Getting your player ready...
The winner: Jere DeBacker, Denver: My two great-great aunts, Ella Butterfield and Maude Butterfield Wilson, were at the dedication of the plaque in 1936 though the Smoky Hill Trail Pioneer Monument and Fountain was built in 1911. I still have the program from the 1936 event. My great-great grandfather, David A. Butterfield, operated the Butterfield Overland Dispatch from Atchison, Kan., to Denver in 1865. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of freight were shipped over the Smoky Hill Trail on the B.O.D. before the first passengers arrived on the new Concord stage coach on Sept. 23, 1865.
