Cheyenne to Lincoln

We're making it out of the West and into the Midwest as we leave Wyoming. Today's topics range from women's suffrage to Cabela's to a heartfelt community story centered on trains running through North Platte. The land is getting greener as we enter the rain-fed plains...

Transcript

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Hello everybody. Or I guess good morning in our shared universe of this pseudo trip across the United States. We're in Cheyenne State Capital. I'm always intrigued about state capitals and why they chose them. There's some really great stories about state capitals being stolen in Oklahoma. It's my favorite one apparently. It may have happened in Idaho as well, but not as scandalously as in Oklahoma. But it's always interesting. I once made a map for fun after I graduated from school, and I still knew how to use mapping software where I found the center of population for each state and then the actual center of population or the center of population for each state, and then the geographical center of each state, and then imposed the state capitol and found the distance between them all. I need to go find the map again. But it's really interesting because Wyoming, Cheyenne is not anywhere near the center. I mean places like Colorado, Ohio, Indiana, if I remember right, it's either Indiana or South Carolina that have the most perfect capital placement. A bizarre topic of conversation, and maybe that should be another podcast is. Who has the most perfectly placed state capitol and who doesn't have the most perfectly placed state capitol. But I'm always intrigued'cause Cheyenne's basically in the corner of Wyoming, but that's where everybody lives because that's where the most rainfall probably happens because the rest of Wyoming, I mean, no one wants, you can't have Jackson be the capital. It's a tourist town. And Yellowstone pretty. But Casper maybe, I guess, but at this point, no one's moving it. Interesting. The story's interesting. Interesting. Anyways, state capitals, obviously we, I love state capitals with an A, but I also love state capitals with an O on a quest to visit every state capital in America. And of course, every time we pass one on Interstate 80, we are going to stop and look at it. So Cheyenne, home to Wyoming State capital Building. This state capital building is not the best looker in the country, I will say. And we just came from Utah. Sits on a hill is that beautiful gray white stone with the dark dome. It's gorgeous. Set up among the mountains. Wyoming just looks plain. I'm sorry. It's reflective of the whole state. But the building was built between 1886 and 1890, and this was prior to statehood. Curiously, and the most interesting thing is that even the people who have contributed to Wikipedia have decided to make the note that the contract for the building was issued to the lowest bidder. Things haven't changed for government spending in over a hundred years. Lowest bidders are us like many other state capitals, its design was originally based on the United States Capitol. I don't think it looks like, sure it has a dome and the whole facade and everything, but it doesn't look as similar as some others would, but that's my opinion. The dome was initially covered in copper, but it tarnished so poorly that they then covered it in gold leaf. So that has it going for it. It was re gilded in 2009 at a cost of$1.3 million. And gilding is just in really interesting art form, architectural form, form of ornamentation. This is slightly tangential, but watch the documentary on the renovation of Big Ben in London and they talk about using gold leaf and gilding. And you actually need moisture. So the people in Big Ben actually use a brush and they brush along the side of their face jawline really, and then brush the gold leaf out of its little booklet and onto the building. And I imagine it's very much the same when you're reiling a state capital dome I guess the narrator, the interviewer, the lady running the documentary, she was like, oh, you need the static electricity.'cause it just pulls right off the page. And they were like, no, no, it's the moisture. You just get the barest amount of moisture from your face, either sweat or oil, and then it causes the gold leaf to stick to the building where you put it. Fascinating. Wyoming, for all of its bleak. Ugliness is actually really important in women's suffrage, in the women's suffrage movement. And there were many a convention that were held at this state capitol talking about women's suffrage. And this is really one I wanna get to talk to because Wyoming is the first state to give women the right to vote. And in fact, it's not just the first state, it's the first place in the entire world to incorporate women's suffrage. And this is in 1869. So imagine that we are. Decades before national suffrage is granted to women. This is way before the famous suffragette movement in the United Kingdom but way before all of that, right? 