The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Jesus, Nick. I can’t believe this. You did my laundry.”

  “I found a laundromat in town. Does that surprise you?”

  “Well, sure. You folded my shirts.”

  “You seem to forget that we have the same mother.”

  Clutching the hazard lights in one hand, Nick carried his chair over to the wagon to sit beside me. When he spoke, his voice was low, not his usual baritone foghorn, and he seemed very relaxed about something.

  “Listen, I’ve made my decision,” he said. “I’m not going back to Maine. I’m going to stay with you for the whole trail.”

  I was too grateful and flabbergasted to respond right away.

  “But, Nick, what about your play?”

  “Don’t worry about my play. I talked to all of my theater friends about it. They all agree it’s a no-brainer. Why would I start the Oregon Trail and not finish it? I want to be out here. Every horseman in New England will be jealous of me for this.”

  It was hard for me to be humble and say what I really felt then, but I knew that I had to.

  “I do need you, Nick. I can’t get across the trail without you.”

  “We need each other,” he said. “When you sent me that email about the saddle, I knew that this was my ticket out. I needed to get the fuck out of Maine.”

  “Okay. But I appreciate that you are sacrificing a lot here.”

  “Rink, no. Don’t pull a guilt trip on yourself. I hate it when you do that. It’s our trip. We’re doing this together.”

  We talked for a while longer sitting beside the wagon, and then I realized that I was immensely tired. A great burden had been lifted from me. Ever since the bridge at Marysville I’d been waking at three o’clock in the morning to brood, turning from shoulder to shoulder for two hours before first light, trying to reassure myself that I could survive without Nick. Now I felt exhausted. I stood up, gripped Nick by the shoulder, squeezed hard, and then climbed into the wagon for some sleep—my first afternoon nap of the trip. While King Lear at the height of his madness raged outside, I slept soundly for several hours.

  • • •

  Along the Little Blue, I discovered walking. The monotonous rumbling of the iron wheels and the plodding of twelve hooves on the dusty section roads, hour after hour, became a prairie lullaby, and by noon or one o’clock every day I was drowsy on the wagon seat, nodding off sideways and then frantically grabbing on to the brake handle as I swayed above the rotating spokes.

  For me, falling off the wagon and then getting crushed by the wheels was one of the most frightening dangers of the trip. As a boy, I snared my leg once in the moving spokes of one of my father’s buggies, and was flipped upside down and dragged along a gravel driveway. I lost most of the skin on one cheek and my head ached for days. I knew from the trail journals that few wagon trains reached Oregon without fatalities underneath the wheels, and the casualty rate was particularly high among children.

  One of the most poignant accounts of death under the wheels appears in the journal written by Lucia Loraine Williams, an Ohio pioneer who made a speedy but perilous crossing in a seventy-wagon train in 1851. Along the Platte, while Lucia and her three-year-old daughter Helen were in their wagon, it was blown over by a windstorm. Later, Helen almost died of scarlet fever. At the large Ash Hollow pioneer encampment in central Nebraska, the Williamses’ train met a party of Sioux raiders who were carrying Pawnee scalps still wet with blood. A month later, just after crossing the Green River in western Wyoming, Williams and her husband, Elijah, decided to let their ten-year-old son, Johnny, a popular boy on the train, ride for the day with a baggage wagon far behind them. But the driver fell asleep, probably from the heat and the monotony of the ride, and his team ran away. Johnny fell off and was crushed by the wheels. Riders were sent ahead to alert the Williamses about the accident, and they rushed back for their son.

  “Poor little fellow, we could do nothing for him,” Lucia wrote in a letter to her mother that fall. “He was beyond our reach and Oh, how suddenly, one half hour before we had left him in health as lively as a lark, and then to find him breathless so soon was awful. I cannot describe to you our feelings.”

  Johnny was buried in the high desert, a half mile east of Fontenelle Creek. Many years later, Lucia’s closest friend in the train, Esther Lockhart, described the impact of Johnny’s death on the other pioneers.

