There are lots of Germans out in this area. It sits at the front door of the Great Plains and is flat as a pancake. Head west out of York on a sunny day and the sky will open before you like a Cinema as you sit on a 2-lane concrete slab as straight as an arrow.
I had made this trip out to York scores of times to see a certain unmarried farmer who lit one cigarette off the previous one, ate Texas toast and t-bone steak every night of his life, and poured stiff black coffee down his throat like somebody who was having a heat stroke.
Then he would go home with a belly full of caffein, meat, and smoke and sleep as if he were in a coma. The passenger seat floor in his car or truck was piled high with coffee cups and cigarette butts beneath a dashboard carpeted with brown dust. Driving to Chicago for him was like driving into a nest of cobras in Calcutta.
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He loathed every second of it. Sitting alone on a tractor or pounding down another steak and coffee in a fly-infested cafe with pickup trucks tied up in front in a joint called Sutton, Nebraska, was the same thing as Disneyland to him. He owned a a Blue Heeler that would sit next to him in the pickup and menacingly stare down every car that came down the highway.
As the car approached, the dog's head would lower and his eyes would bead in on it. When the vehicle passed, the dog's head would whip to the left for the final challenge as if he were saying, "I thought so." I visited several people in Des Moines, Iowa, on the way to him, and when I got there, I could barely hold my eyes open during the dinner while he nearly strangled himself on a 20 ounce t-bone, a chuck wagon of coffee, and enough cigarettes to finish off a cancer ward.
The next morning I rolled down that I-80 slab over the same terrain that 50,000 covered wagons a year used to travel in the 1850's and entered the main gate of the Oregon Trail at Kearney, Nebraska, which was named after Stephen Kearny who is called "the father of the United States Cavalry." Between 1843 and 1869, over half a million men, women, and children rode and walked the trails through here to the West Coast.
All roads to Oregon converged here in Kearney, a natural highway through Nebraska and the easiest part of the journey to Oregon. There were no bridges, no stores or homes, no food except the buffaloes, no roads except those they made with their wagons, and few primitive and uncertain sign posts indicating a precarious way along the Oregon Trail. Just before reaching Kearney, straddling over I-80 is a huge arch and museum called The Great Platte River Road Archway. A stop there will orient the uninformed of what is beneath their feet.
There were many places a hundred miles or so further back where the Oregon Trail emigrants first launched their journey from the eastern banks of the Missouri River within the states of Missouri and Iowa, but all these trail tributaries flowed into one at Fort Kearney, which is considered the official starting point of The Oregon Trail. I have traveled by motorcycle over some of these routes on the way to Kearney and have seen forgotten, weed-covered grave sites of people who died on their journey. In fact, the Oregon Trial has been called the world's longest graveyard. They say that there is a grave site about every 229 feet on average of those who died on their way to Oregon, a 2,170 mile, 4-6 month journey that only covered about 20 miles a day.
Most of them abandoned almost everything they owned and saved themselves by walking into Oregon with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They drowned at river crossings, starved and died of thirst, were run over by their wagons or trampled by their livestock, fell to poisonous snake bites, and were victims by the thousands to disease, especially the dreaded cholera that stalked them along the length of the Trail and generally killed a person in just hours. There were years when large scale cholera epidemics broke out on the trail population and swept them away, some wagon trains losing two-thirds of their people.
All of them were also loaded to the teeth with guns and ammunition and suffered self-inflicted wounds from dropping their firearms and similar accidents. Weather and violent thunderstorms with baseball sized hail took some. Just be out here when a summer storm strikes, and you will understand. In a few parts of the state of Nebraska where not every inch of the trail has been plowed under, you can still see swales in the land where hundreds of thousands of wagons had left their marks on the soil as their wheels rolled together in each other's ruts. You have to get off the main roads and onto the tractor roads through the cornfields to see these places. There are books in libraries that list hundreds of these spots with exact location details along with cemetery markers.
Stage coaches on their way back and forth to California carried Mark Twain and Horace Greeley over this very same road where I-80 now lies. The Pony Express raced over this exact same path for a year and a half in 1860-61, and the transcontinental railroad came right behind them in the late1860‘s. Most people go into Nebraska and see absolutely nothing.
If they are heading West on I-80, they cross the bridge into Nebraska and are greeted by mile marker 454, and their hearts sink, thinking they are about to endure the most boring ride in America. But all you have to do is read The Great Platte River Road by Merrill J. Mattes that the state of Nebraska published a few years ago or Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose, or Roughing It by Mark Twain. You will never see Nebraska the same way again.
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Like me, you will just stop and sit on a lonely road off the Interstate on a warm day and imagine the ghosts of history passing before you. Many journalists of those Oregon Trail days recorded that by the end of the route in Nebraska, they would pass huge piles of household goods in the form of dressers, sewing machines, stoves, tables, chairs, books, and hope chests stacked high on the Great Plains that the emigrants threw off to lighten their loads and save their lives. Nobody picked them up.
Further out and down the road in Ogallala, the Oregon Trail branches off to the northwest along US 26 and heads up to Scotts Bluff, right next to the eastern wall of Wyoming. Out in this remote section, you will feel as if you are as deep in the West and as desolate as you can get as you approach Ash Hollow, Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scotts Bluff, four of the most famous stops on the Oregon Trail. Nebraska is one of my favorite states.
The green of Iowa and Nebraska morphed into the brown desert of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado when I forked onto I-76 toward Denver. Soon the tops of the Rockies began to peak over the horizon. I took US 34 off of I-76 and was soon greeted by the fragrant stock yards, dairy farms, and hog farms that preceded Greeley-Loveland where I spent a couple of days eating and laughing with dairy men, friends, contractors, and others related to agriculture.
