Cottonwood Connection

The Smoky Hill Trail

Season 4 Episode 12 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

The Smoky Hill River tied the country together and set the stage for major commerce.

Aired 06/02/2024

Cottonwood Connection

The Smoky Hill Trail

Season 4 Episode 12 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

The Smoky Hill River tied the country together and set the stage for major commerce.

This passage along the Smoky Hill River served to tie regions of the country together, and it set the stage for major arteries of commerce to come.

Aired 06/02/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

The Smoky Hill Trail

Season 4 Episode 12 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

This passage along the Smoky Hill River served to tie regions of the country together, and it set the stage for major arteries of commerce to come.

Aired 06/02/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

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On a winding line through western Kansas stand limestone pillars with the letters B.O.D. initials that stand for Butterfield Overland Dispatch. The B.O.D.

was a major part in establishing one of the great trails of the American West, the Smoky Hill. (upbeat music) [Music] In May of 2024, Stagecoach wheels rolled once again along the path of the Smoky Hill Trail. I'm Rick Hamby and I own and operate the old Stagecoach, the Journey Stagecoach. And we started about 25 years ago delivering pen pal letters from school kids in Missouri to kids all the way across the great American West. It's been an incredible adventure, an incredible crew that we have. Every time, about every two years, we try to do another long distance Stagecoach run. It's always an interesting concept of how you go about trying to figure out the route. So myself and some of the crew came out last November, drove out here to West Kansas and to Mount Sunflower and looked at that for our starting point, the highest point in Kansas. The scenery, it just captivates you.

I mean, the openness, the freedom, just... And always throughout the years, I keep coming across the BOD, Butterfield Overland Dispatch Trail and the Smoky Hill Trail. And then you start putting it all together, you find out, oh my goodness, you know, it was a direct route from Missouri, our home state, to the West. Yeah, this episode of Cottonwood Connections is about the Smoky Hill Trail. Mike Baughn is the Secretary of the Smoky Hill Trail Association. He has been past president of it. He has been a Thomas County Sheriff, a County Commissioner, and also an official on the executive board of the Thomas County Historical Society. Mike has been absorbed in history, I think, almost all of his life.

I've known him for many years. And if I have a problem, I do call him occasionally and visit with him to see what the true story is about the thing. So, Mike, why did the Smoky Hill Trail come up the Smoky Hill River? Well, as far as we can find in our research, it was an established trade route for the Plains Indians. So it was pretty well established as a route. Well then, in 1849, gold seekers headed to California utilized the route, not many, but there were a few. And then when gold was discovered in Colorado on the Front Range in 1858, then by 1959 there were some hundred thousand gold seekers headed out, usually using the Platte or the Arkansas. But a lot of them used the Smoky Hill because it was the shortest route. So it was utilized over quite a period of time. There was a man that was born in Maine by the name of David Butterfield. And so then in 1862, he moved to Denver because he saw that there was a great deal of money to be made in mercantile in Denver. So he went out there and saw that there was a great need for a short route to get his merchandise in and also the mining equipment. So in 1864, then he moved back to Atcheson and they had established Butterfields Overland Despatch. I think it was in June of that year when the first freight wagon and then September of 1865 when the first staging started. The one deficit he didn't count on, he didn't have the mail contract. And that was probably one of the biggest issues that caused the trail to, or his company to not succeed. That was one of the reasons. Yeah, because having the mail contract was a very lucrative thing and he'd almost survive on that. There's also another Butterfield Trail. It leaves Fort Smith, Arkansas and goes down through Oklahoma and out to California. But it has no relationship to this trail. In 1857 or 8, I believe it was, John Butterfield, different than the BOD Butterfield, got the first cross-country mail contract from Tipton, Missouri to San Francisco, California. And the contract was for $600,000 to deliver mail from Tipton, Missouri. The trains would bring it to there and then the coaches would head west with it to San Francisco, connected east coast to west coast. I've seen evidence that they were possibly kin.

