Thursday, June 1, 2006

At five in the morning, in these latitudes, it’s still dark on June 1. The night before I had filled the gas tank until it gurgled, and packed the “wayback” of the little SUV with about ten cartons of books. The suitcases, garment bag, laptop computer, cameras, projector, and assorted other cases were on the back seat. We drove about a mile down Tooele’s Main Street (the 1919 Lincoln Highway), and breakfasted at our local Denny’s. At 6:15, when we left the parking lot, it was getting light. We headed north on Utah 36. About ten miles ahead we passed the road leading to Grantsville, the same road taken by the Donner Party in 1846, and Alice Ramsey in 1909.

(Refreshing, Alice was the 22-year-old mother who piloted a Maxwell from Manhattan to San Francisco in 1909, becoming the first woman to drive an automobile from coast to coast.)

In the next two weeks we’ll be giving ten slide presentations about the amazing Alice—the first in Kearney, Nebraska, this Saturday, and the last in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the fourteenth annual conference of the Lincoln Highway Association. And hoping to sell copies of our Alice’s Drive in the process.

A few hundred yards north of the Grantsville road we passed the craggy blackAdobe Rock, mentioned in several emigrant narratives as their covered wagons and pack mules headed west over the notorious Hastings Cutoff. Alice didn’t mention Adobe Rock but just about everybody else did.

Adobe  Rock

Sunrise comes late along here, as Old Sol first has to climb the Oquirrh (pro. OH-kerr) Mountains, separating the Tooele Valley from the Salt Lake metroplex. We caught our first glimpse of it as we rounded Lake Point, at the southern tip of the Great Salt Lake, mounted I-80, and headed east. Glimpse? More like a smack in the kisser, right in our eyes.
Since we arrived in the Holy Land from Tucson, and since we make trips from Tooele to Salt Lake City about once a week, the superslab from Lake Point into the city seems rather routine to us. Yet, the sight of the gulls swooping down for their breakfast, the pelicans digesting their brine shrimp, the avocets, great blue herons, cormorants, the Canadian geese, and the leggy sandpipers along the way, never gets boring.

For some reason the gummint was unable to run I-80 straight through Salt Lake City. There is a one-mile jog to the south before the eastward course can be resumed. Then it gets very interesting to us. We are soon in Parley’s Canyon, opened by Parley Pratt in 1850 as a toll road, but the old pioneer road through Emigration Canyon continued to be used for another decade.

The Lincoln Highway proceeded through there with great difficulty in the early years, with numerous crossings of Parley’s Creek and the Union Pacific Railroad
extremely irritating (and dangerous) to travelers in 1913-15. But gradually the road was improved, winding through Coalville and up the Weber River to the mouth of Echo Canyon. As we proceeded east we could see the old Lincoln Highway up on the ledge to the left, far below the boulders the Mormon “Destroying Angels” stacked atop the canyon wall in 1857, ready to rain down on Buchanan’s Army should they decide to enter the city.
(The feeling in Washington was that Gov. Brigham Young wanted his State of Deseret to become a nation apart from the United States. Not true, but the army was packing along a new, and very nervous, governor, just in case.)
 

The Lincoln Highway runs through
Echo Canyon

We left Utah some four miles west of Evanston, rolling east at 75 mph, pausing in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to make those good people at Conoco forty bucks richer. With all that weight, the Hyundai Tucson was still getting 24 mpg.

We were getting extremely bored with I-80 so we left the fool thing and mounted US 30, the Lincoln Highway, in Sidney, Nebraska. The interstate was clearly visible to our right, often less than a mile away. Traffic was cruising there at 70-75 mph, and we were doing 60-65. One semi after another over there. We saw exactly one on this stretch, and it was going in the opposite direction.

The Lincoln Highway , US 30, crosses the middle of the photo
as cornfields stretch north to the horizon in western Nebraska.

We stopped for the night in Ogallala, Nebraska, 600-plus miles from home. And thirty-five years of memories later. I was pulling our Holiday Rambler trailer then and stayed in Ogallala, in August 1971. The second-last field trip leading to publication of The Oregon Trail Revisited was over and I was headed back from Oregon to my then-home in St. Louis County. I had planned to fill the tank of the new Ford station wagon in Scottsbluff, but what the heck, there was enough to get to Bridgeport. We passed that town after six and it was locked up for the night. Okay, then Broadwater. Or Oshkosh, or surely Lewellen. All dark. The needle on the gas gauge was to the left of E, with thirty-one miles to go to the next town, Ogallala. Slowing down to 50 mph to conserve fuel, we managed to roll downhill to the town, turning right just before reaching I-80, where there was a Texaco station, lights burning brightly. The Ford took almost seventeen gallons in the sixteen-gallon tank, meaning all the lines were empty and she was running on whatever remained in the carburetor bowl. There was a Ramada Inn right next door.

Well, the Ramada Inn is still there. Only now it’s the Gray Goose Lodge. Way overpriced, but we were tired so we shut down for the night.