Our Nest on Wheels

by Jane

Last year we spent some time in Moab, Utah, visiting Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. But we had some bad weather that kept us from seeing (literally) everything we wanted at Canyonlands, and besides, now we have one of those cool National Park passport books, so we decided a second trip was in order--if only to get the stamps in our passport.

Next stop: three parks we've never seen before, all featuring Ancestral Puebloan ruins.

by Steve

May 10, 1869.  Promontory Summit, Utah. The driving of the golden spike completed the trans-continental railroad, which finally enabled travel from one coast of the US to the other by train. I always knew the date of the event as it's the same as Jane's birthday (but a different year). But there are a lot of other odd things about the whole enterprise of building a cross-country railroad that we didn't know. In our visit to Golden Spike National Historic Park, we learned a lot. 

Here are some odd facts you might not know:

1. Delayed by war; jump-started with bribes. The track was built by two competing railroad companies. The Central Pacific (CP) started in Sacramento California and headed east; the Union Pacific (UP) began in Omaha and built to the west. In the first year of work, not much was accomplished; it was hard to get financial backing because investors could make more money on the Civil War than by investing in railroads. After the presidents of the CP and the UP visited Congress with sacks of money, Congress wrote a new railroad act that doubled the subsidies to the railroad companies. After this, the pace of work picked up.

2. Built primarily by immigrants. The war impacted the workforce, so both companies hired mostly immigrants to do the actual labor. The CP had a few additional challenges: difficult terrain (they had to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains at Donner pass, which required them to dig 15 tunnels through solid granite), and the California gold rush. According to one source, Californians were disinclined to the level of discipline required by the railroad companies. As a result, 90% of the CP workforce came from China.

3. Thirsty engines. Promontory Summit, where the two sets of track meet, is on the north side of the Great Salt Lake. The north side of the Salt Lake has steep grades that necessitated numerous cuts (through hills) and fills or trestles. And it was longer than going along the south side of the lake. So why take the longer, more difficult route? Steam locomotives require a lot of water to operate. While they hold around 2,000 gallons, this will only get them 20 to 30 miles. So they need a source of water every 20-30 miles along the route, and the south side of the Great Salt Lake has no water along it. If you think that the range of an electric car might be limiting, imagine needing to stop for 2,000 gallons of water every 20 miles!

4.  Milking the subsidies. Each railroad had a team that surveyed the route, then a team that built the grades, and then a team that laid the track. The railroad companies got government subsidies when the grades were built, and the railroad act allowed the grading to be up to 300 miles ahead of the track laying. As the CP and UP teams neared each other, there was no decision either by the companies or by Congress on where the two tracks should meet. So the grading teams passed each other and built grades side-by-side, often within 50 feet of each other. Ultimately 250 miles of parallel grades were built before Congress found out and set the location for the railroad to meet at Promontory Summit. Both grades are still visible today, 150 years later. You can take a driving tour on the CP grade to see things like this sign posted to commemorate a bet that the CP team won.

At one point, the UP had laid 8.5 miles of track in one day, and bet the CP $10,000 that they couldn't beat that record. The CP waited until the UP was less than 10 miles from Promontory Summit, and then proceeded to lay 10 miles of track in a day. The UP could not beat this new record as they had less than 10 miles to go.

5. The reason the site was chosen. The completion of the track was a big deal--the entire country was following the progress. So you might think that the location of the final track laying and ceremony might be chosen with some care. But it's in the middle of nowhere--then and now. Congress designated Promontory as the site for the ceremony because it was about half way between the two ends of track at the time that Congress discovered that the railroad companies were milking the subsidies. (See point 4.)

6. The wrong train showed up for the ceremony. The president of the CP, Leland Stanford, traveled to the site of the meeting for the historic ceremony in his private train. To ensure that the track was clear in the work zone, Stanford's train followed a "regular"--a scheduled train that workers were expecting. But apparently nobody told the workers, so when the "regular" passed, they rolled construction materials onto the track, which, of course, Stanford's train hit. So Stanford had to switch to the "regular" locomotive, which happened to be a locomotive called the Jupiter. Fortunately for today's tourists, the Jupiter was a beautiful and photogenic locomotive, as you can see from this photo of the replica.

7. The ceremony happened on the wrong day. It was scheduled for May 8, but the vice president of the UP telegraphed to say that he had been unavoidably detained. What he didn't say was that his engine had been chained and locked to the rail in Laramie, Wyoming, by unhappy sub-contractors who had not been paid in four months. He was not allowed to proceed until he had wired payment to his contractors. Can you imagine a successful businessman today who stiffs his sub-contractors?

8. A swing and a miss--twice. The whole country had been following the progress of the work, and since the railroads were also stringing telegraph lines as they built the track, the whole country could be notified via telegraph when the final spike had been driven. The ceremonial spike (bearing the date of May 8) was made of gold, and the sledge-hammer to pound it in was wired to the telegraph, which would send a signal as it was hit. The president of the CP took a try at driving in the spike and missed. Then the vice president of the UP tried, and he also missed. So a railroad worker was pulled from the crowd and he drove the spike in. The identity of this worker has never been known.

