The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Did you happen to make extra brake shoes?” he asked Don when he returned from his shop. “Or can I take along some uncut oak stock? I’m not sure these oak shoes are going to last very long.”

  Werner frowned and sniffed at the thought. He was obviously very sensitive to any criticism about his wagon restoration.

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary, Nick,” Werner said. “Those brake shoes will last you all the way to Oregon. I guarantee it.”

  Nick was working hard at being polite, but his Fu Manchu mustache dropped. I quickly looked at him, shook my head, and then spoke up and changed the subject with Don.

  What Werner had just said was ludicrous to me. Wooden brake shoes without pads—rubbing against iron tire rims through the first stretch of the Flint Hills—wouldn’t last even a hundred miles. But it wasn’t Werner’s fault. Like most wagon makers today, he restores pristine, “period-accurate” vehicles for museum displays, or for collectors who might run horse-drawn vehicles ten or fifteen miles a year in parades. He doesn’t know working hitches, and few wagon makers today would understand the problems we would have with wooden brakes over two thousand miles. And it wasn’t worth an argument now, because I had Nick, who could rebuild a set of brake shoes in less than an afternoon.

  There was one thing that happened in Horton that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until hundreds of miles later. When Nick tested the Trail Pup wheels by grabbing the spokes just above the hub and giving them a strong shake, he grimaced. When he ran his hands over the front wheels of the main wagon, I could tell that he was unhappy. But he never mentioned anything, and he didn’t take off his NAPA cap.

  In the jumping-off commotion of our next few days, and then the elation of travel after we left, I completely forgot about this. And it was typical of our different personalities that I failed to pick up on what Nick was seeing in the wheels. He knows mechanics, wood, and hubs that pass or fail the shake test. I am incurably aesthetic, and the wagon looked beautiful. Silence often results from incompatibilities like that. So, the question of the wheels didn’t come up.

  That afternoon, the trucker we’d hired in Kansas, Doyle Prawl, rolled in to pull the wagon and Trail Pup back to Ropp’s place in Missouri. There, at an Amish welding shop near Ropp’s farm, we would install a number of additional modifications—a rearview mirror, safety lights, brackets and hangers for our ropes and buckets—that Werner wasn’t interested in doing because they were not “period-accurate.” When we had all the fixes on the wagon made, the trucker would haul our mules and the wagons across the Missouri for his farm along the St. Joe Road, where we’d launch for the junction with the Oregon Trail farther west in Kansas.

  That night, crickets screeched and spring peepers peeped from the wetlands as we rode east in the dark toward the Missouri River. At the river the great horseshoe bend where the pioneers had crossed glowed neon purple and blue from the lights of the riverfront casinos. I was exhausted and unsettled, still worried about all of the fixes we had to make to the wagon, realizing that in the morning I would be dealing with so much uncertainty. But after we cleared the lights of St. Joe the Missouri farmland outside the truck was moody and quiet, with just a few lit houses widely spaced along the road. The cool air racing in through the pickup windows, and my fatigue, whittled my thoughts down to a satisfying, narrow clarity.

  We were jumping off. Uncertainty was my life now and I had to learn to improvise day to day.

  • • •

  The conflict between the reenactor-collector mentality that Werner represented and my own determination to make a modern crossing of the Oregon Trail went to the heart of what I was doing with this trip. There is no such thing anymore as the Oregon Trail. There never was a single Oregon Trail. After Fort Kearny on the Platte in eastern Nebraska, some wagon trains hugged the north side of the Platte along the edge of the Sand Hills, and some took the south banks. To avoid each other’s dust and to hunt for game, the wagons fanned out widely across the prairie all day. The trains generally followed a set of central “ruts,” or the rivers, for navigation, but the trail west was often five miles wide on either side of the river, or as much as twelve miles total, including both banks. By the 1850s, western Wyoming was a sprawling network of wagon tracks and shortcuts—the Lander Cutoff, the Farson Cutoff, the Sublette Cutoff, the Hams Fork Cutoff—that extended more than a hundred miles north and south, all of it considered the Oregon Trail. By some counts there are as many as forty cutoffs and alternate branches from the main ruts along the 2,100-mile route. The “trail” was really just an aggregated landscape that the pioneers followed across the plains and then the high deserts.

