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Articles written by Carson Vaughan


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  • Situated west of Lincoln, a little-known, cash-strapped university outpost spawns renowned work, serious awe

    Carson Vaughan, Flatwater Free Press|Aug 14, 2024

    The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn't the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above. Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. But back in 1974, he was a 34-year-old professor at the University...

  • New Mystery Remembering Nebraska's forgotten "whodunit queen"

    Carson Vaughan, Flatwater Free Press|Mar 30, 2023

    When reporter Eva Mahoney arrived in Valentine in 1930 to profile America’s next great mystery novelist, she found Mignon Good Eberhart in a “pleasant little home,” struggling to visualize her next murder. Bewitched by her new surroundings, the big skies and grassy dunes, the author had contrived a remote hunting lodge in the Nebraska Sandhills as the site for her fictional crime. It had log doors, “a great, deep fireplace made of native, unfinished rock,” Eberhart wrote, and a hodgepodge of antique pewter lamps, a quirk of the cabin’s late own...

  • Attack of the clones: Thirty years ater, a Taylor-made mystery lives on

    Carson Vaughan, Flatwater Free Press|Nov 17, 2022

    In the summer of 1978, Allen Wilke slammed the brakes. He did this often. A true plantsman, he observed everything but the road itself. He would spy a flowering prickly pear in the ditch, a wild grapevine. He would double back without warning, often sending his son and daughter – half asleep in his gutted cargo van's backseat – tumbling forward with their luggage. This time, the plantsman was alone. He was puttering through the Sandhills on Highway 91, a mile west of Taylor, when a tall, ski...