by Rinker Buck
I didn’t want to attempt a difficult ascent like this, risking the whole trip after coming almost five hundred miles.
“No,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I came out here to do the trail,” Nick said. “The real trail. I can put the mules on that ridge.”
“Nick. Why do you do this to me?”
“Daddy used to say that. Like it was my fault.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“We already know that.”
The moment condensed our history as brothers. In Maine, Nick was known for fastidiously building mansions and reconstructing burned-out summer camps in record time, but that was when he was working for someone else. On his own time, he sank boats, stripped gears pulling swimming floats from rivers, and wrecked wagons and sleighs. Essentially, crossing the Oregon Trail together, we were a case of collaborating DNA presenting symptoms of incurable bipolar disorder. I proceed with an abundance of caution and prefer not to be dead. Nick is thrilled by danger and proceeds with an abundance of risk.
“Boss?” he said. “Rinker?”
“Let me think,” I said.
I leaned against Jake’s neck, scratching his ears, and stared down at the river. It was a hazy afternoon and a smudgy pall of moisture rose over the curving channel of the Platte. The wrong move here could end the trip. But without Nick I wouldn’t even have been at California Hill. Besides, I was addicted to mileage now. Instead of the twenty miles that I had planned, we were now regularly logging twenty-five miles by late afternoon. Reaching the plateau directly from here would save us an eight-mile detour, once more bumping our daily gain to almost thirty-five miles. There was still light in the sky and I was overwhelmed by my evening mania for distance.
Shit. I simultaneously hated Nick’s ass and loved him for asking me to do this.
“Nicholas Buck,” I said. “You are a miserable braggart, a shameless daredevil, and a horrible dresser.”
“Great, we can do it! Thanks, Boss. Olive Oyl! He said yes!”
“You do know that your ass is grass if we get stuck up there.”
“Boss, relax. The mules will climb this hill. Have you ever known me to fuck up?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Let’s water these mules.”
• • •
Western hills are deceptive. The ridgeline seen from a hill’s base elevation on the flats is often a false summit, but you have to reach it to see the succession of higher rises after that. The sand hill formations of Nebraska are high grassy dune after high grassy dune. As we clambered up the first rise with the team I didn’t know what we’d find, except that the ridge that I saw probably hid a few more.
I realized the magnitude of our error when we reached the first summit and stopped beside the OCTA interpretive sign. The fence line protecting the old swales blocked our way, and the original trail disappeared over the green hill on a northwest diagonal. The pioneers had expertly picked their terrain along a narrow corridor of uphill slope between the ravines. But the perimeter road that we would have to follow actually plunged back down into the neighboring canyon, requiring two drops into the hollows and two more steep climbs. The footing on the path was a deep, chalky sand. Steep canyon walls rose on the north and south sides of the last climb, where the soil roadbed was eroded about eight feet below the contour line. The wind had blown onto the roadbed a deep blanket of black, dried tumbleweed, two feet high in some places, and we would have to plow through that to reach the summit.
It was an Everest for mules. I had never attempted to push a team up such steep hills, and we had now inserted our wagon into such a narrow space that there was no turning around. We were committed, but that is far too polite a word for our predicament. We were fucked.
I sighed and took a drink from my canteen, took off my hat, and wiped my brow with my bandanna.
“Jesus,” I said to Nick. “Can the mules make that last hill?”
“Boss, chill. When we get into camp tonight?”
“Yeah?”
“You can take your medications.”
We plunged down through the first ravine, and then up the rise, without much difficulty. I held just enough pressure on the brake to keep the rig off the mules until the last part of the downhill, and then released two tons of wagon and trailer on the mules to force them nearly to a gallop and gain momentum for the climb. But the next hill presented a new problem. Just before the climb, the road turned sharply west. At the bottom, Nick had to slow the mules to a walk to safely negotiate the turn, denying us a running start for the hard vertical pull ahead.
But the mules looked uphill to the wall of dust and black tumbleweed and wouldn’t stop for the turn, pulling right through the brake and fishtailing the wagon around the bend. They dug in their haunches for the pull.
