Planes, Trains, and Ponies in the Historic Heartland!

Des Moines, IA → Atchison, KS → Kansas City, MO
244.0 mi (392.7 km)

More 2022 Adventures

A Hawkeye hello, everyone!

I’m up bright and early in the capital of Iowa, Des Moines, a city whose name translates to “of the Monks” in French, but was probably a bad translation of the local Moingona tribe’s name! It’s my final day on a triangle tour of capital cities, so I set off into the misty morning to see what I could see with that time I had left!

I started at the Jordan House, not far from the hotel! While lots of folks wanted to discourage the settlement of Black folks in Iowa, James Jordan was the chief conductor of the Underground Railroad in Polk County, as well as one of the county supervisors, state senator, and leader of the push to make Des Moines the state capital! He even hosted famed abolitionist, John Brown, here twice!

Too early to go inside the Jordan House, I pressed on eastward to a very familiar-looking fountain! This Humane Alliance Fountain, tucked very awkwardly onto a neighborhood island, bamboozled me! Des Moines is home to the second Nationally Registered Humane Alliance Fountain, and as I later found out, this one was not it! Des Moines received two drinking fountains from Hermon Ensign during his national campaign to hydrate thirsty animals, and while this one was very festive, it wasn’t the one I thought I was looking for!

Also not quite what I was looking for was the Central Library downtown. See, the Des Moines Public Library is on the National Register of Historic Places for being the birthplace of the Library Bill of Rights in 1938. That bill gave everyone the right to visit a library and access materials by any author of any background or belief! That also was not at this library, which opened in 2006 after the old one ran out of room. That Beaux-Artes building is now called the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates, and is not not a library at all! But I did learn about a cute rabbit named Miffy, who’s apparently been a world star from the Netherlands since 1955!

Well this was a discouraging start to the morning, and on top of that, it was supposed to start raining soon! I’d come all the way across Des Moines with some real head-smackers, but there was at least one building here that I was not about to mistake!

That’s the gold-domed state capitol of Iowa, which brings everything together from the Beaux-Arts elements to one of its architects Mifflin (Miffy?) Bell to its place as the host venue for the World Food Prize, given out annually to folks who have done great work in ending world hunger! What stood out to me, though, were its absolutely lovely side domes that reminded me of either Faberge eggs or sea urchins, the work of John C. Cochrane and Alfred H. Piquenard!

But I had a flight to catch at 4:11, and I had lots more to see as the storms were settling in overhead! I switched on some tunes and headed south out of Iowa until next time when I visit the Effigy Mounds. I’d visited lots of sites over the years related to the Pony Express, and I’d be darned if I missed a chance to visit its starting line in St. Joseph, Missouri, now the Pony Express Museum!

Part of a bold experiment in mail delivery, the first horse, ridden by Johnny Fry, left this stable en route to Sacramento on April 3, 1860, while across the country, Sam Hamilton and his horse left from the B.F. Hastings Building and made the journey in reverse! The 1,996-mile journey needed to be completed in 10 days, which meant recruiting 400 horses and 200 riders for the relay! There were 165 stations for swapping out horses and riders, such a colossal plan that it was super-reliant on government contracts, not just postage stamps!

There were all kinds of artifacts on display, from historic saddles and harnesses to different types of shoes: horse, mule, and ox! There was even a special medicine bit on display, which is hollow so when it’s put in a sick horse’s mouth, it dribbles medicine for the horse to swallow!

They also had a bunch of replica mochilas on display! Each mochila had four pockets called cantinas, which would each be stuffed with five pounds of mail and passed from horse to horse at each station! The rider’s weight would hold these mochilas in place as they navigated treacherous terrain, terrifying tornadoes, and even stampeding bison!

The main administration of the Pony Express took place in this luxury hotel, the Patee House! Built in 1858 to tend to westbound emigrants before they faced the four-month journey across the Plains, this hotel’s first floor played host to the meeting of William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell, which launched the Pony Express! It only lasted a year, though, because of huge costs, loss of contracts to Butterfield Overland Mail, and the completion of a telegraph line between Omaha and Sacramento!

Tucked into the back of the Patee House was the final home of outlaw Jesse James, where he moved with his family on Christmas Eve, 1881. It was in this home that his partner, Robert Ford, decided to cash in on the governor’s $10,000 reward and shot Mr. James in the back of the head! The home was originally about a block northeast of here, but it was moved twice, first to the Belt Highway in 1939 then here to the Patee House in 1977! Today, it’s a museum within a museum, dedicated to the outlaw who staged the world’s first robbery of a moving train 9 years prior!

And then, like a pony, I set off to my final city on this triangle tour, Atchison, Kansas, birthplace of aviatrix extraordinaire, Amelia Earhart! It’s the last tangible piece of her life after she vanished over the Pacific on July 2, 1937, but from here, high on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, it was easy to see how young Amelia would have been inspired to new heights!

The house has passed through several owners since then, but it’s been arduously restored by an international organization of women pilots called The Ninety-Nines, from Ms. Earhart’s childhood bedroom to displays of her lesser known clothing and luggage lines! She was a gal who made the most of her time in the air and on the ground alike!

Amelia’s hometown of Atchison had been an important adventure stop just over ninety years before she was born too. On July 4, 1804, Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery passed through here and named the creek they encountered after the holiday when they encountered it: “4th of July 1804 Creek.”

The plaque marking that historic creek happened to be next to my final stop, the Santa Fe Depot, at the start of the famous Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. It’s the last remaining building in Atchison associated with that railroad and a very rare stone freight house! Inside was a fantastic museum about Atchison County natural and human history. One display told the story of the Reverend Pardee Butler, an abolitionist tied up by pro-slavery opponents and set adrift on the Missouri River to drown, only he cut himself free, fashioned himself a paddle, and got out of that wild river, earning a place in local folklore for years to come!

But it was already pushing 2:00, and I didn’t want to miss my flight back to LA (Spirit’s not too flexible on that front, you know), so I bid adieu to Kansas and Iowa and Missouri, and so-long to a 2022 jam-packed with adventures. The new year starts in a few weeks, though, and I can’t wait to get planning!

See you in 2023!