A Morning Exploring Some Mysterious Grain Bins Found on Old Highway 83

By STEW MAGNUSON

For a road buff such as myself, figuring out where U.S. Highway 83 once traversed is a constant pursuit.

The federal highway system was created in 1926 — not really that long ago in the course of human history — but in many cases we have already collectively forgotten the original paths of these old routes.

That is not the case for the old alignment for Highway 83 from North Platte, Nebraska, south to the town of Maywood. It is well marked. An “Old Hwy 83” sign is at the corner of every quarter section on this gravel road.

I had the opportunity on a spring Saturday morning to explore Old Highway 83 for the first time. It was not hard to find. I headed east on East Sate Farm Road south of North Platte until arriving at Old Highway 83 a couple miles later.

Exploring this old stretch of highway is worth the time, if for no other reason than to stop at what is surely the most unique antique store on the 1,885 miles of U.S. 83 (old or new sections), which about four miles south.

Grain Bin Antique Town is worth the stop for those on the hunt for collectibles, or interested in our agricultural past.

Placed in a row overlooking a scenic valley are 15 Depression-era wooden grain bins, restored and repurposed to serve as small antique shops.

The octagon structures are still a bit of a mystery.

Owners Lori and Pat Clinch bought 14 of them from a farmer near Imperial, Nebraska.

It is thought that the government sent the easy-to-assemble kits to farmers so they could store grain in the countryside, but the Clinch’s and other researchers haven’t found much in the historical record to confirm that. The original owner had them since the late 1930s.

Pat is a builder, so after acquiring the first batch he installed larger doors and windows. The boardwalk along the bins came from recycled wood from an old school. Then they acquired a 15^th bin from a farmer north of Stapleton, Nebraska, who had read about the Clinches in the local paper.

Most of these bins fell into disrepair over the years, and finding so many in good shape was a small miracle, Lori explains. Some were converted into tool sheds or served other purposes. The seller in Imperial had kept his in great shape.

“The oil from the grain protected the wood and gave it a natural beauty,” Lori explained.

A farm cat escorted me as I walked down the boardwalk. The bins are crammed with country antiques. I scored a quilted doll blanket for my daughter for $15.

I continued down the road south. The county had come by and plowed up the ditches, overturning the dirt and allowing me to walk along and hunt for old bottles.

One can imagine an archeologist 1,000 years in the future excavating the shoulders of these old roads, and making all sorts of assumptions about our society. Getting caught with an open container of alcohol was frowned upon, they could surmise. And others were just too lazy to dispose of our trash properly.

I find a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can recently unearthed by the county plow in remarkably good condition. It advertises the new “pull tabs. “No Opener Needed,” which makes it a circa 1963 can (the year I was born). I leave it there for that future archeologist to find.

It’s curvy. It’s loose gravel. It’s really not all that safe to drive at high speeds. In other words, it’s what traveling down 83 would have been like in its early days decades before it was paved from end to end.

Old Highway 83 dips and rises, with some sharp curves, and serves as a good reminder of what highways were like before they were paved, and straightened out. That, coupled with the drinking and driving, must have cost a few lives.

My father, who was from Stapleton, Nebraska, 30 miles north of North Platte, must have traveled this road many times on his way back and forth from McCook, where he attended the community college and played football.

The land here is flat enough for farming, although it is too early to see what are going in this year. I take pictures of wild turkeys and a beautiful ring-neck pheasant, who apparently knows that it’s not hunting season. He barely budges as I stop the car and begin shooting (with my camera, of course.) All these farms nearby and their loose grain, along with the shelter belts, makes the a pheasant-wild turkey paradise.

Drivers might get lost when arriving at East Echo School Road, don’t go straight. Go east one section to pick up Old Highway 83 again.

My trip ends with my car coming over a crest into the Medicine Creek Valley, where the town of Maywood is located.
Maywood, population, 261 at the last census, is equidistant from North Platte and McCook, and its quiet on a Saturday morning. Most businesses are located seven miles to the east in the town of Curtis, which is three times its size. Many of the residents here commute to one of those two cities.

