The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  But he had done it. He had “made” Oregon with a set of wheels, traveling 1,600 miles from the banks of the Missouri with a wagon—six hundred miles farther west than the Bonneville expedition with wagons in 1832. Oregon Trail experts still marvel at Whitman’s determination and the resourcefulness of his small party. Whitman’s clarity of purpose and his ability to sense the mood of the country were most significant. He knew that the news that a wagon had reached the mythical Oregon country—a wagon, in Oregon!—would electrify a nation poised to jump off for the next phase of its expansion, and it did. Two years earlier he had been a hardworking but largely unknown doctor in the Bible-thumping, canal-boating, Burned-Over lands, 3,500 miles away. Now he was famous for doing this crazyass thing. He had put mule hooves and wagon wheels into Oregon.

  After several adventures in wilderness Oregon, the Whitmans settled and began building their mission to the Cayuse tribe at a beautiful spot along the Walla Walla River called Waiilatpu. Marcus built a log-and-adobe house in the style of a New England saltbox and it was there, in March 1837, that Narcissa Whitman established another milestone, delivering a daughter who was named Alice Clarissa, the first white child conceived on the trail and born in the far West. This news was considered particularly important in an age when birth control was all but nonexistent and married women, already overburdened with several children, knew that they could conceive at almost any time. Women could quickly calculate back from Narcissa’s published diary and realize that she had been on the Platte, in June, when she conceived. After that, she had crossed the dry country past Chimney Rock, made a difficult ford of the Platte, galloped up South Pass, and then made the hellish passage along the Snake River in Idaho—all while pregnant. Her safe delivery of a healthy girl the next spring proved that even the likely prospect of pregnancy shouldn’t prevent women from crossing the trail.

  • • •

  Marcus Whitman would make one last—and invaluable—contribution to the western migration. Over the winter of 1842–1843 he abruptly decided to make a dangerous crossing eastward along the trail, to return to Boston and persuade the American missionary board to continue supporting his missionary project at Waiilatpu, even though it was clearly failing. After reaching Boston, he arrived back on the Missouri in the spring of 1843, and was alarmed to discover a spontaneous gathering of more than a thousand pioneers near Independence, Missouri. The group had organized into a train of about 120 wagons that was about to jump off for Oregon. The pioneers had hired Captain John Gantt, a former army officer and fur trader, to lead them across as far as the remote Fort Hall on the Snake River in eastern Idaho, where they planned to abandon their wagons and walk the rest of the way to the Pacific, trailing a pack train. Whitman considered the idea of scuttling wagons in Idaho disastrous and agreed to lead the expedition jointly with Gantt.

  A few smaller wagon trains and military exploration parties had crossed to Oregon and California in 1840 and 1841. But the 1843 wagon train—called both the “Gantt-Whitman Train” and the “Great Migration”—is considered the first mass crossing of the Oregon Trail, and historians now date the beginning of the overland trail migration to 1843. Interestingly, there is no single explanation for the haphazard gathering of pioneers outside Independence in 1843. The tide of desperate and essentially homeless farming families had begun to build in late winter, probably because after the Panic of 1837 almost half of the banks in America had failed. During the deep economic depression that followed, farmers deprived of both markets and credit realized that they couldn’t afford to buy planting seed that year, and they were forced to either abandon their land or quickly cash out at fire-sale prices. Meanwhile, considerable and well-publicized sentiment was building in Congress to flood the Oregon country with American pioneers, to overwhelm Britain’s thinly staffed fur-trading empire, managed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. American citizens would effectively seize control of the Pacific Northwest by squatting on the land—the same practice that had worked in the Alleghenies during the American Revolution. The tactic worked brilliantly in the Pacific Northwest, where there were about five hundred English agents and trappers allied with them in the early 1840s. By 1845, there were already five thousand Americans.