1869, there were not many people in Wyoming in 1869. It was a risky move, especially because as we learned with Utah, the federal government will. Not allow a territory to become a state if they have laws that they disagree with. And Wyoming was really nervous about this because obviously they were alone in women's suffrage and they kept the territorial law, however, and statehood was still granted in 1890. Now there's some other neighbors, notably Kansas and the Dakota Territories that had come quite close to granting women's suffrage as well. But it was really Wyoming who pioneered the movement, and it was entirely local. This wasn't like people from New York came and said, give Wyoming women the right to vote. No, it was all local, and Wyoming was also one of the first places to have women in political offices. So two years after women were given the right to vote in 1871, the first female jurors and female justices of the peace. Were allowed to practice or be involved in the process. And there were also notaries who were women. The legislature full of men obviously tried to repeal the law many a time. And a governor vetoed, governor Campbell vetoed the repeal and the Vito override failed by one vote. So there was one husband who went home to a. Who, a wife who was probably very happy that he voted in favor of a women's suffrage. One of their arguments, their biggest arguments was that female jurors were placed in close quarters with male jurors scandalous, and they heard unseemly testimonies. One would also imagine though, that women had unseemly things happening to them, and so were not strangers to the unseemly testimonies just saying. It's a whole thing. Obviously, Wyoming women overruled all those Wyoming men out in the Wild West, so you really could say it was the Wild West at this time. Wyoming also elected the first female American governor in 1925 after her own husband, who was the governor previously died. So I guess we can give Wyoming a little credit for women's suffrage, but it's really interesting that they tried to repeal it and many places would do give freedom, right? And then take it back after they realized not in our best interest, but not Wyoming, and it actually held through statehood. So that is just fascinating and. Kudos to Wyoming and Wyoming women. Really, the people like you had a lot of strong people there, uh, in the 18 hundreds, but we're done with Wyoming because Cheyenne is really close to the border. And dumb da dumb. Welcome to Nebraska. I love Nebraska. My favorite author grew up in Nebraska. She was originally born in Virginia, but she is most famous for her novels about Nebraska and it's beautiful. I love farmland. I love driving through just watching the farmland pass, but first it's still kind of a little ugly as we start descending an elevation. But we're gonna pass something really out of the ordinary, and that is Cabela's. The OG Cabela's headquarters of a big national, international brand. This is in Sydney, Nebraska, which in all senses of the world, word is a very small town. Cabela's itself was started in 1961 when Dick Cabela started filling fishing, fly mail orders with his wife from their own home in another tiny town in western Nebraska. Their success. Made them shift into a direct mail catalog business. Go them. Go them. And in 1968, a mere seven years after they started filling those mail orders, they moved to Sydney, Nebraska and moved into other outdoor equipment. Now, anybody who's been to a Cabela's knows that it is very famous for the outdoor scenery, the mountain animals, the aquariums, the production, if you will, right. You just don't go into a store. It's just not a normal store. There's a lot to look at. There's a lot to wander around and look at, and you never know when you're gonna come face to face with a furry critter that has been taxidermied. Not my favorite store in the world, but it has a cool story. Right? And it's still, still kind of headquartered in middle of nowhere in Nebraska. It did merge with Bass Pro Shops in 2016, which is why you now see them together in many places. The largest Cabela's is in Hamburg, Pennsylvania with more than 250,000 square feet of floor space. Wow. Put it on our bucket list, right? Well, we'll just keep blowing past Nebraska, all these tiny towns that follow the railroad, and you can always tell where the railroad is because there's the silos and. Greenery by the side. And these tiny towns have some fascinating names. Sometimes Cozad, Lexington, north Platt, and North Platt is next on our list. North Plat is not just an outpost. Um, it is, but it isn't. It's home to one of the most famous railroad yards in the