Grain Bin Antique Town is open Wed.-Sat., 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Check out its Facebook page at: 
https://www.facebook.com/GrainBinAntiqueTown

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, (available at A to Z Books in North Platte and Common Scents Greenhouses and Nursery in McCook) and winner of the 2009 Nebraska nonfiction book of the year: The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder.

To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.  Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com

Stop Nebraska Public Power From Destroying the Beauty of the Sand Hills on Hwy 83

By STEW MAGNUSON
Easter Sunday morning last month, I woke up in Stapleton, Nebraska, at 5:30 a.m. so I could get on the road going north early.

I knew I had one of the most beautiful drives in the state ahead of me. Indeed, the morning light bathed the one of Nebraska’s great secrets and treasures, the Sand Hills, in soft morning light as I drove up U.S. Highway 83.

Imagine something like this..

I had to stop about once every mile to take a picture of this unique landscape.

Just the night before one of my cousins had told me of the Nebraska Public Power District’s plan to plant giant power lines along this scenic highway. “Surely, that can’t be true,” I thought.

.... planted across the beautiful Dismal River...

... or strung along a landscape like this. Photos by Stew Magnuson

Unfortunately, it is. NPPD’s R-Project would install giant power line towers along the road. This is actually its “preferred” route. There are alternatives away from the highway.

Nebraskans, lovers of the prairie, fans of our nation’s scenic highways must unite to defeat this ill-conceived plan.

Many, sadly, don’t know what is at stake.

The proposed power line route hugs the highway so closely it is actually impossible to distinguish the two on the map NPPD provides. (Link to map here). The monsterous lines will be clearly visible from the road.

Along with scarring the natural beauty of the Sand Hills, the towers would mar one of the most beautiful river valleys in the state, the Dismal River.

I remember meeting a motorcyclist at the scenic overlook at the Dismal River in 2009.

“It’s not so dismal,” he told me.

The Dismal was named because early settlers found it so treacherous to cross. It has nothing to do with its natural beauty. In that regards, it is a total misnomer. If this plan goes forward, motorists will gaze down from the overlook and see steel towers carrying power lines.

The biker explained that he had ridden up Interstate 80 on his way to Colorado a half dozen times, but had never ventured north. He was amazed at what he had been missing.

So too will other travelers. There was once a U.S. Canada Highway 83 Association that encouraged motorists to take this Great Plains highway, and spend some of their dollars in the small towns along the way. The association is long gone, but the idea lives on. Other states such as Kansas are declaring some of their roads Scenic Byways, and heavily promoting them as a way to encourage motorists passing through to get off the Interstate and come see what its communities have to offer.

This is what Nebraska should be doing — not destroying the natural beauty of our prairie lands.

Highway 83 from the Kansas border south of McCook to the South Dakota north of Valentine should be declared a Scenic Byway and developed for tourism.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Nebraskans from both parties joined together to stop the Bureau of Land Reclamation from damming the Niobrara River. (Does anyone today regret fighting that fight?) A similar alliance helped steer the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline route out of the Sand Hills.

We can all come together again to defeat another bad idea.

Nebraskans, and anyone who travels this federal highway, must speak out to defeat a poorly thought out plan to string ugly power lines along one of the state’s most stunning landscapes.

Leave comments on the NPPD’s website (LINK HERE), speak out at the public hearings, write letters to lawmakers and authorities.

Stop the R-Project’s Preferred route through our beautiful Sand Hills.

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, and winner of the 2009 Nebraska nonfiction book of the year: The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder.

To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.  Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com

The Most Fascinating Historical Figure One Encounters on Highway 83 Is Spotted Tail

Credit: Library of Congress

As an author, when I sit down to write a book-length piece of nonfiction, I normally have a point I want to make.

I don’t think when I first had the idea to start what would ultimately be a three-part series: The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83, also known as The Highway 83 Chronicles, that I had some overarching theme in mind.

