Metal-Redwing 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 3-Jul-25 this trackable had survived for 4.3 years and had been moved by 12 cachers, for an average drop every 131 days, or 2.8 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.

Redwing (also Red Wing) is an unincorporated community in Barton County, and is 1.5 miles from the northern edge of the Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area, 6.0 miles east of Hoisington, and 7.0 miles west of Claflin. I presume it was named for the Redwing Blackbirds that nested in the nearby marsh.

We used to travel through Redwing on the way to the grandparents in Claflin and Lorraine. There were a few homes, a tavern and a postoffice that operated between 1892 and 1955. There was a grain elevator and a Missouri Pacific siding.  In my youth, beside the elevator, there was an alfalfa dehydration plant making pellets…as children we would hold our breath when we went by the facility.