Hidden Places: Where History Lives; Two Routes West

<v Narrator 1>This program is made possible in part by grants from Bankers Life Nebraska <v Narrator 1>and Internorth and from the State Humanities Councils in Idaho, Iowa, <v Narrator 1>Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming, <v Narrator 1>which are affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities. <v Narrator 1>[music plays] <v Elizabeth Henniker>We started for California on the 14th day of April with five <v Elizabeth Henniker>yoke of cattle, one pony and sidesaddle and accompanied by <v Elizabeth Henniker>several of our friends and neighbors as far as the first town where <v Elizabeth Henniker>we parted and said our last goodbye. <v Philip Abbott>In the 19th century, nearly a million people went west <v Philip Abbott>over a foot trail that led through mid America, then split off to California, <v Philip Abbott>Oregon and Utah. <v Philip Abbott>With the prospect of new lands to farm and gold to mine, people launched

<v Philip Abbott>themselves into the wilderness with a kind of zeal that hasn't been matched since. <v Philip Abbott>And most of them had no idea what they were in for. <v Elizabeth Henniker>In truth, this journey is much more arduous than we had been led to believe. <v Elizabeth Henniker>Our little company moves along in single file now following the ruts <v Elizabeth Henniker>that have been cut in the dry ground by the wagons that have come this way before <v Elizabeth Henniker>us. <v Philip Abbott>Elizabeth Henniker made that entry in her diary on the way west in 1855. <v Philip Abbott>Today, her great grandchildren in California lead lives she could never even dream <v Philip Abbott>of. <v Philip Abbott>But parts of the rutted trails she wrote about can still be found. <v Philip Abbott>[music plays] <v Philip Abbott>This is the trail in the Sweetwater Valley of Wyoming.

<v Philip Abbott>Just west of here, it crosses the continental divide and splits <v Philip Abbott>off. Wagon trains west. <v Philip Abbott>What an adventure that must have been one hundred years ago. <v Philip Abbott>And standing here in this section of the old trail <v Philip Abbott>in this unchanged valley, seeing it just as the <v Philip Abbott>immigrants saw it, you can almost hear them moving by. <v Philip Abbott>And surprisingly like these trail ruts, many real places that played <v Philip Abbott>a part in the Western movement can still be found. <v Philip Abbott>I'm Philip Abbott and we're exploring some of those hidden places <v Philip Abbott>along two routes across what was known as the Great American Desert, <v Philip Abbott>the plains of Mid-America. <v Philip Abbott>Those two routes were the Platte River Valley, where the immigrant wagons ?rode? <v Philip Abbott>and the Missouri River, where steamboats hauled supplies to mountain mining towns. <v Philip Abbott>But our story begins a thousand miles east of here.

<v Philip Abbott>From gathering points on the Missouri, the immigrants began their trip west by making <v Philip Abbott>their way across the plains. <v Philip Abbott>The many trails converged at the big blue crossing and the trail then headed north <v Philip Abbott>west. <v Philip Abbott>What was then the unbroken prairie is now the rich farmland of eastern Kansas. <v Philip Abbott>Here in the midst of all this farm country <v Philip Abbott>is an old house that is once a trail in a Pony Express <v Philip Abbott>home station, a saloon, a post office, a <v Philip Abbott>stagecoach stop and a general store. <v Philip Abbott>This is Hollenberg station there, Hanover, Kansas. <v Philip Abbott>And it's all that's left of the high plains empire of Garratt Hollenberg, <v Philip Abbott>a German immigrant who built here one of the most extensive weigh stations <v Philip Abbott>along this part of the trail. <v Philip Abbott>The stagecoach passengers, the wagon train people, the ?inaudible? <v Philip Abbott>hauling freight, the mountain bound fortune seekers, would all have congregated

