Elk City, OK

 

 According to the National Historic Route 66 Federation, Congress authorized the funds for establishing a national highway system in 1925.  In 1926 the diagonal route from Chicago to Los Angeles was assigned the moniker “Route 66”.  While other great highways are well  remembered, the Dixie Highway (Chicago to Miami) and Lincoln Highway (New York to San Francisco), it is Route 66 that has come to be the great American “Mother Road”.  

Why?  Perhaps because of the great Dust Bowl migrations of the 1930s immortalized first by John Steinbeck’s social commentary, “The Grapes of Wrath” about the Joad Family’s odyssey.  This novel, plus the film staring Henry Fonda established the route as the Mother Road.  Later after World War Two came to a close and prosperity helped the United States embrace the automobile culture, Route 66 was the major conduit for immigrants and vacationers from the chilly northern reaches of the Midwest to balmy Southern California.  During this time the road gained even more fame when Nat King Cole and then countless other performers sang Bobby Troup’s “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”.  The asphalt strip was again recognized in the 1960s television series starring Martin Milner and George Maharis wherein they drove their hot sports car up and down the highway (and many other highways).  

So with recognition from so many forms of entertainment, books, movies, music (radios and records) and a television series it is little wonder that Route 66 is the one road that evokes romance to travelers throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, one year after the last stretch of it was bypassed by Interstate 40 at Williams, Arizona.  The road that was originally designed help connect main streets of urban and rural communities along its length was replaced by Interstate Highways that were designed to sidestep those same main streets.

Sandy and I are traveling old Route 66, hoping to rediscover some of those bypassed main streets.

Today we started in Oklahoma City and drove to Elk City, OK with a side trip to Kingfisher to visit the Chisholm Trail Museum.

We stopped at Roberts Grill for the “Onion Fried Burger”.  These hamburgers were born of the depression era when Roberts Grill and other area diners started stretching the hamburger by making them with equal parts meat and onions.  Turns out that people really liked this taste.  Now, at just about every diner in the area you can get one of these delicious sandwiches.  Roberts has been doing this since 1926.  The place shows its age (note the stool next to me) and they don’t seem to be overly concerned about the local health codes.  While there, the place filled up with people very interested in the Oklahoma vs Texas football game.  We left long before the game ended, but later found out that Oklahoma won the game in the last minute of the game.  I wish I would have been there to watch them celebrate.

From 1866 through 1885 hundreds of thousands of Texas longhorn cattle were driven annually to shipping points in Kansas.  The Chisholm trail was the major trail to those Kansas towns.  During the Civil War, while many Texans were fighting for the Confederacy, cattle roamed free and multiplied.  By 1866 cattle on the hoof in Texas were worth two dollars a head, in the East it was worth forty dollars a head.  Thus the Texas ranchers began rounding up the cattle and driving them north to Abilene KS and Dodge City, KS.  Interesting fact; the trail was named after a man named Jesse Chisholm.  Jesse never moved cattle anywhere.  He was a peddler trading with the various tribes in Oklahoma.  The path he traveled became known as the Chisholm Trail.