Metal-Medicine Lodge Silver Laser-Cut Gear TB

I maintain records on my trackables. They have the goal to circulate more than five years and to be moved by at least 25 cachers. That is a target rate of five drops per year for five years, or a drop every 73 days. The average drop rate of my trackables in the US is 124 days, in Europe it is 71 days. As of 31-Mar-24 this trackable had survived for 2.0 years and had been moved by 4 cachers, for an average drop every 185 days, or 2.0 drops per year. Please keep it moving, then drop it in a safe place!

No permission is needed to leave the U.S. While in the U.S., please drop it at an event, in a Premium Member only OR a rural cache near a busy trail or road. Do not place it in an urban, non-premium cache. Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and dry, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items. Otherwise, take the trackable anywhere you wish.

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 Kansas than that. The wheat grown there feeds the world, and the people are nice. Each trackable in this series of metal travel bugs is named for Kansas towns with interesting names or histories, some of which have connections to my youth.

Medicine Lodge is a city in and the county seat of Barber County, in the south-central part of the state. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 2,009.

The particular medicine lodge, mystery house or sacred tabernacle from which the Medicine Lodge River received its name was in reality an arbor-like shelter of tree trunks and leafy branches which was erected by the Kiowa people for the celebration of their annual sun dance in the summer of 1866. It was in the valley of the Medicine Lodge River, several miles below the present town of Medicine Lodge, which is at the mouth of Elm Creek. In their own language, the Kiowa people called this stream A-ya-dalda P’a, meaning "Timber-hill River." The Kiowa had considered the site sacred due to the high content of Epsom salts in the river.

In October 1867, the Medicine Lodge Treaty was a set of three treaties signed between the United States and the Kiowa, Comanche, Plains Apache, Southern Cheyenne, and Southern Arapaho. The site of the Peace Council camp was about three miles above that of the future town and on the same side of the river. A Peace Treaty Pageant, first presented in 1927 in an outdoor amphitheater on a quarter section of Kansas prairie, commemorates this significant event in Western history.

Settlers led by a man named John Hutchinson founded the town of Medicine Lodge north of the confluence of Elm Creek and the Medicine Lodge River in February 1873. The community grew rapidly with a hotel, stores, and a post office established within a year. The next year, in response to Native raids in the region, residents and the state militia constructed a stockade. A group of Osage killed three settlers within a few miles of the compound, but no direct attack on the fortifications occurred.

Temperance activist Carrie Nation launched her crusade against the sale of alcohol while living in Medicine Lodge in 1900. Her home and a reproduction of the 1873 stockade are open to the public.