Dan posing in front of the sign welcoming us to Colorado

With hours to drive before reaching the night’s Not-So-Super-8 Motel, we stopped in Julesburg, Colorado, for only one hour, the time Mark Twain spent there on his 1,700-mile stagecoach ride west in 1861 to Carson City, Nevada. I was prepared, as an oh-so-serious, glass-half-empty journalist, to write off Julesburg as yet another dying small town (2010 population 1,225, down 16.5% from 2000), bypassed by industry and focused more on its past than its future.

After all, the town sports two, not one, history museums; a monument to its days as a Pony Express station; a municipal light building that commemorates Julesburg’s century-old, community-owned electric utility, and a lyrical sign about the town’s role in Colorado’s history—as gateway on the route west for travelers by foot and wagon, then rail and auto.

But the gloriously restored Hippodrome Theatre at 215 Cedar Street offers a message of hope, not despair, about Julesburg today. Built in 1919 at a cost of $10,000, the Hippodrome failed as a 500-seat movie theater and closed 2 ½ years later. The theater survived a name change and a variety of owners until 1996 when it was reborn as the Hippodrome Arts Centre, a nonprofit intended to serve as a multicultural center as well as a 162-seat theater showing newly released films each weekend for $5 (free if you’re 4 or under).

The theater’s restoration has not been completed, but the Hippodrome Community Players envision performing there several times a year. Next month the theater will host the Missoula Children’s Theatre for live performances. An annual fund-raiser helps subsidize such events.

The Hippodrome Theatre in Julesburg

One hundred and twenty volunteers—high school students, farmers, sorority sisters and bankers called “Hipp Helpers”—staff the movie theater, usually one night a month. Their pay for the night is free popcorn, soda and a ticket to the show.

Sherri Hinde, volunteer coordinator as well as bookkeeper for her husband’s machine and welding shop, says, “If it were not for the volunteers the Hippodrome would not exist.” But it does exist as a wonderful example of what a community can do to help itself.

Loren Ghiglione

Rev. Paul J. Colling, a vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island Diocese

“The writing was on the wall,” says Rev. Paul J. Colling, the 54-year-old pastor of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, Lexington, Nebraska, who also serves as vicar for Hispanic issues for the Grand Island diocese, 50,000 square miles of Nebraska that extends north to South Dakota and west to Wyoming. He remembers the life-or-death decision faced by the region’s small towns.

They could remain virtually 100 percent white, a choice favored by many residents, and lose their few factories to plants in other towns that welcomed low-pay, nonunion workers, a majority of them immigrants. Or the communities could try to avoid becoming ghost towns by supporting the hiring of workers who would make local factories more competitive. In Lexington, population 10,000, “city leaders said, ‘This is what we gotta do if we’re going to survive,’” Colling recalls.

So immigrants arrived in Lexington, home to an IBP (now Tyson Fresh Meats) beef processing plant, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, finally by the thousands. The town became ethnically 63 percent Hispanic, 37 percent non-Hispanic, with also an estimated 1,300 to 3,000 Somalis (not counted fully in the 2010 census).

When the immigrants—Mexicans, Guatemalan Indians, Cubans, Colombians, El Salvadorans and natives of numerous African nations—started arriving, many Lexington whites left for nearby towns like Johnson Lake, which grew from 531 in 1990 to 825 residents in 2000 and remains 98 percent white. The so-called white flight might not be completely attributable to the arrival of immigrants. An unpleasant odor, blamed on the STABL Inc. rendering plant, which converts dead animals from farms and feedlots into such products as Happy Hound dog food, reportedly also played a role.

Colling says that while prejudice still exists in Lexington he believes the community comparatively “is really, really open.” He says the town now attracts whites because of its diversity. If you walk along Washington Street, the main business thoroughfare, you can choose from not only from the usual downtown businesses but also a Somali restaurant, two importers of Mexican and Latin American goods, two Chinese restaurants and African International Food Market.