I just thought it would be a fun project to research and write. But that certainly changed as I began the process.

Assign 100 authors to write a hybrid travel-history book about the stories and people they discover along Highway 83 and you would end up with 100 different books. That is because we would all be personally drawn to different stories.

And one story I have been drawn to for a number of years is that of Chief Spotted Tail of the Brulé Lakotas.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this book is to at least raise a little awareness about Sinte Gleska, as he is known in the Lakota language. In my mind, he is one of the most fascinating and complex historical figures of the 19^th Century “Old West” era.

But few know of him. Why?

Take a poll of the public and ask respondents to name five famous Native Americans. One could probably predict the responses: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Pocahontas would probably be the top four, with number five up for grabs. (Cochise, Red Cloud or Chief Joseph might make the cut.) I doubt Spotted Tail would be on the list even if it were expanded to 10, or more.

We associate all but one of these figures with resistance to the American expansion in the West. They were so-called “war chiefs.”

Spotted Tail was not one of them. I won’t recount the early days of his life. That is in the book, but I will mention that as a young man he came to the realization long before his contemporaries that the plains tribes would ultimately not win a straight ahead war with the tidal wave of white men coming from the East. When his Oglala Lakota rival Red Cloud fought a successful guerilla war on the Bozeman Trail in 1868, he sat that conflict out. He was nowhere near the Battle of Greasy Grass, or “Custer’s Last Stand” in 1876.

He knew such conflicts would get his people nowhere.

Yet he had many other kinds of battles with the U.S. government. He was a tough negotiator, and wanted the best outcome for his people. These were “wars of wills,” not with weapons. And he mostly came out on top.

Americans always wished Native American nations had an ultimate leader, like our own president — someone who spoke for all of the tribes and could make decisions. But that wasn’t normally how these societies worked. It was more about consensus among many chiefs.

Spotted Tail took on this role, though. He went to Washington to negotiate, and could at least speak for the Brulé Lakotas, although it was only one of seven different Lakota, or Teton Sioux, tribes.

He was no pushover.

Highway 83 bisects the Rosebud Reservation. The Highway 83 Chronicles project gave me a chance to do something I had wanted to do for many years: tell Spotted Tail’s story. In the final section of The Last American Highway, I seek to answer the question of how the reservation and the Brulés ended up where they are today.

The story is telling. For several years, the agency was located along the banks of the Missouri, where it was more convenient for the government to deliver supplies. Spotted Tail hated this spot. Firewood and game — once plentiful along its banks — had been depleted. It was easy for whiskey bootleggers to ply their trade there. And such rivers were also a conveyance of diseases. The bureaucrats kept stalling a planned move away from the river.

Spotted Tail pulled up the stakes and moved everyone to where the town of Rosebud is today without the U.S. government’s approving the site. Not all the Brulés wanted to leave the Missouri, though. So he had his loyal men strong arm the others into accompanying them. He had become the autocrat the Americans wanted him to be. This created rivalries and jealousies in others, which led to his demise.

A marker honors the life of Spotted Tail along U.S. 83 in Mission, S.D.

In a story not recounted in my book, Spotted Tail was asked to send some of his children to the Carlyle School in Pennsylvania so they could receive an education, At first, he thought that a white man’s school would be beneficial. After a trip to Washington, D.C., he stopped to visit. What he saw shocked him. The purpose of the school was to transform Indian children into whites, not to provide them with an education. Children who resisted were treated cruelly. It was brainwashing. He yanked his kids out of the institution and brought them back to Rosebud despite the angry denunciations from the school’s supporters.

Spotted Tail had in fact been fighting to preserve Lakota traditions and walking a fine line between the two cultures for years.

The American Indian Movement and its sympathizers in the 1970s had disdain for Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, who, after the Bozeman war, had come to the same hard conclusions about resisting the U.S. government. They were called “treaty chiefs.” Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were right and those two men were white lackeys in AIM’s book. (Leonard Crow Dog, one of the movement’s spiritual leaders, was a descendant of the man who murdered Spotted Tail.)

