Cottonwood Cathedral

 

Cottonwood gallery near Gothenburg, Nebraska

When my flight from Seattle was descending into Denver International Airport my first thought was, “Where are the trees?”  You could see how the early homesteaders must have cherished the sight of trees — most often cottonwoods lining river and stream banks — as they travelled across the plains of Nebraska and Colorado because the landscape is so empty of trees.

Colorado landscape with cottonwoods

When I spotted this magnificent gallery of cottonwood trees arching over a road near Gothenburg, Nebraska along I-80, I couldn’t resist the urge to stop for photographs.  The over-arching branches created a vault like the interior of a cathedral.  Awesome!

 

Carhenge: Another Roadside Attraction

 

Carhenge near Alliance, Nebraska

Like many roadside attractions in America, Carhenge appears to be a case of “If you build it, they will come.”  This art installation by Jim Reinders is a replica of Stonehenge with old cars standing in for monoliths.  A bit of whimsy on the edge of the sandhills of Nebraska.

Somehow being at this imaginative, quirky place inspired a playful mood.  My sister-in-law and I pulled out our iPads and used the Photo Booth app to exaggerate the odd quality of the art installation.  We laughed and laughed.

Carhenge with Twirl effect

Carhenge with X-Ray effect

Unhinged at Carhenge

 

 

 

Tumbleweeds

 

Kochia tumbleweed caught on fence, along I-80 in Nebraska

“[F]rom the point of view of humans, the tumbleweed’s main function is poetic.  They roll and bounce on the wind, they fly through the air like half-filled weather balloons, they pile up in throngs against fences and buildings.”
—  Ian Frazier

Tumbleweeds caught on a fence in Nebraska

Kochia tumbleweed with shadow

Tumbleweed piles up along fence

It was very windy in Nebraska, so it was no surprise that we saw tumbleweeds bound across the land as we drove along I-80.    They made me smile, and I soon was silently humming the drifting tumbleweeds song that I must have heard on the radio when I was a child.

“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” lyrics by Marty Robbins

I’m a roaming cowboy riding all day long,
Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song.
Nights underneath the prairie moon,
I ride along and sing this tune.

See them tumbling down
Pledging their love to the ground
Lonely but free I’ll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Cares of the past are behind
Nowhere to go but I’ll find
Just where the trail will wind
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

I know when night has gone
That a new world’s born at dawn.

I’ll keep rolling along
Deep in my heart is a song
Here on the range I belong
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Driving Nebraska

Sunrise near Kearney, Nebraska

Nebraska is flat!  I was struck by the wide open landscape and the dearth of trees.  You could understand why early settlers resorted to building sod houses, for wood is scarce.  When we saw trees,  often cottonwoods,  it signaled a river or natural water source.

Nebraska landscape along I-80

The Great Platte River Road

Sun halo (sun dog) we saw at a rest stop along I-80

Huge fields with nary a farmhouse in sight

Irrigation machinery

A whimsical Nebraska practice — capping fence posts with old, discarded boots

Power lines across the Nebraska landscape, near sunrise

Nearing sunrise, Nebraska

When we left Kearney, we drove north and west through the sandhills of Nebraska.  This is the mid-grass prairie, but the grass grows in clumps rather than in waving expanses, on undulating low hills.  It is range country.  I was surprised to see windmills dotting the range every couple of miles.  I was also surprised at the hundreds of ponds and rainwater basins dotting the land, many with sapphire blue water.

Sandhills (with pronghorn)

Horse with cottonwoods

The ubiquitous windmill

Sandhill region of Nebraska

I had not seen such natural blue water since Crater Lake.

Train tracks (We saw so many trains carrying coal — I counted 120 coal cars on one train.)

 

 

 

 

Sandhill Cranes Described Poetically

“The blood-red head bows and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction.”
— Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

Watercolor sketch of sandhill crane

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.  The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.”
— Also Leopold, from “Marshland Elegy,” A Sand County Almanac

Their beauty may lie beyond words, but as I was reading about sandhill cranes in preparation for my trip to Nebraska, I came across so many wonderfully descriptive and poetic passages by expert writers.  Sometimes the writing was as lyrical and beautiful as the physical birds.  While I was crane watching, it was rewarding to overlay my observations with these writers’ words.

