by Rinker Buck
Dan roared in a little later in a big rusty King Cab pickup with a bad muffler, pulling a trailer. It took us half an hour to unload the cart, right it, wheel it up onto the trailer with ramps, and then strap it down. We stacked the hay, gear, and broken parts beside it. As Dan drove off with his crazy trailer load of dismembered Trail Pup, he promised to call the lumberyard in Oshkosh to see if it had the oak stock that we needed. I told him that we’d rehitch the mules and be down on his ranch with the main wagon within two hours.
Nick stood with his hands on his hips while the crippled Trail Pup rumbled over the cattle guard and then disappeared west on the muddy trail. He took a deep breath, turned toward me, briefly stared at the ground, and then looked directly into my eyes.
“Rink, just for the record, I apologize about this. This accident was my fault.”
I can’t account for my feelings just then but I felt terribly guilty for Nick, and I loved him. I wasn’t angry about dumping the Trail Pup, but I knew I couldn’t explain that to him. But there was something that I could accomplish here. Nick’s penchant for reckless driving, his break-it-so-we-can-fix-it style, was a threat to the trip. His insistence that only he knew mules and wagons, that his judgment about driving was always superior to mine, was manifestly wrong. I had to move the conversation to that without making him feel bad for me and blaming himself.
“Nick, I’m not angry, okay? Let’s start there. We took the hill on a diagonal. Neither of us saw that.”
“Don’t be so fuckin polite,” he said. “You told me to go easier on the speed, I should have listened. That’s what flipped the Trail Pup.”
“Nick, I’m actually happy about this. It’ll be fun proving that we can quickly get the rig back on the road. It’s just . . .”
“My drivin.”
“Your driving. I mean, can’t you just listen to me? You can drive more carefully.”
“I should have been listenin. I was drivin too fast. I’m gonna start listenin and this won’t happen again. I promise, Boss.”
“All right,” I said. “We don’t need to talk about this again. Just fucking listen to me, okay? C’mon. Let’s harness these mules.”
Muddy Creek Ranch stood back from the trail about a quarter of a mile and had a ramshackle stucco ranch house buried in a cottonwood grove, lots of barns and corrals in the back, and a yelping pack of furry blue heeler and Australian shepherd puppies scrambling underfoot everywhere we walked. Our afternoon there was another emotional reprise for us. Nick was determined to prove that, having broken a wagon in the morning, he could have it back on the trail by nightfall, and I knew that he would exhaust himself doing that. My job was to pretend that nothing had happened and to run around in the ranch pickup, like an obsequious delivery boy, providing just-on-time delivery of parts. At Muddy Creek, I felt that I had discovered a completely new aspect of management. I had to handle things so discreetly, so invisibly, that there wasn’t really a Trail Boss at all.
While Nick hammered away outside the ranch implement shed with an immense ball-peen hammer, to bend the heavy steel fittings back into shape, I ran into Oshkosh with Dan Hanlon and found the last piece of cured oak stock at the lumberyard. I ran it back to the ranch and then raced into Bridgeport for the plumbing supplies we needed to fix the broken water barrel attachments. When I got back from Bridgeport, Nick had already finished building out the new Trail Pup tongue. With his immense strength, he had lifted the heavy Trail Pup by the tongue, single-handedly hauled the cart all the way across the ranch yard, and reattached it to the wagon.
When I drove in, Nick was collapsed against one of the wheels of the main wagon, playing with Olive Oyl and a couple of the blue heeler puppies, who were scrambling around on his lap.
“I can’t believe that you’ve got this much done already,” I said to him. “You’re a monster for work.”
“I told you we could be back on the trail tomorrow.”
“You look spent,” I said. “Why don’t you go into the house and take a nap?”
“I think I will. We can figure out what to do about the bows later.”
I knew from my wagon research in the spring that the only source for replacing our broken bows was an Amish wood shop in Ohio—too far away to expect a timely delivery now. Nick wouldn’t like it, but I thought that I could somehow shitrig new bows for the covered top of the Trail Pup myself, a good idea to have on a Nebraska ranch, where nothing ever seems to get thrown away. Cruising the scrap piles behind one of the barns, I found several sections of five-eighth-inch plastic conduit pipe that had been used on the pasture irrigators, and could probably be fashioned into bows. In the shop, there was a pile of brackets that I could bend into shape with vise-grips, to hold the plastic pipe to the sides of the cart.
