Wedding Ride - Summer of 2013 - Next Stops Oklahoma and Texas

I got a good night's rest in Dodge City and headed out for Oklahoma around 5:45 the next morning.  I had another short riding day planned (325 miles) but again, lots of things to see along the way.  The forecast called for rain in the area, so I donned the rain gear and got the hell out of Dodge!  (See, I spent the night in Dodge City if you'll recall, so "Got the hell out of Dodge", get it?)

This is the closest I've gotten to taking my own picture while riding the motorcycle.  That's my shadow on the side of the road just outside Buffalo, Oklahoma.

I must have barely missed a rain shower as I was crossing into Oklahoma on US-183.  The roads were wet and I could see it still raining to my east.  As I rode into Buffalo, Oklahoma, I noticed a war memorial on the grounds of what I believe was the local VFW.  I pulled in to take a look.  It was a nice memorial in honor of all who have served and protected their country.

The Veterans Memorial in Buffalo.  There are flag poles that include a flag for each branch of the service.  The granite stones are inscribed with the names of veterans from the area who have given their life in service of their country. And, the most moving part of the memorial is the sculpture of the soldier sitting in the front.

The soldier is sitting and has his notebook on his knee as he writes a letter home.  This sculpture really added to the emotional impact of the memorial and drove home the personal sacrifice our men and women in the military make to keep us free.

I only made it a few blocks down Hoy Street in Buffalo before I noticed a large mural painted on the north side of one of their downtown buildings.  I had to circle back around the block because it caught my eye and I wanted to take a closer look.

The mural in Buffalo at the corner of Hoy and Williams Streets.

A close up of the east end of the mural that features the bank.

This is the west end of the mural. I think it is a historic painting of Buffalo because even though you can't see it in this picture very well, the building on the far right in the mural has the name "Buffalo" on it. I wasn't able to find out anything about the artist.

I also noticed this old gas station sitting across Hoy Street from the mural.  I thought it was kind of cool looking too.

I continued down US-183 out of Buffalo and made a gas stop in Woodward.  I took advantage of the stop in Woodward to grab a Snickers and a Mountain Dew for breakfast then continued on toward my next planned stop in Kingfisher, OK.

Thirty miles or so southeast of Woodward, a missed turn caused me to pass through another small town called Seiling.  Actually, the missed turn didn't really cost me anything in distance and, had I made my turn, I would have missed out on the sights Seiling had to offer.

The east end of the mural in the Veterans Memorial Park in Seiling, Oklahoma.  The mural is located at the corner of Main and 3rd Streets in Seiling.

The center portion of the mural.  This is a painting taken from a picture of Seiling from around 1906.

The mural was painted by art professor, Dr. Bob Palmer, and his students from the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, OK.  I'm thinking they might have had something to do with the mural in Buffalo also, but there's no reference to the Buffalo mural in the information I could find.

The mural is on the wall that's part of the Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Seiling.  The park includes various military apparatus.

Seiling Veterans Memorial Park. In honor of all U.S. Military personnel past, present and future whose service in defending the free world is greatly appreciated.

I took US-270/281 southeast out of Seiling to Watonga where I headed due east on OK-3/33 toward Kingfisher.  I was able to get another 65 miles down the road from Seiling before I hit my first bout of real rain.  Prior to that, it was mostly just wet roads and road spray that I had to worry about.  But, as I rode into Kingfisher, it officially began to rain.

My reason for stopping in Kingfisher was to get a picture of the statue of Sam Walton.  Kingfisher is Sam Walton's birthplace.  Sam was the founder of Wal-Mart.

Sam Walton and his dog, Ol' Roy, sit outside the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Kingfisher.

By the time I rode out of the Wal-Mart parking lot that was home to Sam Walton's statue, it was raining pretty hard.  I had passed a statue in the heart of downtown Kingfisher on my way to the Wal-Mart, so I wanted to stop there and get a picture of it also.

