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A tiny Nebraska town has only one resident. At 89, she literally does everything.

Elsie Eiler serves as mayor, secretary, treasurer, librarian, tavern owner and more.

Andrew Filer/Wikimedia Commons

Monowi, Nebraska. Population: 1.

Big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are well known to people across the U.S. Even if you've never been to any of these cities, you likely know where they are and can name some facts about them. Small towns, on the other hand, tend to fly under the radar, and the smaller the town, the less likely people are to have heard of them.

But one small U.S. town in particular is so small that it barely even exists. Monowi, Nebraska (pronounced MON-oh-why) has a whopping population of one. As in only one person officially lives there. Her name is Elsie Eiler, she's 89 years old, and since her husband died in 2004, she's been the sole resident of the tiny incorporated village five miles south of the South Dakota border.

As the sole resident, Eiler "elects" herself as mayor every year, and all of the official town duties fall on her shoulders, including record-keeping, licensing, maintenance and more. Some reports say she collects her own taxes from herself, but Eiler told travel vloggers Kara & Nate that that's not true. "I pay taxes like everybody else," she said.

What is true is that there's no city council to make decisions, no other residents to worry about—the entirety of the town is just Eiler, her home, her tavern, and the library she opened in honor of her late bookworm husband. And her playing every role in town makes for some humorous chains of bureaucratic steps.

“When I apply to the state for my liquor and tobacco licenses each year, they send them to the secretary of the village, which is me,” she explained to the BBC in 2020. “So, I get them as the secretary, sign them as the clerk and give them to myself as the bar owner.”

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Though it's never been large, Monowi has not always been this small. Nearly a century ago, it was a thriving farming community and home to 150 people. People riding the Elkhorn Railroad could stop there, and the town had all the normal amenities one would expect in a town—grocery stores, restaurants, a one-room schoolhouse and even a prison.

But Monowi was a casualty of the collapse of rural communities in the Great Plains after WWII. Eiler herself left to work for an airline in Kansas City, wanting to become a flight attendant. She didn't care for city life, thought, and at 19, she returned home to Monowi. She married Rudy, who she met when he was in the 4th grade and she was in the 3rd grade. They raised two kids in Monowi, and in 1971 fixed up the tavern that had belonged to Eiler's father.

Eiler still runs the tavern, personally serving up homemade burgers, hot dogs, and cheeseballs to the patrons who come from neighboring communities or who happen to be passing through the town. She also does all the dishes, as she's the tavern's only employee. As of 2021, the tavern was open 9:00am to 9:00pm six days a week.

She's also the librarian at Rudy's Library, which houses 5,000 titles and works on the honor system.

monowi, nebraska, rudy's library, smallest town in AmericaEiler created Rudy's Library in her husband's honor.Bkell/Wikimedia Commons

The rest of Monowi is made up of dilapidated, abandoned buildings, and the town's church, which last held a funeral when Eiler's father died, is filled with old tires and beehives. So what is it that keeps Eiler here? Essentially, it's home.

"I'm not here because I have to be," Eiler told Kara & Nate. "I could pack up and go anywhere I wanted to, but this is where I want to be." She told Nebraska Public Media the same thing. "I mean, basically I'm happy here. This is where I really—I want to be here, or I wouldn't stay here."

Education

What's up with Wyoming? Video explains why it's 'empty' compared to twin neighbor Colorado

The states are almost identical in size, shape and geographical features, but Wyoming has 580,000 residents to Colorado's 5.8 million.

Wyoming and Colorado have vastly different populations despite being geographically similar.

Most states in the U.S. have oddly shaped boundaries, largely formed by meandering waterways and coastal irregularities. But two states stand out for their seemingly defiant rectangularness—Wyoming and Colorado.

These almost-twin states share a border, are almost exactly the same size (Colorado is just 1.06 times larger than Wyoming), boast basically the same shape and have the Rocky Mountains eating into a sizeable chunk of them. (Wyoming's share of mountains is a bit larger than Colorado's, but its topography isn't nearly different enough than Colorado's to account for how many fewer people it has.)

Wyoming's population as of 2022 was estimated to be just over 580,000, while Colorado's was estimated to be just over 5.8 million. Almost exactly a 10-fold difference between the two very similar states.

So…why?


Water resources? A logical guess, but nope. Both states contain the headwaters of multiple major rivers, and according to RealLifeLore, Wyoming actually has a slight edge over Colorado due to the way its freshwater is legally allocated.

What makes Wyoming the least populous U.S. state despite being the country's 10th largest state by area has to do with the Gold Rush, agriculture, World War II, federal lands, the rise of the telecom industry, educational institutions, airplanes and more. It's a historical Tale of Two States that illustrates how twins with different upbringings can share many similarities but also end up with two very different life stories.

Watch the folks at RealLifeLore explain the population discrepancy between Wyoming and Colorado:

The one correction some people in the comments of the video offered up was that referring to the "mild" climate in Wyoming seems a bit misleading. Several people mentioned that the winter weather in Wyoming is harsher than in Colorado, which may account for fewer people wanting to live there. (However, considering the fact that there are more densely populated places in the world with exceptionally punishing winters, weather doesn't fully explain it, either.)

