This is the fifth installment of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.
The morning dawned, as I'd hoped, with a blue sky and only a few light clouds. So nice when you order something from Amazon and they get it right! So: top went down. Idiot light comes on: "Convertible not latched." Sure enough, the latching mechanism was stuck in the "up" position. I had thought that the noise the mechanism makes had sounded somehow different: it was that the motor had kept whirring and the clickety-clack of the latch retracting had been missing.
Okay, I thought as I put the top back up, that's it; I'm going home. Forget Michigan. Who needs it?
Then I thought, what the hell, so I put the top down again. It worked perfectly. I guess it's like restarting your phone when Google Maps freezes (like it's done twice now on this trip).
Plugged in my first stop: the Wilbur Memorial in White Cloud, Kansas. I had changed the trip settings and allowed freeways, so it took me straight up Interstate 29 to St Joseph, Missouri. Told me to exit at US Highway 36, which I did. That is the only bridge across the Missouri river for many miles in either direction. Unfortunately, there was some kind of oversized load broken down on the bridge access and a line of vehicles (mostly trucks) that stretched away for as far as I could see. I figured there must be some other way, so I went the opposite direction, got down into the town, and checked the map on my phone. Sure enough, there was an access to the bridge from the southbound side that would put me beyond the broken down vehicle. So I went about a mile and a half up the road until I came to a street that would take me to the southbound side of I-29; cut over and got on the freeway again, and immediately exited for US 36 westbound.
The ramp that goes from I-29 southbound to US 36 westbound is under construction, and there's a detour.... Guess where it takes you.
Fortunately, the oversized vehicle had moved and the traffic was clearing. So I like to think that I spent the delay seeing something of St Joseph, Missouri. A charming town, I'm sure, with its Pony Express Museum and the home of somebody famous.
When I got to White Cloud, my GPS took me to a vacant field where some guys looked to be setting up for a yard sale. They weren't from here, and while they were surprised and interested in my story about a pig monument, they had never heard of such a thing (to use their words). So I asked at the post office. The clerk wasn't from here either, and she suggested the "water people" across the street. Those women were locals and knew immediately what I was talking about, and told me it was across the street at the next corner, in front of the church. And so it was.
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| Pig Monument |
As one source put it, Pete the Pig got nothing out of all this. He was, presumably, slaughtered and eaten.
My next planned stop was the boyhood home of Harold Lloyd, famous silent film comedian, in Burchard, Nebraska. He was one of my favourite movie actors when I was in college. I remembered (for the first time ever) to download directions in case of poor cell signals. Unfortunately, that didn't help. The directions wanted to take me down a gravel road, and I couldn't get it to alter that plan. Having no paper maps to fall back on, I had to go by vague memory and dead reckoning. When I came to a town where there was a signal, I looked it up again and verified I was going the right way. Got to the town and had no signal so just had to guess where it was. I had seen it on the map about a month ago, & remembered correctly: 4th & Plum Streets. Well, it's a tiny town, population 82, so how far astray could I have gone?
And with no signal, I couldn't pull up directions to my next destination on my phone. So again I had to go by those month-old memories of what the map looked like as I was planning the trip. Again, I remembered right, and when I got a signal, about 10 miles down the road, I was able to verify that I was going right. Followed the GPS from that point until I came to a sign that said "Road Closed." Having no real alternative -- the place I was going was on that road -- I went around the sign. Continued for a mile. By now I had no signal again. Came to a stop sign, and another "Road Closed" sign. Continued up over the next hill, and this time the road actually was closed. So I turned around, and found a sign directing me down a side road to my destination. (There had been no such sign coming the other way.) My GPS kicked in again as I got to the entrance of Rock Creek Station State Historical Park, and guided me through beautiful woodlands down to the creek bottom ... where there's a picnic table and a bathroom. Well, opportunity knocks and I answer.
Then I head up the hill, ignoring the GPS's exhortation to make U-turns every few yards, and I located a visitors' center farther along in the park.
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| Rock Creek Toll Bridge |
The Overland Stage company's manager didn't make the rent payments timely, so one day McCanles and his son Monroe, aged 12, along with two other men, employees Woods and Gordon, went over to collect. The manager refused to come to the door, sending first his wife and then his hired hand, a hothead named Hickok. Long story short: Bill Hickok ended up hiding behind a quilt wall and shooting McCanles from his hiding place. Woods and Gordon, who had been doing other business over at the toll house, came running at the sound of the rifle, but Hickok shot Woods while the stage company manager, a guy named Wellman, bludgeoned him to death with a hoe. He tried to kill Monroe too, but the boy got away. Gordon got as far as the creek before he was done in by a shotgun. Wellman and Hickok were both arrested and tried; Monroe, being only 12 years old, was not allowed to testify. That was the law at the time. Without his testimony, there was no evidence, so both men were acquitted. Hickok went on to live life large and become famous, until justice caught up with him in Deadwood, South Dakota. I don't know what became of Wellman.
