The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  In Jamesport, I had listened carefully to the commands that Philip Ropp used, as well as his pronunciation. To slow a team for challenging terrain, but not to stop them, the command is “Easy, Team,” or “Easy, Now, Team.” But in Ropp’s thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, this came out “Eas-A, Eas-A.” We would have to pronounce it that way or the mules would be confused.

  We used modern, BioThane synthetic harnesses, based on a traditional design for leather draft-mule harnesses, as a hedge against breakage along the two-thousandmile trail.

  But calling mules well goes beyond that. Mule-calling expresses a feeling about life, a passion for the land that is being crossed, and a love of the animals in front of you. Mules actually have a great deal of emotional complexity. Except for the occasional laggard like Bute, they love to work, and they can sense when they are headed off for a long ride and not just a brief run up to the cornfields. Mule-calling developed because the trips—along the nine-hundred-mile Sante Fe Trail, the 2,100-mile Oregon Trail—were so long. The driver shared his loneliness with his team, expressing his thoughts about the lengthy road ahead, warding off boredom, and trying to stay awake. The particular timbre of the caller’s voice tells the mules who is driving and conveys to them a mood. That is why so many mule-callers speak to their animals with an animated, singsong style.

  In nineteenth-century America, team-calling was a familiar sound of everyday life. Walt Whitman was legendary for walking from place to place, and he often heard the mule-callers along the busy roads that he followed on his rambles up and down the Eastern Seaboard and out west. “I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule,” Whitman wrote in “Salut au Monde!” (“The bells of the mule” is a reference to the bells that teamsters would attach to the collars of their draft animals, to warn another driver of the approach of a wagon from the opposite direction, on days when rain or fog reduced visibility.) From the 1840s to the 1880s, the country that Nick and I were passing through was thick with mule teamsters and covered freight wagons. The worn military roads that ran through the Flint Hills curved northwest to the two main forts along the Platte—Fort Kearny in Nebraska and Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming, and later, after the Indian wars began in the 1860s, there were a dozen new forts just in Wyoming to supply. Most of these forts were founded specifically to protect the covered wagon trains of the pioneers along the Oregon Trail, and the freighting teamsters and the pioneers often commingled on the trails. One of the largest and most recognizable companies in the country then—the FedEx of its day—was Russell, Majors and Waddell, which ran freight, supplied the military forts, and carried mail on the West’s intricate system of trails. In the Kansas junction country, the freighting season stretched from May to early November. As the long wagon caravans moved north toward the Platte, the hills echoed with the mule skinners’ calls.

  Often, learning why a teamster uses a particular call tells you something about his or her personality. I asked Nick once why he called his teams “odd buggers.” That sounded like a derisive term to me, but I knew that Nick loved his horses.

  “It’s from the James Herriot book All Creatures Great and Small,” Nick said. “Odd buggers is a Yorkshire Dales term for all animals. My horses aren’t insulted by it. They know I’m paying them a compliment.”

  To understand mule-calling, you have to imagine yourself in a place that you love, and what you would sing, say, to your favorite canoe or cross-country skiing trail. Alone on a hiking trail, people sing to their dogs. When I am working in my woods at home, I sing into the trees as I split logs. Now Nick and I were in the comely junction country of eastern Kansas, surrounded by green hills, kids at the housing developments circling on small bikes, and pheasants flushing as we rumbled the wagon over the creeks. I was on the dream journey of my life and I longed to sing to my new mules.

  When I could see the town of Highland, Kansas, coming up, and knew that we were safely established on a westward course for Hiawatha, I decided that it was time for me to drive the team myself and learn the proper calling of mules. Thinking about it, I decided that I should emphasize a feminine theme. Beck and Bute, the base team that had worked together for years at the Ropp farm, were mollies. And Jake is a big, self-confident guy, obviously the sort of friend to whom I could say, “Well, Jake, just between us girls, you know?” I would call in a style that acknowledged the feminine nature of our team.

  When Nick handed me the lines, I took a deep breath, reassured myself that this wasn’t going to be as difficult as I had imagined, and inaugurated my calling career.

  “Girls! Let’s Go, Girls! Yo, Step Lively Now. Girls! Beck! Bute! Jake! Girls, Girls, Girls! Rah, Rah, Rah! Go! Go! Go! Oh, Girls, We’re Going to Hiawatha! Don’t be Sissy, Girls! Go! Go! Go!”

