The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  I began to relax about things a lot more. Fathers do not let go, and memories of them condense with age. Nick and I were crossing the trail, fifty-three years after our Pennsylvania trip, thirty-six years after my father had died. Having him along for the ride was as much a part of the journey as the jingling of harness, my afternoon walks, or the hard blue skies against the South Hills.

  • • •

  Twenty miles out of North Platte, along the shores of a modern man-made lake called Sutherland Reservoir, we reached a T in the road near a prominent choke point along the trail, O’Fallon’s Bluff. Here, the South Hills abruptly tumbled down to the river, forcing the pioneers either north to ford the river or due west, up the gently rising, sandy slopes of a broad plateau. On the westward route, the wagons would continue to follow the avenue formed by the river and the South Hills out past Alkali Lake and Happy Hollow, to make the “upper ford” at California Hill.

  Today, the northern route is blocked by Route 80, which is only a few yards from the old trail, so we couldn’t turn that way. The western route would carry us around the lake to a sandy, inferior farm country where I suspected we would have difficulty finding a place to camp. I could tell from my maps that the landscape ahead was the chain of roller-coaster hills that Bill Petersen had warned me about. But I couldn’t see very far ahead. It was just a Sahara out there. The prevailing westerly winds rocketing across the plains had churned the bluffs into giant clouds of sand that obscured the roads and sky.

  It was late afternoon and I was tired. Beck had been shying a lot all day, and I wasn’t sure that the mules could pull our rig, with five hundred extra pounds of water added to the rear of the Trail Pup, over the steep hills of O’Fallon’s Bluff. But there was no place nearby to camp, my late-afternoon mania for more miles was quickly turning into an evening mania, and there were still two hours of light left. I decided to push on past a homestead called Dorsey’s Road Ranch, another trail waypoint that had enjoyed a second life on the plains as a Pony Express and stage stop.

  We could see what kind of trouble we were in as we climbed the first rise after Dorsey’s. The western fringe of the bluffs extended as a series of sharply rising hills directly in front of us, with no section roads turning west to allow us to get around the heights. But it wasn’t just the climb—the steepest so far of the trip—that we faced. The winds blowing hard from the west had turned the sandy edges of the bluff into an impenetrable gale of sand. We couldn’t see how high we would have to climb, or how far the hills stretched, and we were probably going to be driving blind through the sand blasts. In the narrow channel of clear air that we could see to the west, dark, low rain clouds were pushing in.

  We were completely boxed in. There was no way we could turn the wagon around on the narrow road. Our only choice was to penetrate uphill through the sand clouds, hoping that we could summit the indiscernible space beyond and then descend into the clear by nightfall.

  I was frustrated because I had studied this stretch of trail several times during the winter, and knew that I had to find a way around the high terrain. Now we were headed straight for O’Fallon’s Bluff.

  “Nick,” I said. “I’ve screwed the pooch on this one.”

  “Boss, we’re on the trail, right? Wasn’t that a marker back there?”

  “We’re on the trail.”

  “So? Fuck it. Let’s go. The trail’s the trail. What’s the name of this place?”

  “O’Fallon’s Bluff.”

  Nick slapped the lines on the rumps of the mules. “Hup, Team! Hup, Hup! C’mon, you odd buggers, it’s just a whore called O’Fallon. O’Fallon’s Bluff, Team! Bute, Jake, Beck! O’Fallon’s Bluff!”

  By now we’d learned some things about the team. Bute, a complete laggard for work, nevertheless pulled hard on the hills. It was the procrastinating mule in her. She mostly wanted to lay back all day and let Jake and Beck pull the load. But when there was work to do that couldn’t be avoided, she wanted to get it over in a hurry. When she saw a hill coming, Bute leaped into a fast walk-trot, leaned hard into her collar, and somehow lunged her shorter legs ahead of the team. Jake and Beck hated that and never wanted to be left behind by Bute, so they raced forward together as a team, all six tug chains pulled tight. We knew to exploit that now, and Nick yelled to Bute in his best mule-calling baritone and touched her rump with the whip.

