When it rains in Wyoming, it really rains. During the night the skies opened up and all the water in the world poured down upon Cheyenne, but the sound of rain pounding down on the world only lulls me into a deeper sleep, which will be a terrible survival instinct if the world ever ends that way. But when morning came the rain had stopped, and only a thick, low cloud remained, so low it was almost fog. Let me tell you, this does wonders for Wyoming. When you can’t see what’s out there beyond a few hundred feet away, it could be anything. It might not be endless, boring plains at all; I mean, how would you know?
Cheyenne became a town in 1867, the same year Canada became an independent nation. It was created by one General Grenville Dodge, who had just the previous year resigned from the military to become a railway engineer. Dodge helped choose the route of the Transcontinental Railroad, which is why he founded Cheyenne as a point for that railroad to pass through. He was also a congressman at this point, and owned shares in a railway contracting company that made a fortune both by building the railway and by manipulating the route to bring the railway through lands owned by the company’s investors. Good times.
The city is, of course, named after the Cheyenne Nation, one of the best known Native American tribes. The history of the relationship between the United States and the Native American tribes that lived in the west after American independence is a long and troublesome one. Just as troublesome, perhaps, is the fact that things started out so well with the Cheyenne.
In 1825 a US treaty commission visited the Cheyenne tribe as part of a broad effort to formalize relations with various native groups in the west. In part this resulted in a treaty between the Cheyenne and the United States, which vowed perpetual friendship between the two groups, acknowledged that the land of the west was formally part of the United States, and formalized trading routes. All was well.
But as Americans moved west to California, Oregon, or — in the case of Mormons — Utah, they brought diseases with them, and it is estimated that as much as half of the Cheyenne Nation was killed by cholera. More and more settlers moved through the region known as Indian Territory, and the US built roads to facilitate this travel, and then forts to guard the travellers on the roads, and then soldiers with weapons to man the forts. There was tension in the air, and to reduce it the United States created a new treaty in 1851, the Fort Laramie Treaty, which affirmed that the area now occupied by Colorado and Wyoming was the territory of the Cheyenne.
Yet conflict began anew in 1857 when, in retaliation for one of their warriors being wounded, the Cheyenne began to attack travellers on the roads. Negotiations were taking place to reduce hostilities, but the Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, ordered an attack by the military. If you know your American history, you may know that Floyd was a particularly incompetent Secretary of War who was suspected of trying to undermine the military in the north while over-supplying the military in the south just before the outbreak of the American Civil War, and who was also forced to resign after a scandal in which he was suspected of abusing his power for his own financial gain; during the Civil War he would go on to be a general with the South, and would lose a critical battle at Fort Donelson, the very same battle that catapulted future war leader and President Ulysses S. Grant to fame. At any rate, clearly Floyd was not an exceptional person, and his order to attack the Cheyenne must rank among the worst of his transgressions.
The result of this was that the Cheyenne and the American military fought for the very first time in the summer of 1857. Casualties were few, but Cheyenne camps and winter supplies were burned, and money and supplies that were part of the Fort Laramie Treaty were instead given to a different tribe. Tempers had grown bitter on both sides, and the worst was yet to come.
For several years after this first conflict there was an uneasy peace, and in 1861 the US made several Cheyenne leaders sign a new treaty that established a small reservation for the Cheyenne in what is now southeastern Colorado. In exchange, the Cheyenne would give up claim to all of the land that had been guaranteed to them in the Fort Laramie Treaty. If this sounds like a terrible deal to you, you aren’t the only one who thought so, as many Cheyenne refused to sign the treaty and continued to live in their treaty-guaranteed territory. But the United States wanted this territory now, and that made all the difference.
In 1864 a band of American militia slaughtered as many as 200 Cheyenne, most unarmed women and children, who were living under a truce banner. The event was known as the Sand Creek Massacre, and sparked war between the Cheyenne and the United States. Warriors of the tribe began to carry out raids and murders against Americans and Europeans in their territory, leading to an escalation of conflict that reached its peak with the infamous Lieutenant-Colonel George Custer.
