The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  The next morning Stansbury saw a small Indian village on a bluff across the Platte.

  “The total absence of any living thing about them interested us from curiosity to cross the river, here nearly a mile wide, with a strong rapid current,” Stansbury wrote in his journal. After wading across, Stansbury found five tepees with nine dead Sioux inside, their buffalo robes, spears, and camp kettles arrayed around them. He was touched most by the body of a pretty Sioux teenage girl, carefully wrapped and laid out alone in one of the lodges. She was “richly dressed” in scarlet leggings, ornaments, and a pair of new moccasins beautifully embroidered with porcupine quills.

  “I learned that they all died with cholera,” Stansbury wrote, “and this young girl being considered past recovery had been arranged by her friends in the habiliments of the dead, enclosed in the lodge alive, and abandoned.”

  There is very little evidence today of the chaotic, crowded wagon cities, or the colorful, scruffy Sioux camps, described by the pioneers. Ash Hollow is now a mostly deserted, well-preserved scenic space operated by the state of Nebraska as a historic park. After resting the mules, Nick and I spent a lazy, pleasant afternoon as tourists, driving the wagon around to the Oregon Trail sites—an old fur trappers’ cabin that was probably used as a trading post during the overland years, and a well-appointed visitors’ center and museum perched on the ridge above the North Platte. From a parking lot on the west edge of the hollow, an asphalt path climbs Windlass Hill, the sharp, three-hundred-foot drop where the pioneers were forced to lower their wagons with ropes. I was struck several times that afternoon by the irony of visiting preserved space, the contrast between past and present on celebrated ground. The mules clopped from historic marker to historic marker along smooth paved roads, passing neatly mowed picnic grounds, attractive restroom stops, and pullouts commanding spacious views of the Platte. Everything was as orderly and well-appointed as the campus of a wealthy New England college. This is what we so often find when searching for history—emptiness, quiet, acres of mowed grass. Battlefields where hundreds of men died on a single day become vast, pristine lawns, as lovely as a landscape by Constable or van Gogh, and historic birthplaces are so lovingly maintained that it’s hard to believe anyone ever lived there. Edith Wharton’s cellar becomes a gift shop. In the cemetery quiet of these places, all the clangor and hell of actual history—the smell of manure where horses were bedded, earth scorched from fire pits or cannonball explosions, the stench from bayonets ripping flesh—has been sanitized away. While preserving history, we remove it. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, and I’d rather see a beautifully maintained battlefield than a Wal-Mart parking lot. But that is what we’re doing while visiting historic space. It’s Versailles without the hideously overdressed and clownish aristocrats, a Potemkin village without the rotting slums behind the facades.

  From Windlass Hill, a curving path of wheel ruts, dark against the grassy ridge, meanders south, marking the route that the pioneers followed out of the hollow into the North Platte valley. I was excited about that. After Ash Hollow, we would pick up the trail across several private ranches and the dusty, unpaved Platte River Road, bumping along on original ruts for almost fifty miles. We were just a few days away from some of the most dramatic scenery on the route, the sandstone waypoints of Courthouse Rock, Jail House Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scotts Bluff, which the pioneers knew from their guidebooks were the gateway to the Rockies.

  At the bottom of the hollow, a low concrete bridge carries motor traffic across the Platte to Lewellyn, and the summer tourists speed west along the paved highway. We turned left at a small cemetery on the river to remain with the Oregon Trail. The Platte there is moody and dark, with ancient cottonwoods growing out of the black, muddy floodplain, and the sharply rising cliffs to our left narrowed our vision to just the dark tunnel of the trail. We emerged eight miles later in bright sunlight onto a broad grassland plain that swept toward one of the most dramatic escarpments in the west, an old Sioux camp and lookout point, Signal Bluff.

  • • •

  The immaculately restored bunkhouse at the Signal Bluff Ranch felt palatial to us, and the fun-loving ranchers there, John and Nancy Orr, were the best trail family yet. Nick rebuilt the mule bridles and replaced the thresher-belt pads on the brakes, while I wrote letters home and took notes. But there was still more greenhorn revenge for us.

