The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  In his delightful and ironic Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, published in 1855, Langworthy pointed out that the pioneer dump zone stretched all the way to the Pacific. Langworthy traveled the California Trail, the branch of the overland trail system through the deserts of Utah and Nevada that was developed during the 1849 Gold Rush. It departed southwest for California at Fort Bridger in western Wyoming, after following the main ruts of the Oregon Trail for a thousand miles. In the deserts of Utah, Langworthy stopped to rest at places that were littered with emigrant graves, or where a man ate his lunch “gravely sitting upon the carcass of a dead horse.” He described another desert scene, a few days’ travel beyond Salt Lake.

  The destruction of property upon this part of the road, is beyond all computation. Abandoned wagons literally crowded the way for twenty miles, and dead animals are so numerous, that I have counted fifty carcasses within a distance of forty rods.

  The Desert from side to side, is strewn with goods of every name. The following articles however, are peculiarly abundant; log chains, wagons, and wagon irons, iron bound water-casks, cooking implements, all kinds of dishes and hollow ware, cooking stoves and utensils, boots and shoes, and clothing of all kinds, even life preservers, trunks and boxes, tin-bakers, books, guns, pistols, gunlocks and barrels. Edged tools, planes, augurs and chisels, mill and cross-cut saws, good geese feathers in heaps, or blowing over the Desert, feather beds, canvas tents, and wagon covers.

  An adaptive swap-meet mentality soon prevailed on the plains. Having been cheated by the Missouri outfitters with poor-quality flour or bacon, the pioneers quickly learned to just exchange their inferior barrels for better-quality supplies discarded by someone else along the way. The Missouri River outfitters, and traders at the forts, were adept at multiplying their chicanery. As soon as a covered wagon train disappeared over the bluffs, the merchants dispatched wagons of their own to recover the tons of flour and dried beef that they knew would be thrown overboard. The recovered goods were then hauled back to the post to be resold to the next train of suckers.

  The American traveler’s remarkable penchant for oversupplying was a theme that played out in many other ways. Pioneer journals recorded how, when a wagon train arrived at a frequently used camp at night, the men happily plugged away at the confused, thirsty steers abandoned just that morning by the preceding wagon train. Then they cooked steaks on the cast-iron and tin stoves also left behind by earlier wagons. In this way, each hundred-wagon train became a sort of dusty logistical support system for the train just behind it, a mobile convenience store that consumed some of its inventory itself but left plenty behind for others.

  It’s impressive how, even then, America was so superlatively organized for producing waste. The Gold Rush of 1849 was one of the great boom years in American history, and the butchers of Missouri and the steamboat lines had worked overtime the winter before, preparing for what they expected to be a record invasion along the trail. The documented tally of 49ers and pioneers who crossed that year is 25,000, but historians believe it could have been as high as 32,000. The overloading that spring of wagons, carriages, and wheeled vehicles of every description—some 49ers crossed the trail pushing wheelbarrows and dogcarts—was epic. After Fort Kearny along the Platte in Nebraska, Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming, about 350 miles down the trail, was the second big stop. It was located near a pleasant grove of cottonwoods at the junction of the North Platte and Laramie rivers and was a popular resting place where the pioneers camped for a day or two to trade with the Indians and reassess their loads. By May 30 that year—still early in the travel season—twenty thousand pounds of bacon lay abandoned on the plains outside the fort.

  • • •

  As we harnessed and hitched the team in Hiawatha, I began to realize how much work was required every day to get a covered wagon rolling again. Feeding and carrying water for the mules, breaking camp and reloading the wagon, and then harnessing and hitching took at least an hour. The dust flew from the mules while I curried them, the harnesses dug into my back as I carried them across to the team, and the wagon pole creaked as I raised it to hook to the yoke. Nick and I worked briskly and efficiently together and the last few minutes of our morning routine—while I held the mules up front, Nick attached the chain tugs—were tense. Even in the cool morning air, as I climbed the wheel to mount the wagon seat, the back of my shirt was spongy with sweat. Still, every morning I felt the wonderful endorphin rush of the Ultimate Equine Vacation.