Working frantically so that I would be done before Nick woke up, I cut the conduit down with a hacksaw and drilled holes for the brackets on the sides of the Trail Pup. Then I assembled everything, dusting off the canvas cover before I pulled it over the new bows, and cinched it tight with the pucker ropes.
My solution wasn’t elegant. The plastic conduit was much narrower than the original oak bows, and underneath the canvas wagon cover the new plastic bows looked like ribs showing through the loose skin of a starving dog. But the assembly would at least hold the rain and the dust off our feed and gear, and our rig looked like a set of matched white-tops again.
When Nick finally came out, I heard him groan from the corner of the house when he saw the new covered top.
“Oh, shit me,” he said. “You didn’t fix the bows, did you? I thought you would wait for me on that.”
“Nick, it’s a good fix. I did all of this myself.”
Nick stood on the tongue of the Trail Pup and ran his pudgy hands over the new plastic bows. He leaned his shoulder onto the first bow and gave the whole works a brisk shove.
“All right, Boss. This’ll hold in the wind. It looks uglier than a stump post, but it’s a decent repair.”
I smiled and quietly laughed when Nick said that, and he must have seen the contentment on my face.
“I’m gonna tell everyone at home about this,” he said. “You’ve had a total fuckin personality transplant. You can actually fix somethin now.”
“Thanks, Nick. I really appreciate that.”
For the rest of the afternoon, while the wind blew dust devils down from the bluffs, Nick and I were a blurred frenzy of hammering and driving in screws, making the rest of the repairs. We were done well before dark, and then we sat beside the wheels on our camp chairs and played with the blue heeler puppies.
• • •
The layover for repairs at Muddy Creek stalled us again along the Platte. For the next two days we were stranded at the ranch as the monster storm system we were worried about lashed through western Nebraska, pushing the river over its banks at a giant bend six miles west of the ranch and blocking the trail with an immense lake. We quickly fell into the life of the ranch. Between the worst rain squalls we helped Dan run his cattle to new pastures, splashing on horseback through the sandy mud up on the South Hills, and Nick roamed through the ranch house and barns with his tool kit, replacing leaky hydraulic fittings on tractors and repairing broken light fixtures. I spent the rainy afternoons lounging on a couch in the ranch house, poring over my maps and reading pioneer journals.
The forced stop proved more useful than I expected. With enough time on my hands to calculate our total mileage from St. Joe, I realized that we had made 490 miles in a month, just ten miles shy of my monthly goal. I had always roughly calculated that we would traverse one state per month—Nebraska in June, Wyoming in July, Idaho in August—and we were easily meeting that pace, which would put us near Oregon by September. My furtive instinct about pushing the mules until late in the day seemed to have a logic now. There would always be obstacles along the trail—weather, breakdowns, detours around rough terrain—but we were compensating for the lost time by the extra five or eight miles we made during our e
vening runs. I even liked being delayed on the Platte, because our adversity seemed so appropriate. Franklin Langworthy, Margaret Frink, Abigail Jane Scott, and Mark Twain had been stalled by the flooding Platte too.
When we finally left, Dan reached into the back of his pickup and gave us a spare gate jack, which we could use at the cattle guards in the rangelands ahead. He decided to ride the wagon with Nick to check the high water on the river ahead, and he gave me his best cow horse, a spirited paint, to ride beside the rig. As we splashed through the puddled sand along the trail where the Platte was dropping back within its banks, I swayed the paint in S-turns behind the wagon and then galloped off to explore a dry stretch of bottomlands along the river. We were past the 100th meridian dry line now, the rains would probably abate, and this was the dream journey by horseback that I had always imagined for myself.