This sculpture of Jesse Chisholm sits at the corner of US-81 and OK-33 in downtown Kingfisher.  Titled, Ambassador of the Plains, it was created by sculptor John Gooden.

If you remember from the earlier blog post about Dodge City, the Chisholm Trail was one of the greatest cattle trails in the U.S. and was used to move millions of head of cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas.  The Chisholm Trail ran along what is now US-81.  The trail was blazed by a mixed-blood Cherokee guide named, Jesse Chisholm, and this statue sits right along the old trail in his honor.

I continued on OK-33 to Guthrie for my next gas stop and a little side trip that I thought would be interesting.  A little over a mile north of the main street (Noble Ave) sits Summit View Cemetery and Summit View Cemetery has its own "Boot Hill".  Summit View's Boot Hill only has two graves in it, but they both have an interesting story.

Boot Hill in Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma.  It took me a little while riding the Harley through the cemetery to find it, but I finally tracked these two down.

Bill Doolin's grave.  One of the two outlaws buried in Summit View's Boot Hill section.

Bill Doolin was suspected of being a member of the infamous Dalton Gang who terrorized the West from 1890 - 1892 robbing various banks and trains.  It's believed Doolin might have been holding the horses in an alley in Coffeyville, Kansas when four members of the Dalton Gang where killed in a shootout as a result of a botched bank robbery (they tried to rob two banks simultaneously).  Doolin got away and later formed his own gang called the Wild Bunch.

The Wild Bunch got away with several successful bank robberies before the group of relentless law enforcement called the Three Guardsmen finally caught up to them.  The Three Guardsmen were made up of the lawmen Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas.  In early 1896, Doolin was captured by Bill Tilghman, but escaped on July 5th.  He was hiding out in Lawson, Oklahoma when Heck Thomas tracked him down and killed him with a shotgun blast.

The headstone tells some of the story of Elmer McCurdy, the other Summit View outlaw.

I pulled most of my information on Elmer McCurdy from Wikipedia.  McCurdy was another bank robber who met a violent death.  After hiding out on a farm and then a ranch near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a posse tracked him down.  Instead of surrendering, McCurdy got into a gun battle with the posse from his hiding spot in a hay shed.  Posse members claim McCurdy took several shots at various members of the posse before they opened fire on him.  The return fire was so intense that neighbors came out to watch the battle from a safe distance.  When the firing died down and no return fire was coming from the hay shed, the Chief of Police climbed the ladder and found McCurdy dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.  

This is when the McCurdy story gets interesting.

When no one claimed McCurdy’s corpse, the undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it with an arsenic-based preservative and allowed people to see "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up" for a nickel. People would place nickels in McCurdy's mouth, which the undertaker would collect later. As increasingly large numbers of people came to view his remains (with each leaving a nickel), McCurdy was said to have made more money in death than in life. Many carnival operators asked to buy the mummified body from the undertaker, but he refused.

Almost five years after McCurdy died, a man showed up from a nearby traveling carnival known as the Great Patterson Shows claiming to be McCurdy's long-lost brother. He indicated that he wanted to remove the corpse to give it a proper burial. Within two weeks, however, McCurdy was a featured exhibit with the carnival. For the next 60 years, McCurdy's body was sold to successive wax museums, carnivals, and haunted houses. Eventually, McCurdy's corpse wound up at an amusement park in Long Beach, California.

In December 1976, during filming of the television show The Six Million Dollar Man, a crew member was moving what was thought to be a wax mannequin that was hanging from a gallows. When the mannequin's arm broke off, it was discovered that it was in fact embalmed and mummified human remains. Later, when medical examiner Thomas Noguchi opened the mummy's mouth for other clues, he was surprised to find a 1924 penny and a ticket from Sonney Amusement's Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. That ticket and archived newspaper accounts helped police and researchers identify the body as that of Elmer McCurdy.

