6/25 to 6/28/2018.

Kansas City, KS. Sunny, hot and humid. Daytime highs: 87F to 102F.

Whereas a Lewis & Clark trip has been on our bucket list for years, the reason we made the trip this year was because a group of Cheryl’s & sister Carol’s Spangler cousins decided to have a reunion in Kansas City. That gave us a perfect reason to do the Lewis & Clark trail and a family reunion on the same trip.

This post is family stuff, so if you are looking for the travelogue about the Lewis & Clark Trail, hang tight, we officially give you permission to skip this over post with no hard feelings, and go to the 6/30/18 post, and where we visit St Louis, and start our return trip on the trail of L&C from St Louis to Astoria.

Kansas Cousins: Spanglers in Kansas City and McCammons in Olathe

On this trip, Cheryl’s twin sister Carol and her husband Jim traveled with us. This is the third major road trip we have made with Carol & Jim: the Oregon Trail trip in 1992, the Transcontinental Railroad trip in 2013, and this year, the Lewis & Clark Trail. Even though we all live in the Seattle area, we don’t live physically close to each other and our lives are on different tracks. We live in the suburbs (Edmonds north of Seattle) where we still have our house of 33 years, plus our daughter and her family live quite close with our 3 grandchildren. Carol & Jim live in a retirement complex in downtown Seattle and are very involved with their social life there. So with all of our lives going in such different directions we often go weeks or even months at a time without seeing each other. Despite that the twins are very close as they have always been, and Jim is as close to me as a brother since we have known each other for so long, and I did not have a brother growing up. We all get along very well together, and our daily rhythms are similar, so traveling together like this for a month is not a problem … on the contrary we always have a great time and look forward to these trips when the opportunity arises.

With that preamble out of the way, I should explain that Cheryl and Carol made many trips during their Portland, Oregon childhood to visit their grandparents in Herington, Kansas. And since Herington was more or less on the way to Kansas City, we made a side trip to see what we could see of Grandma & Grandpa Smith’s house at 707 “C” St. They had both passed on some time ago, in the 70s and 80s, so it had been a long time since we had all been there, and they wanted to see the place for old time’s sake. The girls had many happy childhood memories from Herington.

We drove into Herington north on Broadway past the same old limestone town swimming pool building that the girls had gone to when they were kids … and the place was still going strong with enough kids at the pool to justify having a life guard on duty.

Since we had the address for the house, we were able to follow directions from Google Maps and drive right to it. It turned out that the house was empty with an “Available” sign out in front which I assume meant “for rent”. So there was no need to go knock on the front door to ask to take photos … we could walk right up to the house, look in all the windows and be just as nosy as we wanted to be. At one point, a neighbor’s curiosity got the best of him — he hollered to us from up the street wanting to know if we were buying or just visiting the house where we were snooping around. “No, just visiting our grandparents old house,” Cheryl hollered back. Then he unleashed a tirade about the high tax rate, total corruption of the town officials, and said that he was going to sell and get the hell out of there. Well now, it’s a good thing we found that out!

Photo 5677. Peering in the windows at Grandpa & Grandma Smith’s house in Herington, KS, which is loaded with childhood memories. It seemed bigger then.

The house looked like it had been in the hands of tenants for a long time and was in pretty rough shape all around. It took a while to walk all around the house and look in from all sides including the back kitchen window. The cistern was still in the back patio with the original old-fashioned pump, just as they remembered it.

With that blast from the past, it was on to Kansas City for the cousins reunion, and we got to Ray & Joan’s place in time for an informal pasta dinner. Cousin Janet showed up a little later … good grief we had not seen her for over 30 years! We had some lively conversations, including about our various travels: Ray & Joan had just returned from a Viking river trip to Germany, whereas Carol & Jim recently had a similar Viking Trip to Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.  And of course we talked about our trip around the world last year. Cheryl and I have never done a cruise so we were “all ears” listening to the stories. We also had a brief review of the political situation, during which Ray informed us that Wyandotte County in Kansas is one of a very few blue areas in a very red state … a rare distinction shared with Lawrence, the home of KU.

The next day, we hung out at Ray and Joan’s house chatting, sharing memories, telling family stories, recording details of family genealogy, looking at old family photos and such. We wrapped up the day with a visit of a famous barbecue restaurant in KC: Jack Stack. Barbecue is very big is Kansas City, and it was delicious.

Collage 0289: going over family genealogy, BBQ dinner at the KC Jack Stack restaurant, sharing family photos

Orchids in Limestone Caverns. The following day we did some KC sightseeing for entertainment of the troopers. First stop: a place called Bird’s Botanicals. Unusual, to say the least – these folks specialize in raising orchids … in a limestone cavern! The orchid-growing operation was in one section of a huge underground complex of limestone caverns big enough for semi-trucks to drive around inside of. It was definitely odd to see semi trucks drive into this underground place and disappear around a corner! But we were headed for a different section of the caverns where the orchid-growing takes place. The whole growing operation was underground, done under grow lights, which gave everything a kind of orange-ish color. Never saw anything quite like it. Very interesting though … and any of the workers were glad to stop and talk about what they were doing: who comes to buy, how the plants transition to outdoors, target markets, etc.

