The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Petersen has spent the past few years studying a forgotten but important spur of the trail, the Fort Kearny Cutoff, which was originally developed in the late 1860s as a military freight corridor between Nebraska City on the Missouri and the Platte, and was later used by remnant wagon trains carrying homesteaders looking for a shortcut west. He uses old pioneer journals, newly unearthed maps, and local land records to establish the original route. Documenting the innumerable cutoffs in the west, Petersen believes, tells an important story about how the trail was really used by the pioneers.

  “The single biggest error newcomers to the trail make is believing that it was this single set of ruts crossing the plains,” Petersen told me one day as we drove toward The Narrows, a choke point on the trail near Oak, Nebraska, where the pioneers were forced by high terrain down to the banks of the Little Blue. “The trail went all over the place. There’s an enormous amount of country between here and Independence, Missouri, or St. Joe, and whenever people thought that they had invented a shortcut to get to the Platte quicker, they tried it. When they got to the Platte and, yes, had to follow those banks, they were still all over the place looking for forage or better camping spots. Some days they were right on the river, some days four miles away. Our trail markers are just indicators. There’s an immense swath of land on either side of them that was all really the Oregon Trail.”

  A few miles north, near a muddy crop field filled with wild turkeys and yellow iris, Petersen stopped beside a monument dedicated to Robert Emery, a stagecoach driver who in August 1864 wheeled his wagon around near The Narrows after being chased by Indians and raced back to the protection of a wagon train, saving his nine passengers. The monument is one of several in the area dedicated to the Indian wars that ignited throughout the West after the late 1860s, mostly because the tribes had concluded that the U.S. government had no intention of enforcing treaties that guaranteed them protection from settlers and buffalo hunters, and had now turned on the wagon trains they once welcomed. But Petersen said that the meaning of the Emery monument goes beyond this.

  “It’s significant that this stage driver galloped back for the protection of the wagon train, because it shows the overlapping traffic that was always on the trail,” he says. “The pioneers cut what would eventually also be the stage routes, the telegraph lines, the Burlington Northern and Union Pacific tracks, and even today’s Route 80. The Oregon Trail was an economic catalyst for a lot of history since then, even today.”

  But continued economic development in the West remains the biggest threat to preserving the trail. Advances in irrigation technology and a spike in commodity farm prices since 2008—mostly a result of the ethanol boom—have made it financially desirable for farmers to develop the gullied fields and wetlands along the bottomlands of rivers that were unplowed until a few years ago. There’s a new sod-busting rush in America today. The big new effort is the expansion of center-pivot irrigators. These are the large, gantry-like structures of sprayer bars, mounted on all-terrain tires, that rotate in a circle around a crop field from a central source of water. (This is the method of irrigation that gives the Midwest, from the window of an airliner, the appearance of being a matrix of bright green circles.) Corn prices that shot up from $105 per metric ton in 2002 to more than $250 per ton in 2011 have driven farmers to sod-bust hilly, virgin ground that they used to ignore. Across the Midwest, there is a brisk entrepreneurial business in building bridges for the pivot-irrigator wheels, so that creeks and sharp gullies in the fields can be crossed by the circling irrigators. All the way out from St. Joe, whenever we reached a paved highway, we saw dozens of long-body pickups and flatbeds speeding by, carrying these welded structures to expanding farms.

  McMansions built by retired couples, wind farms, and oil and gas fields in Wyoming are increasingly crisscrossing sections of the trail that were pristine landscapes with visible ruts ten years ago. As we approached the hamlet of Oak, Nebraska, from the north, Petersen pointed out an eight-section pivot that was slowly moving across a hilly cornfield. As we watched, the pivot irrigator inched up a mounded rise in the middle of the field. Later, when we returned along the same road, the pivot irrigator had completely disappeared down the far side of the same rise. The land being irrigated today is that hilly.

