It’s been a while since we’ve posted a Pasley trip report.
Those reports came fast and furious for nearly a decade as we crisscrossed the country with our travel trailer. But the trailer is gone and we’re now summering in our Buena Vista, Colorado townhouse, which we got just in time for the 2020 Covid lockdown.
Finally, last month, we ventured out on the road again for a report-worthy two-week trip to Chicago to visit Tex and Rachel. For obvious reasons, it seemed like this trip would be quite different from our past meanderings across America; but, in many ways, it wasn’t.
In fact, it was eerily similar to many of our past trips; germinating from the seed of an off-hand comment about a baseball game that somehow morphed into an exploration of the Santa Fe Trail in, completely serendipitously, the SFT’s bicentennial year. Somehow, spending three nights next door to Harry Truman’s house in Independence, Missouri found its way into the mix.
We had no plans to leave our summer digs in Colorado until one day, when we we’re FaceTiming with Tex and Rachel, they suggested we should come to Chicago for a visit. The prospect of going to a White Sox game was dangled as an incentive.
Do the Sox play the Astros, Betsy inquired? A quick Google search answered affirmatively and, just like that, the trip was anchored around the Sox-Astros game on Sunday afternoon, July 18.
That’s when the Pasley trip-planning genes kicked in. I-80 is pretty much a straight shot from Colorado to Chicago, but there must be a more interesting way to get back to Colorado, right?
Santa Fe is about a four-hour drive south of Buena Vista, so why not take the Santa Fe Trail back to Colorado? And doesn’t the Santa Fe Trail start in Independence? (Initially, no. But I’ll get to that later.) And isn’t Harry Truman’s house, a National Park Service unit that Betsy had not visited, also in Independence?
The answer to each question (except the part about the starting point of the SFT) was yes. And there you have it (in a nutshell, so to speak); a detailed insight into how my brain works.
Speaking of which, late last year we bought a small, two-door, soft-top Jeep Wrangler (mainly so that we could have a vehicle with Colorado license plates). Since then, the Jeep has sat mostly-undriven in the garage in Colorado. Thus it (sort of) seemed to make sense to take the Jeep on the Chicago-Independence-Santa Fe trip, and give the faithful truck with its hard 200,000+ miles a break.
We worried a bit about how “Rocky” would handle on the highway, about the road noise and how we would pack for a two-week trip in a relatively tiny vehicle, especially after spending the last decade traveling in a spacious pickup truck with a 30-foot trailer in tow.
Surprisingly, the Jeep turned out to be quite comfortable and we quickly adapted to the smaller space. Plus, it got nearly 28 mpg!
We blasted across half of Colorado, all of Nebraska and Iowa, and most of Illinois in two-plus days and settled into our Airbnb, a few blocks from Tex and Rachel’s place, by early afternoon on day three.
Chicago
We spent the next five days hanging out with T&R and exploring Chicago.
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| At the baseball game, naturally. |
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| Chicago commuters. |
And I do mean exploring. In addition to the baseball game, we paddled kayaks on the Chicago River, watched Tex play croquet in Jackson Park, toured the Museum of Science and Industry, grooved at an iconic jazz club, saw Tex’s new office, met college friends for lunch, and walked, bussed, and trained through, seemingly, most of the city. We also ate well; everything from Mexican to Thai to Soul.
A lot of folks may think of Chicago as dangerous and dysfunctional, but it didn’t feel that way. People were courteous and friendly, and it was easy to move around. Basically, stuff worked, and people behaved like you would want them to.
I was amazed at how many flowers there were; from hanging baskets to numerous well-maintained planted beds.
The city is virtually flat, and most streets have wide, well-maintained sidewalks that are separated from the curb by parkway strips that often have trees. There is also a pervasive system of alleys which are used for utility services and trash pickup. On-street parking is allowed on most streets. All these factors combine to make Chicago a very walkable city because pedestrians are well-buffered from vehicles and there are few trash bins or utility poles to negotiate on the ample, flat, shady sidewalks.
Flat as it may be, Chicago also has lots and lots of stairs. There are stairs up to the elevated trains and stairs down to the subways, with vanishingly few escalators or elevators. Plus, many Chicagoans live in multi-story structures. Suffice to say, we got plenty of exercise!
