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12 April 2006 -
Wednesday
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We awoke around 6:15
and found the temperature had dropped considerably during the night so we
closed the windows while the coffee
brewed. As we didn’t have access
to a bathhouse we skipped our usual morning shower and we had to use the
van’s sink for washing and shaving.
After cleaning ourselves up and straightening the interior of the van
we pulled down the top and headed out to another day of adventure. Some 33 miles northwest of Liberal we came upon the small
town of Hugoton, the seat of Stevens
County, Kansas. Located in flat high
Yes, there certainly is a lot of sky in this part of
the USA plains country the area’s economy primarily encompasses natural
gas and agricultural production. Hugoton itself has 4,000 citizens and bills
itself as the “natural gas capital of the United States”. The county was
named after Thaddeus
Stevens (1792-1868), Congressman from Pennsylvania who was famous for his
fierce abolitionist beliefs. Other
than Hugoton we found the entire area to be made up of desolate, dry
desert-like land with few residents to fill up the 727 square miles that is
encompassed by Stevens County. Upon
experiencing this we both began to wonder what had attracted our 2nd
great-grandfather John P. Moreland to this seemingly uninviting
environment. Our first business
here was to visit the Recorder of Deeds in the Courthouse to find what we
could about John P. Moreland and the land he may have purchased and
when. We located a record filed 18
March 1913 showing him “paying in full” to the Federal government for 160
acres he was homesteading, and another document, filed the same day selling
the land. Why would he do this we
asked ourselves? Just a bit after
10:00 am we headed next door to the County Library. The librarian advised us that the room containing their
genealogy collection would be used for a children’s book reading from 10:30
to 11:00 am. As our research would be
interrupted for a short time the librarian found us a place close-by where we
could obtain much needed haircuts.
Upon arrival the proprietor Shelley Taylor informed us that she could
take us at 11:00 am so we headed out looking for a cup of coffee which we
found at Domino’s Bar and Grille. We
spent most of our ½ hour there chatting with the owner about our trip. Soon her father arrived, and she inquired
as to where “Herman” was. She quickly
explained that her Dad had injured his foot and that she had named his cane
“Herman”. Dad was a grizzled old
retired farmer who didn’t know a day without work. He summoned his daughter to help him lift a cooler up onto the
bed of his pick-up. When she voiced concern about the task the crippled man
replied that it ONLY weighed about 150 pounds. Seeing the need for assistance Tom quickly headed for the door
followed closely by Fred. The four of
us lifted it up on the truck and Fred scrambled up into the bed to assist
with securing the object. When we
left the establishment the owner refused to let us pay for our coffee as we
had provided “neighborly” assistance.
Ah, another enjoyable encounter with life in America’s heartland. After Shelly had given us our haircuts we
headed back over to the library.
Since we |
had a hunch that our 2nd great- grandmother Lydia A.
(Brown) Moreland had passed away while residing in Stevens County Tom sought
out the newspaper collection to look for an answer, but was disappointed to
find that obituaries were not listed as they are today. At the librarian’s suggestion he began to
seek out that portion of the paper that contained the local “goings on” or
chatting type of news. Almost
immediately he found a paragraph about Mrs. Moreland being sick with
pneumonia. This was a find certainly
worthy of a “genealogy dance” that only family historians can
appreciate. Subsequent notices
advised of her deteriorating condition until her eventual death was reported
in the 28 March 1913 edition as occurring on 15 March. We had found the answer to our question as
to why John had made final payment and sold his land on March 18th. His wife and constant companion of 60
years was gone, and he at age 81 was most likely a tired and broken man no
longer interested in living in such an inhospitable environment. It was early in the
afternoon when we left Hugoton. We
planned our route out of the area so that we would go past the land
homesteaded by John and Lydia. Upon
reaching it we took pictures as well as a GPS bearing. Again we contemplated why at such an
advanced age they would attempt to settle this unforgiving land? Little did
we know that the answer was awaiting us at our next stopover in Arizona. Soon we were back
into Oklahoma where, in Guymon, we ate lunch at an establishment named Cactus
Jacks. It was here that we met Dee
the super-waitress. Dee was a 40
something cowgirl who plainly loved her work. She displayed a special upbeat style and smile that one
couldn’t ignore. We voted her our “# 1” waitress of the trip and by the time we had left Fred was
positively enchanted with her. Before long we
entered the Texas panhandle where the land is so flat that one is able to see
from horizon to horizon and there isn’t a tree to mar the view! A few miles past Dalhart, Texas we first
smelled the cattle and then soon saw the huge feedlots that seemed to stretch
almost to the horizon. It was this extraordinary sight that made us ponder
the many steaks and burgers we Americans consume each year. Soon we were in New
Mexico and the Mountain Time Zone. We
promptly changed the clock on the radio and instantly added another hour to
our day. At Tucumcari we got onto
Interstate 40 west to Santa Rosa where we planned to stay the night at the Santa Rosa Lake
State Park. Upon our arrival we
were instantly impressed with this New Mexico campground. Despite the fact that we would have
preferred the cool lush forest setting in the East we both were pleased that
Mother Nature had provided us with a different setting to enjoy. The land was beautiful, and Fred took the
following picture of Santa Rosa Lake from the front window of the van’s
penthouse top. A quick tour around
the immediate area convinced us that this park would certainly rate a 5 in
our book. We were
really impressed with the bathhouse as it contained a very
good-looking shower room with plenty of hooks and even rubber mats on the
floor in each stall! Wow! This place has to take our No. 1 “Bathhouse Award”. |
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