Tuesday, August 13, 2019

August 13, 1919. Rawlins to the Red Desert.

If the diarist had found the prior day a bleak one, he most definitely did today.


The roads in Wyoming were, simply put, bad and the Lincoln Highway at this time made wide use of an an abandoned Union Pacific railroad bed, that being, undoubtedly, the bed of the original transcontinental rail line which is visible throughout its old course, both in the form of the bed itself and on the ash path on either side of it.  So going was slow, and at one point a very wide detour had to be made.

At the end of the day, for the first time on the trip, the convoy camped out in an unoccupied area with no nearby towns or cities.  This is probably the camp at which Dwight Eisenhower famously told the party to expect an Indian attack as a joke.

In other military endeavors, ammunition ships that were started before the war continued to be finished.

Man-o-War, the racehorse named after a type of ship, was defeated for the first time on this day in 1919 by a horse named, appropriately enough, Upset

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