  With the trail being that broad, innumerable paved roads, rail lines, irrigation ditches, and equipment sheds now interrupt it in many places. The Oregon Trail is what historic space always becomes—a landscape blending modernity with the past. The original emigrant road runs through modern downtown Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas. In Oregon, the last two hundred miles of the trail hugging the Columbia River are now Interstate Highway 84.

  The reenactors, the self-appointed protectors of our past, hate this. They don’t want to run their shiny Schuttler or Studebaker wagons on asphalt, down past the Dairy Queen or the Sinclair convenience store. They want ruts, dust, verisimilitude, the geographic equivalent of their button and holster fetishes. Fine, chucklehead, be a reenactor reenactoring in a wagon, but I just want to ride the old route and see what’s out there today. The real world doesn’t frighten me. I knew that I would be enjoying many long, dreamy afternoons following undisturbed old trail ruts through the lonely bluff country of Nebraska and Wyoming. But because the trail naturally morphed over time into county roads and state highways, I would be riding on a lot of asphalt too. That’s the challenge, the fun, the point, of crossing the Oregon Trail today. Flashing safety lights and a rearview mirror are required to cross what the modern trail has become.

  I rejected the dogmatic “authenticity” fetish of the reenacting mentality for another reason. The reasons the trail has changed are the story of my country. In Kansas, the old St. Joe Road that fed into the Oregon Trail between St. Joseph and Marysville is now State Highway 36. In Nebraska, the Oregon Trail between North Platte and the Wyoming line—a mythic stretch along pink desert soil that includes Chimney Rock—is now Highway 30 and Highway 26. The paving of these particularly scenic stretches of the old trail wasn’t a crime against the past. It was something called American history, economic history, to be more exact. The original trail went where people wanted to go, west toward free lands, forming the roadbed of the largest land migration in history, and then it continued going in the direction that people wanted to go. Even before the flood of pioneers and homesteaders crossing the frontier ended in the 1890s, farmers and ranchers in the West used the old Oregon Trail route, which followed the rivers and the best, level terrain, to run their cattle east into the big slaughter yards and railroad terminals in Omaha and Kansas City. Those cities grew and became major economic engines of the Midwest because the Oregon Trail was gradually converted from a wagon road into a cattle-driving route. Later, during World War I, long stretches of the trail in Nebraska were paved over to truck cattle to the slaughter yards of Omaha, so that canned beef could more quickly be shipped to the more than three million American doughboys serving in Europe. The Nebraska beef industry boomed. That’s the trail. That is our history and what it means today. That’s the trail I wanted to see. Often, it’s a paved road, requiring safety lights on a slow-moving wagon.

  But by refusing to add features like this because they weren’t “authentic,” Werner was teaching me one of the most valuable lessons of the trip. Modern wagon making is determined to remain locked in the past, and putting real people and a real team across the trail today is a lost art. I would have to figure that out for myself. In that way, there was something very authentic about the experience I was having. Now I knew a little bit more about how the pioneers felt as they embarked for the West. It was m
y jumping-off time and I was getting jacked around by the outfitters.

  • • •

  Back in Jamesport, Nick and I spent three happy days inside the large welding and machine shop run by Ropp’s Amish neighbor, Ivan Schrock, fabricating parts for our wagon and equipment for our camp. Schrock’s shop was busy with planting season work, but he carved off a corner of the barn near the doors for us to work, strolling over every hour to offer suggestions about the parts we were making for the wagon. I reached a nice jumping-off moment there in Schrock’s barn. Hammering away at an anvil on one of our projects, Nick would frequently interrupt his progress to step over and help someone else fix a hydraulic line, or to shitrig a cultivator with an old windmill part. Keeping Nick focused can be a full-time job, and it was frustrating to watch him wander off to help someone else every hour or so. But everyone racing through Schrock’s shop for spring repairs adored Nick for this, or they simply adored him because of his laughter and fun. People would do anything for him. This would become a major asset during our crossing of the trail, and in Jamesport I became more relaxed, less obsessive about meeting deadlines, and enjoyed letting Nick just be Nick.

