Buffalo, the Pawnee and an Old Story on a Trip Across the Plains

(NYTimes) One of the most adrenaline-fueled vacations in American history took place in August 1872, when a young New Yorker named George Bird Grinnell boarded a train at Grand Central Depot for the era’s hot new travel destination — Nebraska. While most Gilded Age travelers preferred to immerse themselves in the Old World pleasures of Paris and Venice, the 22-year-old Grinnell was one of a new breed of nature-lovers who chose to take rugged, and often dangerous, excursions into the Western wilderness, usually for the purpose of hunting and fishing. Now Grinnell was taking America’s first “adventure travel” trend to a new cultural level: In order to experience firsthand the most romantic image of the Western frontier, he intended to join the Pawnee Nation of Plains Indians on their summer buffalo hunt through the prairies. Continued