Bute leaped forward and tried to pull the others along with her, as she’d done the night before. I couldn’t believe Bute’s gumption here—she was the little mule that could. At a moment of excitement like this, herd mentality, the stampede instinct, takes over with mules, and it means a lot. Jake and Beck were now furiously competing for position as the lead.
Oh, mules. Thank you, George Washington of Mount Vernon. Thank you, Royal Gift. These black Andalusians were spectacular beasts. I had never seen such athleticism and drive.
The front hooves of the team pounded the sand, their shoulders were bent low and far forward, and the trace chains against the trees were tense and metallically cracking from the pressure. Twelve hooves pounding sand and threshing tumbleweed created so much dust that I couldn’t see the slope ahead of us. The running gear banged and creaked and the mules grunted inside our cosmos of dust.
Nick was pleading with the mules now, begging them, leaning all the way forward on the footboard so that he was out over the team and slapping the lines on their rumps. He was desperate. His bravado terrified him now. His voice cracked as he called the mules.
“Big Team! C’mon, Big Team! Beck! Jake! Bute! Oregon! Oregon, Big Team! We gotta make this hill, Big Team!”
In the swirl of emotion and heart stoppage that our expedition now was, I called the mules too.
“Team! Jake! Beck! We have to make this hill. We can’t stop! Oregon, Team! Oregon!”
Nick was hoarse now, calling the team in a creaky whisper. Olive Oyl was whimpering and shaking with fear beneath the wagon seat, and I was hanging way off the side of the wagon to look straight down at the wheels, with both hands on the brake, barely able to stay on the seat. If the wheels stopped and began to give even an inch backward, I would have to throw on the brake to prevent four thousand pounds of wagon from pulling the mules backward on top of us.
In the dust, and with the deep bed of black tumbleweed, Nick couldn’t see the track ahead. He pulled the team too far to the left, into a beach of sand and tumbleweed that seemed to swallow Bute. She was pumping her legs furiously now, without any traction underfoot. But pulling the team back to the center would have slowed our momentum.
We were just inching forward now. Only Jake in the center position on the pole had any purchase on the hardtack middle of the ruts, and he was still pulling like a monster. Our momentum was stalled, the wagon nearly motionless, seventy feet from the top. We were doomed, a pair of foolhardy easterners ruined on California Hill, more than a thousand miles from Oregon.
Nick seemed Lilliputian now, his bravado spent, and my confidence in his prowess was evaporating. He was too hoarse to call the team except in a whisper.
But the team, especially Jake, wouldn’t stop pulling. We moved forward and uphill, a foot at a time, and near the crest I panicked when I realized that if we stopped too early, before the heavy Trail Pup behind us was off the slope, the wagon would plunge back down in reverse.
I grabbed the lines from Nick and called the mules the last hundred feet.
“Team! To the flats! To the flats, Team! Jake! Beck! You’re gorgeous! To the flats!”
With supreme stamina, their mighty chests an
d bellies heaving, their haunches pushed low to dig in their hooves, the mules grunted us over the top.
On level ground, with the brake set, we sat speechless on the wagon seat, our hearts still pounding. The breeze racing across the broad plateau lifted our shirt collars and hats. The only sound was the heaving of the team. Finally, Nick spoke.
“This is one fuckin awesome team. I cannot believe these animals.”
We contemplated that for a while, still chemically high and euphoric from the adrenaline pumped by California Hill. Both of us arrived at the same thought.
“We are going to make Oregon,” I said.
“Yeah,” Nick said hoarsely. “We’re gonna make Oregon this summer.”
• • •
The plateau surrounding us was uniformly flat and stretched for miles, a heaven of wheat fields in the sky. Once more it was dusk, we had no place to camp, and a new storm with low snarling clouds was bearing down on us from the northwest. We walked the mules west in the fading evening light until we found a farm where the middle-aged couple who owned it welcomed us in, telling us to bed the mules down in their goat pasture and then inviting us into their kitchen for a dinner of pancakes and elk steak.