The diversity does not necessarily mean people mix. At lunchtime, Madeline’s Café & Bakery has 17 white female customers and, two doors away, Freddy’s, a Somali restaurant, has four black male customers. Colling tries at St. Ann’s, which has two masses in English and two in Spanish, “to help the community blend as much as I can.”

He delights in the local July 4 parade that features Mexican-Americans riding their dancing horses. He encourages whites to experience the Our Lady of Guadalupe Fiesta, with its Mexican dancers wearing traditional, hand-made costumes. And he applauds the efforts by Tyson Fresh Meats to accommodate the cultures of workers who, for example, attach great significance to funerals: “They’ll just leave and can be gone for a week.”

But tough challenges remain, he says. He bemoans the closing of Haven House, a shelter for people who arrived in town virtually penniless, looking for work. He says his church is undertaking a feasibility study for the establishment of an immigration office for the parish.

He encourages us to talk with other Lexington residents. We are curious about the impact of the town’s meatpacking plant on its workers. It’s hard not to see the immigrant workers at Tyson as the twenty-first century equivalent of Jurgis Rudkus, the devastated Lithuanian immigrant in Upton Sinclair’s classic 1906 novel, The Jungle, about meatpacking in Chicago.

Ana Maria Hermosillo

But Ana Maria Hermosillo, 45, whose husband worked in Lexington’s plant, has a different view. She worries about immigrants now “applying but not being called” by Tyson. She fears for the future, pointing to the cut in workers’ hours at the plant, from 48 hours to 37 hours. Work at the plant may be repetitive and it may be exhausting, but she believes that the alternative, work in the fields, “that’s the hard work.”

Loren Ghiglione

After Matthew Shepard’s bloodied and frozen body was found tied to a buck fence on October 7, 1998, the city of Laramie, Wyo., changed the names of the streets.

On a wintry day, at the intersection of Pilot Peak and Snowy View Roads, the sky and the snow-covered ground appeared to have no boundary in the Equality State. The desolation of the place 13 years after the murder could be felt despite the houses in the distance.

At 21, Matthew Shepard, 5’2” and 102 lbs, met two Laramie men who were pretending to be gay at a local bar. Planning to rob Shepard, Aaron McKinney, 22, and Russell Henderson, 21, held their victim at gunpoint and took his wallet containing $20. After driving Shepard away from Laramie and tying him to a fence in an isolated area, the two men continued to beat him and finally left him to die.

18 hours later, a cyclist found Shepard’s body. The police officer who responded to the 911 call testified, “Though his face was caked in blood, his face was clean where streaks of tears had washed the blood away.”

Due to the efforts of resistant residents, there is no marker or memorial in Laramie to commemorate Shepard’s murder.

Our last night on this amazing Twain adventure. I encountered some fire spinners at the top of the hill at Gas Works Park in Seattle. It’s hard to derive symbolism from these images, so I didn’t even try.

Lastly, here is an article the Seattle Times published about our odyssey the next day.

Thanks for following us these past three months. I won’t ever forget this.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

Today is Samuel Clemens’ 176th birthday. And, consequently, another reason for us to order dessert.

Alyssa

That’s 13,500 miles.

Alyssa

“A cross-country road trip in a crowded van might conjure images of Little Miss Sunshine. Replace the mute brother, drug-addled grandpa, precocious 7-year-old, and eccentric parents with a 70-year-old journalist turned professor, a recent Medill grad putting off a career, and a current journalism student looking for the thrills of the open road and you’ll have the “Twain Trip” — sort of.”

Continue reading here.

Our visit to Marion, Indiana was sobering and tense. The last lynching in the North happened here on August 7, 1930, an event immortalized by Lawrence Beitler’s photograph, Abel Meeropol’s political poem and Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in song. In the video, Bill Munn, a local historian, shows us the building where the lynching was planned and two Marion high school seniors, Evan Munn and Meredith Kuczora, meditate on their hometown’s history.

Video by Dan

The Marion lynchings, August 1930

Whatever the upbringing of Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) in slave-state Missouri, he was a critic of lynching by adulthood. In “Only a Nigger,”—an August 26, 1869, Buffalo Express column attributed to him—he told of the rape of a white woman in Memphis, for which “an avenging mob” hanged a black man, only to have another confess his guilt.