  The entire train was immediately stopped. We were the first to reach poor little Johnny, and we saw at once that he was beyond earthly aid. The heavy wagon wheels had passed directly over his forehead and face, and death must have been instantaneous. The innocent victim never knew what happened to him and when Mr. Williams, who was an extraordinarily devoted father, saw the lifeless form of his child he was beside himself with grief and anger. He ran for his gun and was about to shoot the unfortunate driver when four men overpowered him and took his weapon away. Later, when reason and calm judgment returned to the distraught father, he was thankful he had been restrained from committing a heinous crime.

  The driver was broken-hearted over the tragedy. He did not recover from the effects of this deplorable accident during the remainder of the journey. A rude casket was improvised from a large trunk belonging to Mrs. Williams, and the body of the dear little lad who had been a merry companion a few hours before, and loved by everybody, was tenderly buried near the scene of the accident. After some hymns had been sung and a few prayers said, a wooden marker was placed at the head of the grave. His parents wished this to be done, as they felt that we were now in a neighborhood where the Indians would not disturb such places. On the headstone was written the little lad’s name, his age and the brief circumstances attending his death. Then, with many regretful tears for the promising young life so suddenly and cruelly cut short, we drove sadly away, leaving him alone in the wilderness, in his last long sleep. For many days we could not forget this agonizing experience. It hung over us like a black shadow. It took all the joy out of our lives, it had been so sudden, so unnecessary, so full of all that was sad and tragic.

  My drowsiness now also had a lot to do with the weather. By the middle of the day the flatlands of Nebraska were hot, and beside us the mixed fields and scrub prairie were luminously green under a cloudless sky, with sleepy, vapory mirages rising over the tree line of the Little Blue. The heat didn’t seem to affect Nick at all and I asked him to pull the wagon up while I changed into canvas hiking boots. A long, brisk walk would improve my circulation and wake me.

  “You’ll be all right?” I said.

  “I love drivin team alone. Enjoy yourself out there.”

  I knew that the faster-walking mules would quickly outpace me, and that Nick would daydream off and forget about me. I asked him to wait if I fell out of sight.

  “Sure,” Nick said. “Here, take Olive Oyl. She’ll enjoy the run.”

  It was rhapsodic out there. As the wagon slowly pulled ahead of me our American flag snapped in the breeze, six bright red wheels turned up contrails of dust, and the sun high in the southeast sky cast a long, cockeyed shadow—a silhouette of mule ears, canvas tops, and churning wheels slanting across the scrub brush. On foot, the prairie seemed even more wide open, and once more I was levitating on plains. I felt better, wide awake, right away.

  Nick, of course, daydreamed and forgot about me. The wagon disappeared off the far rise and I wouldn’t see it again for two hours. But it was refreshing to feel so abandoned, wrapped in solitude. Narcissa Whitman had galloped ahead of the fur caravan, losing sight of the wagons. I was walking alone on plains that I had dreamed about for years, our transit to the Platte was nearly complete, and my brother was staying with me on the trail.

  12

  IN 1906 THE HOMESTEADERS WHO lived along the watery draws of the abandoned Oregon Trail witnessed the spectacle of a thin, very old man, incongruously dressed in a three-piece gabardine suit, walking eastward across the old emigrant road. He was leading a team of oxen pulling a covered wagon decorated with patriotic m
ottoes and an American flag. The prairie schooner hobo was living simply off the land, camping at old trail stops like Farewell Bend and Independence Rock, supporting himself by selling five-cent postcards to schoolchildren. His idea was simple, but so idealistic that no one had thought to articulate it before. Before the Oregon Trail was obliterated by progress—the farmer’s plow, irrigation ditches, new railroad sidings—he wanted to mark it for posterity.

