The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Virginian John Clark also crossed in the busy emigration year of 1852 and, as early as St. Joe, observed the impact of cholera on the crowded jumping-off camps. A shortage of spades meant that many cholera victims were buried so poorly that their toes protruded from their graves, and shady volunteers lingering on the edges of the camps cheerfully offered to help dig graves, only to run off with the flour casks and cooking pots of the deceased, which were quickly resold to incoming pioneers. Clark described another scene when his train camped one afternoon between the Big Blue and the Platte.

  We pitched our tents but soon found we were in a distressed crowd. Many Oregon families. One woman and two men lay dead on the grass & some more ready to die of cholra, measles & small pocks. A few men were digging graves, others tending the sick. Women & children crying, some hunting medicine & none to be found scarcely; those that had were loathe to spare. With heartfelt sorrow we looked around for some time until I felt unwell myself. Ordered the teams got up & move forward one mile so as to be out of hearing of crying & suffering.

  The rote burials along the trail numbed many of the pioneers. There is rarely any mention of a religious service before the dead were interred, and pioneers already inured to death by passing a dozen or more graves a day seemed more intent on keeping the wagons moving. After hastily hacking away at the hard prairie soil, the survivors buried the latest cholera victims in graves so shallow that the outline of the body could still be clearly seen. Many families worried that a new grave would be disturbed by coyotes and deliberately buried their dead on the shoulder of the trail, or even in the middle of the ruts. Then, thirty or forty teams and wagons were run directly over the grave to hide its existence from predators.

  Trail scholars are particularly grateful to Micajah Littleton, a native of Georgia who quit his job on a Mississippi River steamboat to cross to California in 1850. Littleton became a sort of professional grave-spotter, meticulously recording the names of over three hundred of the dead, carved on headboards, that he saw between St. Joe and South Pass. He often wandered far off the main ruts in search of additional burials and found dozens of unmarked graves hundreds of yards from the main ruts. Littleton’s precise notes helped historians to make estimates of the complete death toll in a bad cholera year. An accurate grid of burial sites has also helped trail experts establish how far the wagon trains traveled away from the main path.

  During just two days in the third week of June 1850, Littleton found thirty-one graves along the Platte. One grave he described depicts a common sight along the trail and demonstrated the hastiness of the burials. His tender sadness yet resignation about the scene must have been typical for pioneers who, by the time they reached Fort Laramie, regarded another new grave as no more noteworthy than a passing antelope.

  I passed one today what appeared to be a woman poor creature. Her skirts and dress lay some 15 feet from her grave as though She had dropped them. . . . Her bed a few yards further and her pillows and blankets with some other clothing lay around like it had been only a few hours Since she was buried, a sad spectacle. It caused deep emotions to thrill in my bosom to look on the Sad Sight but Sooner or later we all have to render up an account to our God.

  There seems to have been a supreme irony, however, about being surrounded by so much misery and death. Bodies stacked five and six deep in the camps did not diminish the aesthetic appeal of the Platte Valley landscape, and in many journals there was a prevailing sense of charmed travel. One afternoon in early June 1852, Abigail Scott saddled her horse and left the “very sandy” road beside the Platte for a ride up through the nearby hills. Scott’s journal entry that day is significant because it challenges the traditional depiction of pioneer women as either passengers in the wagons or weary walkers hurrying the children along on foot, while the men galloped off to hunt buffalo. Like Narcissa Whitman and Margaret Frink, Scott was an avid equestrienne.

  In one place the bluffs came up very near to the river, and I ascended on horseback to the top of the highest one that we could see from the road, and there saw, indeed a romantic spectacle. The Platte below me flowing on in peaceful music, intersected with numerous islands covered with timber. . . . The emigrants wagons cattle and horses on the road in either direction [stretched] as far as the eye could reach.

  Over the next two weeks, hardly a day went by without Scott’s remarking on the majestic terrain. She found the “columns above columns of sand and sand stone” that the wagon trains used as navigation points—Courthouse Rock, Jail House Rock, Chimney Rock—aesthetically irresistible. On June 15 her train reached Scotts Bluff in western Nebraska, the gateway to the Rockies. To the west, she could see the purple dome of Laramie Peak, seventy miles away.