  The pioneer years are often depicted as a single, deliberate moment of history, when thousands of emigrants decided together to move west to find new lands and fulfill America’s continental destiny. In fact, the movement was more accidental. It was also a default toward traditional patterns of settlement. Americans were simply doing what they had always done, outfitting their mover’s wagons with hickory bows and a canvas top, loading up, and pushing west, hopeful that they would find a solution and a new situation for themselves when they reached the frontier, but, really, having no finished plan. Many pioneer trains were also formed by breakaway groups of Baptists and Methodists eager to escape bitter denominational fighting at home. Departing for the trail was an adventure forced on them by economic necessity and dreams of more religious elbow room. There was no certainty about the outcome and most families didn’t really know where they would end up.

  Settlement on the old “Northwest” frontier—Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana—had established this rootless American style. Each new stage of frontier development was a rolling infrastructure supporting the next stage moving farther west. Americans who decided to become pioneers knew that they could count on the hospitality of the small settlements and rugged farms—populated by recent pioneers like themselves—that stood between them and the Missouri. Meanwhile, the rapid development of the Mississippi River steamboat business had led to the growth of small towns in Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois, conveniently placing a string of supply depots along the roads to the Missouri frontier. As the homeless families moved west, they formed into “companies” that picked up new members as they passed new towns.

  Suddenly pulling up stakes and becoming a “westering” family wasn’t considered unusual, and a kind of national ethos formed around the idea. In 1843, a new American term, “Oregon fever,” was coined. “The Oregon fever is raging in almost every part of the Union,” the Ohio Statesman reported in April that year. “Companies are forming in the East, and in several parts of Ohio, which added to those of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, will make a pretty formidable army.” In May, the Telegraph in Painesville, Ohio, reported, “From ten to fifteen teams [with wagons] have passed through this town every day for the last three weeks.” Oregon fever was contagious and soon even families with relatively prosperous farms, and no apparent reason for picking up and leaving, were deciding to sell out and join the adventurous train of white-tops moving west.

  Whitman’s experience and natural talents made him an ideal leader for the 1843 wagon train. A relentless but inspiring taskmaster, he goaded families to rise early and hitch their teams, without stopping more than one night at a camp. Whitman’s biographer, Clifford M. Drury, describes how he would exhort the 1843 pioneers with the motto, “Travel, travel, travel!” Whitman rode far ahead of the wagons to scout the route every day, and he delivered the first baby born on the Oregon Trail. On his riding mule, he was an engaging figure, tall and rugged, dressed in fringed buckskin pants and a mangy fur cap.

  “The Doctor spent much of his time in hunting out the best route for the wagons, and would plunge into streams in search of practical fords, regardless of the depth or the temperature of the water,” wrote one of the 1843 emigrants, J. W. Nesmith. “Sometimes after the fatigue of a hard day’s march, [he] would spend much of the night in going from one party to another to minister to the sick.” (Wagon masters soon learned that attracting doctors to their “company” would help recruit families, and thus increase their guide fees.) When the pioneers reached Fort Hall, Whitman’s insistence on continuing with wagons is credited with saving the expedition and delivering the first big wagon train to Oregon.

  By the spring of 1844, accounts of the Gantt-Whitman Train—the letters and journals of the pioneers—had been published in many
eastern and midwestern newspapers. Whitman epitomized a new American character type, the benevolent but driven wagon master. The first mass crossing had positioned the trail for rapid growth. By 1845, trail traffic had picked up to 2,500 people crossing in a single summer, and then with the Mormon hegira that began in 1847, and the crazed Gold Rush of 1849, as many as fifty thousand were crossing in a year. America’s insatiable drive west would have happened anyway, but the Whitmans’ contributions—especially trailblazing the five-hundred-mile leg along the Snake River in Idaho—had been pivotal, defining the style and the élan of a new age of travel.

