We have visited Every Cowboy State

We have visited every cowboy state. It has taken almost five years to do this. Put another way, except for Alaska, we have camped in every western state. I call this a milestone. This is not to say that there are no cowboys in states we have not yet visited. There are also plenty of cowboys in Alaska and Canada, maybe next year.

Fort Smith

Crossing Arkansas this spring, we entered the cowboy states at the traditional place. Perhaps Texas was first as a cowboy state, followed by Oklahoma. Fort Smith is located on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border along the Arkansas River. In the mid-1800s, Fort Smith was at the edge of the frontier.

Oklahoma, west of Fort Smith, was Indian Territory. It was home to displaced Indians from across the East and South. The 1830s, regretfully, were marked by the exile of the Five “Civilized” Tribes of Indians from their traditional lands in the East and South. The Cherokee call the forced march the Trail of Tears. They started their walk from North Carolina. The Seminole Indians had an even further walk starting in Florida. Overall, more than thirty-five tribes were “granted” reservations in Oklahoma.

For many, Oklahoma was the chosen destination, well more than a thousand miles from their homelands. Many innocents died during the forced march. Not long after this, as you may recall, there was the Oklahoma Land Rush (1889), which further took reservation land away from the Indian Tribes.

No God west of Fort Smith

The full quote is “Ain’t no law west of St. Louis, ain’t no God west of Fort Smith“. The quote was quite popular in the mid-1800s, and it especially applied to Oklahoma. Justice was at the court of Judge Parker, who was called the hanging judge.

The hanging judge

Judge Parker was assigned to Fort Smith (1873), and, as in the John Wayne movie True Grit, outlaws crossed into Oklahoma believing they were beyond the reach of justice. Like John Wayne’s character, Bass Reeves was a U.S. Marshal who worked mostly in Oklahoma.

Bass Reeves was an escaped slave who fled to Oklahoma and learned the Indian languages. He became the first black lawman west of the Mississippi. Overall, Bass Reeves made more than 3,000 arrests. Many eventually stood trial in Judge Parker’s court, and some took their last steps on the gallows behind the Fort Smith courthouse.

Every cowboy state

Of course, our trip took us through Arkansas, and we stopped in Little Rock and Fort Smith along the way. After Arkansas, we crossed Oklahoma and Kansas on our way to Nebraska. This three-state journey completed our quest to visit and stay in every cowboy state. You can see the stickers we collected for our map (picture below) for every other cowboy state we visited during our travels last year.

During our trip through Oklahoma, as we wrapped up the last of our cowboy states, the weather was cold. Colder than we had hoped, but we already covered and nearly beat to death that topic in previous blog posts. The most surprising thing was that between Fort Smith and Oklahoma City, we only saw one oil well (and it wasn’t pumping). North of Oklahoma City, we saw a few more oil wells (not pumping) all the way north to Kansas. As I contemplate fuel prices, if there was a “real” fuel shortage, then wouldn’t the pumps be pumping? But I digress.

Federal Building Monument

In Oklahoma City, we visited the site of the Federal Building Monument where a deranged terrorist bombed the Federal Building. The blast tore off the front of the building, killing 168 innocents, including 19 children in the daycare center. More than 650 other people were also injured.

The coward chose the Federal Building in Oklahoma City specifically because it was an easy target with a high chance to kill the most innocents. The memorial is fitting and emotionally moving, and even though we don’t want to dwell on this kind of thing, we are really glad we went. It is a must-see.

Cowboy Museum

Oklahoma City has the best museum we’ve ever been to. The Cowboy Museum. The real name is the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. The Cowboy Museum is easily at the Smithsonian Museum quality level. The displays are first-class. They are well laid out in a huge building, and we only saw the indoor half. It was too cold to visit the outdoor exhibits. When we go back to Oklahoma City, we most certainly will stop again.

TV cowboys included

Every aspect of cowboys (and Indians) is completely covered, including a section dedicated to Hollywood depictions of cowboys. You might say the focus was cowboys, but it covered so much more than just cowboys, and the “western heritage” aspect of the museum was just as big as the cowboy coverage. It covered farms, ranches, the Gold Rush, and western migration. Some museums cover specific events, as the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum does. No museum we have been to covers the big picture any better than this one.

On our way to Kansas

Heading north out of Oklahoma City, we stopped at Perry Lake. While there, we visited Perry (a small town) and Stillwater (a college town). Both towns deserve a longer stay. The lakes in the area really deserve a closer look at wildlife from our kayaks. While we were there, the weather was still too cold to do that.

We enjoyed our route through Oklahoma, but again the weather was too cold for outside exploring. I have a feeling Oklahoma needs to be explored in the fall. If you spend time here, March is too cold. April is too dangerous due to the thunderstorms and tornadoes. Summer is obviously too hot. I think that September and October might be wonderful.

Kansas from south to north

Kansas is the last state on our milestone to visit every cowboy state. Our first stop in Kansas was Wichita, and we stayed for four nights. While in Wichita, we didn’t do much except watch the snow melt. We were stuck inside, hoping that the snow would be gone before we were scheduled to move again. In Wichita, we stayed at McConnell Air Force Base Krueger Recreation Area. They have a very nice campground.

