Trails of the unexpected

ONE HUNDRED miles south-east of Kansas City, Highway 177 leaves Interstate 50 and heads for the very heart of the prairie. From here to Texas it’s Stetsons all the way

The Plains Indians once held sway across these lands. They lived off the buffalo, also called the American bison, also called “the Indian supermarket” — because it provided meat, shelter, carpets and even ornaments for the tribe. 

That was before the white man came.

Just over 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson struck one of history’s rather good bargains.

He went shopping for the states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Wyoming and Dakota – the French got 3 cents an acre, and soon hordes of the Old World’s unhappy campers headed for a new future.

“The West” was born.

Settlers, cowboys and farmers began moving across the Great Plains, their epic journeys the stuff of silver screen legend.

The history of these tumultuous times looms large in Middle America. But separating frontier fact from fiction can be a mighty tricky feat.

What we do know is this: the dark side of the venture culminated in the near eradication of the Plains Indians, an uncomfortable story sitting alongside the glorification of the Wild West.

The state of Kansas

FACT FILE

* So, Kansas is flat. We know that. But three geographers wanted to ascertain if it really was "as flat as a pancake".

* They used topographic data from a digital scale model prepared by the US Geological Survey. The International House of Pancakes supplied, yes, a pancake.

* If perfect flatness were a value of 1.00, the researchers reported, the calculated flatness of a pancake is around 0.957 "which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat".

* Kansas's flatness however turned out to be 0.997. In scientific terms this is "damn flat". Flatter than a pancake, in fact.

* The three geographers were nominated for an Ig Nobel Prize.

KANSAS is flat. It is also cowboy central.

Dodge City in eastern Kansas was once the central cowtown in the territory.

Rodeos, ranches and round-ups are still a way of life here, but much of what is portrayed as fact is closer to hogwash than history. Take Zane Grey, creator of hundreds of western novels. A New York dentist, Grey was not untypical of the writers, painters and film-makers who mythologised the West. Quite simply, he knew as much about life on the range as he did about politics in the galaxy Andromeda.

But the cowboy of popular culture did exist. Jesse Chisholm pioneered the moving of millions of cattle from Texas up to the railheads in Kansas and Oklahoma. People like Joseph McCoy (very likely ‘the real McCoy’) began hiring cowhands to spend some 60 days in the saddle “looking at the south end of a northbound steer”.

Wichita was the epicentre of the cattle trade, a far dodgier place than Dodge City. Those two wild horsemen, merriment and drunkenness, were regular visitors. Which may well have helped embroider the mythology surrounding these, the most romantically portrayed farmworkers in history.

Today Wichita is home to a reconstruction of a dusty western town, the Old Cowtown Museum. Here on the banks of the Arkansas River, you can be right neighbourly with tame longhorn cattle, watch a staged gunfight, or chat with cowpokes just off the trail. These guys have accents that still have cow dung hanging from them.

You can also dance with some very purtysome saloon girls – although whether there is opportunity for lyin’ and cheatin’ and runnin’ about, I really couldn’t say.

Does it give an accurate portrayal of how things were in the Old West? It's a hoot alright, but remember this: 

 — a bullet for a Smith and Wesson revolver would have cost something like a day’s wages for a cowboy. So instead of a shoot-out in the saloon, it was probably more a case of, "Look, pardner, I'm really sorry, old chap. I'd like to shoot you, but to be honest I just can't afford it."

The Wild West, in short, wasn't that wild. Never mind that from the 1850s onwards the most common cause of death among cowboys in the American West was being dragged by a horse while caught in the stirrups — rancher, rustler and buckaroo were soon destined to become Hollywood superstars.

Not just on screen. 

 Puccini, somewhat improbably, got into the act with an opera called The Girl of the Golden West. Its successful premiere in New York in 1910 had the Italian composer deeming it one of his greatest works.

But it was the homegrown extravaganzas that were to prove key. Chief among these was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which portrayed the mythic frontiersmen, gunslingers, sharpshooters, riders of the range, with pizzazz.

Crucially, Cody took his show to Europe — between 1887 and 1906 he appeared before Queen Victoria, performed in front of Kaiser Wilhelm, and received an audience with Pope Leo XIII. 

The lure of the cowboy was copper-fastened, and soon made its way onto the silver screen and television, where it dominated for decades. 

It wouldn't last: by the end of the 1960s the Lone Ranger, the Range Rider, Hopalong Cassidy, Cheyenne, the Cisco Kid, Sugarfoot, Bronco Laine, The Virginian . . . . were all unceremoniously given their P45s in exchange for Colt .45s. From the early 1970s, television became a largely cowboy-free zone,; Wells Fargo, Boots & Saddles,Champion the Wonder Horse et al were supplanted by cop shows and soap operas.

But the legend lingered. And there can be fewer better places to view it than in the states of Kansas and Oklahoma.   

The Flint Hills

JOINING the cowboys on the frontier were settlers, homesteaders and farmers. Headed ever westward on the Santa Fe trail, they journeyed across “the limitless and lonesome prairie”, to quote Walt Whitman. If you’ve ever wondered about agoraphobia, this is the place to give it a go.