” . . . in the faint light of the new day, I could see cranes downriver, emerging from the water like the pilings of some abandoned, improbable ruin.”
— Paul Gruchow, “The Nebraska Sandhills: The Flight of Cranes,” from The Necessity of Empty Places

Early morning on the Platte River; view from a blind at the Rowe Sanctuary

“The cranes stood like a congregation in the shallows of the river.  I could see their long necks now, could watch them stalk about as if on tiptoe, could observe them stretching and settling their wings.  Already some of their brethren from the sandbar farther south had taken flight, heading from the river to the fields nearby to feed for the day.  They showed the characteristic profile of the cranes, necks straight out, legs tucked in, feet trailing behind like rudders.”
— Paul Gruchow, “The Nebraska Sandhills: The Flight of Cranes,” from The Necessity of Empty Places

“Into this single field were crowded tens of thousands of cranes, standing in gray ranks like weathered corn. . . . Hundreds more were landing every minute, planing down at a shallow angle, bugling and calling.  When an especially large flock would begin its approach, the clamor was almost deafening, as the incoming birds sideslipped and tumbled like falling leaves, spilling air from their wings, then straightening out an instant before impact and thumping down, one after another.”
— Scott Weidensaul, Living on the Wind:  Across the Hemisphere with Migrating Birds

Morning dawns accompanied by the unbroken clamor of the cranes.

“At the rim of the horizon, the sky began to lighten.  The sound of the birds was hauling up the curtain of the day.”
— Paul Gruchow, “The Nebraska Sandhills: The Flight of Cranes,” from The Necessity of Empty Places

” . . . the primeval sound rushed in, halfway between a croak and a song, the music of dry bones rattling.  It surged and fell in a regular rhythm, like waves of water washing against a shore. . . . The sound of the sandhill cranes is like the roaring of the sea in a conch shell; when you have finally heard it, you recognize that you have always known it.  It is like the cry of a loon or the howling of wolves or the warning rattle of a snake, an article in the universal language.”
— Paul Gruchow, “The Nebraska Sandhills: The Flight of Cranes,” from The Necessity of Empty Places

“Crane chorusing can only remind one of listening to an amateur performance of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ as chaotically sung by a vast assemblage of tone-deaf but enthusiastic lovers of fine music.”
— Paul A. Johnsgard, Sandhill and Whooping Cranes:  Ancient Voices Over America’s Wetlands

“The thousands of cranes . . . rose into the air as one body, the force of their wings sounding against the weight of the air like the rolling of a thousand snare drums.”
— Paul Gruchow, “The Nebraska Sandhills: The Flight of Cranes,” from The Necessity of Empty Places

Watercolor sketch of sandhill crane shortly after taking to the air

“The daily return of the cranes to the [Platte] river near sunset is not so much a sudden explosion as a gradual build-up of tension and beauty, in a manner resembling Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’  As the western skies redden, the cranes fly up and down the river, calling with gradually increasing urgency, evidently trying to decide where they might safely spend the night. . . . The decision to land is finally made by a few adventuresome souls, and the rest of the birds tumble in behind, all calling at the tops of their lungs.”
— Paul A. Johnsgard, Sandhill and Whooping Cranes:  Ancient Voices Over America’s Wetlands

“A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.”
— Archibald MacLeish, from “Ars Poetica”

 

 

Old Farms, Abandoned

Abandoned farmhouse with swing set

Window, abandoned farmhouse

Steps to cellar

Barn ruin

 

“Abandoned Farmhouse”
by Ted Kooser, from Flying at Night: Poems 1965 – 1985

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard.  Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child?  Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm — a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls.  Something went wrong, they say.

 

Crane Viewing at Sunrise on the Platte River

Cranes at dawn from the blind at the Rowe Sanctuary

Sandhill cranes on the Platte River at sunrise

“Soon after the sun fires the horizon, the crane armies rise in stupendous celebration, crossing the black winter trees along the river . . . . an exaltation of life . . . when the sandhills rose in thunder, swirling and climbing and parting into wisps and strands in the fiery suffusions of the sunrise.”  — Peter Matthiessen, The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes

Yesterday morning we got up at 4:30 a.m. to drive in the dark to the Rowe Sanctuary, where we had reserved space in one of their blinds on the Platte River.  We waited as quietly as possible for the sunrise, and then saw the cranes come to life.  They left the river in small groups, headed for the corn fields and their day of fattening up.

This was definitely a multi-sensory experience.  The cranes vocalized nonstop from our arrival before dawn.  Thousands of crane voices, rising to the new day.  Wonderful.

