KANSAS: CIMARRON NATIONAL GRASSLAND, THE SANTA FE TRAIL, AND POINT OF ROCKS

 October 17, 2020

After our exhausting climb to the summit of Mount Sunflower 🤣, we needed some nourishment, so we stopped in Syracuse (Kansas, not New York) for lunch and had a very mediocre tostada in a restaurant called "Porky's Parlor." The name alone should have warned us away. Not one other person besides us was wearing a face mask. Yep, Trump county.

However, at least we got to visit the "Home of the USA's First All-female City Council." That was a treat!

Mural in the restaurant parking lot

Our first afternoon stop was Cimarron National Grassland, 108,176 acres of grassy plains bisected by the Cimarron River. National Grasslands are essentially identical to National Forests, but think prairie instead of trees. This grassland, which used to the the territory of the Comanche Indian tribe, is now the largest area of public land in Kansas.

The Native Americans got chased out, but there are still a few local residents left.

Supposedly this is a popular fishing area, but when we were there is was so quiet. There was no one else there, but also no birds, no bunnies, no creepy-crawly things (except the aforementioned grasshoppers).

The Little House on the Prairie books take place in Kansas, and I could picture Laura running across this expanse, her gingham skirt and braids flying out behind her.

Our next stop was Middle Spring, a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, which pretty much bisects Kansas.

These trees are relatively new additions to the site. They certainly weren't here when the pioneers were passing through.

The bridge across the stream is also an addition since Santa Fe Trail days.

The travelers endured miles and miles of prairie with very little water until they reached Middle Spring.

Supposedly, these ruts were made by the wooden wheels of the Conestoga wagons that were a common mode of transportation.

In contrast, this was our rental car--a Jeep Cherokee.  I just had to squeeze a picture of it in for the great-great-grandkids. It might seem as foreign to them as the Conestoga wagons do to us.

We walked for a little way down the "trail" to get a feel for it.

Our last stop was at a tall butte called Point of Rocks. At 3,540 feet, it is the third highest point in the state and was an important landmark for travelers heading west.

An information board at the site has this great quote from Albert Pike. Note that he spells "Cimarron" "Semaron." 

Caravans on the 800-mile-long Santa Fe Trail took six to ten weeks to make the journey between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the railroad reached Santa Fe in 1880, the Santa Fe Trail gradually slipped into obscurity.

I feel almost guilty for having accessed this spot via an air-conditioned four-wheel drive vehicle.

As we left Point of Rocks and started the drive to our hotel in Clayton, New Mexico, we drove past several of these interesting animals. It looks a little prehistoric, doesn't it? Something to do with fossils, perhaps?

A beautiful sunset was the perfect ending for a fun day.

"A Prairie Sunset" by Walt Whitman

Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,

The earth's whole amplitude and nature's multiform power consigned for once to colors;

The light, the genial air possessed by them--colors till now unknown,

No limit, confine--not the Western sky alone--the high meridian--North, South, all,

Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.

TOPEKA, KANSAS: MONROE SCHOOL AND BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

One of the earliest events in a long string of events that became the Civil Rights Movement involved a group of black children who were being bused to a segregated elementary school in Topeka. It wasn't a bad school--in fact, it was designed and built by the same company that built the all-white elementary school in town that many of the children lived quite close to. In addition, there were more teachers with master's degrees in the black school than in the white school. Unlike other places, "separate but equal" seemed to apply in this case. After all, Kansas had sided with the Union in the Civil War and, as far as states go, was quite progressive on race issues. The junior high and high schools were already integrated.

Monroe Elementary, an all-black elementary school built in 1926

The beef, however, was that some of the students who attended Monroe School, the black students' school, lived much closer to the white students' school. Some of the parents wanted their kids to have the opportunity to attend in their own neighborhood. None of the parents, along with the NAACP, liked the idea of "separate" in the "separate but equal" ruling of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).  A group of thirteen parents, who represented their twenty children and were encouraged and supported by the NAACP, were the plaintiffs in this case. The eponymous plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was the father of a third-grader named Linda. Linda walked six blocks to her bus stop, and then she rode the bus a mile to Monroe School. An all white school, Sumner Elementary, was just seven blocks from her home. In the fall of 1951, the NAACP encouraged the parents to try to enroll their children at the neighborhood school. Of course they were denied and told to register at the segregated schools.

