The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  The hybridization of closely related but not exactly matched species, like horses and donkeys, produces sterile offspring, and mules cannot reproduce themselves. (Donkeys have sixty-two chromosomes; horses have sixty-four. This creates a mule with sixty-three chromosomes, preventing a full “chain” of matches that can produce an embryo.) But the contributions from the more feral side of the donkey sire more than make up for the mule’s inability to reproduce itself. Mules endure heat much better than horses and can travel long distances without water. They require about half the feed of horses and don’t gorge on grain. The legs and hooves of a mule are stronger and tend not to “founder,” or go lame, on rocky ground or with hard use. Mules live and continue to work until they are thirty years old, while most horses have finished their working lives at twenty. Another critical advantage is contributed by the donkey’s large eyes. Because mules’ eyes are set farther back on the head and are more D-shaped than a horse’s, their peripheral vision includes their hind feet, making them exceptionally sure-footed and confident in rough terrain.

  The mule’s reputation for difficult behavior derives, ironically, from its superior instincts. Mules have a slightly larger cranial cavity than horses, and thus larger brains, and are more intelligent and judgmental. Mules also possess, from their donkey side, a more feral, self-preservationist nature, and intensely dislike putting themselves in danger. At a water crossing or a steep ravine, the highly domesticated and more pliant horse will usually behave much like a dog, cheerfully obeying its master. Spur the horse and urge it forward and it will jump into the creek. A mule won’t do that until it considers the next step safe, or through experience has seen the same situation a few times. The placid, saturnine faces of mules indicate a lot about their personalities. Mules ponder matters a lot more.

  Two related feral traits of mules—a keen sense of smell and acute hearing—made them legendary on frontier farms and the overland trails, at least to men sensitive enough to understand them. At the approach of predators, like a pack of coyotes or a herd of buffalo, mules would lift their heads and throw their ears forward, gazing intently toward the threat. This might happen long before the perceived hazard was visible—a mule’s sense of smell extends a mile or more, even beyond nearby hills or forests. Once they are sure of the approach of an unfamiliar or dangerous object, mules stop and refuse to be driven toward it, a kind of early-warning function that eventually came to be appreciated on the desolate plains. (When a wagon train’s mules indicated the approach of a buffalo herd, hunting parties would quickly mount and rush off for fresh meat, galloping in the direction indicated by the mule ears.) Pioneer Dexter Tiffany, who crossed the Oregon Trail during the busy Gold Rush year of 1849, commented on this while approaching the Green River ford in southern Wyoming. “My mules know whether they are safe long before I do, & I can not whip or spur them on to one [situation] which is dangerous.”

  The superior instincts of mules require special handling. A good team driver steps off his wagon at a creek and lets his mules watch him cross the water with his arms held in the air, demonstrating to them that the water is only waist-high. Or he can ride a horse across first and let the mules watch. Best, he can appreciate that mules suspicious of a threat feel vulnerable about being hitched to a heavy, cumbersome wagon that prevents them from exercising their deepest instinct—fleeing from danger. This led to the common practice during the overland era, especially on the first two hundred miles of trail, of unhitching mules at even a shallow stream, leading them across individually, and then ferrying the wagon over by hand or by using chains and ropes.

  Mules are also acutely sensitive to voices and establish trust over time with a familiar driver. At a steep downhill, the naturally cautious mules are terrified that the heavy rig they are attached to will overrun them from behind. By repetition a driver displays to his team that, on steep grades, he always brakes securely, with a perceptible jerk of the wheels that the mules can feel through their harness. The better drivers “call” their mules properly with reassuring, soothing words. Mules like to be addressed with familiar, one-syllable words that they can readily understand and inform them that their driver is aware of the dangers they face. Loud, jubilant calling is appropriate on an open road or during a steep uphill climb, when the mules can see for themselves that they are not in danger and are simply being urged to pull hard or step lively. But at a tricky gate or a perilous descent, soft, confidence-building talk tells the team that the driver will protect them.

  Of course, over the years, the human side of the mule world has been populated with as many blockheads as you would find at a muffler shop or golf course. At the bank of a rushing stream, or the top of a steep hill, when the mules stop to look the situation over, the dolt on the wagon seat gets annoyed at his team and decides to whip them. In unfamiliar terrain, a plastic bag impaled on barbed wire is snapping in the breeze. Mules are skittish about that because they haven’t seen it before, and it reminds them of a predator. So the “muleteer” beats them there too. Eventually, when the mules tire of getting beaten, or are just fed up dealing with a less intelligent species, they use the tremendous power of their hind legs to kick out the tug chains and run away. For this, mules are known as “ornery.” In English we use the common phrase “stubborn as a mule,” a classic example of man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.