His remains were examined in 1976 by forensic anthropologists. McCurdy's remains revealed incisions from his original autopsy and embalming, as well as a gunshot wound in the right anterior chest. Additionally, a copper bullet jacket or gas check from a .32-20 caliber projectile was found embedded in his pelvis (analysis of the projectile showed that the jacket was manufactured between 1905 and the 1930s). Also, video superimposition of the remains with photographs of McCurdy's corpse in the University of Oklahoma's Western History Collection confirmed McCurdy's identity.

He was finally buried in the Boot Hill section of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977. The state medical examiner ordered that two cubic yards of concrete was to be poured over the casket, so that his remains would never be disturbed again.

It rained like crazy as I rode east out of Guthrie along OK-105.  Things calmed down a little north of Chandler on OK-18 and had pretty much stopped by the time I turned east on historic Route 66 headed toward my in-laws home in Bristow.

My wet and very dirty Road Glide at rest in Bristow for a couple of days.

I spent some time visiting with my in-laws in Bristow and watching the weather for a chance to make a break for Texas without having to spend another day wet.  I decided to make a run for Texas on Wednesday.

The ride to Texas was about 460 miles and mostly on interstate.  I did get to do a little bit of US-377 south out of Stroud, Oklahoma down to Ada where I picked up the Chickasaw Turnpike.  Don't be too impressed.  The Chickasaw Turnpike is a two-lane toll road.  In fairness, it was good road and traffic moved right along, but since I'm not a big fan of toll roads in general, a two-lane toll road was particularly appalling to me.

I gassed up in a little town called Davis and then hit I-35 for the remainder of my ride.  The rain started just south of Fort Worth, but was off and on, so it wasn't too bad.  I made one extra stop at Horny Toad Harley-Davidson in Temple, Texas (how could I not stop at Horny Toad H-D?) and continued to slip in and out of light rain the rest of the way to Kyle where I would be visiting Jeremy and Casey and meeting my new granddaughter, Kayla Renee, for the first time.

Jeremy was still at work when I got to Kyle so I treated myself to a What-A-Burger with jalapenos and killed a little time.  I decided to move on closer to Jeremy's house, but didn't get more than a mile before the bottom dropped out.  I took refuge at a Valero gas station, bought a cigar and sat outside and smoked it while waiting for the rain to die down again.  It did and I was back on the bike for the final couple of miles to Jeremy's.

Before the evening was done, I was finally getting to meet Miss Kayla and that made all of the days of riding, riding in the rain, riding in the heat, all were worthwhile.

Pappy meets Miss Kayla.  One of many pictures I took and sent to Renee to torment her until she could fly down a couple of days later.

Renee said I needed to write less in these blogs.  She thinks I'm being too wordy.  So, I tried to include more pictures and less words in this one (though I couldn't resist all the words associated with the Elmer McCurdy story.)  I also learned to make the pictures a little bigger for you.  Let me know what you think.

The next post will cover the second wedding of the trip as well as the return back to Virginia.  More fun and a bunch of interesting stops on the way back.  See you soon.

Wedding Ride - Summer of 2013 - On to Dodge City

I enjoyed a good couple of days hanging out in Denver with my club brothers.  Stretch’s wedding was on a Saturday night and I managed to keep the partying to a respectable level given my plan was to be up and on the road by 6 the next morning.  I had a relatively short day planned riding from Denver to Dodge City, Kansas (365 miles), but I had a lot of things I wanted to see along the way.

Dodge City was on my stop list because, well, it’s Dodge City.  The fictional home of Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty.  The cowboy in me insisted I needed to stop in for a visit.  Assuming I got to Dodge City early enough, I'd be able to wander around town before the sun went down.

I only had to do about 80 miles of interstate to start the day and after that I was good to go on US highways, mostly two lane, from Limon, Colorado to Dodge City.  I left I-70 and headed south on US-287 across the plains of eastern Colorado.  As I passed through the small town of Hugo, I noticed another sculpture sitting in front of the local bank.  I decided to make a U-turn and go back and check it out since it looked pretty cool as I past it.