The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, noting that the standards established in Plessy v. Ferguson for "separate but equal" facilities had been met. Thurgood Marshall, who was the NAACP's chief counsel and who would later be appointed to the Supreme Court himself, argued the case before the Supreme Court in spring 1953, but the justices could not reach a decision and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953. (I had no idea that could be done.) Initially, it appeared the vote was sharply divided. Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that segregation was based wholly on the idea that black people were inferior to white people, a preposterous idea. His simple argument was effective. Eventually there were only two holdouts, but Warren and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter decided that this was such a significant case that there needed to be a unanimous vote rather than a simple majority, even though legally a majority is the same as a unanimous vote. They continued to work on the holdouts, and eventually they got their consensus.

TOPEKA, KANSAS: FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND TIFFANY WINDOWS

     “I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."
     "That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
     The Scarecrow sighed."Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”                       ~L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

As noted in a previous post, the Oz books were my life when I was in elementary school, and I must confess that everything I have ever thought about Kansas came from their pages.

Boy, was I mislead. I suppose Kansas can be hot and dry, and most likely I would feel differently if I had visited during a cyclone, but now that I've been there, I think Kansas is full of art and culture and lots of surprises. We ran across one of those surprises in Topeka.

Topeka's First Presbyterian Church, built in 1884, is relatively simple as far as churches go. The original building had a wooden steeple that stood 160 feet high. It was damaged by lightning in 1888, repaired, and then damaged again in 1910. Can you blame the church leadership for deciding to permanently remove the tower?

Photo from here

The church has a large sanctuary with a beautiful hand-carved altar:

However, the real glory of the church and the Big Surprise referred to earlier is on the surrounding walls: ten stained glass windows designed by none other than THE Louis Comfort Tiffany and installed in 1911 at a cost of $14,000. The church calls them "Windows of Comfort," a nice play on Tiffany's middle name.

(These are terrible photos, but they give a good idea of how the windows are placed in the church.)

TOPEKA, KANSAS: STATE CAPITOL BUILDING

Topeka, Kansas, was our third state capital in a week, and the capitol building, along with the one in Lincoln, Nebraska (see post here), and Des Moines, Iowa (see posts here and here), was one of the most beautiful we've seen. It has the classic majestic exterior known to those who are familiar with the US Capitol. At 304 feet, this dome is actually taller than the 288-foot-tall US Capitol dome, but its 50-foot diameter is about half of the US Capitol's 96 feet. It has the look of a rocket ready for launch.

Construction took 37 years, and the capitol was declared finished in 1903. In 1901, a proposal had been submitted for a sculpture of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, to "complete" the tower.  Controversy over the cost and the pagan subject (and her questionable morals) prevented the statue from ever being cast and installed. It wasn't until 1984 that the process for selecting a new design began. The winner of the competition was a sculptor named Richard Bergen, whose design was a Native American warrior shooting an arrow at the sky:

While funds were being raised to pay for the sculpture, the cupola had to be reinforced so that it could hold the 4,420-pound, 22-foot-tall figure. Before it was installed, the finished sculpture was driven 3,000 miles to 35 cities around the state in the back of a truck so that Kansans could see and touch it. It was 2002 before the sculpture was finally lifted in place by a huge crane:

Photo from here

Surprise, surprise! A copy of the Statue of Liberty graces the capitol grounds. This is the third or fourth one we've seen at a capitol.

WAMEGO, KANSAS: THE OZ MUSEUM

Starting in about 4th grade, I became obsessed with the Wizard of Oz--the book (which was actually originally titled The WONDERFUL Wizard of Oz, but the word "Wonderful" was dropped in 1903), the movie, the characters, the music--I loved it all. When I discovered that there was a whole slew of sequels to the original book, I was overcome with joy and read every one that was on the shelves of our local library. The first book that I can recall buying with my own money was Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Baum's fourth Oz book (published in 1908). I still own the book. In fact, that's a photo of my copy to the left. It cost $1.50 and I bought it at the BYU Bookstore.

During my childhood there was no such thing as a "video," so the only way to see a movie was in the theater or on TV. The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz came around on TV once a year, usually on a Sunday evening, and that was one of the rare times my mom would let us watch TV on a) a Sunday and b) a school night.

I remember inviting my next-door neighbor and best friend Lori over to watch the movie with me and my sister Christine. Mom would let us pop popcorn, and then she even let us eat it in the living room while we were watching TV. It was epic, and Lori was soon converted to loving Oz too. I was sure I was named after Judy Garland (doubtful), which may have been part of my love for the movie. The Wizard of Oz was the principal source of magic that filled my childhood.