 

Armchair America: Nebraska through Books

Vintage postcard of Nebraska

“The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.”
—  Willa Cather, My Antonia

I decided to stray from my alphabetical journey across America through books.  Having read my way through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas, today I am making a detour to Nebraska in preparation for an upcoming trip to see the sandhill crane migration along the Platte River.

I can remember traveling to Nebraska only once before on a car trip with my parents.  We drove from Minnesota to Colorado, and the one memory I have of Nebraska is that it was flat, seemingly endless, and rather boring.  The Willa Cather quote that opens this post gave me a chuckle because it resonated with my recollection of the state.

Map of Nebraska

Vintage postcard

I consulted with Rita, a reference librarian at the Kearney Public Library, for book recommendations for my pre-trip reading.  I asked for books by Nebraska authors or books that take place in Nebraska.  Here is the list of suggestions from this local expert:

Adult Fiction:

• Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• Any of the Alex Kava mysteries
• Any of Willa Cather’s novels, but especially O Pioneers and My Antonia.  Cather was born in Virginia but moved to Nebraska when she was 9 years old.  She graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Adult Nonfiction:

• Any books by Paul Johnsgard, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an internationally renowned ornithologist and crane expert
• The Great Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline via Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie by Merrill Mattes
• A Prairie Mosaic by Steven Rothenberger and Susanne George-Bloomfield
• The Platte River: An Atlas of the Big Bend Region by Allan Jenkins
• The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley

Juvenile:

• Have You Seen Mary by Jeff Kurrus
• The Nebraska Adventure by Jean Lukesh

Nebraska Photographers:

• Michael Forsberg  (My library has one of Forsberg’s books, Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild, but unfortunately it was checked out by another patron, and I was not able to read it before my trip.  I did look at his online photographs, however.  Spectacular!
• Solomon Butcher (including Sod Walls: The Story of the Nebraska Sod House and Photographing the American Dream)

Nebraska Poets:

• Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004 – 2006
• Twyla Hansen, Nebraska’s current Poet Laureate

And these are the books I actually read on my armchair travels to Nebraska:

Adult Fiction:

My Antonia by Willa Cather.  This novel is told through the voice of Jim Quayle Burden, who at age 10 becomes orphaned and is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska.  Antonia is the daughter of immigrants who homestead on a neighboring farm.  Even after Jim and his grandparents move to town, he keeps in touch with Antonia while he goes to high school.  Antonia moves to town, too, as a “working out” girl, hired as a housekeeper for a town family.  She runs away to get married, but is abandoned unmarried and with child.

Eventually Jim moves away for college and law school, and 20 years later he returns for a visit.  He finds Antonia — who had returned in disgrace — now married, mother to a houseful of kids, living a hard-working life on a farm. . . but joyful and filled with life and strong ties to the land.  She says, “I like to be where I know every stick and tree, and where all the ground is friendly.  I want to live and die here.”

Jim gives some vivid descriptions of the Nebraska landscape of his childhood:  “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased . . .”  And he also felt ” . . . buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate:  burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvest; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron.”

Jim lived in a wooden, not sod, house with a windmill, sunflower-bordered roads, with rattlesnakes, and shaggy red grass “as far as the eye could reach.”  It was a wide open landscape.  “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. . . . And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.”

And the sunsets were glorious:  “The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.  That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending. . . It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.  The protagonist of this novel, Alexandra Bergson, is the daughter of Swedish immigrants homesteading in Nebraska.  She is the strongest, smartest, and most industrious of her parents’ children, so when her father dies, Alexandra takes over the farm.  With her smart business sense, she risks going into debt to expand the family’s holdings against the reluctance of her more staid brothers.  Years later, the brothers have been set up on land of their own, and Alexandra is one of the wealthiest farmers in the area.

Cather depicts the challenges and hardships of farming on the prairie.  “Our lives are like the years, all made up of weather and crops and cows.”  And she also shows the dark side of relationships turned sour, lonely souls, and unrequited love.

Echo Maker by Richard Powers.  This novel explores the mysteries of the brain.  Mark suffers brain damage from an accident, and when he starts recovering, he believes that his sister Karen is an imposter, that someone is impersonating her.  Meanwhile he is also trying to recover his memories of the accident — where were his friends that night?  Was someone in the truck with him?

The backdrop for this novel is the sandhill crane habitat near Kearney, a seemingly wide open landscape, but really one with dark secrets.  “She felt all over again, as she had as a child, the vicious treelessness of this place.  Not a scrap of cover in sight.  Do anything at all, and God would spy you out.”