In 1868, Custer and his troops identified a band of natives where several of the raiders were living. This band was led by a Cheyenne leader known as Black Kettle, who was one of the chief proponents for peace between the two sides; but he couldn’t control the actions of everyone who came to his band. Not one to worry about the baby when there was bathwater that needs throwing out, Custer attacked the entire band and killed more than 100 people, again many of them women and children.
When it came time to confront Custer once and for all in 1876, the Cheyenne took part and fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn with the Lakota and Sioux, killing Custer and most of his army, an event that shocked the sensibilities of decision-makers living in the east. The US military went all-out now to hunt down, capture, or kill every last Cheyenne in the west, and band after band surrendered and were forced at last to live in a reservation created in Montana. The days of the Cheyenne on the Great Plains of America were over.
None of this was on my mind that morning in the city that bears their name. In the way of all North Americans too modern to worry overmuch about the past, all I wanted was some food and some gas. Since the breakfast at the Super 8 was even less appetizing than that I’d faced the day before, I went for two birds with one stone and grabbed both food and gas at a nearby station. The very friendly young man behind the counter spoke with what I could definitely say was the first real Midwestern accent I’d heard on my trip. As I was leaving I heard him mention to someone else that I had been very soft-spoken. That’s something I get a lot.
Now, the shortest path between Cheyenne and Corpus Christi involves a trip through Denver, Colorado, but I didn’t want to take the exact same route both going and returning, so I had planned for my trip down to take just a little bit longer by shooting east into Nebraska and then driving down through Kansas and Oklahoma, just for a change of scenery. After the monotony of central Wyoming, I was beginning to think I might regret this, but it was too late to change my plans. Gassed and fooded up, I headed east.
I was pleasantly surprised by southern Nebraska. It’s not even that it wasn’t flat, because it was. It was very flat indeed. It’s just that for the first time on my trip I could look around me and think, wow, I am really and truly in the Great Plains now, that great glacier-crushed expanse of farmland and rolling vistas. The vistas on this particular morning were not rolling because of the fog that pressed in enough to only allow me visibility to about a thousand feet in any given direction. This added mystery to the plains, and I could let my mind wander and think about pronghorn and bison and days gone by. In addition I was looking at nice green grass instead of endless dirt and scrub as in central Wyoming. It made for a surprisingly enjoyable drive.
Also, I must say it somewhere so it might as well be here, I greatly appreciate the US interstate system. It’s fast and convenient, with food and gas at regular intervals. You never get stuck behind someone, and even when there’s road work they simply divert you into a single lane on the opposite side of the interstate so that you never need to stop. And the rest areas. Oh, the beautiful rest areas. We do have them in Canada, but they are far fewer than and not nearly as nice as the mostly modern, fully plumbed rest areas of the US interstates. Never did I have to struggle with a bursting bladder, scanning the horizon for the next gas station or even a reasonably large stand of bushes. I always knew where the next rest area would be, and it was always waiting there to accept both me and the contents of my bladder. Bless you, American rest areas. Bless you.
After passing a nice morning drive through southern Nebraska, I passed into the Central Time Zone and turned south around lunchtime, just before Lincoln, and headed into Kansas on Highway 81. This was the first part of my trip that wouldn’t be on an interstate — I would have needed to drive all the way around to Kansas City for that — but the traffic was light and it turned out that most of it was on divided highway anyway.
I’ve always wanted to drive through Kansas, and I’m not sure why. Everything I’d heard told me that it would be no great shakes, but something about that name, Kansas, speaks to me of the American bread basket. It’s where Dorothy Gale came from in the Oz books, it was hit by the dustbowl phenomenon during the Great Depression, and I have a book that I want to write someday that will be set in Kansas, so I simply needed to see it.
Once again I was pleasantly surprised. I drove through a mildly rolling country of green fields and farmhouses that was easy on the eye and didn’t bore me nearly so much as the dry, scrub-filled plains of central Wyoming had. This was a good land where people made a good life, and if there were churches and religious signs everywhere, well, to be honest I saw those almost everywhere I went on this trip. Kansas didn’t stick out. It was just another thumb on the great American religious hand.