The storm blew in an hour after dinner. I sat toward the rear of the wagon, propped up by my gear and wrapped in quilts, and wrote notes about the day. To the rituals of wagon travel—prairie dreamscapes all day, Platte River storms at night—I was now adding a new routine. As my white-top rocked with the winds, I debriefed all the mistakes of the day. At the bottom of California Hill, I had known there were probably farms with water and grass for the mules on the plateau. I could have off-loaded all of our hay bales but one, emptied our water barrels, and taken off our grain and returned for it later. Then I should have walked the slope behind the wagon. All told, our wagons could have been lightened by a thousand pounds, immensely increasing our chance of making the steep grade.
Our rig on the first slope of California Hill near Brule, Nebraska. The experts said that we could never “take” this obstacle, but Nick was determined to try.
But maybe I was changing. As the prairie winds howled, and my womb of oak bows and canvas buffeted and creaked, I put down my notebook and stretched out to sleep, once more luxuriating in the nocturnal romance of sleeping under a white-top in hard rain. I preferred that to a nocturnal cataloging of my errors. Mistake by mistake, haphazard decision by haphazard decision, we were steadily moving west. We had taken California Hill, and I have never slept so well.
16
THE OLD PIONEER CAMP AT Ash Hollow, Nebraska, along the banks of the North Platte, is one of the most scenic and accessible Oregon Trail sites today, and it also typifies what the modern trail has become. The original ruts that plunged off the tableland and dropped for the Platte are too steep for automobile traffic, and the state of Nebraska has mostly protected them by securing conservation easements where the trail crosses private ranches, or by fencing them off on state parklands. But a two-lane state road that descends steeply from the plateau, Highway 26, closely parallels the nineteenth-century pioneer route, and the old ruts themselves crisscross the blacktop several times. Historian Merrill Mattes has described the downhill ride into the fabled pioneer camping grounds seen by contemporary tourists. “Modern highway engineering, ironing rugged topography into gentle declines and curves, makes the automobile descent into the Hollow seem painless.” But here Mattes was merely commenting on the relatively sheltered experience of seeing the trail by car.
For more than an hour Nick and I managed the job of guiding two tons of wagons down a steep paved slope. The brakes on the rear wheels of the Schuttler could hold back only part of the load. The downhill gradient was so steep that the mules also had to help hold back the wagons, by leaning backward into the harness breeching straps on their rumps, bracing their weight against the force of the wagon falling downhill. “Putting” a team against its breeching is uncomfortable and awkward for the mules and can be terrifying for the driver because so much depends on the footing underneath the animals. Only Beck on the right, walking the graveled shoulder of the road, had a surface beneath her to grip with her hooves. Jake and Bute were constantly fighting to remain upright as their steel shoes slipped on the slick, hot tar of the roadbed. Every time they stumbled their harness slacked and the wagon lunged forward, threatening to overrun and panic the team.
While Nick drove and called—“Hold back! Hold back!”—I gingerly jockeyed the brakes. But locking the iron wheel rims for too long on the slick asphalt jackknifed the rig, swaying the pole and the team toward the guardrails, and we were burning out the brakes. Our new thresher-belt brake pads billowed smoke, and the acrid smell of burning rubber followed us all the way down to the valley floor.
Still, it was glorious to reach Ash Hollow. From the highway, we stared down the nearly vertical sides of a narrow ravine to the right of the wagon, topped by white cliffs, stretching for four miles down to the North Platte. Natural springs feed a creek that runs the length of the hollow floor to the river. On June and July nights after the late 1840s, this oasis on the North Platte was a busy camp town, with hundreds of wagons parked above picturesque Sioux tepees, U.S. Cavalry detachments, military freight caravans, and parties of buffalo hunters traveling east to St. Louis, their donkey carts piled high with robes.