<v Philip Abbott>here. [laughter] One of the best interpreters of what life was like <v Philip Abbott>on the trails is folklorist Roger Welsh. <v Philip Abbott>Well, I don't know if I'd have the courage to start out on a long trip like that. <v Roger Welsh>W- even even driving across the plains bothers me these days. <v Roger Welsh>And uh I wonder about those people who made it at the rate of 8 or 12 miles a day <v Roger Welsh>and most of the time walking alongside their wagons because it was tough enough for the <v Roger Welsh>animals to pull that load, yet to have the people who could carry themselves also sitting <v Roger Welsh>in the wagon. <v Philip Abbott>I suppose a place like Hollenberg would be the forerunner of the modern motels. <v Roger Welsh>That and more like a filling station because it was a place where they could get repair <v Roger Welsh>on broken wheels and and wheels were always a problem. <v Roger Welsh>Uh a lot of people think that the Plains Indians were backward because they didn't use <v Roger Welsh>the wheel. But in many ways, the wheel was just not suited for plains travel because the <v Roger Welsh>soils were so loose and it was so dry that those wheels would dry out, start to fall <v Roger Welsh>apart, break. And in a place like this, they'd always have a wheelwright who could repair <v Roger Welsh>those those wheels and tires.

<v Philip Abbott>Were cooks provided with the wagon train or- <v Roger Welsh>They were all responsible for their own meals. And it was very often a a good wholesome <v Roger Welsh>food, but the monotony was what killed 'em. <v Roger Welsh>Dried beans, dried corn, salt bacon, salt pork. <v Roger Welsh>Often they'd have a cow following along behind the wagon train. <v Roger Welsh>They'd milk her in the morning, hang the milk uh from one of the stays in the wagon in <v Roger Welsh>a bucket, and it'd churn as they traveled along. <v Roger Welsh>So they'd had their butter and buttermilk by the end of the day. <v Roger Welsh>And that provided them the main part, the mainstay of their food. <v Philip Abbott>What'd they use for uh fire? <v Roger Welsh>Well, that's uh that's an interesting question, because there weren't very many trees out <v Roger Welsh>here. So they used what's called Nebraska Oak or Kansas Oak, which was buffalo <v Roger Welsh>chips, which provided a hot, clean fire. <v Roger Welsh>And in fact, one of the advantages I heard of was that when you cooked with buffalo <v Roger Welsh>chips, you didn't have salt and pepper. <v Roger Welsh>[laughter] They said that some of the women out here on the plains developed huge right <v Roger Welsh>toes from flipping over those cow pies to see if they were done [chuckles]. <v Roger Welsh>?Well? I think about uh the people who were on the Oregon Trail, people who stopped at <v Roger Welsh>places like this. What I like to think of is us, because we're the kind of people who

<v Roger Welsh>were on the Oregon Trail, really. The folklore of the trail very often points that out. <v Roger Welsh>It- th- the folk songs that I'm interested in were the ones that were transmitted <v Roger Welsh>primarily by unsophisticated means, one person to another, just passing them along. <v Roger Welsh>And they were often singing about themselves. <v Roger Welsh>They knew that they were in the midst of an adventure. <v Roger Welsh>The Oregon Trail was going for a long enough period of time that songs developed <v Roger Welsh>on the trail about the trail and then they'd be sung for another 10 or 20 years on the <v Roger Welsh>trail um about the kinds of people they saw around them. <v Roger Welsh>I know one that's always been my favorite because I first heard it when I was in grade <v Roger Welsh>school was sweet Betsy from Pike. <v Roger Welsh>And of course, the teacher there um kind of doctored it up a little bit so it was <v Roger Welsh>suitable for children's ears. <v Roger Welsh>And as a result, I thought the Oregon Trail was really kind of dull when I heard about it <v Roger Welsh>in the fourth grade. [laughter] But the more I learned about the folklore and history of <v Roger Welsh>of this area, [Philip Abbott: Okay come on Roger let's hear it] [laughter] ?inaudible? <v Philip Abbott>The clean version first. <v Roger Welsh>Well, she had this little fire forest set out in the middle of the classroom, and we had <v Roger Welsh>some pork and beans that we ate by way of Pioneer Fair.