  We headed due west, diverting a mile or two above the paved Route 36 to follow the quiet dirt section roads that paralleled the highway. The mules were fresh and wanted to trot. It was a brisk and clear Kansas morning, with cattle bounding over to the fence lines to stare at us as we passed, meadowlarks bobbing above the grasslands, and low, creamy sun on our backs. I kept track of our progress on my maps and was pleased to see that we could make the important waypoint of Marysville, Kansas, an old trail and Pony Express stop, after just a few days of pleasant camping.

  We quickly noticed all of the problems we would have with the team. Bute was actually quite game for work and struggled to keep up whenever Beck trotted ahead of her, but Bute’s hooves were splayed sideways and too small for her body weight, and she had an awkward, short stride that made it hard for her to keep up with the more athletic Jake and Beck. We had planned to trot at least an hour or two every morning to make good time when the air was cool. At a trot, mules can make seven miles per hour. They walk at four miles per hour. I was already mile-obsessed and wanted to gain at least fifteen miles of trail before noon, so we could enjoy leisurely afternoons of walking in the warmer temperatures and be guaranteed our twenty or twenty-five miles per day by the evening.

  But Bute just couldn’t do this. She was a walker. After fifteen or twenty minutes of trotting, she would stumble and start to favor her right leg—not limping, just shambling along with an ungainly, obviously uncomfortable gait. I tensed up with stomach spasms every time Bute stumbled, especially when we were on paved roads. If she fell to her knees, the other two mules would probably drag her for several yards before we could get them stopped. An injured Bute would then have to be replaced, a time-consuming setback this early in the trip.

  Beck presented her own cluster of issues. She was an immensely attractive mule, jet-black, tall and leggy, with a naturally long, athletic stride. She loved to pull and perform as the “lead” mule of the team, and her trace chains were always tight. But she was an unpredictable, crazy girl who shied at everything—strange-looking culverts, a piece of farm machinery beside the road, cows chasing up behind us in a field—leaping sideways in her harness and pushing hard left against the other mules, momentarily breaking into a gallop and frothing at the mouth as she bolted away.

  Beck is very strong, and several times, when she suddenly veered sideways, the whole team would be pushed toward the center of the road and even over the painted line, which was dangerous if there was traffic. Instantly, even when Nick was driving, I would grab the right line and seesaw it back and forth, grinding the bit into her molars to get her back in line. Whenever Beck shied, Nick and I would pull the team back that way, both of us gripping with all our strength on a single line.

  But Nick loved our twisted sister mule. She appealed to his thrill for danger and his natural empathy for tortured souls.

  “Okay, so Beck is just Tonya Harding on steroids,” Nick said, as we pulled her back toward the shoulder of the road one day. “Big fuckin deal. That just makes me like her more. She’s the smartest of the three.”

  I was careful after that not to denigrate Beck, but this was difficult after she made it clear that she despised me. She would act up in harness as soon as she could tell that I had taken the driving lines from Nick. In the morning, if I approached her with the harness, she spooked sideways and looked at me angrily, promising to kick my brains to a spongiform pulp.

  Beck was Nick’s mule, Nick’s project. In the pastures at night, he coo
ed to her and caressed her with brushes and gall ointment, while I carried apples to Jake and let him bury his head in my arms.

  Nick and I discussed the team and what it meant for our trip several times those first few days. We expected the mules to settle quite a bit after a week or two of work and after losing their winter fat. Perhaps Bute and Beck would improve. Still, understanding what had happened and what we faced with the mules led to one of the first big revelations of the trip.

  I didn’t believe that Philip Ropp had deliberately sold us a bad base team of mules. Beck would not have been shying very regularly on a farm that was familiar to her. So Ropp wouldn’t have known how bad she was that way. Bute’s poor feet, which made it impossible for her to trot, might not have shown up on Ropp’s farm either, because he rarely ran the team while working his fields. A mule man of Ropp’s experience should have known about these limitations of Beck and Bute. But I was the one who made the bigger mistake, buying a team as quickly as I did.

  “We’re just as naive as the pioneers,” I said to Nick as we bumped along on the wagon seat. “Don Werner wouldn’t make the changes we wanted on the wagon, and Phillip Ropp sold us some bozo mules.”

