Nebraska, following I-80:

The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument Heading West, you drive under this a mile or so before the Kearney exit. (I am told that "Kearney" is actually pronounced without the first "e" as if it were short for "carnival.") From the exit you wend your way back along a marginal road, past barbed-wire bison, colorful tepees, and abandoned stagecoaches.

Inside the monument, you exchange your ticket for a pair of headphones and go up the escalator into the archway proper. Here, audio in place, you find yourself not over a modern highway, but in the middle of a wagon train in a thunderstorm.

The monument is less a museum than a walk-through of methods of travel across the praries. Starting with wagon trains, they cover the Pony Express and the telegraph, the stagecoach, the transcontinental railroad, and the growing road system from the collection of local roads that made up the Lincoln Highway (Rt 30), to the modern interstate. At the end, you come out into a little pseudo-50s-style diner where the windows look out over the highway, and they have speed tracker boxes so you can see how fast the trucks are speeding. (Although on a windy day with a 75 mph speed limit, more people are actually going slightly under the limit to avoid being blown off the road.)

Gothenberg, Pony Express capital of Nebraska

Gothenburg's claim to fame is that it has not one, but two former Pony Express stations within the town limits. The original one is now part of somebody's farm, and as he didn't want people tramping through his pigpens to visit it, the town imported the upper story of another building from about ten miles away which was used by both the pony express and the stagecoach in its day.

Contrary to popular impression, the pony express only operated for about 14 months in 1860 & 61. During that time it was hugely successful, as it was the only way to get news between east and west with any regularity; for a few dollars, you could get your letter placed in one of the locked pouches on a rider's saddle, and the rider would transfer the saddle as he changed horses all the way back to civilization at the Mississippi. The creators of the pony express had almost recouped their vast initial investment when they got put out of business by the telegraph.

As it happens, the only reason the pony express is still famous today is that Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider for it in his youth, and therefore thought it worth including when he did his Wild West show. This wagon is in the park behind Gothenberg's transplanted pony express station. I think it's sad there aren't more of these in playgrounds across the country. I mean, wouldn't you have wanted to play on one?

Sod House Museum On my way back to the highway, I stopped at this place mainly because it was right there. The barn houses half museum/half giftshop with postcards and sunbonnets and all sorts of newspaper articles about sod houses & various pioneer things pinned to the walls.

One of the articles was written by a woman who had made some sort of study of the photographs people had taken with their house & most prized posessions arrayed in the background. One thing she kept noticing was that nearly all the pictures she saw included wire birdcages under the eaves of the houses, and this seemed strange to her. But when she began to do research, she learned that the women who moved out to these houses-- isolated spots on the prarie, where their menfolk might be gone three days on a trip to town to get supplies-- would complain most about the silence, when they were used to the birds and people and noises they had heard back east where there were trees and people. On their prarie spots, not only was there nothing to see most of the way to the horizon, there as nothing to hear but the wind.

So their solution to this was to keep a canary, as something smaller and more fragile and more cheerful than they were. The author of the article went on to say that she had given a talk about this where an old woman came up to her afterwards with tears in her eyes, and said that this had explained something she had never understood. Her grandmother had been a pioneer woman, and when she had gotten too old for it she had left the prarie, and moved into smaller and smaller apartments, getting rid of the things that were no longer so important to her, until when she died in the equivalent of a nursing home room, all that was left for her family to sort through was a shoebox of her dearest treasures. And her granddaughter opened the shoebox and found things that made sense to her, like love letters from her husband, and she also found a carefully wrapped package in which was the dried-out corpse of a dead bird. Not until she heard the author's talk had she understood how this could have come to be one of her grandmother's most prized posessions.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: Interstate 80