Travel
Kansas
By
Jesse Mullins, Jr.
If a visitor had to settle for only one Western travel "theme" to
explore in all the state of Kansas, the case could be made that the Santa Fe
Trail best fills the bill. It beckons with significance, scope, and serendipity.
In
significance, it stands with anything that the West
has to offer. In some ways it is the West-in that it
was the first major overland trail to the West. Established
in 1821 as a trade route between St. Louis and Santa
Fe, the trail was blazed-like the "Bloody Bozeman" through
Wyoming and Montana-only with sacrifice and hardship,
and its very name is evocative of dangers and wild
romance, of the linking of farflung cultures, of colorful
characters.
In
scope, it is Kansas' "biggest" feature, in
that it runs the length (actually, the width) of the
state, going more than 400 miles east to west. The
Santa Fe Trail is to Kansas what the Oregon Trail (its
only rival for trail preeminence) is to Nebraska-an
artery that fed the various histories of all other
parts of the state. The trail's points of interest
include names every Western history buff will recognize:
Council Grove, Great Bend (of the Arkansas River),
Pawnee Rock, Fort Dodge, the Cimarron Cutoff.
In
the matter of serendipity, it is perennially promising,
for, given its 60-year history and its geographical
and environmental diversity, it is studded with
sites, stories, and discoveries that run the gamut from legendary to all-but-overlooked.
For
a good dose of the underappreciated, do as I've done
and meander the back roads, crisscrossing the route,
looking for ruts and trying to envision why they followed
this ridge or skirted those flats. You'll need a trail
guidebook.
For
a good dose of the legendary, get yourself to Larned,
a locale that's as representative, and as significant,
as you could hope to find. Here you'll find both Fort
Larned National Historic Site and the Santa
Fe Trail Center, yielding a double-barreled
bonanza of trail history and insight.
Fort Larned's Chief Ranger, Felix Revello, described the site as "the
finest example of an Indian Wars-era military post on the Santa Fe Trail." Calling
it the "best preserved" among comparable sites, Revello remarked
that the fort attracts more than 35,000 visitors a year. Summertime is perhaps
the best, because it is then that the living history participants are most
active.
Four
miles away stands the Santa Fe Trail Center, with its
7,000 square feet of museum exhibition space.
Betsy
Crawford-Gore, curator for the Center, said that the
exhibits fall into three historical epochs: the pre-trail
era, the active trail years of 1821 to '80, and the
post-trail settlement era. The Center has interpretive
exhibits, period rooms, and many artifacts.
" The museum and the fort together really make a wonderful place to stop," Crawford-Gore
said. |