  “But it’s not their fault,” Nick said. “Nobody really knows what it takes to drive a team a thousand miles anymore. The art of horsemanship has been lost. We’ve got to reinvent that ourselves.”

  “I’m not going to live this whole trip blaming our outfitters for our mules and rig,” I said. “This is our trip, our responsibility. If we’d known about these problems before?”

  “We never would have left,” Nick said.

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “We’re just going to have to fix our problems ourselves as we go along.”

  This became our creed, almost a religious faith. Nobody knows and we would have to figure everything out ourselves.

  Nick and I were also adjusting to our very different driving styles. Even when I am relaxed and enjoying myself out there, I hold a team with the lines gathered tightly on my lap, always ready for a mule to shy or for the team to decide to bolt. Fear is my retentive personality. I consider it my great weakness and could spend hours ruminating on where it came from. Had I simply been born this way—cautious, skittish, cerebral—or did the chaos of my upbringing force me toward a need to control? When I was a boy, my father had scared the hell out of me on horses and in wagons, and stunting in planes, and terrified me with his temper. I was convinced that a hideous death, or at least injury, lurked everywhere for me, and my fatalism extended to virtually every other aspect of my life. I turned in my best work as a journalist convinced that my editors would reject it. Logging, I could take the better part of an hour roping, notching, and then felling a tree. Now I sat on the seat of a Peter Schuttler wagon, climbing the hills and crossing the creek beds of eastern Kansas, gritting my teeth and trying not to confess to Nick that I was gripped by images of disaster every time he trotted the team.

  Nick had developed his bold style of driving over the past twenty years in New Hampshire and Maine, lunging his teams through drifts and over streams to get his sleighs through. If there’s a challenge to face—inching a wagon through a narrow space, backing to get out of a parking lot—Nick is all driver, intensely focused and just about the best there is. But the rest of the time he sits cross-legged with the lines loosely gripped in one hand, daydreaming. He enjoys a rough ride and doesn’t carefully plan a turn, skittering the wagon over at the next road.

  It was a style driven by Nick’s psychology. If you ignore a problem long enough, things will build to a crisis. The mules will shy wide, kicking at their tug chains, nearly toppling the wagon. Then Nick could rescue the situation and prove his mettle as a driver. The normal precautions of life don’t occur to Nick. One of my brothers describes him as “proud to be careless.”

  But we were adjusting. During those first few days in Kansas, if I didn’t like the look of an intersection ahead or saw some farm machinery coming over a hill that would probably spook Beck, I reached over and took the lines myself or spoke up to Nick.

  “Nick, gather your lines now. Hold this team back. I don’t like the looks of this.”

  It was a frequent refrain and I hated correcting Nick. But I was constantly aware that one mistake could cost us the trip. Each time, I apologized to Nick as soon as we were clear of the danger.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Nick said. “It’s not your fault that you grew up to be such an old lady.”

  • • •

  The other big problem we had out along the St. Joe Road in Kansas, and then later in Nebraska, were the recreational vehicles. Someday, when historians perform their “why the Mayans declined” necropsy on American society, they will marvel at the way that, at a time of high anxiety about energy resources and costs, millions of elderly people took to the road in the clumsiest, most inefficient vehicles ever devised by man. The lunacy of America is all right there, in the RVs.

  Highway 36 through Kansas is, essentially, a motorized ghetto for the massive Winnebago and Gulf Stream motor homes that American seniors drive themselves around in these days. As they head out toward Yellowstone Park or to visit their grandchildren in Seattle, these road geriatrics follow the advice of their guidebooks and motor along the “Pony Express Highway” between St. Joe and Marysville, and then lumber up to highways 30 and 26 in Nebraska to follow the Oregon Trail country along the Platte. Spending six figures for a McMansion mounted on a bus chassis is truly an adventure in bad taste. At a few state parks and Sinclair convenience stores where we stopped along the Pony Express Highway, the proud owners of a Winnebago Adventurer or a Newmar Mountain Aire would occasionally insist that we step inside their rig for an inspection tour. Everything desired by America’s gaudiest consumers is inside these things—immense flat-screen TVs in the kitchen and living room, microwaves big enough to stew a whole cow in, whirlpool baths, extra dens and porches that extend off the sides by activating humming motors. The designers at Winnebago and Gulf Stream seem to understand the Walter Mitty fantasies of American seniors. In most of these RVs, the driver’s seat is called the “pilot’s cockpit.” The passenger side, which includes a laptop stand on the dashboard, is called the “copilot” seat.

