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I camped beside Lake McConaughy near Ogallala, Nebraska , my first night out. The symbolism of being camped next to where the Oregon Trail passed by when it was heavily used in the 1840's and 1850's was very meaningful to me. Just as those pioneers were on a journey of discovery, so am I! But my life today is so much easier than what the pioneers had to contend with as they passed by here, following the North Platte River during this section of their long journey to the west coast. See if you can find information on those pioneers and make a list of their daily chores and compare them to my jobs that I have to do as I travel along. Compare the speed with which we travel now, compared to then. See if you can find out what foods the pioneers ate daily and how they dressed. Did they have air conditioning on hot days, as I enjoyed that day at the lake? What were the dangers for them? Pretend you are a child on one of the wagons moving along the trail and write a letter to your friend back home describing your daily life.

Knox County, Nebraska

President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory , to seek a route to the Pacific Ocean , and to make peaceable contact with the native peoples. Lewis and Clark left May 14, 1804, from St. Louis and arrived at the Pacific in November, 1805. They returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806, having traveled more than 8000 miles in two years, four months, and nine days. It was just about where this picture was taken that Private George Shannon, who had been lost for more than two weeks, rejoined the expedition as it was on its way up the river. Believing he was behind the party young Shannon had hurried to catch up with the keelboat when actually he was ahead of it. Eventually, Shannon used all of his ammunition and was subsisting on grapes. Weak and tired, he was waiting by the shore for a trading boat to find him when the party arrived. William Clark's journal for September 11, 1804, states:

here the Man who left us with the horses 22 [actually 16] days ago and has been a head ever since joined us nearly Starved to Death, he had been 12 days without any thing to eate but Grapes & one Rabit, which he Killed by shooting a piece of hard Stick in place of a ball. ....Thus a man had like to have Starved to death in a land of Plenty for the want of Bullitts or Something to kill his meat.

Mobridge, South Dakota

Sitting Bull

Photo: the monument on top of Chief Sitting Bull's grave on a hillside overlooking the Missouri River, across the river from Mobridge, South Dakota and on the reservation of the Standing Rock Nation.

The wording on a monument at the base of the mound:

1834-1890. Indian name: Tatanka Iyotake. Sitting Bull was born on the Grand River a few miles west of here. His tragic end came at the very place he was born. He was shot when being arrested because of his alleged involvement with the Ghost Dance craze. Sitting Bull was originally buried at Fort Yates, North Dakota. On April 8, 1953, surviving relatives with the aid of the Dakota Memorial Association moved his remains to the present location and dedicated the memorial burial site April 11, 1953. In 1876 he was victorious at the Battle of Little Big Horn. In 1877 he sought asylum in Canada. In 1881 he returned to the United States, and in 1885 he toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show .

Roger Maris' hometown - Fargo, North Dakota

When Roger Maris died in December, 1985, he was buried here in his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota. There is a museum of his memorabilia here in Fargo, and there are many ballfields all over town. At the park where my campground was I counted eight baseball diamonds. Find out what accomplishment of Roger Maris' first put him in sports history books. Hint: it involves a record set by Babe Ruth.

Please see the August 6, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Lake of the Woods, between Minnesota and two provinces of Canada, is one of the world's largest lakes. It is ocean-like in its size and moods. It has 65,000 miles of shoreline and 14,000 islands! Where this picture was taken at Zippel Bay at the south end of the lake it's 80 miles across to the northern tip of the lake! It is 55 miles across at its widest. You are seeing the lake on a calm day, when the waves were lapping mildly at the sandy shoreline. On stormy, windy days the waves crash in like the ocean surf, and they can be very high and dangerous.

Up on the west side of the lake, sticking out on a large peninsula, is an area of the United States called the Northwest Angle. The only land it is connected to is in Manitoba, Canada, and the only way to get to it without going through Canada is by boat. The "angle" is the result of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, when the United States Revolutionary War was over and the United States was setting the Canadian boundary with England. The language of the treaty stated that the northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods would belong to the United States. But how do you determine the northwest corner of a lake so irregular in shape? The wording resulted in fifty years of controversy that ended in 1842 when a treaty between the United States and Britain officially established the present boundary between the two countries.

Please see the August 9, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Voyageurs National Park is dominated by water. Within the park's boundaries are more than thirty lakes of varying sizes which fill glacier-carved rock basins. Once you arrive at one of the park's four entry points, you leave your car behind and set out on water, just as the voyageurs traveled during the fur trade of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Today motor boats and houseboats, as well as canoes and kayaks, ply the waters of the park. Although some campgrounds in the park are accessible by car, others can be reached only by boat. There are trails for hiking in summer and for snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling in the winter. There is even a seven-mile-long ice road across part of Rainy Lake that provides automobile access into the park in the winter time!

