A little trip out west--Ash Hollow

So the man who "discovered" it, some say--discover being a deceptive word right here--was, historians say, Robert Stuart, a Scottish-born, Canadian-American explorer who was actually travelling west to east, Oregon to St. Louis. He was, as most white men out here were back then, engaged in the fur trade, an employee of the Pacific Fur Company. What he wanted to do was establish a continent-wide trading network. We're talking way, way back here, a year before the War of 1812, in fact. 

Of course, way, way back is deceptive too because a there's a cave on the edge of of one of the many hills here that's home to artifacts that date back hundreds, even thousands of years. Robert Stuart, bless his soul, didn't discover Ash Hill, Nebraska. Thousands of indigenous people had known about its sweet grasslands and pure water, and Stuart didn't happen to come along way, way long ago; Native people had been there for centuries. Robert Stuart just happened to be the first Euro-American, the first white man. White man's privilege has its own vocabulary.

What Robert Stuart stumbled on in 1811 is a gorgeous valley that must have paradise to him, as it was to a half-million other Euro-Americans who followed the trail west to Oregon after him. After two weeks of hard travel through the Great American Desert, from the Missouri River west all the way to Ash Hollow (named after an ash grove deep in the valley), just think of it this way: you've been forever in absolutely nothing but cornfield. Nothing, Zilch. Okay, maybe, here or there, a spray of cottonwoods in a river gulch. Otherwise, nothing.

Then, suddenly, you run up the Platte to find this spacious valley between breathtaking hills and incredibly clear water, lots of it--and, oh, yes, abundant grasses for the livestock. Ash Hollow was the Garden of Eden, so beautiful that hundreds of covered wagons thought of the place as a vacation spot.

At Ash Hollow, you can almost still see the haze of campfire smoke from literally hundreds of covered wagons put up for a short stay. Even if as many as 400,000 people took the trails west, you'd be hard pressed to find any of them who didn't stop and take a rest at Ash Hollow. May well have been White America's very first public campground.

The state of Nebraska has more than its share of Oregon Trail wagon tracks still visible in its long plains, but few of those originals is as well-defined and sculpted as those at Ash Hollow. You can see the swails from the air. Sometimes wagon trains would spread out for four or five miles wide, but some geographic areas funneled the intercontinental travelers, as Ash Hollow did, especially a hill that covered wagons had to go scale--as they would, held back by safety ropes hand over hand. Historians claim no pilgrim ever died at the place people call today Windlass Hill, but the ruts they left behind are still sweat and bleed. 

Thousands never made it--Rachel Pattison among them, a young bride, just 18 years old, whose life was choked away by cholera. She's buried here, along the road in Ash Hollow Cemetery. 

Something mythic in proportions is in the air here, in the long plains and sharp valley around Ash Hollow. There's something immensely heroic--all those families moving west through all kinds of danger, many left behind in a thousand graves, most of which weren't as reverently placed as Rachel Pattison's. 

It took a world of gumption, a soul exploding with dreams of yet a better life. Traveling the trails west took everything anyone had in them, all the strength and will and spirit. For the most part, they were pioneers, not people of standing or wealth, people who didn't have much at all but gumption. If they would have been well-heeled, they'd have stayed out east. It's remarkably easy to stand on the hill at Ash Hollow and mythologize, even lionize those who passed this way behind mules or oxen, getting dinner only from whatever wildlife they could find.

Look at 'em--they're heroes. There's no end to the postcards.

American history is no easier than the story the trails still tell through long lonely passages and dozens of gorgeous places like Ash Hollow. Those wagon ruts mark the path of strong men and women. Getting here took everything a family had, even, at times, life itself. It's a joy, an inspiration to stand up on a hill above Ash Hollow with "America the Beautiful" ring like an anthem through the wide emerald hills all around. 

But American history is a book with many chapters. More tomorrow right here at Ash Hollow.