Day 2 Adventures

First person account from Tom Smedley

Day 2 August 23, 2022 Team Clyde (Tom, Ross & Lara Smedley) and Team Agnes (Vicki Barbour, Erica & Sarah Schmitt, Cathie Koon) spent the night at the Fairfield Inn and the other part of Team Clyde (Jimmy & Sarah Smith) slept at the Hampton Inn, both in Scottsbluff, NE. Each Team had nice breakfasts at their respective Inns, and at 8:00am sharp, the caravan of three Team vehicles headed to our 1st destination of the day, the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, at Fort Laramie, WY.

Ranger Duke, dressed in his 1862 “buckskins”, gave us a detailed history of the beginning skirmishes between the Northern Plains Tribes, the Oregon Trail emigrants and the Fort Laramie soldiers. We mentioned to Duke that our great grandfather William Smedley wrote in his diary on June 18, 1862, that “we drove opposite Fort Laramie.”

Next, we head about two miles away to the actual town of Fort Laramie to have lunch at the Ft. Laramie Bar & Grill. After a tasty lunch and lively reminiscing family stories and photos from from Vicki’s Smedley & Vickers Family Book, we all headed to Casper, WY, and our “Dutch Oven Evening Trek” put together by Morris Carter and his “Historic Trails West”.

We first experienced a bit of the true spirit of the trail that William must have felt, as Jimmy, Sarah, Vicki, Cathie, Lara and Ross rode in a covered wagon (very similar to William’s) as Erica, Sarah and Tom rode 3 lovely horses along with the covered wagon that Morris drove. In the cooling of the late afternoon, we all rode out in to the prairie near the North Platte River that William most certainly would have traveled, and looked up the valley ahead, to see red sandstone hills, that William must have seen, when he wrote on June 27, 1862, “A few miles from camp, opposite Red Hills”. The “Agnes & Clyde” Team members all rode on in the covered wagon and on horseback back to the setting of a delicious “Dutch oven dinner” prepared by Niola, that was topped off by yummy homemade peach cobbler. Another wonderful day of sharing family time together, following in the “footsteps or wagonwheel ruts” of our “William”.