The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  The Schuttler was an outdoor pavilion exposing me to the intensity of the storm but protecting me from its dangers. The views of the black clouds and lightning rolling over the prairie, and the rivulets of rain trickling down the canvas cover, filled me with contentment, a kind of melancholy loneliness of the plains. We were living so simply and haphazardly now, cobbling together an existence from what we carried in the wagon or could find on abandoned homesteads. It felt incomparably romantic to be there and I wanted this trip to last forever.

  11

  A BIG THUNDER CELL FINALLY landed right on top of us just east of Shickley, Nebraska. We were pushing northwest on paved roads out past Fairbury, trying to make our transit from the Little Blue to the Platte, surrounded by storms so violent that the mules were beginning to spook. Mules are actually quite comfortable in a storm, as long as they are left free in an open field or corral. Then they bunch together for protection, point their rumps toward the storm, and patiently wait out the weather while the rain pummels their backs. But when a storm arrives overhead, they are terrified of being restrained by harness and a wagon, because that deprives them of their feral ability to protect themselves. Now we were on the open plains, with thunderbolts fusing off purple and orange auras as they landed all around us, and a menacing black cloud swirling low directly ahead. At most, we had ten minutes to get the mules to shelter.

  At an attractive farm ahead, we saw a woman chasing around her lawn on a riding mower, trying to get the last of her grass cut before the storm hit. Behind the tree line along the road I could see an extensive compound of barn roofs and grain bins. There would have to be a feedlot corral somewhere in there. With the mules jumping sideways and beginning to panic every time another lightning bolt landed, we ran the wagon up to the farm and I jumped off.

  “Ah, ma’am, we need to get these mules unhitched before that cell lands on us. Can we use your corrals?”

  The woman looked confused and uncertain and bit her lip. Her hair was blown up past her ears by the wind and she glanced hurriedly around, as if looking for help.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I wish my husband was here. He’s still in the fields.”

  “Well, ma’am, if we could just get in there . . .”

  “Oh, no! Did I just say that? I didn’t mean it that way. Of course, go in, go in. I just don’t know where he’d want you.”

  “Is there a corral?”

  “All around the barns.”

  “Okay, we’ll find one. I’m sorry, I can’t talk. We have to rush.”

  “Rush. Go. My husband will be back after the storm hits.”

  I waved to Nick and then ran ahead of the wagon into the farmyard, found a corral, and decided that it would be best to run the team around a long gray barn on the left. There wasn’t any time now. Lightning was touching down on the plains on three sides of us, and the wind had picked up so strongly it blew my hat off.

  “Nick! Don’t stop the wagon. Just get around the barn facing out. Quick! We have to be unhitched.”

  I hadn’t checked the barn, but there wasn’t any reason I would have thought of that. As soon as the mules approached the low pens on the ground floor, a grotesque roar of grunts, squeals, and the sound of dozens of feet sloshing through wet manure rose from the barn. Damn. Hogs. There must have been hundreds of them in there. The roar was deafening, and the mules immediately began to leap away from the sound, with Beck rearing in her harness and refusing to walk ahead, and then Bute rearing and acting out because that’s what Beck was doing. Somehow, Nick got the team moving forward again and disappeared around the far end of the barn.

  I will never forget the image of Nick and the wagon reemerging around the corner of the barn underneath the storm clouds. The mules were rearing away from the sound of the hogs on one side, and bolting sideways from the lightning on the other side. It was a complete spectacle of chaos.

  Nick’s display of horsemanship was extraordinary. Every time the team reared and balked he screamed at the mules above the wind to move forward again. Hogs, lightning. Hogs, lightning, with Nick in the middle lashed by the rain and wind, absolutely fearless and incapable of giving up, holding back a team that would have defeated almost any other driver.

  When Nick finally got the team past the hog pens I knew what I had to do. Beck and Bute were still rearing and turning sideways against the pole and I was terrified about scrumming in there beside them, but I didn’t have any choice. Don’t think. Just do it. I splashed across the wet grass with an armful of lead chains and leaped up for Beck’s bridle, managing to get her lead chain attached before I went for Bute.

