Despite the fearsome brazier raging in a petrol blue sky, there were indications that the new dawn heralded problems which had nothing to do with grilled flesh. A row of emperor butterflies were lined along the edge of the tarmac with their wings parked up like F-14 Tomcats packed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Above a church, the Stars and Stripes flew without flapping, like a steel plate, and empty cattle trucks batting down the highway leaned at a southerly tilt. The Panther was charging in from the north-west and everything indicated I was in for a day of hard graft.
Settling into the grim task of carving through the air stream, I slid up and down the wave band, searching for something on the radio to occupy my mind. Between ranting fundamentalists, bigoted talk shows, music from the sixties and everything escaping from Nashville, American radio can induce a coma, but Nebraska Public Service Broadcasting was airing a talk about Crazy Horse, Chief of the Lacota, the nomads contained in this part of Nebraska when it was the Indian Territories. The Lacota were one of the tribes which made mincemeat of General George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, but their initial position on the great white migration was to help it along, steering the pioneers right when they got lost, providing food when they ran low. For Crazy Horse, the Oregon-California Trail was a Holy Road. It was forbidden to attack it or hinder the travellers in any way which might cause the U.S. Army to rain down upon the tribe.
As with most of the indigenous and relocated tribes the wagon trains encountered, the Lacota were no threat. It was only later that the natives became incensed about the white man stealing their crops, scaring off the buffalo, spreading cholera and destroying the woods which provided summer shade. When settlers began nicking their lands, Crazy Horse and his people joined Red Cloud’s Oglalas in raids on American civilians but, during the transition from migration to colonisation, what most disturbed the natives were the ‘singing wires’ — the telegraph lines being strung across their homelands to replace the Pony Express. The Lacota used to try out-racing the Morse code, galloping like fury to overtake the songs travelling down the line. In my case, I was having trouble overtaking the telegraph poles, and was now struggling between towns at barely six miles an hour.
Since Crete, Route 6 had been tracked by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railroad line. With the stone embankment running less than a hundred feet from the edge of the road, I soon discovered that the enormous length and slow progress of an American freight train made for a marvellous wind break. On a few occasions, I even managed sufficient speed to keep pace and enjoyed anything up to fifteen minutes unimpeded pedalling. It was a busy line, and every driver hung on his horn and waved encouragement. For the first time since my knee had been playing up, I enjoyed my cycling.
The railroads played a decisive role in the conquest of the West, and historical markers had started to appear beside the road where the Iron Horse had been attacked by natives. The strip of land on which the Burlington Northern was built was originally provided by the federal government. Land either side of the track was sold on to incomers from the east and, every ten or so miles, a town was mapped out, the distance between settlements governed by the miles a horse drawn wagon could travel on a day return. Burlington Northern demanded the towns be named in alphabetical order. Thus the places I ticked off included Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, Grafton and… Sutton. Did the town stick their heels in and say to the railroad, “Don’t be so daft!”?
Beyond Crete, fields became noticeably larger, sometimes as big as four miles squared, and the terrain ironed out a little flatter. Clumps of fir trees, lines of telegraph poles, irrigation systems and a rare farm house were the only items sticking above the ruled line between heaven and earth. As I pedalled out of one town I could see straight down the road to the next. Above its tight cluster of trees and roofs, the water tower and grain silo stood like white plant markers in a tray of seedlings. Only once were the miles of emptiness disrupted when a row of billboards suddenly appeared informing me I was ninety miles from Howard Warp’s Pioneer Village at Minden. Each billboard featured something different I should get excited about — fire wagons, kitchens, agricultural equipment, numismatics. What the hell was this place I couldn’t afford to miss?
After Sutton came an unusually long gap of twenty-eight miles before we got back on the alphabetic track with Hastings. The town itself was an uneasy combination of red brick college community on the inside and agricultural service industries on the out. Turning my nose up at the official KOA camp site on the edge of town, I went in search of the Adams County Fairgrounds, hoping there would be space to slip a tent between the caravans of travelling entertainers.
