Beyond Imagination
Arrayed along an invisible line, the 100th meridian, the Great Plains states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska invite modern-day pioneers to explore their rural past.

By Alan Wilkinson
Think of the Great Plains, and you’ll likely think of westward movement; the line of settlement advancing behind the breaking plow; the great overland migrations blazing a trail to Oregon and the California goldfields; the railroads snaking through the virgin grasslands. I first encountered that huge empty expanse traveling from the east by bus, by car, by train, and finally—because I wanted to get more intimately acquainted—by bicycle, from the Missouri River to the foothills of the Rockies.

As you head west elevation rises, imperceptibly, and the landscape reflects a progressively drier climate. And because it suits our purpose, we designate the 100th meridian as the line that divides the well-watered land you’re leaving behind from more arid territory up ahead.
The 100th meridian is more than just a climatic divide of course. It separates corn from cattle and two very different cultures: the cowboy and sodbuster, and industries: ranching and farming. Success for the dirt farmers on their 160-acre holdings proved elusive. The old homesteads were soon abandoned, and the soddies were absorbed into the gentle undulations from which they were hewn. But some people are hanging in there, and every so often some modern pioneer moves out onto the Plains to retire or to set up in business.

It was with all this in mind that I flew out to Houston, drove to Laredo, followed the Rio Grande upstream until I was 100 degrees west, then headed north. The plan was to follow U.S. Highway 283 all the way to Canada, and, for the first thousand miles or so, to parallel the old Western Trail—aka the Dodge City Trail—as described by Andy Adams in his book, The Log Of A Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days. My plan pulled in a huge expanse of real estate, so I’ve divvied it up, covering the Great Plains states—Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska—saving Texas and the Dakotas for an issue all of their own.

OKLAHOMA
You can no more generalize about the Great Plains landscape than you can generalize about Great Plains people—or for that matter a place like Oklahoma. On an earlier trip through the central and eastern parts of the Sooner State, I had marveled at the lush grasslands, the abundant trees and lakes, the booming cities and cultural vitality of a land that drew so many settlers in the late 19th century.

The 100th meridian, however, runs right along Oklahoma’s western edge, bordering the Texas Panhandle in a land they call Texoma. It’s a working landscape, by and large, and a productive one. It’s generally flat, although here and there are rounded outcrops of stratified earth. Nevertheless, it has a stark, elemental beauty, with a huge sky, broad horizons broken by solitary cottonwoods or the occasional abandoned barn slowly settling its weary bones into the ground… and, of course, windmills. To some people, the slow, rhythmic clanking of a wind-driven pump is akin to the lament of the lonesome cowboy. To a lover of the West it speaks of the beauty of solitary places and the heroic endeavors that went into populating them.

You’ll find a lot of windmills in areas like these, nearly all of them fallen from disuse. Maybe the well’s run dry, or maybe an electrically driven pump’s been installed in its place, but from time to time you’ll come across an Aermotor or a Dempster, perhaps a Fairbury, that’s still drawing water from the underground aquifer at its own unhurried pace. I hope no one comes after me with a warrant when I confess to having slipped through a five-strand barbed wire fence and crossed a few hundred yards of pasture, just for the pleasure of sitting beside a working pump and listening to its languorous music. As the breeze turned the vanes, so the loosely coupled rods rose and fell, rose and fell, and I cupped my hands under the outlet to gather a gout of cold clear water as it gurgled its way towards the holding tank.

There aren’t a great many towns along the trail I took, and the few that you do encounter generally bear traces of the shrinkage that followed the Dust Bowl exodus. But they have fascinating histories—some obscured by the dust that’s settled over the frontier period, some staring you right in the face in the shape of derelict gas stations still advertising 89-cents-a-gallon unleaded. Sometimes it’s there in the street names, as in Erick, birthplace of country music legends Roger “King of the Road” Miller and Sheb Wooley, both of whom have thoroughfares named after them.
If you grew up in Erick, chances are your thoughts naturally would turn towards the West before long. America’s most celebrated highway, Route 66, runs right through town on its way to L.A. by way of Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, and all those other towns celebrated in Chuck Berry’s seminal classic.