It'll be interesting to see in another hundred years or so if these states' population trends change, but for now, Wyoming remains the least populous and most naturally undisturbed state. So if you're big on the outdoors and not so big on people, the Equality State (Side fun fact: Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote.) might just be the place for you. If you love the mountains but also people, Colorado may be more your speed.


This article originally appeared on 5.10.23

Pop Culture

How GeoGuessr pros can pinpoint any place in the world just from a Google street image

Sometimes it's literally just a field, and they can tell you within a handful of miles where it is on the globe.

Photo by Josh Sorenson/Pexels (left) Canva (right)

Can you tell where in the world this is?

Imagine someone handing you a photo of a random street corner, neighborhood or field anywhere in the world and expecting you to know where it is. Occasionally, you might get lucky and see a sign or a landmark that gives a helpful clue, but chances are good that all you'd have to go from is some vegetation and maybe a building or two to guess from. We live in a huge world—seems impossible, right?

But that's often all that GeoGuessr pros need to be able to tell you in seconds where on the globe the image came from, often within just a handful of miles.


When Swedish IT consultant Anton Wallén launched the GeoGuessr app in 2013, he surely didn't expect it to launch an entire global esport phenomenon. It was just a fun game to be dropped somewhere on the globe and try to guess where you are. But thanks to the pandemic forcing people to travel virtually for a while, it took viral hold as a competitive game in 2021. Now there's even a GeoGuessr World Cup championship, and it's a wild ride to watch.

In fact, these players are so fast at pinpointing locations based on photos that would have most of us scratching our heads, saying, "Heck, that could be anywhere," it's almost hard to watch. Check out even just a minute or so of these highlights:

One of the most popular Geoguessr players on social media is Trevor Rainbolt, one of the hosts of the 2023 GeoGuessr World Cup. While he says he's not as good as some of the other pros, his TikTok account has 2.7 million followers and he consistently demonstrates his ability to find anything on the planet based on an outdoor photo. Literally anything, anywhere.

Rainbolt explained to WIRED some of the tools and tricks of the Geoguessr trade, and it's both incredibly impressive and surprisingly mundane. Obviously, when there are street signs visible that offers a huge clue, but players learn details about every element of different countries' landscapes, from telephone poles to vegetation the way lines are painted on the street to what garbage bins look like in different cities. They even get so specific as the color and texture of soils.

Watch Rainbolt explain:

Geoguessr players educate themselves using Google Maps so thoroughly that they are able to piece together every tiny clue to make an educated guess about where an image comes from. But it's the speed with which the pros make their guesses that's so mesmerizing—the result of years of learning and practice, just like any other highly developed skill.

If this all seems a bit pointless (though one could argue there's always a point to knowing where you are), there are actually some really heartwarming things that have come out of the "geonerd" world. For instance, a woman had a photo of her mom, but zero other information about her. Rainbolt was able to pinpoint the exact location the photo was taken, giving the woman a clue into her own past.

@georainbolt

this one felt good #geo #geoguessr #geography #geowizard

And another similar request yielded similar results:

🫶

Sometimes people's requests are even more challenging, and yet Rainbolt manages to find locations with remarkable accuracy.

@georainbolt

road matching #geo #geography #geowizard #geoguessr #ReadySetLift

People often tell him he should be hired by the CIA or FBI, and for sure that seems plausible. But what's great about what he does is that he explains exactly how he does it. It just takes countless hours over years and years to get to know the planet as well as he and other Geoguessr pros know it.

Anyone can play—just download the GeoGuessr app or play online and give it a go. Fair warning, though. It's not nearly as easy as these guys make it look.

Highly recommend following @georainbolt to watch more.

The Wallace line divides the entire Malay Archipelago.

A fascinating biological phenomenon occurs between two islands in Indonesia. An invisible line divides the entire Malay Archipelago, and on the western side, the animal life is characteristic of Asia, featuring rhinos, elephants, tigers and woodpeckers.

Contrasting this, the eastern side of the islands presents a completely different ecological cast, boasting marsupials, Komodo dragons, cockatoos and honeyeaters, often associated with Australia.

The stark differences in biodiversity on the islands captured the keen eye of British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace during his 19th-century travels through the East Indies. Even before the discovery of plate tectonics, Wallace postulated that the western islands must have once been interconnected and linked to the Asian mainland.


So, in 1859, he first sketched a line of demarcation between the zones which came to be known as the Wallace line.

The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart

According to a video by PBS Eons, Wallace was onto something all those years ago. Researchers would later come to believe that the land masses on other sides of the line were once separate continents brought together by tectonic shifts.

“Today, we know them as the paleo continents of Sunda in the west and Sahul in the east, both of which existed during the ice ages when more water was locked up in ice and sea levels were lower. Wallace didn't know it, but while they’re pretty close now, the two partly-sunken continents used to be much, much further apart,” the video says. “So even though the species of each side are neighbors now, they’d been evolving separately for eons, their two worlds only colliding fairly recently in evolutionary terms.”