LARAMIE - "The stars seemed to get brighter the more we climbed the High Plains. We were in Wyoming now. … As the truck reached the outskirts of Cheyenne we saw the high red lights of the local radio station, and suddenly we were bucking through a great crowd of people that poured along both sidewalks. 'Hell's bells, it's Wild West Week,' said Slim."

That's how Jack Kerouac, an unknown 25-year-old writer from the East, described his entry into Cheyenne in July 1947 in his book called "On the Road," which was first published 10 years later and became an icon of American literature.

Kerouac was on his way to Denver to meet some rowdy, non-mainstream friends who were having a big post-war time in the Colorado capital, including a Columbia classmate named Allen Ginsberg.

As part of a Wyoming Humanities Council book discussion program on the Beat Generation writers, 30 Wyomingites Sunday went "on the road" themselves by bus from Cheyenne to Denver, retracing the path followed by Kerouac to the streets and bars of Larimer Street in lower downtown Denver.

They were accompanied on the bus and the streets by Audrey Sprenger, a Denver Public Library cultural programmer who will soon move to Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Mass., to write an authorized biography of the writer.

The program is sponsoring discussion groups in Casper, Lusk, Laramie and Cheyenne this summer, with about 80 participants reading Kerouac, Ginsberg and William Burroughs, according to Jenny Ingram, the Humanities Council staffer in Laramie who organized the program.

University of Wyoming poetry professor Craig Arnold led a group of poets from Denver and Wyoming to Lusk, Casper and Cheyenne a week ago for "poetry slams."

Marcia Britton, council director in Cheyenne, was among the group in Denver Sunday. She and Ingram both said they were pleased with the program because it had attracted interest from all age groups and both genders. Britton said the program was developed by the council in Wyoming but was funded by federal dollars.

Speaking from the front of the bus, Sprenger told the group that Kerouac's book about transcontinental travel - with a lot of booze, drugs and promiscuity thrown in - "caused an incredible stir" when it was published in 1957.

"It wasn't so much the traveling that brought it a lasting recognition," she said. "It was about recognizing the hobos who traveled the nomadic lifestyle, about recognizing the migrant workers in California, and the subculture of musicians who were playing in juke joints in inner cities all across the country. It was about tapping into the rhythms of America and recognizing America's own spiritual self-worth."

The readers and walkers in Denver Sunday were all pleased with the program.

Lynn Swearingen, a UW ID-card staffer who also teaches courses on American Indian literature on occasion, said the Beat reading project has given her "a sense of the history of the time and the people. It's expanded the view I had of that time, which was dominated by the 'Leave It To Beaver' television shows. I've gotten a better understanding of the people who came back from World War II."

Miranda Webster, a Laramie resident majoring in mass cultural studies at a college in Oregon, said she had first learned about Kerouac in her ninth-grade history text and had started reading the Beats at that time. She said the program provided "an enrichment of the community in the arts in expressive ways. Not only do you meet people in the community, but you learn so much."

William Streib, a retired Iowa engineering professor who now lives in Laramie, said the program is valuable "because we have a very complex culture in American today.

"Many of us see only our own culture, and there are so many ideas elsewhere if you look," he said. "We need a world where we're seeing broad views of things."

Diane Wolverton of Laramie, a UW economic development outreach specialist, said Kerouac and the other writers can help present generations solve problems "by giving us a look into the minds of people who are cracking through the paradigms of their time."

Kathleen Urban, a Cheyenne attorney and council board member, said the program gave her an opportunity to retrieve the books she had first read in college in the 1960s "and read my old margin notes."