His name was John Butterfield, but I don't think they really knew each other. So sometimes people get the two trails confused. So that's why I think a lot of people are going back to the old use of Smoky Hill Trail. Yeah, to see the BOD markers. Yeah, because of Howard Greensford. B-A-R'd put up years ago, but you know. Howard Greensford of Ellis actually walked every mile from, I think it was, Trego County all the way to the state line. These are hand-drawn maps that were made by Howard Greensford. Howard walked the Smokey Hill Trail from Trego County to the state line. He marked all the stations. He was very specific. He got the legislature to pass an act that allowed the placement of these BOD markers on every north-south road from Ellsworth County on. And he's made a map of not only the station sites like this, but Wallace County. He's mapped where the trail goes. There's all these major roads that have a marker on them where the trail passes. He's marked the station sites, and for each county he's done that. And then he has gone into a few of the station sites, and this was Lookout Station, and sketched, you know, just exactly where the station was. And he just showed how the actual site looked, and he's done that for several of the station sites. This museum here in Russell Springs, the Butterfield Trail Museum, was actually established after the courthouse changed in 1963. They closed the courthouse here and moved to Oakley. The Butterfield Trail Association and Historical Society of Logan County was organized. And since this is the only building we can find that's existing that sets pretty much on the trail, we decided to use it as a preserving place for Butterfield's history. And in 1965, Elizabeth Waite, who was out from Denver, and her grandson, Jare DeBaker, came out to our dedication in 1965. David Butterfield was my great-great-grandfather. David and his wife Mary left Maine shortly after they married and came to Kansas. They were in Kansas for a few years in two or three different places, Manhattan Junction City. And they went to Denver in 1862 and then went back to Atchison in, I believe, 1864. And David started the Overland Dispatch. I'm sure he wanted to make money. And he wanted to do something big. When he was organizing the dispatch, he went to New York and raised well over a million dollars. This was in the 1860s to finance the organization. Then he started the Overland Dispatch.

He shipped hundreds of thousands of tons of freight between the Missouri River and Denver. And then they started the stagecoach line. The first one arrived in Denver on September 23, 1865. David and a group of the other men who were involved in the organization were on the first stagecoach. I don't know.

He just had the ambition, the inspiration. So they kind of gave us the impetus to start collecting. And over the years, you know, we've probably focused more on local history. But we still maintain that all of the research that we can provide for the Butterfield Trail, the Smoky Hill Trail, we want to showcase that here. So we're trying to preserve it.

Then the Smoky Hill Trail Association started. And so working with Fort Wallace, working with the Smoky Hill Trail Association, Butterfield, we're trying to preserve as much of the trail history as we can because it's one of the forgotten trails through Kansas. It's one of the most vital trails to supply Denver and to supply the Front Range. More heavy goods.

On the freighting side of it. Butterfield used a lot of what they call Santa Fe wagons.

They were the big freight wagons. Yeah, they were big. Because they hauled a lot of mining equipment to the Front Range. So, you know, he used mules.

Started out with oxen and used mules and mostly mules on his stagecoaches. Yeah.

And Butterfield used Concord Stages. They were the top line of the stagecoach. They started out with the tri-weekly stage and then they went to every day. They did use horses.

Of course, the mule had a more stable footing in a lot of this area that they had to come through. And the mules could take the heat a lot better.

They're more heat resistant than the horses. They were high price in some cases. But yeah, a good mule was very valuable. And the thing too, I think what people see is always the stagecoaches going at a dead run. Yeah. And you could wear out the whole team in five or six miles and they were down. The only time I could think of maybe a dead run was at Fort Mounment when it had at Smoky Hill Springs. When they were attacked and they were trying to get away and they were flying as fast as they could. And I can see them coming into a station maybe for the last quarter mile or something. Yeah, they wouldn't last long. At the most they probably went at a trot.