  The mules stopped. The wagon lurched to a halt. As soon as I started calling them, the mules planted their feet on the dirt road as firmly as a runner reaching second base and stamping his cleats on the bag. WTF? Boy, I am really developing into a unique badass mule skinner here.

  Nick’s Fu Manchu mustache dropped, and he looked disgusted.

  “Jesus, Rink,” he said. “These are well-trained mules. Amish mules. If you say ‘Go,’ it sounds just like ‘Whoa.’ So they stop. Do I fuckin have to tell you everything? You fuckin said ‘Go’ to a mule.”

  “Give me a break here, Nick,” I said. “I’m just learning.”

  “And what is this ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ shit?” Nick said. “You sound like the fuckin lacrosse coach at Miss Porter’s School.”

  “Nick, c’mon, they’re females, mollie mules. Right? I addressed them with the proper respect that you show all women.”

  “Oh, God. I am not believing this.”

  Nick picked up Olive Oyl and placed her in his lap, scratching beneath her chin, as if she were the only comfort left for him now.

  “It’s all right, Olive,” he said. “The Trail Boss is just learning. He’s such a fuckin idiot he said ‘Go’ to a mule. But don’t worry, Olive. He’ll get better.”

  I decided to revert to a calling style that I knew would work. I slapped the lines on the mules and tried again.

  “Team! Big Team! Big Team! Jake! Beck! Bute! Get Up There Now! Team, Get Up!”

  The mules picked up their feet and briskly trotted west on the section road. We clattered over the narrow concrete bridge that crossed Mission Creek, flushing up some wood ducks that became silhouetted in the sky against a red barn up the hill.

  • • •

  The Peter Schuttler was a memory wheel too. By the middle of the afternoon, Nick and I were both fighting sleep, the need to get off the seat for an hour or two and escape the effects of wagon travel. The metronomic clopping of hooves, the exposure to sunlight and wind, and the bouncing of the wagon were powerfully soporific. We both had sore backs for the first two weeks, until our bodies adjusted to the hard seat and constant jostling. But neither of us wanted to give up valuable time, which would be translated as miles not elapsed, by stopping to take a rest.

  We began to realize just how much persistence would be required to make twenty miles a day, and the experience of trying not to nod off on the wagon seat was actually frightening. Up on our tall seat, above the wagon box, there was nothing holding us in—no seat belts or sides. If we fell asleep at the lines and rolled off the wagon, we would either be caught in the whippletrees up front or crushed by the wheels.

  “This is just a whole lot of work,” Nick said that afternoon. “It’s not at all like our Saturday-morning rides with Dad.”

  The image of our Saturday-morning rides with my father surprised me, because it returned so powerfully and reminded me of how much work in the barn I had done with Nick when we were boys. I had completely forgotten about this period in our lives and was amused that a covered wagon trip across the plains, almost fifty years later, prompted a memory so potent.

  In the early 1960s, my father was the associate publisher of Look magazine, second only to Life as America�
�s big picture title. He actually ran the entire operation—Mike Cowles, the owner, kept the title of publisher for himself but he was in the office only once or twice a month. Tom Buck was a very inspiring man who perceived his role as promoting the career of everyone who worked for him, and his staff adored him. “I supply the charisma,” he used to say. “They do all the work.” He was enormous fun, a quirky high school dropout and autodidact who sold advertising space by taking clients out to lunch and quoting Winston Churchill and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He worked hard for Look in the morning and then, after lunch, manned the phones for his “causes”—getting friends elected to Congress or as governor, raising money for an Alcoholics Anonymous clinic that he had cofounded, civil rights. We never saw him during the week because most evenings he was either at an AA meeting or giving a political speech. His weekends were often devoted to entertaining clients or his AA friends, and the only free time he had was on Saturday morning.

  We all knew that my father needed time alone on Saturday mornings, just to goof off with a horse. Nicky and I were the two horsemen in the family who liked to rise early, and most weekends we walked down the long hill outside our house together to spend the hours after dawn in the barn, doing chores and harnessing a horse for my father.