Find Rainy Lake on a map and compare its size to that of Lake of the Woods. The Voyageurs used both lakes to transport beaver pelts. Which lake would have taken them the longest to cross?

The route of the Voyageurs through Rainy Lake became so established that the 1783 treaty ending the American Revolution specified that the international boundary should follow their "customary waterway" between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods. Today, Voyageurs National Park, established in 1975, adjoins a 56-mile stretch of the Voyageurs Highway.

Picture: 2.7 billion year old rock

Voyageurs National Park lies in the southern portion of the Canadian Shield. The ancient sediments that comprise the shield represent some of the oldest rock formations exposed anywhere in the world. Younger rock formations do not appear here. Perhaps they never existed, but more likely glaciation simply removed them. At least four times in the past one million years, continental glaciers--ice sheets two miles thick--bulldozed their way through the area. They removed previous features, leaving mostly level, pock-marked rock up to 2.7 billion years old. Hundreds of ponds, lakes, and streams now nestle in the depressions, and some rock surfaces in the park still bear the scrape marks. Why could we say that the Voyageurs Highway through all these lakes was actually a gift of the glaciers?

Apostle Islands, Lake Superior (off Bayfield Peninsula, Wisconsin)

The Apostle Islands, near the southern end of Lake Superior, were named by missionaries who followed the French fur traders into this area. It was thought that there were twelve islands in this archipelago (and therefore the missionaries named the group after the twelve apostles), but there are in fact twenty-two islands. Twenty-one of them are now within the boundaries of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, a part of the National Park Service. In the first picture you are looking out across Sand Bay from a point on the mainland over to Sand Island in the distance.

The islands are formed of brown sandstone laid down by braided streams about one billion years ago. Sandstone on several of the islands was quarried for about thirty years, beginning in 1869, to furnish brownstone for urban Midwest buildings. In the second picture you see the old county courthouse in Bayfield, Wisconsin, which now serves as park headquarters for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and which is built of the brown sandstone quarried from the area.

Lake Superior is 360 miles long, 160 miles wide, and 1,332 feet deep at its lowest point. It is the world's most expansive freshwater body. Lake surface altitude lies at about 602 feet elevation, and its bottom, gouged out by Ice Age glaciers, reaches 730 feet below sea level!

The capital city of Wisconsin is Madison, home to two of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs in architecture. One is the Unitarian Meeting House, which was built between 1947 and 1951. The newest is the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center on the shore of Lake Monona, which was built between 1994 and 1997 from a plan that Wright designed for the purpose before he died. From one side of the center one can look out across the lake, and from the other side one can look up a pedestrian mall two blocks to the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building, he not only designed the structure of it, he also designed the furnishings, complete with carpet. The orange, brown, and gold carpet in the expansive hallways and convention rooms has been a source of controversy between factions who either like it or dislike it intensely. Personally, I think the carpet is very unattractive--a design and color choice of at least two decades ago, and I wonder if Wright would choose it if he were alive today. Outside the center, I love the graceful draping concrete designs on the lakefront side.

Oconto, Wisconsin, is the site of a 4000-year-old burial mound of an ancient Copper Culture people. Archeological excavations revealed many artifacts fashioned of copper, which were buried with the dead. Today a park is situated on the site, and there is a path leading up to the small mound, on which is a rock engraved with the name Copper Culture and stating the age of the mound to be about four thousand years.

Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the site of a deadly forest fire that killed over 800 people on the night of October 8, 1871--strangely enough, the same night as a much more widely publicized fire that destroyed part of Chicago. The fire was fueled by tinder-dry woods and grasslands, at the end of a dry spring and summer. It was spread by a tornado-force wind that hit that night, driving the fire from the forest right through the town. A thief who had been stealing from damaged houses the next day was sentenced to be hanged. In the whole town, there wasn't an unburned rope to be found for hanging him, and his cries for mercy convinced the crowd to pardon him. He was actually saved by the fire!

The cliffs of Pictured Rocks rise from Lake Superior along forty miles of shoreline between the towns of Munising and Grand Marais, Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula. The cliffs are a spectacular example of the erosive action of waves, wind, and ice. There are many colors of rock on the cliff faces and fascinating formations carved by nature. Longfellow refers to the cliffs in his "The Song of Hiawatha." "Gitche Gumee," named in the epic poem, is Lake Superior. "Mighty Gitche Manito" refers to a formation in the rocks called Indian Head Rock today. It is part of a cliff that rises 300 feet from the water. Flat Teddy visited the area today, August 19, with me on a three-hour boat cruise. Lake Superior had some two-foot swells and gave us quite a ride in the 65-foot boat we were in, but we had a good time on the top deck in the sunshine and cool wind.