  Ezra Meeker was a geriatric burst of energy, the John Muir of the Oregon Trail, who reinvented himself for lasting fame after a life of spectacular success and failure. Born in Ohio in 1830, Meeker first crossed the trail as a pioneer in the peak migration year of 1852, settling in Puyallup, Washington, and quickly establishing himself as a prototypical western achiever. He made a fortune growing hops for breweries, indulged a grand tour of Europe and returned to build his wife a fabulous Italianate mansion in Puyallup, then lost it all when a plague of aphids destroyed his crops in the 1890s. Meeker dabbled in many businesses after that, briefly entered politics, and was involved in several unseemly squabbles over efforts to promote the business prospects of the Pacific Northwest. But he didn’t become a household name until 1906 when, at the age of seventy-six, he began his covered wagon journey across the trail, stopping along the way to harangue crowds about the importance of preserving trail history and installing granite “Meeker Markers” at important trail junctions.

  Meeker was rakishly handsome and had matured into elfin old age. With his long white beard, floppy brim hat, and gimpy team of oxen—“Twist” and “Dave”—Meeker made an improbable hero, but America soon fell in love with the geezer adventurer bent on saving the Oregon Trail. Oddsmakers in Chicago and New York took bets on where Meeker would die on the plains, but he astonished everyone by making it past the Missouri River by the end of the summer and then continuing on to Indianapolis, where he wintered over and printed a journal about his walk, Ox-Team Days. In the spring, finding that he enjoyed trail life, Meeker continued on to New York, where he scuffled with police who wouldn’t allow him to run his oxen down Fifth Avenue. In Washington, D.C., he ran his rig onto the White House lawn and enlisted President Theodore Roosevelt to help him preserve the trail.

  Meeker was a big, visionary thinker. Not content with merely preserving the trail, he advocated the creation of a national commercial and military road across the West, linking growing cities like Denver and Salt Lake with the East, and spur roads that would connect with the vast national parks that had been created during the Progressive Era. Swimming and fishing facilities, hotels, and even towers with navigational beacons for passing airmail planes were all part of Meeker’s plan. None of this was built during his lifetime, and Meeker would receive no credit for his elaborate transportation dreams. But the national parks system built during the New Deal, and the interstate highways paved in the 1950s, eventually created a network of concrete and open spaces remarkably similar to Meeker’s original scheme.

  Meeker showed no sign of slowing down in old age. In 1910, at the age of eighty, he made another crossing of the trail by covered wagon, and then progressed through transportation technology by making several more crossings by train, automobile, and—at the age of ninety-four—open-cockpit biplane. He died in 1928, just two years shy of his hundredth birthday, while working with Henry Ford on still another rig, a stretched Model A outfitted with a covered wagon top. Meeker called it the “OxMobile” and was planning to use it that summer to make a new crossing of the trail.

  Ezra Meeker was a geriatric dynamo and visionary whose frequent recrossings of the overland route were critical to preserving the trail.

  After Meeker’s death, the organizations that he founded or inspired—the Oregon Trail Memorial Association and the American Pioneer Trails Association—managed to stage a few commemorative events at major trail stops like Independence Rock. Workers from the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps built an Oregon Trail Museum at Scotts Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska. But it wasn’t until 1982 that a group of trail enthusiasts and historians founded the Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA), which has carried on the mostly thankless work of marking remote stretches of the trail, preventing encroachment by housing developments and energy projects, and identifying pioneer graves.

  But Meeker did leave behind one vital legacy. During his 1906 trip, he installed more than thirty inscribed monuments along the trail, and a hundred temporary wooden tablets awaiting permanent fixtures, a rudimentary chain that eventually became the basis for marking the trail. On his subsequent trips, Meeker lobbied state government officials to follow his example, and his popularity made him hard to resist. After World War I, several state governments along the trail—Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon—installed hundreds of granite markers along the original ruts, and these were supplemented by U.S. Department of the Interior markers across more than four hundred miles of the trail on public lands in Wyoming. The relatively few stone markers that Meeker installed himself, and the government granite markers, collectively came to be known as Meeker Markers and dozens of them still exist on the trail today. Every year, the state chapters of OCTA regularly replace worn or vandalized markers with metal stakes.

  Though relatively simple, Meeker’s contribution had lasting effects. The trail route was now staked, known. Without the markers, hundreds of miles of trail would have been overrun by irrigation projects and new roads and lost to history. In 1982, OCTA’s founder Gregory M. Franzwa published a three-hundred-page bound edition of geodetic maps covering the whole trail, and it is now possible to pick up the trail in the suburbs of Kansas City and follow the original route more than two thousand miles to Portland, Oregon.