But I know they walked a lot of times. Oh, yeah. A trot is the easiest thing to get the most mileage out of a horse or a mule. Every 12 miles or so, there'd be a stage stop. Basically for the coach horses to change out and put a fresh set on. Yeah, Thomas Curry was an art instructor. His artwork, the college then put into books. They were, you know, they're a pretty good depiction of these stations. Yeah, there was a lot of action in some of them. Yeah. But there was a lot of action at those stations too. And a lot of them were even sod.

You know, they didn't have any wood to build. And rocks. Yeah, or rocks. Yeah, or limestone stations.

There was a variety of stations. And so they would send their superintendent out and agents to go out and procure contracts with the different ranchers along the routes. If they would like to operate that as a stage stop, they would have hay and feed delivered for the animals, corrals set up. And then the women would do the cooking for the passengers when they stopped. So it was a lucrative thing for many of the ranchers because money was scarce. You know, you might find an eating station that was well supplied, had a good cook. But a lot of them didn't.

So food was a problem for them. Yeah, they weren't used to dirt floors in the station.

They had the table on them. That's right. They had the mule there and the flies buzzing around everywhere. If you've ever been in a house that is just heated by a wood stove that doesn't have all the insulation and forced air heat that we have now, they were freezing cold in the winter, roasting hot in the summer.

And there again, tough times. There's various accounts.

You see some of those aged pastures thought it was absolutely awful. It was fast, but there's so much dust and stopping at the stations.

The food wasn't very good and they were a lot of hardship. In fact, probably a family with a wagon had it better off than going on a stage. It was just so much slower.

Because they had supplies. It's not a rough ride.

The coach has slung on leather and they rock like a baby cradle.

But hot is hot. A lot of times, if you, they'd hold up to nine passengers, you'd have seats facing this way and seats facing this way. There'd be a bench in the middle.

So those people that sat on that bench, they would have been pretty uncomfortable. Just like an airplane or jet, no legroom.

No legroom crowded in there. Unless you fly first class, airplane, your elbow to elbow with someone in there cramped up tight and crossing them. And we get aggravated if it's a three or four hour flight. But in a stagecoach, you were cramped up with individuals shoulder to shoulder squeezed in there that you never even knew deodorant was probably unheard of. And you had individuals that would like their bottle a little too much and you had somebody that smoked or chewed. So you had squabbles and you had genteel folk and you had outlaws all mixed in together.

So it would have been a trying experience. I'm sure there was arguments.

There was fights.

There was bad moods, bad tempers and all of that stuff. So I think the weather, of course, is a massive element.

I can't imagine the driver setting up there. Kansas can be windy, you know, and imagine January coming across the plains with a 50 mile an hour wind. It's 10 above zero.

And you're setting up there hour after hour holding those lines. Horses then are like horses now.

Mules then are like mules now. They're a prey animal, so they are flighty. Every stage had what they called a messenger.

The TV shows called him the shotgun rider. But they were the messenger.

They were in charge of any communications that happened to be sent. And there were some letters sent out that didn't pass through the postal system. They were in charge of the valuables and they were armed.

And they were the basic protection for that coach. Of course the passengers would have been armed, a lot of them. The driver would have been armed. And the messenger was armed. And Butterfield was fairly successful until 1865. And in that year there were some southern Cheyenne that had gone to visit their northern Cheyenne relatives. The trail had started prior to that time.

You know, they weren't too concerned about the people traveling through. But I think they saw probably Smoky Hill Station.

It was a permanent kind of an earth station. And that incensed them.

And as it went on, it wasn't limited just Indians. I think some of the people up on the Platte route, they have stories where they were disguising themselves as Indians and attacking Butterfield. So he was facing some major issues there. There was probably not a more dangerous route to travel on due to not so happy at losing their land Indians. Bandits.

