34 Nebraskaland • June 2023
his is our experience crossing Platte River; the meanest
of rivers — broad, shallow, fi shless, snakeful, quicksand
bars and muddy waters — the stage rumbles over the
bottom like on a bed of rock; yet haste must be made
to eff ect a crossing, else you disappear beneath its turbid
waters, and your doom is certain," so reads an 1862 emigrant
diary quoted by historian Merrill Mattes in his landmark
book, The Great Platte River Road.
Mattes writes that some travelers referred to the "Coast of
the Platte" because the broad river on its sandy bed looked
almost like an ocean shoreline in the distance. He quotes a
traveler named James Evans who saw the river swollen with
spring rains and snowmelt:
"From the sandhills, it had the appearance of a great inland
By David L. Bristow, History Nebraska
'T
1886 map showing where to ford the Platte. HISTORY NEBRASKA, RG2102-1-5
Crossing the Platte,
'the meanest of rivers'