I admire Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. But I admire Red Could and Spotted Tail equally as men who whose peoples were put in a terrible situation. They guided them as best they could in a time of traumatic upheaval in their society and resisted in their own ways.

Was Spotted Tail some kind of saint or the Native American equivalent of Gandhi?

Certainly not. Ask the Pawnees if he was a “man of peace.” He waged war against them every chance he had. There are no Pawnees left in Nebraska. They moved to Oklahoma, and part of the blame lies with Spotted Tail.

Spotted Tail’s life ends in the Rosebud chapter of The Last American Highway: The Dakotas, but not his story. There’s much more about him in the Nebraska-Kansas book coming out next year.

Finally, a plea. Most of this information on the life and death of Spotted Tail is derived from one book: Spotted Tail’s Folk by George Hyde, which was published in 1961. The world needs an updated biography on this fascinating man. I’m hoping a historian or author reads this column and takes on this challenge.

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, and  The Last American Highway: Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma edition. Both are available online or in museums, bookstores and gift shops on Hwy 83.
To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.  Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com

Take Me Out to the Ballgame on Highway 83

Corbett Field, Minot, ND. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Late last summer, I wrote a Highway 83 Chronicles blog on Dave Almany’s book about three Highway 83 high school football teams: Prairie Blitz. The road and its communities have a rich history when it comes to football.

That is even more true for baseball, I have found. And since Opening Day is this week, I thought it might be a good time to talk about the national pastime and its connection to U.S. 83.

Starting north to south, here are some of the highlights.

The Minot Mallards

Minot, N.D., once hosted the Minot Mallards, an independent team in the 1950s that played in the ManDak League. Many former Negro League players spent their twilight years playing for the Mallards until the league folded in 1957. Corbett Field where the Mallards once played is still in use today.

Check out Minot native Bill Guenthner’s excellent website devoted to the history of the team. CLICK HERE.

Satchel Comes to Bismarck

The legendary Hall of Fame pitcher LeRoy “Satchel” Paige spent two summers in 1933 and 1935 playing for the Bismarcks, a local independent team made of local white players and former Negro League players Red Haley, Roosevelt Davis and Quincy Trouppe. Owned and organized by businessman/manager Neil Churchill, this was long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige agreed to pitch in North Dakota after getting into salary disputes with the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, Gus Greenlee. Paige’s dramatic arrival in Bismarck just in time to pitch against cross-state rival Jamestown is a chapter in my book, The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas.

A more detailed account of this pioneering team can be found in Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line by Tom Dunkel.

Zane Smith

Dozens of lesser known baseball players have been born or raised in Highway 83 communities over the years. Zane Smith lasted longer than most in the Bigs. A major league left-handed pitcher from 1984 to 1996 with a 100-115 record, Smith was a graduate of North Platte High School in 1979. He pitched for the Braves, Expos, Pirates and Red Sox. He’s not well known, but he’s a 3^rd cousin of mine. (although I have never met him). So I’m doing a little name dropping!

Mike “The Human Rain Delay” Hargrove and the Liberal BeeJays

Mike Hargrove hails from Perryton, Texas, and got his nickname, “The Human Rain Delay,” for the interminably long pauses he took between at bats. The 1974 Rookie of the Year went on to play in 12 seasons and compile a .290 lifetime batting average. He managed the Indians, Orioles and Mariners.

He returned to the area, when he managed the Liberal BeeJays for three seasons 2007-2009.

Credit: Stew Magnuson

Liberal’s semi-pro team comprises college players and plays in the Jayhawk League, which is part of the National Baseball Congress. The team has existed since 1955, and 165 of its alumni have reached the majors. Ian Kinsler of the Tigers and Hunter Pence of the Giants are two former Liberal players who are currently in the majors. Yankees pitcher and Cy Young Award winner Ron Guidry is another notable alumni. Hargrove played on the team during the summer of 1972.