  “Bute, you odd bugger, up the hill, Bute! We’re cutting your weight down for the prom, Bute! Bute! Get up! We’re going to the prom. Up O’Fallon’s Bluff, Bute!”

  The edge of the bluffs rose as a mounded grassland on our right, a little higher than the wagon top, protecting us momentarily from the wind. But then the vegetated ground fell toward a small canyon just ahead. We had another quarter mile of clear air before we reached the high ground obscured by the sandstorm.

  As we started uphill, I kept my hand ready for the brake and told Nick that if the summit was obscured by the sandstorm, I’d lock the wheels to reassure the team when we felt the wagon lunge downhill.

  “Nick! Here we go! Just see if you can keep them straight on the road.”

  “Yup, Team! Yup, Team! O’Fallon’s Bluff, Bute! Oh, fuck, Rink. Look at this hill. I love this.”

  It was just a wispy edge of wind and arid soil at first, dust devils on a Nebraska hill. I could feel a sensual pitting of sand on my hands and cheeks. But as we climbed higher the blasting sand stung my skin, even through my clothes. On the exposed ridge below the summit, the wind buffeted us even harder—thirty-five miles per hour, forty-five miles per hour, I couldn’t tell. Our hats ripped up against the parade strings under our chins, and I could see Beck’s harness rise off her rump.

  Farther up the hill, we entered a noiseless zone where the wind racing past our ears was so compressed that there was no sound at all except for a muffled jingling of the tug chains and the groan of the wagon tongue. Nick’s voice, calling the mules, reached me as a distant, hoarse whisper. There was nothing to see straight ahead.

  Bump. The wagon lurched sideways—hard left. I couldn’t see or hear anything in the blinding cloud of sand. I could only sense the wagon by the seat of my pants. Oh, yes. That’s three axles back. The Trail Pup is in the ditch, pulling right, jackknifing the main wheels left. Beck had been thrown left by the lurch and was pulling hard right to regain her footing. But Nick, feeling her pull right, was trying to keep her left, thinking that she was leaving the road.

  From my position on the right side of the wagon seat, Beck, on the right of the team, was directly in front of me. As she regained the edge of the road I noticed a clear visual reference by staring straight down at her rear hooves—practically the only thing I could see. Her right hind hoof and her right tug chain were about eighteen inches from the fuzzy line of green prairie grass that grew along the road shoulder. Hoof to prairie grass—eighteen inches. That was my distance from the edge of the road.

  This was instrument flying, in covered wagon mode. I could almost perfectly assess our position on the road by Beck’s distance from the grass line. She needed to get right again to be on the edge of the road, but Nick couldn’t see anything from his side of the wagon and kept pulling her left. Bumpety-bump, bump, bump, the right Trail Pup wheel was skidding sideways into the rough off the road and swaying the main wagon off center.

  I leaned hard into Nick, yelled into his ear, and grabbed at his knees for the lines.

  “Nick! I can see the edge of the road! I’ll take the lines. You call.”

  All of this happened in just a few seconds and now I had the lines firmly in my hands. When I inched Beck back right I picked up the edge of the road and then pulled her even farther into the grass, hoping that I could straighten the wagon and get the Pup wheel out of the rough edge of the trail. I was driving entirely by feel now, steering the rig according to the surface I could sense that the wheels were passing over—bump, bumpety-bump, bump, bump, bump. Then the ride suddenly turned smooth. Yes, I’m back on the grassy edge of the road. Hold
it steady on the grass to stabilize the wheels. After twenty yards of that, I coaxed the team left and could see the prairie grass again where it was supposed to be—eighteen inches off Beck’s hoof. Good. The ride was smooth and we had six wheels back on solid ground.

  It was just a thing of driving beauty after that, with a thrilling sense of danger, competence, instinct, and joy. I was amazed, too, at the wonder of personality. Beck, our Lizzie Borden of a mule, was always acting out when there was nothing to fear. Now, under terrible conditions, she was pulling like the bejesus, and her steps were so consistent that I could drive through a sandstorm by looking at her hooves. For the rest of that blind pull I was one fluid sensation of shoulders and hands coordinating driving lines, mule bits, and wheels dampened by dust. My eyes were bloodshot from the sand and wind but I wouldn’t take them off my eighteen inches to the green line of prairie grass. There was still no vision ahead, and not much sound, and I didn’t know where the hill ended but somehow I felt secure, neurologically fused to the mules through the lines.