world. It's called the Bailey Yard. It is almost located exactly halfway between Denver and Omaha. It is the world's largest railroad classification yard. So rail cars are sorted, serviced, and repaired here now, union Pacific, very famous name because they were part of the Transcontinental Railroad, but this, this Bailey Yard services the entire country. Serves all of North America, in fact,'cause it is very centrally located. It is 4.45 square miles in size, which is roughly 2,150 football fields. So this place is huge. Many a track, many a railroad car. If you are a train spotter, this is heaven. It's eight miles in length and two miles wide at its widest point. About a thousand yards on average though, for the whole place. There are 200 separate tracks and it totals 315 miles of just rails. Amazing. An average of 139 trains and 14,000 railroad cars pass through the Bailey yard every day. Largest for a reason. You can, as a visitor, go to the Golden Spike Tower to get a view of the yard. I have not yet been, sadly, I'm working my way across Nebraska and things we did not do every time we traveled across the country, because honestly, north Platte, it's a really great place to stop. The first night after leaving Utah, you get about 10, 11 hours of driving in and the next day you're just kind of like, okay, let's get going. Anyways, it'd be really cool to go up to this tower and just watch the railroad now because it was so centrally located and because so many cars passed through it. It is also home to one of the, it's home to a lesser known story of World War ii, which is the North Platte Canteen. The North Platte Canteen is a railroad stop. North pla obviously, and this is where locals would serve soldiers traveling through the area. And it ran from December, 1941, so at the very beginning of the war until April 1st, 1946. One has to imagine helping the soldiers get home. Soldiers would be fed in 10 to 15 minute stopovers. And really there was a 26-year-old woman who really is. To be credited for this because she wrote to the newspapers to organize a more permanent canteen because at first it was just out of the goodness of North Platt's heart. They did it for Christmas, they did it for New Year's time when. You would be missing your family, especially as you go off to war in some distant land that you'd never imagined you'd be going to. And she wrote to the newspaper and organized this, and it turned into a four and a half year event, and it was sustained entirely by donations. 125 communities took part to support it. People would travel over 200 miles to volunteer so. Nebraska, obviously I 80 d. You follow a line of towns all around, but then there are so many other tiny towns to the north, to the south, and these people would dedicate entire weekends and drive through the middle of the night to come feed the soldiers and to help out, help write letters, get letters, delivered, packages, donations, food, you name it. So the expenses were roughly about 200 to$225 a week. Doesn't sound like much to our modern ears, but that's about$4,000 today, which probably still pretty good women. The women volunteers would help write letters and they would also take messages and then call the families on the telephone. And have these long lists of what to say and whatnot. And then you can just imagine what that service was to so many families for these soldiers, many of whom would not come home from wherever they were sent in the theater of war. And so this is North Plat. This is really like we're starting to get into like Midwest Nice. Where it's just a bit different and people always say, oh, there's nice people everywhere. Which there are, but some places are just. Come together in a different way, in a more, I don't know. Everywhere does come out for their military and support the troops, which God bless them. And it's really cool to hear the story. And oddly, I had not heard about it until I was researching the Bailey Yard, which is a tragedy. It probably make a really great movie. They could probably even film there. I don't know. North Platte is also, uh. A special place in our family. There's lots of special places, but the first time we were driving out east for my sister to go to school in Massachusetts, it was 2017 and it was August. And the way the dates lined up were, uh, was spectacular because we were able to be in North Platte. We actually had to stay in Denver. It's a whole, it's a whole thing for the solar eclipse that went across from Oregon to South Carolina in 2017. This was the first time I'd ever seen a total solar eclipse and we were gonna sit in North Platte because it's right on the freeway. We already had to get up at like 5 35 from Denver because that was the closest hotel we could book, which is insane considering that most people are not, they, there's enough