Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Niobrara, NE

Niobrara is a village in Knox County in northeastern Nebraska, standing where the Niobrara River flows into the Missouri River.

The village's name comes from the Omaha–Ponca words Ní Ubthátha, meaning "water spread-out."

The 2020 census counted 365 people in Niobrara.

At the 2010 census the village had 370 residents living in 193 households, and Native Americans made up 11.6 percent of the population.

Niobrara was founded in 1856, when a party led by Dr. Benneville Yeakel Shelly marked a claim on the banks of the Missouri River and built a log garrison; the founding company called itself L'eau Qui Court.

The village stands in the historic homeland of the Ponca Tribe, whose reservation lay between Ponca Creek and the Niobrara River until the United States mistakenly included their remaining lands in the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868.

In 1877 the federal government forced the Ponca to leave their Niobrara homeland for Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, a removal during and after which many Ponca died.

Chief Standing Bear, born near this river confluence around 1829, carried his son Bear Shield's remains back toward the Niobrara in 1879 so the boy could be buried in their homeland; his arrest led to the case of Standing Bear v. Crook, in which a federal judge ruled for the first time that an Indian is a person within the meaning of United States law.

Standing Bear died in 1908 and was buried near Niobrara in the Ponca homeland; the Ponca Tribe dedicated a statue of him in the village in 2018, and the Nebraska Highway 14 bridge just east of the village, crossing the Missouri River to South Dakota, is named the Chief Standing Bear Memorial Bridge.

Niobrara served as the seat of Knox County from 1877 until the county seat was moved to Center in 1902.