The mass of humanity wedged into the narrow hollow inevitably created problems—cholera outbreaks, fights over stray cattle, trading disputes with the Sioux—and the pioneers complained in their journals about having to herd their animals several miles down the Platte to find a grassy area that had not been foraged out by earlier trains. During long camps that might last two nights, the pioneers paused to bake pastries from the abundant supply of wild berries in the hollow, and Ash Creek rang with the hammer blows and saw cuts of impromptu wagon-repair shops. Ash Hollow was a nineteenth-century mobile home park, throbbing and noisy, with the lowing of cattle and the caterwauling of whiskey drinkers echoing off the canyon walls all day and night. Here too, however, the noise and confusion of a busy wagon camp didn’t prevent the travelers from enjoying the unique landscape. Lingering, powerful memories of the sylvan beauty of the hollow dominated the pioneer journals.
As his eleven-wagon train crossed from the south to the north fork of the Platte in 1849, Israel Hale stumbled on the decaying bodies of four white men who had apparently been scalped by an Indian war party. Hale was incapable of dwelling on that image once he saw the lovely ravine enticing the wagons onto the North Platte.
Struck Ash Hollow. It is a narrow, sandy valley with low ash trees scattered along its side. We had not driven far when we found considerable underbrush, such as currents, rose bushes and several shrubs that I did not know the name of. The morning was clear, the air was pure and the roses nearly in full bloom, and sent forth a flavor which can better be imagined than described. The air appeared perfectly scented with them and I think if they had named the place the Valley of Roses it would have been a more appropriate name, for there were fifty rose bushes to one ash tree.
Over time, Ash Hollow would also come to symbolize the tragic clash of cultures between the white emigrants and the Native Americans that eventually doomed the Indian tribes. In 1855, a detachment of six hundred U.S. Army soldiers commanded by General William S. Harney surrounded a band of Brule Sioux led by Chief Little Thunder near Blue Water Creek, six miles north of Ash Hollow, slaughtering eighty-six braves and capturing most of their women and children. Harney’s expedition was launched in retaliation for an incident the year before, when an inexperienced Army lieutenant, John Grattan, had brashly marched his soldiers into a large Brule Sioux camp outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming, demanding that the chiefs produce the Indian who had shot a Mormon pioneer’s cow, even though the Brules had already offered restitution for the cow by giving the pioneer his pick of their sixty-horse herd. The usual army bumbling was involved. Grattan was a recent West Point graduate, unfamiliar with Sioux ways, and his French-Canadia
n “interpreter” could not speak the Brule dialect and was drunk. After shots were exchanged, Grattan and all thirty of his men were killed. The carnage in both engagements was senseless and produced no results, and historians generally credit the so-called Grattan Massacre and the Battle of Blue Water Creek as the events that set off the disastrous series of Indian wars that racked the west after the Civil War.
The tribes had already been decimated by a silent killer introduced west of the Missouri by the army forts and the overland emigrants. The arrival of diseases such as cholera, measles, and smallpox, to which the Sioux, the Pawnee, and the Osage tribes had never been exposed, began to have a devastating impact after the 1849 Gold Rush. Historians have never been able to accurately estimate how many plains Indians died from the introduction of European diseases in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is clear that it caused widespread panic and disruption in the lives of the tribes.
“Some Indians quickly recognized the consequences of these diseases,” John D. Unruh Jr. wrote in The Plains Across, “[and] by 1850 a Fort Laramie observer reported that frightened natives were deserting the trails in hopes of avoiding the deadly peril. . . . The demographic impact of cholera alone among the [tribes] was considerable. These population losses had obvious implications for the ability of the western tribes to resist the American expansionist onslaught.”
Captain Howard Stansbury, an army surveyor dispatched across the trail in 1849 to explore new routes and file a report for his unit, the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, poignantly described one scene at Ash Hollow. Stansbury’s mounted unit, trailed by five supply wagons, reached the pioneer camp in early July. There, he found a small band of “tall, graceful” Sioux camped at the head of the valley. The Sioux had invited a group of emigrants into their lodges but quickly decamped when cholera broke out. The disease had already spread to the Sioux band, however, and a few days later they returned to Ash Hollow begging for medical help. Then they disappeared again.