by Jim Noles
Such success presented—and continues to present—challenges in America’s West, where cattlemen and ranchers depend upon the BLM land to forage and graze their own herds, particularly as the herds of wild horses grow. To their frustration, those ranchers often find themselves in competition with the wild horses and burros.
Nevertheless, such controversy was not enough in 2004 to prevent the mustang design from galloping away with a winning percentage of the 60,000 votes cast in a statewide poll to determine Nevada’s state quarter design. The trio of mustangs left the four other candidate designs—“Nevada’s Early Heritage,” featuring a petroglyph and native artifacts; “Silver Miner,” with a miner holding a pickax in front of a Comstock mine; “Nevada Wilderness,” featuring an image of a bighorn sheep above snow-capped mountains; and “Battle Born Nevada,” featuring a pair of crossed pickaxes fronted by a stylized star—in the proverbial dust.
On January 31, 2006, the U.S. Mint issued the first of 589.8 million Nevada state quarters bearing the mustang design, one of the largest mintings to date.
Chalk up another victory for Wild Horse Annie.
37
NEBRASKA
A Rock by Any Other Name . . .
Admit it—you never thought the U.S. government would mint a coin with an elk penis on it. But in 2006, it did—some 591 million of them, in fact.
But before you scribble an angry letter to your Representative or Senator, rest assured that if ever an elk penis deserved to be on a piece of U.S. currency, it is the one featured on Nebraska’s state quarter along with a pioneer’s covered wagon.
Today, the feature in question—actually, a 325-foot-tall pillar rising out of the broad and dusty North Platte River Valley—is far better known as Chimney Rock, the name given to it by passing pioneers. But if you had asked a Native American to name the geologic formation, he would have told you “Elk Penis”—a far earthier appellation coined by tribes that, unlike the pioneers, had never even seen a chimney. At the same time, however, many of those pioneers passing Chimney Rock must have wondered if they would ever see a real chimney again.
Chimney Rock stands astride what some historians have called the Great Platte River Road. It was a kind of pioneering superhighway that served as a conduit for a host of trails that would one day be synonymous with the settling of the American West. The Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Mormon Trail all followed the same dusty path along the North Platte River at the point they passed Chimney Rock. And although their destinations differed, they all demanded a high, and sometimes fatal, toll in blood, sweat, and tears of those who traveled them.
Consider the Oregon Trail, for example. Army explorers and fur traders first blazed the path in the 1820s; it wasn’t until the spring of 1842 that the first organized wagon train of settlers set out for Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley. That original party numbered between 100 and 160 settlers, and it was a number that would be readily eclipsed within a year.
The following spring, the so-called Great Migration of 1843 occurred when Marcus Whitman led a party of 800 immigrants westward to the as yet unorganized Oregon Territory. Their reports of a verdant paradise sparked “Oregon Fever,” leading to 5,000 new immigrants within two years. Such a surge in settlement sparked a diplomatic crisis with Great Britain, which had its own interests in the Pacific Northwest. In 1846, diplomacy settled the so-called Oregon question; by 1848, Oregon was a vast territory (which originally included modern-day Washington and parts of Montana and Wyoming). In 1859, Oregon became the thirty-third state.
Statehood encouraged further settlement. The numbers of pioneers increased steadily every year until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed and offered a far faster—and safer—route west to California. The completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 almost completely outdated the notion of a 2,000-mile wagon journey to the Pacific Northwest.
But before the railroads were completed, the Oregon Trail was the way west. And for most of the trail’s travelers, their journey would have truly begun in St. Louis, where they would have hopped a steamship to capitalize on a 200-mile run westward in relative comfort and ease. But the Missouri eventually turns northward, which meant that the would-be emigrants had to debark at any one of a number of small towns along the river—the “jumping off ” places, like Independence, Westport, St. Joseph, Omaha, and Council Bluffs.