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| East Farm |
Rock Creek Station was restored back in the 1980s, and except for the sign boards and the cleanliness of the buildings and grounds, looks pretty authentic. East Farm, where all this took place, is a pleasant fifteen-minute walk from the visitors' center. I spent most of my time over there talking to a young man who was weedeating; he was very glad for a break, and I believe pretty knowledgeable about the plants around there. I'd seen and photographed a bush with red berries or flowers on it, and he said it was poison sumac. Then we got into a long discussion of the flora in the area, and wandered around as he pointed out this and that and generally talked for half an hour about bluestem and cottonwood trees (pointing out a couple of trees that were in a photograph taken of the Station in the late 1860s and were still standing).
I remember seeing how creeks cut right through the soil in the Great Plains around Scotts Bluff, in western Nebraska. Rock Creek is the same way. The ground may be more or less flat -- no mountains, anyway -- but damned if there ain't a 20-foot-deep gorge with vertical banks at every little creek in this area. If I'd been trying to cross the country in a covered wagon back then, I would have just gone back to New York.
(A propos of nothing: I just happened to glance out the window of my hotel room in Percival, Iowa, to see the reddest sunset I have ever seen.)
On leaving Rock Creek Station, I calculated that the car museum in Lincoln would be closed by the time I got there; all the other locations I'd planned to visit there are open 24/7, but none of them are important to me, so they can wait until Lincoln becomes a destination instead of a waypoint. I instead plugged in a planned site at Nebraska City, on the Iowa border: the monument to Where the Wagon Broke Down.
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| Where the Wagon Broke Down |
This required a couple of miles on dirt roads to get to, but dirt's okay as long as it's in good repair. These roads were. I found the spot with no trouble.
In 1862 -- wasn't there a war on then? How did anybody have time for this? -- a self-propelled steam wagon (of Gargantuan proportions) was invented in Minnesota by Joseph R. Brown. It was built in New York City and transported by steam ship down the Ohio River and up the Missouri River to Nebraska City. It was to be driven from there to Denver. It was the "first self-propelled road vehicle ever used west of the Mississippi". It made it only about four and a half miles before it broke down, and was abandoned (I reckon because of its size). And for some reason people thought that would be the appropriate subject of a brass-and-stone monument. So there is a brass plaque mounted on a stone to memorialize the event. They are just desperate for history in Nebraska.
My next stop (and in fact my last stop in Nebraska, having gotten the two counties I was after) was at a Runza fast-food restaurant. My sister- and brother-in-law gave me a book recently called USA State By State, one of the resources I used in planning this trip. And the best thing about that book is that, for every state, it makes suggestions for local foods that are unique to the area. Well, some of those things I already know about. I've already had enchiladas in Texas, and po-boys in Louisiana. I tried scrapple in Delaware and Ranier cherries in Washington. But I would not have known about runza in Nebraska without that book.
I had a couple of runza shops marked on my route, but the last one (in case I hadn't already tried it in Rulo or Beatrice or Lincoln, was in Nebraska City; and it was suppertime when I drove away from Where the Wagon Broke Down, and I needed to find and reserve a room for the night, so I went to the Runza restaurant in Nebraska City.
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| Runza |
The only other thing I'd planned to see in Nebraska City was a Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, which closed at 4pm, so I was too late for that. But it was one of those things that make it onto the trip plan just in case I feel like going there: one of those awareness locations that are easy to skip. I was not in the mood for Lewis & Clark anyway, and had no regrets about passing on it. Even with all the stuff I'm skipping -- all of Tulsa, all of Lincoln, lots of other places along the way -- I'm still roughly on "schedule" with this trip. Or, I guess, because of all the stuff I'm skipping. Being "on schedule" only matters because I have to be back in San Antonio by a certain date, and let's face it: there's nothing on this trip, absolutely nothing, that I have to see or do.... I could abandon this trip at any point, now that I've made my delivery; and I've been this close to doing just that at least twice now. Well, except for stocking up on moonshine in Ohio on the way back. I do have to do that. That is absolutely necessary....
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