  Late in the afternoon during our first day of rest at the ranch, I was sitting on the deck of the bunkhouse, writing letters and enjoying the spacious view down the Platte. When the sun emerged from behind a cloud, I was suddenly blinded by a strobe of light bouncing off the felloe on the front wheel of the Schuttler.

  Felloes are the semicircular wooden parts, just below the iron rim of the wheel, into which the tops of the spokes are fitted. But why had a long strip of paint peeled off one of them, revealing underneath what looked like a shiny patch of plastic?

  I could see what the problem was as soon as I walked over to investigate. Along about six inches of the felloe, a shiny coating of cheap plastic filler—like auto-body shop “bondo”—had been skimmed over the wood. When I pressed my thumb against the felloe, bits of the brittle plastic fell off and blew away in the wind, revealing a gaping stretch of dry rot underneath. There were more bondo strips on the bottom felloe, and on the other front wheel. Our wheels, the one part that couldn’t fail if we were to reach Oregon, were riddled with rot.

  “Nick! Have you seen these front wheels? They’ve been bondoed over. They’re rotten underneath.”

  Nick’s Fu Manchu dropped and he stepped over from his chair, where he had been working on the bridles. He looked at my face, sighed, and then stared at the ground.

  “Oh, Christ. I’ve been prayin for weeks that you wouldn’t notice these fuckin wheels,” he said. “They must have slicked over that rot and then painted the wheels, so they would look fine. It’s an old wagon makers’ trick—bondo over the rot.”

  “How bad is this?”

  “One rotten felloe won’t collapse the whole wheel. Somewhere ahead we’ll find a shop and I’ll cut out all of the rot and rebuild the wheel.”

  I suddenly remembered the grimace on Nick’s face back in Kansas, after he had given the Trail Pup wheels a hard shake when we were picking up the wagons.

  “What about the Trail Pup wheels?” I said.

  Nick scowled and limped back to the Trail Pup, pointing a stubby finger at the joint where the bottom of the spokes joined the hub on the left wheel.

  When he leaned onto the wheel and gave it a hard shake, a faint creaking rose from the hub and I could see space opening up and closing on the joint.

  Nick explained that there was probably dry rot inside the wheel spokes and hubs, which explained the loose fit and the creaking noise they made. That had been painted over as well. If we reached rough terrain where the cart leaned over on one side, the load could shift to the low wheel and lead to “hub failure,” breaking the wheel.

  “Nick, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “If we’d stopped way back in Kansas to rebuild all of these wheels, we never would have left. There’s at least a fifty-fifty chance these wheels will last all the way to Oregon.”

  I turned away from the wagon, disgusted with myself for paying so much for a rig with four questionable wheels. Once more, I had been as naive as the pioneers. We had now come 450 miles in exactly a month—spectacular progress. But we still had the Black Hills of Wyoming and then the Rockies to cross, and I didn’t even know if my wheels would hold.

  • • •

  Leaving Signal Bluff and riding our first long stretch of original ruts was lyrical. The trail meandered west past towering flattop buttes and golden grasslands that stretched to the horizon. We were now in famous ranch country, where the big herds of longhorn had been driven up from Texas to the Platte after the Union Pacific tracks were laid in 1867. But reaching the cattle lands presented a new problem that I had completely failed to anticipate.
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br />   The scrub grasslands of western Nebraska look remote, but the region is heavily fenced. Every mile or so along the trail a long barbed-wire fence line ran down from the South Hills and crossed our path, culminating in an obstacle called a “cattle guard.” Cattle guards are welded structures of parallel steel pipes, like prison bars laid flat, placed on top of a deep trench on the trail. Cattle that have wandered off from their herds and broken through fence lines won’t cross the guards, because they look straight down through the bars and see the trench, confining them at least relatively close to their intended range. These familiar structures on western roads are also called “auto gates,” because they allow a passing car or pickup to rumble over the pipes on top of the trench. Horses and mules won’t cross cattle guards either. To let the cattle and horses through for the frequent local cattle drives, however, barbed-wire gates are built adjacent to the guards. The gates are attached to the fence lines with circular loops of wire.