Once ashore, the pioneers usually found themselves cooling their heels in vast encampments, waiting for the grass on the springtime prairies to grow high enough to support their wagon trains’ oxen, mules, and horses. It was a delicate decision. Go too soon, and there would not be enough forage for the oxen and mule teams pulling the settlers’ wagons. Go too late, and the winter snows would catch the wagon train before it made it through the Rockies.
Oxen, mules, and horses dragged the wagons, which were typically hardwood boxes about eleven feet long with bows for the cover five feet above the bed; they could typically carry a load of 1,600 to 2,000 pounds. “No pen can adequately describe our start,” wrote one pioneer. “Half-a-dozen circuses combined in one would have been tame in comparison. Not one of our 300 mules . . . had ever had a bit in its mouth or a collar on its neck.”
Six hundred miles into their journey—a long month on the trail, but barely one-fourth of the way to Oregon—they would have spotted Chimney Rock. “This is the most remarkable object that I ever saw, and if situated in the states would be visited by persons from all parts of the world,” one emigrant wrote. “No conception can be formed of the magnitude of this grand work of nature [until] you stand at its base and look up. If a man does not feel like an insect, then I don’t know when he should,” said another.
“Raising camp at daylight we resumed our way, and soon afterwards arrived opposite the ‘Chimney,’” wrote pioneer Rufus B. Sage in 1841. “How came such an immense pile so singularly situated? What causes united their aid to throw up this lone column, so majestic in its solitude, to overlook the vast and unbroken plains that surround it?”
Still others, perhaps more thirsty and less philosophic, were less enthused. “This afternoon we sighted at a distance, the so-called Chimney Rock,” wrote Charles Preuss, a frontier artist. “Nothing new otherwise. Oh, if there were a tavern here!”
After Chimney Rock, there were still several hard days of travel to Fort Laramie. After that came the long uphill climb along the Sweetwater River to the Rockies’ South Pass. Beyond the mountains lay the blazing alkali deserts of Wyoming, the winding Snake River with its treacherous river crossings, and finally, the nearly impassable Blue Mountains that guard the entrance to the fertile Willamette Valley.
In 1852, 50,000 emigrants funneled through South Pass, participating in what some historians have called the greatest western migration in the history of the United States. To quote an observation reportedly made by famed mountain man Kit Carson, “the cowards never started and the weak died on the way.”
Apocryphal or not, the sentiment reflected in Carson’s statement was absolutely true. Hunger, thirst, blizzards, disease, and hostile Indians claimed the lives of thousands of pioneers along the length of the Oregon Trail. The passages recorded in a pioneer woman’s diary illustrate the gruesome realities her wagon train faced in 1854.
“Here we found a man’s skull and bones, and a bullet hole in the forehead, and a short distance from it found his clothing, an oil coat and some shirts and 2 or 3 pounds of tobacco, a knife, a pair of goggles, ink stand and so forth. We think if Indians killed him they would have taken his things, but the circumstance is unknown to us at present.” Later, she reported that her train “noon’d at a grave yard where there is 10 died . . . great has been the suffering of man and beast at this place.”
Shortly after passing the fur trading post at the Snake River’s Fort Hall, the Oregon Trail continued down the Snake. The California Trail, at that point, turned left and plunged southwest toward the goldfields of California. From 1848 to the end of 1849,
California’s Anglo and Hispanic populations swelled from 14,000 to over 100,000. The migration to California raged at torrent-like proportions from 1848 to 1852, as emigrants rounded Cape Horn by boat, debarked in Central America to cross to the Pacific by land, or spent between sixteen and twenty-two weeks on the trail to California. A total of 20,000 died from 1841 and 1859, ten graves per mile on the overland route, as they tried to reach California.
The Mormon Trail, blazed in 1847, added to the westward flow. Seeking religious sanctuary for his people, Mormon leader Brigham Young led a party of 148 people and seventy-two covered wagons along the Platte River Road, into the Rockies, and south into modern-day Utah. Within three years, their capital of Salt Lake City had grown to 5,000.