The fairground was a jigger car park lousy with weeds and oily puddles behind the stands of a modest county showground. In the ground, circus people were grazing Shetland ponies and elephants, and practising juggling. The tigers’ cage and their living wagons were parked within a circle of carnival trailers forming a separate encampment away from those who permanently inhabited the car park. I joined the permanent residents and was told I could pitch anywhere amongst the battered caravans dotted around the gravel. The guy who gave me the okay reeked of bourbon and fell out of his van when he answered my knock. Every beat up trailer was surrounded by a small scrap yard and paired with an beat up banger. There was nothing on the car park younger than thirty years old. Most of the humans were the worse for drink and looked twice that age. I was down amongst the Hastings down and outs, the cream of Nebraska’s trailer trash.
As I unpacked, Leroy and Neal wove across the car park from their respective hovels, homing in on me like confused Cruise missiles. They plonked themselves on the ground beside my bike and started rabbiting, passing a Coke bottle between each other. Offered a swig, I first established the contents were one part Kool Aid to three parts vodka, receiving the added information that the invention of Kool Aid was Hastings’ great claim to fame. It tasted good. I had a few more swigs and we became bosom buddies.
Neal was bearded, well built, mean looking and wore a tatty quilted combat jacket, despite sweltering heat. He was thirty-six years old, going on 106, and filthy.
“He never fucking washes, dirty bastard,” Leroy said to his face.
Leroy chain smoked. Everything he said was punctuated by nasal snorts and hefty gobs of nicotine tainted phlegm.
“Oh, is there a bathroom?” I inquired.
“Showers, man, but don’t use the toilet with the fucked cistern. It’s fucked,” Leroy explained. “They’re over there, behind the cattle pens.”
I pictured wash facilities splattered with faeces and swimming in urine, but they were sparkling.
Neal lived in the smallest caravan on the planet.
“Yep, just enough room for a bed and my TV. Wanna see?”
I gracefully declined.
“Last night, the wind pushed his van sixty fucking yards across the car park,” Leroy said, “So we’ve chained it to a fucking pylon.”
Neal arrived in Hastings a year and a half ago, nobody knew where from. He pitched a tent on the car park and survived winter to winter under canvas. At the beginning of spring, his tent was shredded by a storm and he took to sleeping in the toilet block. Then Leroy found him the matchbox he currently occupied. He received social security for a “mental problem,” which he and Leroy immediately pissed against a wall.
“Hey, we’re drunks, man, but we ain’t fucking moochers.”
I think this meant they weren’t beggars or scroungers. Neal certainly was a grafter. While we were talking, his boss drove up in a pick-up laden with lawn mowers.
“His name’s Elton Hughes,” Leroy told me between coughing fits, “Like Howard fucking Hughes’s cousin, yeh? Never saw any of the money. The guy’s a city farmer. Lays sod.”
Boom-Boom came running up to Leroy and clung to his jeans. Otherwise known as Alan, Boom-Boom was Leroy’s one year old and a remarkably advanced child to say that his father was an alcoholic and his mother, Judy, was illiterate. Judy was in her thirties, had a chubby face and a drinker’s nose though she never touched the stuff. She was badly disabled from birth and didn’t stray far from their caravan, but Leroy loved her, he said, and brought her talking books from the free library to educate her. It was Judy’s welfare cheque that supported the family.
“Hell, I can get me seventy-five bucks an hour when I work,” Leroy said, competing with the $25 Neal earned for a full day’s toil. “It’s getting the fucking work is the problem.”
Leroy was a qualified refrigerator mechanic trained in the penitentiary, or what he called the “grey bar hotel,” who could also turn his hand to washing machines and spin driers. He kept his tools in the boot of a 1956 Plymouth which listed at an acute angle under the weight. Having spent eleven of his forty-eight years inside, he was probably an expert at his trade and totally trustworthy. Except for scamming petrol from almost every gas station in Hastings, he had turned away from thieving now that Boom-Boom was on the scene. “Okay, so I drink, but I don’t need no trouble with the law.” I still couldn’t see the college fraternity of Hastings falling over themselves to ask Leroy to mend their whiteware.
The family lived in a thirty year old caravan which was larger than Neal’s but tiny by American standards. They filched electricity through a cable jerry-rigged to the lights above the cattle pens and were terribly house proud. Accepting Leroy’s invitation to join them for evening popcorn, I had to take my shoes off in the doorway before padding into a fluffy love nest where everything which had a place was trimmed in pink, including the toaster. We drank unadulterated Kool Aid and the smell of booze was noticeable by its absence.
Married for sixteen years, Judy and Leroy had spent the last two living on the showground car park. They previously rented a house in Colorado, but set off one day to visit Judy’s dad in Minnesota. On the way home, the car broke down east of Hastings and the police impounded the vehicle. Because they had no money, they were dumped in separate crisis centres. Leroy felt grossly insulted. Two days later he had fixed the car and they set off to continue the drive home to Colorado. Four miles west of Hastings, they broke down again.
“I kinda figured that if God had meant us to leave this place, we’d be long gone. Two breakdowns, either side of town — man, you gotta reason God wants you to stay.”
They celebrated settling into a new town by having Boom-Boom despite the Medicare doctor advising them against parenting.
Route 6 had a bend in it twenty miles west of Hastings. Nebraska is not a place where the joy of travelling includes the thrill of seeing what’s round the next corner. It wasn’t even a proper corner — more a lazy curve gently realigning the highway to the south-west. Before it, the BNSF railroad switched to the left hand side of the road, stealing away my windbreak. I quickly gave up on the exposed tarmac and slipped across a level crossing to pick up the grit service road running the other side of the tracks. At Hastings, the single track had expanded to four and barely five minutes elapsed between one or more freighters rumbling by. Between windbreaks, I rode huddled over the handlebars beneath the height of the rail embankment, revelling in the thought that the Panther couldn’t see me.
I rode into Minden anticipating great things and was immediately greeted by a huge white arrow supporting a Model T Ford twenty feet above the ground. In the back seat of the car sat a plaster cast grandma losing her rag with her middle-aged son, who was crouched before the radiator ready to give the hand crank a whirl. A second enormous arrow labelled ‘Entrance’ pointed to a long, low, brick and glass building in the vane of car showrooms of the Fifties. On the roof stood a Conestoga wagon. At around eleven in the morning I stepped into Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village and didn’t leave until thrown out at sundown.
Harold Warp made his millions out of glazing and was the president of Flexo-Glass, Chicago. His dad, John Nelson Warp, settled near Minden in the ‘south-west quarter of section 10, township 5, range 14’ purchased off the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company. At some point, young Harold started to collect bits and bobs which the farming family were throwing away. His hobby grew into an obsession with amassing anything telling ‘The Story of America and How It Grew’. Harold collected everything from thimbles to churches and blades of grass to a Pony Express relay station. To contain his trinkets, he bought twenty acres of Minden and expanded to include a functioning motel, camp ground and restaurant. On the edge of town, he also owned an airstrip, from where courtesy cars delivered visitors down to his Village.
Harold’s was a magnificent obsession, now spread around attractive grounds where even the trees were exhibits and labelled. Splayed around a circular green, transplanted buildings hid a row of two-storey hangers packed to the rafters with clobber. There was no way anybody could appreciate a fraction of what the site held unless booked into the motel for a week. The main building alone contained over 10,000 items, and each hanger was so tightly packed you couldn’t get near half the exhibits. I followed a family around the Homes and Shops Building, eavesdropping in on their memories of this type of kitchen which they had before the kids were born, and that type of bedroom, so like great grandma’s. Outside the sod house, I waited while a husband took a snap of his wife standing in the doorway. On her father’s farm there were the remains of the two storey sod house her grandparents built. Where the Smithsonian focused on the extraordinary, Harold Warp concentrated on the common and garden. His hoard provided the whole family with a chance to wallow in nostalgia while those too young to know the meaning of the word whizzed round the oldest
U.S. steam powered merry-go-round, still only 5¢. Harold’s collection of wagons put the Smithsonian’s to shame. It provided me with an opportunity to study the rolling stock which crossed the virgin plains. On the Oregon-California Trail, light farm wagons were preferred over the chunky Conestoga wagons because of their ability to negotiating tight canyons and steep bluffs. Around three metres long and one and a half wide, the bed of the wagon was a simple wooden box protected by a hooped canvas top, capable of carrying around a ton. To improve manoeuvrability, the front wheels were generally smaller than the back, but the rigs had neither a brake nor springs. On steep descents, chains were used to lock the rear wheels and provide a drag.
Of course, all manner of wagons, buggies and two-wheeled carretas carried the gold hungry west. In the rush to join the migration, anything which was light, manoeuvrable and load bearing hit the trail, often with dire consequences. I was now nine days out from Independence and the Forty-Niners had been on the go for just under a month. Already the rigours of the prairies were taking their toll on the weaker vehicles and some wrecks had been hacked in two to form a carreta. Where most companies left the Missouri with a wagon to every three men, some were now forced to double up, which meant dumping supplies. By the end of the journey, twelve per wagon was not uncommon and most people had crossed the West on foot. Walking was quicker than riding. Though mules were faster than oxen, they weren’t as powerful, so which engine you chose to hitch your wagon to depended on your approach to driving the trail. Horses were never used for pulling, though they accompanied some wagon trains in much the same way that today’s RV owners tow a car. For reconnaissance, hunting and rounding up stray cattle, the horse was a useful accessory but not essential.
Reeling with an overdose of Americana, I staggered out of Harold’s place and headed north to rejoin the westward trails. As the evening sun hovered low over miles of feeder pens and shimmied in the heat rising off thousands of cattle being fattened for slaughter, I swung into the Fort Kearny camp ground. Three college students were lounging around the office shed, all working holiday jobs at the State Recreation Ground. While I checked in and bought papers from the vending machines, they brought me up to date with what was happening in the world. I learned that America was fighting the “commies in the Middle East” (Yugoslavia) and that the city of Lincoln had just agreed to house an intake of Armenians. Public opinion (the lads) was concerned that America was about to be swamped with refugees, “and what do they know about democracy?” Pointing out that the United States was built on refugees, it was explained that that was different. “They brought civilisation to this country.”
The camp site was bordered on one side by the Platte, the river which came to mean so much to those undertaking the long haul west. For nearly 500 miles, they and I would track it to the doorstep of the Rockies. As early as 1842, John Frémont recommended the U.S. government establish a fort south of the flow to protect the pioneers. Three years later, Congress approved plans for a chain of military outposts stretching from the Missouri to the Rockies, but what the army erected at Fort Kearny was more a collection of barracks, warehouses and officers’ quarters than a fully fortified stockade. At the historic park next door to the camp ground, stubby markers located the four corners of the original buildings. A sketch drawn by a traveller in 1849 showed just a handful of disparate sod buildings, a few tents and an adobe brick sutler’s store. (A sutler is a civilian licenced to sell provisions on an army base.) Twenty years later, another contemporary drawing indicated the outpost had grown into a small brick village.
Bright and early the next morning, I joined a group of second grade school kids and their teachers for the slide presentation in the Visitor Center. The show was introduced by Paul Hendrickson, an elderly volunteer dressed in the Yankee uniform of C Battery Artillery, Fort Kearny. After an over-long history of the fort, the lights went up and Paul introduced somebody sitting at the back of the room as, “A very interesting young man who is from overseas and following the trail of his ancestors.” I looked around for the guy Paul was inviting to step up and say a few words. Once again, who I was and what I was doing had somehow travelled before me.
As I made to leave, Eugene (“Call me Gene”) Hunt beckoned me back into the Visitor Center. Gene was the Superintendent of Fort Kearny, bespeckled and moustached, and bubbling with enthusiasm for his corner of American history. He was one of those people for whom breathing and full stops get in the way. He brought out maps of the area plotted by Frémont, Lt. Woodbury (the fort’s original surveyor), and the Burlington Northern Railroad, who relocated the town on the opposite bank of the Platte and called it Kearney. Misinformed that I was following the family trail, he was angling for me to send him a photocopy of my argonaut ancestor’s diary. The request was symptomatic of the desperate retrieval process caretakers of America’s abused heritage are compelled to undertake.
Despite Fort Kearny’s leading role in the epic narrative of westward expansion, the outpost was torn down after it had fulfilled its military purpose and, in 1871, the land was opened up for homesteading. Fifty years later, Nebraska decided that hadn’t been such a great idea, and bought the land back. Had somebody paused long enough to think further than making a buck, the original buildings might still be in place. As at so many historical sites, Americans were left with reproduction buildings, static displays and a turgid audio-visual show to bring the conquest of the West to life. This possibly explained why those who devised the displays were obsessed with statistics. Every wayside historical marker and exhibit in a Visitors Center groaned under the weight of how much, how many and how often.
In fact, most diarists wrote very little about their time at Fort Kearny. Some noted that travellers outnumbered residents by as many as ten to one, and that their camp was surrounded by thousands of grazing cattle, also on the road west. While some in the companies pestered the army for intelligence about the way ahead, others dived into the sutler’s store to buy provisions, or called in at the mail room to deposit letters for dispatch to the States. By June 23rd, 1849, the last of the wagons had moved on and it was estimated some 23,000 people had passed through Fort Kearny that summer, driving about 6,200 wagons. The year before, the Oregon-California Trail had attracted just 100 wagons.
In many respects, the month it took the overlanders to reach Fort Kearny had been a shakedown experience. By no means arduous, those 320 miles were sufficient to convince waverers to turn back before things became really sticky. For those more determined, it was a period when men learned driving and animal handling skills, became proficient at setting and striking camp, and decided they were grossly over-burdened. Between Fort Kearny and the river, the land was trashed with piles of discarded goods. With no idea of what they were getting into beyond the Missouri, Easterners had loaded their wagons with all manner of featherbeds, rocking chairs, chests of drawers and other luxuries which had no place on an expedition. It reminded me of journeys I had undertaken with cyclists who produced dressing gowns and fluffy slippers from their panniers. For some, it takes many miles before they feel sufficiently comfortable with the wild to discard home comforts.
It was an unprecedented third fine day. Stratocumulus clouds sauntered east across a graded cyan sky like scrubbed Charolais grazing their way towards the water trough of the Missouri. My road beside the Platte River was pancake flat but, a mile to the north, gentle curves marked the southern edge of the Dissected Plains — ancient flatlands eroded by wind and water into smooth ridges and steep slopes. In the broad valley basin, plumes of dust indicated where farmers had finally managed to get into the fields to start ploughing. Mighty mammoths with double rear bogies and multiple plough shares scraped back and forth across huge acreages separated by the flimsiest of barbed wire fences. In some fields, irrigation systems were sprinkling land which four days ago had been soused by storms.
I was now hugging the line taken by the exodus of Mormons as they fled Nauvoo, Illinois, and tramped towards their New Zion on the ‘Trail of Hope’. In a land settled by Europeans fleeing religious persecution in the Old World, New World settlers had successfully harassed the church clear across country. From its inception in Fayette, New York, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved to Ohio, then Missouri and on to Illinois in search of somewhere to settle. In Nauvoo, they helped build one of the largest cities in the State of Illinois, with a population in the early 1840s of over 11,000 people, but strength of numbers and solidity of brickwork only increased the suspicions and resentments of the nonbelievers in town. In 1844 their founding father, Joseph Smith, was murdered by an angry mob, and a year and a half later the great Mormon migration began.
