Before the Cornhuskers: When Nebraska Was the Bugeaters

The University of Nebraska football team during the Bugeater era, 1890s.

Image credit: University of Nebraska–Lincoln Archives & Special Collections.

Football Season in Nebraska Means Something a Little Different

As summer gives way to fall, Saturdays begin to take on a familiar rhythm. Red shirts come out of closets, flags appear on porches, and thousands make their way toward Lincoln and Memorial Stadium.

Today, there is no mistaking the name.

We are the Cornhuskers.

It's a word so closely connected to Nebraska that it's difficult to imagine the state without it. But before Memorial Stadium and long before generations of Nebraskans began calling themselves Huskers, Nebraska football carried a considerably different name.

They were the Bugeaters.

Before There Were Cornhuskers

Nebraska football began in 1890, when the university played its first game against a team representing the Omaha YMCA.

College football itself was still young, and many of the traditions surrounding the game had yet to take shape. Nebraska didn't even have a permanent nickname.

During those early years, the team was known by several names, including the Old Gold Knights, Antelopes, Tree Planters and Rattlesnake Boys.

By the early 1890s, however, one name had emerged above the others.

Bugeaters.

Strange as it sounds today, the name wasn't created specifically for football. By the late nineteenth century, "Bugeaters" had already become a nickname associated with Nebraskans.

Exactly where it came from is less certain.

Why Bugeaters?

One explanation points toward the Nebraska sky.

Common nighthawks, sometimes called bull bats, were familiar sights over the plains. The birds fed heavily on flying insects and were sometimes referred to as bugeaters. The University of Nebraska has cited these insect-eating birds as one possible source of the football team's unusual nickname.

Another explanation comes from the grasshopper invasions of the 1870s.

The insects devastated crops across parts of the Great Plains, including Nebraska. For families trying to establish farms on the plains, the loss of a crop could be devastating.

According to an account recorded by early Nebraska newspaperman John A. MacMurphy in 1894, a joke began circulating about conditions in Nebraska. The grasshoppers had eaten the grain, the potato bugs had eaten the potatoes, and things had supposedly become so desperate that Nebraskans were now eating the bugs themselves.

A newspaperman apparently picked up the joke, helping spread the Bugeater name.

Whether the nickname came from the birds overhead, a joke born from the grasshopper years, or some combination of the two isn't entirely clear. What we do know is that by the 1890s Nebraska had become associated with the Bugeater name.

Not everyone was fond of it.

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1889, as the young state began shaping an identity of its own.

Image: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

A Young State Looking for a Name

Nebraska had only been a state since 1867, and by the 1890s there was already an organized effort to replace "Bugeaters" with something that presented the state in a more favorable light.

Members of the Nebraska Territorial Pioneers Association proposed "Tree Planters", recognizing Nebraska's connection to Arbor Day and the enormous number of trees planted by settlers across the state.

Their effort succeeded.

In 1895, the Nebraska Legislature officially declared Nebraska "The Tree Planter State".

The football team, however, continued to be widely associated with the Bugeater name.

That would soon begin to change.

From Bugeaters to Cornhuskers

Charles S. "Cy" Sherman was a Lincoln sportswriter who believed Nebraska's football team needed a better name.

Sherman had watched Nebraska play Iowa as early as 1893 and later recalled seeing newspaper accounts describing Nebraska's players as Bugeaters. As his career in sportswriting developed, he began using a different name for the team.

Cornhuskers.

The word itself wasn't new. A cornhusker was quite literally someone who harvested corn by hand, removing the husks as they worked their way through the fields.

At the time, corn husking wasn't a nostalgic image of Nebraska's agricultural past. It was everyday work.

Before mechanical corn pickers changed the harvest, corn was husked by hand across Nebraska. Skilled workers became known for how much corn they could husk in a day, and organized corn-husking contests would eventually turn the work itself into competition.

For an agricultural state like Nebraska, the name fit.

Around 1900, Sherman began regularly referring to the university's teams as the Cornhuskers in his newspaper coverage. Other writers followed, and the Bugeater name gradually disappeared from Nebraska football.

From Football to the Entire State

Over the following decades, the word became increasingly connected with Nebraska itself. As the university and its football program grew, so did the use of the Cornhusker name.

By the time Memorial Stadium opened in 1923, the Bugeater years belonged to an earlier generation. Nebraska football was becoming one of the state's shared traditions, and Cornhusker had become a familiar name well beyond Lincoln.

Nebraska's official nickname, however, was still "The Tree Planter State".

That changed in 1945.

Fifty years after adopting the Tree Planter nickname, the Nebraska Legislature officially changed it to the name Nebraskans were already using.

Nebraska became "The Cornhusker State".

A nickname that had been popularized by a Lincoln sportswriter for a college football team had become part of the identity of an entire state.

Memorial Stadium, Lincoln, Nebraska. © Nebraska 1867.

Before the Sea of Red

Today, the Cornhusker name is everywhere.

It's on license plates, businesses and signs across Nebraska. It represents the University of Nebraska and its athletic teams, but the word has come to mean something larger than football.

Every fall, Memorial Stadium fills with people wearing red and another season of Nebraska football begins.

The game those early Nebraska players knew would be almost unrecognizable today. Memorial Stadium was still decades away, and most of the traditions now associated with Husker football had yet to exist.

Those early games marked the beginning of a Nebraska football tradition that would continue for generations.

More than 130 years later, football remains closely tied to Nebraska culture. The Bugeater name has largely faded into history, but the name that replaced it became something much larger than a football nickname. Cornhusker became part of Nebraska's identity, connecting the state's agricultural past with a tradition that continues every fall.