The tracks are no longer here. The route was changed to cross the Great Salt Lake on a causeway in 1902, and the tracks were pulled up to be used in the war effort for WWII. But the grades and fills are all still there, and you can drive on part of the CP grade. The UP grade was abandoned within a year of completion, so it has deteriorated a bit. But you can hike a portion of it and see the cuts and fills that the grading teams created. Just be careful as there are rattlesnakes that live in the area. We hiked it safely, but we now know exactly what a rattlesnake sounds like. 

As we crossed North Dakota, we found ourselves following along the path of a previous, more famous (or infamous) traveler: George Custer. From Fargo we headed west to our next stop, near Bismarck, the capitol of North Dakota and home to the most boring capitol building in the US. Near Bismarck is Fort Abraham Lincoln, which was home to the 7th Cavalry Regiment and is now a state park. Before becoming a state park, the fort had been abandoned by the army, and local people had come through and dismantled most of the buildings for their materials. Custer's home has been painstakingly recreated, using drawings and photographs from the period. The most famous picture of him hangs on the wall.

This was the home from which Custer left (along with two brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law), in pursuit of the Lakota, Arapahoe, and Northern Cheyenne tribes, who had refused to go to their designated reservations. (They were on a reservation at the time, but it was not the reservation that the US government wanted them on.) There were many reasons for this, but a large factor had to be the violations of their existing treaty by the US government, which had allowed prospectors to overrun the Black Hills territory granted to the Lakota tribe. Gold had been found in the Black Hills, and after George Custer's earlier mission there confirmed it, the army did not stop prospectors from entering these lands.

Custer, with around 700 men of the 7th Regiment, pursued these renegade tribes and found their camp in the area of the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana. It's said that there are more books written about the Battle of the Little Bighorn than any other battle, so I won't try to retell the story of the battle. There's a reasonable summary on Wikipedia that you can read here. Custer thought he was going up against a much smaller force than he was. After dividing his force into 3 units, he really had only a few hundred men who now found themselves trying to fight a few thousand Native warriors. Things did not go well, and all 268 cavalry members were killed.

The story of the Little Bighorn battle, now memorialized at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, has long been told from the perspective of the white man. The victors get to write the history books, after all. The monument was originally named Custer Battlefield National Monument, and for years the only markers on the hillsides were the white stone markers indicating where  US Army soldiers had died. In recent years, there has been an acknowledgement that Native people fought and died here also, and there are now some red markers where they died, and the addition of an Indian Memorial. 

In addition to the white stone markers for each soldier killed, there are markers for the horses, many of which were killed by the soldiers so they could hide behind them. The horses were memorialized well before the non-white humans were.

Newer markers on the site indicate where Native warriors died. There are no accurate counts or estimates of Native American deaths, and as they removed their dead from the battlefield immediately, the locations for most are not known. But there are now a few.

A stone marker at the top of last stand hill contains the names of all the fallen Cavalry soldiers.

by Steve

We tend to write about our travels at least a couple weeks after we were in a place. So when you're reading that we are in North Dakota in the middle of October, rest assured that we are not dodging blizzards; we were there earlier, when the weather was nicer.  

We continued our trek across North Dakota by going to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, on the far western end of the state. We didn't know much about this park, other than it is the "badlands" of North Dakota, and it was this wild country that motivated Teddy Roosevelt to set aside so many National Parks, Monuments, and Forests. (5 parks, 18 monuments, 150 forests. Read more here). TRNP has a South Unit and a North Unit. As with the Grand Canyon, most people visit the South Unit (probably because it is on the I-94 Interstate), but both units are worth your time.

The Little Missouri River runs through TRNP, and carves out interesting landscapes.

There are odd volcanic boulders embedded in eroded canyon walls, and new ones being exposed over time.


Wild horses roam the park. We saw several groups. This horse was fairly close to the road and posed nicely.


Both the South and North units of the park are home to multiple prairie dog towns.The residents seem to be quite comfortable with humans nearby, but they got rather agitated when a coyote showed up.


We saw this lone coyote crossing the road in a prairie dog town. The prairie dogs were not pleased with him being there. The bison couldn't care less.


We took several hikes in the part, including an interesting trek to a section of the park with petrified tree stumps. Some of these are small, but others are pretty massive stumps, still in the bank of the riverbed where they were formed millions of years ago.


TRNP doesn't have one single feature that makes it stand out, like Grand Teton has a mountain range and Grand Canyon has a big hole in the ground. What it does have is a lot of really interesting features all rolled together in a really wild section of land, and that makes it worth visiting.

If you go, allow 2-3 days to fully see the park, depending on how much time you spend hiking.In the summer season, the town of Medora has an on-going musical presentation that is quite an attraction, as well as a show with an actor playing Teddy Roosevelt.