  “The hills have a truly grand romantic appearance,” Abigail wrote, “calculated to fill the mind with indescribeble amazement approaching almost to sublimity.”

  Over those same two weeks, the Scott train had covered more than two hundred miles and passed fifty-two fresh graves.

  • • •

  The theme of beauty intimately mingling with death occurred to me, too, at the end of our first day out from Minden, when we rested and watered the mules on the site of a popular pioneer wagon camp that we reached by crossing a small bridge, now the location of the Plum Creek Cemetery.

  Nick and I had spent the day running the mules west along roads that hugged the river, following Bill Petersen’s trail markers, so that we reached Plum Creek with a wonderful feeling of having “struck” the Platte in the morning to follow the old ruts for the rest of the day. Yellow coneflowers and bitterweed glowed in the untilled fields, and the wind from the river blew a summer snow of cottonwood seeds across us on the wagon seat. The mules picked up their feet and wanted to trot when we reached the long, cool tunnels of shade beneath the occasional groves of cottonwoods along the trail.

  The Plum Creek Cemetery stands on a level patch of open prairie with a breathtaking view to the South Hills. The burial ground is primarily known for its memorial to the thirteen victims of an attack on a wagon train by a Cheyenne and Arapaho war party in 1864. But I was particularly intrigued by an intricately carved marble headstone that stood near the entrance to the graveyard and dates to one year later.

  Sarepta Gore Fly, a Missouri native, had originally traveled across the trail with her husband, William, in 1859, to join the Colorado Gold Rush. The Flys decided to return to Missouri in 1865 and were traveling eastbound on the trail when Sarepta suddenly died—probably of cholera—in early June. In the early twentieth century, her headstone was found by children playing in a field near Plum Creek, and it was moved to the cemetery in 1930. The professional carving on the headstone and the impressive use of type fonts made it obvious that the marker couldn’t have been made locally in 1865. Over time a legend grew about how the stone reached this lonely stretch of the Platte. Sarepta’s husband, William Fly, it was said, was so disconsolate about losing his wife that he traveled east to Kearney, supervised the carving of the headstone by a stonemason, and then pushed the two-hundred-pound stone all the way back along the Platte in a wheelbarrow.

  The story is almost certainly apocryphal. William Fly was a practical man who had participated in both the California and the Colorado gold rushes and would move on to a successful career as a Montana rancher. It’s far more likely that he hauled the headstone back to Plum Creek on the family wagon, or caught a ride on one of the many freight wagon trains that by the 1860s were passing through Kearney every day.

  But for more than a century the wheelbarrow story has been retold as if it were historic truth, and variants of it are a persistent western myth. I had already encountered it at the grave of Susan Haile near Kenesaw, Nebraska—her husband, Richard Haile, is said to have pushed her heavy marble headstone all the way from St. Joe. (This version of the legend is usually told with an O. Henry twist, that Richard Haile was forced to resort to a wheelbarrow because he had sold his team and wagon to pay for the headstone.) Over the summer I
would encounter four more versions of the wheelbarrow story at trail graves farther west, and there are any number of stories like it on other overland trails. Randy Brown, a Wyoming historian and preservationist who has exhaustively studied trail burials, concludes that “the wheelbarrow aspect is probably an embellishment added in later years by local people.”

  I was fascinated by this. The serial legend of a mourning widower pushing a gravestone for his wife across the plains in a wheelbarrow seemed to be an ineluctable narrative of the Oregon Trail. Standing alone before Sarepta Fly’s headstone, I wondered how shared stories like this get started, why they are so contagious, and what they mean. Perhaps the early homesteaders, whose field plows often turned up bones from shallow pioneer graves, felt a need to atone for the haphazard placement of so many bodies across the plains. Maybe the desolation of the early homesteads, the sadness of the constant howling wind, naturally conjured up an image of a lonely man pushing a wheelbarrow. Pioneer widowers were well known for hasty remarriages, often before they had even finished the trail, and the journals are full of examples of thirty-year-old men with several children wooing and winning teenage girls. William Fly was known to be different, however, and did not remarry for seven years. The image of a disconsolate but determined husband pushing a heavy wheelbarrow across the trail certainly implied true love.

