Stopping Along the Santa Fe Trail

Mission accomplished in Denver, we headed east. Destination: Houston-—but we added the goal of an intermediate stop in Stillwater, OK, so that Bill can meet the Oklahoma State University professor who was his predecessor on the AESP project (and who is still involved in other NASA education projects).

After a night at the Fountain Valley RV park (“best RV Park in Colorado Springs”—enter between the Taco Bell and the MacDonalds) we picked up the Santa Fe Trail (in Colorado, a bit of it is our old friend, Route 50, that lonely road), and, Sunday being our day for recreation and sight-seeing, we played at being settlers and stopped at Bent’s Old Fort, located on the Arkansas River not far from La Junta, Colorado.


In 1833 this was a very important trading post. This was the era, remember, when beaver pelts were essential for the making gentlemen’s hats, and the American West was a major source of the fur; trappers called the pelts “furry banknotes.”

The fort was also a grateful wayside stop for travelers; the fort highlights excerpts from the diary of an 18-year-old newlywed whose well-heeled husband brought her west in a private stagecoach with three maidservants and a dressing tent. “I travel like a prairie princess,” she wrote. “Honey, just like you!” Bill said.

The fort burned under mysterious circumstances in 1849; for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976 the National Park Service reconstructed it, brick by handmade adobe brick, using a painstaking plan fortuitously drawn up by a 19th century visitor with surveying skills who was recovering from an illness at the fort and was kinda bored, looking for something to do . . . so he measured everything!

The rooms are all furnished with period artifacts, and unlike most Sturbridge-Village equivalents, you can walk right in and look around and peer closely at everything. Most surprising amenity: Even though this was a rough frontier fort, they actually had one big room set aside just for a bar and billiard table . . . hmmm, these gents had their priorities! Costumed Park Service interpreters wander around the place with grizzled faces and dusty boots. We loved it.

That night we stayed at ANOTHER stop on the Santa Fe Trail, Dodge City . . . at the Gunsmoke RV Park (“Best RV Park in Central Kansas.”)
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The bathroom-laundry room-office-gift shop complex is all tricked out to look like the set of the popular 1960s TV show—a little mini Wild West Town. An especially nice touch is the cactus-laden graveyard-landscaping out in front, with tombstones and man’s boot poking out of the ground.