Pictures

I had intended to post pictures to go with Camilla's post on the gravestones. Better late than never: Laura Rice:

Aunt Alma Rice (Laura's sister):

Aunt Olive Bowen (sister of Mary, mother of Laura and Alma):

Good marriages are important!

I suppose I should say that good alliances are important (just to stay politically correct). Given all that I have heard about the tempestuous relationship between Aunt Dede (Laura and Elial's daughter, alternately known as Jay Nettie, Jeannette, Aunt Dede), and her husband Elisha Bell, I was startled to find them buried side by side. Here's a case when you just don't know who to believe.

As the story goes -- Aunt Dede, born in Indiana, accompanied Laura and Elial on their journey across Indiana and Kansas when she was a little girl (how did parents keep their children entertained without state license plates to identify and collect??), and grew into quite a beauty after they arrived in Trinidad. Her father died when she was ten or so, which must have been hard. At 15 or 16 her mother sent her back to Oxford Ohio, to the Western Female Seminary to complete her education (otherwise known as the Mount Holyoke of the West -- an institution where friends of Laura's taught.

And then the story gets complicated. Family lore says that Dede was homesick, didn't like her math and science classes and begged to come home which is why she never "finished" her education. My grandmother, Laura Jeannette (you can see whom she was named for) told me once that Aunt Dede was also infatuated with a handsome Trinidad local - that would be Elisha - and he traveled all the way back to Oxford where he lured her away from school and they eloped (ie sex won out over studying).

Here's where the pictures of the dashing couple are supposed to go but it seems that I didn't copy them to my computer in the correct format, hence you will just have to imagine two very good looking people.

You can imagine the rest: She returned to Trinidad with a new husband - nine months later to give birth to a son (Roy Bell). Elisha proved a less than ideal husband and the two -- while married the rest of their lives -- lived separately. Now things get complicated: Aunt Dede lived a comfortable live in Denver as Elisha, a rancher and real estate developer, did well financially. She also continued to claim he was head of household as all the census records for her household list list him as present (as well as a grandson, Sherwin Bell, Roy's boy - whom he abandoned to his mother). But the census records also list Elisha as living in Las Animas County (Trinidad) and show a second household. Hence the mystery - did Elisha have two families? Unfortunately -- because historians love a good scandal -- their lives may have been a lot less interesting than family lore suggest (maybe they just had two houses?). But perhaps one of my relatives can correct me here.

Aunt Dede's younger brother Elial -- born in Trinidad soon after Laura and Elial arrived to open their grade school under the auspices of the Methodist Church -- struggled in business, ran a small grocery store and ultimately worked as a bookkeeper until he lost his job during the Depression. His last job was in the Post Office. My grandmother Laura Jeannette (known as Jeannette) was a crack student, won a scholarship to the University of Colorado and ultimately, after taking a year off to save money and then borrowing $500 from a local rich patron, was able to transfer and graduate from Mount Holyoke in 1929.

Rather than return home to Trinidad where there was no work, she stayed in Amherst, Massachusetts working at the local public library for four years until she was no longer able to stave off her beau's, Jackson Stromberg (ultimately my grandfather), entreaties to come home to marry him.

Back to those marriages and alliances:

It matters who you connect yourself up to and while Elial and Laura may have shared faith and principle, it's not clear that it did them much practical good. Thankfully Laura's granddaughter, Jeannette, proved more sensible when she married her sweetheart Jackson.

He had the good sense to know that Trinidad was eventually going to go the way of Warsaw, New Castle, and all the other temporarily thriving towns that Laura and Elial had tried to make homes in -- and die economically. Not that Trinidad isn't pretty, but Jack Stromberg made a good decision when he moved the family clothing business down to Albuquerque in 1934. With mining in the doldrums, the car making the railroad obsolete, and New Deal money largely passing southern Colorado by, he looked south to New Mexico where Albuquerque stood at the crossroads of the Santa Fe Trail and Route 66, boasted two airports and a growing number of military installations bringing in Federal dollars. Granddad Stromberg may have been a Republican but he knew the value of government stimulus. If my grandfather Jack brought a level of financial stability that my grandmother Jeannette had not previously known, she -- with her Mount Holyoke degree and her intellectual curiosity and commitment to education -- brought him a degree of principle that he admired and supported his whole life (even if she did forever after cancel his Republican vote with her Democratic one).