I’m glad I did.  It turned out to be another impressive sculpture by Charlie Norton (the same sculptor who created the Buffalo Bill sculpture in Oakley, Kansas).  This one was called “The Partners” and was a monument to the way of life on the plains and how neighbors, even though maybe separated by miles, helped each other when they needed it.  As I've now come to expect from Charlie Norton, the detail in the sculpture is incredible. 

"The Partners" depicts a male and female rancher holding a newborn calf while their faithful dog stands watch for predators on the plains.

From Hugo, I continued south on US-287 to Kit Carson.  I used my instincts again to draw me to my next stop which was the Trading Post Restaurant.  I noticed the parking lot was full of pickup trucks.  That's always a good sign, particularly in the morning when you’re looking for breakfast.  I pulled in and ordered my usual, biscuits and gravy.

I have never gone wrong when I have stopped at a restaurant with pickup trucks filling the parking lot.  The Trading Post proved to be another good stop.

I know you've seen this shot before, but biscuits and gravy looks pretty much the same wherever you get it.  However, this is actually my breakfast at the Trading Post.

After leaving Kit Carson, I noticed some signs on US-287 referencing Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.  I checked the map, but felt it was a little too far off my route to go visit.  Plus, to get there would include five or six miles of dirt road and that's just not fun on a Harley.  Still, it piqued my interest, so I looked into it to find out what happened here.  

The Sand Creek Massacre was an atrocity that occurred during the Indian Wars on November 29, 1864.  A force of 700 men from the 1st and 3rd Colorado Cavalry and the 1st Regiment New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a campsite of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians.  Two officers, commanding the 1st Colorado Cavalry companies D and K, refused to follow Chivington's order and told their men to hold fire.  Chivington's remaining soldiers massacred many of the campsite's inhabitants.  Historian Alan Brinkley wrote that 133 Indians were killed, 105 of whom were women and children.  Kind of makes you think maybe the white man entering the plains states in the 1860's knew a little about terrorism techniques too.

A few more miles on US-287 and I connected with US-50 and headed east.  I always enjoy getting on US-50.  It runs from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco, California.  It passes about 7 miles north of my home in Virginia, so anytime I’m on it, from anywhere in the country, I feel like I’m close to home.  I’ve ridden it from Ocean City to St. Louis, Missouri and then various parts of it west of St. Louis in Kansas and Colorado.

I keep thinking I’ll do a cross country ride across US-50 one of these days.  I really want to do the stretch in Nevada that’s called “The Loneliest Road in America”.  Plus, the stretch in central and western Colorado travels through some of the most scenic areas in the country including Royal Gorge, Monarch Pass (over the Continental Divide) and Gunnison, just to name a few.

I made a stop in Lamar to top off the gas tank.  While I was there I wanted to check out a building made of petrified wood.  I snapped a couple of pictures of that building and then rode a few more blocks to the Lamar Train Depot.  The Depot sits in a picturesque park called “Enchanted Forest” and serves as home to the Colorado Welcome Center and Lamar Chamber of Commerce as well as the station for Amtrak's Southwest Chief passenger train.

Lamar's petrified wood building was built by lumber dealer W. G. Brown in 1932.  The building walls and floors are constructed of large pieces of petrified wood thought to be more than 175 million years old.  Based on the sign out front, Ripley's Believe it or Not calls it the only such structure in the world.

Lamar's restored 1907 Train Depot and Amtrak Station.

The park is also home to several interesting items that represent the history and future of Lamar.  There’s a historic steam locomotive sitting beside a water tank and windmill paying tribute to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railway.  There’s also a wind turbine blade that gives you an up close feel as to how large the wind turbines are as well as shows how Lamar is making use of what has always been considered the bane of existence here: the wind.  Added to all of that were two sculptures that again gave me a feel for the territory I was riding.

The AT&SF train display.  AT&SF was one of the larger railroads in the US and was chartered in 1859. The railroad ceased operations in 1996 when it merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF).

Locomotive #1819 was manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works out of Philadelphia, PA in 1906 and hauled freight and passengers nearly a million miles before being retired in 1953.