<v Roger Welsh>And then we sang. I remember the picture even in the book with the the sun bonnet and <v Roger Welsh>gingham gowned ladies walking alongside her wagon out in front. <v Roger Welsh>And we sang, [singing] [banjo playing] Don't you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike? <v Roger Welsh>You crossed the wide mountains with her brother Ike. <v Roger Welsh>[speaking] [banjo stops] Well, that's not the way sweet Betsy crossed the White Mountains. <v Roger Welsh>The real version of that song, the way it was sung out around this area was, [singing] <v Roger Welsh>[banjo playing] Don't you remember, sweet Betsy from Pike? <v Roger Welsh>Across the wide mouth with her lover Ike. <v Roger Welsh>With two yellow oxen and one yellow dog, a tall ?inaudible? <v Roger Welsh>rooster and an old spotted hog. <v Roger Welsh>Singin' ?inaudible?. [speaking] I do remember singing this verse. [singing] <v Roger Welsh>?inaudible? quite early this stop by the flat was nearby the road on a <v Roger Welsh>green shady ?flat?. Betsy quite tired lay down ?inaudible? <v Roger Welsh>while Ike gazed with wonder at his Pike county rose. <v Roger Welsh>Singin' ?inaudible?. [speaking] But I don't remember singin' this verse [laughs] [singing] They broke out the whisky one bright

<v Roger Welsh>starry night and as fate would have it, Sweet Betty got tight. <v Roger Welsh>She sang and she danced and she rolled o'er the planes, showed her bare bum <v Roger Welsh>to the whole wagon train. Singin' ?inaudible?. <v Roger Welsh>[speaking] I think Sweet Betsy was the first of the new liberated women. This Pike County couple gotten <v Roger Welsh>married, of course, but Ike he grew jealous then came the divorce. <v Roger Welsh>Betsy quite satisfied gave out a shout, good bye ya dumb <v Roger Welsh>?inaudible? I'm glad ya backed out. Singin' ?inaudible?. <v Philip Abbott>Oh, that's great. <v Roger Welsh>And all it was to me, you know, the character of these people comes out [Philip Abbott: <v Roger Welsh>Oh, sure]. They were people like us the profane, the the sacred, everything. <v Roger Welsh>And- <v Philip Abbott>The ?thing? it brings home to me is their sense of humor. <v Philip Abbott>They were able to laugh at themselves. <v Roger Welsh>Twain said that that humor doesn't come out of the good times. <v Roger Welsh>It comes out of adversity. And that was definitely the case out here. <v Roger Welsh>I've I've never really known for certain whether it was the survivors who laughed or the

<v Roger Welsh>laughers who survived. But there's a correlation there that can't be denied. <v Philip Abbott>Don't you think the value of a place like Hollenberg Station is that it <v Philip Abbott>brings to life a sense of our immediate past? <v Roger Welsh>That's exactly it. I think people might very well wonder why save an old building like <v Roger Welsh>this? It's really not all that attractive. It's not all that distinguished. <v Roger Welsh>But if you've got any romance in your soul at all, what it does is bring home the spirit <v Roger Welsh>of history. If there are such things as soul food that really are more nourishing <v Roger Welsh>to your spirit than to your body and that's also true of buildings like this. <v Roger Welsh>It's a soul building. It's uh a building that regenerates your appreciation <v Roger Welsh>for history, even if it's not precisely serving the understanding of history. <v Roger Welsh>If you stand in a place like this and know who came through here and know what it was <v Roger Welsh>like, what this building meant to the people who were here then, then I think you can go <v Roger Welsh>back and read some of the history and understand what it is they were talking about. <v Roger Welsh>Then you're not trying to imagine a building in your mind. <v Roger Welsh>You can remember this building and know exactly what it was they were talking about

