Road Trip To the Boundary Waters (13)
The Outlaw Trail Scenic Byway
Highway 12 is known as the Outlaw Trail Scenic Byway, for reasons I will discuss below. I knew nothing of this designation while planning my trip. I was only made aware of Highway 12 from reading a New York Times piece written by Jim Harrison (Author of Dalva). Harrison had extolled the varied scenery and lack of traffic on this route, two significant virtues to my mind. I don’t recall anything in that article about an Outlaw Trail.
I rejoined Highway 12 when I exited Fort Niobrara NWR, just a few miles east of Valentine. Highway 12 extends for 238 miles between Valentine, and South Sioux City. From South Sioux City there is a bridge over the Missouri River to Sioux City, Iowa. The entirety of Highway 12 lies within ten miles of the South Dakota border. The plan was to take Highway 12 all the way to Sioux City. I had figured on 5-6 hours, including side trips.
I passed on the first possible side trip to Smith Falls State Park and the waterfall for which it is named. But I did take the side trip at Springview, south to “Nebraska’s Own Grand Canyon”. Nebraska also has another “Grand Canyon” in the southern part of the state. It is apparent that Nebraska’s tourist authority could use an injection of creativity. Enough with the Grand Canyons. I wouldn’t even call the one called “Nebraska’s Own” a canyon, much less a Grand Canyon. But it was enthralling in its own way.
Back in Springview I learned the story behind the name Outlaw Trail Scenic Byway. Evidently there was an outlaw trail in the 19th century, along which justice was retributively administered by lynch mobs. How closely the highway hued to the outlaw trail pathway is impossible to know. But there were plenty of outlaws in this part of Nebraska. One of the most notorious among them frequented the area around Springview. His name was James Middleton Riley, better known as Doc Middleton. His criminal specialty was horse theft, a skill he honed from the age of 14, when he stole his first. Middleton claimed to have boosted two to three thousand horses in a two-year period a fete for which Buffalo Bill Cody—bison menace and the P.T. Barnum of his era—recruited Doc to join the Wild West Show.
Equine thievery was among the lesser of Middleton’s varied crimes. He was convicted of murder when 19, sentenced to life in prison at the famous Huntsville Prison in Texas, the first publicly funded project in that state. (Sounds about right.) But Huntsville was not, at that time, sufficient to contain Middleton. He escaped after 3-4 years, a valuable lesson, no doubt, in making Huntsville the secure facility that it is today. That and the escape of the Texas Seven almost exactly a century later.
Middleton was soon in trouble again, caught stealing horses in Iowa, and in the Nebraska Panhandle, for another murder. This time a soldier in a bar fight. After that he made what you might call a pre-trial escape, a lynch mob serving as judge and jury. He was later involved in a shootout with an army detachment, captured, convicted of larceny. He served that sentence in full.
That Buffalo Bill Cody could ignore Doc Middleton’s transgressions is not surprising. The more notoriety the better for Buffalo Bill. But what were the citizens of Ardmore, South Dakota thinking when they appointed him Town Marshall. And you would think that killing a man in a bar fight would disqualify you as a saloon operator. But Middleton owned at least three during his life, in several locations. It was at one of his saloons that he got into a knife fight, convicted and sentenced once more. While in jail he contracted a cellulitis-type infection and died, the final punctuation of his criminal career. But not his fame. He is celebrated in Springview as the Robin Hood of the Sand Hills, who sold his stolen horses at a discount to the locals. His crimes were justified. He was just trying to make a living where making a living was hard. As for the murders and knife fights—always self-defense.
As I headed east from Springview the landscape remained rolling hills, but greener. At the village of Niobrara, I turned north to Niobrara State Park, and the confluence of the Niobrara River with the Missouri River. I stopped briefly there, visiting the Interpretive Center, which offered scenic views in all directions. I learned that Lewis and Clark camped in the vicinity on their way up the Missouri River There were trails there as well but I didn’t have time to hike any.
Continuing east from Niobrara highway 12 entered the Santee Sioux Reservation. Like the Lakota (including the Oglala) Sioux, the Santee Sioux originated in western Great Lakes region. Their westerly movement was gradual, spurred by conflicts with other Native American tribes and government soldiers. The latter protecting settlers in the region.
The hills were getting gradually steeper as I headed east, the hill tops and valley bottoms further apart vertically. Things were also getting greener, the vegetation, including trees, lusher. Fortunately, I was not in a hurry, because at any settlement along the road, no matter how small, I had to slow to 25 mph. And though this area is sparsely populated it is full of tiny hamlets, few large enough for a gas station. One of the larger settlements, Wynot, has a population of 217.