“Ah, well! Too bad to be sure! A little blunder in the administration of justice by Southern mob-law, but nothing to speak of,” wrote Twain, “Only ‘a nigger’ killed by mistake—that’s all.”

In “The United States of Lyncherdom,” not published until after Twain’s death, he wrote about a Missouri lynching following the murder of a young white woman. Twain tried to understand the “moral cowardice” that led a good man, “afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval,” to join in, even joke about and revel in lynchings.

We too wanted to understand lynchings. So we detoured on our drive from Chicago to Cleveland to visit Marion, Indiana, site of August 7, 1930, lynchings, reportedly the last in the North.

We met with William Munn, Taylor University history professor and Grant County historian, who took us to a small church at Eighteenth and Meridian in Marion. There white workers, some Ku Kluxers, from nearby Superior Body (what irony in that name) plotted to pull three black teenagers out of the Grant County jail and lynch them from trees in front of the county courthouse.

The teenagers had been accused of murdering a white man and raping a white woman. The noose was removed from the neck of one of the three, James Cameron, when a woman, by one account, shouted, “Take this boy back! He had nothing to do with any raping or killing.”

The two 1930 lynchings before thousands of whites, some of whom returned home with body parts and other souvenirs, were captured in an iconic photo. But today nothing in Marion memorializes the lynchings.

The courthouse in Marion, Ind., where the last lynching in the North reportedly took place

All of the trees in front of the courthouse have been cut down, some say to remove from view the lynching trees. Munn said, however, that the courthouse trees are cut down regularly, “so it is a little hard to make that connection.”

But not even a plaque or sign marks the spot. The only reminder at the courthouse of race relations from that era is a monument to local soldiers killed during World War I. Two names have “COL.” next to them, not for colonel, but for colored. Munn said he went to the country commissioners to have that monument changed: “They did say they would do something, but they haven’t.”

As a Marion High School history teacher until last year, Munn encouraged students to undertake ambitious writing and video projects about race. He introduced us to two Marion High School seniors, his son, Evan, and Meredith Kuczora, who had written papers for his U.S. history course that touched on the lynchings.

Kuczora recalled her disbelief at first learning about the local lynchings. She came to understand the town’s silence: “A lot of the families that were involved still live in Marion. It’s a sensitive subject.” In trying to grasp the reasoning of people who participated in lynchings she wound up writing about human ritual sacrifice.

Evan Munn looked at why no marker or monument existed “to show that we publicly observe this tragedy.” He contrasted the response to lynchings in Duluth, Minn., where a memorial was created as an expression of shame and regret, to the effective resistance of the victims’ families in Marion to a memorial.

But Munn said a 2003 Reconciliation Day—organized by black and white Marion ministers—provided a helpful healing for hundreds of citizens. A white minister apologized and asked for forgiveness on behalf of white Christians. A black minister responded: “We forgive those who failed to stand up. From this day forward, we will rise up out of the ashes of disgrace.”

Despite the efforts by many Marion residents to forget the 1930 lynchings, the photo of the lynchings moved Abel Meeropol, a Jew and Communist Party member from New York who wrote poems and songs under the gentile name of Lewis Allan, to compose “Strange Fruit.” The song was published in 1937 and memorably recorded two years later by Billie Holiday.

“She gave a startling, most dramatic, and effective interpretation which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere,” Meeropol said. “This is exactly what I wanted the song to do and why I wrote it.”

Toward the end of her life, addicted to heroin, her body wasted, Holiday hoarsely rasped the song in a way that gave dignity to her suffering and a broader meaning to the song’s words.

Jazz critic Rudi Blesh wrote, “Lynching, to Billie Holiday, meant all the cruelties, all the deaths, from the quick snap of the neck to the slow dying from all kinds of starvation.“

On our way out of town we played Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Then, after playing a Holiday jazz standard, the kind you can listen to without thinking about race or racism, we played “Strange Fruit” one last time.

