A s the years passed, we began to succumb to those familiar signs designating historic sites and scenic places. Clearly, we were missing the good stuff. As if to prove that, Kansas set up the Santa Fe Trail Yellow Brick Road Trip from Kansas City to Dodge City and beyond. We began our tour in the yard of the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop and Farm Historic Site at Olathe, south of Kansas City. This was the first stop on the Santa Fe Trail west of Kansas City in the 1860s when more than 500 wagons a year made the pil- grimage. The Mahaffie house was the Cracker Barrel of its time, a family-owned business that catered to the trail trade, provid- ing food and acting as a gathering place for travelers. Most of the folks that came through weren’t your histo- ry-book pioneers — farmers with helpless children and bon- neted women in Conestoga wagons squinting into the sun. These were profiteers, business people establishing and perpet- uating commercial traffic between Santa Fe (the newly inde- pendent Mexico’s northernmost province) and Independence, Missouri. When Mexico overthrew its Spanish colonial masters, William Becknell and his companions became the new gov- ernment’s first trade partners. Becknell’s success created a rush of two-way traffic to and from Santa Fe, using heavy wagons called freighters. Going to Santa Fe were guns, textiles, and manufactured goods. Coming from Santa Fe were gold, silver and livestock. For 25 years, the more direct way — the “Dry” or Cimarron Route — was the primary one taken. It extended for 800 miles through woods and prairies and windswept landscapes where buffalo roamed and Plains Indian tribes, the Kaw (or Kansa) and Osage, exercised territorial rights. By the 1840s, another route — the “Wet” or Mountain Route — 45 miles longer, fol- lowed the Arkansas River, providing a predictable water source. Kansas has designated a historic Santa Fe Trail Yellow Brick Road Trip (travelks.com), directing travelers to significant points of interest: river crossings, cemeteries, federal forts and prominent landmarks. From Olathe, we picked up State High- way 56 and began our trek across the tall-grass prairie, running through communities plain and unassuming, with water towers as prominent as monuments. The road undulates up and down, with each green hill rising higher than the next. There were moments when we literally reached for the sky. In a magazine article titled “Lost Horizon,” Wayne Fields observed that “The prairie ... makes pointless a rush to somewhere else and creates an overwhelming suspicion that there is nowhere else.” Our goal for the first day was Council Grove in the Flint Hills, a place replete with Santa Fe Trail landmarks and the site where surveyor George Sibley counseled with the Osage Indi- ans in 1825 for safe passage for travelers. Council Grove was a trading center, watering hole, the last chance for lumber to repair wagons, a place where animals could be shod or stabled, a general meeting spot and a service center. Large trees became meeting points, mail drops and centers of activity. Caravans were reconstituted for the next leg of the trip with wagons running four abreast to ward off hostile Indians and allow for quicker circling in case of attack. We roamed the city in our own covered wagon, a 32-foot
eggshell trailer pulled by 275 horses marshaled under the hood of a Ford pickup. We stopped at the Kaw Mission State Historic Site and Museum, built in 1851 by the Methodist–Episcopal Church for boys from the Kaw American Indian tribe. Kaw was an early name of the native people, which translates to People of the South Wind. The museum holds various items such as beads, blankets and clothing and is a good place to learn of other Council Grove sites, such as the Last Chance Store (circa 1863), the old- est commercial building in town that served as a supply depot to early travelers. The Hays House (circa 1857), a restaurant and former mail-distribution point, district court, church and newspaper-publication site, is one of the oldest eateries west of the Mississippi. At the end of Main Street stands a sign marking the crossing of the freight wagons at Neosho River. Water crossings were a big deal for wagoners because the rivers often ran swift, animals were fearful, and heavy freighters sank into the mud. A shallow crossing on a gravel riverbed was preferred. Eighteen-year-old pioneer Susan Shelby Magoffin noted in her journal in 1846, “It is amusing to hear the shouting of the wagoners to their animals, hooting and hollering, the cracking of whips almost deafening.”
“The prairie ... makes pointless a rush to some- where else and creates an overwhelming suspicion that there is nowhere else.”
Highway 177 runs south out of Council Grove and is a sce- nic route to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Along many Kansas two-lane highways, we came across steel silhouettes of cattle, covered wagons and cowboys or Indians on horseback. Situated on the crest of hills set against the cumulus-clouded Kansas sky, this prairie art is both fetching and fleeting. At the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, we stepped inside the great stone barn of the historic Z-Bar (Spring Hill) Ranch where two national park rangers gave us introductions to the exhibits. Earlier in the spring, various tracts had been burned to renew the prairie and, as a result, only the first growth was visible in May. The anticipation of walking through grasses as tall as an elephant’s eye had to be put off until we visited in late summer or fall. The 10,894-acre ranch became a unit of the U.S. National Park System in 1996 along with its 11-room native limestone home. Of the 140 million acres of tall-grass prairie that once flourished in North America, only 4 percent remains, found mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma. We walked the trails, observing recovering forbs and
SUMMER 2014 COAST TO COAST 17
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