The internal body clock of North Platte, Nebraska, ticks slowly. The posted speed limit is 25mph almost everywhere: residential streets, thoroughfare bridges, industrial areas, cornfield-lined country roads, and stoplight-filled Jeffers and Dewey streets, the two (opposing) one-ways that bisect the town.
Sleepy, tree-lined neighborhoods mix homes with a grocery store, schools, and churches. People sell corn and fresh produce from their front yards and pickup trucks. Most other businesses—strip malls, fast food joints, Starbucks, fuel stations, hairstylists, banks, a Goodwill—congregate in a faded, slightly gritty way along Dewey and Jeffers. During my stay, I continuously tat along these streets in little loops, making only left- or right-hand turns to run an errand or visit a side street and return to my original direction of travel.
Transactions are also slow at the Sunmart grocery store as clerks greet customers by name and ask after family. My ice cream softens on the conveyor belt while the cashier leaves her station, goes to the back office, and checks whether it’s OK for the customer ahead of me to use a certain kind of coupon that her register doesn’t acknowledge. Refreshingly, neither she nor the customer offers an apology for this delay. It’s as if no one knows the force of a pressing schedule here. How different from a life driven by instant messages, the next to-do list, and artificially urgent deadlines.
To enter North Platte from its south side requires crossing the South Platte River. To leave it from its north side requires crossing the North Platte River. I find this logical setup comforting.
In between these rivers sits the entire city of North Platte and one of its many claims to fame: the world’s largest railroad classification bailey (sorting yard), a confluence of one eastbound and one westbound track that split off into over thirty tracks for detaching, rearranging, and reattaching thousands of railcars into trains that will carry only the goods that are meant for their proper destinations. This 24x7 operation processes more than 10,000 railcars a day and is the heartbeat of the Union Pacific railroad.
Among North Platte’s other points of pride is that its state is at the center of the nation’s first transcontinental road, the Lincoln Highway Scenic and Historic Byway (Hwy 30, “America’s Main Street”), whose traffic is now handled mostly by the roughly parallel, multi-lane I-80. It’s home to Buffalo Bill’s personal ranch, Scout’s Rest, where he would retreat between his Wild West Show tours to relax and entertain guests. It’s the stomping ground of its most famous native son, William Jeffers, president of Union Pacific and the “Rubber Czar” of World War II (he stopped the rubber shortage by producing enough synthetic rubber for the war). And it’s the site of one of the most amazing volunteer troop support efforts for World War II—the North Platte Canteen.
Rather than my relating the story of Buffalo Bill and his North Platte home, you can double-click this image to enlarge and read it.
Imagine this front yard as a dirt (and muddy) drive of horses and carriages, with cattle and buffalo fields surrounding, for an idea of what it was like before all the grass and trees were planted.
Exterior of the Cody home, spic and span.
Entry way, original glass.
Like Gaston of Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast, Cody apparently used antlers in all of his decorating. These two chairs are original.
Memorabilia in the house includes some of his Wild West Show costumes, saddles, and related programs, as well as private furnishings, awards, honors, and relics from his many scouting years. This three-way mirror traveled with him on almost every Wild West Show.
The current park-like grounds. Cattle graze way in the distance and walk through the headwaters of the creek, which I don’t think is original, given the photos inside the house.
The 1887 barn where so many of his horses and their tack was stored.
The eaves are shaped like rifle stocks.
Interior of the barn, front stalls. Old posters of the Buffalo Bill shows, many almost peeled off the walls now, line the area above the stalls in a back row, and lots of photos and history are posted to read about here. You also get to go up into the full-length hayloft, where they had an ingenious system for stacking hay in vertical chutes that dropped it down into hay feeders below. Kind of like an automatic feeder for horses.
A new museum, The Golden Spike, has room for improvement, but it gives a nice aerial view of the railroad yard and environs (mostly cornfields).
A drawing of the railroad yard. Each line depicts a separate train track for sorting railcars or moving engines to the repair and fueling shops. On two raised “humps,” incoming east- and westbound cars are split off from their trains and sent by gravity down the proper track to join others and an engine. The cars on each newly formed train must be grouped in a specific order based on the order of their arrival to the next destination, so they can easily be dropped off at the right city and the rest of the train can continue on.
Railroad cars to the horizon.
The Lincoln County Historical Museum has more to offer than its humble façade and $3 fee would suggest. An 18-building western prairie village (shown here) is at the back, and artifacts and antiques since the turn of the century are arranged inside in appealing groupings. Vacuum cleaners through the ages (OMG, I recognize that old upright Kirby), old hair dryers and perming machines, a mock radio station, outmoded movie-theater projectors and cameras (remember flash cubes?), areas set up as complete dining rooms, kitchens, and parlors. I practically had the place to myself for a couple of hours.