“It seemed to him, as he drove, one of the last places left in the country where you would have to face down the conflicts of your own soul, stripped of all packaging.”

When those secrets are lifted to the light of day, the confusion over Mark’s accident starts to lift, too.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.  This young adult novel by an Omaha author was one of my favorites.  It is a story of first love, a universal theme that really could have taken place anywhere.  I was drawn to Eleanor, who feels herself something of a misfit after moving to a new school midway through her high school experience.  She is subject to bullying at the school, but is also struggling with an abusive stepfather.  Her slowly evolving friendship with Park and budding love give her strength to persevere through life’s challenges.  The writing is excellent and the relationship feels authentic.

A Perfect Evil by Alex Kava.  This is the first in a series of eleven novels about FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell.  And although this book is by a Nebraska writer, the Nebraska setting is not essential to the story.  Maggie is called to assist the sheriff of Platte City, Nick Morrelli, in solving the murders of three boys.  The murder’s identity is pretty clear about one third of the way through the book, but there is a twist at the end and some loose ends that I imagine are designed to keep readers interested in the next books in the series.  Alas, I will not be one of those readers!

Adult Nonfiction:

Map showing the trails west along the Platte River from Platte River Narratives by Merrill J. Mattes

Happy as a Big Sunflower:  Adventures in the West, 1876 – 1880 by Rolf Johnson.  This is the diary of a man who, at age 20, emigrated with his parents and siblings to Nebraska.  They were part of a group of families of Swedish descent who travelled by train to Kearney and then by wagon to Phelps County to establish homesteads.   Included are some descriptions of the Nebraska landscape:  “Leaving Omaha we soon crossed the Elkhorn and found ourselves on the plains, which stretched away to the horizon, a treeless waste covered with brown and russet wild grass. . . . Occasionally a stream with a fringe of trees along the banks broke the monotony of the scene.”

Later in summer, Johnson talks about a walk amidst the sandhills:  “We had a pleasant walk over the prairie, which is carpeted with a soft velvety coat of buffalo grass and many varieties of prairie flowers.

From the top of one of the hills we had a fine view of the surrounding country.  To the east stretched a thousand hills with green grass; to the north the broad valley of the Platte, with the river like a  belt of silver with its emerald isles. . . ”

Conditions in the early days were very harsh and uncomfortable.  They first arrived in March, and March in the prairie was still unforgiving winter:  “A snow storm is now raging the like of which I have never seen before.  The snow is falling about with its blinding force and it is about as much as a man’s life is worth to go out to the well after a bucket of water.”

“Last evening we had to bring the horses into the house for fear they’d perish outside and they kept stamping overhead all night so we could not sleep, fearing they would come through the floor.”

“A snow storm has been raging all day and we have been crowded into the dark cellar like so many rats in a hole.”

Some of the new settlers lived in a dugout, “which is partly a cave and partly built of log and mud.  They are perched here and there on the steep banks and hidden away in crevices like so many swallows nests.”  Others lived in sod houses.  Johnson describes how to build a sod house starting with breaking sod with a plow and cutting it into bricks about 12 inches long and 4 inches wide.  The walls on his family’s sod house were two feet thick, enclosing an interior 16 x 21 feet.   “Building sod houses, especially when the wind blows, is not quite as pleasant as being out buggy riding with a girl.  One’s nose, eyes, mouth, ears, and hair gets full of loose dirt.  OK! its bad!”

Johnson writes about other challenges of homesteading in Nebraska:  mishaps with oxen, equipment breakdowns, losing crops to grasshoppers, prairie fires, encounters with rattle snakes, the drought.  “Sadly in want of rain.  The ground is so dry and hard it is almost impossible to plow.”  Sometimes they scavenged buffalo bones to sell at $6 a ton for needed cash.

Still, it was a surprisingly social place, especially for a young single man.  Johnson talked about breaking bees (similar to quilting bees but gathered for the purpose of breaking the sod prairie), hiring out during harvest times, going on a buffalo hunt, and visiting friends.

All in all, the diary entries paint a realistic picture of Nebraska life during the homestead years.  A nice pairing with Cather’s novels.

An Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature by Loren Eiseley.  Eiseley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and he writes as a naturalist and anthropologist.  He discusses how scientists and philosophers place man in the evolutionary scheme of things.  And he muses about how the development of consciousness in humans fits with the succession of life on this planet.  He believes that the rapidity of change in the human brain, a surge in growth, seems to be a unique modification and adaptation story in history:  “In the first year of life, its brain trebles in size.  It is this peculiar leap, unlike anything else we know in the animal world, which gives to man his uniquely human qualities.”