I got a ticket on a one o'clock boat tour through the boat locks at Sault Ste. Marie. I have never been on a boat that was progressing through locks, and it was very exciting. I tried to imagine the scale of the Panama Canal locks as compared to these. There was only one lock from the Ste. Marie River to Lake Superior, and it raised us 20 feet. But still, it was interesting to see the bottom door close behind us and then watch the side of the canal as we rose up through the lock while it filled with water. There was a great "Ah!" from the passengers as the upper lock door opened, and ahead of us we saw the blue waters of Lake Superior shining in the sun. We cruised north across the eastern end of the lake to the Canadian side and past a steel plant. Then we went down through the Canadian locks. I got a good look up at the Ste. Marie rapids as we went past them when we were back down on the Ste. Marie River. They drop twenty feet overall, and they gave the early travelers (the Indians and the voyageurs) such a headache portaging around them! After I was back in the RV I could see a huge Great Lakes ore boat (here is a picture of a historical ore boat) approaching the locks, so I drove over to where I could watch it pass through. It looked as if it would take a person at least five minutes to walk from the bow to the stern of it. A mighty ship. I thought of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in Lake Superior in a huge storm in 1975, taking all hands with it, and wondered how its size compared to this one.

Please see the August 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This five-mile-long bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. It connects the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the lower section of the state, crossing between the towns of St. Ignace and Mackinaw City. It opened in 1957 and replaced the old ferry crossing between the two sections of Michigan. In the days before the bridge, the line of cars waiting for a ferry would sometimes stretch back as far as twenty miles. Every Labor Day many people participate in the Mackinac Bridge Walk, as the west two lanes are closed to vehicle traffic and people can walk there. The east two lanes remain open for vehicles to drive across. On the right (or west) of the bridge lies Lake Michigan, and on the left (or east) side of the bridge is Lake Huron. The bridge crosses a narrow five-mile-wide passageway called the Straits of Mackinac, between the two Great Lakes.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, atop a low hill beside the St. Joseph River sits this small gravesite. John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed , died in Fort Wayne in 1845. You can see in the picture that someone has left some green apples on the stones in front of the marker. Johnny Appleseed walked the frontier lands around this area planting apple seeds and sharing the love that he felt for all creatures and all people. Indians and settlers alike loved the man.

Please see the August 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This is the last of the motor-homes that Charles Kuralt and his team used for their travels around America as they collected stories for their television show "On the Road." It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. I wondered if someday we'd see Charlie Brown parked right beside Charles Kuralt's RV in this museum! (You see, Charlie Brown isn't named just for Charles Schulz's cartoon character, he's also named in honor of Charles Kuralt.)

Noah Webster House

This house is in Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan. Noah Webster had this house built in New Haven, Connecticut when he was in his sixties. He was a great believer in public education and promoted the idea of girls going to school. He wrote Webster's Blue-Backed Speller in 1782. In 1831 he published The Elementary Primer, or First Lessons for Children. It cost 6 1/4 cents then. It was created to be an introduction to the Blue-Backed Speller for younger children. In all, about a hundred million copies of the Blue-Backed Speller have been sold and used around the world. As late as the 1920s many people had fond memories of learning their spelling lessons from one of these little textbooks. Henry Ford had this house moved to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, to honor the life and mind of Noah Webster and the influence Webster had on American public education. Henry Ford built Greenfield Village to honor Americans who had shown great inventiveness and thereby influenced American life. All houses and workshops in the village have been moved here from original sites all over the United States. Among others, one can visit Thomas Edison's Menlo Park compound where he worked on his inventions, Luther Burbank's garden office, the Wright brothers' cycle shop where they built their first full-scale airplane, and George Washington Carver's childhood home.

Fort Collins Trolley in Dearborn, Michigan

Imagine my surprise to look up at this trolley in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and see these words painted on it! The sign beside the trolley says:

This trolley is a Burney Safety Car, made in about 1921. This car was used first in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During World War II it saw service in Marion, Indiana, and in 1948 was sold to the Fort Collins, Colorado, Municipal Railway, where it received a complete mechanical overhaul.