Something I try to do when I go on trips is obtain those free state maps that they hand out in visitor centres. I had found one for Wyoming, but hadn’t been able to find an open visitor centre in Nebraska. It wasn’t for lack of trying, you understand. At one point a sign pointed me off the interstate to a visitor centre, and I followed it but couldn’t find the centre. At another point a similar sign promised me my map, but when I reached the place it was an old, dusty looking train locomotive sitting in a parking lot with the door padlocked, the sort of place where crazy people wait to murder map-seeking Canadian tourists. I was on a schedule, and I had a booked hotel waiting for me much further along the road, so I didn’t stick around and look in either case, and had to leave Nebraska without my map.
So when a sign rose up alongside Highway 81 shortly after entering Kansas that pointed me left to a little building near a church and promising me all the visitor information my visiting little heart could desire, I pulled my car into the parking lot and wandered inside.
There were pamphlets everywhere in the grandest visitor centre style, and souvenirs or knickknacks a person could purchase to remember their exciting trip to Kansas. A nice white-haired lady behind a semi-circle desk asked if she could help me, and I didn’t want to be rude but all I wanted was a map. She had my map, but to get it I had to approach the map area of her desk, where there stood a teenager with thick reddish hair and a blue t-shirt.
As I approached he helpfully pulled out a map, partially unfolding it before handing it to me, and added that I could look at it if I wanted to. I thanked him and folded the map back up, intending to leave, but the young man then asked where I came from. As a Canadian, I am bound by magics applied at birth to politely answer any question posed to me, and so I did.
“Canada?” he exclaimed, and ran his hands through his thick hair with an excited expression. “That gives me a great idea!” I hoped that his great idea did not involve Canadians, and in particular did not involve me, but that seemed a little too much to hope for.
He asked if I had ever played the Cap Pop game Zuma’s Revenge. I had, once, on Facebook, and being genetically engineered to be incapable of telling a lie I admitted this to him. His excitement grew, and he began to run his hands through his hair over and over as he launched into the most bewildering monologue I have ever encountered in my life. I can’t even give you the words. He started out talking about how he likes to alter the files in computer games, by replacing backgrounds and graphics with customized versions that he created, and went on to explain the failings he had found in the graphics of Zuma’s Revenge. As I stood waiting to get a word in to excuse myself, he continue into a detailed description of the exact names of the individual files he has changed in the past, including the file extensions. He went on for some length like this, several minutes, running his hands through his hair the whole time, without coming to any sort of point about this great idea he’d gotten after hearing I was Canadian, and here I was too Canadian to interrupt him or just walk away.
The elderly lady saved me; as an American she had no qualms about interrupting him, and did so in order to ask if the young man used computers often. I shot her a grateful look and as the young man took a breath to answer I regretfully informed them both that I had to be getting back to the road. I thanked them for the map. As I started to leave the young man, afraid of losing his audience, began to actually follow me out of the building, launching right back into his garbled monologue about file names. I didn’t reply. I kept walking as though I couldn’t hear him, and perhaps wondering if this was the case he increased the volume of his voice as I hurried further away from him.
“And that was the .dll file!” he called as I needed to know this vital information before I could leave, perhaps because there would be a to-the-death computer trivia checkstop further down the road. “You know, dee-ell-ell, a dee-ell-ell file that was in the root folder with the —” I escaped into the light and fled the town as fast as my car could manage, only a little worried that I might look into the rearview mirror and see him sitting in the back seat, running his hands through his hair.
Soon enough I was back on an interstate, I-135, and found myself driving through Wichita. At 380,000 people, this was by far the largest city I had yet approached in America, so imagine my surprise when it barely felt like I was in a city at all. The interstate through Wichita is elevated and surrounded by trees, so that all you get are some distant glimpses of the tops of a few tall buildings in some areas and a reasonable urban sprawl around some of the exits. I gleaned exactly zero insights as to the actual character of the city.