Day 7 -- Albuquerque, NM

Our last day of driving yesterday began with our return to the cemetery, since I had proclaimed the day before that we would not be leaving Trinidad until we found the Rices. And eventually, after much wandering and some confusion...

 

...find them we did!

Here we have Jessamine Rice...

Elial Jay Rice, the next Elial down the tree...

Jeannette Rice-Bell, also known as Aunt Dede...

Elisha Simpson Bell, Jeannette's husband...

Alma Rice...

Laura Rice Pearson, who remarried after Elial died but was buried near him...

...And Elial himself!

Alma & Laura and Jessamine & Elial Jay also got places on Elial's monument.

A picture of the whole plot. Jessamine is behind the group monument, just past the tree. Laura's personal stone is directly beside Elial's/the group monument, right over to the left there.

Susan with the Rices!

After our success with the Rices we decided to also seek out the Woodsons and the Strombergs! We found both families, but since I have to keep asking Susan to repeat the family connections for me I'll just let her make a post about it if she wants.

From there we drove to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where we stopped for a lovely lunch at Estella's, where Valerie and Susan had been years before. And then it was straight on to Albuquerque! We are now settled into the first house we'll be living in while we're here and are all looking forward to our month in the Land of Enchantment!

I'm not sure if we'll be blogging on the way back to the East Coast, so... bye for now, everybody!

If you want to get a real sense of the growth and spread of Walmart over the last 40+ years, check out http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/, an amazing visualization by Nathan Yau of FlowingData.

On Pork and Malls

The Pig Car parked outside the bank in an otherwise Republican Ulysses KS was a highpoint of our long drive. Was the message intentional? Or was this a promotion by the bank (“we don’t take pork”)? Who knows and because it was Sunday, we couldn’t ask. There’s some irony that in this otherwise “anti government” West the most friendly and accessible person we encountered was the forest ranger who was on his rounds. Not only did he take us to the petroglyphs which they like to keep secret because people do things like outline them in black marker or better yet, shoot at them (I guess if you can’t kill real “Indians” you can “kill” prehistoric ones). Perhaps everyone else was in church.

Not only has Wal-Mart taken over the country but they seem to be flanked close by with mega-churches. While I travel I’m also teaching online – and have assigned to my students a book by Bethany Moreton on Wal-Mart . We’ve been struck not only by the ubiquity of Wal-Mart but also by the “mall-ification”of religion. Often you see a supercenter with a mega church nearby. Not only have the downtowns been left to ghosts but I’m betting the in town churches – and their beautiful stone buildings – have been “gutted” as well. The only towns that seem to have preserved their downtowns as active places have done so by playing up their notoriety, as in Dodge City KS, where Wyatt Erp’s image is found everywhere.

Day 6 -- Trinidad, CO

Well, we're in the home stretch! We have reached the end of Elial and Laura Rice's journey west. Tomorrow we'll set out and follow the Strombergs into Albuquerque.

One of the first towns we drove through today was Ulysses, Kansas. Ulysses itself is nothing to write home about, but it did have this:

 We're not sure if it was parked outside of a bank on purpose, but it still made for a nice political message.

After much driving we made our way to the Camanche Grasslands National Park. After seeing no one on the side-road we had been driving on, we ended up being joined at the park by a forest ranger and two pick-up trucks of visitors immediately after our arrival! We fell into conversation with the ranger, and in the end he offered to take us on his rounds through the park. He showed us some of the petroglyphs he knows about in the park -- their locations are often kept secret in order to prevent vandalism -- and was all around a really nice, friendly guy. We don't think we've ever met a park or forest ranger we didn't like though. They tend to be a good bunch.

 A petroglyph -- some kind of geometric shape, not easy to see.

 A carving of a big-horned sheep to the left and two carvings of deer to the bottom right (the latter are harder to see).

 Carving of a deer or an elk. All of the antlers kind of remind me of the Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke, if anyone has seen any of the animated films by Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

Another big-horned sheep.

From the park, we got lost on the surrounding back roads and drove around in circles for a while. Once we made it back to our side-highway though we just drove west in a straight line to Trinidad. Valerie commented at one point that you can really tell how compacted everything is back east -- since this morning, we've gone up about 3,500 feet without climbing a single noticeable hill (we're now at 6,000 feet above sea level).