  There was a brief clear space of air just below the summit of the first hill where the mounded grasslands returned. I quickly looked west before we reentered the sand plumes and it was an exhilarating sight. For thirty miles the verdant crop fields shone green along the Platte. Directly below us, shafts of sunlight punching through the breaks in the low clouds brilliantly lit the aluminum grain bins on the farms. There were storm clouds farther west. Then we disappeared again into the brown fury of sand.

  There must have been something about emerging from the sand plume to see the intense vista below. I was overwhelmed with a single, pellucid sensation. I felt completely free. Nothing existed behind me or ahead of me on the trail.

  Uncertainty. Complete, purified uncertainty—that’s what I was living for now. I didn’t know what lay beyond these hills. There was no place certain to go, no camp that we knew of tonight. What did pushing mules up this sandy hell of hills mean? Beck had been a shying maniac all day and now she was pulling through the sand clouds like a dream girl. My father had appeared to me unannounced in Gering. Our path west carried us toward another thunderstorm. But I didn’t want certainty now. I loved living this way and I just wanted three mules, Nick, and the trail. All I could do was continue moving west, west, west, a fanatic for miles. My reward for that was learning to embrace uncertainty.

  We were still trapped by the blowing sand when we crested the first hill. I could tell that the wagon was heading downhill again when the pole lifted and the trace chains went slack. I reached over for the brake with my right foot and felt through the lines the mules momentarily panicking and then relaxing when I locked the wheels. We descended in the blowing sand for another minute until we reached a clear spot along the grasslands again, and the next hill was obscured for only about forty yards.

  The rest of the hills were lower and the wind began to abate. Over them, we were driving blind for only a minute or less. But I had my mantra now. Uncertainty was a sacrament and the quest for miles meant that we’d never know where or how we’d end the day.

  • • •

  It was nearly dark when we found the first road leading west, away from the hills. Once more we were racing dark clouds over the Platte to find shelter and dodge a runaway before the storm hit. The plains beyond O’Fallon’s Bluff were littered with sad, ragtag farms, mostly deserted. These run-down areas, which would become a common sight as we moved west, were produced by the consolidation of farming that has taken place in American agriculture over the past thirty years. Mechanization, chemical fertilizers, and improved seed hybrids have allowed farmers to efficiently till large parcels of several hundred acres, even more than a thousand acres, at once. In the past, a typical one-mile-square parcel of cropland, containing 640 acres and called a “section,” supported four family-owned farms of 160 acres each. (Many areas even had “eighth-section” farms of eighty acres apiece.) When these smaller, less efficient farms were abandoned or sold, the larger, prosperous farming outfits that bought the acreage ripped out the old tree lines and irrigation systems to join the neighboring fields into one giant crop factory that could be “plowed through” with huge John Deere or Case tractors for a mile or longer. With typical American indifference to aesthetics and road views, however, many of these new agribusiness firms have simply left the old houses and barns along the road frontages to rot. There are hundreds of clusters of these “ghost farms” throughout the Midwest and West today. While the best ground surrounding the farms shimmers with mile-long furrows of wheat and corn, the sun-bleached old hay barns and wooden houses along the road look abandoned and forlorn, their doors and clapboard siding flapping in the wind.

  Just before the storm hit, we finally found a family of renters at one of these run-down farms willing to let us camp, and we stripped the harness off the mules and got them into a corral as it began to rain. Nick wandered off with Olive Oyl to sleep in a dilapidated semitrailer that had been converted into a horse barn, and he would wake in the morning with a beard of manure plastered to the whiskers on one side of his face. I spent my fifth night of the trip sleeping in the wagon during a thunderstorm.

