America's Byways, Road Trip 2019, Part 3

Friday, July 26

This has been kind of a long day because I did a bit more driving than I had planned on and ended up in a relatively isolated part of Missouri where I was lucky just to get a room in this very small hotel.  Mountain View, MO, seems to be a rather popular area for fishing, hunting, and camping but its hotel space is more than a little limited, so I lucked out in being able to get a room as late in the day as I did.  And to top it off, there is even a good restaurant within 100 yards of my room that serves some of the best fried catfish fillets I've ever had.  Now if only the WiFi connection and the telephone signal were a little better, things would be just about perfect.

I started the day by backtracking to Shiloh Military Park to visit the scene of a major Civil War battle that took place on April 6-7, 1862.  This one pitted the forces of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston (who would die in the fighting) against those of Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Of the 44,699 Confederates and 66,812 Union soldiers on the field during those two days, roughly 1,700 on each side were killed and each side had another 8,000 soldiers wounded - many of whom later died of those wounds. In addition, almost 3,000 Union soldiers and 1,000 Confederate soldiers were listed as missing. The Confederates decisively won the fighting of the first bloody day of fighting, but during the night - after both exhausted armies decided to stop fighting for the day - the Union army received enough fresh reinforcements to force the Confederates to retreat to Corinth, Mississippi, the next day. 

This is one of my favorite Civil War battlegrounds because its geography and landmarks make it so easy to visualize and understand exactly what happened here and why. Very little ever changes in these military parks, but this time something I've been expecting would happen in Shiloh since I first visited the park in the early eighties finally had happened. General Johnston bled to death under a big tree after suffering what was at first thought to be just a minor wound to his lower leg. That old tree was clearly marked but it had been rotting away for years, and every time I saw it, it was smaller and more fragile looking than the time before.  Well this time around, it was completely gone - and I felt like crying when I saw it was no longer there. I really did. The spot where the tree used to stand has now been marked by this rather hokey looking painting. What a downgrade, that is.

Some of the state sponsored monuments in the park are pretty spectacular, but even the more simple presentations serve to remind the tourist that Shiloh was a bad place to be in April 1862.
I spent about three hours in the park, and during that entire time I saw less than a dozen other people.  A few years ago the battleground parks were packed with people, but these days they all seem to be pretty near empty when I'm there.  That's good for people like me who like to go slowly on the self-guided tours, but I find it sad that so few people care about the history of their country nowadays. As a country, we are so very lucky to have sites like this one available to us, and it's a shame more people don't visit them. 

After a quick lunch in Savannah, TN, it was time to head north again toward the Missouri border. And that's when I got one of those little surprises I could never have imagined.  Because I rely on my car's GPS system for navigation purposes, I seldom look at a map to get a better picture of what's ahead of me or on either side of me. I usually confine that to a quick look in the evenings, with maybe another quick peek during breakfast. That's why I didn't see this surprise coming.

The Dorena, MO - Hickman, KY Ferry

As I approached the northwestern border of Tennessee, I was surprised to see that I was entering Kentucky - but I was only in the state for what seems like about fifteen minutes before the road suddenly ended on the banks of the Mississippi River. There I learned that in order to get to Missouri from this part of Kentucky I was going to have to ride across the Mississippi on a little ferry that had the capability of carrying four vehicles at a time on the twenty-minute journey across the river.  I, though, was the only one wanting to go there, so after a ten minute wait during which no one else showed up, we were off. On the Missouri side of the river, a single red pickup truck was waiting to climb aboard the ferry for the return trip to Kentucky. See why I like to wander the roads with as little planning as possible? You just never know what you might find out there.

So tonight I see that I'm about an hour away from the Laura Ingalls Wilder home and museum, and although I've never read any of the "Little House" books, I plan to head that direction in the morning to see what's on display there. (Book nerd that I am, that's just a no-brainer.)  Too, I think that Branson is somewhere in this part of the state, and although I've always ridiculed Branson as the place that old performers go to die again and again in public performance, I might give the city a look anyway. Depends on what kind of mood I wake up in.

(Again, clicking on the photos will give you an enlarged version.)