The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Wagons are worth nothing,” one correspondent wrote back to a Missouri newspaper in 1859. “We frequently cook our supper with the spokes of a better wagon than half the farmers in St. Louis County own.”

  Pioneers who considered Nebraska dry now realized that they hadn’t really seen the Great American Desert yet. On reaching Wyoming, Niles Searls, the 49er from Albany, New York, wrote in Diary of a Pioneer, “The country around us presents a dreary desolate appearance, the grass being parched with drought.” Kansas pioneer John Boardman lay over for two days at Fort Laramie to attend lively dancing “fandangos” outside the army barracks, but the trail that followed was sobering. “After we left Laramie we came to the Black Hills, the worst of all traveling,” Boardman wrote, “[it is] hilly, sandy and full of wild sage—’tis death on a wagon.”

  For us, the remote country through the Black Hills was our only choice. The segmenting of the western reaches of the trail into a maze of cutoffs and branch routes begins in eastern Wyoming. At Guernsey, the “main ruts” proceeded due west along the south bank of the Platte, through the alkali plains toward Casper. In the 1850s, however, an Oregon Trail cutoff along the north banks was blazed through the Black Hills. This northern detour for Casper was called The Child’s Route, after a gold seeker from Wisconsin, Andrew Child, who followed the northern banks and published a map of his eighty-mile route in a guidebook in 1852. The Child’s Route was busy with wagon traffic after 1853 and was one of many instances of nineteenth-century cutoffs that, once blazed, proved as popular as the main ruts.

  We had to work exceptionally hard transiting the hill country, but I liked being forced onto the cutoff along the north banks by the same kind of problem the pioneers faced—an obstacle, this time a modern one, blocked our way. Interstate 25, the big north-south highway running from Texas to Montana, cut across the main ruts below Glendo, Wyoming, and there were no access roads around the four-lane. One hundred fifty years after the wagons went through, we were experiencing ourselves the multitude of choices offered by the broad associated terrain of the Oregon Trail.

  The isolated Child’s Route through the Black Hills is now mostly scrub grasslands used to graze cattle, and over the past century the wandering herds have obliterated the wagon ruts. The long fence lines between grazing ranges required time-consuming searches for gates. The ranchers we met in eastern Wyoming said they had heard that there were a few old granite markers for the trail past Wendover Canyon, but they had never seen them. The trail, essentially, had vanished.

  After climbing Rifle Pit Hill west of Guernsey in another violent sandstorm, we turned the wagon up a dusty ranch road that my maps showed would lead us to the cutoff over the Black Hills. We were grateful to leave civilization behind for a few days and climbed steeply over the first dusty rise to enter remote, enchanted space. The trail ran up and down through high stands of cedar and ponderosa pine, and the mounded plains were bright with goldenrod, white and purple thistle, and blooming yucca plants. In the morning, the dew drying on the sagebrush released the pungent camphor on the branches, filling the air with a sharp scent, like mothballs mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg.

  That night, on the Cundall Ranch, we managed to find the old wagon camp at Cottonwood Creek, which was marked with a plaque, and the next morning I discovered a relatively easy way to make the terrain work for us. The terraced foothills of the Rockies channeled the North Platte into a series of oxbows far below us, a placid navigation beacon that glowed silver against the pink plains. All I had to do was climb for the heights on foot ahead of the wagon, and then guesstimate the most passable route that would keep the river in sight while cutting off the extra miles presented by the oxbows. When the hills were too steep to climb or blocked my view of the river, I used my compass to follow a course due northwest over the flats. We found only two Oregon Trail markers in three days. But the creek washes that we splashed over seemed to be the same ones marked on the maps, and from the high ground I could see that we were making steady progress along the North Platte.

  I hiked most of the day, scouting a path ahead of us, then signaling Nick from the heights around the worst gullies and sagebrush thickets. Up the hills, I carried the heavy gate jack on my shoulder in case I found another fence and had to search for a gate, and on the descents I walked slightly ahead of the wagon with a four-foot length of ponderosa pine on my shoulder, to throw in front of the rear main wheels if the brakes couldn’t hold the wagons. Olive Oyl ran ahead of me in wide circles through the scrub grass, clearing the trail of prairie dogs and snakes, which we were afraid would spook the mules. This was one of the places along the trail where Nick’s superlative driving skills proved decisive. He expertly held the team back through the descents into the creek washes, or called the mules over the inclines, simultaneously operating the brakes by depressing his foot on the brake handle. It was arduous work, but I was exhilarated by conquering this secluded country and making our gritty way north. The hills rang with purpose each time Nick brought the wagon up. The pole banged and the canvas top swayed and creaked over the bumps and sage thickets, and Nick’s voice echoed through the canyons.

  “Yup, Team! Yup, Jake, Beck! Big Team, Big Team. You’re my odd buggers! To the top now, Big Team. To the top.”