  America’s bent toward overproduction also contributed to the unfavorable reputation of mules. During the peak mule-breeding years, from the 1840s to the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of mules were indiscriminately bred every year to supply the expanding frontier, the booming farm economy, and the military. Mules were considered less valuable than purebred horses, and many farmers saved their best mares for breeding with male horses. Too often, the mammoth jacks were “put” instead to inferior mares, just about any old hag around the farm. This undesirable practice tended to concentrate a lot of bad DNA in mules. Then, after rudimentary training, the mules were quickly shipped off to auctions that catered to the kind of agricultural rube who couldn’t tell the difference between a “green” or a “well broke” animal. Mules were like used cars, or high school athletic directors, swapped around the land according to a system that guaranteed mediocrity and disappointment.

  Over the last thirty years, however, mules have become hot, expensive trophy purchases, much prized by Connecticut rich girls and California dentists. Considerable care is now devoted to making good matches of jacks and mares. Today, a variety of high-quality mules—Paint and Thoroughbred crosses for dressage and jumping, Morgan and Tennessee Walker mules for driving, really fine Percheron draft mules—are being produced.

  The overland pioneers of the 1840s and 1850s, whose experience contributed mightily to the formation of American attitudes, were legendary victims of the chiselers who ran the mule business. No one actually planned the Oregon and California trails. They were created by an explosion of travel that happened after 1843, when thousands of needy or adventurous farm families and gold seekers began flocking every summer to the frontier along the Missouri River around Kansas City. By then, there had been settlement in Missouri for almost thirty years, enough time for the establishment of mule lines and big breeding farms. To service the sudden burst in demand for draft animals created by the overland trails, Missouri mule breeders put their jacks to anything in sight, imported large herds of Mexican mules from Louisiana and Texas, and generally thrived in the carnival atmosphere that now surrounded the mule business along the frontier. In the autumn, Missouri farms echoed with the whinnies and groans of jacks and horse mares coupling. In the spring the cleared lands chimed with trace chains and iron tires as two- and three-year-old colt mules were slapped into harness with a big gang team, run around for a few miles, and then pronounced “fit” to sell to the pioneers. It wasn’t unusual for one farm or breeding operation to have a hundred or more mules penned in a single large corral. In late April or early May, the mules were herded up and run over to Ind
ependence or St. Joseph to be quickly sold off as “dead-ass broke” teams ready for the overland trails.

  Missouri mule breeders didn’t consider themselves dishonest. They considered themselves Americans, obligated by birth to accumulate not quality but cash. They knew that the bustling tent cities and outfitting depots mushrooming around the jumping-off towns created market conditions favorable to them. The pioneers who bought their mules would never be seen again. Once safely ferried across the Missouri, the wagon trains disappeared beyond the bluffs into a prairie wilderness that was, literally, a no-man’s-land, a vaguely mapped “Northwest Territory,” or “Indian Country,” large parts of which were disputed by Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States. Few returned from this foreign abyss, waving a lemon law in your face, demanding their money back for deficient, green mules.

  Fortunes were made. The shorter, less attractive Mexican mules were best used as pack animals, or for pulling light buggies, and brought only $50 a head, or $100 a team. Prices shot up from there for taller, stronger Missouri mules, anywhere between $125 to $250 for a choice team. Pioneer families buying for their wagon might want either a four-mule or a six-mule hitch. Depending on the year and the supplies of mules that season, the price of a team could reach $1,000 or more per wagon, a large capital investment for the time. The owners of even a relatively small breeding operation could travel to the Missouri River in the spring with just a dozen or more mules, realizing profits of $700 or so, and then return home with enough cash to pay off their bank loans and maybe invest for next year in more mares, or to branch off into wagon dealerships or dry goods. Larger operations of “mule jockeys” made thousands of dollars in profits every spring.

  The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America’s basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes, the Oregon and California trails delivered thousands of hearty pioneers every year to the Pacific, developing America’s west coast and its interior plains. But the convergence of an extensive trail system and a ready supply of mules at embarkation points along the Missouri River effected a historic transfer of wealth that left most of the capital back in Missouri. America’s “westering” urge after 1843 was a mobile banking network. Cash for mules, cash for mules. After a season or two selling mules to pioneers, farmers morphed into mule brokers, then big outfitters and bankers, then land speculators and the owners of paddle-wheel steamers. The transaction was as American as apple pie. You risk losing your life to cholera or to a runaway team just over that bluff there; I get possession of your family savings for bigger, safer things. Every year more pioneers came. Missouri, a critical frontier state, prospered for many reasons—good soil, river access, fast-growing hardwood forests—but mostly because of mules.

  Boom cycles are notoriously cruel to the economically vulnerable, and there is no question that the pioneers were fleeced by the mule brokers. After buying green mules from the Missouri River brokers, the pioneers endured brutal shakedown runs across the plains. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, there were ravines along the Wakarusa and Little Blue rivers in Kansas, just a hundred miles from the jumping-off cities, that became vast boneyards littered with wagon wrecks, most of them the result of runaway mules. The 1849 Gold Rush introduced a particularly hazardous character to the West—the urban, nonfarming dreamer who couldn’t drive teams. The combination of green mules with inexperienced drivers from back east was only occasionally fatal, but hundreds of gold bugs and pioneer families were forced to cut their mangled wagons in half and continue west with carts, abandon their possessions and join up with other wagons, or, in rare cases, return to Missouri to be resupplied. Wrangling difficult mules became an inseparable part of Oregon Trail lore.

