National Trails System National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior National Historic Trails Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska and Northeastern Colorado “Approaching Chimney Rock” by William Henry Jackson Chimney Rock, in western Nebraska, was one of the most notable landmarks recorded in emigrant diaries and journals. Courtesy of The Wagner Perspective. NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAILS AUTO TOUR ROUTE INTERPRETIVE GUIDE Nebraska and Northeastern Colorado Prepared by National Park Service National Trails Intermountain Region 324 South State Street, Suite 200 Salt Lake City, Utah 84111 Telephone: 801-741-1012 www.nps.gov/cali www.nps.gov/oreg www.nps.gov/mopi www.nps.gov/poex NATIONAL PARK SERVICE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR August 2006 Second Printing September 2010 CONTENTS Introduction ...................................... 1 The Great Platte River Road .......................... 2 From Path to Highway .............................. 4 “A Whiz and a Hail” —The Pony Express ............... 8 A “Frayed Rope” .................................. 11 The Platte Experience .............................. 15 Natives and Newcomers: A Gathering Storm ........... 18 War on the Oregon & California Trails ................ 21 Corridor to Destiny ................................ 25 Sites and Points of Interest. .26 AUTO TOUR SEGMENT A —ODELL TO KEARNEY ................ 27 AUTO TOUR SEGMENT B —OMAHA-CENTRAL CITY-KEARNEY ........ 36 AUTO TOUR SEGMENT C —NEBRaska CITY-CENTRAL CITY-KEARNEY ... 43 AUTO TOUR SEGMENT D —KEARNEY TO WYOMING BORDER ........ 45 For More Information .............................. 64 Credits .......................................... 64 Regional Map ....................... Inside Back Cover Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska INTRODUCTION any of the pioneer trails and other Mhistoric routes that are important in our nation’s past have been designated by Auto To ur Congress as National Historic Trails. While most of those old roads and routes are Route not open to motorized traffic, people can drive along modern highways that lie close to the original trails. Those modern roads are designated as Auto Tour Routes, and they are marked with highway signs and trail logos to help today’s travelers follow the trails used by the pioneers who helped to open a new nation. This interpretive publication guides visitors along the Auto Tour Routes for the Oregon, California, Mormon Pioneer, and Pony Express National Historic Trails as they approach and parallel the Platte River across Nebraska and cut across the northeastern corner of Colorado. Site-by-site driving directions are included, and an overview map is located inside the back cover. To make the tour more meaningful, this guide also provides a historical overview of the four trails, shares the thoughts and experiences of emigrants who followed those routes, and describes how the westward expansion impacted native peoples of the Great Plains. Individual Auto Tour Route interpretive guides such as this one are in preparation for each state through which the trails pass. In addition, individual National Park Service interpretive brochures for the Oregon, California, Mormon Pioneer, and Pony Express National Historic Trails are available at many trail-related venues, and can be requested from the National Trails System Office at 324 South State Street, Suite 200, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111. These brochures provide more detailed information about each of the trails. Additional information on each trail also can be found on individual trail web sites. Links are listed on the title page of this guide. Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska THE GREat PLattE RIVER ROAD “Too thick to drink, too thin to plow, too pale to paint.” “A mile wide and an inch deep.” “A stream flowing upside down.” overed wagon pioneers of the 19th century liked to joke about CNebraska’s Platte River, a stream unlike any they had known back East. But the Platte, strange as it looked, was no joke. A summer shower could send it raging over-bank and through camp; its soft quicksand bottom could swallow up an ox team. River crossings were ordeals to dread. The river’s setting, too, seemed strange. Surrounding prairie, frequently cleansed by wildfire, was burned bare of trees right up to the water’s edge, and a line of low sand hills, looking like a storm- wracked beach, rimmed much of the river valley. Yet the yellow Platte, that treeless “Coast of Nebraska,” was an emigrant’s lifeline —a water source that snaked 800 dusty miles between the Missouri River and the uplands of central Wyoming. Though a choked and sandy disappointment of a stream, the Platte always was and still is a natural east-west corridor across the central plains. Migrating game and moccasin-clad feet wore paths through “Fort Kearny & the South Platte River” by William Henry Jackson 2 Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska the valley thousands of years before any white man ventured there. Like those first travelers, covered wagon emigrants and their slow, plodding oxen found water, grass, and fuel along the river. They also found the valley floor to be fairly level and smooth, a fine setting for roads in the 21st century as well as the 19th. When you drive the riverside routes of today’s U.S.