The song reminded me that however much people would like to forget lynchings Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” will forever force us to remember.

Loren Ghiglione

Our 13 hours of driving begin at 7 a.m. in Chicago with Alyssa at the wheel, Dan napping and Loren reading Sunday newspapers hamster-style, ripping articles from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune (how far that paper has fallen).

On the four-hour drive to Marion, Indiana, Alyssa and Dan propose listening to CDs during our around-the-USA drive to improve ourselves—to learn, say, the Spanish language. Ah, the eager young. I’m less eager but willing, as long it doesn’t cut into sleep-to-survive time.

I ask what we should name our fuel-inefficient van (17 miles, city; 21 miles, highway). We (thanks, Alyssa and Dan) settle on Allegro III, in tribute to my father’s Allegro II fishing boat. I don’t know when my father first knew he had cancer, but toward the end of his life he got out of the wine business and used his Allegro II to follow his dream, a sports fishing business. He would fish, whether he had a customer or not.

Racial discrimination? In Marion, we eat lunch with guests at a Japanese restaurant. All of us have to ask for chopsticks. Except for Dan, who is handed them without asking.

We visit the county courthouse in the center of downtown Marion, site of 1930 lynchings, reportedly the last in the North. I don’t see a step. My swan dive to the pavement leaves me with no injuries, just ripped pants and a scraped left knee. But my new Nikon is suddenly a three-piece camera, ready for the repair shop.

We interview John “Tony” Ghiglione in Medina, Ohio, who asks me if I know what “Tony” stands for. I don’t. He says Italian immigrants insisted it stood for “To New York,” entry point to a better life in America.

At our hotel near the Cleveland airport I spend two hours catching up with e-mails. The most interesting: an ephemera collector in Brattleboro, Vt., volunteers to explain America’s personality, based on his collection; a Twainiac in NYC shows us his website map of Twain locations across the United States.

Two Mark Twain experts confirm that the father of a family friend really did interview Twain in his long johns in 1895 in Seattle, the last stop in our 12,000-mile journey, I used to say 9,000-mile, but we’re driving a lot more miles than I anticipated. We may hit 15,000 miles before returning to campus.

Loren Ghiglione

Connie Ritter

Smiles and laughter come easily to Connie Ritter, 61, the second of 10 children born and raised in Monroe City, Missouri. But her face turns stern when she recalls the playground beside the Mark Twain birthplace museum in Florida, Missouri. She and other African American children played there, but they never entered the museum. “No one ever told us we couldn’t go inside. But we knew we couldn’t go inside. And now I work here.”

Ritter makes clear that times have changed in her 16 years at the museum, now part of Mark Twain State Park. More African Americans are employed at Missouri’s state parks. She has been promoted from tour guide through several positions to interpretative research specialist II. For a year, she served as acting administrator. “But that doesn’t help your mind and heart change. It’s a struggle to forget so you can heal.”

She says that, at the beginning, “Mark Twain wasn’t my cup of tea. I hated Mark Twain.” Why? “Because of Nigger Jim” in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “It took me awhile to understand what I understand about Huck Finn now” as an assault on racism. Today she cannot get enough of Twain: “I want to learn more. I want to learn more.”

Ritter has helped make clear the role of slavery in the area. Beginning last year, the museum introduced a display panel on slavery. Missouri, as the only slaveholding state west of the Mississippi, attracted slaveholding families from the East and South. All of the grandparents of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) owned slaves.

His parents, at the time of their marriage in Kentucky in 1823, owned six slaves. By 1835, the year of Samuel Clemens’ birth in Florida, Missouri, they had sold five of them. The family kept only Jennie, a slave who was flogged by Clemens’ mother for insubordination. The panel includes a quote from Frederick Douglass: “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”

The house Mark Twain was born in

Ritter says it is important to tell people the role and reality of slavery in an area of Missouri known as “Little Dixie.” The display’s reproduction ball & chain—a foot-wide, 7 ¾-lb. ball attached by a short chain to a slave’s ankle—makes clear the virtual impossibility of a slave picking up the ball and walking with it. “I can’t think of good slavery,” says Ritter. “I just can’t.”

