The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation was established by the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830, which set aside a tract of land for the mixed-ancestry descendants of French-Canadian trappers and women of the Oto, Iowa, and Omaha, as well as the Yankton and Santee Sioux tribes.

The owners of plots were never required to live on the properties they had been allotted, and many eventually sold their lands to white settlers.

[3] The Underground Railroad, a route staffed by volunteers' helping slaves escaped to the North, ran through the Reservation toward Mayhew Cabin in Nebraska City.

Seeking to help mixed-blood Indian descendants get settled in society, the United States government designated allotments of land in western territory for their use.

Because of American Indian tribes' rules of descent and membership, European-American society's discrimination, and the distance that such mixed-race families lived from most European Americans, the children of unions between European fathers and certain Indian mothers were often left outside the social networks of both societies.

The United States government selected an allotment of land along the Missouri River bluffs, an area described as "too steep and tree-covered for farming, fit only for hunting."

It was described in the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830, confirmed by the Otoe, Omaha, Missouria, and other tribes and the government, which established the rules for the half-breed tract.

One of the original survey lines is now partly marked by the Half-Breed Road which runs in a southeast direction from the Missouri River.

In 1860, thirty years after the creation of the Reservation, the government moved to allot tracts to individual households, in an effort to force assimilation to European-American practices.

[13] There is evidence the Underground Railroad ran through this tract up to John Brown's Cave, located 35 miles (56 km) north.

Joseph Deroin was the son of a French Canadian trapper Amable De Rouins and his Oto wife.

Other notable residents of the tract included French-Canadian fur traders who had married Native American women, such as Charles Rouleau.