Metal-Lyons Gold Butterfly TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S.  Travel bug photos included with the logs will be posted here. 

While I have lived in Texas for nearly 50 years, I was born and grew to an adult in Kansas.  When I tell someone of my origins, they almost always respond in one of two ways:  “I have been there but I don’t remember much about it” or “that 400 mile drive across the state on Interstate 70 is really boring.”  There is more to the state than that.  The wheat grown there feeds the world, and the people are nice, but I will focus on the sometimes lawless history of the state.

Kansas achieved statehood in 1861, but it was far from civilized.  From 1850 until 1900 the region was a frontier, and at the center of important events in US history:  there was the westward movement of pioneers from Europe and the eastern US and the subsequent conflicts with Native Americans; the Santa Fe Trail crossed the state and the Pony Express and the Oregon Trail passed through a corner; there was a border war because Kansas was a free state and a center of the abolitionist movement, whereas neighboring Missouri was a slave state; and finally the several new railroads were extending westward into hostile territory and furthermore some of the railheads were the destinations of cattle drives from Texas.  Each trackable in this series of metal travel bugs is named for towns with interesting histories (at least to me), some of which have connections to my youth.

Lyons is the farthest north the Spanish explorer Coronado reached in his quest for the Seven Cities of Gold.  West of town is a cross commemorating Juan de Padilla, a member of Coronado's expedition, who returned the following year as a missionary.  He was killed in 1542 by Native Americans after establishing a church in the area.  He is considered the first Christian martyr in North America.  Main Street in Lyons is on the old Santa Fe Trail.

We move to Lyons in 1943, while my dad was in the Navy.  After he returned home he worked as a mechanic for the Hudson dealer.  You have to be over 70 or under 12 (from the movie Cars) to have heard of that make of automobile.  I am told I was a serious explorer as a 4 and 5-year-old.  Some of my earliest memories are of finding ways to escape the house and walking the five blocks to the town square.  Other fond memories of that square are the court house, the drug store that served ice cream, a photo studio that my mother would take us to, a tamale vendor on summer evenings and my aunt teaching me the words to Mairzy Doats.