  Nicky was this fun little belly laugh of a kid. He was enormously tough and energetic one minute, then bawling his shorts off the next. He loved wagons and horses. When we came down into the barn through the large space where my father’s wagon collection sat, Nicky would caress the patent-leather fenders of every carriage he passed. Then we descended an ancient set of oak stairs into our boy cave, the stone-foundation stable and tack room area. The stable cellar smelled heavily of moist foundation rock, manure, and harness oil, and Nicky and I puttered around down there for hours. We taught ourselves to harness the horses by using step ladders to reach their withers and heads.

  Many Saturday mornings, my father took us along with him in a surrey or a buckboard, and we enjoyed long, dreamy rides across the New Jersey horse country or trotted into town and ordered fried egg sandwiches at the village store. But usually we could see that our father was brooding and distracted, overwhelmed by the details of his dense-packed life, and he just wanted to drive alone. When Nicky ran up to the house to check, my father would tell him to hitch one of his favorite mares, Maxine or Boots, to one of his single-seat racing sulkies.

  When we were all done with the hitch, Nicky would hold the reins and ride the sulky up to the top of the drive with his feet dangling off the seat while I led the horse by the bridle. The window at the head of the kitchen table was right there, and my father could look out and see that his sulky was ready.

  On cool mornings in the summer, my father would take his buggy ride in an Irish cardigan sweater with leather buttons and a tweed cap. In the fall, he wore a scarf and one of the tweed jackets from his tailor in Dublin. He would step out from the house, cross the patio, and mount the sulky by grabbing his trousers with a hand to heave his bad leg past the tall wheel. Once he sat down and took the reins, he stuffed and lit his corncob pipe, blew out a smoke ring, and thanked us for bringing up his horse.

  “Nice job, boys,” he said. “You guys are lickety-split.”

  Then he trotted off with his mare, slapping the reins for a fast trot as soon as he hit the road. The buggy whip in his right hand was perched at an angle over the rump of the horse, and the smoke from his pipe billowed out over his shoulder. He was an endlessly fascinating and contradictory man—enormously social yet in need of solitude, gifted but demanding with children, superbly organized for business but always broke. Nick and I would stand there and watch him disappear in his sulky down the road, the pounding of the horse hooves slowly dissipating as he got a quarter mile out.

  I had completely forgotten this image from my childhood, but there was probably a good reason that I repressed a memory this poignant. I had spent my early adulthood terrified that I would turn out like my father—his eccentricities, his financial disorganization, and his wild scattered energy weren’t an example I wanted to emulate. But in recent years I had come to accept, even embrace, his paternal stamp. The him in me wasn’t frightening anymore. I couldn’t change myself anyway, and my obvious similarities with my father—escapes from reality in covered wagons and planes, obsessive reading, a devil-may-care attitude toward social proprieties—were not embarrassments, but the skill set that propelled me out on the Oregon Trail.

  Nick’s mental jolt about my father’s Saturday-morning rides also forced me to reconsider what memories are. I sat on the wagon seat brooding about it. Why are some cameos from our past always there, while other, important ones are repressed and require a prompt to revive them? Certainly memory isn’t completely random. An invisible hand of logic and need, even self-protection, rules our recollections, and memory is an expression of character. I had told myself that I was out on the trail seeking adventure, knowledge of an epic era of American history, proof that a modern crossing could still be done. But now, as Kansas slowly passed by, with the clopping of hooves and the ringing of harness acting as a neuroenhancer, I knew that I was also out here seeking my past.

  • • •

  We camped that night at the Brown County Agricultural Museum south of Hiawatha, a hokey, agrarian Louvre on the plains. Beside a small village of restored barns, antique tractors and rusting farm equipment were haphazardly displayed in long rows across several acres of cleared fields. The gem of this collection was Windmill Lane, a large display of historic windmills gathered from farms throughout Kansas and Nebraska. We stabled the mules for the night on a grassy area behind an old Union Pacific caboose. While Nick walked off with Olive Oyl to explore the barns, I hauled water for the mules, lugging the heavy buckets forty yards from a water hydrant. I lit a barbecue fire to cook dinner, and then Nick and I strolled down Windmill Lane.

