Forgotten History in Our Most Beautiful Spaces

On my way between a steaming hotspring waterfall near Granite Creek, WY and sweeping, wind-carved Medicine Bow Peak. , I pulled over in a highway town called Rock Springs. I got fajitas in a strip mall, filled up on gas, and left. It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 in which white rioters burned down a Chinese immigrant encampment and murdered 28 Chinese miners. It was a massacre no one ever stood trial for, and which now seems lost to history and the dust of the desert highway.

Medicine Bow

This sent me down an internet search hole- how many Chinese massacres had there been in the West, in an era rife with racism and lawlessness, when railroads treated workers as expendable subhumans, and what law that existed did the same? How many had I just driven by on a route that began on the Pacific NW Coast? A lot it turns out - from the Tacoma Expulsion to The Massacre at Deep Creek, these sites of a bloody forgotten history dot the landscape of The West. From the middle of cities <link to LA> to the most remote forests <link to Hell’s Canyon>, each unknown to guidebooks and travel itineraries. I’d pulled over for the Oregon Trail. I’d pulled over for lost white pioneers. And I hadn’t pulled over for this.

About a month ago, my friend Cass and I were up in Lake Placid, where she was researching a travel article about the region. We biked to John Brown's farm, surprised the tourism board never mentioned it to her. John Brown was an abolitionist prior to the Civil War; fed up with what he considered pacism and inaction in the face of the atrocities, he advocated armed insurrection to free the slaves. Most associated with Bleeding Kansas and his fateful raid at Harper's Ferry, VA, we had no idea he made his home right here in the Adirondacks in upstate NY. We had no idea the entire area - now one of the whitest districts in the state - had once been set aside as an eden for freed slaves.  

So many our most beautiful places are dotted with forgotten history, a distinctly American story of landscapes and wilderness fought over and built upon by people lost to our guidebooks and travel blogs. 

10 best lobster rolls. Ride this gnarly trail! Peakbag 35, 46, 21, get your patch. 

It's not that I don't want to do these things. I want to do all of these things. I love lobster rolls. I love collecting patches. I love standing at the the top of a mountain and inhaling the scenery for what is is and only what it is. It's just that I've been conditioned to think that what interesting and aspirational is not my voice - that one must be an ultra-fit white guy or a lithe influencer with cascading blonde locks to stand at the top of that mountain and make other people care. That no one would be interested in researching history with me, with studying the blood stained soils of these crystal vistas while shredding them, or roadtripping them, or climbing to their highest reaches. But I travel, I hike, I bike, I camp and backpack, I read maps, I plan trips, I am an amateur historian, an amateur geologist, and I am starting to understand that I see things on these routes that other people don't see.

So Come with me to mountains, the forests, the ravines, while traveling in the footsteps of those who should no longer be ignored.





Location: Rock Springs, WY 82901, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trip Report: South Dakota Bikepacking Part I

Image
Route Overview, Maps, Reading List >> Day One - Deadwood / Lead to Hill City / Orenville Camp on the Mickelson Trail Deadwood, an old west gold rush town is famous for its connections to Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, is the official terminus - Mile 109 - of the Mickelson Trail . You can see their gravestones and the saloon where ol' Bill was shot up in a poker match. Keep walking the hill over the cemeterery and you'll get to Sheriff Seth Bullock's grave, the man credited with finally bringing some order the lawless old west camp. Hike another short ways up the rutted, rocky trail and you'll get the top - White Rocks- a portruding, precariously stacked rock tower that you can scramble to the top of for a panoramic view of Deadwood and the surrounding hills. I do not recommmend climbing White Rocks in bike shoes, as I did. The Mickelson was once the route of the Burlington Northern train, abandoned in 1983 and converted into a gravel and crus...
Read more

Route: Searching for Paha Sapa - South Dakota Black Hills

Paha Sapa , The Black Hills, was the center of the world, the place of gods and holy mountains, where warriors went to speak to the great spirits and await visions. In 1868, the Great Father considered the hills worthless and gave them to the Indians by treaty. Four years later, white miners were violating the treaty. They invade Paha Sapa , searching for the rocky passes and clear running streams for the yellow metal that drove white men crazy - Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee On this route we circumnavigate the center of the world, starting in the Old West town of Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickock was shot in saloon poker match, past birch tree archways, through old mountain tunnels on a dedicated Rail to Trail with a detour to Crazy Horse monument. We complete most of the Mickelson Trail and veer off in the tiny one-saloon outpost of Pringle, complete with eccentric bike sculpture, before heading into Wind Cave National Park, where, according to Lakota legend, hu...
Read more