  While Nick worked on his projects, Philip and I addressed the most important challenge of our hitch—the tongue-reliever to lift the heavy weight of the tongue, also called the pole, off the mule collars. Knowledge about tongue-relievers is almost completely lost today, even in the team-driving community. Heavy wagons don’t travel long distances anymore, and the era of tongue-relievers essentially ended in the 1890s when the blue military escort wagons of the western plains were phased out and replaced by rail transport. I had seen only two tongue-relievers in my life, and both were mounted differently. But they came down to the same thing—a long chain and spring assembly that ran from the front of the wagon box, attached to a hitch point midway along the pole. The chain provided heft, lifting the pole to the right height to take the weight off the mule collars. The strong, industrial-strength spring provided flexibility, allowing the pole to gently rock up and down with the movement of the team.

  Ropp and I spent an entire day, standing at the metal presses and welding stands in Schrock’s shop, fabricating the mounts for our tongue-reliever, and then mounting it on the Schuttler wagon. When we were done, the heavy tongue was suspended almost perfectly at the chest-height of the mule team, and even Nick was impressed.

  “Rink, when you first told me about this tongue-reliever idea, I couldn’t even find one in my wagon books. But this solution works. The weight of the pole is off the mule collars. I never thought a jerk like you could do this.”

  Nineteenth-century covered wagons were equipped with “tongue-relievers” to take the weight of the heavy pole, or tongue, off the collars of the mules.

  My parole from mechanical idiocy, however, didn’t last very long. On our last day in Jamesport, when I drove into the Ropp farm after running errands in town, Philip and Nick were standing by the barn near the Trail Pup, the commissary cart I had designed and asked Don Werner to build, which we would tow behind the wagon to carry the bulk of our supplies. The Trail Pup was vital to our crossing, because it would liberate us from the fuss and obnoxious presence of the pickup trucks and canteen rigs that provide the “motorized support” of modern covered wagon trips staged by reenactors. I had asked Werner to build the Trail Pup with a detachable towing tongue, so that single-mule shafts could be installed when we were camping somewhere and the cart could be used as a run-about to make shorter trips into towns for supplies.

  Nick and Philip had detached the Trail Pup from the main wagon, taken the towing tongue off, and replaced it with my single-mule driving shafts. The Trail Pup sat on the grass, looking forlorn and all alone, resting forward on the shafts.

  I walked over and Nick spoke first.

  “Rink, pick up the Trail Pup.”

  When I grabbed the shafts, the Trail Pup was so heavy to lift that I could barely get the cart level, and there was no center of gravity to be found. The bed was set so far forward on the axle that the weight was all in the front, and even just a single passenger would add greatly to that. The cart had no resting moment where it should be—level on the wheels. No mule, even one as strong as Jake, could handle that load. As a passenger cart, my half-wagon was a flop.

  I dropped the shafts back down.

  “Fucked again,” Nick said. “You bought a cart that isn’t a cart. There’s no resting moment.”

  There wasn’t time to dwell on my design failure. My mind instantly moved to the next problem. The Trail Pup was also my emergency backup plan. If we broke a wheel out in western Nebraska and Wyoming, where we’d often be fifty miles from the closest town, I was counting on being able to hook Jake to the Trail Pup, tying the other mules behind, and riding to safety with Nick and just the provisions we needed for a day or two. But now I didn’t have that.

  “Philip,” I said, “does Jake really ride okay?”