  Holding on to two rearing mules like that, I was just one of those jerky little lifeless marionettes in a Pinocchio show, suspended between the bridles of two leaping mules, bobbing up on one arm and off my feet when Beck reared, then yanked sideways again and up to the other side when Bute pulled high. Now I knew what it felt like to be a condemned man in medieval times who got quartered by horses. There was one spectral moment when a thunderclap boomed right on top of us and both mules reared together. I was launched high between Beck and Bute and reached my zenith over black mule ears just as a thunderbolt hit nearby, sparking off a purple spear of light on the misty plain.

  It was just one madass dysfunction of rearing mules after that. The rain was pounding now. Nick managed to stumble off the wagon and with his pudgy, stiff hands rip the tug chains away. Fearlessly, he pushed up through the rearing team, grabbed a lead chain, and walked Jake over to the corrals, and then came back for Bute.

  I was left alone with crazy Beck, pinned between the pole of the wagon and a rusty corral fence, holding on to her lead chain as she reared a few more times and her front shoes passed right by my face. I found I could almost bear the fear if I closed my eyes, and that is probably why I didn’t sense Nick coming up from behind me to take Beck. Then I heard myself spontaneously calling out against the wind.

  “Oh, God. I am never going to be able to do this alone. God, I can’t do this alone.”

  Nick shouldered past me in the rain and grabbed Beck by the bridle, leading her off to the corrals.

  I was humiliated by my admission of vulnerability in front of Nick, but there wasn’t any time to dwell on my feelings now. I ran over behind Nick and Beck to help strip the harness off the mules. Once we had the harness off and the team safely behind the corral gate, the mules stood together near the center and turned their backs west into the storm, waiting placidly while the wind and the rain lashed their backs.

  Nick and I stood in the rain with our arms resting on the iron corral railings, looking over to the mules. My shoulders were sore from holding back Beck and Bute, and the lead chains had turned my hands into cube steak. Underneath my shirt, the rain ran over my back, past my belt line, and down my legs into my boots.

  I was upset with myself for my spontaneous wailing in the rain. I didn’t want Nick to interpret what I said as an indirect request for him to abandon his plans to return to Maine and act in his play. We had discussed the problem a few times already and I had always reassured him that I would find a way to continue alone for the five weeks when he would be gone. But now my true worries had burst out in the most embarrassing way, and I felt guilty about that.

  “Nick,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I said back there. It just came out. I’m not trying to talk you into staying after North Platte.”

  For once, Nick didn’t have a sarcastic reply. The rain had matted his graying hair against his ears and he just stared straight ahead at the mules.

  • • •

  At Shickley, Nick and I established our road ranch layover style. The couple who owned the farm, Don and Shirley Kempf, were exceptionally hospitable and excited to have a covered wagon running through Nebraska, and they were the beginning of a long run of happy Nebraskans who welcomed us onto their farms, fed us, gave us hay for the mules, and even drove us ahead on the trail to scout our routes. At the Kempfs’, we took our first showers of the trip, pull
ed the wagon into their large implement shed for repairs, and even went off one night to their church supper. Nick, who bored too easily just sitting around with nothing to do, acted as a mechanical ambassador for the expedition, helping Don and his brother-in-law rebuild their field cultivator.

  I am a master at self-deception, and at first I refused to use my time at Shickley torturing myself with worry about what I would do after Nick left me in North Platte. I didn’t blame myself, either, for exposing us to a runaway by driving the team through storms. We were making impressive time across eastern Nebraska, and not stopping for bad weather was one of the reasons why. One advantage of having spent the prior winter reading pioneer journals was the knowledge that everything that had happened to us so far was predictable.

  Perhaps the best account of the dangers of traveling in stormy weather with mules was written by Niles Searls, a 49er from Albany, New York, whose Diary of a Pioneer was a Gold Rush classic. Searls paid $200 to be carried to California with Turner and Allen’s thirty-eight-wagon “Pioneer Line,” a transportation experiment that drew an excited response when it was announced in St. Louis in the spring of 1849. The passengers would be spared the bother of buying their own wagons and draft teams, and instead would be carried to California in the six-passenger mule wagons of the commercial line, with all of their provisions and sleeping essentials provided as part of the fee.