We were constantly amazed at how quickly things changed from one neighborhood to the next, sometimes from block to block. You can board the train at a gritty station surrounded by empty storefronts and disembark two stops later in front of a Saks Fifth Avenue.
Another shocker was the large number of businesses operating on a cash-only basis. We used more cash in five days than we normally spend in five months.
Lakeshore Drive was also a surprise. I imagined it as a swanky commercial street of shops and restaurants with slow-moving traffic. In fact, much of LSD is a fast-moving, limited-access highway bordered mostly by high-rise apartments with relatively little commercial activity. Thus, it’s surprisingly easy to drive north and south in the city. East to west, probably not so much.
And, of course, there are the fabulous parks along the lakeshore, created largely with fill in the 19th and 20th centuries, after the city was well-established. Throw in the numerous neighborhood parks further inland – plus the numerous and sometimes vast cemeteries – and Chicago has a surprising amount of open space.
Suffice to say, when our whirlwind five-night stay ended, and we climbed back in the Jeep to start the drive west, we knew a lot more about, and had seen a lot more of, Chicago than we had five days earlier.
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| Tex showed us around the offices of the law firm where he works. |
Missouri
In route to Independence, we met two of my cousins for lunch and visited the cemetery where our parents and grandparents are buried.
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| Meeting the cousins for lunch in Platte City is a family tradition. |
I was born in Independence, which is about 10 miles from my hometown of Liberty, Missouri. But I knew surprisingly little about the city, which is essentially a large (Missouri’s fifth-most populous), sprawling (Missouri’s third largest by area) working-class suburb of Kansas City.
The only reason it got on our radar screen for this trip was because we thought that’s where the Santa Fe Trail began, and because there is a National Frontier Trails Museum that we thought would be an ideal place to get us started on our journey to Santa Fe.
A visit to the Truman house historic site was a collateral add on.
But it turned out that the Trails Museum was closed, originally due to Covid and then because the staff had left for other jobs, and the city is still struggling to get it re-staffed and re-opened. Likewise, the Truman house was also closed for indoor tours (because of Covid), but park rangers were offering a guided walk around the outside of the house.
Later we found out that the Santa Fe Trail actually started in Franklin, Missouri; about 100 miles east of Independence.
But that’s when our old friend Mr. Serendipity kicked in (again). It turns out that the Truman Library and Museum, which is about 10 blocks from Harry’s house, had undergone a total renovation and upgrade, and had re-opened just a few weeks before we got there.
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| The view of Harry's house from our room. |
So, we booked that too, unaware that the hotel was a pleasant 10-block
walk from the Independence Square that was a hub of SFT activity in the late
1820s and 1830s.
The re-furbished presidential museum was fabulous, an interactive deep dive into Truman’s life and political career, which is also a deep dive into the end of World War II, the Korean War, and the beginning of the Cold War. We walked to the museum, spent most of the day there, found some Santa Fe Trail interpretive panels in a nearby park on the way back and got to the Truman house in time for an excellent tour around the outside of the house and then exhibits in a house across the street (next door to the hotel) where Truman stayed with his cousins while he was courting Bess Wallace, his wife-to-be.
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| In Independence Harry Truman is, seemingly, always nearby. |
That, in turn, gave us some extra time to consider making the 200-mile roundtrip to Franklin to check out the “official” start of the SFT. We were not particularly enthusiastic about driving another 200 miles, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions of the trip, because we stumbled across a book (at a state historic site in Arrow Rock, Mo.) called “The Santa Fe Trail: A Guide”. Indeed, it was a guide, with incredible details about the SFT that would turn out to be immensely helpful over the next few days.
I had done some cursory internet searching about the SFT, prior to leaving Colorado, and got some suggestions, via e-mail, from the President of the Santa Fe Trail Association. We also had an NPS map of the trail. All of that was useful, but none of it was as helpful as the book, which basically gave us a mile-by-mile description of interesting things to see and important things to know.
Armed with the book, we found our way from Arrow Rock to Franklin and then followed the route of the SFT back to Independence.
One of the interesting stops along the way was in Lexington, Missouri where a “Madonna of the Trail” statue[i] was erected in 1928. Guess who gave the keynote speech at the dedication? Harry Truman!