A fort building in the village has been converted to a child-friendly spot where people are encouraged to handle farm implements, tools, and buffalo.
A manufacturer of jail cells, from the 19th century heyday of steel in Detroit.
Their handiwork.
No telling where this sign originally hung in North Platte. Now it’s relegated to a warehouse of farming machines in this museum. The back reads “CHANGE TO MOUNTAIN TIME HERE. Set Watch Back One Hour.”
One honkin’ big mixer. Makes the one at Camp Burton on Vashon look like it came from an Easy Bake Oven kit.
The Lincoln County Museum also has an exceptional exhibit on the World War II Canteen of North Platte. You walk though a brief setup of the war and its effect on the town, then past lots of story-telling memorabilia for how the canteen started and what it was like to work at and be there. I sat down to watch almost an hour of the excellent video documentary that interviewed 70- and 80-year-old women who worked at the canteen, and some of the soldiers who had visited it.
The canteen was a spontaneously organized, all-volunteer group that started because a few women wanted to greet the US servicemen whose train stopped in North Platte (and every one of them did) on their way to deployment in the war. The train stop was only ten minutes, but every serviceperson on it received free coffee and snacks and homemade baked goods, and was sent on his/her way with the good wishes of all of North Platte. The small idea quickly grew into a multi-town program, with food and ingredients donated and driven to North Platte from all over Nebraska. Sandwiches, fruit, cigarettes, donuts, endless urns of coffee. Every day they gave away more than 20 birthday cakes to the servicemen, even if it wasn’t their birthday.
A sample canteen table, one of scores that eventually took over an area of the Union Pacific train depot, donated by Jeffers for the cause. The canteen served thousands of soldiers daily, week in and week out, eastbound and westbound, for four years—over six million servicemen and women all told.
WWII servicepeople who visit the museum today can record their memories of the canteen in a three-ring binder. Many comment on what this small hospitality meant to them so far from home and with so uncertain a future. A few noted that they had to good fortune to pass through twice: once at deployment, and again on their way home.
Local visitors are encouraged to identify people they may recognize in old photos of canteen workers. This image was full of stick-on notes.
Back home, Patchouli dreams of taking his lasso skills on the road with Buffalo Bill.
The road sings beneath the truck’s tires. Literally sings in deep tones and high ones, running the scale one moment, staying on the same note for other moments at a time. It starts somewhere around mile 285 on I-80 in Nebraska, lasts maybe 25 miles. The road has a peculiar ribbing here, the lines just wavy and off-kilter enough to create and change harmonics as I drive. I miss the music after the road goes smooth again.
Today I took the advice of a friend (thanks, Art!) and made a mid-travel stop at The Great Platte River Road Archway at exit 272 on I-80. They have good RV parking. Opened in 2000, this attraction spans the I-80 freeway in Kearney (“carny”), Nebraska, and celebrates the place where four famous westbound trails converged: the Mormon Trail to Utah, the Oregon Trail to the west coast, the California Trail to the gold rush, and the Pony Express to Santa Fe. It’s also on the transcontinental railroad line, the old Lincoln Highway (that famous road I stumbled on in North Platte), the first interstate highway (80), and the first transcontinental fiber optic system.
I was officially greeted by Meke, a stooped trapper leaning on his walking stick. After taking a pretty decent lunch at their onsite buffet, I bought a ticket, donned the headset, and rode the escalator up to one of the most amazing museums I’ve been to. It’s a multimedia, surround-sound, you-are-there walk through time, what you might get if Disney and Caesar’s Palace joined up with the Smithsonian and National Geographic to document the trails to the West over the past 160 years.
A poor shot, but at the top of this escalator is a film loop of wagons and horses crossing the desert. It’s as if you’re joining them on the trail as you go through.
The realistic detail of each tableau almost wrenching.
Stay long enough, and the lighting in this room changes from dawn to dark, with a lightning storm in between. Having just lived through my first storm last night, I recognized the realism of this one. I almost expected to get wet.
Many handcart groups were rescued from a bad winter that stranded them en route to Utah. So true to life that ice glazes the cart and the woman’s skirt.
As food became scarce and the travel harder, not everything made it to their new homes. Gravesites and debris marked many a trail.
A gold rush scene. I could almost smell the buffalo ribs and wanted to read over this guy’s shoulder.
Hang around to watch the day’s delivery through the front door.
The Lincoln Highway credo.
I can relate to this.
And this!
The cross-country road today: I-80.
Patchouli does his own impression of an arch.
