"The only thing new is the history we don't know." Harry Truman
On average, museums display just 10 percent of the items in their collections. The rest remain in storage, available for research projects or future exhibitions.
The North Platte Valley Museum archive contains some fascinating bits of history that are not on display, including vintage photographs of communities in the valley and a world-class collection of Oregon-California Trail documents.
Vintage images
Image:
The
Paul & Helen Henderson Oregon Trail Research Collection
The
Paul & Helen Henderson Oregon Trail Research Collection contains photographs, maps, correspondence, documents,
books and other items. The collection arrived at the North Platte Valley Museum in 2002. Projects are ongoing to index and enter the vast collection's
contents into a database and stabilize the fragile items .
Image:
The Henderson Story
Paul Henderson became interested in history in his childhood, after finding an 1832 half dime at the site of an abandoned stage station on the Sidney-Deadwood Trail.
As a young man in the 1920s, Paul went to work for the CB&Q Railroad. Conversations with "old timers" on the railroad ignited Paul's passion for the Oregon Trail.
On layovers in Guernsey, Wyoming, the men would show him the still-visible wagon ruts and the many roughly marked pioneer graves. They gave eyewitness accounts of the wagon trains headed for Oregon. They remembered soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie and buffalo roaming the plains.
At a Historical Society meeting, Paul met Helen.
Helen had grown up near a popular Mormon pioneer camp site. She spent her childhood finding pottery shards and other relics marking the pioneers' passing.
Together, Paul and Helen, would spend every spare minute for the next 50 years walking, photographing, mapping and researching the overland trails. The couple lived in Alliance and later Bridgeport, Nebraska.
Paul retired from the railroad after 46 years and worked eight years for the Wyoming State Parks Commission.
As a sideline, the Hendersons served as cartographers, advisers in the rebuilding of historical forts, guides for documentary producers and authors, and resources for families seeking the pioneer graves of their ancestors.
In the 1920s and 30s, the Oregon Trail did not generate much excitement, but the Hendersons knew that the history needed to be preserved. Thanks to them, much of it was. Today, most of the Trail has been plowed under or built over. In many locations, the Hendersons' record, in photographs and maps, is the only visible record that survives.
Paul Henderson was not a scholar. He was known as the "Caboose Historian." He had no point to make and no theory to prove. He and Helen were simply fascinated with the history of the overland trails and the people who traveled them. Their research is characterized by the precision and meticulous detail one would expect of a scientist.
Noted Oregon Trail researcher Gregory Franzwa, author of "The Oregon Trail Revisited," said:
Throughout our research we kept running across the name Paul Henderson. ... His name started cropping up on books published in the 1930s, the latest mention in the long bibliography being in the 1950s.
We were somewhat started to find that Paul Henderson had maps on file in both the Wyoming and Nebraska historical society archives.
We remembered how disappointed we had been in the Crown maps, but we drove to Lincoln anyway, to look over Henderson's work. There they were, at a half-inch to the mile, the Oregon Trail from Independence to The Dalles, Oregon.
We studied those maps intensively. We couldn't at that time find one single flaw. And now, after having traveled the trail in its entirety, some stretches more than one, we still can't find a flaw. The work is monumental.
Today, the Henderson Trails collection is believed to be one of the most comprehensive and complete trail research tools in existence. It contains more than 375 diaries, plus guides, journals, letters from western travelers from 1805 to 1883, Henderson manuscripts from 1924 to 1975, and files of the Hendersons' notes, correspondence, hand-drawn maps, diagrams, slides and photographs.
Though the Hendersons focused on emigrant trails, they also researched closely related topics, providing scholars with a wealth of information about Native Americans, trading posts, military forts, trail cut-offs, early settlements and their founders, and pioneer graves.
Franzwa described the Henderson maps alone as "priceless," and Paul Henderson as "a one-man historical society on the trails of the American West." He wrote that the maps "are the finest by far and despite years of research by many other trail historians, his scholarship remains unchallenged."
This world-class collection is vital to any person making a serious study of western America's overland trails, and will become more important as time goes by.
North Platte Valley Museum P.O. Box 435. 900 Overland Trails Road . 11th & J . Gering, NE 69341 . 308-436-5411 . npvm@earthlink.net
Copyright 2011 North Platte Valley Historical Association. All rights reserved.