<v Roger Welsh>[banjo playing]. <v Philip Abbott>The Kansas Historical Society owns Hollenberg station today. <v Philip Abbott>It's preserved. It hasn't been developed into anything fancy. <v Philip Abbott>It was and is a simple country house. <v Philip Abbott>Rough, but useful like the people it served. <v Philip Abbott>[music playing] Beyond Hollenberg station, the trail pushed on across Nebraska, joined <v Philip Abbott>up with the Platte River, then followed the North Platte to the Rocky Mountains in <v Philip Abbott>Wyoming. <v Philip Abbott>By mid century, accurate guidebooks of the trail were published, but <v Philip Abbott>nothing ever made the journey easy. <v Philip Abbott>In the immense sea of prairie and sky, landmarks would be in sight for days <v Philip Abbott>before they were reached and the names of the places were known <v Philip Abbott>like Chimney Rock. <v Philip Abbott>It was reassuring to finally pass them. <v Philip Abbott>Then onto Fort Laramie and the first mountain range on the horizon. <v Philip Abbott>Landmarks, forts, trading posts were passed.

<v Philip Abbott>Distance was being covered, but the pace was agonizingly <v Philip Abbott>slow. <v Philip Abbott>Now, after two months on the great American desert, the wagons approached the halfway <v Philip Abbott>point. At last there was a change. <v Philip Abbott>They had left the platte and started up the Sweetwater Valley that would take them over <v Philip Abbott>the mountains. <v Philip Abbott>Ahead was Independence Rock, the one landmark they all knew. <v Philip Abbott>It is where they all left their names. <v Philip Abbott>The great register of the desert. <v Philip Abbott>That's what Father ?Desmet?, an early missionary explorer called it. <v Mark ?Younggu?>Supposedly about 1830, the trappers who stopped here celebrated Independence Day and <v Mark ?Younggu?>started the tradition and the immigrants who followed got <v Mark ?Younggu?>here about the Fourth of July in their trek westward. <v Mark ?Younggu?>They had to be out here when the grass was green for their animals.

<v Mark ?Younggu?>[Philip Abbott: Uh huh] So about July 4th, they reached this point, which was about a <v Mark ?Younggu?>halfway point between Independence, Missouri and the West Coast. <v Philip Abbott>Historian Mark ?Younggu? is with the Wyoming Recreation Commission. <v Philip Abbott>Look at these um names here that date back to 1850, <v Philip Abbott>July the 4th. <v Mark ?Younggu?>Very nice. Very precisely done. <v Mark ?Younggu?>Well, the state does not wanna develop this too much. <v Mark ?Younggu?>The people of the state don't want to see a carnival like atmosphere here. <v Mark ?Younggu?>They want this rock to appear as it appeared to the immigrants. <v Mark ?Younggu?>So the development will be very minimal. <v Philip Abbott>But you do want to have it more accessible to the public. <v Mark ?Younggu?>That's right. That's right. But we wanna provide just the amount of <v Mark ?Younggu?>facilities that those people need. <v Mark ?Younggu?>For example to the west and south of the rock, we wanna fence off a small area where <v Mark ?Younggu?>people can come in and they can get the basic necessities and they can also walk along <v Mark ?Younggu?>an interpretive display or exhibit and learn about the history of this rock. <v Philip Abbott>See out way over there on that range of mountains?