• • •
After Bridgeport, Nebraska, the landscape changed dramatically, from grasslands to spare, dry sagebrush country, and the soil turned from sandy brown to pink. We were entering the magic, pastel geology of western Nebraska that was celebrated by the pioneers and became familiar to Americans through the paintings of William Henry Jackson and Albert Bierstadt. Today the only route along the south banks of the Platte is the two-lane Highway 92, a prime example of the Oregon Trail adapted for modern use by paving the ruts with asphalt, but I was delighted to see that the prospect from the wagon seat was virtually unchanged.
The wagons had navigated west through a natural gallery of art. Two adjoining formations, the sand-colored Courthouse Rock and Jail House Rock, were the first in a long string of landmarks composed of sandstone, clay, and volcanic ash that had been eroded by the ceaseless Nebraska winds and over centuries separated from the surrounding formation of bluffs. A profusion of yellow coneflowers and rudbeckia grew at their base and green sagebrush fringed their sides. Then we cleared a rise and, from almost forty miles out, the lavender and pink pinnacle of Chimney Rock came into view.
Chimney Rock, rising almost 350 feet above the sagebrush plain of the North Platte valley, is a pointed sandstone column resting on a conical base. In their diaries and letters home, the pioneers made this landmark as recognizable to Americans as Niagara Falls. Virtually all the trail diarists mentioned it, usually in considerable detail, and the trail annals now contain twenty-one sketches of Chimney Rock, many of them displaying remarkable line-drawing skills, made by the pioneers. Because it could be seen so far away on the horizon, Chimney Rock lingered within sight of the wagons for almost a week, and the pioneers used the pinnacle as both a forward and a reverse waypoint for sixty miles or more. Pioneers who camped and fixed their wagons near the rock learned to judge western distances by eagerly hiking the “few miles” to the curiosity and finding that it was more like five or six miles away. Margaret Frink’s husband scrambled up the base of the cone and carved their names into the soft red rock.
Chimney Rock in western Nebraska was among the first of a string of natural waypoints that the pioneers used to steer west.
The diary entries and sketches of Chimney Rock, often reprinted in local newspapers across the country, created additional allure about the trail. The central duality of the land migration—aesthetic wonder trumping hardship—prevailed here. At Chimney Rock, the camps were crowded and cholera occasionally returned. The draft animals were beginning to give out because the sandier soils and sparse rains to the west supported only thin grasses. The trail departed here for about two miles below the Platte, and there were long walks for water. But the beauty of the unfolding western terrain was the predominant theme, as if the pioneers needed a natural wonder reaching for the sky to alleviate—or deny—the hunger, dehydration, and death they saw all around them.
Virgil K. Pringle was a Connecticut native whose family had moved to St. Charles, Missouri, north of St. Louis, in 1826, establishing a lending library and a dry goods store. In 1846, the Pringles decided to follow a brother out to Oregon, and they reached Chimney Rock on June 19.
The dramatic river views and rock formations of the West, like Scotts Bluff on the Nebraska-Wyoming line, astonished pioneers who were used to the more predictable geography of the East.
Passed the chimney in the fore part of the day and the formation of the bluffs have a tendency to fill the mind with awe and grandeur. The chimney might pass for one of the foundries in St. Louis, were it blackened by burning stove coal.
As we dropped the wagon down into the broad valley along the North Platte, the purple beacon of the pioneers glowed against the yellow Nebraska sky, and remained within sight for three days. We found a comfortable, fenced pasture for the mules at the old pioneer camp near the rock, slept through another night of violent thunderstorms beneath the escarpments at Scotts Bluff, and then turned the mules toward Mitchell Pass, the route through the Wildcat Hills that the pioneers followed after U.S. Army engineers built a military road in 1851. It was a hot day and the mules labored up the eastern slope of the pass, and our brake pads smoked all the way down the other side.
From the summit of the pass we could see the hazy blue dome of Laramie Peak, more than ninety miles away. There were more rain clouds ahead, and once more we would race the storms to shelter. But nothing rattled me now. Our shakedown with adversity—the endless rains, the endless barbed-wire gates of Nebraska—was behind us, and before us lay a mythic stretch of trail, 350 miles of original ruts through the Wyoming Rockies.