  You have not really lived until you’ve sampled a classic American hodgepodge like Windmill Lane with Nick Buck. Nick didn’t really know much about windmills, but he could instantly figure out the mechanics of the old Dempsters, Aeromotors, and thirty-two-volt Windmeters that we stopped to look at. From Nick that night, I learned all about ninety-degree gear reductions, what a sucker rod is, and how you can tell, just by looking at a windmill, whether it’s intended for livestock feeding, or to supply water to a house. I was in love with our trip that first night. As we traveled west, I had expected to be trapped in Oregon Trail interpretive centers or at cowboys-and-Indians farces at the big rodeo shows. But Windmill Lane in Hiawatha seemed to promise that I would be seeing so much more.

  As we returned toward the wagon at dusk, I realized that we had already learned something important. Elaborate travel planning and careful logistics weren’t required here. We had reached Jamesport on a Monday and launched today, the following Saturday. We had spent only five days jumping off.

  One thing about Nick would endlessly impress me on our trip. He can sleep anywhere. His only requirements for bedding are enough space for his wide girth and oxygen in the air. When we were planning the trip, I told Nick that I would be bringing along a spacious four-person tent to erect for him every night as we made camp. I would also pack a double-wide foam cushion to provide more comfort against concrete slabs or the hard desert floor. But Nick wasn’t interested. “Tents are for pussies,” he said. “I never use them, and we don’t want to clutter the wagon with that much gear.” For the entire trip, while I slept in my wagon bed, he bedded down in barns, horse stalls full of manure, sagebrush plains, and abandoned log cabins. He never complained and only once got a bad night’s sleep. Traveling with him for the summer changed my mind about a lot of things, and the need for expensive accommodations is one of them. If you are as tough and as spontaneous as Nick Buck, tents and Comfort Inns don’t need to exist.

  When Nick and Olive walked off to sleep in a barn, I fussed around the wagon for a while, cleaning up after dinner, and then I walked over to the mules at their red caboose, ma
king sure that they had enough water. Jake nuzzled me hard when I scratched him behind his ears.

  After the occasional rains that day, the sky had finally cleared. The sun was setting against high cirrus clouds, with fleecy Winslow Homer yellows and pinks softening the sky. As I fell asleep in my wagon bed, the view through the narrow canvas opening concentrated and fused pastel sky to pastel plains. The mules contentedly munched on their hay over at the caboose and I heard my first wail of a Union Pacific whistle, a certain reminder that I was on the Oregon Trail.

  7

  THE EMIGRATION TO OREGON AND California was epic adventure and social history, but I was intrigued by the overland years for another reason. The cast of characters along the western trails yielded many surprises, revealing a past more nuanced than I had thought was there. The vaudeville of American life was acted out on the trail and, in particular, religion and conquering gender stereotypes played a formative role in developing the route to the Pacific. The very idea of wagon travel across the plains might have been indefinitely delayed had it not been for Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a dreamy but persistent evangelist from the Finger Lakes of New York, who in 1836 became the first white woman to cross the Rockies. Narcissa Whitman is largely forgotten today, but her impact on American history was enormous, and for a time she was one of the most famous women in antebellum America.

  Narcissa Prentiss was a product of the “Burned-Over District” of upstate New York. The term was coined when religious fervor swept Appalachian America in the 1820s and evangelization became so intense in western New York that the area was considered “burned out” of new souls to convert. A natural beauty with a frizzy mane of auburn hair and a pretty, symmetrically oval face, Narcissa was the third of nine children in a devoutly Presbyterian family from Prattsburgh, New York. At the age of sixteen, during a “born again” experience, Narcissa decided to devote her life to converting American Indians to Christianity. But she had spent most of her adult life in utter frustration. As a traveling schoolteacher and busy organizer of missionary fund-raising events, she remained single, and her applications to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were consistently rejected because she was unmarried. (The board considered missionary work beyond the Missouri River “foreign” because the uncharted plains included lands disputed by Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States.) Narcissa solved this problem by abruptly deciding to marry a man she hardly knew, a medical doctor and fellow missionary zealot, Marcus Whitman. After a hastily arranged wedding ceremony at the Presbyterian church in Angelica, New York, Narcissa and Marcus left for the Missouri frontier the next day, arranging to travel with another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding. The importance of the Whitmans’ speedy marriage for American history can hardly be overestimated. The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.