Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

And here occurs another direct quotation from Cartwright's diary: "We reached the top of a very high bluff, from whence the most magnificent view burst upon us. Hundreds of feet below us lay ridge after ridge of bold bluffs in every conceivable variety of shapes...while far in the distance could be seen 'Ash Hollow' filled with trees and covered with a rank growth of wild vines. Farther off we saw the waters of the 'North Fork' rolling along with its swift and turbid current. The pencil of Cole or the pen of Irving alone could do it justice."

Legendary Ash Hollow lies there still, much as Cartwright described it. A traveler these days can sense something of the emigrants' pleasure in the place by climbing up Windlass Hill in the evening, feeling the air warmer on his face where the setting sun has touched high ground later than the valley, to look down where ropes and tackle tortuously lowered prairie schooners. Deep ruts still lead to beautiful Ash Hollow below, and in the violet and lavender hills and purple ravines coyotes still bark and howl.

There is one present-day campground at Ash Hollow, a spacious one. Visions of little kids playing Cartwright's game on the very sites of his wagon circles, particularly this favorite one, had beckoned all the way from Pittsburgh. There are none. In fact, not one pickup sandlot game was to be found anywhere along the route from Illinois to Wyoming.

MCGREW, NEB. Here, beyond the great stone monoliths of Courthouse and Jail Rocks, a little cow pasture of a baseball field is distinguished by having equidistant views of even more famous Chimney Rock and Castle Rock, which figure in almost all acounts of covered wagons and which must be the most mythic trailmarks since Moses' pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Chimney Rock, that portentous finger of rock pointing to the sky, is visible through the crude net backstop on a direct line through home plate and the pitcher's rubber. You have to hope that the McGrew team, whose name two little Sioux girls playing nearby do not know, is called the Dangerous Dans—and that it is suitably inspired by the view.

GERING, NEB. Kid-leaguers of wholly unmajor reticence and eptitude wave at passing pop flies on four immaculate diamonds. Behind the park looms historic Scotts Bluff. The small fry are oblivious of it, but Cartwright saw "immense bluffs most fantastically and curiously shaped." Here he first tried packing with mules. He struck out for Fort Laramie with one Caleb Boylston and several animals, including two named Billy Button and Mulligan. "Just as we were congratulating ourselves and agreeing as to the superiority of packs over wagons," he wrote, "Billy Button's pack took a turn and came under his belly. My eyes! There was a go, and not the only go either, for the unfortunate Billy's lariat was fast to my pommel and as he started off, my saddle turned and out I came. Away went Billy with his pack and my animal with his saddle, and away went Cale on his fast Mulligan...and in a twinkling he lay on the prairie.... We could not help laughing at the ridiculous figure we cut."

After a long, hard walk (unarmed, in Indian territory), the two trailed the runaway mules to the hut of Mr. Robidou, a famous trapper and trader who had sold them the animals. "He laughed heartily at our mishap and invited us to stop a while and refresh ourselves." Robidou served them coffee and buffalo meat, and would not let them leave until they had a drink of what he called A-No. 1 Brandy. "Of all drinks," Alick wrote, "that was the damndest. I can compare it to nothing but liquid hell-fire. I writhed and twisted in agony. My contortion of visage must have been fearful. Rushing to a bucket of water I caught up a tin cup full and tossed it down my throat, but this only appeared to aggravate it. I could hear my stomach hiss as the water came in contact with the fiery fluid."

TORINGTON, WYO. The first unmistakable sign of baseball is the sight of a man and two boys flailing at a row of shrubbery on West C Street, bending over and peering intently at the ground. "Which side did it go on?" they query plaintively. It is that classic American vignette, The Lost Ball.

Here in Torrington are the first unorganized games—even games of catch—seen since Illinois. There are too many to be coincidence: picnickers, little girls playing between supper and bedtime, a group of young men in Pioneer Park playing until after dark, proud of their ability to stop the unseen ball by following its sound.

FORT LARAMIE, WYO. "Sure, they used to play baseball at Fort Laramie way back," says a Park Service ranger. "They played right out here on the parade ground, in front of Old Bedlam, the unmarried officers' quarters. There was organized ball here at least as early as the 1880s, when Colonel Burt was commanding officer. He learned his baseball at Yale, and he was the first officer ever to associate with enlisted men playing games."

The ranger unearths a remarkable picture of an early Fort Laramie team, rare evidence of a little-known facet of frontier life. He also digs out a biography of Burt and we discover that that worthy had been captain of the Yale team in the 1850s, just about late enough for Cartwright's game to have caught on at New Haven. An excerpt from the book reads, "In later more tranquil years, at the usual variety of military stations, he [Burt] had much time for his own pursuits. The Indians merely required paternal surveillance, and there was only an occasional white man's riot to quell. He entertained celebrities, displayed his fossil and Indian collections, invented a better shelter tent, became the best rifle shot in the Army, composed a successful melodrama for stage-happy Buffalo Bill Cody and organized baseball teams at every post."