  “He rides fine,” Ropp said. “It’s like being on a truck, but he rides.”

  Jake became my new backup plan. If we got stranded in the Wyoming wilderness, Nick and I could ride him out together, or I could leave Nick behind with enough provisions and water for a day or two and ride alone for help. This would require a return trip to the Amish harness shop where I could trade in my old Wyoming saddle for a larger saddle that would fit Jake’s broad back.

  I walked down to the barn, harnessed and hooked Jake to the spring wagon, and threw my saddle into the back for a run down the county highway to the harness shop. It was a lonely drive and I felt dejected about my failed design for the Trail Pup, and also pressed for time. I was determined to jump off by May 15, now just two days away, but there were still so many details to nail down.

  When I arrived at the harness shop, carrying my saddle on my shoulder, Elmer Beechy was standing at the front counter. Elmer is a slender middle-aged man with a scraggly white beard, glasses, and a plain old straw hat—not the flattops that most Amish wear. He is more western than Pennsylvania Dutch. I liked him right away because he is such an American character type, and classic Amish. There is a reason that he’s the biggest harness dealer in the West. Elmer is a born salesman who maneuvers you toward a deal by trying to make you feel that he really cares deeply about your needs.

  I explained to Elmer that I needed a draft saddle built on a wider frame for Jake’s broad back. I would trade in my old high-quality handmade saddle for a used one, which we would then build out with the extra tack—a breastplate and breeching straps for the rumps—that traditionally is used on mules. I figured that these modifications would cost me about $200. But my Wyoming saddle was so valuable—I had originally paid $800 for it—that I would probably be able to make an even trade for everything and not spend any more money.

  Holding it up with one hand, Elmer briefly inspected my saddle and then dropped it onto the floor by the sales counter.

  “This saddle you want to trade is worthless,” he said. “It’s got a slick seat. Everybody wants padded saddles these days. That thing will sit in my shop for months and I’ll end up having to wholesale it out at a loss.”

  “Elmer, this is a handmade Wyoming saddle. Look at this thing. I bought it at the best shop in Rock Springs.”

  “I’ll do you a favor, seeing as you already spent money on harness here,” Elmer said. “I’ll take the saddle off your hands so you don’t have to worry. I’ll be losing money, but I am willing to do that, just for you.”

  “How much for the trade-in?”

  “I’ll give you $150. And it ain’t worth even half of that.”

  It was the classic jumping-off hustle and Amish cash burn, rolled into one. Elmer knew that I was in a hurry to get on the trail and that there wasn’t another harness shop within hundreds of miles that could build out a mule saddle. I didn’t have any choice.

  “Okay, Elmer,” I said. “Can you help me pick out the right saddle for Jake? Then we can get started on the breeching.”

 
We ended up finding a used padded saddle on the sales floor that Elmer said he would “let go” for $350. He was making $200 before he sold me all of the extra tack.

  While Elmer and I were saddle-trading, a middle-aged, obviously well-heeled horse fancier from the Kansas City suburbs had come in. He drove a shiny cream-white SuperCrew Ford pickup with the expensive King Ranch options package, and he wore a ridiculously large rodeo buckle and lizard-skin boots. His daughter had just married and the new son-in-law wanted to join the family weekends by learning to ride. The indulgent father-in-law was buying everything in sight for the new family brat—chaps, spurs, a fancy breastplate, a Navaho-pattern saddle blanket, the whole nine yards of cowboy pimp.

  When the man carried this pile of loot up to the front of the shop, he saw my old saddle sitting on the floor by the counter. He walked over and picked it up.

  “Elmer, what’s this?” he said. “It’s a nice saddle.”

  “That’s handmade in Wyoming,” Elmer said. “And it’s got the slick seat. You sure don’t see many of them anymore. Tell me, is your new son-in-law a he-man?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s big. He’s tough.”

  “Well, we ain’t going to sell any padded saddle to him.”

  “Nope. Padded is for dressage girls. So, what do you want for it?”