The BeeJays play from about the end of May until the first week of August at Brent Gould Field at the Seward Community College.

John Lackey

Boston Red Sox starting pitcher John Lackey was born and raised in Abilene, Texas. He lettered in baseball, football and basketball at Abilene High School. He has compiled a 138-107 record since his debut with the Angels in 2002. Last year, he was the winning pitcher in Game 6 of the World Series helping the Red Sox to clinch another ring. He also won Game 7 of the World Series for the Angels in 2002 in his rookie season.

Rogers Hornsby

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

One of the greatest hitters of all time, Rogers Hornsby was born in Winters, Texas, in 1896, and lived there until he was six years old. He had a phenomenal lifetime .358 batting average over 23 seasons, which is second only to Ty Cobb. The St. Louis Cardinal had 2,930 hits, 301 home runs and seven batting titles over his career and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1942. Like Cobb, he was notoriously hard to get along with and not well liked by other players. I’ve driven through Winters twice looking for a “Birthplace of Rogers Hornsby” sign, but saw none.

Laredo Lemurs

Fans can catch independent baseball games at Uni-Trade Stadium in Laredo, Texas. Part of the American Association, the Lemurs open their season May 15 and play until Aug. 28.

  

 

To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com. 

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, now available at Amazon.com in paperback, or Kindle eReaders. To learn how to order signed copies, message him at stewmag (a) yahoo.com.

Two Very Different Kinds of Book Tours

The Highway 83 Chronicles welcomes guest bloggers. Email Stew Magnuson with your ideas! This week, reader Howard Pierpont writes about the circuitous route the newest book about Highway 83 took to reach its destination. Afterwards, check out the dates for the Last American Highway book tour taking place in Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota in April.

 

 By HOWARD PIERPONT

Stew Magnuson of Arlington, Va., has just completed and published the first book in a trilogy: The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas. There are a group of people affectionately called ‘road geeks’ and are

Mailbox. Cherry County, Nebraska. By Stew Magnuson

followers of Fans of U.S. Route 83 on Facebook or the Highway 83 Chronicles blogspot. When Stew announced the publication of the book, folks asked if they could order copies. Stew was very accommodating, taking orders and making sure copies were out in the mail before they were generally available.  Each one was shipped in the same style packaging and had a USPS tracking number associated with it. Most were delivered without incident.

One book was destined for Weatherford, Texas, a mere 1,382 miles from the mailing point of Arlington. The day after it was mailed to book package had traveled to Greensboro, N.C., where it spent a day.  Presumably the book was regaling the other packages about the tales of the Dakotas. When it headed out, somehow the next destination was Allen Park, Mich. It was a short stay and then went off to Warrendale, Penn. Here again, a full day stay, probably with other like packages telling stories of the Great Highway. The next day started the three day journey across county to Dallas, Texas. Not wanting to be left out of the mix, Forth Worth, Texas, then invited the book to pass through its facility. The stay would not be a long one as the book finally make it to the proper destination later that same day.

The trip took 10 days to cover the 2,457 miles from Arlington. This trip was 30 percent longer than the entire 1,885 miles covered by U.S. Route 83 and six states. The book still has not crossed or traveled U.S. Route 83. This can truly be called a book tour.

Stew Magnuson will be doing his own book tour in Nebraska and the Dakotas in mid April. He promises he will not make people drive a postal truck. Stew and his Fans of U.S. Route 83 would like thank the U.S. Postal Service for their support in touring the book!

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, now available at Amazon.com in paperback, or Kindle eReaders. To learn how to order signed copies, message him at stewmag (a) yahoo.com.

Last American Highway Book Tour 2014

Saturday, April 19

A to Z Books

507 N. Jeffers St (Hwy 83)

North Platte, NE

Time:  2 p.m.

Stapleton, NE

Early Evening

Time and Place TBD

Monday, April 21

Main Street Books

106 Main St.

Minot, N.D.

(Signing, meet and greet only)

Noon to 1 p.m.

