Metal-Tribune Silver Butterfly 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 7-May-24 this trackable had survived for 3.1 years and had been moved by 8 cachers, for an average drop every 141 days, or 2.6 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 the state than that.  The wheat grown there feeds the world, and the people are really nice.

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.

Having grown up near Tribune, and having worked in the community, some of what is written in Wikipedia is at variance with what I learned about the town and county. Horace Greely of the New York Tribune, famously encouraged western settlement with the motto "Go West, young man."  Tribune and Greely couny are both named in his honor. However, so also is the tiny community of Horace, a few miles west of Tribune. While it may true that the railroad depot was built in in Tribune in 1887, the original railroad town was Horace, which was the larger community of the time. There was a dispute over which community would be the county seat (maybe there was gunfire involved) and Tribune won out.  In my youth, Horace existed only to serve the changing railroad crews...there was a YMCA boarding house for overnighting crews and across the street was a small cafe that served up monster steaks.