  Over the winter that I read about the Whitmans, New England was blanketed by record snows. The powdery vortices swirling past my windows at night provided a romantic stimulant that helped me realize something important about the Whitmans before my dread hours of planning began in the spring. Before entering the wilderness west of the Missouri in 1836, Marcus Whitman was an unknown country doctor in western New York, and Narcissa was a schoolmarm, neither of them possessing the specific “hard” skills required for cutting a wagon road west. The experts scoffed at their inexperience, and they had to overcome a deep cultural skepticism that wagons could be pushed to the Pacific Northwest. Their only real endowments were soft skills such as a willingness to accept the help of strangers, stubborn practicality, and the ability to live with uncertainty. But they became the first married couple to “make” Oregon with a covered wagon, inviting the multitude that followed.

  Starting out, my own dreams of western adventure were just as unrealistic. The only advantages I could count on were the soft ones—luck, maybe, and persistence, as well as an enthusiasm for learning what I needed to know as I went along. More or less impulsively, I had bought a covered wagon and a cranky team of mules, and enough canned chili and lantern fuel to last me for several months. Maybe that would be enough. In Kansas, in my wagon womb at night, exhausted after a day of splashing across swollen creeks and carrying water for the mules, I was comforted by the spunky image of American womanhood that Narcissa Whitman presented, galloping sidesaddle up to South Pass. I often fell asleep thinking of her as my guardian angel of the trail.

  8

  NARCISSA WHITMAN’S LITTLE TRUNK ABANDONED on the Snake was symbolic for me. My own comedy of discarding began that first morning, when I woke at the agricultural museum in Hiawatha. I had slept peaceably enough, but across the thirty-eight-inch span of the wagon my head was wedged between a barbecue cooker on one side and a stack of books on the other. My feet had rattled all night on a pile of kitchenware and boots mounded in the back of the wagon. I felt like an Egyptian pharaoh, buried in his crypt with all the possessions needed for the journey into the hereafter.

  It’s amazing how transformative twenty-four hours in a covered wagon can be. I had left St. Joe the day before obsessed with the fear that I was forgetting something. Everything I needed for four months of travel to Oregon had to be in that wagon. Now, as I gingerly fanny-walked past the barbecue cooker, and then fell through the wobbly pile of kitchenware and boots to get out of the wagon, I was gripped by the opposite obsession. Deep-six this shit.

  It was dawn, with weak tendrils of light filtering in over the prairie, making the distant silos and barns glow pink. I pulled on my boots and rummaged around in the pile of gear in the Trail Pup for the Coleman cookstove, propane, and coffee, got that started, and began sorting through my redundant gear.

  Creating a new discard pile of my possessions was a useful exercise in self-analysis. First of all, the assortment of kitchenware that I had assembled for the trip—glass casserole cookers, extra Revere Ware pans, a pasta cooker, and a vegetable steamer—was patently ridiculous, the prissy collection of a cable-TV chef. Oh, and Rinker, isn’t it useful, you ludicrous fop, to have retained the shoe shine kit for this long? Underneath the bales of hay in the Trail Pup I retrieved the contraband that I had smuggled past Nick in Jamesport—the CD player, the boccie balls, and the backgammon set. Another item, I thought, truly burnished my image as a pioneer. I had packed my Brooks Brothers bathrobe. Walking back and forth in camp every morning to carry hay to the mules, I would look so fetching in a Brooks Brothers bathrobe. And look at this! A can of Niagara Spray Starch! For ironing shirts! Rinker, from the beginning of all time to the end of all eternity there certainly have been and will continue to be a great number of imbeciles, but you are rising pretty quickly here to the top of the dickhead heap.

  When I was done, I had four large garbage bags stuffed with excess barn jackets, boots, saucepans, and the rest of the yard sale that I had packed. I tossed the garbage bags beside a wagon wheel, walked over to the caboose to feed and water the mules, and then enjoyed what would become my most pleasurable time on the trip—the first hour after dawn, before Nick and Olive Oyl woke up. While the windmills across the field whirled in the morning breeze, I tidied up camp and then stood at the tailgate of the wagon, preparing breakfast. I loved being alone in camp on the plains. The smell of sizzling bacon and the expanse of prairie, bright green and fresh with dew, gave me an expectant feeling about the day.

