Developed as a shipping point on the Union Pacific Railroad for the great western cattle herds, Ogallala was the goal of the cattle-driving cowboys who rode day and night with their "eyelids pasted open with tobacco." Many of them are buried in a genuine Boot Hill Cemetery, between 11th and 12th streets, on a 100-foot rise above the South Platte River, where there have been no burials since the 1880s.