The buffalo are largely gone (although in places making a comeback), but a million or so cattle still graze the endless grasslands.

Highway 177, designated the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway, will take you through this extravagant, undulating landscape. What the ribbon of a highway offers most is wide-open space.

Wildlife abounds — prairie chickens, great blue herons, coyote, deer, collared lizards, bobcats and rattlesnakes.

Look out for tortoises crossing the road, too. I pulled up when I saw a specimen, about the size of a soup bowl, crossing the highway. I picked the scaly creature up to remove him to a safe haven — only to find six large snails attached to his underside. How lazy do you have to be that you hitch a ride with a tortoise? But then again, maybe they were in a hurry. All seemed relieved to be put in the grassy verge.

The Flint Hills route starts in the town of Cassoday (population 130), where the dirt Main Street has a few weathered 19th-century wooden buildings housing an antiques store and a cafe popular with cowboys, truck drivers and bikers.

The road out of town leads ultimately to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. An interest in grass will serve you well here: big bluestem, switchgrass, sage, tumbleweed, wild rye and countless other species all fidget in the breeze. This is one of the few places left in the United States where a visitor can see the grasses that once covered much of the American heartland, and where the Plains Indians led their blameless lives for millennia. 

The park has miles of hiking routes, with the only sound-track the click of the cricket or the howl of the coyote. The trails lead through grass dotted with coneflowers, groundplum, milkvetch, plains indigo, plus hundreds of other botanical gems.

The state of Oklahoma

SOME fifty miles south of Wichita you cross the state line into Oklahoma. Route 66, Abilene, Amarillo, Muskogee, Tulsa – the road signs read like any self-respecting country singer’s gig list.

Impossibly long trains bearing names like Union Pacific and Santa Fe Railroad snake across the prairie, their mournful whistle underpinning the emptiness. Every so often a sprawl of fast food restaurants and dollar shops tells you that a town is nearby. Eventually one such billboard landscape leads into the state capital. Some of the romanticisation of the Wild West can be traced right here to Oklahoma City.

The National Cowboy Museum and Heritage Center, Oklahoma City www.nationalcowboymuseum.org has firearms galleries, ranching exhibitions (“feed and seed”), a complete history of the saddle and of course an entire section devoted to the cowboy hat.

8000 different samples of barbed wire are also on show to satisfy all your fencing enquiries.

Most significantly of all, the museum houses the paintings of a man who was instrumental in mythologising the West.

Frederic Remington’s portraits — Shotgun Hospitality, The Plains Drifter and so on — began the cowboys’ ride across popular imagination.

The only trouble was, Fred never actually experienced life in the saddle. He was immensely fat, far too lard-arsed ever to ride a horse. Besides, by the time he headed west the cowboy era was all but over.

Remington eventually died, not in a gunfight, but of appendicitis and peritonitis occasioned by morbid obesity. But his spirit, and indeed lack of experience in the saddle lived on in Hollywood. The actor Jack Palance, famed for his cowboy appearances, had such difficulty getting onto a horse that the production team would film him getting off, and then reverse the film to show him mounting up.

BACK along Route 66, past The Rock Café and Get Your Steaks On Route 66, you’ll see signs for Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee nation. This is the other side of the frontier story. In contrast to the romantic portrayal of the cowboy, celebration of the Indian culture is less boisterous, covering as it does the near destruction of the Native American culture.

In 1838 the Cherokee tribe were forcibly relocated from their traditional lands in Georgia to “Indian Territory” in what would become the state of Oklahoma. Even today, some Native Americans refuse to carry a 20 dollar bill because it bears the portrait of the man who signed the treaty – President Andrew Jackson. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the BIA — an agency of the federal government — is routinely referred to by Native Americans as the “the Bossing Indians About department”. The Cherokee Heritage Center www.cherokeeheritage.org in Tahlequah presents this story with dignity, and explores the vernacular culture.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath endowed Route 66 with an almost malevolent vigour, draining money, energy, and enthusiasm from the optimistic Okies heading west. But this area had known immense suffering before the Great Depression. The decimation of the Cherokees took place on this hard road westwards, their subjugation completed by journey’s end.

It’s still called the Trail of Tears.

Today's visitors to the US tend to stick to the same few destinations: shopping in New York, taking the kids to Disneyland, whimpering with delight at San Francisco’s cable cars. But, to quote a Californian poet, you can take the road less travelled. If you have any interest in Wild West culture or the vexed story of the Native American, then this slow-moving corner of the US is a-hollerin’ for you.

Be warned however: the people of these states are friendly, helpful and hospitable — although utterly perplexed as to why anyone would want to visit their home states.

It’s very disarming — but be sure to have a good answer ready.

For further information about Kansas & Oklahoma, including travel guides and state maps contact:

UK & Ireland Information Service

Kansas & Oklahoma Travel

Email: info@travelksok.co.uk

Tallgrass National Prairie Preserve www.nps.gov/tapr offers ranger-guided prairie bus tours

Kansas Flint Hills Adventures www.kansasflinthillsadventures.com

MAL ROGERS flew Dublin - Chicago as a guest of Aer Lingus