-26, U.S.-30, and I-80 across Nebraska, you are following the footsteps of native explorers, hunters, traders, and fighters, and of mountain men, soldiers, and countless pioneers. This broad highway along the Platte River was known in the 19th century by a variety of names, depending on a traveler’s purpose and destination. Some native peoples called it the Great Medicine Road; other travelers called it the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express Route or the California Road. But taken all together, the footpaths and wagon ruts that flanked the roiling, yellow Platte into Wyoming now have one name in common: The Great Platte River Road. [The Platte River] was fearful to look at, —rushing and boiling and yellow with mud, a mile wide, and in many places of unknown depth. The bed was of quicksand —this was the worst difficulty. —Margaret A. Frink, emigration of 1850 “Buffalo Stampede” along the South Platte River by William Henry Jackson 3 Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska FROM Path TO HIGHWAY upply caravans hauling supplies to the annual fur trappers’ Srendezvous began following Indian paths along the Platte River and into the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s. Their pack trains and wagons wore rough tracks, or “traces,” along both sides of the river across Nebraska and up the North Platte into Wyoming. In May 1840, as the profitable trade in beaver pelts drew to an end, emigrants Joel and Mary Walker took four children and two wagons to join up with the last supply caravan leaving Independence, Missouri, for the final “Trappers’ Rendezvous.” From the rendezvous site in western Wyoming, the Walker family continued westward with a group of missionaries and trappers, reaching Oregon’s Willamette Valley in mid-September. They were the first emigrant family to cross the continent on what would become the Oregon Trail, and their trek marks the beginning of the overland emigration era. In 1841, the first full wagon train of westbound settlers headed up the Platte. More wagons set out the following spring, and the next, and the next, gradually beating a well-defined wagon road along the south side of the river and into the Rockies. Maps of the emerging emigrant trails were published in 1843 and 1845 government reports prepared by explorer John C. Fremont, who was delighted to encounter pioneers using his work to guide them west. Fremont’s mapping expeditions for the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers made him a national hero, and the dashing young officer inspired many Americans to start across the Nebraska prairie. The neglected old teamsters’ trace along the Platte’s north bank was revived in 1847, when a purposeful party of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) began developing its own road, apart from the main Oregon and California migrations. Thus began a distinct and separate current of the westward overland movement along Nebraska’s Platte River. After years of conflict with anti-Mormons across several states, church leaders decided to move their people west to live and govern themselves according to their beliefs. Church President Brigham Young led the first phase of the Mormon emigration from 4 Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide Nebraska Nauvoo, Illinois, to Winter Quarters (Omaha), Nebraska, in 1846. (The Nauvoo-to-Omaha trek is described in the Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide for the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail Across Iowa.) Mud and hardship dogged the Latter-day Saints across Iowa in 1846, leaving them exhausted, sick, and hungry by the time they reached the Missouri River. Unable to go on, the Mormon pioneers built temporary shelters and settled in for the coming winter. At Winter Quarters and scattered settlements in Nebraska and across Iowa, more than 700 Mormon emigrants perished from exposure, malnutrition, and disease over the winter of 1846–47. During those brutal months, Brigham Young and his advisers prepared carefully for the final push over the Rocky Mountains, studying maps and reports and gathering equipment and supplies. Young left Winter Quarters in mid-April 1847 with a handpicked company of 143 young men, three women, and two children. For safety and efficiency, the group formed two large divisions, which later were divided into companies of fifty and ten. This well- disciplined lead party would trek across the prairie and through the mountains to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake to begin preparing a place for the thousands of faithful to follow during the coming summer. …we found that the River we had seen in the distance was none other than the celebrated “Platte,” the highway of our future journey, which caused joy & rejoicing in my Soul… —Thomas Bullock, 1847 Mormon emigration Keeping to the north side of the Platte River was key to Young’s emigration plan.