111-foot long General Electric wind turbine blade.  When you think of three of these mounted on the windmills in the wind farms, it's kind of amazing how huge they are.

This bronze sculpture is titled "Short Fuse on a Slack Rope" and was created by sculptor Justin I. Young, Jr.  A plaque on the memorial reads: "Perseverance is the virtue of the West, symbolized by this determined cowboy, roping an equally determined bull. Like a fractious bull, land may be owned, but it cannot always be controlled. Therefore, this monument is dedicated to the pioneers of Prowers County who lassoed an untamed country, then held on tight."

The Madonna of the Trail honors the pioneer mothers of covered wagon days on the Santa Fe Trail.  This monument is one of only 12 in the world.  Lamar was chosen for one of the statues because it was located on the Old Santa Fe Trail highway.

From Lamar, I continued east on US-50 headed toward Garden City, Kansas. I crossed back into Kansas 32 miles later and then re-entered the Central Time Zone just east of Kendall, Kansas.  That's the biggest problem with traveling east, when you lose that hour each time you cross a time zone. 

About 7 miles west of Garden City is a small town called Holcomb.  Holcomb is the town made famous in Truman Capote's true story book, In Cold Blood, where Richard Hickock and Perry Smith brutally murdered a local farmer, Herbert Clutter, his wife and two of their four children in 1959.  Capote spent six years writing the book that became one of the best selling books of the true crime genre.

I couldn't get close enough to the house to get a decent picture because it sits across a field.  I fried my camera at the beach a couple of weeks before, so I was taking pictures on this trip using my phone.  Rather than try my luck trespassing, I decided to just move along.  But, it was interesting to ride by just the same.

I missed my turn out of Holcomb that would have taken me to Garden City along the Arkansas River, but I made it just the same albeit a couple of extra miles.  Dodge City is only about 50 miles from Garden City and US-50 basically follows the river between the two cities.  The only real problem I could see was that there appeared to be some serious rain both north and south of US-50.  The question was, can I sneak between the storms or was I going to get wet again.  I got lucky and split the storms and rode into Dodge City mid-afternoon.

The Dodge City welcome sign on US-50. Another biker had parked and walked up to the sign, so I had to wait for him to walk around to the back side of the sign so I could take this picture.

I was really excited about visiting Dodge City.  Besides being the location for the show Gunsmoke, the real history of the town was my main attraction.  It all started when the US government built Fort Dodge in 1865 as a means of improving the protection for travelers and settlers using the Santa Fe Trail.  The town was laid out in 1872, but consisted of one saloon in a tent to service the soldiers from Fort Dodge.  The railroad also arrived that year and soon brought the cattle business with it.

This picture of James Arness and Amanda Blake (Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty) hangs in one of the shops that serves as a self-guided museum along Front Street in Dodge City.

The way Dodge City became the "Queen of the Cow Towns" is interesting in and of itself.  Texas Longhorns carried a tick that caused a disease called Texas Fever among other breeds of cattle.  So, when Texas ranchers wanted to drive their cattle to the railheads in Kansas they used what was known as the Shawnee Trail to go to southeastern Kansas.  Kansas ranchers persuaded their legislators to set up a quarantine that would keep the Texas cattle in the central part of the state.  This route used the Chisholm Trail toward Abilene, Kansas.  Once central Kansas started getting settled, they persuaded their lawmakers to move the quarantine line further west.

El Capitan is a life-sized bronze sculpture of a Texas longhorn steer.  From 1875 to 1885, over four million longhorn cattle were shipped to eastern markets from the railhead in Dodge City.

The movement of the quarantine west meant cattle would branch off the Chisholm Trail to what was called the Great Western Cattle Trail or Western Trail.  The Western Trail led the cattle into Dodge City.  Dodge City's peak cattle years were 1883 to 1884.  Dodge City was a true wild west frontier town and had more gunfighters working at one time or another than any other town in the West.  It also had more than its fair share of saloons, gambling halls and brothels.  Dodge City also had some of the West's more famous lawmen.  Men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Charlie Bassett all worked in Dodge City in some law enforcement capacity.