  While the rain pounded on the canvas top, I counted the section lines from North Platte on my DeLorme map. We’d covered thirty-two miles that day. The mules weren’t even spent, and, at this rate, we could be in Ash Hollow in two days—450 miles from St. Joe in exactly a month.

  Pushing on for the hills after we’d already done our twenty miles for the day wasn’t a sensible decision. We should have camped before reaching the lake and taken O’Fallon’s Bluff early in the morning, when the winds were lighter. It was a mistake. But these mistakes were working for us. After the storm blew over, I fell asleep to the frantic calling of screech owls, who for some reason had decided to dive-bomb the wagon top. I thought back to my sandy epiphany up on the bluffs. Perhaps, on a covered wagon trip, there were no mistakes. Only luck and persistence counted. My father had taken the Delaware that day in 1958 on a guess and a prayer. We had just taken O’Fallon’s Bluff, one of several obstacles on the trail I was warned not to cross, driving blind in a sandstorm. Uncertainty and unplanned days were kiting us west well ahead of plan.

  15

  CALIFORNIA HILL IS ONE OF those places along the trail that Daniel Boorstin was referring to when he described the covered wagon as “plainly a community vehicle: everything about it required traveling in groups.” After fording the South Platte channel near present-day Brule, Nebraska, the pioneers crossed twenty miles across a breathtakingly scenic plateau to the North Platte drainage, which they followed northwest into Wyoming and the Rockies. Several fingers of badland ravines, however, coursed through the scrub and brush plains around California Hill, and the only access to the plateau was a smooth, sharp incline between the canyons. The pull to the top involved an elevation change of about three hundred feet in less than a half mile, one of the steepest grades on the trail.

  All summer during the trail years, as hundreds of wagons converged above the South Platte, California Hill bustled with purposeful chaos. The white-tops were parked at all angles, spread like dominoes between the canyons. The flour casks and trunks of the pioneers were strewn in piles everywhere. Families camped and cooked as they waited for their turn on the hill. Children earned their keep scurrying uphill, carrying the contents of the wagons piece by piece, and the canyons sang with the sounds of jangling harness and groups of men shouting as the draft teams were doubled and the lightened wagons were pulled upslope.

  Studying choke points along the trail like California Hill, I was often struck by the paradoxes of American thinking about the pioneers. We think of them as sojourners in the wilderness, explorers almost, bravely conquering the “Great American Desert.” But the many places where the terrain forced the pioneers to gather en masse acted as transient, urban clusters, cities of people in mobile homes traveling to the next big ford or bluff, there to cluster again as an essentially urban unit. The pioneer
s were mostly rural farmers, but on the trail they had to rely on the negotiating skills and habits of organization demanded of city dwellers. Schoolteachers and historians depict the pioneers as exemplars of that supposed American trait, “rugged individualism.” But rugged individualism was wrapped in an envelope of group enterprise.

  Even before I left New England, I had known that I wouldn’t take California Hill. The old ruts are now preserved by OCTA with a fence line and a narrow gate allowing access to tourists on foot, but preventing damage to the historic swales by teenagers on ATVs and dirt bikes. Nowadays no one wants a team of mules scrambling up there, either. I had planned to divert west to Big Springs on Highway 30 and then climb to the plateau along the steep but graded Day Road.

  Most of the Oregon Trail experts, including Bill Petersen, had warned me to resist one temptation. There is now a dusty, steep ranch road that tightly circles the perimeter of the old trail, but this grade is actually steeper than the original ruts. Conquering that grade would allow me to say that I had climbed California Hill. But this was considered foolhardy and I would be running the risk of getting stuck or wrecked up there. An unassisted climb up the hill in a loaded wagon, pulling a heavy Trail Pup, would be insane.

  We reached California Hill late in the afternoon, tired and hot after a thirty-mile run from O’Fallon’s Bluff. Today, there is a pullout and a historical plaque dedicated to California Hill at the base of the rise, along Highway 30. Excited about reaching this milestone of the trail, I stepped from the wagon to read the plaque and to describe to Nick the nineteenth-century bustle of California Hill.

  Nick gazed north up the sharp rise with a quiet, faraway expression.

  “Rink, I can put these mules up on that ridge.”