Route 66 is a thing of threads and patches nowadays with some stretches still in use, some incorporated into Interstate 40 and some abandoned to the elements. At the little town of Texola (pop. 45) you can see a careworn but still viable section of the mother road as it says farewell to Oklahoma and lights out across Texas.

Sometimes in that kind of country you turn around and you’re completely alone, and it depends on your mood as to how that takes you. But here’s the thing with the Plains. The minute you think it’s just you and the land and the sky, that’s when you’ll hear something like the liquid trill of a meadowlark. When I saw my first one, sitting on a fence post, it seemed it celebrated the joy of living in that great expanse of space, and of the rolling country that awaits you a little further north at, say, the Black Kettle National Grasslands.

Based around the town of Cheyenne and the Washita River, and named after the Southern Cheyenne chief whose band was wiped out by Lt. Col. George A. Custer in an 1868 raid, this 30,000-acre reserve offers lakeside campgrounds, fishing, and wildlife viewing, all set in the red shale earth that contrasts so vividly with the bright green of spring growth. At Boiling Springs State Park, constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the midst of hard times, I found more relief in the shape of lush grass, voluptuous contours, and acres of deciduous woodland.

KANSAS
And so it was on to the western half of Kansas, a more crystallized reflection of the legacy of the grid pattern bequeathed to us by its original surveyors. Extensive areas of the Dakotas, certainly, large parts of Nebraska too, are characterized by country roads platted unerringly north-south and intersected by those platted east-west. I’ve seen the same thing in the rolling farmlands of Iowa. But in the Dakotas, the Missouri River, and the Black Hills there are breaks in this manmade attempt to make an imprint on an otherwise unmarked wilderness. In Nebraska, there’s the Platte River and the Sand Hills. In Iowa, the plentiful trees. In western Kansas, however, very visible straight lines crisscross gently rolling pastures.

That insistent geometric influence on movement first struck me as soon as I entered the state. You could go straight ahead or left or right—nothing else. The first town I hit on crossing the state boundary was Englewood, right there on U.S. Highway 283. I wanted to get to Ashland, the seat of Clark County, 15 miles or so to the northeast, specifically its public library where, as in most small towns I visited, they allow travelers to email home free of charge, which is right neighborly of them.

I found myself asking directions and mentioning an angle road I’d seen on my map. The lady I asked, friendly and helpful as she was, made little attempt to hide her reservations about an angular course. It occurred to me that a Westerner’s suspicion of diagonals is innate. Westerners are raised, after all, in a country marked out in square miles. Their farms are square, their counties too, even their states—if they’re to count for anything at all—are rectangular. They think like their pioneer forefathers, in sections and quarter sections. And they orient themselves exclusively by latitude and longitude. There’s east and there’s west, occasionally north and south. No place is ever five miles northwest of any other place. No, it’s three miles west and four miles north.

In Ashland I got a good lunch and absorbed a history of “The Town at the End of the Angle Road.” It was organized in 1884, and 12 months later had a population of 2,042. But while just about all these frontier towns have shrunk—Ashland now has barely 1,000 residents—there are still a few newcomers looking for a better life. What drew my lunchtime waitress to settle there was Kansas’ reputation for providing good education. She and her husband spent every summer for four years touring the Western states from Idaho to Texas looking for a good place to bring up their family and find peace of mind. They bought a business in town, and the children thrived. One is a pharmacist, one is married to a local rancher, another earned a doctorate, and the fourth is in law school.

And now my own confession. The Angle Road doesn’t actually run at 45 degrees at all. It’s stair-stepped—a mile or two up, a couple across, another mile north, and then one east. And awfully hard work if you don’t have power steering.

