Colorado Cold

Tuesday 19th May, and I’m sitting in the RV with fleecy pj bottoms and a double layer on top to keep warm.  Only way to get over the blues of dealing with the cold we have encountered since arriving in Colorado is to sit and plan our route following our visit to Richard’s brother Jim in Denver in June.

Not that it is all doom and hailstones here – the weather systems seem to give us sunny mornings where it is warm enough to go for a walk with a short sleeved T Shirt and admire the scenic foothills of the Rockies that tower snow-capped in the background,

but dark clouds roll over them in the afternoons and we have had thunder, hail and lightening every evening since we arrived on Thursday, and pretty much everywhere else we have stayed in the interim.

The US Airbase where are camped has a loud speaker system that warns of approaching storms and tells you to seek shelter.  It was quite funny at first, now it’s just annoying.  Today, after a night of constant rain, and temperatures that are not rising above 40 F, I am cursing the weather again.  Locals say it is unseasonably cold for the time of year.  Spring has definitely not sprung here yet.

In fact, we seem to be in a state of “back to the future” as we keep moving west and back in time (we are now on Mountain Time Zone), and we seem to be in the wrong season.  It appears we are reliving Spring in every state, and we are reliving history too.

The museum visits we have made keep taking us back through the ages, and so far we have learned all manner of interesting facts about the geology of the area, and how early American Indians lived, tried to protect their lands, were relocated to make way for “land grabs” and had to be policed by the army to ensure they stayed off the insurgent pioneering settlers’ properties.

Everything revolves around land here in the mid-western States.  In the UK the land was parceled out to the aristocracy over centuries, and you can still see landowners’ feudal payments incorporated into mortgage deeds.  The UK baby boomer class (working class two generations previously) now has the ability to own property, but are not really capable of buying the acreage that is common place here.

With a population ratio of roughly 1:4, and a land mass ratio of 1: 40, you can understand why US towns are spread out, parking lots for even the smallest of businesses are enormous, and the most basic of old style houses in rural areas seem to be surrounded by a minimum of two or three acres of land.  Even in the cities, there are massive and more numerous car parks.  And although in the suburbs the large “subdivisions” (housing estates), with new build houses, are built much closer together, they are still of incredible proportions compared to the average Wimpey house (Wimpey are a national house-building company in the UK), and yards or gardens are still larger than those found in the average town in Scotland.

I digress.  The highlights of our travels since Hot Springs, Arkansas have been:

• Hugo Frisco Railroad Depot Museum in Choctaw County, Oklahoma – and also the graveyard area dedicated to the circus performers.  Hugo is not far from where Richard graduated from High School, and he remembers routinely seeing elephants in their winter quarters there, for the town was once famous for being “home” to the large and very popular travelling Circuses that used to travel the States.
• The open prairie of the Wichita Mountains in western Oklahoma, which gave us our first view of free roaming buffalo (they are HUGE)
  
  and our visit to a  large US army artillery base, Fort Sill,

  

  Fort Sill Cavalry barrack as it would have looked in the past

  The fort was mostly built in 1869 by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry of the US army, which consisted solely of negroes with white officers.  This nickname was acquired from the local Indians, who thought the soldiers resembled the buffalo with their dark skins and woolly hair, and their courage and endurance.  Unlike other U.S. territories, Indian Territory

  

  Indian Territory in 1869, now the state of Oklahama

  had no organized government so Army posts like Fort Reno, Fort Supply and Fort Sill provided protection to Indians and civilians alike, sometimes dealing as mediators between the Indians and the Indian agents, and protected the various Indian tribes against intrusion by those who came to grab the land in an uncontrolled way.  The Homestead Act of 1862 said that any settler could claim 160 acres (0.65 km2) of public land, and this was erroneously taken literally by some as a free for all. In 1874, the Comanches, Kiowas and Southern Cheyennes went to war on the encroaching settlers of the Indian Territory (which eventually became Oklahoma), but without a chance to graze their livestock and faced with a disappearance of the great buffalo herds, the tribes eventually surrendered after a year.  Geronimo spent some time in the local jail on Fort Sill.  It was a very strange experience to have walked in the footsteps of  this legendary Indian, one of the last Indian leaders to resist the encroachment of the white settlers, and we visited the Apache cemetery to see his grave.  
  
• In the Texas panhandle, we were very impressed with the red rocks and red gullies of Caprock Canyon and Palo Duro, a sort of Grand Canyon in miniature – in both length and depth.  
  
  
  
  
  
  Here we had our first sighting of a turkey hen, quail, prairie dogs, lizards, and a diamond back rattle snake.  Some of these would not stop long enough for a photo opportunity.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The land here is harsh and unforgiving, with constant storms and droughts, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon (south of Amarillo Texas) gave us an all round understanding of the hardships encountered by both the Indian tribes and the early white settlers. 
• Our first view of Colorado was the never ending windswept plains, with the small town of Lamar situated on the banks of the Arkansas River, an oasis both now and back in the late 1800’s when it was a resting place for the wagon trains taking settlers from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe in New Mexico.  Lamar’s museum had a host of carts, and other artifacts from the days of the Santa Fe Trail.

  

  A John Deere Wagon - green even in days gone by

  
  

  

  These washing tools date from 1901 - early settlers might have had a tin tub and a washboard

   Yup, the early Hollywood films were actually pretty true to life when it came to portraying the accouterments of the Wild West.  I particularly remembered the foot rests on the front of the wagon, and the little triangular cubbyhole where the extra guns were kept.  However, the other artifacts I encountered here made me realize what little these pioneers had to build their new lives with.  To them the rights and wrongs and the politics of the taking of the land from the Indians was unimportant.  Uppermost in their minds, on the most meager of diets, in the harshest of environments, was daily survival.

When we finally reached the foothills of the Rockies, I guess the feelings of majestic awe that stirred in us as we took in the breathtaking view of dark snow capped peaks in sharp relief against blue cloud scudded skies, might have been something similar to the feelings of those early settlers.

Though of course, the prospect of moving through said mountains with Benny and the Jet can no way compare to the apprehension they must have felt!

I am so thankful I live in this era, and that my wagon comes with a built in cooker, sink, toilet, shower, fridge, king size bed and above all, a furnace (fireplace) and central heating system!

Writing this blog has cheered me up no end.  Time for a hot cup of coffee, methinks.