There and Back Again, to New Mexico

There and Back Again is the lesser known subtitle to The Hobbit. Bilbo went east, across the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood to the Desolation of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain. He had to contend with giant spiders, crabby dwarfs and a dragon. We had an easier trip; we went west, across the Mississippi Delta, the Great Plains, the Texas Panhandle, and into New Mexico. We traveled in a comfortable camper van and had no difficulties beyond two hail storms and a day of dangerous winds.  We spent the windy day in a hotel with wi-fi and a swimming pool. While perhaps not a Bilbo-level adventure, we had a wonderful trip.  It’s easy to find interesting places in New Mexico; most of the state is filled with dramatic scenery, you just can’t miss it. This post concerns not New Mexico, but our time traveling to and from New Mexico, starting at Laura’s childhood home in Kentucky. Some areas take more imagination than others to appreciate, but there are worthwhile sites to be visited and valued everywhere. Google Maps really helps. In geographic order, here is some of what we saw:

The above photos were taken from the bluffs above the Mississippi River at Fort Pillow State Historic Park, north of Memphis, Tennessee. The first photo shows an ox-bow lake where the Mississippi River originally flowed below the fort. The river has since changed course and the second photo shows the current river on the horizon. Fort Pillow was built in 1862 to defend the Mississippi River from the upstream Union Navy. The Confederate Army under Nathan Bedford Forrest won a decisive battle here in 1864 driving the Union forces down the bluff and into the Mississippi. To defend their honor, homeland and way of life, the Confederate soldiers executed those Black Union troops and their white officers who attempted to surrender. Prior to the war their commander, General Forrest, had been among the South’s largest slave traders. Following the war he ran a large farm using convict labor, and served as the first Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. In 2019, to celebrate his accomplishments, the Tennessee legislature proclaimed July 13 as “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day.” Really.

Sorry. Moving on to more pleasant topics, we crossed over the Mississippi River at Memphis and headed south and west into Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta. We visited the boyhood home of Levon Helm in Marvell, Arkansas. Levon, who grew up in a sharecropping family, became the main vocalist for The Band and was an important influence in the revival of Americana and Roots music. His house was originally located in the community of Turkey Scratch just north of Marvell but was moved to Marvell to escape demolition. It’s open for tours, you just have to ask at the water department office across the street.

Beside Levon’s house is another relocated sharecropper house. This house is in the “shotgun” style, a series of rooms aligned one behind the other, with doorways connecting each space. The name is thought to originate from the idea that a bullet fired through the front door could theoretically pass through the house without hitting anything.

Continuing south down the Mississippi Delta, we visited the Rohwer Japanese World War II internment camp, outside the very small town of Rohwer. In March 1942, the entire west coast of the United States was declared a “military exclusion zone” from which all persons of Japanese ancestry were to be removed. They were considered a threat to national security given the new war with Japan. Accordingly, about 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, the majority of them US citizens, were incarcerated in ten inland camps. The Rohwer camp in Arkansas was the most eastern camp and housed 8,400 people. The camps were closed starting in December 1944 following a Supreme Court ruling that the government could not continue to detain citizens who were “concededly loyal” to the United States. The Rohwer camp was constructed mostly of wood and little remains of the camp now except the cemetery and one smoke stack. The rest is planted in cotton.

Leaving the Mississippi Delta, we drove west across Oklahoma. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, we visited the Woody Guthrie Center which showcases the life and work of this important American artist.

We continued west into the Panhandle of Texas, that is the part of Texas that sticks up below the skinny part of Oklahoma. The Texas Panhandle is a rough place; windy, desolate and dead flat except for the river canyons. 

I had never given much thought to windmills before, but traveling through the Great Plains they grab your visual attention. They are everywhere; many dilapidated and not turning, others twirling away, presumably pumping ground water or generating electricity. More accurately termed wind pumps rather than windmills, they have been used throughout the world for centuries. Technological improvements in the late 1800s lead to models that were reliable, affordable and could be transported to remote locations. These wind pumps transformed the economy and history of the western United States. Previously agriculture and ranching had been limited to areas near streams or springs or shallow groundwater. Wind pumps provided reliable access to deeper groundwater, allowing the expansion of agriculture through the arid west. It’s hard to imagine the Great Plains landscapes without them.

After our time in New Mexico, we drove back to Kentucky through Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. Being retired, we have the luxury of not being in a hurry, and we mostly avoided the Interstate highways. We also have the luxury of traveling before the summer heat and dust. In March and April the weather was usually pleasant. Even in the desert there was some spring greenery.

Until the railroad arrived in Santa Fe in 1880, the main route to New Mexico from the eastern United States was via the Santa Fe Trail. From its beginning in Missouri to Santa Fe were 900 miles of arid plains and desert, little shade, unreliable water and hostile natives. The ruts made by sixty years of wagon wheels, hoofs and feet are still visible along parts of the route.

We hadn’t planned to make a tour of Japanese-American World War Two internment camps, but we came upon a second one. This is the site of the Amache Camp outside of Granada in southeastern Colorado. Like the Rohwer camp in Arkansas, little is left of the camp. After 1945, the buildings were torn down and the lumber reused. All that is left are concrete foundations and the cemetery.

Continuing eastward, we stopped at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site outside Saint Louis. It is presented as a prosperous farm where the future president lived with his family prior to the Civil War. In reality Grant was quite poor then and the farm belonged to his in-laws.  In 1857 he had to pawn his gold pocket watch to afford Christmas presents for his family. Nevertheless he voluntarily freed his one slave in 1858, (immediately after his father-in-law gave the slave to Grant) rather than sell him. Grant gave up on farming after a few years and moved to Illinois where he worked as a clerk in a tannery until he joined the Union Army after the start of the war. At the time of his death in 1885 he was considered among the most significant figures in American history.

You’re unlikely to recognize the above pictured building, the Veterans of Foreign War post in El Dorado, Illinois. Nevertheless, it is a site of arguably world historical importance. In September 1963, worn out from a year of constant touring and the release of their first album, the four Beatles took vacations. Paul and Ringo went to Greece, John went to Paris, and George with his brother Peter travel to Benton, Illinois to visit their sister Louise. Louise had moved to Benton with her husband a Scottish mining engineer who worked for a local coal mine.  Twenty-year old George apparently had a nice visit. He went camping, went to a drive-in movie, and ate at an A&W root beer stand where the waitress was on roller skates; all novel experiences for a young Liverpudlian. At the time the Beatles were unheard of in America. The locals were struck by George’s long hair and wondered if he was too poor to afford a barber. He met some local musicians and  sat in with a local band, the Four Vests, at their gig at the V.F.W. post in nearby Eldorado, paying rockabilly. This was the first public performance by a Beatle in America.

The next day George and his brother were driven to Saint Louis for their flight back to England. In England the Beatles were by now famous and likely to be mobbed by screaming fans wherever they went. In the coming months their fame would spread world-wide. I imagine George’s two weeks in small-town Illinois was the last time in his life when he could walk about as a normal person, free to watch a Shiner’s parade with his family. There is a nice article about all this here.