Please see the August 27, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This house in Dayton, Ohio, was the home of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, an African-American poet, novelist, and civil rights advocate. His short life spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When he was in high school in Dayton he edited a newspaper, The Dayton Tattler, that was printed by the Wright brothers, who had a small business of printing neighborhood newspapers. Dunbar was a high-school classmate of Orville Wright. Paul Lawrence Dunbar published twenty-one books during his lifetime. He had many friends around the world; four prominent friends were Frederick Douglass , Booker T. Washington , and of course Wilbur and Orville Wright. He bought this house for his mother, and he lived in it with her in the last years of his life. Among other furnishings in the house, there is a bicycle that the Wright brothers gave him. He died in 1906 at the age of thirty-three.

Warren G. Harding had this house built in Marion, Ohio, his hometown, in 1891. He and his wife Florence were married in the home on July 8, 1891, and lived in it until 1920, when Harding became President and they moved to Washington, D.C. . It was on the porch you see in this picture that Harding conducted his famous "front-porch" campaign that got him elected. He had been a newspaperman for most of his career before entering politics, so he had a great rapport with the media. Behind this house he put in a small pre-fab building, purchased from Sears, Roebuck for $1000, that was designed and sold to be a house. Harding set it up as offices for correspondents who covered his campaign. Never had the news media been so comfortable covering a candidate. That Press Building today is a small museum about Harding's presidency and contains information about two scandals, involving members of his cabinet, that became public after his death. One of those scandals was the infamous Teapot Dome affair.

The stress of the presidency, his probable knowledge of at least one of the scandals soon to become public knowledge, and his poor health led to his death while he was in office. He had traveled to Alaska and was in San Francisco, on his way back to Washington, D.C., when he died on August 2, 1923, of either a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage. Symptoms recorded at the time point to the possibility of either cause of death. Calvin Coolidge, the Vice President, was sworn in as President.

Pictured here is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Inside, there are many items on display used by famous rock and roll artists through the years--guitars that Elvis played on, clothes that Madonna wore for filming certain videos, a sheet of paper on which one of the Beach Boys had scribbled lyrics as he was inspired by an idea, record album jackets, candid photographs, and thousands and thousands of things to see. There are also several movie theaters in which one can see such titles as: "The Roots of Rock and Roll," "Rave On: Rock and Roll's Early Years," "Mystery Train," "Kick Out the Jams," "Video Killed the Radio Star," and "Rock Is." There are also kiosks scattered all through the building on all floors where one can put on a set of headphones, touch a computer screen to choose a decade from the 1900's, and listen to music by any artist from each decade, simply by choosing titles displayed on the screen and touching them. The sound fidelity is incredible, and needless to say, I spent a lot of time listening to my old favorites from the 50's and 60's! I was limited by time, so I missed two whole rooms devoted to Hip-Hop and Soul. It was a very fun place to spend an afternoon in Cleveland!

This is The Old Tavern in Madison, Ohio, near the shore of Lake Erie . Before the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves , the basement of this building was used as a hiding place for escaped slaves from the South, who had arrived there with the help of a network of people called the Underground Railroad . In getting to this place, the escapees would have traveled for weeks at a time from the South, walking at night and hiding in safe places (like this very one) during the day. Sometimes instead of walking at night, they would be hidden in a wagon under loads of produce or helped in many other creative ways by sympathizers to the cause of anti-slavery. Once here on the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, they could get in a boat belonging to other sympathizers of the cause and be taken across the Great Lakes to Canada and freedom.

The sailing ship in this picture is a little hard to see because I was taking the photograph in the last light of day through a chain-link fence. The exhibit had closed by the time I got there, so I didn't get to go inside the fence. I wanted you to see the ship, anyway. It's the "Niagara," an exact replica of the sailing ship that was commanded by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry in the decisive battle against the British in Lake Erie in the War of 1812 . Many of the naval battles of that war were fought on the Great Lakes. There were two signs near the ship that told about the battle. One sign described the contribution of the African-Americans who were crew on that ship and how their sailing expertise helped win the battle for the Americans.

Please see the August 30, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Susan B. Anthony owned and lived in this house in Rochester, New York, from 1866 until her death in 1906, the forty years of her life that she was most politically active. She was 86 years old when she died. She never married. She constantly protested laws that made it illegal for married women to own property (title to the land or the house had to be in the husband's name), and to get custody of the children if there was a divorce (children belonged to the husband), or to vote. In those days, if a married woman inherited wealth or property, it became the property of her husband. Although women couldn't vote, they were taxed, and Susan B. Anthony and others in the women's rights movement protested this fact, frequently quoting the American Revolutionary slogan, "No taxation without representation." Friends of Susan Anthony and frequent guests in this house were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's rights advocate, and Frederick Douglass, advocate for the abolition of slavery.