  Turner and Allen enticed gold seekers to their line with a beaut of a boast. They promised to deliver their passengers to the gold fields two thousand miles away in only sixty days—half the traveling time of a conventional covered wagon train. To live up to their advertising, Turner and Allen amassed a large herd of three hundred mules that would have to perform the considerable feat of traveling almost thirty-five miles per day. A gullible, pro-trail, pro-development western press helped promote the scheme. The Daily Missouri Republican pronounced the plan a “magnificent enterprise” and wrote approvingly of the elegant wagons and “the finest mules” that Turner and Allen would deploy. By May, more than 250 gold seekers had subscribed for the trip, and demand was so high that Turner and Allen planned a second wagon train later in the spring.

  This was 1849, a year when the frenzy to reach California gold was so intense that all wisdom had percolated from the American brain. Speed in reaching northern California was everything, and Turner and Allen were actually pikers in that department. The craziest westering scheme of all was devised by a head case New Yorker named Rufus Porter, an inventor and balloon enthusiast who was the founder of Scientific American magazine. Like many Americans, Porter was swept up by the visionary possibilities of a mass crossing to plunder the gold fields of the Pacific West. Porter became convinced that giant balloons, powered by twin steam engines borrowed from a paddle-wheeler, could loft as many as two hundred Gold Rush miners to California at once.

  The rush to reach the California gold fields created many crackpot schemes, like Rufus Porter’s steam-powered dirigible “Air Ship to California.”

  Porter’s aerial palace, complete with twenty-six windows, a long exhaust pipe for steam sticking out the rear, and a giant American flag fluttering over the rudders, was designed to ride beneath an immense cigar-shaped dirigible. The engineering was lunacy, but Porter’s marketing was brilliant. He proposed dispensing entirely with the notorious jumping-off hassles along the Missouri River by launching his “aerial locomotive” from New York. The coast-to-coast trip, Porter’s calculations showed, could be made in just three days—five days if the prevailing headwinds were particularly bad that week. Porter aggressively advertised his “Air Line to California” in eastern newspapers and magazines. Amazingly, over two hundred suckers paid a subscription price of $50, which included three-course meals and wine, for the inaugural balloon hop to the gold fields. That winter, a large crowd gathered in a Long Island cornfield to watch Porter test a model of his airship. But the craft never left the ground because the steam engines were far too heavy for the balloon.

  The would-be Porter aeronauts, however, were the lucky ones—they never had to leave in the first place. The 125 paying passengers on the first Turner and Allen Pioneer Train were not so fortunate.

  The Turner and Allen expedition of 1849 was the Edsel of wagon trains. Moses “Black” Harris, the mountain man hired to guide the thirty-eight wagons of the Pioneer Line across the ruts, died of cholera before the expedition left Independence. Many of the teamsters hired by Turner and Allen deserted along the Platte, forcing the passengers to drive the mules themselves, a difficult task considering that most of the mules were not “the finest” at all but wild and green, and few of the passengers had any experience beyond driving one-horse rigs in the city. At least twenty passengers died of disease, and violent free-for-alls for discarded provisions broke out when the overloaded wagons were progressively lightened at river crossings. A ton of cured meats was left at one campsite in Nebraska, fifty gallons of liquor were poured into a Wyoming stream, and the last of the coffee and sugar was depleted by Soda Springs in Idaho. Fleeing mules and wrecked wagons forced most of the “passengers” to walk the final seven hundred miles into California. The survivors of the Pioneer Line ended up reaching California after more than five months of suffering, and founders Turner and Allen barely escaped being lynched. In Oregon Trail lore, the term “Turner and Allen” became synonymous with disaster and advertising hype.