<v Mark ?Younggu?>Right. <v Philip Abbott>Is that Devil's Gate? <v Mark ?Younggu?>That's right. It doesn't look very far off from here, but I suppose that's about five <v Mark ?Younggu?>miles. It's a natural feature. <v Mark ?Younggu?>It's it's another landmark along the trail. They could point in that direction and know <v Mark ?Younggu?>that they were headed in the right direction. <v Philip Abbott>How much different would you say if this looks today than it did 150 years ago? <v Mark ?Younggu?>I think we'd all be surprised to find that possibly this whole scene here is less busy <v Mark ?Younggu?>than it was in the 1850s when you had many, many wagons coming through here, a lot of <v Mark ?Younggu?>dust being raised. Uh you wouldn't have the sound of a semi or uh a car, <v Mark ?Younggu?>especially about 1850. I think that was about the height of the traffic through this <v Mark ?Younggu?>area. <v Robert Munkres>It is surprising to what extent you become personally involved with people, particularly <v Robert Munkres>if you use the same diary for a variety of different purposes. <v Robert Munkres>There was one woman, for example, the name of Sarah Sutton. <v Robert Munkres>I suppose I had used excerpts from her diary and three or four articles until I came <v Robert Munkres>across a little footnote from her granddaughter that Sarah Sutton never made it to <v Robert Munkres>Oregon. She died in the ?inaudible? valley of mountain fever.

<v Robert Munkres>And it sounds crazy, but I felt like I'd lost a close friend <v Robert Munkres>and the woman had been dead for a hundred and thirty years. <v Philip Abbott>Robert Munkres of Muskingum College has researched the diaries kept by people <v Philip Abbott>who made the ?Overland? crossing. <v Robert Munkres>Oh naturally people would record anything that was out of the ordinary for them. <v Robert Munkres>The actually simply the magnitude of space you can see out here was perhaps <v Robert Munkres>the greatest uh difference for most of those who came from the east and the lack of <v Robert Munkres>trees, any number of them referred to these godforsaken, treeless plains. <v Robert Munkres>So the dangers uh were, of course, accidents. <v Robert Munkres>Uh wagons with some frequency ran over particularly women and children. <v Robert Munkres>In a surprising number of instances, though, the kids weren't hurt. <v Robert Munkres>And in one instance, a fully loaded wagon ran over a woman and the ground was soft <v Robert Munkres>enough she just sank into it, passed over her. <v Robert Munkres>[Philip Abbott: Wow] Another kind of accident that occurred far more frequently than the <v Robert Munkres>fictional treatment of Western history would have you believe are firearms accidents. <v Robert Munkres>Practically all of the men were armed.

<v Robert Munkres>But before the Civil War, which of course gave a great many men military experience, uh <v Robert Munkres>they weren't a great many of them very proficient in the use of these weapons. <v Robert Munkres>Well the result is, of course, they shot at oh, rocks, sheep, <v Robert Munkres>goats, a blanket in one case under the assumption that all <v Robert Munkres>of these were Indians and they shot themselves with remarkable regularity, <v Robert Munkres>using [laughter] what has always baffled me is the number of times I saw records of an <v Robert Munkres>accident, someone was wounded because they pulled a weapon from a wagon loaded cock <v Robert Munkres>barrel first. [Philip Abbott: Oh] Uh firearms training was not terribly <v Robert Munkres>highly developed. <v Philip Abbott>Speaking of Indians, [Robert Munkres: Mhmm] did you come across many recorded incidents <v Philip Abbott>of Indian attacks? <v Robert Munkres>Well not in the again the Hollywood sense of the word. <v Robert Munkres>The circled wagons and 10,000 savages coming pouring over the brink of a hill. <v Robert Munkres>I have never encountered one attack of that type. <v Robert Munkres>Uh horse stealing. <v Robert Munkres>Oh, yes. But more frequently than not, it was done silently and quietly and at night.

<v Robert Munkres>As far as dangers, many of the dangers they faced here were the same <v Robert Munkres>that they faced back home. <v Robert Munkres>But they took on a greater magnitude because they felt so much more isolated. <v Robert Munkres>Mean, here we sit today in the Sweetwater Valley, we're an hour from Casper, we're three <v Robert Munkres>hours from practically anywhere in the country. <v Robert Munkres>Here they sat in the Sweetwater Valley and they were three months from anywhere. <v Philip Abbott>This whole valley is a natural trail. <v Robert Munkres>It is. It is a natural trail uh without which the settlement <v Robert Munkres>of the West would have happened in an entirely different way, because it's not only a <v Robert Munkres>natural pathway, so natural wagon road, that was the real key. <v Robert Munkres>That you could bring wheeled vehicles here, which meant not only people and families, but <v Robert Munkres>trade goods in large quantities. [music plays] <v Philip Abbott>While most of the wagon trains were filled with families headed for new lives on new <v Philip Abbott>land in Oregon or California, there was another group of people who <v Philip Abbott>stayed in the Rocky Mountains. <v Philip Abbott>They were the prospectors. Miners and small businessmen who were on their way