At every road intersection, My Google Navigator kept trying to direct me northward, which I knew was wrong. I began making derogatory comments directed at the irritating female voice. Fortunately, I wasn’t talking to a real person, because I came to realize that the fault was mine, I had mistakenly entered as my destination Sioux Falls, instead of Sioux City. I had confused the two Siouxs.
After Wynot, the road turned somewhat southward and the terrain became increasingly rugged. Farms at valley bottoms seemed to be hundreds of feet below the road. The scenery brought to mind some Grant Wood landscapes I had seen. The steepening represented a change in soil type from one dominated by sediments eroded off the Rockies to the west to one dominated by sediments derived from glacial deposits to the north. (Glaciers penetrated as far south as northeastern Nebraska during at least one glacial advance.) Glaciers are powerful millers, grinding rocks, to a flour-like grain size. When the huge continental glacier that last covered the northern third of North America retreated it left behind till of all sizes, from large boulders to the finely milled. The finest grained material was blown to the south and accumulated into soils called loess (German for “loose” and pronounced “luss”). Accumulations of wind-blown loess are especially abundant along river floodplains, where they consolidate as loess hills. The loess hills I was driving through were part of a larger area on both sides of the Missouri River, in western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. What surprised me is that this fine-grained loess, could form steeper slopes--including near-vertical bluffs--than the sand in the Sand Hills. I still haven’t figured out why “the angle of repose”, to use Wallace Stegner’s phrase--the steepest angle at which granular material can stick to the slope--is greater for a loess grain than it is for a sand grain.
I had seen loess hills before, in the Palouse of eastern Washington, but those hills were gently undulating and shallow-angled. I think the difference must be water. The Palouse is semiarid. The loess region of eastern Nebraska gets much more rainfall and lots of stream and rivers. These rivers have shaped the landscape of eastern Nebraska through erosion creating what is known as a dissected terrain. The Loess hills of the Palouse have not been subjected to erosion of this sort.
Nearing the end of the outlaw trail scenic byway
Before finding a place to stay in Sioux City, I wanted to make one more stop, at Ponca State Park. The park is named for the Ponca tribe of Native Americans. The Ponca language is part of the Siouan language family, but their lifestyle was quite different than that of any of the varied Sioux tribes and bands, or any of the other plains tribes farther west. The Sioux peoples were essentially hunter-gatherers when they first came into contact with Europeans. For food, they relied heavily on bison and other mammals; the plant component of their diets was foraged, not cultivated. The Ponca, on the other hand, derived most of their sustenance from cultivated crops; they also hunted but only as a supplementary resource. That was their lifestyle when Lewis and Clark came upon them in 1804 near the confluence of the Niobrara River and the Missouri River.
The Ponca were granted a reservation in 1817, where they remained until 1877, when, once more, the United States government changed its mind. In a strategic appeasement of the Lakota Sioux, a much greater threat, the Ponca were de-reservationized, forced to move to the Indian Territories of Oklahoma--thought to be the most expendable part of the country—another Trail-of-Tears tribe. (The Lokata only briefly held the former Ponca lands, of course, the originally agreed to reservation boundaries, soon whittled down, to the Pine Ridge.) Once the Ponca arrived in Oklahoma, half of them, led by Standing Bear, decided to return to Nebraska, but there was no longer any land to call their own.
In the long run, those that returned to Nebraska, now called the Northern Ponca, are better off than those that remained on the reservation in Oklahoma. In their Tribal Jurisdictional Area, the Northern Ponca are self-governed and provide services—including the health and housing-related-- for all tribe members, however intermingled with non-native Nebraskans. As is true of displaced and decultured Native Americans throughout the U.S., the Northern Ponca economy is now casino dependent.
The Ponca were awarded the honor of a city name and that of a state park. By the time I arrived at Ponca State Park I was low on energy. No Hiking for me, just touring in the car. Until I saw a sign for a tri-state overlook. It was less than a one-mile round trip. That I could manage with what was left in my tank. The hike through eastern hardwood forest was pleasant and the overlook was engrossing. The view was over the Missouri River, from which bits of Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa could be seen. The low sun intensified the colors and the contrasts of shadow and light, as it always does. I lingered at the overlook to watch the scene slowly but perceptibly change as the sun made its way toward the horizon.
Nearby was a campground, which met two of my three camping criteria: no water or flush toilets. On the con side, there were a few electrical hookups and spaces for small RVs. The idyllic location, directly above the river, tempted me nonetheless. But I had been looking forward to a hot shower and a bed since I set out in the morning, so I wasn’t psychologically prepared for another night in the tent. I would spend the night in a Sioux City hotel.