In Trinidad we're staying in the local Best Western, which, though it's more "plebeian" in Susan's words, is actually very nice. For less than our stays at Hampton Inns and the one Holiday Inn, we get a very spacious room, a nice basic bathroom, a little fridge, and a microwave (plus we're supporting a Trinidad business owner and the town economy, since Best Westerns are locally owned). We ate at a nice Mexican place and each ordered our own dish because we were able to bring the leftovers back with us.

After dinner we went to the cemetery to try to track down Elial and Laura, since it really wouldn't be a family trip without another visit to a cemetery. Or without getting lost. In that sense, we've hit two big family trip marks today! We could not, however, find the Rices today, since the cemetery seemed to be laid out with no rhyme or reason (it could possibly be set up by congregation, Susan said later, but it still seemed to have no numerical organization). We looked up the location of their plots later and will try to find them again tomorrow, since we won't be in any hurry. After all, Elial & Co.'s travels are the whole reason we're on this trip, we can't leave without paying them a visit!

We also had a very lovely walk through town, since we ate a very early dinner. We were probably the only people walking around though. But, it is a Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere in one of those places where people usually drive, so I guess that makes sense. It was beautiful though -- lovely weather, nice town. Still, by now we're all eager to reach Albuquerque!

Days 4 and 5 -- Lawrence and Dodge, KN

So yesterday nothing much happened. We drove, and drove, and drove some more, making perfect time and reaching Lawrence in nine hours even with minor traffic issues. Lawrence itself is another wonderful hippy-dippy little college town with a lively, well-preserved downtown and lovely real estate; I can't speak for Valerie and Susan, but by the end of dinner last night I almost didn't want to leave.

Today started out on a good note. To begin with, when we got ready to drive into town for breakfast, we noticed we'd picked up a hitchhiker!

 (No praying mantises were harmed in the making of this road trip.)

From breakfast (which wasn't quite as good as our fantastically amazing dinner the night before, sadly) we hit the road and drove to the Black Jack Battlefield, where a major battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces took place. Haven't heard of the Battle of Black Jack? That's because it's one of the pre-Civil-War battles that usually gets left out of history lessons that aren't taught by Susan Yohn (American history is, as we know, rather selective).

 Stone monument with a brief blurb about what the Battle of Black Jack is.

 Our new friend, the resident guide-cat.

 This should be a picture of wagon ruts. Which are also known as swales, apparently.

 Shot of part of the battlefield. Not very interesting, when all's said and done. I have to admit, as much as I love history, the obsession with the Civil War has always eluded me.

Super-Friendly Guide-Cat investigates Tako-Tako, who is back to not feeling so sure about this adventure.

Ah, now this is a picture of the nearby(-ish) Baldwin train depot. The building pictured here was built around 1906, a while after Elial & Co. would have hypothetically gone through if they had taken a train instead of traveling by wagon.

After a lot more driving, we ended up making an impromptu visit to the Kansas Underground Salt Museum, which is in an old salt mine 650 feet underground. The part of the mine that the museum is in was dug out by Carey Salt, which is now the Hutchinson Salt Company and continues to produce road salt in another part of the mine. Visitors go down to the mine in a double-decker elevator, wander about exhibits about how the salt was formed and how it's been mined since Carey Salt started in 1923, see a small selection of the papers, movie props, and other paraphernalia stored elsewhere in the mine by Underground Vaults & Storage, and go on little train and tram rides through the mine. The whole thing was beyond cool. Unfortunately though, we all forgot about my camera, so there are no pictures. The trip did reafirm our idea that bizarre museums would make a great subject for a future road trip though, so who knows, we might go back one day!

Since none of us had eaten lunch and we ran out of corn chips back around Day 2, we opted to eat in Hutchinson instead of pushing straight on to Dodge after the salt mine. We ended up at a highly recommended barbecue joint which lived up to all of the praise. Susan and I are very happy to have had our ribs. Also, the portions were among the most reasonable we've come across on this trip! It was definitely an experience all around, and a good one at that.

So now we're in Dodge. Tomorrow we leave Kansas and make our way into Colorado, and then on Monday we finally reach Albuquerque! Stay tuned!