  But these gates are maddeningly inconsistent. Depending on the ranch or the age of the fences, some of them were child’s play to open, with aged, slack wire holding the gateposts, which were easy to manipulate. But many of the gates were built with new, extremely tight loops of wire. To open the gate, cowboys crouch down low between the strands of barbed wire, push hard against the post with one shoulder, and then move an arm up past the strands of barbed wire to close the attachment. For the tighter gates, most cowboys also carry a large, pliers-type device called a “gate jack,” which pulls the posts tightly together, making it easier to close the gate.

  Veteran cowboys make this Houdini act look easy. But easterners like me crouch up against the posts, feebly attempting to open and shut the wire attachments, ripping their shirts and drawing blood on the rusty strands of barbed wire.

  The standard “gate jack” of the West, used by ranchers to open and shut stubborn barbed-wire gates.

  There were fourteen cattle guards and gates along the trail after Signal Bluff, and they were particularly frequent after Rush Creek. After opening a gate, we would drive the mules down through the gulch at the edge of the cattle guard and then call them up the steep sides back onto the trail.

  The cattle guard gates were a test of our personalities. There probably isn’t a barbed-wire gate in the West that Nick can’t grunt open, but I struggled with most of them, chastising myself for forgetting to buy a gate jack. By the end of the day we both had been stabbed by barbed wire several times, and the right shoulder of my plaid cowboy shirt was ripped open and stained with blood. Under the blazing Nebraska sun, the blood clotted quickly and hard against my cotton shirt, and the scab reopened and bled every time I jumped off the wagon to push a new gate. I found that pouring water from my canteen on the wound kept it soft and helped it to heal. After a few days of opening gates, my shoulder was calloused with scar tissue and barbecued purple and red where the sun came through the tear in my shirt. For several days, when I woke in the morning, my bloodied shoulder and shirt had matted onto my sheet, and I ripped the wound open getting out of bed. But the fresh blood trickling down my back felt welcome and warm, reminding me of the gratifying soreness I felt at home after a day of logging in the woods.

  We encountered more than 250 cattle guards’sometimes twelve or fourteen in a fifteen-mile stretch’across the West.

  We made the rodeo corrals at the deserted hamlet of Lisco that night, another camp where the sweet exhaustion of the day, and the poetic sunset over the Platte, seemed joined together as a single sensation. The cowboys from the local spreads, Rush Creek Ranch and Muddy Creek Ranch, had spent the day watching our white-tops cross the rangeland, and many of them drove over in their pickups to see the mules. They brought hay, told us what to expect ahead on the trail, and swapped stories while we sat on our chairs and stared across the river to the Sand Hills.

  From the cowboys, we learned that we faced more bad weather ahead. A huge thunderstorm system was forming over the Rockies and was expected to push east the next day, dumping considerable rain, and would probably cause flooding along the low banks of the North Platte near Bridgeport, Nebraska, blocking the trail. Once more we were racing against the storms of the Platte and we had to get past Bridgeport by sunset the next day.

  17

  NICK’S BRAVURA DRIVING STYLE FINALLY caught up with us the next morning at Lisco. To reach the gate at a cattle guard just above the remote rodeo corral, we had to curve southwest, plunge through a runoff ditch beside the road, and then climb a sharp hill of treacherous soft soil, muddy from the recent rains. Nick loudly called the mules and broke them into a trot to build momentum for the hill, taking the incline on a diagonal, but I was sure we should be going much more slowly.

  It became a classic trail clusterfuck. While I was calling “Eas-A, Eas-A, Eas-A” and reaching over toward Nick to restrain the lines, he was slapping the rumps of the mules and calling “Yup there! Big Team! Up the hill!” The team listened to Nick and gamely scrambled up the hill at an angle. When we reached the road we heard a sharp Bang! from behind and the mules started digging in their hooves to pull a heavier load, as if we suddenly had a gang plow attached to the rig. Something was wrong.

  “Whoa! Whoa, Team. Whoa!”

