Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Great American Plains

This is a vast area stretching westward from the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Here you can experience St. Louis, Missouri’s birth as a trading post in the wilderness. From there you can travel up the Missouri River with Lewis and Clark as well as other explorers.

Before Zebulon Pike, Manuel Lisa, and later John Charles Fremont with Kit Carson at his side began to discover and record the wonders of this bountiful and lonely land it was far from empty. Here was the home of the buffalo, the wolf, and prairie dog. They lived in a harmony of survival with their brothers the Wichita, Pawnee, Kansa, and the Osage people who were later joined by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanches. Some of the first white men on the plains were missionaries who, like all creatures, brought both good and bad to the plains.

Homesteaders built sod houses and raised their crops and children in this wind-blown, wildflower scented world where prairie fires killed, grasshoppers devoured, and crops grew taller and more abundant than could ever be dreamed.

Here, from the earth of the prairie, grew broad expanses of grasses that fed the buffalo until hide hunters nearly depleted them. Then those same grasses fattened longhorns being driven northward from Texas to the wild and lawless cow towns and railheads in Kansas and Missouri. These towns drew not only cowboys but gamblers, outlaws with lawmen on their trails, and “soiled doves” to the rows of saloons that lined the streets in such places as Abilene, Dodge City, and Sedalia.

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, part 6

At last it was time for the Whitmans and Spaldings to leave Elizas decaying city of St. Louis. Now it was up the Missouri...

Prairie Dog Town

On May 20, 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal that he was on his way. He was referring to the Lewis and...

Joe Meek Becomes a Mountain Man

Joe Meek was born in 1810 in Virginia not far from the Cumberland Gap which was, at that time, the gateway to the west....

Fort Raymond

During the summer and fall of 1807, Manuel Lisa, a swarthy Spaniard, known around St. Louis, Missouri and other extended parts of the young...

Immigrants – Native and New

The Missouri River courses 547 mile through an ancient land now called South Dakota. Along this mighty river’s Dakota shores Mound Builders left traces...

Fort Mandan

In December of 1804, in the area around present-day Washburn, North Dakota, the temperature averaged 4 degrees above zero. The following month, January of...

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, part 2

From that time on, Man and Woman created the eternal triangle. It was no different in the early 1800s, nor for prospective missionaries or...

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, part 1

In Prattsburg, New York, in the early years of the 1800s there stood a church whose combined congregation consisted of Presbyterians and Congregationalists. This...

Heart of the Plains

When Coronado explored that part of the Great American Plains known today as Kansas this wild and rugged land was inhabited by the Wichita,...

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, part 4

Narcissa Prentiss remained at home, waiting to see what the future would bring. Shed had her chance. Perhaps she could have married Henry Spalding...