West 2008: Thursday, July 17, 2008

We left the motel in St. Cloud early and again headed west on I-94. We had about 654 miles to cover by evening. Our destination was Dickinson, North Dakota.

I-94 shoots straight as an arrow across the wide expanses of North Dakota at a speed limit of 75 miles per hour. We could see for miles in all directions, with wide expanses of blue sky above us and miles of concrete ribbon speeding by beneath us.

We made a couple of stops that day for birdwatching and photography. First we stopped at the Dawson Wildlife Management Area near Dawson, North Dakota. A sign with a binocular pictured on it caught Linda’s attention, and so we pulled in to this small clearing along a rural road.

I busied myself taking pictures of the area while Linda explored the perimeter of the clearing with her binoculars for signs of bird life. Her records indicate she saw a cliff swallow, western kingbird, marsh harrier, yellow-headed blackbird, white pelican, eastern wood pewee, eastern bluebird, yellow warbler, forsters tern, and a tree swallow.

Later, across the river from Bismarck, North Dakota, we stopped at the Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. Here she saw a red-eyed vireo, cedar waxwing, and catbird.

Fort Abraham Lincoln played a role in the history of another site we would visit several days later. This military post opposite the Missouri River was home base for the Seventh Cavalry whose commander was General George Armstrong Custer. It was the Seventh’s assignment to defend those who would open the west for both the railroad and the settlers that would follow.
In the summer of 1876, General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry left Fort Abraham Lincoln on a 500 mile-long journey into history. A problem had developed in what eventually would become southwestern Montana. Indian tribes who had not made treaties with the United States government were refusing to stay on their lands and threatened the westward expansion efforts. Under orders from President Ulysses Grant, General Custer and his men rode into the valley of the Little Big Horn River and one of the fiercest battles in the history of winning the west. None of General Custer’s men or himself returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln. Even their horses were killed in the intense fighting that lasted for two days.

We left the Fort as well, probably never to return, as we headed west to the town of Dickinson, a town of about 16,000 people situated on the eastern edge of some of the most spectacular scenery in America.

Photo: Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park across the Missouri River from Bismarck, North Dakota.

West 2008: The Trip of a Lifetime

It was a trip planned over the course of five or six years. It was a trip of a lifetime.

Several years ago, while working on my book, Windsor’s Child, I thought it would be rewarding to go to Farragut State Park in Idaho, which in the early 1940's was the Farragut Naval Training Station. Readers of the book will remember that this is the place where my brother, Ron, was sent for training when he enlisted in the Navy in 1943.

As I discussed the possibility of this trip with my wife, she added that she would like to visit Montana, which is right next door to Idaho. She was especially interested in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Montana.

These two sites became the focus of a dream trip, one that would take much time and money to bring to life. I planned this trip several ways with different itinerary and costs, and finally early in 2008, the year of the fortieth anniversary of our wedding, we decided to make the trip. We leased a new 2008 Toyota Rav 4, made the final plans, and set out on the trip on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. The trip would take us over 4500 miles, consume thirteen days, take us into eleven states and four time zones, and past one million (more or less) orange barrels. It was budgeted at about $2500. The price of gas was hovering around $4.00 per gallon as we made the final plans for the trip. We decided we were not going to get younger (I was 67 and my wife was 60 at the time), and gas was not going to get cheaper, although it did get cheaper during our trip.

It became apparent to me early in the planning that this trip would follow two historical routes. First, it would follow the trails blazed by the hardy pioneers who decided in the early 19th century to pull up stakes in the east and head west, not knowing how arduous the journey would be or what they would find once they arrived at the end of their journey. Across endless prairies on ox-pulled wagons that, at the end of the prairie, hit ground so tortuously twisted as to be impassable, they followed their dreams to the new promised land of the west.

But we were following another trail. In 1943 when my brother was sent to Farragut for training, the Navy shipped him from Detroit to Idaho on a train that followed roughly the present-day route of Interstate 94 across the northern tier of states. In his letters home, he mentioned passing through the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota, through Bismarck, North Dakota and through the state of Montana, all of which we would pass through on our journey west.

The story of how those early pioneers won their west is a well-known segment of American history. The story of how my brother won his west is a well-known segment of my family history.

Linda and I now add our own story of how we won our west in this journey.

This is a daily journal of the trip of a lifetime, a trip we called West 2008.

The picture shows our Rav 4 in the Lake of the Woods Park near Mahomet, Illinois.