<v Philip Abbott>to the new gold and silver mining towns that were springing up. <v Philip Abbott>These quick built towns appeared overnight around every new discovery, <v Philip Abbott>but they produced only the raw ore. <v Philip Abbott>Every tool, every machine, every case of beans. <v Philip Abbott>Every commercial product needed in the mountains was shipped in. <v Philip Abbott>Most of the freight for the mining camps in the Northern Rockies was loaded onto shallow <v Philip Abbott>draft wood burning steamers at St. Louis. <v Philip Abbott>There they began the 60 day, 3000 mile trip up the Missouri to Fort <v Philip Abbott>Benton, Montana. <v Philip Abbott>The farthest steamboats could go on the river. <v William J. Peterson>It was a difficult, hard, dangerous trip. <v William J. Peterson>And generally speaking, it is only rarely that you <v William J. Peterson>found a boat that made two trips a year. <v William J. Peterson>Most of 'em made that one hazardous trip.

<v Philip Abbott>William J. Peterson, an Iowa historian known as Steamboat <v Philip Abbott>Bill, is a specialist in the River Steamboat era. <v Philip Abbott>You know, we hear a lot about the opening of the West by the overland trails. <v Philip Abbott>But we don't hear so much about the great rivers. <v Philip Abbott>Were- did they play an important part in that regard? <v William J. Peterson>They played a tremendously important part. <v William J. Peterson>In fact, it was the steamboats that plied the Missouri <v William J. Peterson>River. That furnished to towns along the ?Missour?. <v William J. Peterson>They became jumping off points. <v William J. Peterson>It furnished those who were moving westward with covered wagons. <v William J. Peterson>Actually, the railroad didn't reach the Mississippi River until 1854. <v William J. Peterson>Here you got the- this boats on the Missouri River, getting up to Fort Benton [Philip <v William J. Peterson>Abbott: Uh huh] by 1850. <v William J. Peterson>And so in this whole period, you have to uh think in terms <v William J. Peterson>of only one source. [Philip Abbott: Mhmm] The Missouri River [Philip Abbott: Mhmm] as the <v William J. Peterson>great highway of commerce.

<v Philip Abbott>[music plays] In the spring, the Missouri in flood was one of the most dangerous rivers <v Philip Abbott>in the world for commercial shipping. <v Philip Abbott>More than 400 boats were lost in 70 years. <v Philip Abbott>Hundreds of the old steamboat wrecks are still in place today. <v Philip Abbott>They're buried in the farmlands that now cover the lost channels the river discarded <v Philip Abbott>years ago. <v Philip Abbott>In 1968, one of the lost steamers was rediscovered inside <v Philip Abbott>the National Wildlife Refuge at DeSoto Bend just north of Omaha, <v Philip Abbott>Nebraska. The Bertrand, bound for Fort Benning, went down <v Philip Abbott>here on April 1st, 1865. <v Philip Abbott>The large curved lake is a cut off old river channel. <v Philip Abbott>This small pond is the site of the sinking of the Bertrand. <v Philip Abbott>The National Park Service supervised the excavation. <v Philip Abbott>After several months of digging and pumping, the boat was found 20 feet down