  Most of the problems faced by Turner and Allen’s train derived from a simple fact of life that I had just faced: mules and thunderstorms do not mix. Of the three hundred mules that the Pioneer Line departed with, only half were left by the time the train had emerged from the thunderstorm belt in central Nebraska. Most of them had run away, harness and all, during thunderstorms and hailstorms and vanished on the plains.

  Niles Searls’s published diary described the difficulties of introducing skittish green mules to the stormy springtime climate of Nebraska. After 1849, accounts like his would persuade many pioneers to choose the more plodding but less excitable oxen.

  We have several times in this trip experienced heavy showers and once or twice have had hail. The rain fell in torrents accompanied by a whirlwind and hail the size of hickory nuts. Two of our carriages were overset by the gale and one of them crushed to atoms. Mules and loose stock were stampeded and ran for hours. Captain Turner, who was on horseback, was struck in the finger by a hailstone, which dislocated the joint. In the short space of ten minutes no less than three inches of hail and rain fell. Our only course was to turn our teams to the leeward and, in the language of the seaman, scud before the gale.

  At Shickley, scudding before the gale seemed to have become our permanent challenge—we were delayed two days there by more storms rolling over the plains from the Rockies. I chided myself for being unrealistic in my planning and despaired that we would ever reach the Platte. Maybe living with this much uncertainty was beyond me. But what was most interesting about the trail experience so far was that it was also making me more unrealistic. The dream of pushing mules to Oregon still acted so powerfully on me that I could imagine any number of contingencies that would allow me to continue once Nick was gone. At North Platte, I would hire a cowboy to ride with me for a month and help handle the mules. I could carefully stage the team every night at corral fences, where the mules could be chained while I unhitched alone. I could find a ranch and hole up for a month, studying trail journals and ironing my shirts until Nick was back, even if this would delay our arrival in Oregon until October.

  But speculations like these were just distractions that prevented me from facing a deeper problem. I hated asking Nick for help. This was still the big, unresolved legacy of my childhood and Catholic upbringing—an obdurate guilt complex about asking for what I needed, which only exposed me as vulnerable and weak. My father had drilled this into all of us, but especially the older boys. We were the ones who helped someone else and never asked for help ourselves, especially from a younger brother. When we drove into town to shop
for food or visit the Sears, Roebuck store, if my father saw an old woman struggling across the green with her shopping bags, he hustled the boys out of the car to help her cross the street. We got bonus points if she was a nun, or blind. This was a huge pain in the ass because the Seeing Eye Foundation for blind people had headquarters nearby, and the hills around our place were dotted with convents for retired nuns. Every time we drove into town my brothers and I were jumping into an out of the car like circus clowns.

  Never ask for help—provide it. Now I was on the dream journey of my life and surrounded every day with a surfeit of help. Receiving help, not providing it, made me feel guilty. I couldn’t possibly ask one more favor of Nick.

  And I certainly understood Nick’s problem. He is ferociously loyal to friends and to his commitments, whether it’s building a house or a longstanding promise to act in a play. If he stayed on the Oregon Trail with me, he would disappoint everyone who was counting on him for Stones in His Pockets.

  • • •

  Nothing is ever very private with Nick, and I could tell that he was mulling things over. Between the storms at Shickley he was spending a lot of time on his cell phone talking with friends back in Maine, his booming voice echoing over the soybean fields as he walked out to the edges of the barnyard. I heard just snippets of his conversations—“Well, Rinker, you know,” or “North Platte.” If I looked toward him, Nick pressed his finger deeper into his ear and walked farther out into the fields.

  During our second afternoon at Shickley, I took a long, relaxing pickup ride out over the Nebraska plains to scout the trail ahead, while Nick spent a few hours in town. When I returned to the Kempf farm, Nick was sitting quietly near the wagon in the implement shed, changing the batteries in the hazard lights on the rear of the Trail Pup. When I stepped toward the back of the wagon for one of our camp chairs, I found a neat pile of my clothes—blue jeans, several shirts, my underwear and socks, all meticulously folded. I grabbed my travel bag from the wagon and placed the pile of clothes inside, amazed.