Snowbound in Kansas

Just like I mentioned, March is too early to cross Oklahoma. April 1st is too cold in Kansas. We knew this before our arrival but went anyway. We knew what we were in for, so we wouldn’t beat this horse (already dead) anymore. I describe our weather adventures in this post. January in April.

One way I have been dealing with the weather on our route this year is staying flexible. I described this method in our April 3 post, written and published while we were waiting for the snow to melt in Wichita. The post is titled, and the emphasis is on Into the cold, ahead of the storms

Anyway, the plan was to wait until the weather cleared and then get down the road. Looking back on our spring, even though we got blasted by weather several times, the method worked. A far better method would have been to stay south until the weather warmed up. We didn’t do it this way and regret it. What we don’t regret is being in Oklahoma and Kansas. They were fascinating.

Abilene Kansas

Abilene, Kansas, was not on my radar. If you Google Abilene, the first four hits you get are about Abilene, Texas. Abilene, Kansas comes in after Texas on Google. The population of Abilene, Texas is about 125,000. The population of Abilene, Kansas, is just under seven thousand.

Abilene, Kansas, is a tiny town with a huge attraction, and I am so glad we went and stayed there. Going there required a reroute, but it was so worthwhile. Even Smithsonian Magazine named Abilene, Kansas, as one of the “Best Small Towns to Visit”.

What’s so great about Abilene, Kansas?

Abilene, Kansas, is a small town at the north end of the Chisholm Trail. This town is where the train picked up cattle on the Kansas Pacific Railway to ship east to market at much higher prices. If that doesn’t qualify Abilene as a cowboy town, I don’t know what would.

Abilene, Kansas, is also home to the Greyhound Hall of Fame (we didn’t go there, not that I don’t admire amazingly fast dogs). In Abilene, you can also ride the Abilene and Smokey Mountain Railway (we did not). In summer, you can enjoy can-can dancers and mock gunfights in the old town area (it wasn’t summer when we were there). The Abilene is also home to the world’s largest spur, towering more than 28 feet tall (we didn’t see it).

So what did we do in Abilene?

We went to Abilene specifically to visit the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home. I am going to save this subject for later. Here is the brief-brief.  The Eisenhower display in Abilene, Kansas, is the best depiction of life in the 1950s that I have seen. It really lays out the world’s situation and the changes between World War II and when I start remembering things in the 1960s.

Stockton & Nicodemus

Our last stop in Kansas was the city park in Stockton. Stockton is 1/6 the size of Abilene, but of course, we didn’t know that before we got there. Overall, we should have stayed longer in Abilene and spent less time in Stockton. Then maybe we would have seen that really big spur.

Stockton City Park has campsites, and I think we were the only campers there for our entire two-night visit. Overall, it was a tiny town in farm country in western Kansas.

We made a day trip to an even smaller town named Nicodemus. Nicodemus was founded by homesteader ex-slaves freed after the Civil War. Kansas, being a slave-free state, was attractive to ex-slave blacks who founded Nicodemus. Today, the Nicodemus Historical Society and Museum is a National Historic Site operated as a National Park Museum.

Life as an ex-slave in Nicodemus was very hard, and most of the population made the trip west with almost no money and no farm equipment. The town has nearly become a ghost town several times and still hangs on by a thread and a whisper.

Windy

Seeing the potential for dangerous winds, we left Stockton and rerouted to the only place I thought we would be comfortable in fifty knots of sustained winds over four days. Here the winds were from the northwest, and I needed a place to hide. So on April 4th, we made a two hundred-mile dash to Ogallala, Nebraska.

Specifically, we stayed at Ogallala State Park on the afterbay of Lake McConaughy. Our location was behind the dam, which is 162 feet tall. To get to Ogallala State Park, we crossed the dam and then turned onto the next road to the east.

Wind streaked across the lake, causing crashing waves on the dam for three days. After topping the dam, the wind then made Lake Ogallala look like a large white-water river. We were camped facing away from the wind at the state park. I was a little worried that we would lose a few trees in the campground. Mostly, we were safe, much safer than we would have been in any exposed place.

While we were there, semi-trucks lost control, blown over by the wind on Interstate 80 just to the east of our campground. The only day we ventured out, into the wind, was a mistake. Every place we drove to had worse winds than our campground.

Next Year

So now we have visited every cowboy state and nearly every southern state. This year we added Arkansas to our map and then the cowboy states of Oklahoma and Kansas. It didn’t qualify as a quest to visit every cowboy state, but it didn’t just happen without a plan. Next year we may go to the Northeast, or maybe we’ll go to Alaska instead.

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As you know, our blog income is zero – this allows us to be independent and just tell the truth.  We don’t earn income or commissions. No, we don’t make paid endorsements.  We don’t make recommendations; instead, we tell you what we like (or dislike). We provide links only as a quick reference to help our readers.

Links

Fort Smith National Historic Site

Oklahoma City Federal Building Memorial

National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

Krueger Recreation Area

Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum

Nicodemus  Historical Society and Museum

Lake Ogallala State Recreation Area

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