<v Philip Abbott>in the organic muck that had preserved her for 103 years. <v Philip Abbott>The hull of the Bertrand is back under water and there will most likely stay. <v Philip Abbott>The man who found the Bertrand wreck is Sam Corbino, an Omaha businessman. <v Philip Abbott>[leaves rustling] [sighing] Sam, how did you ever find this place? <v Sam Corbino>Uh first of all, we started with the uh Corps of Engineer maps that were uh <v Sam Corbino>printed in 1897. We uh made an overlay and transferred it to uh the current <v Sam Corbino>river maps. And we found that in this area there was a channel from the <v Sam Corbino>Missouri River that narrowed down to a small stream. <v Sam Corbino>A riverboat captain going up river could possibly mistake that <v Sam Corbino>channel for the main channel and uh uh snag the <v Sam Corbino>river boat in a small stream. <v Philip Abbott>How did you know that this is the place to dredge? <v Sam Corbino>Well, we used a magnetometer to locate the exact side of the boat. <v Sam Corbino>And then we used earth ?inaudible? to drill down through the boat to bring up part of the

<v Sam Corbino>cargo. We broke apparently broke through a whiskey bottle and we brought up the neck <v Sam Corbino>of the bottle and the odor of whiskey was on the ground. <v Philip Abbott>[laughing] Was it a good whiskey? <v Sam Corbino>It smelled alright. Mhmm. <v Sam Corbino>[laughing] There's a lot of gravel down here and an awful lot of ground water. <v Sam Corbino>So we put up a series of well points. <v Sam Corbino>And essentially what we did was to lower the water table about 20 feet. <v Sam Corbino>Then we were able to work dry. <v Philip Abbott>Are you or or were you in the salvage business? <v Sam Corbino>No, not at the time. Uh I would consider myself an amateur archeologist if <v Sam Corbino>anything. <v Philip Abbott>I see. <v Sam Corbino>There had been reports of uh a large variety of cargo <v Sam Corbino>that had sunk with the the Bertrand and approximately 250 flasks <v Sam Corbino>of mercury. We were looking for the mercury and the cargo. <v Philip Abbott>To and uh in effect, we're looking for a little treasure. <v Sam Corbino>A little treasure to help uh pay for our efforts. <v Sam Corbino>We found the uh a little bit of quicksilver. <v Sam Corbino>We found nine flasks, but we didn't find the others. <v Sam Corbino>And uh we also found 100 tons of miscellaneous cargo.

<v Sam Corbino>It was like uh a great general store, all sorts of different kinds of cargo. <v Philip Abbott>You also found Uncle Sam waiting for you. <v Sam Corbino>Yes since the boat was found on federal property, we had to make <v Sam Corbino>an agreement with the federal government. <v Philip Abbott>An' how'd that work out? <v Sam Corbino>The government agreed to give us 60 percent of all the arti- of all the cargo on the <v Sam Corbino>boat that was not determined to be an artifact. <v Sam Corbino>As it turned out uh the General Service Administration, working with the National Park <v Sam Corbino>Service archeologist, determined all the cargo to be artifacts, leaving us nothing. <v Philip Abbott>Did you have any recourse at all after they decided that everything on the boat was a <v Philip Abbott>artifact? <v Sam Corbino>Well, we we consulted an attorney and our attorney dealt uh with the general service <v Sam Corbino>administration attorneys. And after about three or four years, <v Sam Corbino>uh we did make a settlement with the with the government. <v Philip Abbott>Here is what came out of the Bertrand. <v Philip Abbott>[music plays] More than 175,000 items. <v Philip Abbott>A cross-section of nineteenth century products, everything needed on the frontier,

<v Philip Abbott>and almost all of it perfectly preserved in the cold river of mud where there <v Philip Abbott>is no oxygen. <v Jerome Petchey>One of the things that we did in the field was to record the stenciling on the outside <v Jerome Petchey>of the the cases. And the reason we did this is because all it took is just a few <v Jerome Petchey>hours, uh even minutes sometimes of uh <v Jerome Petchey>exposure to uh the 80 and 90 degree temperatures uh before <v Jerome Petchey>this would be obliterated and we couldn't even read it. <v Philip Abbott>The excavation and salvage of the cargo was supervised by National Park Service <v Philip Abbott>archeologist Jerome Petchey. <v Jerome Petchey>I don't think a day passed here but what we weren't surprised uh to learn <v Jerome Petchey>about something uh that the people on the frontier had used. <v Jerome Petchey>Many of the objects are so very much like objects that we use today. <v Jerome Petchey>Uh the array of condiments, uh some very nice tableware and glassware <v Jerome Petchey>uh shows you that uh it wasn't rough living for everyone.