I like how Eiseley wove personal stories into his more scholarly essays.  Here he describes the Platte River:  “As it leaves the Rockies and moves downward over the high plains towards the Missouri, the Platte River is a curious stream.  In the spring floods, on occasion, it can be a mile-wide roaring torrent of destruction, gulping farms and bridges.  Normally, however, it is a rambling, dispersed series of streamlets flowing erratically over great sand and gravel fans that are, in part, the remnants of a mightier Ice Age stream bed.  Quicksands and shifting islands haunt its waters.”  And here is the Platt River in winter:  “The land was stark and ice-locked.  The rivulets were frozen, and over the marshlands the willow thickets made such an array of vertical lines against the snow that tramping through them produced strange optical illusions and dizziness.”

I will soon be seeing the Platte River in winter, and I am curious to see how it compares today to Eiseley’s experience of it.

Flying at Night:  Poems 1965 – 1985 by Ted Kooser.  I liked quite a few of the poems in this collection because the images of farmhouses, Midwestern folk, and the countryside rang true to my memories of growing up on a farm in Minnesota.  Here is one of Kooser’s poems about his state:

“So This Is Nebraska”

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska.  A Sunday
afternoon; July.  Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind the shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to.  You feel like

waving.  You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around the road.  You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Quite serendipitously, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac posted another of Kooser’s poems a week before my Nebraska trip.  I could see myself in this particular poem:

“A Person of Limited Palette”
by Ted Kooser, from Splitting an Order. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014

I would love to have lived out my years
in a cottage a few blocks from the sea,
and to have spent my mornings painting
out in the cold, wet rocks, to be known
as “a local artist,” a pleasant old man
who “paints passably well, in a traditional
manner,” though a person of limited
talent, of limited palette: earth tones
and predictable blues, snap-brim cloth cap
and cardigan, baggy old trousers
and comfortable shoes, but none of this
shall come to pass, for every day
the possibilities grow fewer, like swallows
in autumn. If you should come looking
for me, you’ll find me here, in Nebraska,
thirty miles south of the broad Platte River,
right under the flyway of dreams.

Juvenile:

Photo by Solomon Butcher from Prairie Visions

Photo by Solomon Butcher from Prairie Visions

Prairie Visions: The Life and Times of Solomon Butcher by Pam Conrad.  This book introduced me to Solomon Butcher, a photographer who took pictures of Nebraska pioneers.  The typical setting was outdoors in natural light, in front of a sod home, and including some prized possessions (a piano in one photo!), all designed to show “people set in the drama of their everyday lives.”  Butcher was considered lazy by some of the hard-working settlers because he simply could not settle into homesteading.  Instead he worked odd jobs and set up a photo gallery so that newcomers — farmers and their families — could get portraits to send back to relatives back East.  In 1886 he started a dream project to document the history of Custer County, Nebraska.  He spent 7+ years on the road with a wagon and supplies and took over 1500 photos and collected stories and biographies.  Then his home caught fire and he lost all the narratives.  Thankfully his glass plate negatives were safe in an out building.  Butcher had to start over, reconstructing the text.  Thanks to the patronage of Ephram Swain, his work was compiled into a book that was published in 1901:  Pioneer History of Custer County, Nebraska.

Because this is juvenile nonfiction, the life of Solomon Butcher is described in a very accessible way.  We learn about the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres of land free to any adult, citizen, head of household provided they paid an upfront filing fee of $14, built a home on the land (a shack would do), made improvements to the land in the first 6 months, and lived there for five years.  They proved up after five years by paying the remaining $4 of the filing fee and providing testimonials of two witnesses.  Still, many claims were abandoned because the settlers were ill prepared or ill equipped to be farmers, or the conditions were too harsh.

We also learn about sod houses, which were cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  But the roofs leaked, snakes and small animals lived in the walls, and mud fell from the ceiling.

I was also interested to learn that there were black settlers who took advantage of the Homestead Act after the Civil War.

Conrad includes some of Butcher’s pioneer narratives in this book, including the story of a dead frog in a coffeepot, a book-smart judge who carried water for two miles through 2 feet of snow, and a hotel where 15 men slept in one room with six blankets.

The next state on my armchair travels:  California