You know, just the natural human nature of people in want and need. And we did know that there were a lot of horse wrustlers out here. And those horse wrustlers did a lot of damage to not only Butterfield's business, but to the ranchers that the Indians got blamed for. Oh yeah. There was quite an organization of outlaws out here. There were. So it would have been a dangerous ride, but they provided as much as they could. And then when they, you know, the fort systems were established to first protect the trail and then to protect the railroad. So you had Fort Riley, Fort Fletcher, Ellsworth, Fort Monument, and Fort Wallace.

Fort Wallace was the westernmost. The overland dispatch did not go as well as planned or expected. They also were having a great deal of trouble from Ben Holladay, who was the competition for stagecoach lines. By the spring of 1866, Ben Holiday ended up buying the line and he subsequently sold it to Wells Fargo. Well, as the railroad progressed, or as the Pacific Eastern Division progressed west, then they moved the staging to the end of the track. And then after the railroad moved on to Kit Carson, then the staging just kept shortening. Finally, the last stage entered Denver in 1870, but the railroad had already been there. So they had not too much of a route to follow. It's an interesting history.

And even after the commercial use of the trail ceased, there were people that were heading westbound. They were still using the old trail.

It was definable you could see it. But there were a lot of homesteaders as late as the 1885 and 1887 still using that old Smoky Hill route heading west. Well, and that's the deal with a lot of trails that they were still used for a long time. Because it was usually the route of best accessibility on stuff. When you start studying on this, you find out that, and we've stagecoached from Springfield, Missouri to Tombstone, Arizona, from Tombstone, Arizona to California, up the Colorado River to Nevada, Dodge City to New Mexico, crossed a lot of old trails and done history on all of them, of course, before we leave. And I have never found a trail such as the Smoky Hill Trail that encompasses more of the American west, the ideals, and the things that the movies have portrayed.

The big ranches, the Native Americans, the buffalo, the pioneer spirit more than the Smoky Hill Trail. I put it top on the list as when we drove back from here, I felt like this region of the trail that we're getting more and more familiar with is a complete ball of history of American west, of the pioneer spirit and of all those things. Yeah, it's amazing. I think especially with the Smoky Hill Trail, also known as the Butterfield Trail, the lasting legacy would be the importance that it played in developing the front range of Colorado. And also, it's the first step in what we like to call the transportation corridor. You know, you had the Smoky Hill Trail, and you had the railroad, and you had Highway 40, then you had I-70. So there's kind of a, all following that same route, the Smoky Hill route. That's where we're fortunate here at Butterfield Trail Museum. There's a BOD marker just on the northwest corner, and the trail actually passes just right down through here, and you can still see some definable marks. In June, we still have a day trail ride?. I think the benefit is to try to get the younger generations to experience a part of what their predecessors lived, so they can go out and see the pristine prairie. I know how I was impacted as a kid. In 1964, I was taken to Silver Dollar City by my mother and father. My brother that's here, my brothers, and my cousin, who's our stagecoach driver, I was five at the time. They took us there, and I'll never forget. I walked in there, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. It was a big red stagecoach with yellow wheels, and I got to ride on it. We all did. And that is the exact same stagecoach we're driving on the Smoky Hill Trail. The same stagecoach, and how God was worked out around, and I wound up buying it in 1999. And so as a family, we started thinking about it, and praying about it, and decided, well, since mail was the big thing in the old days, that we're going to deliver mail. But we're going to deliver special mail. And we started our Interstate Pen Pal program, where we partner elementary schools in Missouri with elementary kids, and their schools all along every route that we do. And what we see is it causes the kids to study about where their letters are going, and the kids that are receiving them out here, and out in the west, are studying about where their letters come from. And the benefit is to try to encourage these young people to value their heritage, and get them involved in some phase of preserving history. Because if we don't get them involved, all of us old folks are going to pass away, and there's not going to be anybody to take over to preserve this history that we have. And it's a rich history. ♪ Way like dust in the wind ♪ ♪ Dust in the wind ♪ ♪ Dust in the wind ♪ (audience cheering) [music]

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS