Efficiency at Its Peak

We’ve enjoyed a lush garden this summer with tall corn, big cabbages, sweet potato vines that should be art, and towering tomato plants. Imagine our horror when we visited the garden one morning to find an interstate of raised trails weaving in and out our plantings. This was my introduction to a live mole.

Frankly, I didn’t know much about these creatures, other than that they don’t have much for eyes. I had no idea that in one night, a six inch mammal could tunnel through long rows of corn, cabbage, tomatoes, and potatoes. If I’d been betting, I’d have told you an army of mole engineers had worn themselves out moving all that earth. I’d have been wrong.

After we discovered our visitor, I did some research. They don’t eat roots, they eat insects—earthworms are a particular favorite menu item.  They are loners. The only time they get together with other moles is in February and March to, well, make other moles. Socialization is very low on their activity list. One source suggested five moles an acre would be a crowd.

Though they are small, a six inch torpedo-shaped mammal, they’re efficient.  As I first observed, these  critters are digging machines.  Their front feet look like miniature ping  pong paddles with Freddie Kruger nails. Apparently the muscles attached to these pink shovels are especially strong as these long nosed critters have a “lateral digging force equivalent to 32 times its body weight.”  An expert explained this compares to a 150 lb. man exerting a 4800 lb. lateral force.That’s some serious earth moving ability.

Not only can these guys tunnel earth at 18 feet per hour, their respiratory systems adapted to their underground existence.  They have twice as much blood and red hemoglobin as another mammal of their size. This enables them to thrive underground in a world with low oxygen and high carbon dioxide ratios.

Since they can’t see so well in their dark world, they don’t have much for eyes. In fact, looking at one, it’s hard to see an resemblance of these orbs that most humans take for granted.  If they can’t see potential food, they have to do something. And they do. Their noses work at optimum capacity, allowing them to smell an earthworm and latch onto it in no time. Their saliva contains a toxin to permit them to paralyze their prey so they can eat it lat their convenience.  As I noted earlier, they are a miniature model of efficiency. 

Knowing more about these dirt throwers gives me a new appreciation for them and their capabilities.  However, I don’t want to see their craftsmanship in my  garden, even if they aren’t eating the roots to my thriving greenery.

Leavenworth Pikes Peak Express

The scenery along   Highways 9 and 36 challenges many people’s belief that Kansas is flat and treeless. Even in western Kansas, the road undulates over rolling hills and trees line meandering waterways that lead into either the Solomon or the Republican Rivers. This lovely grass covered country makes it easy to understand why native inhabitants fought so hard to continue hunting and living in its sheltered valleys.

Even today, it’s clear to anyone who’s traveled the stark dry and treeless Santa Fe Trail across southern Kansas into Colorado that this northern route has more trees and fresh water. That would explain why partners who successfully ran Majors, Waddell, and Russell freighting business between Leavenworth and Denver would organize  a stage line for travelers to the gold fields 1859 using this trail . They named their brainchild the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express and charged passengers $125 one-way for a quick one to two week journey to the Rockies (amazing how the definition of quick has changed with the advent of cars and airplanes).

The surveyed course had 26 stations that provided meals, lodging, new horses, and fresh drivers.  Unique in this business, the company allowed station operators’ families to join them at these remote outposts located near either the Solomon or Republican Rivers. Little documentation of actual sites exists, but George Root and Russell Hickman jointly published an article in the Kansas Quarterly in 1944 providing some record of these locales.

Station 12 was located  “In Smith county, probably a little south of the forks of Beaver creek, about seven miles southwest of present Smith Center.” One diarist recorded the following fact about this site, “At Station Twelve where we dined, the carcasses of seven buffaloes were half submerged in the creek. Yesterday a herd of three thousand crossed the stream, leaping down the steep banks. A few broke their necks by the fall; others were trampled to death by those pressing on from behind.”

Down the road was Station 13, near present day Kirwin.  Newspaperman Horace Greeley describes a tent lodging in a journal entry of his trip on the Express. “I write in the station-tent (having been driven from our wagon by the operation of greasing its wheels, which was found to interfere with the steadiness of my hastily-improvised table), with the buffalo visible on the ridges south and every way but north of us.”