  Of course, the RVers were thrilled to see a covered wagon moving down the St. Joe Road. Opportunities to create traffic hazards are much coveted by RV couples, and they loved us. They were relentlessly bad drivers and would sway their big Gulf Streams around the back of the wagon, rumble alongside at four miles per hour, just inches from the mules, and then open their windows and flash away with a cell phone camera for several minutes as traffic backed up behind them.

  Several times a day, packs of RVs would pass us on the highway, and then the drivers would stop a half mile ahead, positioning themselves to take better pictures. They parked with about two feet of the Gulf Stream girth on the shoulder of the road, with the remaining eight feet blocking our westbound lane. The driver of an eastbound RV, curious about why the Sun Sport with Wisconsin plates had stopped, of course had to stop too, allegedly parking on the shoulder of his side of the highway. There was just enough room in between for us to squeeze the wagon through this RV gauntlet.

  RV occupants, however, have fine, salient minds. True erudition rides behind those windshields. As we inched our way through the behemoth Venture-Ride and Endura-Maxes blocking our way, the RVers stood to take pictures and asked us questions.

  “Hey, how come their ears are so long?”

  “Where’s your police escort? I don’t see escort cars.”

  “Who cooks? How do you cook?”

  As we traveled the St. Joe Road, we found that the Sinclair convenience stores were a comfortable place to stop. The large roofs built over the gas pumps provided shade for the mules, we could water them there, and then run in for a coffee for me and a Diet Pepsi for Nick. The Sinclairs were our road ranches in Kansas. We ran into a lot of RVers there.

  Apparently, there is a consid
erable gassing off of formaldehydes and vinyl parts inside a moving RV that causes aggressively boring men to consider themselves wildly funny. They would come bobbing out of the Sinclair shops in their veterans’ ball caps and baggy cargo shorts with suspenders, see the covered wagon at the gas pumps, and then knock off a one-liner that they were convinced was hilarious.

  “Hey, whad’y’a put into this baby, hunh? Regular or High-Test? Ha, ha, ha, ha! Doris, did you hear what I just said? Regular or High-Test! Aren’t I funny? What a gas!”

  One afternoon, outside Seneca, Kansas, another one of these himbos strolled toward us across the Sinclair ramp. His humor was more highly refined than your average RVer. Any mere reference to High-Test or Regular was too hackneyed for him.

  “Hey, how many pounds per square inch do you pump into them tires, hunh? Ha, ha, ha, ha! PSI thirty-five or thirty-six? Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

  As the man walked by toward his green RV, Beck followed him with her eyes, turning her ears slightly in his direction. Then she abruptly spread her rear legs, squatted down with her rump, and let off a riverine piss that splashed onto the pavement. The bladder capacity of these big draft mules is legendary, and Beck is clearly a best of breed. Her Nile of urine ran downhill and formed a shiny yellow moat around the man’s Winnebago Adventurer.

  As he tiptoed in his Naugahyde sandals through the urine pool, the man craned his head backward and yelled.

  “Hey! Hey! This is . . . That mule of yours . . . That’s public urination!”

  Nick was up on the wagon seat, sharing some fried chicken with Olive Oyl. His Fu Manchu dropped and he looked over, expressionless, at the fatboy standing in the urine pool.

  “Thanks for the information, bubba,” Nick said. “But don’t blame my mule, okay? We trained her to do that.”

  The man stepped inside his Winnebago, angrily slamming the door with a metallic bang. Through the tinted windows of the RV we watched him delicately remove his sandals with his fingertips, and then wash them in the RV sink and drop them into the dish strainer. Then he plunked himself down into his pilot’s seat, the Winnebago muffler roared with life, and the RV departed the Sinclair, its rear dual tires leaving sparkling tread marks of mule urine on the highway.