Believe it or not, Harry Truman was the president of the National Old Trails Road Association, a job that took him across the country meeting with members of the association to determine the NOTR route.
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| We couldn't go inside (because of Covid) but we did get a unique and personal tour of the outside of the house and the grounds from a park ranger. |
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| This is (fairly close to) where the trail to Santa Fe began in 1821 (the original Franklin, MO was destroyed in a flood, this marker is in in "New" Franklin, MO). |
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| The Madonna of the Trail statue in Lexington, Missouri. |
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| Royals Stadium is a great venue, but it can get a bit warm on a muggy summer night. |
The Santa Fe Trail (west from Independence)
From Independence we set off the down the SFT in earnest, which is probably as good a point in this narrative as any to make some general comments about the trail.
Unlike the other three major western trails of the 19th Century (the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails) the SFT was not about emigration and westward expansion. The SFT was almost entirely focused on trade and commerce. Thus, for instance, there were very few women traveling on the SFT, and many of the men that traveled the route did so on multiple occasions because it was their job.
Another interesting aspect is that, from its very beginning in 1821, the route became almost continuously shorter as, first, steamboats on the Missouri River and later railroads, pushed further and further west at a rapid clip until, in 1880, the railroad reached Santa Fe and the SFT was history.
One of the first and most significant “shortenings” of the trail occurred in 1827 when a beautiful landing spot was developed on the river 100 miles west of Franklin. It was so good that a town – Independence – sprang up to facilitate the transfer of material from river boats to wagons.
For the next four decades, until the railroad began to extend west from Kansas City after the Civil War, Independence was the SFT’s transfer point from river to wagon. And much of that commerce took place on the town square, just 10 blocks from Truman’s house and our hotel[ii].
After the war, the expansion of the railroad began in earnest. Each time a new section of railroad extended west a new terminus was established and a new wagon route was developed leading from the railhead to the closest point on the SFT. Each time this happened forwarding houses were established to facilitate the transfer of goods between the modes of transportation. To give a sense of the pace of change; one of the largest forwarding operations had to move its headquarters 11 times in a span of just seven years.
The demise of the SFT was swift. In 1866 the eastern terminus of the trail was at the end of the rail line in Junction City, KS (about 130 miles west of Independence). Fourteen years later the railroad reached Santa Fe and the SFT was history.
The trail got its start when William Becknell, an indebted merchant, had either a stroke of genius or luck (maybe both)[iii] when he set out in 1821 from Franklin, Missouri to trade with merchants in a foreign country. When he started out, that country was Spain, which prohibited trade with the United States and arrested and imprisoned Americans that attempted to do so. However, by the time Becknell reached Santa Fe it was part of the newly independent country of Mexico. Fortuitously for Becknell, the Mexicans not only allowed but encouraged trade with the United States; thus, Becknell more or less stumbled into becoming the 1820s equivalent of Jeff Bezos.
If we had known all of this, and had the book before we planned out the trip and made reservations, we probably would have taken a few extra days to make the 800-mile trip from Independence to Santa Fe.
Nonetheless, we had time during our three-day, two-night drive to make several interesting stops.
On the first day we viewed trail ruts, noted DAR trail markers (including the Madonna of the Plains statue in Council Grove, KS), and read interpretive signs.
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| The Madonna of the Trail statue in Council Grove, Kansas. |
We got there in time to catch the tail end of what had apparently been a long presentation about the SFT, and the hardships faced by those who traversed it.
There were maybe a dozen people in the room, and I realized (by the clothes the women wore and the men’s beards) that most, perhaps all, of them were Mennonites.
The “speaker” was a local guy that had apparently done some on-line research and then typed it into a document that he had on his I-phone. He then projected the text of his report onto a screen while he read, verbatim, from the text on his phone.
Not long after we got there, he wrapped up his “presentation” by noting what a service the settlers in the area (including, apparently, his ancestors) had performed by exterminating the buffalo and running off the Indians; enabling the current residents to productively raise crops and livestock.
About this time, I smelled smoke and looked over to see that the speaker’s words and, especially, his presentation style had set Betsy’s hair on fire. Flames were shooting out of her nostrils. Fortunately, we were able to get out of the library without setting off any fire alarms and soon lowered the temperature with a root beer float at a Mennonite-run store just down the road.
