nerdtripping.com

(This is the sixth in a series of posts that follows our real-life adventures in August 2011 along The Oregon Trail, Apple ][ version. We arrived here after a brief stop at Chimney Rock. Screenshots and photos by Rachel.)

As soon as we crossed into Wyoming from Nebraska, we knew we were in a whole new world. No offense to Nebraska or any of the other states, but boy howdy does Wyoming know how to “do” history. Imagine this: roadside historical signs you can actually read from the car before reaching the spot, so you know if it’s an interesting place that you might like to stop before you’re already past it. Heck, we were so thrilled by the roadside signs that if we knew the amazing restorations and replicas we’d see the rest of the way across Wyoming, we’d probably have just an apoplectic fit right then and there at the first mile marker. Wyoming’s awesome historical sites prompted Rachel to say both then and now, “I’d kind of like to get a look at their state/county budgets, and compare to places that are less amazing.” Like I’ve said before, we’re current and former cultural heritage professionals, and nerds, so this sort of statement should not come as a surprise.

Anyway, we were zooming our way to Fort Laramie from Chimney Rock, so as to get to this wonderful NPS historical site before it closed at dusk. We did, and spent quite a bit of time wandering around its grounds. You, too, can see the grounds in this “virtual tour” from CyArk (that I wish were an Omeka site, but alas), but we both highly recommend stopping at Fort Laramie yourself if you’re ever in Wyoming.

Read more »

Ash Hollow and Windlass Hill are not in the Apple ][ Oregon Trail game, but we stopped here nonetheless. I’m not exactly sure why we stopped at this not-in-the-game location as opposed to the hundreds of others, but I think it had to do with it being a little creepy—it was a cloudy day, we had descended into a bit of a valley, and from the road all we could see was what looked like an abandoned shack and a burnt-out wagon. I mean, who wouldn’t want to stop?

We had just turned off Interstate 80 (big highway) and onto US Highway 26 (smaller road), and the sky was darkening. I was thinking things like “we’re going to get crappy pictures at Chimney Rock,” and not so much “this is starting to look like kind of rough terrain for wagons to go through”. But indeed it was.

According to pioneer Howard Stansbury, in An Expedition to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (1855), “we were obliged from the steepness of the road to let the wagons down by ropes”—a significant undertaking—”but the labour of a dozen men for a few days would make the descent easy and safe.” Shoot, and here we just zoomed on through…

As we were zooming on through, we decided to stop and check out the spot, even though to our current-and-former-cultural-heritage-professional eyes the area seemed to be in a little bit of a state of disrepair. Although designated as a state historical park in 1962, and noted in William Hill’s The Oregon Trail (1986) as having a visitor center housing “a fine museum and displays covering the whole history of Ash Hollow, starting from pre-historic times and including the Oregon Trail period,” today there’s just the remnants of a fake covered wagon-looking walkway and an empty building that was probably the museum, plus two signs describing wagons and what a “windlass” is (it moves heavy weights and includes a winch). (Click on images below to embiggen)

If it wasn’t so cloudy and lightning hadn’t started up while we were there, we would’ve explored a bit more. We would’ve seen the remnants of wagon ruts coming down the hill, gotten a better view of the vast site that acted as a popular campsite because of the grass for livestock and nearby plentiful water source, and probably trekked out to the grave of Rachel Pattison, whose story is sadly typical of someone traveling any of a number of overland trails in the mid-nineteenth century: she died of cholera.

We continued on toward Chimney Rock.

Photos by Rachel.

(This is the second in a series of posts that follows our real-life adventures in August 2011 along The Oregon Trail, Apple ][ version. We arrived here after the Oregon Trail trailhead. Screenshots and photos by Rachel.)

In the Apple ][ game, the Big Blue River Crossing is the third stop, 185 miles into the adventure. However, as we were meticulously (*cough*) mapping our route before the trip and checking various and sundry historical reports from the trail, we identified a “Blue River” on the map that was approximately 19 miles from Independence, heading toward Topeka (and the Kansas River Crossing), and crossed by a road called “Blue River Road”. We figured that had to be it, so we headed for it—a second stop instead of a third.

Read more »