  On the way out of Hiawatha that morning, we couldn’t find a Salvation Army or a Goodwill store. I asked Nick to stop the wagon on Kickapoo Street, near the door of the social hall at the First Presbyterian Church. It is strange how people behave when they fear they are being watched. Kickapoo Street was a quintessentially placid and sensible residential neighborhood in a small Kansas town. Nearby, children circled on bikes in the driveways of lovely Victorians and prairie-style bungalows, and people walked their dogs. Lifting the large bags of my discarded possessions out of the wagon, I tiptoed over to the Presbyterian social hall and discreetly placed them on the steps. Then I tiptoed back to the wagon and we headed north for the junction country along the old St. Joseph Road.

  • • •

  My contributions to the next attic sale at the First Presbyterian Church reminded me that, no matter how much I had studied the overland journals and tried to learn from them, I was condemned to repeat the pioneers’ mistakes. My choice of conveyance—a covered wagon—determined my behavior and had turned me into a twenty-first-century retread. The westbound travelers who crossed the plains before the Civil War were, in the words of one historian, “the greatest litterbugs of American history.” By the late 1840s, a vast solid landfill of wrecked wagons, ox and mule carcasses, bacon barrels, and discarded sinks had replaced the charming waypoints of Chimney Rock or Lizard Butte. Dozens of pioneers would report in their journals that they had simply followed the debris field all the way to the Columbia River.

  In peak migration years like 1850 and 1852, the crush of wagon travelers converging at the Missouri every spring created tent cities around Independence or St. Joseph that were sometimes as large as three square miles. The burgeoning merchant class of these towns knew what this jumping-off economy meant. The outfitters had a month, at most six weeks, to extract from the overlanders as much income as they could get, and they told lurid tales about wagon travelers who had starved before they even reached Fort Kearny in Nebraska.

  The scare tactics of the Missouri River outfitters were abetted by a lively secondary market generated by the trail, guidebooks like Randolph Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler and Lansford Hastings’s Emigrant Guide that began to be published as early as 1845. These Baedekers contained elaborate lists of the camping gear, guns and ammunition, and dry provisions that a typical family should pack and were available at every jumping-off town and even sold in bookstores in New York and Chicago. In addition to advising pioneers to carry a broad assortment of tents, poles, axes, and tools, Hastings suggested packing at least sixty feet of rope for each draft animal. One of the most popular of these guides, Journal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains to the Mouth of the Columbia River, was written by an enterprising Indiana Quaker named Joel Palmer, who recommended that covered wagon travelers amass, for each adult, two hundred pounds of flour, seventy-five pounds of salted bacon, twenty pounds of su
gar, ten pounds of rice, and casks of vinegar, salt, dried beans, and coffee.

  The pioneers quickly learned that they didn’t need all of this loot. In the early years, game was still plentiful along the trail, and during several dry years in the late 1850s the buffalo and antelope grazed near the rivers to be near water. Meanwhile, the draft teams were struggling up the steep slopes of California Hill in Nebraska or Register Cliff in Wyoming, and unloading and then reloading the wagons at the river fords was becoming tedious.

  The result was a historic American dumping. “This jettisoning process began in a mild way a few miles out of Independence or St. Joe,” historian Merrill J. Mattes writes in The Great Platte River Road. “It began in a serious way at Fort Kearny and continued to its climax at Fort Laramie.”

  One of my favorite trail diarists is Franklin Langworthy, a Universalist minister and scientist from Illinois who crossed the trail in 1850. Langworthy should be credited with being America’s first recycler, a Goodwill Industries sort of man. On the trail, when he tired of the chore of washing his clothes, Langworthy simply threw them out and replaced them with the long johns and suits of his size that he found on the shoulders of the ruts. When he was done reading a volume of Cicero or Voltaire, he tossed it overboard for another pioneer to find and soon replaced it with another book from the vast prairie library at his feet.