  I pushed home the brake and stood up on the wagon seat to look back over the cover and couldn’t believe what I saw. The Trail Pup lay on its left side, mostly intact but smashed in places, like an overturned semitrailer on a highway embankment after a jackknife accident.

  “Goddamnit, Nick. We flipped the Trail Pup. The Trail Pup is lying on its side.”

  “Hold these mules. Let me get back there. I wanna see it! I wanna see it and see if I can fix it.”

  I was surprised by how calm I felt about our first accident of the trip. I was almost elated about it. The pioneer journals had indoctrinated me that completely. I had always known that there was no way we could cross to Oregon without at least one wagon wreck, and now we had a baptism by disaster that would prove our mettle. We had to be coolly analytical and show ourselves that we could quickly recover and get back on the trail.

  I told Nick that we would unhitch the mules from the wagon and drive them over to the corrals before we assessed the damage.

  Nick was frantic with worry as he drove the team away, looking back over his shoulder and calling out so that his loud, booming voice echoed over the plains.

  “Tell me what’s broken! Can I fix it? What’s broken?”

  It was amusing, in a way, to see my beautiful Trail Pup sprawled sideways on the road. Our external water spigots, equipment hangers, hoses, and ropes had all snapped off and were lying in pieces on the road. Bales of hay, grain sacks, and our camping and cooking gear had spilled through the cover where the oak bows had snapped. Nick’s cantilever extension was a testament to overbuilding—the structure had held, but the cooler racks on the side were shattered. The SEE AMERICA SLOWLY sign was pitched up vertically from prairie to sky.

  But I could see that we had escaped relatively unscathed. Our mistake hadn’t been Nick’s racing the team uphill, but negligently taking the incline on the diagonal. The Schuttler, with its four wheels evening out the bumps, had lulled us into a false sense of stability. We had completely forgotten that the two-wheel Pup far behind on the rig was inherently tipsy, especially on sloped terrain. Taking the hill on an angle had transferred the weight of more than a thousand pounds of supplies and water onto the low wheel and, when it all shifted sideways at once, overturned the cart.

  But the dumping of the wagon had been so swift that the wheels, miraculously, weren’t broken, and the only big part that was damaged was the oak tongue that connected the cart to the main wagon. The tongue was now a mass of twisted splinters. The heavy steel fitting connecting the tongue to the wagon was bent, and we would probably need to heat it with welding torches to hammer it back into shape. The oak bows would have to be replaced.

  Flipping our Trail Pup was the first accident of the trip, and held us up along the Platte until we c
ould make repairs.

  We were now stranded on a secluded stretch of trail, with no ranches or houses within sight, and we were never going to make it past Bridgeport today. But as I inspected the downed Trail Pup I remembered that the manager of Muddy Creek Ranch, Dan Hanlon, whom I had met at the corrals the night before, lived just four miles west. Hanlon, a joyful, beer-bellied man who rarely shaved, was not a quiet cowpoke. He was one of the boastyboys, dressed in jeans that hadn’t been washed in a week, scuffed packer’s boots, and a Resistol straw hat browned by the sun, sweat, and grime. But the boastyboys are often the most fun, and sometimes the most generous. He had extended the Nebraska welcome as he stepped into his pickup to leave the corrals that night.

  “Any old goldarn thang ya want?” he said, wiggling an imaginary cell phone near his ear. “Just give me a jingle on the brain-cancer device and I’ll be right there in a jiffy for ya.”

  I had written Dan’s number down in my pocket notebook. Relieved to discover that I had cell phone coverage, I dialed him, and he answered right away. When I told him what had happened, Hanlon said that we could fix the cart in his shop and that he’d be down with a pickup and trailer in fifteen minutes.

  While we waited for Dan, Nick made a brief inspection tour around the cart, and I was relieved by his confidence about making repairs. We were both amazed that the overturning had done so little damage to the wheels—maybe the hubs weren’t rotten after all.

  “I can have this cart back on the trail tonight,” he said. “All I’m gonna need is a six-foot section of cured oak, water spigots, and some hardware, and we’ll need to figure out somethin to replace those bows. Just get me to a fuckin shop.”