<v Jerome Petchey>Now, the true value of this is, is what it tells us about history, <v Jerome Petchey>what it tells us about the frontier technology and frontier living <v Jerome Petchey>and the conditions of the time. <v Jerome Petchey>If you were to go out to start a museum <v Jerome Petchey>with this kind of a thing, there would be no way that you could get such an assemblage <v Jerome Petchey>that would have the integrity in terms of where this material was going to be <v Jerome Petchey>used, when it was going to be used. <v Jerome Petchey>It's absolutely a remarkable collection from that standpoint. <v Philip Abbott>The Park Service Laboratory that was set up at the Bertrand's site has now processed <v Philip Abbott>nearly all of the items from the cargo. <v Philip Abbott>Ed McManus is the conservator in charge of the Bertrand lab. <v Ed McManus>What we're doing with these shovels is uh we're using a ?inaudible? <v Ed McManus>solution. And at this point, I'd like to say that our whole purpose with the collection <v Ed McManus>is to stabilize it. That is to preserve it. <v Ed McManus>So it's going to last into the future. <v Ed McManus>Uh we're really not trying to restore these items at all.

<v Ed McManus>The ?inaudible? solution that's brushed onto the surface of the metal actually combines <v Ed McManus>with the iron forming an iron compound and thereby making it resistant to future rust <v Ed McManus>and corrosion. The function of the shovels or the place of the shovels in uh in <v Ed McManus>the eyes of society has certainly changed. <v Ed McManus>Back when the Bertrand sank the shovels were essentially a functional item, a tool, you <v Ed McManus>know, to be used for digging. And now here we are spending uh a lot of man hours <v Ed McManus>and uh and uh certain amount of money in an effort to preserve and conserve these <v Ed McManus>shovels. And uh and I think somebody who, if they could see from the past, would find <v Ed McManus>that rather humorous. Um their place in time has changed and uh <v Ed McManus>and now they're no longer shovels but they're museum objects, they're out of context. <v Ed McManus>But through them, perhaps we can learn something about the past. <v Philip Abbott>[music plays] The curious cargo of the Bertrand, the immigrants names at Independence <v Philip Abbott>Rock, the plain old house at Hollenberg and the traces of ruts

<v Philip Abbott>in the Oregon Trail. Each one of these places tells its part of the story <v Philip Abbott>of how we got here, and that's important. <v Philip Abbott>There are hundreds of places like this throughout America where the actual experiences <v Philip Abbott>of people of generations before can be shared by us today. <v Philip Abbott>Finding some of these places takes some effort and thought and curiosity, but that <v Philip Abbott>kind of personal involvement makes the experience even richer. <v Philip Abbott>Each one of these original places confirms something that it's important for us to know. <v Philip Abbott>We are not alone. <v Philip Abbott>We're a continuation of all those who have gone before. <v Philip Abbott>[music plays] <v Narrator 1>For an illustrated companion booklet about the historic places visited in this three

<v Narrator 1>program series, send three dollars per copy to Hidden Places. <v Narrator 1>Nebraska ETV Network Post-Office Box 83111 <v Narrator 1>Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. <v Narrator 1>This program was made possible in part by grants from Bankers Life Nebraska <v Narrator 1>and Internorth and from the State Humanities Councils in Idaho, Iowa, <v Narrator 1>Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming, <v Narrator 1>which are affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities. <v Narrator 1>[PBS theme plays]