Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway

by Effie Price Gladding

Ten miles beyond Medicine Bow the character of the country suddenly changed. We came from the grey and brown desert into fine rolling uplands dotted with the new homes of homesteaders and green with the precious water of irrigation. This was a country newly settled and bearing every mark of prosperity. At one point on the road we had great difficulty in getting through. A careless settler had allowed the water of his irrigating ditch to run out upon the road. It was with the greatest difficulty that we succeeded in getting through the mud. Only the help of some fellow motorists from San Francisco, who stopped to push the car while T. turned on its power, enabled us to get through. A few miles on we met the road commissioner who proudly called our attention to the work that was being done on the roads of his county. He told us that he was on his way to arrest and fine the careless homesteader who had flooded the road. After this fine stretch of fertile country we plunged once more into a long stretch of desert. It was here that I saw and welcomed the beautiful yucca that I had seen growing in California. I saw too in Wyoming quantities of cactus blooming in broad patches of color, usually buff.

All day we mounted one ridge after another, buttes to the left and to the right of us; driving through a vast country with practically no ranch houses and only isolated stations on the railroad for watering purposes.

As we approached Wamsutter a wonderful great tableland lay to the right of us, very high and with an immense level top. It was like a fortress with its buttresses and ramparts carved by nature. To the left was a butte that was like a side view of the Sphinx, an immense pyramid rising beside it. As we came into Wamsutter, we drove along a ridge where the road had been laid to avoid a low marshy tract of land.

Red Desert Station, just before reaching Wamsutter, is well named, the buttes having wonderful color.

The day was hot, and it was a relief when the afternoon sun began to decline. We felt that we were dropping with it. But we were dropping toward the East while it was falling toward the West. In the afternoon, out on the great plain, we had crossed the Continental Divide. It had not been marked by any visible elevation of land above the surrounding country. All was open country, rolling and vast, and yet we had ascended the Western slope and were now going down to the Mississippi Valley.

We must soon begin to say farewell to the Plateau States. The long upward climb is practically over. We look forward with the streams to the Atlantic, leaving behind the water courses to the Pacific.

Shortly after crossing the Divide we came to a low head stone and a wooden cross at the left of the road, marking the grave of a man of thirty-five who died in 1900. It is a lone grave on this rolling ridge, yet it is destined to be passed by many travelers in future years.

Some day the Divide will be marked upon the Lincoln Highway by a monument, and the traveler will have a satisfactory outward expression of the thoughts that fill his heart.

Rawlins was our halting place for the night. It is a pleasant town with wide streets and plenty of sunshine. The post office is a beautiful little building. We fraternized in Rawlins with fellow travelers, a lady and her son who were going on from Colorado Springs to Pasadena in a beautiful Stutz roadster.

In Rawlins as in most Western towns, we stayed at a hotel managed on the European plan and ate our meals in a nearby restaurant. It is always a surprise to me to see the number of people in the restaurants and cafeterias of the West. Even in small towns these places are crowded.