We spent the night in Dodge City, KS, a surprisingly bustling city that was founded as a railroad town several years after the SFT’s eastern terminus had moved further west.
The next morning, we had a decision to make. Just west of Dodge City, the SFT split into a Mountain/Wet Route that followed the Arkansas River into what is now southeastern Colorado, or the Cimmaron Cutoff/Dry Route that took a more direct (shorter) path to Santa Fe across the high plains of eastern New Mexico and a section of the Oklahoma Panhandle.
Travelers on the SFT had to make that same decision. And, more often than not, they chose the route we chose; the shorter and more direct Cimmaron Cutoff (so named because it left the Arkansas River at the tiny hamlet of Cimmaron, about 15 miles west of Dodge City).
The appeal of the Mountain Route was that it had plenty of water. The downsides were twofold; it was longer, and it required going over mountains, in particular Raton Pass.
The Cimmaron Cutoff was shorter, flatter and faster. The downsides were more Indians and less water.
We didn’t have to worry about either, so taking the Cimarron Cutoff was a no-brainer for us.
A highlight of the second day was a stop at Autograph Rock in the corner of the Oklahoma Panhandle. In my pre-trip research, I stumbled across some information about obtaining permission and directions to the site from a museum in Boise City, OK.
Autograph Rock is about 20 miles northwest of Boise City; a long, smooth sandstone cliff where many generations have carved their names. Some of those names are relatively recent but a good many of them were travelers on the SFT where the cliff became a favorite stopping point and landmark.
Another key stop for us on the second day was Fort Union National Monument, a new NPS site for both of us! More importantly, the gift shop had copious amounts of SFT bicentennial swag, including a coffee cup, a refrigerator magnet, and a pint glass!
Fort Union sits at the western junction of the Mountain and Cimmaron Routes and played a significant role in supplying SFT travelers and protecting them from Indian attacks in the latter half of the trail’s life.
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| The ruins of Fort Union on the high plains of New Mexico, near where the Cimmaron and Mountain Routes of the SFT converged. |
We were now only about an hour out of Santa Fe, but getting there took us much of the day because we stopped at the very interesting Pecos National Historical Park (checking off yet another new NPS site; Betsy is now at 268 and I’m at 297).
Pecos NHP is significant for many reasons including as a home to many Ancestral Pueblo people. Some remnants of the pueblos remain, and we took an excellent tour of the ruins with a park ranger.
The SFT passed right through the present-day park and an important Civil War battle was fought nearby. In 1941 Texas oilman Buddy Fogelson purchased a ranch that included the pueblo ruins and, soon after, married the actress Greer Garson.
The couple were later instrumental in the creation of the national park, donating the money for the visitor center and, after they died, the 5,500-acre ranch. Thus we were also able to take an excellent, ranger-led tour of the ranch house where Fogelson and Garson lived.
Finally, we passed through Glorieta Pass and into Santa Fe; trekking the final half-mile to the plaza on foot to complete the ENTIRE Santa Fe Trail!
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| The final miles into Santa Fe were tough... |
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| ...but the trail was well-marked. |
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| And we made it! |
Observations on the impact of Covid
We lucked out, Covid-wise, because we caught the window between post-vaccination euphoria and pre-Delta reality. Thus, things were more open than they’re likely to be anytime this year.
However, there did seem to be some glaring discrepancies as we traveled from place to place.
Buena Vista has been hopping all summer, busier than ever. Chicago, however, seemed quieter than normal (although, admittedly, we may not be familiar enough with “normal” to make a good judgement). The White Sox game was packed but it seemed like a lot of retail businesses, restaurants especially, were struggling.
Independence definitely seemed to be Covid-impacted. As mentioned earlier the National Trails Museum was closed because they lost their staff and hadn’t been able to replace them, tours were not allowed inside the Truman house, and the NPS visitor center was closed. One night we walked down to the town square to eat at a restaurant the hotel owner recommended. The restaurant's posted closing time was 8 p.m., but when we walked in about 7:30 they refused to serve us, saying they were understaffed and closing early. We went back the next night, at 7 p.m., and they made a concerted effort to be nice to us, but they only had one waiter and the place was pretty quiet. The food and the service were good, so we’re glad we gave them a second chance.
The Holiday Inn Express where we stayed in Dodge City was completely full. When we walked in there was nobody at the front desk and no staff anywhere in sight. After five minutes or so we used a phone at the desk to call an "emergency" number posted on a placard. The woman that answered the phone was apparently somewhere in the hotel cleaning a room or doing laundry. After another five or ten minutes, she finally came down on the elevator to check us in.
Las Vegas (a city that has been losing population since 1980) was completely dead. After the desk clerk at the hotel informed me their coffee bar was closed on Mondays, he recommended a coffee shop across the plaza. When I walked over to the shop there was a sign in the window that said they'd gone out of business.
Santa Fe was the exact opposite; people were everywhere and there were lines out the door at every restaurant.
Suffice to say, the economic impacts of Covid seem to have been unevenly distributed.
[i] In the early 1900s the Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned 12 identical statues of a “pioneer woman” (purportedly in search of her husband) carrying a baby in one arm and a rifle in another, with a toddler at her side. The statues were placed in each of the 12 states that contain a section of the National Old Trail Road, a coast-to-coast auto route that (more or less) follows the routes of the National (Cumberland) Road and the Santa Fe Trail, and then on to California. Three of the Madonna statues were placed on the SFT section of the NOTR; the one in Lexington, MO, one in Council Grove, KS, and one in Lamar, CO (on the SFT’s Mountain Route). New Mexico’s statue was supposed to be placed, logically, in the center of the plaza in Santa Fe. However, Santa Feans protested that the statue did not fit with the town’s indigenous and Hispanic heritage (this is in 1928, mind you). Writer Mary Austin gave an impassioned speech and reportedly kicked Harry Truman in the knees. (Truman is said to have had a significant role in determining the locations of the 12 statues). Eventually, the DAR gave up on the Santa Fe Plaza location and placed New Mexico’s Madonna statue in Albuquerque. All 12 Madonnas are still standing in the cities where they were originally placed, although some have been moved a short distance from their original sites to accommodate roadway expansions, etc.
[ii] Independence also became the seat of government for Jackson County. Today the main courthouse for the county is in downtown Kansas City but, when Truman served as a county commissioner, the courthouse was on the square in Independence, and he walked the 10 blocks to work; the same 10 blocks that we walked to restaurants on the square during our stay.
[iii] There is a school of thought that Becknell got the idea for his route from Missouri to Santa Fe by reading the journal of explorer Zebulon Pike, which was published in 1810. It’s also widely believed that much of Pike’s information about the route came from his association with a Lieutenant in the Spanish army named Facundo Melgares. In 1806 Melgares led a Santa Fe-based, 600-man force in exploration of what is now Kansas and Nebraska. At the very same time, Pike was leading a 20-man party in exploration of what is now Kansas and Colorado. In fact, the Pike Expedition, following the Arkansas River (accidentally) to its headwaters near Leadville, passed through present-day Buena Vista in the winter of 1806-07. However, not too long after passing through BV, Pike’s journey took an abrupt turn when he and what was left of his group were arrested for trespassing in Spanish territory near present-day Alamosa, CO. Pike had become lost; thinking he was at the headwaters of the Red River when in fact he was at the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The Americans were jailed in Santa Fe where Melgares was, for a time, Pike’s guard. The two men became friends and traded information about their respective travels across the Great Plains. Pike included much of the information he gleaned from Melgares in his journal. And that is, perhaps, where Becknell got the idea for his wagon route from Missouri to Santa Fe. Meanwhile, back in Santa Fe, Melgares had risen in the ranks to become governor of the New Mexico territory under Spanish rule and was somehow able to keep the job under the new Mexican regime. Thus, Melgares was on hand to personally greet Becknell on the Plaza when he arrived there in 1821. Had Becknell arrived just a few months earlier, he may have also been jailed for trespassing, just like Pike. Good timing, and small world, huh?
[iv] From 1883 to 1929 Steel magnet turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie provided funding for the construction of 2,509 libraries in more than a dozen countries, 1,689 of them in the U.S.