Ritter, a divorced widow, has begun exploring the roots of her parents’ families, including the Summervilles, who may have changed their name to Summer to shed their slaveholding family’s name. She recalls asking her great-grandmother whether the family had come from slaves. “That was the wrong question. They don’t want us to talk about it,” Ritter says.

That attitude of former slaves and their descendants toward telling the truth about their past reminds Ritter of interviewing African Americans who worked on Mark Twain State Park as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal public works program for unemployed, unmarried men, 18 to 35, from relief families. “They didn’t want to talk on tape,” she says. “They told people what they wanted to hear. They weren’t being honest.”

The danger, says Ritter, is that “talking good”—the lie, not the reality—“becomes your memory.” Fantasy replaces fact. Ritter seems determined to not let that happen at the Mark Twain birthplace museum.

Loren

Dave Smith

When Dave Smith, 59, was a boy, he used to sled down the backside of 10-story-tall Monks Mound. The same Monks Mound, from which 1,000 years ago a Native American chief ruled a six-square-mile community of 10,000 to 20,000, larger in its day than the city of London.

Now Smith, a school social worker, shows the mound more respect as a part-time guide for the 69 (of the original 120) mounds that comprise Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Ill., 13 miles east of St. Louis. The mounds, he says, were constructed by humans with stone hoes and baskets to cart the dirt, unaided by pack animals or wheels.

Today at Cahokia, those of us who take notes have been requested to wear badges around our necks that announce “Writing Permit.”

Cahokia Mounds

“Preservation,” Smith says, “is a process.” Only in recent decades have area residents come to appreciate fully the monumental earthen pyramids of Cahokia, a community born in about 700 A.D. that blossomed into the greatest metropolis in North America north of Mexico. An agricultural society, the Mississippians traded surplus corn for copper and sea shells in a network that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Ozarks.

Mound 72, only six feet high, revealed during a 1967-1971 excavation the remains of 300 humans—their flesh allowed, says Smith, “to rot off bones until they buried you.” Among those excavated were the chief, buried on a bed of shells from the Gulf of Mexico; several men absent their hands and heads; and women, perhaps wives of the chief, buried carefully on top of one another. “Women didn’t seem to do very well in this society,” Smith says.

What caused the population to vanish by about 1300? That’s a mystery, but Smith lists some of the possible culprits: climate change, internal strife, conflict with other groups, depletion of resources, soil exhaustion (growing corn in one place for 300 years without fertilizer or irrigation), pollution from thousands of 24-hour campfires and disease.

Some theories as to the cause of Cahokia’s disappearance Smith politely dismisses with, “No evidence.” He recently had a visitor from China blame the population’s disappearance on Chinese explorers in North America who brought disease. Other visitors to Cahokia, Smith recalls, kept looking for landing sites on the mounds and blamed the community’s death on aliens.

Alyssa's room

Fitting three months of stuff into two suitcases is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated.

Top hat twins Mark Twain and Loren Ghiglione

Food cooler for the van, check. Extra batteries for cameras, check. Twain hat for head, check.

Well, okay, a Twain hat isn’t normally regarded as essential for a three-month trip, but I’m a hat guy. My favorites are a wide-brimmed straw with a pink band for summers and a wide-brimmed, dark-green Borsalino for winters (wide-brimmed goes with the name Ghiglione).

Twain moved from the small-town world of straw hats to the big-city world of bowlers and top hats. He looked great in all of them. As the accompanying photos indicate, he was absolutely regal in his top hat; I’m ridiculous in mine.

So I visited Hats Plus Ltd. in Chicago, which advertises it has 35,000 men’s hats to sell. I was in search of a different kind of Twain hat, one that really represented his world but made sense for a 21st-century traveler who wants to shield his bald pate from sun, rain and snow.

