The Mother Road, Tucumcari

 The Louisville school, now closed.

 A final flower for Sadie. With it is an antique washboard we brought to represent a few of the things they took on their wagon train. Some substitutions were necessary. Instead of bags of flour, for instance, we took Oreo cookies. It was a splendid compromise.

The IOOF lodge in Louisville, slowly succumbing to the encroaching woods.

VI. The unwritten

       Anyone who has ever kept or attempted to keep a diary knows the utter hopelessness of recording a life fully. Whether consciously or unconsciously details are left out, incidents overlooked, emotions ruled unfit for disclosure or posterity, and every word, every sentence, weighed, judged and critiqued by the most damning of judges—our own internal censor. Most of our daily activities are so boring and tedious anyway that it isn’t worth the paper, the ink or, in this modern age, the hard drive space to even make the attempt. Time constraints are also a limiting factor. Best to record details representative of the day, the incidents and thoughts that propel our story forward, and leave it at that.

After 40 years of keeping a more-or-less daily journal, that’s my theory, anyway. Mark Twain would undoubtedly disagree. “An autobiography that leaves out the little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of a man’s life at all,” he wrote. “His life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.” Maybe so, but as he set about to write his autobiography Twain’s opinion evolved under the difficulties of maintaining a coherent timeline. He finally traded linearity for spontaneity which certainly worked for him. 

But as with all personal diaries, what’s left out often carries more weight than what’s included, especially if something is alluded to. Sadie’s short diary is no exception. On the third day out after a good night’s sleep the reborn mule was so eager to depart that when given the reins it almost jerked her from the wagon. Another mule managed to get tangled under a wheel and had to be extracted. It’s impossible to read her writing without sensing a rank amateurishness tainting their every move. I’ve often wondered if they were surprised each evening to have made it as far as they had. 

The zinger comes midway through her first paragraph, obviously written early in the morning. “All are well but me,” she wrote. “This trip does not agree with me.” 

Followed by—explanations? guesses? details? Only an allusion to something that probably happened the previous day: “We did not get stuck today.”

Either she didn’t know or didn’t want known that she was four months pregnant. It’s an odd thing to omit but she must have had her reasons.  

The resurrected mule’s energy was needed for the first hill, steep enough that Sadie made a reference to it and, by my reckoning, almost certainly identifying their camping spot. When they reached Westmoreland two miles away Charles Jewell left to get his $18 horse shod. “This is a fine day and nice town,” Sadie wrote, with a pointed “We are still waiting.” While they still waited Fred Vail fashioned a shoe out of oil cloth for their dog which was almost lame. According to Sadie it refused to ride in the wagon, perhaps in self-preservation. 

While not geographically true (and not far off, either) it could be said that Westmoreland is the true northern gateway to the Flint Hills. So named by Zebulon Pike in 1806, the Flint Hills encompass the largest intact tallgrass prairie in the world thanks to its underlying limestone chert that made farming all but impossible. Designated internationally as a distinct ecoregion with its own biodiversity, the region stretches in a narrow band from Marshall County in the north to upper Oklahoma. The rolling grassy hills crenellated with pale limestone outcrops resemble nothing more than the surge and swell of the seas that once covered the land during the Permian Period 250 million years ago. Early explorers wrote of bluestem grass reaching to their saddles and of having to outrun wildfires.

Considerably tamed since then, the Flint Hills are still a wild and haunting place, scarcely settled except for the occasional small town or isolated ranch unless one counts the abundant cows. Then as now the road undulated as they headed due south, more prairie than woods and the sky its own exalted presence. Once underway they left Westmoreland and crossed Rock Creek whose rocky bottom once provided safe passage to wagons along the Oregon Trail. Nearby Scott Spring was a popular camping ground for its fresh water and grassy meadows, now a small historical park. An unmarked cholera cemetery was partially unearthed when road crews laid Highway 99, creating unexpected delays while an archaeological survey located graves. Several were moved to the west side of the highway with a marker to note their presence.