  John Clark, the Virginia pioneer who caught gold fever in 1852, traveled the Mississippi River system from Cincinnati to St. Joe, and disembarked for the plains in early May that year. Historian Merrill Mattes quotes from Clark’s journal, which describes the scene when Clark selected his mules at “a large coroll full of stock, many of them young and unbroken. We had to . . . risk our lives in roping them. After being kicked across the pen some half dozen times & run over as often, we at last succeeded in leading them out. . . . It was laughable . . . to see the wild devils run with all hands hanging on to the ropes to keep them in check.” Other arrivals at St. Joe that year reported being forced to choose among emaciated Mexican mules that had just been run up from Texas in a stock drive, or spending most of April training their green teams before they felt it was safe to cross the Missouri. The pioneer journals occasionally recorded instances of untamed Mexican mules kicking men to death. Henry Coke, a pioneer who crossed the trail in 1850 with a string of pack mules, spoke for many when he wrote, “What perverse brutes these mules are. . . . Eh, the beasts! How I hate ’em.”

  Another pioneer, John Nevin King, was a Mexican War veteran who decided to cross the trail in 1850 in a relatively unusual way. He paid an everything-included fare to an “express train” company, Alexander & Hall, that carried commercial passengers across the trail in wagons with bench seats. The service included meals, sleeping tents, and clean laundry once a week. While still waiting to depart from the jumping-off town of Weston, Missouri, King wrote to his mother back in Illinois.

  Soon after arriving in town a Team came in, the Teamsters reporting to Alexander that another Teamster had harnessed his 4 mules and hitched them to a Timber wagon and when ready to start the mules became frightened, ran off with the wagon smashing everything—one of the lead mules running against a tree & killing himself instantly the other ran against a sapling and stunned himself badly.

  Apparently the situation never improved. In 1861, a young Missouri native whose career as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot had been briefly interrupted by the Civil War, Samuel Clemens, rode west from St. Joseph on the Oregon Trail, which now also served as a stagecoach route. Clemens, of course, would eventually adopt the name Mark Twain, and his journey west across the trail became one of the most defining in American history, beginning the development of both a persona and a style of literature that continues to be felt today. Twain initially traveled west on a lark, to accompany his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, and he worked as a miner and a journalist in Nevada and California before finding his voice as a writer. In 1872, Twain published a remembered and highly embellished account of his western adventures, the nonfiction classic Roughing It. Twain describes how, at a stage stop in southern Nebraska, the horses pulling his stagecoach were changed out for the sturdier mules that would be used the rest of the way west.

  We left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place. But they were wild Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready. And when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules’ heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon. How the frantic animals did scamper! It was a fierce and furious gallop—and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station-huts and stables.

  But mules never occupied a consistent place in American mythology. If, by some, they were considered difficult and unpredictable, many Americans also considered the mule a symbol of durability and reliability. The modern image of the mule has always had a decidedly southern spin—probably a legacy of the “forty acres and a mule” policy of the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, for settling freed slaves on southern plantations, or the familiarity of Depression-era photographs of poor southern sharecroppers with their tired-looking, long-eared draft animals. Mules suggested the South, Tobacco Road, th
e backwardness of Alabama’s or Mississippi’s agrarian economy left behind by a wealthier and more progressive North.

  This would have surprised nineteenth-century northerners, for whom the mule evoked progress, achievement, and Yankee economic drive. Thousands of northern draft mules, from Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes, were a familiar and deeply beloved fixture along the towpaths of the barge canals that served as critical transportation arteries after the Civil War, carrying passengers and freight between major cities and the outlying country. Towpath mules pulling barges along the extensive Erie canal system through New York’s Finger Lakes, or from Easton to Philadelphia along the Delaware canal system, were an American motif, and up until World War II millions of American schoolchildren were required to memorize the lyrics of a popular Tin Pan Alley tune, “Low Bridge, Everybody Down,” which was also known as the “Erie Canal Song.” In the opening lines of the song, “fifteen miles” refers to the distance a mule usually towed a barge before being replaced by another, rested mule.

  I’ve got a mule, and her name is Sal

  Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

  She’s a good old worker and a good old pal,

  Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.

  The marvelous dichotomy of the American mule endures to this day. Stubborn yet reliable, less attractive than a horse but somehow more adorable, mules evoke America’s past, particularly the challenges of the overland years. Mules were infinitely more desirable for covered wagon travelers as a draft animal, considering the other choices. Horses were too heavy, couldn’t take the heat, and required too much grain. Oxen were cheaper but painfully slow. “I should unquestionably give the preference to mules,” wrote Captain Randolph B. Marcy of the U.S. Army, the author of The Prairie Traveler, a handbook for pioneers that became a bestseller in the 1850s. “They travel much faster, and endure the heat of the summer much better than oxen.”