But like the California and Oregon Trails, the Mormon Trail took a toll in human life as well. In 1856, a Mormon emigrant wrote, “At first the deaths occurred slowly and irregularly, but in a few days at more frequent intervals, until we soon thought it unusual to leave campground without burying one or more persons. . . . ” “Sixty-seven died on the journey,” he eventually tallied, “one-sixth our number.”
With its selection of Chimney Rock and a pioneer wagon on its winning design, Nebraska chose to honor the hardships and travails of such men and women. It was a design that topped 6,500 others. Other finalists for the state quarter honor included “The Capitol”; “The Sower,” depicting the statue standing atop the Nebraska capitol; and “Chief Standing Bear,” the Ponca Indian whose landmark 1879 trial established that Native Americans were “persons within the meaning of the law” and thus entitled to the rights of citizenship.
In the end, though, the days of Chimney Rock topping anything may be numbered. Records indicate that the spire has lost about thirty feet in the past 150 years. The formation is composed of Brule clay with layers of Arickaree sandstone and volcanic ash interlaced within it, a combination susceptible to erosion and catastrophic rock falls. New Hampshire may have jinxed its Old Man of the Mountains with its quarter selection; Cornhuskers can only hope they have not done the same.
38
COLORADO
Secret(s) of the Mountains
When the U.S. Mint unveiled the design for Colorado’s state quarter, the Centennial State’s citizens learned that their commemorative coin would provide a sweeping view of the rugged Rocky Mountains, complemented by evergreen trees and a banner carrying the inscription “Colorful Colorado.”
In the selection process, Colorado’s first lady, Frances Owens, chaired a committee that reviewed 1,500 suggestions and then narrowed the field to five for Governor Bill Owens’s final selection. Unsuccessful designs included “Mesa Verde,” featuring Mesa Verde National Park with cliff dwellings; “10th Mountain Division Birthplace,” depicting a ski soldier of the famed World War II division; “The Centennial State,” featuring a stylized letter “C” entwined with a mountain columbine flower; and “Pikes Peak,” displaying the slogan “Pikes Peak or Bust” and a gold prospector’s tools.
Reportedly, the governor’s decision was not easy. And when he opted for the “Colorful Colorado” design, he sparked a good-natured but growing controversy: Precisely what mountain peak did the quarter depict? In Colorado, where the Rockies are home to fifty-four mountains that soar above 14,000 feet, mountains can be an intensely personal issue.
Initially, the official story was that the quarter’s final design was simply a generic but emblematic portrait of a Colorado mountain. But wilderness-savvy Coloradans wasted little time in identifying the likely model—Longs Peak (named, for some reason, with no apostrophe), which is, at 14,259 feet, the highest peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
For weeks, the controversy grew until artist Len Buckley, of Damascus, Maryland, stepped forward on the eve of the quarter’s official launch ceremony on June 14, 2006, and told the Associated Press that he based the design on a photo he took of Longs Peak during a family vacation in the 1980s.
For his part, Governor Bill Owens was unfazed by the revelation. “We’re told it was an emblematic mountain, but it turns out the artist may have actually drawn a specific mountain,” he assured the crowd at the quarter’s unveiling at the state capitol, five short blocks from the U.S. Mint’s Denver facility. “I don’t know which mountain the artist looked at. It’s indicative of all the mountains of Colorado, and if an artist back at the mint happened to look at one and feature it, that’s fine with me.”
If the secret identity of Buckley’s mountain only lasted a matter of months, Coloradans could take solace in the fact that, for decades, their mountains did a far better job of concealing one of the great secrets of the Cold War.
A secret of the Cold War? You may be tempted to guess the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Built in the early 1960s, the center is located 1,000 feet into the mountain, protected behind thirty-ton iron blast doors designed to shield the famed war room of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) from a nuclear attack.
But after being featured in such movies as War Games and The Sum of All Fears, Cheyenne Mountain has become somewhat passé. Besides, the month after the Colorado state quarter was released, the Washington Post reported that NORAD was shuttering the operations center and moving it to a nondescript office building at nearby Peterson Air Force Base.