The storm clouds building to the east evaporated into a blank haze. We pushed on down 99 cognizant of our departure from Sadie’s trail but hoping to make up some time. Recreating their exact route was never possible nor was I too concerned about an area I knew fairly well, and there was also the matter of what I call the Topeka Vortex, the great sucking gravitational maw of the region’s most populous city. The real adventure would come after we escaped its clutches somewhere to the south, and until then traffic would only build exponentially.

For a while Sadie walked beside the wagon. The wind blew fiercely snapping the canvas rigging and kicking up dust. “I have wore Fred’s cap all day to keep the hair out of my eyes,” she wrote that evening. The convoy passed through Louisville, a small town a few miles north of Wamego. Not much is left but a few hundred people, the downtown business district (such as it is) shuttered and empty as was the old two-story limestone school and the nearby I.O.O.F. lodge. The east side of the town borders heavy deciduous woods dark with shadows and a green creeper crept up the stone façade of the adjoining lodge. Within those shadows lurked rusted hulks of ancient automobiles and crumbling walls of former houses. Fifty years from now the remainder of the town will probably have succumbed to the forest’s relentless march.

A few miles more and they camped for the night. “The wind blew so hard I could hardly get dinner,” Sadie wrote. “We are three miles from Wamego, Kans. I am so sick I can’t hardly hold my head up tonight.”

And here was the last of the day’s unwritten gaps, intentional perhaps but hinting at a more expansive tale. Footsore, weary, suffering from an unnamed illness that left her reeling and a gale that might have seemed personal for its intensity, she managed to cook supper and feed her family. A few quick words jotted into her diary and she was finished: “I will go to bed now.”

Maybe as an aside or maybe as a snide comment, Sadie managed one last sentence. “Fred has piled up the dishes,” she wrote. I imagine them constrained by the era’s gender-specific roles, the man doing the manly roles and the women the womanly roles and never the twain transitioning into true equality. Fred put aside the dishes; he would wash them come morning, or leave them for her, but either way they would get done. Maybe it was just a matter of practicality, the late night, the miles long and steep, the battering by wind and dust and the ordeal of a journey they were undoubtedly ill-prepared to undertake. What came to me as we whipped past fields encroached by two-acre ranchettes each with its own cookie-cutter house was an image of night falling on the campsite, a tiny flicker of flame and the acrid aroma of woodsmoke, the pale shadows of wagons and sleeping livestock cast by the limitless stars ephemeral impressions against the prairie. Fred slips between the blankets beside his wife and whispers a soft goodnight. “Tomorrow will be a better day,” he says, and snuffing the candle brings darkness down like a shroud. 

(To be continued)

Washington County Rodeo

The Way We Worked Project: Dan Gallagher at Musil Farms

V. The Lazarus mule

        “After a fine nights sleep in our wagons we feel fine and are now ready to travel at sun up,” Sadie wrote on the morning of Oct. 4, 1912.  “We breakfasted on flapjacks and coffee. Tasted good. Nothing disturbed us but a dog fight between our dog and Chambers dog.”

From Springside School the road slowly gained elevation in a shallow valley dotted with limestone houses and small farmsteads. A few of them remain, including one fine specimen with “Shehi” engraved above the front door. Shehis were just one branch of Lori’s genealogical backstory, settling the Spring Creek area north of Olsburg in the mid-to-late 1800s. The Herrmann side of her family settled in the Winkler area in northern Riley County, their two-story farmhouse nestled in a narrow cleft of a valley neatly bisected by miles of stone fences hemming in the fields. Few people realize how deep Kansas runs in Lori’s DNA. Because we hail from the mountainous West we’re considered outsiders, something the deceased Shehis, Herrmanns, Grabhorns, Vails, Reeds and others might dispute. 

Sadie probably passed the Shehi house before gaining higher ground with unbroken tallgrass prairie stretching to the horizon on either side. Somewhere between their starting point and the small town of Fostoria the “boys,” a term Sadie used for the three men, gathered some apples and corn for their noon meal. “We relish our meals I can tell you,” she wrote, perhaps all the more considering the fresh fruit was “hooked”—her description. While supplementing precious foodstuffs by accepting nature’s generous bounty was, historically speaking, inherent in wagon travel in the days of westward expansion, reaving remained less socially accepted, notably after Sherman’s march to the sea. This was the first recorded instance of plunder in Sadie’s diary but not the last; eventually the practice would catch up to them. 

