Submitted by scott on

Tuesday, July 30. Arrived at the “Crossing” of the South Platte, alias “Overland City,” alias “Julesburg,” at 11 A. M., 470 miles from St. Joseph. Saw to-day first Cactus. 1:20 P. M. across the South Platte.

Crossing the Platte

At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing of the South Platte,” alias “Julesburg,” alias “Overland City,” four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph—the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.

It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude! We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up suddenly in this. For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before. The reason we had an hour to spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous affair, called a “mud-wagon”) and transfer our freight of mails.
Presently we got under way again. We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and pigmy islands—a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either bank. The Platte was “up,” they said—which made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier. They said it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford it. But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt. Once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be shipwrecked in a “mud-wagon” in the middle of a desert at last. But we dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun.

(Roughing It)

See Burton,  12th August. We cross the Platte. from The City of the Saints

From a privately printed commentary (dubious narrative):

The party in the stage included my great aunt, Thesta Dana, her husband, Lieutenant James Jackson Dana, U.S.A., and their daughter May, two years old.

At Julesburg at the crossing of the South Platte Burton drew a charcoal sketch of a Kiowa buck which engendered a row right off.  J. L. Slade, the baddest bad man the west ever produced, was a Division Superintendent on the Overland Stage, and he rode from Julesburg to Windriver Summit two hundred and eighty miles, ‘Jes to see no didos happened to that baby gal’.  Slade, Wild Bill Hickoc, the Express Messenger, Lieutenant Beverley Robinson, afterwards a General in the U.S.  Army, Joe Cuming, Burton, Lieutenant Dana, and the stock tenders and other hangers on at a Stage Station stood off an attack by the enraged Kiowas.”

From Julesburgh the route lay over the Rocky Ridge Road, “the most Indian Infested and Bandit Frequented on the whole Trail across the Country.”  Over this Slade took my Aunt Thesta and my cousin May in his own buckboard with an outriding escort which my grateful Uncle James later described as sixteen of the most villainous cut throats on the Plains.

Richard Walden Hale Sir Richard F. Burton at Salt Lake City (Privately Printed, 1930).

 

From Julesburg into the Wilderness: Day By Day
Lodge Pole to Mud Springs

At 12 45 P.M., traveling over the uneven barren, and in a burning sirocco, we reached Lodge-Pole Station, where we made our "noonin.” The hovel fronting the creek was built like an Irish shanty, or a Beloch hut, against a hill side, to save one wall, and it presented a fresh phase of squalor and wretchedness. The mud walls were partly papered with “Harper's Magazine," “Frank Leslie," and the "New York Illustrated News;" the ceiling was a fine festoon-work of soot, and the floor was much like the ground outside, only not nearly so clean.

Mud Springs to Fort Laramie

Wednesday, July 31.—Sunrise. Court House Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scott’s Bluffs, in sight. At noon passed through Scott’s Bluff’s pass., 580 miles from St. Joseph. This was the first high ground, since entering upon the plains. All was vast, prairie, until we reached Fort Kearney. Soon afterwards, we struck the barren region, and thenceforward we had a level expanse covered with sage brush, and that was the character of the growth until we arrived here, the plains being more or less elevated, or broken, but in other respects preserving the same characteristics.

Locusts

...the clouds of grasshoppers. According to Lieutenant Warren, whose graphic description is here borrowed, these insects are “nearly the same as the locusts of Egypt; and no one who has not traveled on the prairie, and seen for himself, can appreciate the magnitude of the swarms. Often they fill the air for many miles of extent, so that an inexperienced eye can scarcely distinguish their appearance from that of a shower of rain or the smoke of a prairie fire. The height of their flight may be somewhat appreciated, as Mr. E.

Brief Stop at Fort Laramie

At 12 15 P.M., crossing Laramie's Fork, a fine clear stream about forty yards broad, we reached Fort Laramie — another "fort” by courtesy, or rather by order— where we hoped to recruit our exhausted stores.

Contact Us