Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

BIG SPRINGS, KANS. Cartwright got up at 4:30 Thursday morning, April 26, 1849, after walking 15 miles the day before. The wagons rolled from camp at 6 o'clock. "Everyone in fine spirits," he noted. Near here, at a Baptist mission, he saw his first Indians, Pottawattomies. "One young fellow on horseback I shall never forget; he was a perfect Apollo in shape and sat his horse—a beautiful spirited animal—as if he were a part of him. He was dressed in a blue 'breech-cloth,' a bandana kerchief in turban form around his head, his feet shod with neat, close-fitting moccasins, while for upper dress he had about a dozen kerchiefs of different gay colors, the ends knotted together on one shoulder with the flag-ends passed under the opposite arm and streamed in the wind." If Cartwright played baseball at that campgrounds, it must have been near the ball field which is now close by the mission—small, but lighted for night games. The next day, 30 miles away, he listened to an early settler tell of "vast herds of buffalo that at times covered the country" and "went after plover, many thousand of which were flying about. In a short while we bagged a mess and soon had them strung on a stick and broiled in the primitive Indian style."

The sharpness of detail and the accuracy of observation in the passages copied directly from Cartwright's journal remove any question that might be raised about its authenticity. He was there, and he wrote down what he saw.

TOPEKA, KANS. An Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe softball team has recently defeated Dustin Optical 6-1 to remain unbeaten. Texaco, Hallmark Cards, the Kansas Reception and Diagnostic Center and Indian Dry Wall have also felt the wrath of the Santa Fe. The Santa Fe coach says that his highballers have attracted as many as 2,500 spectators to tournament games and invites the inquirer to tonight's game against Dry Wall. Unfortunately, the railroad is washed out by one of those melodramatic Kansas thunderstorms which splatter the whole sky with oil-paint colors and lightning. Rain gushes, hailstones tattoo and Santa Fe Park, down by the levee near where Cartwright crossed the Kansas River at Papans Ferry, is wetter than Noah's raincoat.

ROSSVILLE, KANS. After crossing the Kansas, Cartwright wrote: "There was much quarreling today and this evening we held a council and decided to 'split up.' " There are no further notes for 18 days.

Up the storied valley of the Big Blue, in this typical prairie town, the archetypical Sunday semipro stadium survives. Great oaks march down to the foul lines, ring the outfield and shade the little grandstand, neat in white paint. In big, precise, dark-green block capitals the backstop wall is lettered ROSSVILLE. It is pure cool green nostalgia. You can almost see the watermelons, the boaters and derby hats of spectators, and the ballooning knickers and flat-topped caps of the players.

HANOVER and HOLLENBERG, KANS., FAIRBURY and HEBRON, NEB. In all the little towns along the Little Blue, the big sports news is the College World Series at Omaha, in which Harvard and Southern Illinois have just lost their first games. Alexander Cartwright, who conceived of baseball as a game for gentry, would have been greatly gratified by Harvard's participation and downcast by its defeat, on the assumption that it was still a school for gentlemen. Here however, it was Southern Illinois' loss that was resented, largely because the Salukis had introduced four—count 'em, four—bat girls.

Alcove Spring, Hollenberg Pony Express Station and lizard-inhabited old burying grounds with small blank rocks as anonymous headstones bring back the frontier. One can roll with Cartwright over the blue-green hills and swells along the Little Blue, cresting rise after rise with awesome views of an ocean of rippling chest-high flowering grasses, each time dipping back into hollows redolent with mint and fragrant herbs crushed under wagon tires, hooves and boots. A theatrically Gotterdammerung sunset lights the river blue and gold, and then there is cricket song and dark.

MINDEN, NEB. Somewhere in the long twilight of the night before the rolling country has changed to Platte flat-lands, the lush high grass has begun to give way to short dry buffalo grass and wild wheat, and the once muddy rivers meander through low sand hills. They are now so clear that big fish seem to walk through the shallow water on their ventral fins. Signs are planted in the center of Minden's Main Street, across from the white-domed courthouse in its leafy square. They announce, "Legion Baseball Today."

FORT KEARNEY, NEB. This section of the diary is lost. But Port Kearney was a major supply post for emigrants, and Cartwright surely stopped here, as almost all pioneers did. During the summer of 1849 there were as many as 500 wagons clustered around Fort Kearney and at the nearby trading post of Dobetown, and 175 soldiers stationed at the fort itself.

Westward from Fort Kearney, the still unspoiled natural grassland presses in upon the irrigated cropland along the Platte. The grassland turns in the south into low, sun-flooded, buff-colored hills, familiar as the backdrops for Remington paintings of pony soldiers in pursuit of aborigines. One range of higher hills, from which silent Sioux watched wagon trains, swells up for some height, but subsides again. Not until the ascent of the divide between the North Fork and the South Fork of the Platte did the wagoneers get a taste of the mountains to come. A trail of precious possessions, discarded, would later mark the long upgrades, but at first the prospect of those weirdly configured hills was exhilarating after the weeks of flatness.