Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway

by Effie Price Gladding

From Minden, we came by way of Campbell to Red Cloud, where we had luncheon at the Royal Hotel.

We had made this detour to Minden and Red Cloud in order to call upon a friend who is enthusiastic over his fine ranch near Red Cloud. Galloway cattle are his specialty, and he finds the rolling plains of southern Nebraska a fine place to breed them. From Red Cloud we came on in the afternoon through Blue Hill to Hastings, and through Hastings to Fremont. We were en route for Lincoln, where we hoped to spend the night. Between Minden and Red Cloud the country is very rolling, and sweeps away from the eye in great undulations. High on some of these ridges were fine silhouettes outlined against the sky: loaded wagons bringing in the sheaves of grain; men standing high, feeding these sheaves to the insatiable maw of the threshing machine; a boy standing in the grain wagon as the thick yellow stream poured into it, leveling the grain with a spade; all these and many other pictures of the Idyl of Harvest. For two hundred miles of our run the smoke of the threshing machines rose in the clear sky.

Sometimes the fields were covered with stacks of wheat looking like great yellow bee-hives. Sometimes the wheat was in rounded mounds or cocks. Surely we were seeing the bread of a nation on these vast Nebraska plains.

Along the roadsides were quantities of "snow on the mountain," its delicate grey-green leaves edged with a pure white border. Across the fields the killdeer were flying, and calling in their shrill, clear notes, which always seem to breathe of the sea. They were not out of place, flying above these long billows of brown earth. The farmhouses were marked by clumps of cottonwood trees, and as we moved Eastward a few low evergreens began to appear.

Around Blue Hill the country is very fine, being a great plateau stretching off into illimitable distances. As we climbed the hill to the little town we met a farmer in his wagon who had just despatched a bull snake, a thick, ugly-looking creature. We stopped to pass the time of day, and he told us that he came to Nebraska from Illinois in '79 in a covered wagon. He was enthusiastic over Nebraska.

We made another stop to watch at close range the operations of a threshing machine. It was a fine sight. Two yellow streams came from the spouts of the machine; a great stream of chaff which rapidly piled up in a yellow mountain, and another stream of the heavy grain, pouring thick and fast into a wagon. One of the men told us that they had threshed fourteen hundred bushels the day before, working fourteen hours in fine, clear weather.

Everywhere the lovely grey doves were flying. There were hundreds of young meadow larks, too, and great numbers of red-winged blackbirds. It was on the 17th of July that I saw brown thrushes for the first time. It is interesting to watch the movements of the birds as the machine approaches. The doves in the road fly promptly. They do not take chances on being struck by the car. The sparrows wait until the last moment and then neatly save themselves. I often wondered how they could escape with so narrow a margin. We thought that the redheaded woodpeckers must be rather clumsy, as we saw a number of them that had been struck by other cars, and thrown just off the road.

It was impossible to reach Lincoln that night, so we stopped at a country inn some miles away. Rising early, we drove into Lincoln for breakfast. After a run about the city and a look at the buildings of the State University, we drove on toward Omaha. Unfortunately we attempted to take a cross-cut and found ourselves in an odd situation. We were driving down an unfrequented hill road, in an attempt to cut across to the main road, marked by white bands on the telephone poles. We suddenly found ourselves hanging high and dry above the ruts of the road. The rain had worn them so deep and the middle of the road had remained so hard and dry, that on the hillside we were literally astride the ridge in the middle of the road. This meant a long journey on foot to a farmhouse to borrow a spade and a pick. It also meant much hacking and digging away at the hard earth under the body of the machine to release the axles and drop the wheels to the road. Finally it was accomplished. We picked up the farmer's children who had come out to see the rescue and drove down the long hill to the farmhouse. There we left our implements and our hearty thanks. How hopeless it seems when one is hung up on the road! And how blissful it is to bowl along freely once more! Still the doves flew about us by the hundred and the brown thrushes increased in number. We had more level country now, and it was only as we approached Omaha that it became hilly.

We left Omaha, after looking about the city, late in the afternoon and drove one hundred and eight miles to Carroll in Iowa. The first twenty miles out of Omaha the road was extremely poor and very dusty. The trees were much more numerous, black walnut, maple, ash, and catalpa being among them.

Just as we felt that one could find his way across Nevada by a trail of whiskey bottles so we began to feel that one could cross Iowa on a trail marked by dead fowls. I had never before seen so many chickens killed by motor cars. Perhaps the explanation lay in the fact that all along our one hundred and eight miles from Omaha to Carroll we passed numbers of farmers driving Ford cars. As we approached Carroll, we came to a hill top from which we looked down on a valley of tasseled corn fields. It was exactly like looking down on an immense, shining green rug, with yellow tufts thrown up over its green surface. We saw but few orchards. This was a corn country.