Between me and the screen of cottonwoods hiding the swirling river, Interstate 80 and the railroad made a bee line for Wyoming. Ankling down Route 30, I cycled beside the ghosts of Latter Day Saints trudging along the Mormon Trail. On the opposite bank of the river, going our way, were the ghosts of gold seekers and pioneers following the Oregon-California Trail. In the eighteenth century, this was the Great Platte River Road used by St. Louis fur traders hauling out beaver pelts, and for thousands of years before that, Native Americans exploited the same natural corridor into the mountains. In a landscape as unyielding as the prairies were before the Industrial Revolution, lines of communication didn’t stray far from the topographical freeways.
The road to Lexington was unwaveringly straight, flat and boring. I leant on the handlebars and surfed through the wavebands. Though I was over a thousand miles from the Tex-Mex border and California, a Mexican station blasted through the speaker loud and clear. I cranked into town humming to a mariachi and turned right onto a deserted main street unusually well endowed with Mexican restaurants and Latino craft shops. I asked a guy in a new Explorer 4x4 if he could direct me to the police station.
“Sorry, man, but I don’t speak American.”
I asked another who was white and mowing his lawn. He pointed the way, recommended I watch my “ass” and told me the town used to be a nice place, before the Californians moved in. “These days, you gotta be some kinda dumb fuck not to lock your dog in if you don’t want it ending up in a damn tortilla, y’know?”
Through an intercom secured behind steel bars, a cop told me I could camp at Plum Creek Park. He then laughed. As I neared the park, the sound of people at play swelled to fill the empty approach road. The park was buzzing with families playing volley ball, picnicking, playing soccer, courting, and fooling with kids. It was the first town park I had visited which was packed, and it made me nervous. Everybody was Mexican. Since St. Louis I had heard nothing but bad things about Mexican-Americans, no doubt prejudiced things. When a football ran loose, I dropped my rig and dribbled the ball back to the game, impressed that I managed to beat two tackles before a third youth whipped the ball from under me.
“Not bad,” the youth said, surprised a gringo could play.
“Yeh, well, it’s our national sport,” I replied, “second only to losing.”
The lads formed a semi-circle round me and began firing off the names of English teams and players. I was in the presence of Lexington’s youth soccer squad and struggling to hide the fact I knew sod all about football.
“I’m confused,” I said, changing the subject. “I’ve travelled hundreds of miles across white America and suddenly I find myself in a Mexican town?”
It was explained that their parents had moved here from Mexico and California to work at the IBP meat packing plant. “Fuckin’ stink hole, man.” Now they mentioned it, there was a whiff of minced beef about Lexington. “Shit work for shit wages, and there’s nothing else round here ’cept farming.” In the middle of expressing horror at the prospect of following their parents into IBP, the team fell into whispers. Pointing out three youths walking across a bridge over the lake behind me, they warned that the gangsters were out. “They’re killers, man.” “Y’don’t fuck with them.” “You gonna camp in the park? Tonight? Man, you gotta be crazy. Those dudes will have you.”
At their meanest, the three gangsters looked capable of pilfering candy from an unattended store but, when they left, they drove away in a customised Cadillac which would have ploughed a furrow had it’s suspension been a centimetre lower. As it prowled round the perimeter of Plum Creek Park, it issued a menacing growl specifically aimed at me. Maybe Lexington wasn’t such a great place to put up for the night?
Possibly because the trails stretch further across the Cornhusker State than any other, most towns allow travellers to camp overnight in the local park free of charge. On the edge of Plum Creek Park, I came upon a large hard standing where two enormous trailer homes and an Excalibur coach were plugged into a line of hook-ups. They were owned by three people who had spent the last eight months on the road showing and training dogs. On the grass before the car park, a row of temporary cages confined five huge Bouvies and a coondog which went ballistic when I approached. That night I pitched as close as I dared and came to appreciate the acrid reassurance of dog breath.