It was a hard day’s journey to Station 14, which was located approximately “12 miles southeast of present Norton and about four miles north of the North Fork of the Solomon River.” There was no description of the building’s construction, but a diarist mentioned the lack of water and trees. One noted, “To-day we have been among prairie-dog towns, passing one more than a mile long. Some of their settlements are said to be twenty miles in length, containing a larger population than any metropolis on the globe. . . . This evening we supped on his flesh, and found it very palatable, resembling that of the squirrel.” Perhaps this abundance of tasty mammals led to the naming of Prairie Dog Creek.

Travelers today can see a replica of Station 15 near Highway 36, on the west edge of Norton, Kansas.  According to a Mr. Richardson traveling through in in 1859, “We spent the night at Station Fifteen, kept by an ex-Cincinnati lawyer, who with his wife, formerly an actress at the Bowery Theater, is now cooking meals and making beds for stage passengers on the great desert three hundred miles beyond civilization. Our road, following the valley of the Republican River, is here two thousand three hundred feet above sea-level. . . . Day's travel fifty-six miles.” 

According to Horace Greeley’s notes, this was the halfway point between Leavenworth and the goldfields. It took his stage a week to get to this point, and he expected to take another week to reach his destination. Nowadays, we could make this trip easily in nine hours. It’s hard to imagine thinking two weeks was a swift journey.

The Quarterly article details encounters with the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kiowa as well as stage coach wrecks and buffalo related traffic jams. While you’re making good time cruising smooth asphalt, remember those adventurous souls who traveled the Leavenworth Pikes Peak Express, hoping to hit pay dirt in the Rockies.

County Fair Time

Sometimes Western Kansans get so caught up in getting through a day or the week, they forget something special occurs toward the end of summer. Those unique events are area fairs, which began a few weeks ago and wrap up over the next few weeks. They provide opportunities to socialize, eat good food while supporting local organizations, and explore 4-H and open class entries in categories from fashion review to animal showmanship. It’s a time for kids and adults to showcase favorite projects.

Growing up in a city, I didn’t participate in 4-H adventures.  However, during visits to my grandparents in SW Kansas, I’d see friends racing to complete sewing, cooking, and animal projects to submit before the entry deadline. This wannabe country girl loved watching farm buddies give calves, pigs, and sheep spa treatments as they trimmed, sheared, shampooed, blow dried, and combed out hair before polishing newly trimmed hooves. 

I loved when my summer visit overlapped the start of the Meade County Fair so I could wander up and down the exhibit aisles.  I longed to be a rural kid so I too could enter a freshly scrubbed critter or a platter of exactly- the-same-size-cookies made from a favorite family recipe.  Jealousy nearly ate my heart when friends would authoritatively state they had to clean a stall or groom their show animal. Though I laugh at my response now, those chores seemed exotic and grown-up to this gal.

Years later, after I became a Kansas country mother, my husband and I encouraged our daughters to raise 4-H sheep. The girls worked with a  handicap since neither parent had been childhood club members, but we muddled through building pens, buying feed, perfecting morning and evening walks down section roads to make well-muscled lambs.

We learned sheep don’t like to be alone, so we convinced our more reluctant daughter to join the fun with a lamb of her own.  I loved seeing my young Bo-Peeps in their nighties and wild bed hair as they paraded their flock of two up and down the long drive in the early morning coolness.

Fellow club members and their parents walked us through the list of preparations to get our daughters’ lambs to the fair. First we had to shampoo the critters. It’s only logical that you’d wash fleece with Woolite for the best effect, right? One young man brought his sheers to the house and showed us how to trim wiry wool into a lovely do.  Then he explained how to polish sharp little hooves to a dark shine.

The cleanliness ritual became fair fun as youngsters from various clubs took turns spritzing hot creatures on scorching August days and then drying and brushing their coats til they gleamed.  Not only were animals soaked, giggling big and little kids wandered about sporting drenched hair and t-shirts. 

While the rearing and preparation of the animal for judging was mostly fun, show time is all seriousness.  Club mentors coached our girls’ clothing selection as well as their interactions with judges, including possible questions they might ask.  On top of these stresses, most of these events occurred when the thermometer was well-over 100. These kids and their animals had to maintain composure in a furnace.

For our family, fair time was mostly about finishing projects and enjoying the experience.  The girls never won coveted ribbons. However, each has a slew of stories about this summer  ritual to tell their children.