Day 8: History lessons

Most of our drive from Cheyenne to Cody, Wyoming, was marked by my obsession with getting a good picture of antelope.  (Obviously, that didn't happen.)  I kept thinking of the words to a song that my dad would sing.  He really had a beautiful voice (in my opinion).

Home, home on the range

Where the deer and the antelope roam.

Where seldom is heard

a discouraging word, 

And skies are not cloudy all day.

We stopped for gas in a town along the way and I got a closer look at one of the signs I had seen along the interstate.  Unfamiliar with the Sand Creek Massacre, I looked it up on the iPad and read aloud to Charlie an article published in Smithsonian Magazine.  O.M.G.  It wasn't enough that in 1864 we were killing our own countrymen in a bloody civil war over the expansion of slavery into new territories, but in the west we were slaughtering American Indians -- women and children and elderly -- who our government had promised to protect.  Both Africans and Indians were too often seen as savages whose lives and dignity were at best inconvenient to the enrichment of white Americans.  Horrifying and very sad.  But there were brave soldiers who told the truth about what had really happened and who paid for their courage and honesty with their lives. 

After that history lesson, I noticed that the rocky mountains that made for a steep and winding interstate were in fact part of an Indian reservation.  Coincidentally (?), the reservation ended where the land became level and fertile.  We owe these people.















After arriving in Cody, we went into town for dinner at the Hotel Irma that Buffalo Bill Cody built and named for his daughter.  Cody seems like a fun little town with pubs, rodeos, restaurants, coffee shops, clothing stores, galleries and the like.  It's definitely worth a stop on the way to Yellowstone.