  “There’s a prime example right there of the biggest threat to the trail today,” Petersen said. “The trail came through on the top of that saddle of land you see there. When the Little Blue was high, the wagons had to keep to the high ground to avoid the marshy areas. But that new pivot has annihilated the old ruts. We are losing more and more trail every year, and you lose the trail experience as you lose the authentic visual environment that it once had.”

  But Petersen also reassured me that long stretches of the trail just ahead remained intact. At his kitchen table, with a large coffeepot between us, we sat up for two nights and mapped out our route across the south banks of the Platte through Nebraska, carefully marking, with a blue highlighter, every road we would follow. The map work was exciting. In many places the trail route wove back and forth across the asphalt for several miles. But once we reached the Platte below Kearney, just half a day’s ride by mule, we would enjoy long stretches of dirt roads along the river that were the original trail. The countryside along the Platte was remote and undeveloped, Petersen said, and the two main features of the trail that the pioneers saw—the river itself and the gullied South Hills that kept them along the banks—are unchanged.

  Along other sections of the trail, especially a particularly scenic stretch through the bluffs of private ranches after Ash Hollow, we would be riding the original dirt ruts. Every twenty-five miles or so there were small rodeo corrals, private ranches, and public campgrounds in small towns where we could stay overnight. Many of these overnight spots were former pioneer camps or Pony Express stops. We would be seeing a great deal of original trail.

  Bill was also concerned that we would take the challenge of following the “original trail” too seriously. There were many obstacles of terrain ahead that the pioneers had conquered only because they were traveling in large trains of wagons that offered them a generous pool of labor. Teenagers and children helped unload the wagons and carried the flour casks and bedposts up to the summits of sharp hills. At steep downhill grades, the wagons were lowered by teams of men with chains and ropes.

  Petersen knew that we wouldn’t have this advantage. He pointed out a few problem areas on the map, like the sharply rising hills after O’Fallon’s Bluff, or the first big ascent of the trail where the wagons were unloaded, California Hill. The Platte was running exceptionally high this year, he said, and there were plenty of other places where we’d find the trail submerged in lakes. With his blue highlighter, he carefully marked routes around these barriers.

  “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “I’m no mule man, but I do know grades. By my book, if you follow Route 30 and then Day Road around California Hill, you’ve still done the trail.”

  Minden was also an important mechanical reckoning for me. I had dreamed about this trip for years, and planned and planned. But now that I’d come the first 250 shakedown miles, I was confronting my many errors of foresight. The bare wooden brakes that Don Werner had assured us would “last all the way to Oregon” were already shot from slowing down the wagon over the low, gentle grades of the junction country. Two hundred miles ahead, we would face the perilous canyons and downhill plunges around California Hill and Ash Hollow, Nebraska. When we removed the oak shoes from the brake assembly to inspect them, the right brake fell apart in our hands. One of Bill Petersen’s friends, a woodworking hobbyist, completely rebuilt the brake out of fresh oak. In a farmer’s barn north of town, I found a coil of thresher belt—a durable rubber, reinforced with nylon, used to convey power from an engine to a thresher or combine—which Nick cut into enough brake pads to last us for the rest of the trip, protecting the wooden brakes from the worst abuse of the hills ahead.

  I had also concluded th
at the fifty gallons of water we were carrying would never do once we got past the forks of the Platte, where the towns and ranches thinned out and we would need to carry more than a one-day supply. Scrounging around another farm, I found a blue fifty-five-gallon plastic drum that had been used to deliver corn syrup to bakeries. Nick spent a day and a half building a cantilever extension to the Trail Pup to mount the barrel and plumb it with a spigot and hose, while I ran back and forth to hardware stores or dumpster-dived for the lumber and parts that we needed. We added racks beside the plastic barrel for our food coolers and pots and pans. My pretty, exquisitely restored Peter Schuttler now looked like a hobo rig, with a thick coating of matted wheel grease, dust, and prairie grass on the sides.