One great part about doing our sightseeing underground was to escape the 90-degree-plus heat and humidity of that day, with a reported heat index of 105 degrees. Yikes! That heat was a killer for us Seattleites! When it gets to 90 in Seattle, it’s literally a news event.

Photo 0295. Underground limestone caverns — hey, what’s holding up the roof?
Where did those semi’s go?

Photo 0316, orchid-growing in limestone caves

The Arabia Steamboat Museum. The encore for that afternoon was a visit to the Arabia Steamboat Museum in downtown Kansas City, one of the most unique museums I have ever seen. It’s quite a story. The riverboat “Arabia”, was a side-paddle steam-powered riverboat plying the Missouri River in the 1850s. During the course of its life, it went up and down the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers dozens of times, including at least one trip up the Missouri and some distance up the Yellowstone River. In that era there were no major cross-country roads … not even railroads. So the Missouri River was the Interstate-5 of that time. With absence of highways railroads, riverboats were big business. It turns out that the Missouri River was a dangerous place for riverboats to go — snags everywhere, and banks and sandbars that constantly shifted on the uncontrolled river.

On September 5, 1856, the “Arabia” was on a voyage from St. Louis headed up the Missouri with 220 tons of cargo and 130 passengers headed for 16 towns on the frontier. I had no idea these boats carried so much! On the river just north of present-day Kansas City, the “Arabia’ hit a partially submerged snag that tore open her hull, and she sunk in minutes. Fortunately, she settled into the mud of the river bottom before the upper decks went under, and there was no loss of life, except for one mule that was tied to some equipment on the main deck.

In 1987 a salvage team was organized, River Salvage, Inc., that set out to find the wreck whose location had become lost over the decades. Using various types of location equipment, the team found the buried “Arabia” in a cornfield a half mile from the current location of the Missouri River — that’s how much the course of the river had meandered over 131 years. It was buried under 45 feet of silt — 45 feet! That’s the height of a four-story building, and when you’re excavating, 45 feet is a LONG way down! Due to the proximity to the river this was a monumental effort which included sinking many well points around the excavation site to keep the site from flooding from all the ground water.

Collage 0357 Excavation of the Riverboat “Arabia”

When the wreck was unearthed the team discovered an amazing trove of cargo that had been mostly perfectly preserved in the mud due to the lack of air. The cargo included all kinds of articles of daily living in the 1850s, and the museum is filled with displays of the recovered articles. We aren’t talking about just a few items, we are talking hundreds and thousands of specimens of things from shoes (4,000 pair!), to carpenters tools, door knobs, dinner plates … the variety and quantity is astounding, and it’s ALL on display. It is reportedly the greatest collection of pre-Civil War artifacts in the world. Much of it had to be treated with special chemicals to keep it from disintegrating when it reached the open air, and you can see the treatment of artifacts going on as you go through the museum. Looking at all those items is like stepping back into a time machine to see what kinds of things people had for living on the frontier in that era. It’s definitely worth a visit if you have any interest in history.

On our last reunion day we went to Joan & Ray’s place for another day looking at old photos, telling stories, etc., plus got some group photos to commemorate the occasion.

One very offbeat family story that came out was about one of the more infamous Spangler ancestors, Ned Spangler, who allegedly held a horse for John Wilkes Booth in back of Ford’s Theater while Booth was assassinating Lincoln. It turned out that Ned had been asked to hold the horse by Booth, who he didn’t know, but he left the horse untended to go do his job changing scenery for the play that was going on inside the theater. For this role, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison. I hasten to add that he was later exonerated!

Photo 5706. Ned Spangler: a Spangler ancestor wrongly accused of holding a horse for John Wilkes Booth.
Those are manacles on his wrists.

We also gave a slide show about our trip around the world last year in search of the world’s greatest engineering sights, and fielded a lot of questions about that, which is always fun for Cheryl and I. The following morning we were off for St Louis to begin our odyssey of following the Louis & Clark Trail.

To add to the family events, we also got in a visit with Cheryl and Carol’s cousin Art (on the McCammon side) & Ag in Olathe, KS where we had another enjoyable day of hanging out, telling family stories, getting more family genealogy information, plus had another classic barbecue meal at Jack Stack in Martin City, MO, reputed to be the original.

Photo 0524. Getting together with Art & Ag in Olathe

Next: on to St Louis: modern day, and starting on the Lewis & Clark Trail.