Goodbye Nebraska. Hello Wyoming

The park ranger at Scottsbluff Monument suggested we stop in at Fort Laramie as we drove into Wyoming. Whenever we travel we always find our best places when we take people's recommendations, so we set the GPS for Fort Laramie. Fort Laramie is different than Laramie. Of course, neither one of us has been to Laramie or Fort Laramie so it doesn't make that much difference.

Fort Laramie was an Army post that stood guard over the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails, was a stop on the Pony Express route, and was a staging ground for meetings with Plains Indians. Sometimes those meetings were peaceful and sometimes they went very, very bad. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse rode into Fort Laramie at various times. This is a National Historic site and most of the buildings at the fort have been restored and you can walk through them. My favorite part was that the single officers' barracks was named "Bedlam".

Mr. C's favorite part was that Fort Laramie was originally called Fort John.








We also stopped at a bridge over the Platte River that was built in 1875 by the army. Since the westward migration began in the 1840s it doesn't take a math major like Mr. C. to figure out that lots of people had to cross that river before the bridge was built. The Platte is a fairly tame river these days, but apparently back then it was far wider, more turbulent, and dangerous. Crossing the Platte River here was one more treacherous area that pioneers heading west had to face. Many animals, children, men, women drowned here. Wagons and supplies had a tendency to sink to the bottom of the river. Not good. Eventually, entrepreneurs came along and set up ferries that were a little safer. But only marginally and they were so expensive that most of the pioneers bet on themselves and would forego the ferry.

These trails were so dangerous--and all were equally dangerous just at different places--that historians estimate there are ten graves to every mile along the emigrant trails. Personally, I hate moving but pioneers moving westward took moving to another dimension that I can't even fathom.

Mr. C. being careful

A little further west is Guernsey, Wyoming where we stopped to see the Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark. We hiked up a trail and whoa! There really are still wagon ruts chewed into the rock. Not little grooves either--tracks four to six feet deep in some places. Ironically, along the trail are all kinds of warning signs for us modern-day tenderfoots. "Walk is steep!" "Difficult wheelchair access" "Open--weather permitting" ".9 trail". If their are any pioneer ghosts lingering around Guernsey they're laughing their ghost heads off at us.


Speaking of ghosts…we left Guernsey and headed for Casper, Wyoming.

We're in cattle country

Casper has a great museum, too. The Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum. More pioneer exhibits and more on the pony express. I'm so glad we started off the trip with a visit to the pony express museum in St. Joe. Everything makes more sense to us as we follow the trails of those riders and the pioneer emigrants themselves.

We spent the night in Douglas, Wyoming at a campground that had cute shetland ponies. Reminded me of our Smokey….a long, long, time ago.

Kathryn