I had made this trip out to York scores of times to see a certain unmarried farmer who lit one cigarette off the previous one, ate Texas toast and t-bone steak every night of his life, and poured stiff black coffee down his throat like somebody who was having a heat stroke.
Then he would go home with a belly full of caffein, meat, and smoke and sleep as if he were in a coma. The passenger seat floor in his car or truck was piled high with coffee cups and cigarette butts beneath a dashboard carpeted with brown dust. Driving to Chicago for him was like driving into a nest of cobras in Calcutta.
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He loathed every second of it. Sitting alone on a tractor or pounding down another steak and coffee in a fly-infested cafe with pickup trucks tied up in front in a joint called Sutton, Nebraska, was the same thing as Disneyland to him. He owned a a Blue Heeler that would sit next to him in the pickup and menacingly stare down every car that came down the highway.
As the car approached, the dog's head would lower and his eyes would bead in on it. When the vehicle passed, the dog's head would whip to the left for the final challenge as if he were saying, "I thought so." I visited several people in Des Moines, Iowa, on the way to him, and when I got there, I could barely hold my eyes open during the dinner while he nearly strangled himself on a 20 ounce t-bone, a chuck wagon of coffee, and enough cigarettes to finish off a cancer ward.
The next morning I rolled down that I-80 slab over the same terrain that 50,000 covered wagons a year used to travel in the 1850's and entered the main gate of the Oregon Trail at Kearney, Nebraska, which was named after Stephen Kearny who is called "the father of the United States Cavalry." Between 1843 and 1869, over half a million men, women, and children rode and walked the trails through here to the West Coast.
All roads to Oregon converged here in Kearney, a natural highway through Nebraska and the easiest part of the journey to Oregon. There were no bridges, no stores or homes, no food except the buffaloes, no roads except those they made with their wagons, and few primitive and uncertain sign posts indicating a precarious way along the Oregon Trail. Just before reaching Kearney, straddling over I-80 is a huge arch and museum called The Great Platte River Road Archway. A stop there will orient the uninformed of what is beneath their feet.
There were many places a hundred miles or so further back where the Oregon Trail emigrants first launched their journey from the eastern banks of the Missouri River within the states of Missouri and Iowa, but all these trail tributaries flowed into one at Fort Kearney, which is considered the official starting point of The Oregon Trail. I have traveled by motorcycle over some of these routes on the way to Kearney and have seen forgotten, weed-covered grave sites of people who died on their journey. In fact, the Oregon Trial has been called the world's longest graveyard. They say that there is a grave site about every 229 feet on average of those who died on their way to Oregon, a 2,170 mile, 4-6 month journey that only covered about 20 miles a day.
Most of them abandoned almost everything they owned and saved themselves by walking into Oregon with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They drowned at river crossings, starved and died of thirst, were run over by their wagons or trampled by their livestock, fell to poisonous snake bites, and were victims by the thousands to disease, especially the dreaded cholera that stalked them along the length of the Trail and generally killed a person in just hours. There were years when large scale cholera epidemics broke out on the trail population and swept them away, some wagon trains losing two-thirds of their people.
All of them were also loaded to the teeth with guns and ammunition and suffered self-inflicted wounds from dropping their firearms and similar accidents. Weather and violent thunderstorms with baseball sized hail took some. Just be out here when a summer storm strikes, and you will understand. In a few parts of the state of Nebraska where not every inch of the trail has been plowed under, you can still see swales in the land where hundreds of thousands of wagons had left their marks on the soil as their wheels rolled together in each other's ruts. You have to get off the main roads and onto the tractor roads through the cornfields to see these places. There are books in libraries that list hundreds of these spots with exact location details along with cemetery markers.
Stage coaches on their way back and forth to California carried Mark Twain and Horace Greeley over this very same road where I-80 now lies. The Pony Express raced over this exact same path for a year and a half in 1860-61, and the transcontinental railroad came right behind them in the late1860‘s. Most people go into Nebraska and see absolutely nothing.
If they are heading West on I-80, they cross the bridge into Nebraska and are greeted by mile marker 454, and their hearts sink, thinking they are about to endure the most boring ride in America. But all you have to do is read The Great Platte River Road by Merrill J. Mattes that the state of Nebraska published a few years ago or Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose, or Roughing It by Mark Twain. You will never see Nebraska the same way again.
orange county bmw
Like me, you will just stop and sit on a lonely road off the Interstate on a warm day and imagine the ghosts of history passing before you. Many journalists of those Oregon Trail days recorded that by the end of the route in Nebraska, they would pass huge piles of household goods in the form of dressers, sewing machines, stoves, tables, chairs, books, and hope chests stacked high on the Great Plains that the emigrants threw off to lighten their loads and save their lives. Nobody picked them up.
Further out and down the road in Ogallala, the Oregon Trail branches off to the northwest along US 26 and heads up to Scotts Bluff, right next to the eastern wall of Wyoming. Out in this remote section, you will feel as if you are as deep in the West and as desolate as you can get as you approach Ash Hollow, Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scotts Bluff, four of the most famous stops on the Oregon Trail. Nebraska is one of my favorite states.
The green of Iowa and Nebraska morphed into the brown desert of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado when I forked onto I-76 toward Denver. Soon the tops of the Rockies began to peak over the horizon. I took US 34 off of I-76 and was soon greeted by the fragrant stock yards, dairy farms, and hog farms that preceded Greeley-Loveland where I spent a couple of days eating and laughing with dairy men, friends, contractors, and others related to agriculture.