  The Minden layover just made us hungrier for more trail. We were acclimated now to movement, freedom, the languor and sweet exhaustion of long days behind the mules. Sitting up late at night with my maps and a pot of coffee separating me from a white-haired, reincarnated Ezra Meeker, was dreamy. The long, serpentine line of our planned route along the Platte, with the braided flow of the river marked on the Franzwa and DeLorme maps, and triangle hatches for the wetlands, was beguiling. Nick and I were impatient to launch for the Platte, and after dinner with Bill and Nancy on our third night we drove out to the wagon and carefully reloaded our supplies, using bungee cords to secure our food coolers on the new Trail Pup extension. Afterward, we sat on our camp chairs beside the wagon and stared up at the stars.

  “Rink, I just want to get back on the trail,” Nick said. “Life is simple out there.”

  • • •

  The next day, as we fell in along the Platte, I could instantly see why the pioneers found the river valley so seductive and navigable. To our right the silvery chain of the river stretched northwest until it disappeared over the horizon, its waters at full stage skimming by so swiftly that the wagon seemed to be racing beside it. Within a half day’s ride from Kearney, the South Hills appeared on the left. They were low and rounded at first but after Cozad they broke into a series of sharply rising, jagged bluffs, with mesmerizing beige and green badlands falling in between. Together, the river and the parallel hills formed the natural shoulders of the avenue where the covered wagons had fanned wide, searching for the best forage or clear air away from the dust created by the trains ahead.

  Historian Merrill Mattes has written that the pioneers were “welding a continent together with wagon wheels” as they followed this highway across the plains. “If God smiled on America’s credo of Manifest Destiny,” Mattes wrote, “He showed it most clearly in providing a geographically central corridor up the Platte.” For the next hundred miles, until The Forks at North Platte, we hugged the same course along the river on narrow paved roads and dirt tracks.

  The trail on the south side of the river was uninhabited and desolate. But through the misty condensation rising off the river we could see the grain elevators and shiny silos of the farm hamlets on the north side. Alfalfa Center went by, then Odessa and Elm Creek. By the middle of the afternoon the jingling of the harness and the rumbling of the wheels had put me to sleep again, and once more I caught myself from falling off the wagon by grabbing the brake handle. I got off to hike, and enjoyed the way that the Schuttler white-top disappeared into the green vastness ahead as the mules outpaced me. It didn’t matter to me if the wagon got too far ahead, or if Nick daydreamed and forgot about me. I was bounded by the South Hills off my left shoulder, and the river flowed past to my right. Everything I could see along the funnel of land in between was the Oregon Trail.

  13

  OUR DAYS OF ENDLESS BEAUTY along the Platte made it difficult to believe that we were traveling through a great valley of death. After the late 1840s, however, the Platte River valley was just that, an avenue through the bluffs that led to an epidemiological cul-de-sac. Even before the wagon trains left Independence or St. Joe, the massing in the camps of so many disparate groups virtually guaranteed outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles and smallpox, but the great killer was Asiatic cholera. After an outbreak in Calcutta in the 1820s, the Vibrio cholerae bacteria were carried across trade routes by rats on ships, exploded across Europe in the 1830s, and reached New Orleans in 1849, just in time to travel up the Mississippi River in the spring steamboats to meet the swelling Gold Rush migration.

  The swampy drainage of the Platte extended several hundred yards from the main river channels. The expanse of standing pools of brackish water and salty, alkaline mudflats often began just a few steps from the wagon ruts. This created a natural petri dish for the microorganism responsible for causing cholera, and the pioneers were adding fresh host material for bacteria—human waste, animal manure, the carcasses and offal of slaughtered animals—every day. Biologists now know that the alkaline deposits that occurred naturally along the Platte River flats mimicked the salty delta conditions of the bacteria’s native India, encouraging the growth of Vibrio cholerae in the squalid waste piles of the camps. The anarchy of latrines in the camps festered overnight, becoming killers for the next arriving train. When the river rose after storms, cholera traveled downstream several miles in a single night.