  We pushed on and that evening made the six-thousand-acre Robb Ranch, which stands on the south banks of the Platte, across from a large island in the river with timber stands and cleared pastures. The proprietor there, Joe Jeffrey, is a joyful, round-faced veterinarian in his seventies, a self-described “cowboy poet” who delivers humorous lectures across the country on the history of outhouses and fence posts. A sign on his barn reads POST HOLES FOR SALE. Jeffrey took us down to the southern portion of his ranch and showed us the old pioneer ford across Plum Creek and the deep swales cut by the wagons that still remain in a few of his unplowed pastures. We ate home-raised Angus steaks in the ranch house with Joe and his wife, Dianne, swapped stories and laughed, forming another of those rapid, intense friendships of travel.

  The Robb Ranch had also been a crowded trail encampment, and that night Nick and Olive Oyl slept with the bones of the pioneers, out in the tall prairie grasses behind the ranch barns. From my mattress in the wagon I looked out through the wagon cover to a moonlit landscape where the old and the modern trail merged. The South Hills, lustrous and black, were profiled against a lighter sky, and on the summits the rotating beacons from three communications towers flashed red. Coyotes howled from the tree line at Plum Creek and I could hear the rumble of the trucks on Route 80, across the river. I was optimistic about our progress on the trail and pleased about the wagon modifications that Nick had done in Minden. We had come thirty-two miles that day, watered the mules three times, and arrived at the Robb Ranch with a full day’s supply of water still in our tanks.

  • • •

  The next day, just south of Gothenberg, Nebraska, Nick and I rested the mules in the shade near another attractive trail remnant, an old log cabin called the Midway Pony Express Station, which stands near the house and barns of the historic Lower 96 Ranch. The ancient checked logs and the cedar-shingled roof of the Civil War–era cabin are protected from the weather by a modern, three-sided aluminum implement shed, tastefully painted in slate gray and light blue to match the Platte Valley sky tones. I was touched by the story I learned there about the cabin and the Lower 96.

  Midway Station is a classic example of how an old pioneer encampment and trading post morphed into something new with each phase of transportation. After the brief, colorful life of the Pony Express ended in 1861, the Midway Station became a stagecoach, freight, and mail stop, conveniently located along the Platte just a one-day pull by mule from Plum Creek. The station probably got its name because it was considered the midway point between Atchison, Kansas, and Denver, Colorado, on the Overland Mail route, when the stage roads were moved north during the Civil War, to avoid Texas, which had joined the southern Confederacy. But place-names in the West often have multiple origins. Midway might also have been named because it stands just a few miles from the fabled 100th meridian at Cozad, Nebraska (100 longitudinal degrees west of Greenwich, England), the line that roughly bisects the North American continent running north from Texas to North Dakota.

  The spot where I was now carrying buckets to water the mules was truly saturated with history—the kind of place that makes a book turd feel light in the knees. In June 1860 a Pony Express rider named Jim Moore made what is still regarded as one of the great endurance rides of all time. Receiving a westbound government dispatch marked “Very Important,” he left Midway Station and galloped all the way to Julesburg, Colorado, only to discover an important eastbound dispatch for Washington that had to be carried back to Midway. Changing horses at Pony Express stations every ten to fifteen miles, Moore covered the 235-mile round-trip in less than fifteen hours, averaging more than fifteen miles per hour. But legends inevitably get stretched and the distance given in many history books is 280 miles, kiting Moore’s average speed up to nineteen miles per hour.