I now took a little detour west, by way of Lake Meade State Park, to a place for which I still have a sentimental attachment, years after I visited it with my daughters. Liberal, Kan., is a thriving city of 20,000 that is bucking the trend for most Western small towns and growing year by year. Its main industry is meat packing, a role it shares with Dodge, along with its population, more than half Hispanic. However, it was a reminder of times past that drew me. Here stands the replica prairie house which celebrates the L. Frank Baum book that put Kansas on the map for a generation—more than that, several generations—of children.

Baum probably set The Wizard of Oz in Kansas to accommodate the twister. He had lived in New York State, later California. The book was a big hit with children long before the movie came out, and here at Dorothy’s house, built in 1907, you can let his heroine take you by the hand and lead you down a yellow brick road to see a variety of exhibits, from the ruby slippers to the actual miniature house they built for the movie—the one that flew away in the twister. And of course you get to see Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man.

Further north, outside Dodge, not so very far from the huge feedlots—incidentally, the first I’ve seen with a scenic overlook!—I came across another of those rare diagonal lines. Nine miles west of the old cowtown is the Santa Fe Trail, or rather the actual marks made in the prairie earth by the freight wagons that first headed that way in 1821. To tell the truth, they’re not as clearly defined as in some places like Fort Union, N.M., but they’re there all right. What you always hope for is that single pair of wheel ruts etched into the grass, but of course the overland travelers moved forward on a broad front to avoid the mud or dust and claim the best grazing, so the trail is wide and loosely defined. But after you’ve squatted and squinted awhile, you soon pick out the parallel furrows in the coarse grasses.

Even more interesting was a historical site further up the trail, east of town. The active life of Fort Dodge was, like many frontier outposts, brief. Established in 1865 to protect emigrants and railroad workers, it briefly housed Custer’s 7th Cavalry, then in 1890 was converted and opened as a home for veterans.

My guide at the Kansas Soldiers Home was Evelyn Heidrick, an 80-year-old resident whose husband served in World War II. She runs the post’s museum. Until the dawn of the new millennium they still had a solitary Great War vet, aged 103. “He was pretty spunky till the end,” she told me. “Used to set off for town along the highway, or hide in the shrubbery just to have the satisfaction of seeing a search party called out. They always found him—could hear the old codger chuckling in the bushes.”

As these veterans of 1917 and ’18 were growing old, there were younger vets arriving, from Korea, Vietnam, even from the Desert Storm campaign against Saddam Hussein, but the great majority are still of 1941 to ’45 vintage. Some are here long-term, others temporarily. The only qualification for residence is to have served on active duty with the U.S. Military during wartime. Some are in houses, some in dorms taking meals in a communal dining room, others in hospital wards.
Evelyn was one of those wonderful curators whose enthusiasm for each exhibit means you never quite get through with one before she moves on to the next—and before I knew it, she’d passed me over to her superintendent, Steve Goodman.

He wanted to talk about Kansas. Born and raised in the state, he worked for a Republican senator, then for a Democratic congressman, so he knew politics, and statistics rolled off his tongue. Did I care to know, he asked, that with a population of around 340, the little community at Fort Dodge was larger than 180 other Kansas towns? Or that eight counties in Kansas with a combined population of 1.3 million controlled the fate of—and state budget for—the other 97 counties (pop. also 1.3 million)?

He was talking of the areas around Kansas City, Topeka, and of course Wichita, which is umbilically tied to the first two by the Kansas Turnpike. The great concern of this whole region, he told me, is the future of the family farm. Who will inherit it? “What they dread is being taken over by the corporate holdings, run from Wichita or K.C., and managed by some hireling toting a laptop and an MBA. It’s the small farms that keep this state alive,” he added, “And keep those county roads open.” Did I know that only Texas and California in the entire United States have a greater network of roads than Kansas? “The 15th largest state, and the third largest system of highways.”
As I drove north, through Jetmore and Ness City, pondering that last figure, I decided the time was right to leave the highway and explore some of this network, to get out into the fields and imagine what the pioneers saw when they lurched up and down every incline of this rolling landscape, fording a hundred creeks and marshy bottoms in cumbersome, ox-drawn wagons.