  Viewed in this way, the largest land migration in history created a fascinating intersection between human need and biological self-destruction. For 450 miles the Platte offered the pioneers everything they required in an otherwise arid, hostile environment—clear navigation points west, water, fresh game, and timber for cooking fires. But the Platte also provided ideal conditions for disease: warm temperatures, alkali soil, and mud holes that acted as stewpots for organic waste.

  Throughout May and June every year there were dozens of covered wagon trains along a single fifty-mile stretch of the Platte, and every one of them functioned as an ad hoc disease transmission system for the wagons downstream. Cholera, which attacks the digestive system and intestines with acute diarrhea, followed by convulsions and vomiting, can turn victims purple and blue in the face and cause an agonizing death within hours. Illinois pioneer John Nevin King rode a paid “express train” to California in 1850, similar to the Turner and Allen experiment of 1849, and saw four men in his group die before reaching the forks of the Platte. “Tis awful when you see an acquaintance at noon well and in the enjoyment of health and learn in the evening that he is a corpse.”

  The cholera outbreaks on the Platte have to be considered an economic indicator, not just a matter of health. Families suddenly dispossessed of their farms by financial panics, or young easterners overwhelmed by the irrational exuberance of gold fever, either had no choice about traveling west or were too crazed by greed to read the warning signs. In peak migration years like 1849 and 1852 as many as 2,500 pioneers died every year between the jumping-off cities and Fort Laramie in Wyoming, making for an average of four graves per mile all the way across from Independence or St. Joe. Historians now estimate that the toll from cholera was between twenty thousand and thirty thousand deaths between 1849 and the Civil War.

  The problem, mainly, was ignorance, and the long delays in communicating scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. Doctors who had treated patients during earlier outbreaks in Paris and in the teeming industrial cities of England suspected that the source of cholera was contaminated water, particularly brackish water mixed with sewage in the low-lying dockside areas inhabited by the working class. In 1854 an English doctor, John Snow, identified a polluted London well as the source of a cholera outbreak, a discovery now thought to be the beginning of modern germ theory. Snow’s work was not widely known outside England, and most Americans continued to believe in the medieval “miasma theory” of disease transmission—that noxious vapors from swamps and bad air carried disease. Snow’s research finally reached North America in the 1860s, but this was too late to save the emigrants during the peak travel years along the Oregon Trail. This invasion of humanity, implanted on this ecosystem, was killing the participants every day.

  The pioneers seemed to understand the threat posed by the
imperfect water supply, but did very little about it. Abigail Jane Scott’s 1852 journal aptly describes the infectious trap posed by the Platte. After her train “struck” the Platte in late May, Scott reported seeing as many as ten “fresh graves” every day along the shoulders of the trail, complained about sickness in her own train, and passed a wagon company from Springfield, Illinois, that had turned back for the Missouri after burying one member of its party in the afternoon and another the next morning. But like the rest of the wagon companies, Abigail’s train was desperately dependent on the water that was killing its members. A single covered wagon carrying five or six pioneers, drawn by thirsty oxen or mules, required up to seventy gallons of water a day.

  But decent water was hard to find. Scott found the water from the main channels of the Platte—roiling with mud, sticks, and sand brought down by the spring rains—distasteful. “The water of the Platte being so mudy and warm that it was impossible to drink it.” Instead, the pioneers were forced to root around in the mud holes and swamps along the edges of the river drainage, even though they knew these sources of water were unhealthy. “The great cause of dierrehea which has proved to be so fatal on the road,” Scott wrote on June 8, “has been occasioned in most instances by drinking water from holes dug in the river banks and along marshes.” She knew. Still, Scott and her party continued drawing water from the brackish and cholera-infested mud holes, a practice they would continue until they reached the cleaner banks and natural springs after crossing into the higher elevations of Wyoming.