  By early June, with the Meeker markers and the Franzwa maps as our guides, Nick and I had completed the first big leg of the trip—the 250-mile transit from St. Joe to the Platte. Now, at Minden, Nebraska, just below the Platte, we would rest the mules for a few days and make some needed repairs to the wagon. But surely the biggest delight of laying over once we reached the Platte was meeting a latter-day Ezra Meeker who embodied his spirit of preserving the trail.

  • • •

  In 1997 the former police chief of Minden, Nebraska, Bill Petersen, had just retired from the National Guard after a thirty-one-year weekend career. Worried that he would not have enough to do on weekends, he went down to a hardware store on a Saturday morning to buy some angling equipment and purchase a fishing license. In a state guidebook containing suggestions about popular fishing spots along the Platte, he noticed several notations for the Oregon Trail, which ran right through prime fishing country. As he began to dabble with fishing on weekends, Petersen became interested in the trail markers and commemorative plaques marking the trail, and then became concerned that a marking system meant to preserve a treasured history really wasn’t being maintained very well. He began immersing himself in trail journals and histories, joined OCTA, enrolled in a Rut-Swale Identification Certification Course, and assigned himself the job of meticulously restoring the markers, or adding new ones, along a 250-mile stretch of the trail east of Gothenburg. Intrigued, he quit fishing and began spending most of his time marking the trail.

  I had first heard about Petersen, now the president of the trail association’s Nebraska chapter, when we stopped off at the OCTA national headquarters in Independence, Missouri, as we drove west to pick up our mules. After we left with the wagon, I contacted Petersen by cell phone from Kansas. He sounded skeptical about what we were trying to accomplish and told me he did not believe that anyone had made an unassisted crossing of the trail since Ezra Meeker’s last run in 1910. But, at sixty-eight, Petersen is computer-savvy, and he began following our progress on his laptop map of the trail, which he overlaid with weather maps. He was impressed that we had pushed through the rains past Marysville and Shickley, and that we were pretty much tracking the typical daily mileage of the pioneers. He offered us the use of a small vacation trailer parked behind his hou
se in Minden if we made it that far.

  It was raining again when we pulled into Minden over the Memorial Day weekend. Minden is a popular tourist town and farming center just south of the main Oregon Trail junction with the Platte, and it stands honestly on the plains, classically midwestern, with very little of the suburban creep that mars other American towns. The railroad tracks intersect with large grain elevators at the edge of town and the restored opera house faces a lovely town square. We found Petersen’s modest ranch house on Blaine Avenue, a few blocks west of the tidy, shaded mansion district.

  Petersen is a thin, energetic man in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and an Indian-print shirt, with thinning white hair and a gravelly voice. He is effortlessly gregarious and helpful. When we pulled up with the wagon, he came out from his house and offered to help us find a farm with corrals for the mules. We settled into the comparative luxury of the backyard trailer behind Petersen’s house, feeling almost guilty about accepting the comforts of civilization again. Every morning we stepped across the dewy patch of lawn behind Bill’s house and entered the small dining nook beside the kitchen, dawdling over coffee and breakfast prepared by Bill’s cheerful wife, Nancy.

  Nick called the instant bonding we were making on the trip “trail family.” In Nebraska, we never lacked for trail family.

  Petersen patrols the Platte River valley in a purple and red Dodge pickup equipped with a dashboard Compaq laptop that, with GPS software, constantly updates his position on or near the trail. His pickup bed is filled with metal stakes, Oregon Trail signs, and equipment for upgrading trail markers. His personal disc storage of data about the trail and trail sites, not simply in Nebraska, but from Independence to Mount Hood, is up there in the gigabytes. He soon proved to be an invaluable source of information about the trail and, in between running errands to hardware stores for Nick, while he was repairing the wagon, and buying supplies for our leg across central Nebraska, I spent several afternoons with Petersen learning more about the trail.