Today has been one in which I find it difficult to settle on a topic about which to write. I am therefore turning to the book of "300 Writing Prompts" for inspiration. Today I choose: "Imagine you are planning a trip across the continent on which you live. Assuming you have unlimited time, resources, and energy, what will be your mode of transportation?"
I'm going to "twist" this topic a little bit and move it in time to the year 1880. I will assume a starting point of New York City and the termination at San Francisco. The journey will be by multiple conveyances.
The fastest mode of travel across the continent is by train, however, I want to experience some of the local lifestyle along the way so, I will vary conveyance at times. The trip does begin by train in a private car. The first major destination is Pittsburgh where I will catch a riverboat down the Ohio River to Cairo, Illinois, then up the Mississippi to St. Louis and then the Missouri River to Kansas City. A riverboat trip is still on my bucket list.
From Kansas City, I will travel by train again to Dodge City, Kansas, and then south into the Texas Panhandle by horseback to Tascosa, Texas. From Tascosa I will continue west to Las Vegas, New Mexico and then south and west to Silver City, New Mexico, and then to Tombstone, Arizona. From Tombstone I will head north and west to Tucson, Phoenix and Prescott before heading north into Utah and then west to the Nevada mining district of Carson City.
From Carson City I would head west across the Sierra's at Donner Pass to Sacramento where I would catch a stagecoach for the last leg of the trip into San Francisco.
The year 1880 was a transition time for the western United States. It was the end of the "heydey" of Dodge City. The wild west was still alive in Tascosa where one might possibly have run into Billy the Kid at that time. Doc Holliday, the Earp brothers, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, and many other famous "gunmen" were slowly moving into the last vestiges of the "wild" of New Mexico and Arizona. Lawlessness was coming to an end and the "frontier" was becoming a safer place.
The Texas Panhandle had finally been opened to the beef industry with the roundup of Quanah Parker and his Quahadi band of Comanche in 1875 by Ranald S. Mackenzie. They still occasionally would come and visit Charles Goodnight at the ranch in Palo Duro Canyon that he managed in partnership with James Adair. Tascosa was still a wild a woolly watering hole for the cowboys of the Canadian River range.
1880 was the peak population of Carson City, Nevada, thanks to the Comstock Mine and others like it. It didn't recover that level of population until 1960. The trail across the Sierras into Sacramento was well traveled and travelers were sometimes waylaid by bandits seeking gold from the mines.
That period of history has always intrigued me. I suppose my "dream trip" would have been to see it first hand.
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