An initial trail trip - The Butterfield Stage route

In the summer of 1999, I started out with my friend Wirt Kerr on a trip in which we intended to follow the Butterfield stage route as far east as we could in the time we had.  I recall driving from Oakland south on the Nimitz Freeway, then continuing south on El Camino Real to the Pacheco Pass area where we crossed into the Central Valley.  The exact route we took down the Central valley escapes my memory, but I do remember passing through one small town, between Hwy 99 and IS5, in which there was a auto repair facility called something like the Butterfield Car Repair Service.  This is the first of many such memorials to the longest surface mail route ever established. We traveled south through the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapis through Riverside and San Diego County until we got to Temecula when we first saw a few true sights remembering the Butterfield Stage Line.  You can trace the route of our trip, and see some of the photographs taken along the way, on this map.

(Note you can enlarge the map to separate the markers if necessary.  Or you can click the list of markers on the left - the first one being Temecula.  Links to this map, or similar ones, will be found throughout these entries.  If you want to print any of the pictures, open an image from the thumbnails, right click on the image, and click the image size you want to capture.  On the next screen you can change the image size if you wish; otherwise right click and then COPY the image to paste into a document, SAVE the link to send the link in an email, or SAVE the image on your computer.)


Unfortunately my sense of history in 1999 was not as well-developed as it is now - I had only been a History Docent at the Oakland Museum for three years when I took this trip. Consequently, I did not document the trip or the photographs very thoroughly. Also, the ability to document nowadays is much easier: Cameras have day, date, geolocation, and much other information automatically saved with the image file. Information about places is much more readily available now than it was in 1999.


For example, one of the the pictures I took was of a sign welcoming us to a place called, Steins, New Mexico. It was a ratty old sign that was obviously old, but I did not know anything about it when I was there in 1999. Now, just Google "Steins New Mexico" and you find out in three microseconds that it is a ghost town that was on the Southern Pacific rail line, You can find more information about Steins by clicking here. With other pictures in this set I deduced where they were taken by clues in the pictures (Street names), dates (recorded on the APS camera I used to take the picture, but not part of the negative), the sequence of roll and frame numbers that are shown on the contact sheets that were provided when APS negatives were developed, and which I saved.


So, even though I am not entirely sure what each photograph shows, I am pretty sure I have them in the right states, at least, and in the right sequence of how they were taken. In the process of learning this blog business and how to link photos to maps showing where they were taken, I have explored a variety of photo sharing sites, and rejected most of them. Picasa and its owner Google I rejected because to see the photos it is necessary to have a Google+ app. Photobucket and Instagram I looked at briefly, but the both seem to be predicated on the idea that you want to share all your photographs, at least, everyone in your address book - which I do not want to do. I thought of using Drop Box, but that does not offer a way to  view the images directly. I thought of making web pages using Thumbs Plus, which I did 15 years ago, but you can only see on picture at a time and at the chosen display size. So I ended up where I started, Flikr.


I like Flikr: The display is accessible by anyone with whom I share a link. And just using that link the person cannot browse any further than the photos in that link. Two problems with Flikr:  You cannot print a photo directly from Flikr, and you cannot add a link to a text file associated with the image. Maybe both of those problems are soluble, but I don't see how at the moment.


So, at least for now, I am using Flikr to store the images in individual sets, Google+ to store a single image for each photo set and for the image in the marker on the Google map.


I guess for now what I will do to provide more information about places is to put the link in the blog, and maybe a note in the photo description that a link exists.  For example, here is a picture I took and and some relevent text:

NO. 793 SAN FELIPE VALLEY AND STAGE STATION - Here the southern trail of explorers, trappers, soldiers, and emigrants crossed ancient trade routes of Kamia, Cahuilla, Diegueno, and Luiseño Indians. On the flat southwest across the creek, Warren F. Hall built and operated the San Felipe home station of the Butterfield Mail, which operated from 1858 to 1861. Later the station was used by Banning Stages and by the military during the Civil War.
Location:  On County Hwy S2 (P.M. 15.9), 0.9 mi NW of intersection of State Hwy 78, near Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (text from http://tinyurl.com/l4z8tgw)

and here are a couple of links to information on the web:

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25066

http://www.militarymuseum.org/SanPasqual.html

Check back with me after May 28 as we start our trip along the Oregon Trail route between Oregon City and Kansas City, or as far east as we can get in order to return to California by the third week in June.