Biohazard Cleanup Near Red Cloud Historic District Red Cloud, NE

Red Cloud is a city in south-central Nebraska near the Kansas border and the county seat of Webster County.

The town was named for Red Cloud, the renowned Oglala Lakota leader; it was voted the county seat of the newly formed county in 1871 and was platted in 1872.

The Red Cloud area had been Pawnee hunting grounds until an 1833 treaty in which the Pawnees surrendered their lands south of the Platte River, and in 1870 homesteaders — among them future Nebraska governor Silas Garber — filed claims along Crooked Creek just east of the present city.

Author Willa Cather moved to Red Cloud with her family in 1883 at the age of nine and lived there for seven years, returning often in later life.

Cather drew on Red Cloud for the fictional town of Black Hawk in her novel My Ántonia, and her earliest published articles appeared in the town's first newspaper, The Red Cloud Chief.

Several nineteenth-century buildings described in Cather's fiction survive within the Willa Cather Historic District, the largest historic district dedicated to an author on the National Register of Historic Places, which also includes her childhood home.

The Farmers' and Merchants' Bank building of 1889 in downtown Red Cloud is now owned by the Willa Cather Foundation.

The 2020 census counted 962 residents in Red Cloud; in the 2010 census the city had 1,020 residents in 480 households.

Red Cloud's population peaked at 1,856 in the 1920 census and has declined through most of the century since; at the 2010 census its median age was 50.5 years.

NOAA climate records for Red Cloud show hot summers — the all-time record high is 117 degrees — and about 25.5 inches of precipitation a year.