Minot Public Library

Book reading and presentation

6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, April 22

Linton, N.D.

Senior Center

203 S. Broadway St.

6 p.m.

Wednesday, April 23

Bismarck Historical Society

Bismarck Public Library

6:30 p.m.

Thursday, April 24

Prairie Pages Bookstore

321 S. Pierre St.

Pierre, S.D.

6 p.m.

Friday, April 25

Plains Trading Company Bookstore

269 N. Main St. (Hwy 83)

Valentine, NE

Noon, (meet and greet, signing only)

Saturday, April 26

Augustana College

Dakota Conference

Augustana College

Center for Western Studies

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Morning. Time TBD

Book signing: Noon

Sunday, April 27

Bookworm Bookstore

8702 Pacific Street

Omaha, NE

1 p.m.

The Rise of the Highway Buffs, aka 'Road Geeks'

FSA photo by John Vachon. Kansas-Nebraska border.

By STEW MAGNUSON

Whether you call us “highway buffs” or “road geeks,” our numbers are growing.

There may never be as many of us as there are “railroad buffs.” And certainly, we won’t rival the Civil War buffs, but we need to be recognized with our own category of fanaticism.

What is a “buff?”

I recall this snippet of dialogue from a classic Seinfeld episode:

GEORGE: Wow, Keith Hernandez! He’s such a great player.

JERRY: Yeah, he’s a real smart guy too. He’s a Civil War buff.

GEORGE: I’d love to be a Civil War buff. What do you have to do to be a buff?

JERRY: …Well sleeping less than 18 hours a day would be a start.

Dictionary.com defines a “buff” as “a devotee or well-informed student of some activity or subject.”

I’m a highway buff and proud of it.

What exactly is a highway buff then? Well, I’m not the arbiter of such things, but to me it is a person who prefers traveling two-lane highways, and/or studying the history of old motor vehicle trails that pre-dated them.

We like looking at pictures of old gas stations, motels and diners, and imagining (in my case) or remembering for the older generation, what the country looked like about when Jack Kerourac was hitchhiking his way West during the trip that inspired his novel, On the Road.

A highway buff can be a person who simply enjoys savoring a drive down the back roads of America. For us, driving on an Interstate is like being forced to walk in a park while wearing a ball and chain. We want to pull over and take in the scenery, or stop at some backwoods barbecue whenever we damn well feel like it. A federal shield sign beckons us to leave the drudgery of driving four-lane Interstates.

We can also be students of highway history. In 1926, the federal highway system was created, and the distinct shield signs began popping up along the roads. Prior to then, there were some 250 motor trails— local and national—crisscrossing the nation. This was not long ago when one considers the course of human history. But today, much of the knowledge of where these first highways traversed has already been lost. 

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road, then came the Bankhead, which took a more southerly route. The Old Dixie Trail, Yellowstone Trail, Lee Highway, the National Road are just a few of them.

The Lincoln just celebrated its centennial last year, with highway buffs, or Lincoln Highway Buffs, making the trip. The Bankhead’s 100^th anniversary is coming up in 2016. Attempting to locate, or retracing, the paths of these old trails is a favorite activity of highway buffs.

I am a devotee of Highway 83. I have found references to a Great Plains Highway that was near it in South Dakota and Nebraska, but I know little else about it. I know there must be an old map out there somewhere. I will search for my remaining days.

No highway has the cachet of Route 66, though. There are dozens of Facebook pages devoted to it, some with tens of thousands of members. Travelers from as far away as Japan and Europe plan whole vacations around road trips retracing its original path. It has been featured in books, TV and documentaries.

Highway buffs may go so far as collecting, too. Check out the prices for old federal shield-style highway signs on eBay. They don’t come cheap. And signs that marked those old pre-1926 motor trails. Too rich for my blood!