I’d crossed the Pawnee River and was entering Ness County. The clouds were darker and lower than they had been. In places, as I headed along an east-west axis, I found north-south roads—tracks really—crossing at precise intervals, marking the original square mile sections. As I looked about me at a huge spread of cultivated land, I imagined a settlement on every quarter section, four 160-acre farms to the square mile. I imagined the fields populated by men, women, and children, all dressed from the same bolt of checkered cloth.

I summoned up an image of horses and oxen, the air ripe with the smell of their dung, or the rich aroma of burning coal from a threshing machine. If I closed my eyes and listened to the wind I almost fancied I could hear lunch being signaled from the homeplace by a bell, and see the whole landscape from horizon to horizon dotted with sheaves of cut wheat, hatched by plowed furrows, vegetable plots, melon patches, perhaps a few fruit trees, each tied to a stake, and over there a church, scattered stables, the distant schoolhouse emptied for the harvest season, while beside each sod or timber home there sits a pile of dried buffalo or cow chips for the stove.

What I saw, of course, was a landscape pretty similar to what the settlers found when they first arrived, except that where they saw prairie grasses, I saw plowed earth. The early settlers on the treeless Plains lacked ready building materials, until the railroad came and could ship in lumber. They even struggled to find fencing materials. But in this part of Kansas—particularly around Ness County—they made their fence posts out of rock: limestone. A stonemason at the Monument and Sign Company explained how the early pioneers referred to the rock as greenhorn, and pointed me in the direction of an early Plains skyscraper, the impressive four-story Ness County Bank, erected in 1890. Here even the mortar contained crushed limestone, rather than sand.

Across the railroad tracks I made the acquaintance of a man whose family has had a business on the same spot since those early days and fulfilled a long cherished ambition. Bob Gantz’s grandfather, Daniel Bondurant, ran a feed store there even before the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway came through town, at which time he went into business with a man who’d built a wooden grain elevator. When that burned down in 1931 they built the new place, and gradually expanded. They now have a storage capacity of 1.1 million bushels. And if you want to work that out, a bushel is 60 pounds. It’s a lot of grain. I was fascinated by Bob’s statistical data, but then I ought to be. I once wrote a history of a 150-year-old flour mill. The awful truth, however, was that I’d gone over there with one thing on my mind: to ride to the top. I couldn’t begin to compute the number of these monumental structures I’ve driven past—or cycled past for that matter—and every time I’ve passed under the shadow of one I’ve wondered what the view would be like from up there.

I no sooner made my wishes known than Bob had me in a little elevator cage not unlike a bathtub—except that it was upright—and had squeezed in beside me. As each concrete floor glided past we both breathed in before emerging into a sort of attic where the top of each silo could be inspected. Rubbing the dust from the windows, I was able—at last—to satisfy my curiosity. The view from up there was just like the view from lower down, only there was much more of it, more cropland, more distant silos, along the line of the railroad, and a little less sky.
I camped that evening at Cedar Bluff State Park. Here’s another example of how these supposedly empty locations give vacationers the very thing they want: space and a sense of freedom. Situated just south of WaKeeney, named for the Chicago firm, Warren and Keeney, that laid the town out in 1879, Cedar Bluff is a set around a 6,800-acre reservoir formed by a dam across the Smoky Hill River. I arrived late, and I drove in from the south, along a dirt road—in a rainstorm. Take my advice. Come in from the north. Or come in a four-wheel drive. Memories of navigating my rented sedan several miles through six inches of gumbo, mostly sideways, still keep me awake some nights.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t fully appreciate the scenery until next morning when I made the 13-mile scenic drive and watched the wind tear the clouds into rags above the 100-foot high limestone bluffs, rippling the sweeps of coarse grass dotted with pine and cedar, and ruffling the expanse of silvery water that mirrored the rising sun.
I’d camped in a primitive site on the south side—Spartan, scenic, and private. Round to the north I found every facility a weary traveler could want: hot showers, laundry, and for the anglers, a fish cleaning station.

