Overland Stage – Part 8 LaPorte to Virginia Dale
Part 8 – LaPorte to Virginia Dale is now live.
Latham to Laporte was a 35 mile run, reduced to secondary status with the main line running south from Latham – continuing to follow the South Platte – to Denver then running back north along the foothills of the Front Range (a bit west of US287) to LaPorte, re-joining the original trail.
The run north from LaPorte was not the flat lands of the South Platte Route. Not quite mountains but one of the most difficult stretches of the entire route was located in this section. Like the other segments, it had its share of Indian attacks and threat from bandits.
Virginia Dale – the only remaining complete station at its original location – and perhaps the most famous of all – was Jack Slade’s headquarters. Only a mile or so below what was then the Dakota Territory, it was perhaps the most pleasing of locations.
Next: The Laramie Plains
I really enjoy these posts about the stage roads. Thanks
Thanks. It turned out to be a bigger project than I expected. The Wyoming section is coming along; I’ll post them as I finish them but the Colorado section was a bit easier. I’ll end at Echo, UT where I-84 splits off from I-80.
There is a good book about the pioneer days in Arizona, “Vanished Arizona”, by Martha Summerhayes, who traveled with her Army Officer husband all through Arizona, in the 1870’s just after Crook had pacified the Apache. Highly recommended.
She described a trip they took, starting from Fort Apache, north across the Mogollon Rim to Holbrook, and then west and south to Fort Verde and Fort Whipple. The road passed by Stoneman Lake before the harrowing descent down off the Mogollon Rim into the Verde Valley. She was in an Army “ambulance”, some sort of covered wagon with her small child, an infant really.
The old road from Stoneman Lake down into the Verde Valley is paralleled for a little while by I-17 going north from Phoenix to Flagstaff. I-17 crosses the wagon road at some point.
Several years ago I spent quite a few evenings poring over Google Maps and satellite view trying to map out the old wagon road to and from Stoneman Lake. I believe there are still traces of it that can be seen when the juniper forest thins out. It’s all ranchland and National Forest around there. Stoneman Lake has vacation cabins surrounding it, and is more dry than a lake now. It’s probably possible to find and walk much of the wagon road down off the Rim.
The Verde Valley is all developed and inhabited now, and the road is gone past Beaver Springs.
Civilization comes, development and habitations, and the evidence that the pioneers were ever here disappears. So goes the old saying, you can’t go home again.
I lived in Tucson a few decades ago. While I poked around a bit looking over some of the military forts, there’s more I wish I had visited. Time runs short now and the body runs rough – it’s doubtful I’ll be able to spend any significant time in the southern regions again.
Wifey & I made the commitment to binge 1883 for the second time (while waiting for the next episodes of 1923 to drop). It’s not the stagecoach but it is the Wild West. It made us reflect on the hardships that our grandparents (mine) and in her case, her great grandparents, went through to transit West. Hers came by wagon; first halfway and then later generations came all the way West.
1883 shows the epic hardships of that transit.
My grandparents on my father’s side came by boat. First from Germany to Ellis Island, then by boat to the West Coast. Then. By. Boat. To. The. West. Coast. means they came around the dangerous passage below South America (Cape Horn), and then they transited the Graveyard of Ships which is the Olympic Coast of Washington State. That’d be the coast littered with ships to include those wimpy little surf coastguard boats they call indestructible. Turns out they’re not, given the tragic loss of some on our coast. It’s dangerous, let’s leave it at that.
Given the epic nature of getting here, I’ll be damned if the Washington legislature drives my family out. Although with the draconian laws they’re passing here, you’d think they well hellset on getting us out. My hope right now is that the state of the nation, under Trump, will put so much pressure on Soviet Washington State, that the idiotic laws will crumble.
My grandfather taught in a town which no longer exists (Thomas) along the RR tracks paralleling what is now 167 in the Auburn Valley – I think at 212 St. He came in through Grays Harbor. I have his 1909 teaching certificate from Washington State. He wrote an “auto-biography” and speaks of buying salmon at 5¢/lb lasting him and his wife for a week. He also speaks of the fear of the people from the coming Halleys Comet in 1910. He headed back east shortly after the comet passed (for family issues).
I lived in the area 80 years later – it was no longer the place he described. From what I hear, it’s no longer the place I lived in either.