The members of Facebook pages devoted to the Lincoln, Bankhead, U.S. Route 83 are minuscule compared to Route 66, but numbers are growing. Here are links to a few pages I have joined:

Backroads in general:

Our Highway

Jimmy’s Backroad Journeys

I Love Cruisin’ the Backroads

Abandoned Highways, Roads and Streets

Specific Highways:

The U.S. Route 83 Fanpage

281: Great Plains Highway

Historic US Highway Route 80

The Texas Bankhead Highway History Group

Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor

Lincoln Highway Scenic and Historic Byway

There’s no need to start a rivalry with other “buffs.” Railroad history and highway history go hand in hand. Many of the small towns you can explore on your travels owe their existence to the railroads.  The development of the rails and the highways made this country what it is today. Old West buffs, Civil War buffs: we all love U.S. history and the best way to explore the sites are on the backroads.

And embrace the Harley buffs. Some of the biggest supporters of backroads over Interstates are motorcyclists. The same goes with the lovers of classic cars.

I don’t have any statistics to prove that we are growing other than the proliferation of pages and members on Facebook. Those in the tourism industry, who are trying to lure travelers to their small towns and less traveled states need to take note, though.

So the next time you’re at a party, or some other social gathering, proudly say, “I’m a bit of a highway buff.”

Spread the message:
Half the fun is getting there.

Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, now available at Amazon.com in paperback, or Kindle eReaders. To learn how to order signed copies, message him at stewmag (a) yahoo.com.

New Book Traces History of the Dakotas Along Highway 83

Award-winning author Stew Magnuson Feb. 24 released The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, a nonfiction travel-history book that uncovers stories found along the road that bisects the states from north to south.

Descending 1,885 miles straight down the center of the United States from Westhope, North Dakota, to Brownsville, Texas, is U.S. 83, one of the oldest and longest of the federal highways that hasn’t been replaced by an Interstate.

Magnuson takes readers on a trip down the road and through the history of the Northern Great Plains. The famous and the forgotten are found in stories he discovers in the Dakotas.

Explorers Pierre de la Vérendrye, Lewis & Clark, Jedediah Smith, are all encountered along with Chief Spotted Tail of the Brulé Lakotas, TV sensation Lawrence Welk and rodeo superstar Casey Tibbs. Cold-blooded killers, homesteaders, ballplayers and rail barons from yesteryear meet today’s truckers, oil rig workers and ghost towns inhabitants as Magnuson launches his own Voyage of Discovery in a beat-up 1999 Mazda Protégé.

Timed for release during the states’ 125^th anniversary year, The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, is a love poem to the natural beauty of the prairie and the fascinating people—both past and present—found along the road.

Says Magnuson: “Highway 83 is itself interesting — and the scenery is beautiful — but the it was the people I met that made this a fascinating journey. Everyone and every town has a story to tell, I discovered.”
Magnuson will go on a book tour along Highway 83 from April 19 to 26.

Magnuson administers the Fans of U.S. Route 83 page on Facebook, which now has more than 1,000 members. He also writes the Highway 83 Chronicles blog. He also set up the U.S. Route 83 Travel page, which gives tips to those who are interested in taking a trip on the road.

Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Stew Magnuson is the author of The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns—Nebraska Center of the Book’s 2009 nonfiction book of the year, ForeWord Magazine’s bronze medal winner for regional nonfiction and finalist for the 2008 Great Plains Book of the Year. He also penned Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, an account of the controversial 2012 Dakota Conference at Augustana College, in Sioux Falls, S.D., where members of the American Indian Movement squared off against retired FBI agents.

The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas is available at Amazon.com in paperback and eBook formats. It is part one of his Highway 83 Chronicles. The Nebraska-Kansas and Oklahoma-Texas books will be released in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

To join the Fans of U.S. Route 83 group on Facebook, CLICK HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com.

 Stew Magnuson (stewmag (a) yahoo.com) is the author of Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding: The American Indian Movement, the FBI, and their Fight to Bury the Sins of the Past published by the Now & Then Reader. It is available as an eBook on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iTunes. Buy it in paperback on Amazon or bookstores such as Plains Trading Company Booksellers, in Valentine, Neb., on Highway 83.