  In 1879 the explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, later the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, established the 100th meridian as the “moisture line,” often locally called the “dry line,” separating the relatively fertile plains of eastern Nebraska and the arid scrub country to the west. (In Nebraska, an average of twenty-two to twenty-eight inches of rain falls annually east of the 100th meridian; twelve to sixteen inches falls to the west.) Revisions to the Homesteading Act under Theodore Roosevelt—a pro-rancher Republican—allowed settlers west of the 100th meridian to claim a full section of 640 acres instead of the original 160 acres, because the drier land was so much less productive, and this is one reason why eastern Nebraska is cropped, and western Nebraska is mostly cattle country. In nearby Cozad there is a historical marker on Route 30 at the 100th meridian, where the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express route, the transcontinental Union Pacific, the Lincoln Highway, and modern interstate Route 80 intersect. The Concord coaches of the Central California & Pikes Peak Express Company, later the Overland Mail Company, ran nearby.

  In the early 1880s, twenty years after its run as a Pony Express station and stagecoach stop, Midway was developed into a successful ranch by a Pennsylvanian, Henry Laurens Williams, whose family eventually expanded it into the Lower 96, a spread along the Platte that included 8,000 acres of cattle range and 1,500 acres of crop ground. More than a century of history is symbolized by the old log cabin station, lovingly preserved by four generations of the Williams family and their in-laws. It is believed that the original log cabin site was a small trading post along the fur caravan routes to the Rockies in the 1820s and 1830s, and the structure itself was built either in the 1850s as a road ranch on the Oregon Trail or in 1860 for the Pony Express. (Some historians question the building’s past as a Pony Express stop.) The cabin was in continuous use as the Lower 96’s bunkhouse until 1956.

  Larry Gill, seventy-one, who married into the Williams family in the 1960s, is the fourth-generation owner-manager of the Lower 96. He was mowing his daughter’s lawn on the edge of the ranch when we pulled by with the wagon, and he interrupted this work to follow us up to the Midway Station in his pickup. Gill is a fit, Hollywood-handsome man who is usually dressed in faded blue denims, pointy packer’s boots, and modern nylon shirts that he buttons up to his Adam’s apple to protect his chest from the blazing Nebraska sun. Gill reminded me a lot of other ranchers I had met over the years. He is not one of those boastyboy cowboys who tell tall tales, but is instead a modest, gregarious man who exudes a spirit of curiosity about visitors.

  Gill told me that, over time, the Williams family has spent at least $100,000 on periodic restorations of the old Midway-Station-cum-bunkhouse—“and that’s in old dollars, you know?” An infestation of powderpost beetles in the 1960s required the expert advice of entomologists from the University of Nebraska. The vagar
ies of Platte Valley weather—heavy rains followed by scorching heat, snow in the winter—caused moisture to wick up from the foundation and sill, rotting the lower logs from the inside. To replace them, Gill and his ranch hands harvested new cedar logs in the South Hills and milled and mortised them by hand. He considered this work the obligation of any ranching family that has inherited a significant vestige of the Oregon Trail, a way of reassuring the public that history could be preserved on private lands.

  A few years ago, when Gill began to think about retiring, he faced a problem common among ranch families today. His three children have successful careers and either have moved away or are not interested in ranching. Gill and his wife have been gradually selling off their grazing range to neighboring ranches, but they will retain and farm the most valuable bottomlands along the Platte so that his children can inherit a substantial family asset. He has purchased enough life insurance to cover the estate taxes when he and his wife die. More than 130 years of continuous family management of the Lower 96 will soon come to a well-planned end.

  But there was still one more chore to perform, which had just been completed when Nick and I rolled through with the wagon. Gill didn’t want to encumber either his children or the eventual owner of the remaining ground on the Lower 96 with the responsibility of perpetual care for the Midway Station log cabin. After making another round of restorations on the old bunkhouse, Gill spent almost $30,000 pouring concrete footings and ordering the attractive, prefabricated implement shed that now shelters the original structure. The big goal was protecting Midway Station from moisture, and the log cabin is now encased in a dry metal barn, with setbacks and space on the sides and in the back designed to encourage a drying circulation of air. The pitched roof extends far enough over the front to protect the facade of the cabin from rain and snow. This side, facing southwest, will remain open, so that the Oregon Trail tourist buses entering the Lower 96 all summer can still enjoy the original prospect of Midway Station. Visitors can stroll inside to see the original floorboards, the old furniture, and the photographs of the ranch in the nineteenth century, when the Oregon Trail ruts were still visible beside the split-rail corrals.