Okay, we discovered rather quickly what it is that they grow in Nebraska. Actually it was pretty evident within about 100 miles of the Kansas border. Does the term “Corn Husker” mean any thing to you?? Everyone in this state must be one because they have like a gazillion acres of corn and I figured everybody must have to spend a few months every year just husking the stuff to get it all harvested! Then Kae, our sort of Montana farm kid, explained about corn for people and corn for cows and corn silage for cows and all that sort of thing. Then I figured out from that that there must be really happy cows here because of all that corn they had to eat... In fact aside from wheat and hay, cattle are the most frequent things near the side of the roads in this state.
Truth is we shot up and across Nebraska pretty darn quickly. We had decided to take Nebraska Scenic Highway 2 because it traversed the state in a northwesterly direction and because Charles Kerault had said it was …”one of his favorite roads, not for what was there, but for what was not there.” He was certainly right! There is a whole lot of beautiful nothingness out in the central part of Nebraska. We took just one day to leave Kansas, shoot past Grand Island (fast enough that I couldn’t even tell if there is an island!), left turn and on to Ravenna, where we stayed at Buffalo County Lake State Park. Everything here is s l o w ! The lake is small, green, and full of sluggish catfish and creeping turtles and moves really slowly! Kae said it felt as if we were in some southern backwater in the late 40’s or 50’s. It was a sweet, slow stop.
Ever westward out into the great prairie and corn country; though some of the hay had dried out enough that they had started baling. Cokie says she just loves those huge one and two ton rolls because sometimes when you come around a curve or crest a hill there will be hundreds of them sitting there looking like they had just fallen out of the sky! Guess that would be one heck of a hay-l storm, huh?
Okay, our destination for this day was Thedford and a free city park with all of the amenities. Really short stay for lunch only though because we discovered why this park is free – it is like just two feet from the tracks with a train whistling through every five minutes! Since we had not been too inspired by Charles’ “not thereness”, we then decided to head due north on Highway 83 toward Scenic Byway 20 which had at least been written up in the National Geographic’s Scenic Byways Book. We felt confident the topography would change as we approached the upper Nebraska Plateau region and the beginnings of the Dakota Badlands. We were also delighted to discover that this is the region known as the Sandhills Country. They are actually sand dunes that have been covered and stabilized by the persistent prairie grasses. They sit on top of the remnants of a huge subterranean lake know as The Oglala Aquifer which helps create hundreds of lakes, ponds and marshes. It is sorta weird to be in all of this sand but also in marshy, wet terrain; can screw up a good dog's senses, you know! Anyway, the Ladies found us a great grassy, shady place on the edge of Ballard’s Marsh State Wildlife Management area. It was a quiet haven and had good drinking water too. We stayed two nights then headed north to Valentine.
Now here was a town that lives up to its name – Valentine - there were hearts all over the place! City sidewalks, highway intersections, buildings, city vehicles, you name it there was a heart on it. There was also a high relief mural on one of the banks that we just had to photograph because it is a beautiful example of art done in bricks and brick/ceramic tiles. Amazing work! We turned due west onto Highway 20, shot across the top of Nebraska and out into more of the Sandhill Country and the beginning of the Pine Ridge area.
We stopped just outside of Chadron so the Gals could visit the Museum of the Fur Trade. This is another example of the excellence of small local state and/or city museums in this country. These can be real gems sometimes and are worth a visit. This museum is dedicated to recording the history of the North American’s fur trade from the east coast and Canada down through the Mississippi region and out into the Great Plains. It documents, with hundreds of incredible artifacts, the impact of the fur traders and great trading companies such as the Hudson Bay Company upon the Indians and their way of life, from the 1600’s through the 1950’s. There is, among other things, the world’s largest collection of Indian trade guns, dating from the 1640’s. The native clothing, weapons, utensils and bead work is amazing! Kae and Cokie hope some of the pictures will do this collection justice.
There was also the actual site of the Bordeaux Trading Post, Built by the American Fur Company in 1837 to buy buffalo robes from the Sioux Indians. The log warehouse and trading post have been faithfully reconstructed plus there is a garden of plants and vegetables to show what was grown by the plains Indians for food and medicine. This garden specializes in ancient seeds, most of which were collected over a century ago by Oscar Will, a pioneer North Dakota horticulturist. The Museum’s plantings will continue to vary from year to year so as to collect, grow and save these pure types.
We'll continue through Nebraska in blog 31.
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