Store manager Tod Canon, 49, said hats are returning to favor, though he doesn’t anticipate they will regain their status of the 1920s, when virtually every man wore a fedora. Canon cites a bare-headed President John F. Kennedy, the advent of low-ceilinged automobiles and today’s less formal dress culture as the culprits.

I settled on a $25 black fisherman’s cap, made in Greece, as my Twain hat. He wore a similar cap on river and ocean journeys. And, by the way, who’s to say a cap or hat isn’t essential in its own way.

Twain told a story during an address in England in 1907 about being at a luncheon party with an Archdeacon Wilberforce who had to leave earlier than Twain and took Twain’s hat by mistake. When Twain left the luncheon the archdeacon’s hat was the only one left that would fit him. So he took it.

Twain described what then happened: The archdeacon wrote him “saying it was pleasant that all the way home, whenever he met anybody his gravities, his solemnities, his deep thoughts, his eloquent remarks were all snatched up by the people he met, and mistaken for brilliant humorisms. I had another experience….I was received with a deference which was entirely foreign to my experience by everybody whom I met, so that before I got home I had a much higher opinion of myself than I have ever had before or since.” When Twain took his newly acquired hat in to be ironed, the proprietor refused to charge him, saying that he did not charge the clergy anything.

Well, even if the hat doesn’t make the man, it covers up part of your body, which Twain insisted is a plus. “Naked people,” he explained, “have little or no influence on society.”

We hopped on our Harleys, revved our engines, as 17-year-olds are wont to do, and roared east on US Route 36 from Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s hometown, weaving past cars and trucks and then, alone on the open road, blasting toward New York City at 90 mph.

Okay, that was my pre-trip dream about how this trip would begin.  I blame the dream on memories of the 1969 movie “Easy Rider,” in which Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) ride America’s roads aboard Harley choppers, and on recent visits to my 43-year-old, Evanston, Illinois, auto mechanic, Jake the Snake Jakofsky, who miraculously keeps our 20-year-old wheezer of a Jeep Cherokee alive.

Jake the Snake

Except for the black, week-old stubble and beard covering his cheeks and chin, Jake doesn’t look like the stereotypical biker.  He is short and slightly pudgy, not mammoth and muscled.  He sports no tattoos.  His tiny, multicolor yarmulke precariously perches atop his Jewfro, which features a foot-long pony tail.  But Jake parks his spotless ’95 black Harley (he also owns a 2010 “Fat Boy” Harley) across the front of his garage, as if to tell you where his heart is.

He rode his first motorcycle at age 10.  He bought his first new one at 15.  When I ogled his Harley with its “Live to ride, ride to live” motto engraved in its spit-shiny silver, he smiled at his motorcycle: “It’s freedom.  It’s flying.  You should get one, it’s never too late.”

Well, it was too late to drive Harleys across America with Twain.  Twain did travel from Hannibal to New York City at age 17, but by stagecoach, train and steamboat in 1853.  He died in 1910.  And on my last birthday, I was not 17, but 70, what Twain called the scriptural statute of limitations.

So this three-month, 9,000-mile trip across Twain’s America will really begin not on a Harley or in a vehicle made for the movies or dreams.  Not in the cherry-red ’68 Cadillac convertible that poet and public radio commentator Andrei Codrescu drove for his book Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century (1993).

Not in John Steinbeck’s Rocinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse, the custom pickup truck-camper that starred in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962).  Not in Ken Kesey’s and the Merry Pranksters’ “magic” 1939 school bus—painted psychedelic colors, wired with sound equipment and cameras and outfitted with bunk beds and a fridge full of LSD-laced orange juice—that crossed the country in 1964 to go, as the misseplled word painted on the destination placard said, “furthur.”

No, we will be driving an off-the-shelf, black Dodge Grand Caravan from the Northwestern University motor pool.  But we Twainiacs are planning to customize our van, turning it into a Twainmobile.  Headshots of white-haired Twain will soon adorn the side panels.  And on the rear of the van, in large letters, will be a Twain quote.  I first thought of using: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.”

But that Twain quote is too long.  So we’re planning to use a pithier one: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Loren Ghiglione