk to a reservation in Oklahoma in 1877, passes through here. Such history gives the land a sacred dimension. More than a century later, oil and gas