1918 – 19
ROOTS
A lmost from its first days, North Platte’s story has been intertwined with railroads and America’s armed forces. In 1859, as a young civil engineer, Grenville Mellen Dodge recognized the broad valley around the forks of the Platte River as an ideal servicing center for a transcontinental railroad. In 1866, after spending the Civil War repairing and rebuilding railroads for Union armies, General Dodge — now the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief construction engineer — laid out North Platte west of the forks as a “division point,” with ample space for sidings and a roundhouse. When the track gangs arrived that November, the recently renamed Fort McPherson had been guarding the Oregon, California and Mormon trails for three years southeast of town. As they moved on in spring 1867, a U.S. Army company from the fort set up North Platte Station (west of today’s Jeffers Street viaduct) to guard the railroad. This post, which stood until 1878, was first commanded by Capt. Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas would be a prominent general in three wars.
North Platte’s most famous citizen, Col. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, gained fame as an Army scout. His Wild West Show, which toured the nation and world from 1883 to 1913, celebrat- ed patriotism even as it depicted America’s vanishing frontier. And the city’s three main north-south downtown streets, originally named for trees, now honor military or railroad fig- ures: Adm. George Dewey, victor of the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay, and past U.P. presidents William Jeffers and Edd Bailey (of whom more will be told). Americans were relative latecomers to World War I. The United States had remained officially neutral for nearly three years after the “Great War” erupted across Europe in July and August 1914. By the time the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, millions of soldiers on both sides had been slaughtered and northern France rendered a bleak wasteland. It was that tardiness, and the subsequent rush to mobilize a nation’s resources, that spawned North Platte’s first canteen along the U.P. tracks — and its undying “Canteen Spirit.”
OPPOSITE: Volunteers, supporters and even a couple of uniformed customers pose in summer 1918 in front of North Platte’s World War I Red Cross Canteen. Its location, a former telegraph office that served as temporary Union Pacific depot from 1915 to 1918, stood west of the 1918 brick depot that would house the World War II Canteen.
1918–19 9
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