hotels in Nebraska, but such was the attendance. And we drove 20 minutes north to a tiny town named Stapleton. Which is really a one horse town, kind of sad but also really cute. And the sky cleared and we were able to see totality, which if you haven't and if you were able to see totality, it's, it's indescribable. Lots of times. I went and read Red it after the last one in 2024. And it's really interesting to hear, to read what people try and say about it and try and capture that and. It gives me chills every time I read it because people are just like, how, how? How do you describe the feeling? And it is kind of weird to see darkness in the middle of the day and to essentially look, feel as if you are standing in the middle of the darkness.'cause there's twilight all around you. And it did get cold. I mean, it's August, so it did get, like, you could feel the coldness really just come about all of a sudden. And then. Birds quieted, crickets would go and then stop. Fascinating. And then we just had to get on the freeway and keep moving along with everybody else. Did get a really cool t-shirt though in Stapleton, or it was, maybe it's North Platte, but it was totally clipse of the heartland and it had this really nice outline of Nebraska. Love a good pun. Love a good pun. So now as we keep driving, we are gonna arrive in Kearney. Now, as I mentioned, I consider Kearney to be the first outpost of civilization on the eastern side of the Rockies on Interstate 80 because we have a Panera here and a target, which sounds ridiculous, but. Utah was the last state in the country to get a Panera. Our first one came in the airport, so you had to have a plane ticket to go to Panera, and I know lots of people are gonna be hearing this and be like, oh, Panera, let's run of the mill. It's expensive, it'ss, but having Panera always meant that we were on vacation or we were outside the state. So it's, it's kind of a special place for us. And yeah. Kearney was the last place we could really get it. There's one in Cheyenne, but it's a bit off the freeway. On the far north side of the city. Kearney's is not as far off, so that was kind of the last place we were able to get Panera and a target if we realized we had forgotten something that we needed. But Kearney also is really interestingly famous for an archway, and once again, random roadside attraction. And finally the last time I drove out for the last year of my graduate program in Ohio, my mom and I stopped to go the archway because they're like, oh, it's a celebration of the road, of pioneers of just travel, transcontinental travel. It was really cool. It was really, really cool because it really talked to, it did talk about traveling across the country. So it started out with the Native Americans and how they were very, they would just move. Hunter gather type lifestyle and follow the buffalo, and really interesting that they would follow the same trails all the time. And then these trails became the footpaths for many a pioneer crossing west, mostly following the Platte River. The three, like the four main trails would then split when they reached into Wyoming. And then of course it moved into the railroad and the Transcontinental Railroad, and then how it revolutionized travel across the United States immensely. Went like you now didn't spend four months of your life walking. You now spent four or five days sitting in a railroad car. Probably not very comfortable, but hey, four to five days, that's a steal. And then it talked about roads, which were really crummy for the longest time, and then the interstate, and it had a lot of Americana and memorabilia about the gold, like kind of that golden age of the automobile where it was really fun to go drag main street and to drive these kind of a route 66 mentality. If you're driving through Kearney in real life, I highly, highly, highly suggest that you stop off and see it. It doesn't take more than an hour, it's just really cool to walk through. You literally start on one side of the bridge and then you go over, and then there's a part where you can look over the the freeway, which you don't really get to do often unless you're walking across an overpass, but you get to sit there and stare at all the cars. And it's just, it's a testament to the modern miracle of travel and that we're able to do this so quickly. And then, I don't know, it's just in the randomest place, but Kearney, Nebraska, everybody, which a lot of people will try and say kearney.'cause I guess generally English pronunciations would dictate its Kearney. But it is Kearney. It's a whole other story, which if you are an old movie fan. Kearney. Nebraska is in the around the world. In 80 days, the David Nevin won. This is where they get lost, get kind of left behind by the railroad and they have to use a push cart, I guess, but