After the Civil War, when congress approved an amendment to the constitution giving African Americans the right to vote, the first statement in the amendment said that the right to vote would not be denied anyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. Further down in the text of the amendment it was clearly stated that the people referred to in the amendment were men. But Susan B. Anthony decided to put the first sentence of the amendment to a test. She got a few women together in 1872, the first election after the voting rights amendment went into effect, and they marched down to the polls and demanded ballots. The men at the polling booth were aghast at these women's impropriety, but they did not want to create a disturbance that would invite publicity. They decided to let them vote, and the women did so. Later, police arrived at Susan B. Anthony's house, and it was in her living room, pictured here, that she was arrested for breaking the law and voting. She spent only a few hours in jail, but the public outrage from that incident greatly furthered the cause of women's suffrage.

Frederick Douglass was born in 1818, into slavery. His was subjected to many cruel brutalities in his childhood. He escaped from slavery in 1838.

Douglass became an ardent abolitionist, choosing Rochester, New York, to be his home for over twenty-five of his adult years. He was an eloquent orator, writer, and public servant. He became known the world over as an abolitionist and human rights advocate. He was a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and he gave his support to help her and others in the women's suffrage movement after black American men were given the right to vote. Both he and Susan B. Anthony are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. The building in the picture is the Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center, the mission of which is to celebrate Douglass' achievements, commemorate his presence in Rochester, and explore his legacy of civic action in contemporary culture.

These two pictures are of the Erie Canal, which is still in use today. It was designed and built in the early 1800's to transport goods between the Hudson River in eastern New York State and Buffalo on the shore of Lake Erie. The first picture shows the Erie Canal as it passes through the town of Palmyra, New York. You can see a bridge that carries traffic of one of the city streets crossing the canal.

The second picture shows a lock outside of Palmyra. The lock is full of water, and the lower lock gate is shut.

The Erie Canal was built to ship raw materials from the Great Lakes region to manufacturing areas of the eastern states, which had access to the Hudson River or to railroad lines. And the canal carried barges laden with goods to transport to settlements in western New York and on up the Great Lakes.

Today the canal is used by individual pleasure craft and tour boats. When I arrived at this spot it was very late in the afternoon, and the only cruise I could book was a dinner cruise with a theme of murder mystery. It sounded like fun, but I wouldn't have gotten back to Charlie Brown until way past time to be finding a campground for the night. I sadly didn't get the experience of traveling a ways on the Erie Canal. I understand that it is possible to travel the length of the canal in a boat. Someday...

Seneca Falls, New York, at the north end of Cayuga Lake, in 1848 became the site of the opening skirmish in the battle for women's rights. A group of women, mostly Quakers, had gathered for tea one morning and invited Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Quakers were ardent abolitionists and involved in the effort to win the battle against slavery in this country. The next step seemed to be getting equal rights for women. In those days, a married woman could not vote, make contracts, divorce an abusive husband, gain custody of her children, or own property--even her own clothing! If she inherited property or wealth from her family, it became the property of her husband.

These women on that particular morning decided that the time had come to make public the need for equal rights for women. They planned a convention and held it in Wesleyan Chapel (of which a few walls remain and are protected from the elements so that we can see it today). They drew up and read a list of grievances based on the Declaration of Independence, called the Declaration of Sentiments, denouncing inequities in property rights, education, employment, religion, marriage and family, and suffrage (right to vote.) The Declaration of Sentiments began:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton moved to this home in Seneca Falls, New York, with her husband Henry (a lawyer and an ardent abolitionist lecturer) and three young sons. It was here in Seneca Falls that Stanton's political stance on women's rights became fixed and very public. In the previous report you read about the tea party at which she first voiced her unhappiness with women's lot in America.

She soon became acquainted with Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, not too far away from Seneca Falls. The two became fast friends and would remain close for the rest of their lives. Stanton was tied to home and family responsibilities that prevented her from traveling and speaking outside the local area, but she did much of the speech-writing for the cause. Susan B. Anthony was free of those domestic duties which confined Stanton to home, so she became the traveler and speech-giver. One time Stanton wrote Anthony a letter saying that if Susan would get over to Seneca Falls and help with the children, maybe Elizabeth could get some writing done! Susan spent several weeks at a time there, many times, helping out with the children. The three boys were quite mischievous, to put it mildly, and they weren't altogether happy when "Aunt Susan" came to stay with them because she was much stricter with them than their parents were.