Fast forward 45+ years. Naturally, when we decided to travel through Kansas, the first thing I thought about was Dorothy and Toto and Auntie Em and the farm. A Google search revealed a potential Mecca: The Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas, and I made sure Bob put it as a #1 priority on the itinerary.

So why is there an Oz museum in Wamego? Was it the home of L. Frank Baum? One of the actors/actresses? The director/lyricist/composer/producer of the movie? The books' publisher? Was there actually an Auntie Em on whom Baum based the character?

No, no, no, no, and no. The Oz Museum was founded in Wamego in 2004 because . . . well, just because.

If you're wondering--and I know I was--L. Frank Baum was born in New York in 1856, moved to the Dakota Territory with his wife and sons in 1888 (the region on which he based Kansas in his book), then moved his family to Chicago in 1891. In 1897 Baum published his first successful book, Mother Goose in Prose, followed in 1899 by Father Goose, His Book. In 1900 he hit the jackpot with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was the best-selling children's book for two full years. He followed it up with eleven more "Oz books" and two collections of Oz-related short stories over the next eighteen years. Two more of his Oz books were published posthumously. An incredibly prolific writer, he penned dozens of other non-Oz full-length works and short stories under his own name and at least seven other pseudonyms.

The Baums eventually moved to California, where Frank worked on stage and silent movie versions of his works, and where he died of a stroke in 1919. He was buried in Glendale, less than two hours from my home. (Yes, his grave is on my Pilgrimage/Places to Visit list.) He never did live in Kansas.

Okay, back to Wamego.

ABILENE, KANSAS: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, MUSEUM, BOYHOOD HOME, AND MAUSOLEUM

After driving through Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska, we headed for our fourth and last state: Kansas. During the next few days, our plan was to visit Abilene, Wamego, Topeka, Lawrence, and Kansas City (Kansas side):

(Wamego? What's in Wamego? You'll have to wait and see.)

The first leg, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Abilene, Kansas, was 165 miles of corn fields. Some people would call this a soothing drive; others might say it's mind-blowingly boring. By this point in the trip, I'd probably go with the latter except for the fact that we had a good audiobook going, so the drive was great.

Our first Kansas stop was the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home in Abilene. Like the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library site we visited earlier in the trip, this is a sprawling park that obviously includes much more than just the museum. Those Midwesterners like their space.

1. EISENHOWER'S CHILDHOOD HOME
Eisenhower's family moved to Abilene from Texas in 1892 when Ike was two years old, and to this house in Abilene in 1898. Ike lived here with his five brothers and his parents until he left for West Point in 1911 at age 20. Ike's parents lived here until they died in 1942 and 1946.

PLACES TO EAT IN AND AROUND KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Kansas City is an eating town. A guide told us that it has more barbecue per capita than any other city in the world. To be ranked as a good barbecue place in KC is like being ranked as a good art museum in New York City or Paris. Going back for another year of AP scoring would be worth it just to be able to try a few more restaurants. In the short time I was there, however, I managed to try the five listed below.

1. FIORELLA'S JACK STACK BARBECUE

When we asked around at the AP Reading where we should eat, this restaurant at 101 W. 22nd Street is the place we kept hearing about. It is ranked #7 out of 1,186 restaurants in Kansas City by TripAdvisor, and it deserves its high rating. When I went there with my AP friends, I had burnt ends, a dish I'd never heard of, and sides of cheesy corn and baked beans. Burnt ends, a unique part of Kansas City barbecue, are flavorful bits cut from a beef brisket. It was a dish that I loved at first bite:

And the cheesy corn, ah, the cheesy corn! So good that I came home and looked up a recipe to make it myself. It can be found here.  

When Bob came in to town at the end of my scoring week, I made sure I took him to Jack Stack's. He liked it so much that we went back for a second visit before we flew home. Bob going to the same restaurant twice when there are 1,183 other options? That's a ringing endorsement!

Here are a few other cuts we enjoyed. This is crown prime beef short rib:

And this beauty is a combo that adds beef ribs and lamb ribs to the crown prime beef short ribs:

Bob rates the barbecued beans among the best he's ever had, so I made those at home as well, using this recipe. It calls for some of Jack's barbecued brisket, which of course I didn't have, so I substituted bacon instead. It was good, but not quite as good as the real thing.