they rig it to make it a sale and then sail past the railroad when the railroad breaks down and sail across the rest of Nebraska, and they're able to continue their journey. Fascinating, but. Kearney, Kearney, Nebraska, outpost of civilization. Now there's one more part to this Nebraska Day'cause we'll spend a lot more time talking about Lincoln after we are arrested because this is a really long day to drive across Nebraska and I get that. I really do. But it is beautiful and that is regional cuisine ronza. A lot of people like to make fun of the name for. Uh, a cheap and easy way for scatological humor. RZA is basically a yeast dough bread pocket, and it really is unique to Nebraska. Now, a lot of other people with German ancestry will be like, oh, yeah, well, we know what that is. Yes. But Nebraska's the only one to make a fast food chain out of it called Renza itself. It's a bread pocket filled with ground beef, cabbage, onions, and seasonings. And of course there's many variations to which you can change up za to your taste. And it has its origins in the Pirogue and the Bureau rock. So, way back when people were still coming across Nebraska to settle, which you can read about in Willa catheter's, novels, the vulgar Germans were one of the biggest groups to come, and they moved to the Great Plains now vulgar German. Is a person of German ethnicity who moved from the vulgar river area in Russia, which is also just another fascinating story, but for the sake of clarity, it's just essentially, Catherine the Great invited a bunch of Germans to come settle the Vulgar River, help kind of jumpstart a farming industry. And they did. But of course, as time goes on, they're not exactly welcome anymore. So a lot of them moved to the United States. Where the conditions were very similar in the Midwest, ironically enough to vulgar Russia, very hard, lots of hard work. Well, they brought their food with them, obviously, and this was the beginnings of Za, a woman known as Sarah Brenning Everett or Sally. She was one of these women, and she adapted a family recipe and invented the name Za. Gave it a little cachet there. She began selling them in Lincoln and when it took off, she founded a chain of restaurants, also called Za, and you can see them everywhere. It's the strangest thing because they are starting to branch out into other states. But you know, when you're in Nebraska, because all of a sudden next to a lot of the gas stations in these tiny towns. Sydney North Pla, Cozad Lexington, Carney. You'll see this this green and yellow sign. Ronza, Ronza, ronza. It's, it's really interesting. All of a sudden they're everywhere. Much like churches and temples in Utah, Ronza, Nebraska, you just know you're there today. Ronza is still family owned and they do serve other food. They do serve like hamburgers and whatnot, but they also serve other Midwestern staples such as chili and cinnamon rolls, which I have never participated, so I'm not going to pass an opinion on that. Rza, I do love Rza, but I'm not the biggest fan of cabbage, so what I end up doing is taking a bite off the top of the bread pocket to open it, and then pretty much with every bite I use half a packet of mustard because cooked cabbage. I have tried many ways of eating in soup, eating it in za, eating it in Chinese food, all sorts of ways to eat cooked cabbage, and it just does not taste good. I know people like it. I do not, Ugh, but for the sake of celebrating Nebraskan cuisine, I will eat it with mustard and does tastes kind of good. You can get them, like I said, with many variations. Every time I'm in Nebraska, I have to go to za. I'm the only one in my family besides my mother to eat that. Normally there is very vehement protestations. But they do have really, really good Pepsi, which. And now that makes me sound super American. I love my soda, but there's nothing like renza and a cup of Pepsi and their fries are pretty decent too. And you're just, it just means you're in Nebraska. There's so much that just, it's like, oh, yay, Nebraska. But now we're driving to Lincoln, the sun is setting behind us. And how do we know we're in Lincoln?'cause you can see the state capitol. It's flat as flat can be. And there is the state capitol. The skyscraper of the planes. There's other names for it, but I will not say that on my podcast for, uh, for reasons that you can look up on your own. But rest up because tomorrow's a packed day. We are going to take another little side trip because Nebraska is just an amazing place, right? And if you don't believe it. Come back'cause we're gonna take an amazing side trip. Gonna talk about Kool-Aid, great American novelist and the geographical center of the lower 48. Get ready to see more of this great country. Thanks for joining us through. Nebraska and enjoy Reza the next time you have it.