Up the Platte Emigrant Highway

Today was all about the Platte River and finding a cup of coffee in something that wasn't a styrofoam cup. 
 
First, the Platte--a wide, shallow, east-west river, providing a corridor which drew Joe B and those who followed him westward.  Starting in the uplands of central Wyoming, it snakes eastward 800 rugged miles to the Missouri River.  Some of the Indians called it the Great Medicine Road as they roamed along it with the great herds of buffalo on which much of their culture was based.  Various emigrants called it the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express Route (about which more later), The Mormon Trail, or the California Road. 
This was a western river, 'Too thick to drink, to thin to plow, too pale to paint.'  'A mile wide and an inch deep.'  It was like no other that they had encountered east of the Missouri, but it provided a route into the continent, first for the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, then the first company of settlers bound for California, then for the flood of emigrants, adventurers and gold seekers who followed, turning the trace or faint track of the Indians and the trappers into a trail, 'nearly a quarter of a mile wide--that is, a row of wagons fifteen hundred feet across, and extending in  front and to the rear, as far as we could see...a vast sea of white flapping wagon covers, and a seething mass of plodding animals,' as described by an emigrant from 1852.

Now about that cup of coffee.  We had been on the road for over two days, and as lunchtime approached I realized that every cup of coffee that I had been served was presented in a styrofoam cup, which as anyone can tell you  is not a proper cup of coffee.  The economics of modern food service--at a certain price level--seems to point the way in America towards completely disposable plates, crockery and utensils--an ecological and gastronomic tragedy.  Fortunately, the ladies running the Julesburg Cafe in dusty little Julesburg Colorado, just over the state line from Nebraska, had not yet been copied on that memo and we were able to obtain lunch and a passable cuppa in a heavy china mug.  Out on the interstate, trucks and cars barreled along fueled by caffeine from styrofoam, unaware of their benighted status.

Wagon trace in the foreground, caffeine junkies in rear

Around the corner from the Cafe, a cathedral of the plains

The rest of our time was spent roaming on both sides of the river, following the National Park Service Auto Tour Guide, looking for emigrant wagon ruts and swales (whatever they might be--I don't travel with a dictionary) and they were there, where we were directed to look. 

Faint tracks, but still visible

 Some of the other roadside historical notices highlighted tracks of the emigrants.  Others indicated burial places of the unlucky who never made it further than the Platte Valley.  Yet other places commemorated wrongs done to the native inhabitants that would culminate in bloodshed in the 1860s.  As early as 1841 a Sioux chief was complaining to a trader, 'The white man takes our  property without paying for it!  He kills our game, he eats our meat, he drinks our water, and he travels our country, and what does he give the red man in exchange for all of this?'  This was not going to end well as more and more emigrants and settlers piled in to the plains.

But for our purposes, we reveled in the footsteps of Joe B who had followed this route in both directions, seven times.  Especially striking were the landmarks of Chimney Rock, and Courthouse Rock with its accompanying Jail Rock.  Perhaps the emigrants might have been anticipating Elvis in calling it Jailhouse Rock.  At any rate, from the time of the very first travelers through this land, these striking rock formations were indications of progress they were making on their way west at the rate of fifteen to twenty miles a day.
And the romance of the landscape is still readily available today, even without a covered wagon.

Chimney Rock was another mark of progress along the trail

Hello Elvis, here's your Jailhouse Rock