Instead, the secret in question—and, admittedly, although still shrouded by the weight of history, it is not a secret anymore—was a Central Intelligence Agency operation known by the deceptively dull code name of “ST Circus.”
“ST Circus” was a project born of the hottest days of the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and China sparred at one another across the globe in any number of shadowy proxy conflicts.
One such conflict raged in Tibet, which had been invaded by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 1951. The capital of Lhasa was occupied; the Dalai Lama was forced to sign a “Plan for the Peaceable Liberation of Tibet.”
Before long, however, it became clear to the Tibetans that in Communist China’s eyes, “peaceable liberation” was synonymous with exploitation, collectivization, repression, and forced acculturation. A resistance movement—Chushi Gandrung, or “Four Rivers, Six Mountains”—arose in the country’s outlying regions, organized and led by a Tibetan trader named Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang. In February 1956, after the Chinese bombed ancient Buddhist monasteries at Chatreng and Litang, Tibet erupted into open revolt.
On the other side of the world, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. intelligence community could not help but take notice—even if, at the CIA’s highest levels, Tibet hardly seemed a compelling cause. CIA officer John Greaney’s recounting of his visit with CIA director Allen Dulles to discuss the situation in Tibet seems illustrative.
“Dulles asked me, ‘Now where is Tibet?’” Greaney recounted. “We stand up on the leather couch in his office, and he has a National Geographic map up there, and he’s pointing to Hungary, and he says, ‘Is that Tibet?’” And I say, ‘No, sir, it’s over here by the Himalaya.’”
Issues of geographic literacy aside, the CIA soon decided that Chushi Gandrung and the revolt in Tibet presented a golden opportunity to make life difficult for the Chinese Communists. In the spring of 1957, it spirited six of Gompo Tashi’s men out of Tibet and to, of all places, the sweltering Pacific island of Saipan. At a military base on Saipan, the six expatriate warriors took to their training in modern guerilla warfare, explosives, and communications remarkably well—so well, in fact, that the CIA decided to undertake a larger-scale training operation at a more appropriate location.
The assignment fell on the capable shoulders of Roger McCarthy, the head of the CIA’s Tibetan Task Force. Casting about for a suitable training site, McCarthy’s eyes settled on forgotten Camp Hale, Colorado.
Fifteen years earlier, Camp Hale had gained fame as the training camp of the U.S. Army’s famed Tenth Mountain Division. Constructed out of whole cloth at the outbreak of World War II, the camp eventually housed some 16,000 soldiers and 3,9
00 animals. The army shuttered the camp at the end of the war, however, and by 1958, it was unoccupied and almost forgotten. But in McCarthy’s eyes, it was perfect.
“Camp Hale,” McCarthy recalled, “offered everything: mountains, valleys, the Eagle River, remoteness, yet near enough to support facilities to make it ideal. In 1958, there was nothing there. The closest town was Leadville. We could shield our effort easily. The entrance was just off a good road, used primarily by tourists.”
In the winter of 1958, the army enthusiastically supported the CIA endeavor, constructing classrooms, barracks, and mess halls. All it knew was that it was building a training facility for foreign nationals, although the CIA was kind enough to suggest what ended up being a highly effective cover story—the base was being used for “atomic-related research.” For its part, the CIA staffed the camp with a dozen intelligence officers and military trainers, a medic, and a pair of army cooks.
Camp Hale was an immediate hit with the Tibetan freedom fighters who soon arrived to train there. One of the Tibetans, Tashi Chutter, recalled: “We drove up to the camp after dark. When I got out of the truck, I saw snowy mountaintops all around me and I was shocked for a moment. The Americans called Camp Hale ‘The Ranch.’ But we Tibetans came up with our own nickname. We called it ‘Dumra,’ Tibetan for ‘flower garden.’ It really did feel like we were back home.”