18
THE OREGON TRAIL IN WYOMING can be thought of as a giant game of topographic stealth. The emigrant road gracefully curved in a long bend around the Rockies, running northwest and then southwest, following the North Platte and the alluring banks of the Sweetwater for almost five hundred miles across the high desert plains. Because the east face of the Rockies could not be directly crossed with horses and donkeys, over time the Cheyenne and the Shoshone, and then the fur trappers, avoided the impassable mountains by following a meandering route along the lower foothills and the flats. Trailblazers like Marcus Whitman and Jim Bridger, and then the emigrant trains, endlessly refined the route into a system of camps and cutoffs to save traveling time. The result is both ingenious and magnificently beautiful. After Scotts Bluff and Fort Laramie, the pioneers spent a week with the alpine heights of the Laramie Range directly to their left, paid the Mormons to ford them across the Platte at present-day Casper, and then twisted their way down through the dramatic rock formations along the edges of the Rattlesnake Hills and the Granite Range. The snowy, heavenly Wind River Range rose after Casper as a lavender and white mosaic in the sky.
The pioneers could instantly sense that they had entered a vastly changed landscape—the real West. Stands of juniper and ponderosa pine rose steeply on the Rockies and their foothills, darkening the upper views, and the pioneers called eastern Wyoming the Black Hills. (The term was broadly used in the nineteenth century to refer to high ground that was heavily timbered with pine, reflecting the sun as black, and only later formally assigned to the Black Hills region of South Dakota.) The water, dropping from streams with sources twenty or thirty miles away in the mountains, was cleaner now, but sometimes a forced march of a day or more was required to reach it. The soil was dry and brownish red, with a thick overlay of scented sagebrush and scattered clumps of short grass for forage. After the ford at Casper the inclines were mostly gentle and the land underfoot appeared to be flat.
That was the genius of the trail in Wyoming—for that matter, almost all the way across. Appearance vied with reality in a long, gradually staged feat of climbing. From St. Joseph or Independence along the Missouri, the pioneers had now ascended more than three thousand feet in elevation without ever really noticing it, except for the occasional dramatic climbs like California Hill. The base terrain through the Black Hills was more than four thousand feet above sea level. Over the next few weeks, again without ever really noticing it, the wagon trains would climb another 3,500 feet to the 7,500-foot South Pass, as the continent imperceptibly rose
toward its divide. In 1860 Sir Richard Burton, the eminent Victorian scholar and explorer, took a celebrated stagecoach ride across the trail to Salt Lake, recording his observations in the bestselling City of the Saints, later digested as The Look of the West 1860. He called the Platte-Sweetwater route “a line laid down by nature to the foot of the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains.”
The high Rocky Mountain country presented other paradoxes. After the Black Hills, the wagon ruts were generally flat, but the ground underfoot was gravelly and bumpy. The constant pounding over the rocky terrain and the dry desert air cracked the wooden running gear parts and wheels, causing frequent breakdowns. In Wyoming, the high mountain country receives thirty-five inches or more of precipitation a year. But just a few miles away, along the Oregon Trail route in the deserts below, annual rainfall rarely exceeds ten inches, in some places less than five inches a year. These stark contrasts of the western high plains were enchanting, but stressful. The reliable winds and the stunning views of the snowcapped Wind Rivers lulled the pioneers into thinking that they were traveling through invigorating, springlike mountain air. In fact, the reduced oxygen level as the elevation rose winded both the draft animals and the pioneers walking beside the wagons, and they were baking all day in the arid terrain.
The wagon trains arrived at the Fort Laramie trading post in eastern Wyoming to find the usual frenzy of discarding and wagon abandonment as the emigrants lightened their loads for the mountains or converted to pack trains. Outside the fort, some of the wagons were even being burned, and they were surrounded by a wasteland of the emigrants’ castoff possessions. While parents foraged through another family’s ditched goods for what they might use, the children were put to work breaking up the boards of scuttled wagons for cooking fuel. Once more, the trail experience reinforced a natural American bent toward waste, followed by avid recycling. Wagons that six weeks ago had been purchased for top prices along the Missouri, making a considerable dent in a family’s savings, were now warming another family’s bacon and antelope steaks.