The valley petered out a mile from the outskirts of Fostoria. The town never amounted to much, not then and certainly not now. Visiting it required a reason, whether because you lived there, knew someone who did, or were lost. It’s what we euphemistically call off-the-beaten-path but only barely, a mile from the main road to Wamego and I-70, a hundred yards from a secondary road to Manhattan. For all that it could be sited on the desolate steppes of Outer Mongolia. Like many other unincorporated rural towns—hamlet might be a more applicable description—there were no cafes or restaurants, no general stores or indeed merchants of any kind, no gas stations, no newspaper offices, no downtown, no sign of life on the few streets save a few dogs and a pair of curious horses peering over a stubby wooden fence. On any other occasion I might have just blown through with only a cursory glance for anything photographic or scenic but this time our goal was to record something at each landmark named by Sadie as a sort of visual memento. What appeared to be a former blacksmith shop sat empty on the main thoroughfare, one door cracked open as if in invitation. I was more interested in an old rusty pickup parked out front and forthwith applied the brakes. The light was't right but rarely is during road trips.

Fred and the two Charleses met a friend in Fostoria, Sadie wrote, so they probably took a short break to rest the horses and mules from the climb out of the Blue River Valley. Their afternoon was spent en route to Westmoreland, now a matter of minutes on a nice blacktop, then not so fast nor on a road so smooth. Even with the hard surface a traveler’s speed is checked by the verticality and convolution of the road. Any half-baked idea that Kansas is flat, boring and ugly is laid to rest on that short stretch. 

For Sadie and crew it was their first encounter with real hills, something of a shakedown to highlight their shortcomings. Her first impression, probably written during the day, spoke of “a few little hills,” later changed to “We had some awful hills to climb today.” Charles Jewell bought a black horse for $18 from a farmer they met on the road. The horse was big, beautiful and completely blind, something that apparently bothered Charles Jewell nary a whit. A trace of envy colored Sadie’s expressed wish that her and Fred’s team were larger, too. The steepness of the terrain made sure of that.

By the time they made camp two miles from Westmoreland they had traveled just shy of 10 miles, surely a testament to the lay of the land. I tried calculating that selfsame distance and settled on a deep valley bisected by a narrow stream, a shadowed stand of timber in the distance and the remains of a limestone house melting into the hillside. It was impossible to say with certainty that they camped there but it was equally impossible to argue that they hadn’t, so it worked for me. I saluted the valley with my coffee cup and continued on toward Westmoreland, the Pottawatomie County seat. 

While the women started supper the men unhitched the horses and mules,  turning them out to roll. One mule did just that and the other dropped as if poleaxed. “[It] died or we thought she was going to,” Sadie wrote. “We gathered around to see her breathe her last. She twitched and jerked and layed (sic) still. I was trying to plan some way to get back to Blue Rapids when up she jumped just as if she had been born again. We were all glad. I guess she is in her second youth now.”

When I relayed this to a historian friend who occasionally travels by covered wagon and mule, she snorted at my suggestion that the beast of burden had crossed the river Jordan, disliked what it found and reversed course for the promised land of Kansas. “It had colic,” she said, not a little smugly. 

Colic, she explained, is caused by changing feed too quickly, over-exertion, allowing overheated mules large quantities of water, and/or parasites. Mules with bad teeth tend to ingest coarse feed which could contribute to colic or indigestive symptoms. The act of rolling on the ground could also cause a kink in the intestine, usually fatal. Rather than my fanciful explanation, my friend diagnosed the death and resurrection on a kink in the intestine followed by a collapse which dislodged the kink, but not before the poor mule temporarily lost consciousness. It sounded too pat. To each his own, I thought. But there must have been a few tense minutes before the mule, colicky or reborn, leaped to its hooves and pranced about joyfully. 

“We had supper on chicken and gravy,” Sadie wrote with apparent satisfaction. “It was good.” 

And so it was. The mule was alive, and Arkansas still beckoned. 

(To be continued)

Blues, Brews and BBQ + Mainstreet + Marysville Poker Run