NEBRASKA
My first stop in Nebraska was at Cozad. Strange sort of name; interesting sort of place—unique too. It takes its name from the entrepreneur who dreamed it up back in 1872. John Cozad was an authentic opportunist. A professional gambler, he wore the jazzy vest and diamond stickpin; he carried the silver-topped cane. He had the bright idea of creating a settlement right here on the 100th meridian. He chose a spot on the banks of the Platte River, a natural enough thoroughfare that the Oregon Trail travelers—and later the Union Pacific Railroad and Pony Express—already had exploited.

But while the town Cozad envisaged eventually grew and prospered, he never saw it happen. Implicated in the murder of an adversary, he left town “between two days” and assumed a false identity. It was his legacy to American culture rather than his legacy to the Great Plains economy that lived on. His son, a teenager when the Cozad excitement erupted, was to resurface in New York City and become one of the great names of the modern art movement around the turn of the century. He called himself Robert Henri, and they have a museum dedicated to him right there in town.

If any Nebraska towns had fighting chances of making names for themselves it was surely these Platte River communities. They had some of the best farmland in the state, access to plentiful supplies of water, and a superb communications network. In the 1920s the road that connected the dots along the flat and fertile river valley was designated the Lincoln Highway, America’s first paved coast-to-coast road. But that, of course, was to be overshadowed by Route 66 from Chicago to L.A. And towns like Cozad and Gothenburg and Lexington—each visible from the next by its massive grain elevator— were soon starting to shrink. It’s Kearney, a college town, and North Platte, final home of Buffalo Bill, which are thriving now. Nevertheless, Cozad is an attractive friendly sort of town.

The story goes that the 100th meridian crosses the railroad tracks where John Cozad and the Union Pacific officials said it did—at the depot. But according to new surveys, via satellite observations, the true line is a few hundred yards further west, by the airport. It seemed a shame somehow, that the city’s founder should get it wrong—but I suspect the Chamber of Commerce sympathizes with the old fellow. While there is indeed a limestone post marking the line that I’d followed for almost 2,000 miles, the historical marker remains where it always has been, down by the depot.

Head north of Interstate 80, and you’re soon into the Sand Hills. I’ve been in love with this area since my first visit as a student of literature 10 years ago. It was the writings of Mari Sandoz (Cheyenne Autumn, Crazy Horse and the biography of her father, Old Jules) that first sent me up state Highway 2 to visit the gruff old pioneer’s last surviving daughter, who lived alone six miles up a dirt track and kept a .410-gauge Winchester propped against the door.

That, though, was on the far western edge of what is the largest dune complex in the western hemisphere. This trip was right through the heart of the Sand Hills, and I was rewarded with sights I’ll always treasure: the moment when I was hiking through a silent valley and a doe emerged from the grass with two young, stood still just long enough for me to draw and hold a single breath, then melted away; the moment when I was hurrying north to Valentine under a sheet of grey clouds, evening closing in, the thin carpet of grass still cloaked in winter dun, and a great splash of white exploded from between two hills— my first sighting of the Sand Hills pelicans.

When I camped at Merritt Reservoir, the skies cleared, and the temperature dropped to 34 degrees overnight. I left my breakfast cooking on the fire, trotted around a wooded rise to warm myself up—and stumbled across one of those natural phenomena so rare, you’re tempted to feel it must mean something. As a huge full moon touched the western horizon, the sun rose in the east. For a treasured moment, I could see a half of each, perfectly balanced on opposite sides of the earth, one aglow with the promise of warmth, the other cold, pale, slinking quietly from view. How common an occurrence is that? For me it was a first, and I’d be happy for it to be a last. As to meaning, it seemed somehow to tell me that whatever else happened, here was one reward for following that imaginary line all that way.