Front Street in Dodge City. While it's a tourist trap, the Boot Hill Museum was still fun to wander through the various shops that are basically a self-guided tour through the history of the town and area.

The Boot Hill section of the museum where eventually 30 graves were dug, including one female, Alice Chambers.  It's believed that 15 men were killed in Dodge City in 1873.

I paid my admission fee ($15, I think) to get into the Boot Hill Museum area and walked through the various displays.  There were period shops where costumed staff would explain what that particular shop might have done like the print shop and the bank.  I eventually made my way to Beatty and Kelley’s Restaurant.  From 1872 to 1879 this restaurant was a saloon.  Now it serves lunch and treats to guests at Boot Hill Museum during the summer months.  The attraction for me was the delightful selection of hand dipped ice cream treats.  I had the girl behind the counter load up a triple cone of Butter Pecan for me and wandered outside to enjoy my "lunch".

The singer and piano player in the Longbranch Saloon.  You gotta love the sign that says, "Don't shoot the piano player...I'm doing the best I can."

Buffalo displayed in the Boot Hill Museum.

I learned more about the Great Buffalo Massacre in the Boot Hill Museum.  The U.S. began to expand westward after the Civil War.  The white men began to infringe more and more on the Indians' lands.  Part of the strategy for driving the Indians off the plains was to kill the buffalo because wherever the buffalo flourished, the Indians flourished.  As a result, the buffalo were slaughtered in unbelievable numbers.  The buffalo population is estimated to be between 20 and 30 million buffalo in the mid-1800's.  By 1889, only 549 buffalo remained.  Luckily, we wised up before we completely terminated the entire species and now there are a few hundred thousand buffalo in the U.S.

There were light showers all around Dodge City during the afternoon, but none that prevented me from my sightseeing.  After wandering around Front Street and the Boot Hill Museum, I made my way across the street toward the Dodge City Depot.

My main reason for checking out the depot was the two large sundials they have in the courtyard next to the depot.  There are two of them set up to show the time in Central Time as well as Mountain Time.  When the original time zones were set by the railroads in 1883 the line between Central and Mountain time ran between the two sundials.

Dodge City Depot and Amtrak Station.

The two sundials sitting east of the Dodge City Depot.  The sundial in the foreground represents the time in Central Standard Time while the one in the background shows Mountain Standard Time.  The dials are about 42 feet in diameter.

One interesting thing about the Amtrak schedule is that it's always dark when the Amtrak train is at the station, so the huge sundials on the east lawn of the depot cannot be seen in use by those passengers.

It was getting later in the day and I decided to try out a local bar called, Kate's, that I saw on the Internet.  Unfortunately, Kate's isn't opened on Sundays, so I made my way back to my motel with a light sprinkling of rain splashing off my glasses and windshield.  They don't have a Motel 6 in Dodge City, so I was staying at Americas Best Value Inn and as luck would have it, Bad Habits Sports Bar was right across the street.  I decided to park the bike for the day and walk over to Bad Habits.  It sounded like my kind of place.

Dinner at Bad Habits started with a healthy salad.  Renee would be proud of me.

She would be proud right up until they brought this plate of mm, mm, good.

A good dinner and a few Coors Lights later, I was ready to cross back over Wyatt Earp Blvd and call it a day.  I enjoyed my visit to Dodge City.  It was a little hokey at Boot Hill Museum, but still fun.  If I would have hung out a little longer, I later learned that they have a gunfight at 7PM.  But, I missed it.  Oh well, maybe next time.

The next post will cover my ride from Dodge City to Bristow, Oklahoma to visit my in-laws and then I finally make it to Texas to meet Miss Kayla Renee Riddle.  Until then, ride/drive safe and get out there and explore.

Miss Kayla...the best reason of all to ride across the country!