TRAVEL
NEBRASKA

By Alan Wilkinson
 
It was the trail of Buffalo Bill that led me to North Platte. I'd seen his grave outside Denver and visited the Historical Center at Cody, Wyo. Now it was time to head up to the old scout's former home by the Platte River.

North Platte is, first and foremost, a railroad town. Halfway between Omaha and Denver, it was an ideal division point on the Union Pacific when the first trains came snaking through in December 1866. With 2,000 railroad men cutting loose on paydays, things were still pretty lively as recently as the 1930s.

Today, its 2,500 U.P. employees are a more staid bunch. Most are based just outside town at Bailey, the world's largest freight sorting yard, with 315 miles of track sprawled out over 4 square miles. There I mounted the observation platform to watch them switching some of the 10,000 cars that are handled daily to make up 135 trains.

Back on the Buffalo Bill trail, I was lured away soon by the world's largest steam engine, Challenger 3977, right there in Cody Park and a fascinating exhibit in the adjoining Lincoln County Historical Museum. Besides having a fine collection of frontier period buildings, a depot, and a caboose, the museum offers a tribute to an extraordinary enterprise dating from World War II. From 1941 to 1945, thousands of servicemen passed through here every day on their way to foreign battlefields.

A group of North Platte women had the idea of setting up a refreshment service at the depot. During their brief stopovers these soldiers, sailors, and airmen were provided with hot drinks, food, cigarettes, magazines or books, and a last chance to talk to a woman in civilian clothes. There was no charge, and the service ran 24 hours a day. Among the testimonials from old soldiers is this: "Where is the spirit today that prompted that generosity?" And the writer answers his own question: It's undergound, awaiting some new crisis, when it reveals itself.

At last, I made it to Buffalo Bill's Ranch, a state historical park known as Scout's Rest. It's a surprisingly modest timber home, dating from 1886. It's surprisingly elegant too with its balconies, carved pillars, and bay windows painted white and trimmed with green. On display are items of personal dress, such as his leather thigh boots, hats, and fringed jackets, his rifles, some of the glass balls that Annie Oakley would shoot out of the air, and across the way the old barn, where in its heyday Cody stabled his show ponies.