Apparently, however, Wichita is a happening place, ranked ninth on a list of the top ten big US cities in which to live — though I suppose they stretched the definition of “big”. Wichita is also the air capital of the world, the founding city for companies such as Cessna and a project ground for Bill Lear, who would found the Lear Jet company. Boeing and Airbus are here too, and many others. The place likes to fly. By all accounts it sounds like a very nice city, it was home to Wyatt Earp for a time, and it was the setting for the Dennis the Menace comics, but I didn't see much of it at all, even in passing. That was too bad, but I didn't have time to dwell on it because as soon as you leave Wichita you hit the Kansas Turnpike.
I had never been on a turnpike before, nor any sort of toll road at all, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Did I need to pay in advance? Would I need exact change? Would they laugh at me because I was Canadian and didn't know how this whole thing worked? Anything was possible, especially the laughing part.
Fortunately it was easier than I could even have hoped for. You drive up to a wide bank of ticket booths, come to a stop just long enough to pull a ticket from the machine, and then you drive onward. When you reach the end of the turnpike, which in this case was not distant at all, you give your ticket to a person in another wide bank of booths, they tell you how much, and they have change if you need it. It cost me just under $2 to drive for a brief time on the Kansas Turnpike. It was worth it just for the experience, even if I didn't notice any appreciable advantage over the regular interstate.
Soon after the turnpike ended I found myself crossing into Oklahoma, where people started to get actual for-real southern accents. Oklahoma was much like Kansas, gently rolling and farmy, but there were more trees alongside the interstate and I appreciated that. Trees break up the horizon and give you something to look at. The evening was growing deeper but the air outside was dark and warm and I drove for a time with the window down just so I could smell it and marvel at May air that is warm in the evening. They don't make May air like that in Canada.
I powered through to my destination and my booked hotel in Guthrie, just north of Oklahoma City. I picked this place to stop in part because I preferred to go through Oklahoma City in the morning rather than try to slip through it in the darkness, and in part because they named it after Raserei the wotmaniac. It was a small place, but built in a deep low spot in the road to give them the illusion of driving up and down hills in one of the flattest places on Earth. It had that small town atmosphere, the sort you can feel from the fact that a hillbilly in the most beat-up pickup truck you ever saw, the bed filled with random trash and tools, pulls up to the gas station parking lot beside you and goes inside not to buy anything but to complain to the lady behind the counter about his girlfriend. Still, the place sold fresh bananas, the last thing I expected to find in a gas station convenience store, and I made short work of this unexpected bounty.
The hotel was a Best Western, a grand place on the hillside with long hallways and nice rooms. It also had very comfortable beds again, which of course meant that I would sleep terribly even though I was tired by yet another 12-hour day. But that was okay. Tomorrow I would reach Texas; tomorrow I would reach the end of the first leg of my trip.
Warder to starry_nite
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
Eighteen Days in America, Part 2
- 03/06/2012 09:06:46 PM
682 Views
I also found that KS Turnpike remarkably simple to use.
- 04/06/2012 02:46:28 AM
508 Views
Kansas
- 04/06/2012 03:44:46 PM
579 Views
Wikipedia claims the KS Turnpikes N/S sections are closer than interstate regs require.
- 04/06/2012 08:08:20 PM
470 Views
i love your continual references references to boring wyoming... i drove through there once.
- 04/06/2012 05:04:05 PM
389 Views
I'm glad that you didn't get abducted by crazy computer/cyborg boy.
- 05/06/2012 04:49:09 PM
511 Views
I really hate driving through Nebraska, and Kansas.
- 07/06/2012 10:05:07 PM
408 Views
Yeah, except for Kansas City, Kansas. *NM*
- 08/06/2012 04:22:36 PM
176 Views
Just joshin', bro.
- 09/06/2012 04:12:33 PM
449 Views
Oh, I don't care if you insult it, as long as your facts are correct. *NM*
- 11/06/2012 04:10:07 PM
151 Views