Star-Journbal Editor
While most kids at Goessel Elementary School were eating lunch at the cafeteria Friday, 11 fortunate fifth graders and their teacher went out for their noontime meal.
They rode the yellow school bus about five miles north on dusty back roads and parked.
But before they could get off the bus, the aroma of something mouthwatering and wonderful, like barbecue, only better, blew in with the breeze.
These boys and girls had traveled only five miles in distance, but about 170 years back in time, to an authentic pioneer campground, which, until this moment, they'd only read about in history books in their class, taught by Ilena Abrahams.
It was realistic. There were covered wagons and pioneer men and women. And, best of all, it was almost time for chow.
It was a beautiful day for a picnic at the ranch property of Leroy and Nancy Schmidt, who, along with their partners, John and Wilma Hybsha, own and operate an authentic pioneer experience called the Osage Mule Company. And, it was a fairly good day for Abrahams to show her students what life on the prairie was like back during the overland migration of the mid — 1800's, when thousands of wagons filled with family's life possessions and food stuffs cut ruts that still can be seen on the trail that pioneers traveled across Marion County.
"We've just completed a reading unit book called 'Bound to Oregon'," Abrahams said. "So this is a culminating activity for that. This is the fifth year we've come out here. It gives the students a chance to experience a little of it for themselves, and to see what the prairie grasses would have been like and what they would have traveled through."
The campground included a couple of real covered wagons, a chuckwagon, and two large campfires in the middle with fires gone to coal.
Nancy and Wilma were setting out the food on long tables, still in the pans and kettles it was cooked in. Vegetable soup, western-style chili, cornbread, and muffins; all the fixin's for an authentic pioneer meal, prepared and cooked the authentic prairie way.
"We do everything from scratch," Nancy said, cooking meat and chopping vegetables. (She did open a can of beans for the chili, she said.)
"It takes hours to prepare a dinner like this one. We started the fires well beforehand because it takes a long time to get the coals just right to bake with."
"It's a lot of mixing and stirring, but no recipes. I just stir stuff together and keep tasting."
When it comes to campfire cooking, Nancy follows Wilma's lead around the chuck wagon. Wilma used to be the head cook for Flint Hills Overland Wagon Train.
It was a few minutes before dinner, so Leroy and John took the students to the mule barn, to watch them harness the mules that would be pulling the wagon.
Leroy showed them the leather straps and buckles and what not, while John made sure they stayed far away from the ornery mule's backsides. There would be no kids kicked into kingdom come.
The dinner call brought boys and girls running down the lane and into the chow line, after washing up in a real washtub. The lids were taken off the kettles and everything smelled divine. The cooks ladled chili or vegetable soup into Styrofoam bowls, and put butter and honey on the hot corn bread or muffin.
The students climbed up into the covered wagon to eat, and it seemed like almost everyone went back for seconds.
There were still two iron pots buried in the coals, but the cooks said they weren't ready.
The students sat on the ground just in front of the wagons as their teacher read aloud a story about life on the prairie.
One of the students, Kara Schmucker, lives on a farm, but there are no mules.
"We just have a miniature horse about three feet tall," Kara said. "It couldn't pull much."
She'd never had food cooked like that before, she said, adding that she really liked the vegetable soup.
Asked if she thought it would have been fun to be a child on a wagon train, her answer revealed that she'd been paying attention in class.
"Sometimes I think it would be fun," she said. "The fun part would be riding on the wagon just for fun. The bad part would be suffering from death and stuff."
About that time Leroy led the mules over and tried to hook them up to the wagon. But the mules had other ideas. The kids watched as it took several minutes of shouting in mule talk before the mules were finally hitched.
It was another lesson for student Brooke Holloway, who said the pioneers would've certainly preferred to have their horsepower under the hood of a car, controlled by an ignition key.
Minutes later 10 boys and girls were loaded in the seats in the back of the wagon. Leroy was in the driver's seat, and Mark Schmidt had the privilege of riding shotgun.
In his rumpled cowboy hat and rugged beard, Leroy Schmidt looks every bit like a mule driver of old. Only the high-tech walkie-talkie fastened to his overalls and his photosensitive glasses connect him to today's world.
Schmidt loves to pass along the experiences of pioneer living to students from Abraham's class because they always come prepared with great questions.
"A kid asked a question from a book he'd been reading about a kid jumping out of the wagon out the brake block, and he wanted to see one," he said. "Another kid wanted to know what it meant to have a break on the last notch, and we showed him."
The wagon rolled from the campsite onto the road and about a half mile to a clearing that led to a dry creek bed. Children imagined what it was like to cross running rivers. Then they cut through a couple of fields of authentic Kansas prairie, untouched by the plow.
When the wagon came back to camp, the iron pots had been taken off the coals. It was time for dessert. Baked apple cobbler in one, cherry in the other. A treat the pioneers didn't have very often.
Life wasn't a Styrofoam bowl of cherry cobbler. To show the students what it was really like, Nancy brought out a photograph taken of a real pioneer family, obviously tired after a long day. The children were barefoot.
After two hours on the Pioneer trail, it was time to go five miles back to school; and back to a world filled with all the modern conveniences, television, video games, computers and cell phones. Come to think of it, maybe not everything was so bad for children on the pioneer trail after all.