  We emerged from the Black Hills a few miles below Glendo, finding an improved dirt road marked on the maps that led us to a state highway, which we followed to the rodeo corrals in town. My shoulder was calloused and sore from three days of carrying the gate jack over the hills, and our white-top was splattered with mud from the creek washes. I was relieved about reaching the familiar comforts of the public corrals. Still, I was wistful about the back country behind us. There are no Oregon Trail ruts through the Black Hills of eastern Wyoming anymore. But we had blazed a path of our own and this seemed like a favorable omen for the wilderness we faced ahead.

  • • •

  Escaping the wagon seat for long stretches of the day and scouting up through the ponderosa pines was immensely satisfying, and the Black Hills cleared my head. I had worried all winter about negotiating this blank space on the map around Interstate 25, but now pushing through the foothills of the Rockies required nothing more than walking on two legs and using my eyes to steer by the river. I swelled with simple, unalloyed feelings of accomplishment and pleasurable fatigue. Walking down from the high timber to signal to Nick, I sat on flat rock ledges with my legs dangling over the edge, taking in the dazzling montage of terrain that dropped to the North Platte and watching the dreamy image of our white-top climbing the ridges.

  I was still muddling over my ghost encounter with my father back at Scottsbluff. In the late 1970s, after my father died, I had gone through a similar period of unexpected “visits” from him. I was then a young, struggling writer in New York, anxious about my future, and often found myself in Manhattan neighborhoods where I had spent time with him as a boy. The wedding-cake facade of the old Look Building on Madison Avenue, or the tulip beds in City Hall Park in lower Manhattan, where he had been arrested during an antiwar demonstration, prompted strong memories of him, and then another one of our conversations would begin. Afterward, I felt guilty about not having been able to help my father more while he was still alive, and confused that I harbored such strong resentment toward someone I also loved.

  I had the emotional intelligence then of a lawn mower. My father’s reappearance in my life seemed too macabre and embarrassing to share with anyone else, and my rearing as a Roman Catholic had programmed me to think that if I ignored inner conflict it would simply go away. (My mother and my aunts encouraged me to “think positive,” and to pray more often.) Emotional health was not a topic that parents or other adults discussed with the young, and no one ever introduced me to the idea that depression was both common and remediable.

  One of my girlfriends, however, could see that I was unhappy and distracted, and she pushed me to see a therapist. I went reluctantly at first but then began to enjoy myself, gradually open
ing up enough to be steered toward the sensible conclusion that feelings of rage toward a difficult parent like my father were predictable, even normal, and it didn’t mean that I had failed to love him. “Why don’t you just think of these talks with your father as ordinary conversations?” the therapist asked me. “Many people have imaginary conversations with family and friends. They visit their parents’ graves.”

  This was reassuring advice, but mostly I missed the point. Now that I had been to a therapist, I expected my problems to disappear, and I didn’t dig any deeper than that into my complicated feelings about my father. Eventually, as I clicked past the mileposts of life, new prompts—taking out my first mortgage, expecting my first child, getting stalled on a book project—would arrive, and I would tailspin down again into a six-month mire of sleeplessness, depression, and return visits from my father.

  One scene from my past returned with annoying frequency. My father had a lot of difficulty letting go of his children once they left home, and his interest in my early career bordered on obsession. He had always been disappointed that the Great Depression in the 1930s and then the responsibilities of raising a large family had forced him into a business career instead of the more romantic, cerebral work he often imagined for himself—writing. The classic, frustrated creative stuck in a “suit” job, he was tortured in old age by a sense that he had wasted his life. Through me, however, he could vicariously enjoy framing the timbers for a writer’s life. During college, I made the mistake of telling him that one of my history professors had told me I was already doing “master’s level” work on my term papers, after which my father insisted that I send him copies of everything I wrote. When I sent him something, he replied with long, wandering letters with suggestions for making the paper “even better,” and he embarrassed me by even contacting my professors with tips for grading me, and steering me in new directions of study. I began to feel a need to push him away, but was still too dependent on his approval to ask him to stop.

  The turbulent events of the late 1960s provided ideal social cover for men like my father, who, during the ugly divisions over the war in Vietnam, were becoming disenchanted with traditional politics and toying with new identities. My father experienced a personality shift typical for the time, trading in his old circle of friends—politicians, bishops, newspaper columnists—for his new best friends, antiwar activists. His speaking style, honed by years of AA lecture tours, and his establishment credentials as a successful business executive with eleven children, were ideal for the times. He began making appearances at colleges and demonstrations across the country organized by a prominent antiwar group, Clergy and Laity Concerned. Late in November 1970, he reached me in my dorm room at Bowdoin College in Maine and told me that he would be speaking in Boston in a couple of days at an antiwar forum at Tufts University. He would be sharing the stage with a number of antiwar leaders, including the historian Howard Zinn. He asked me to drive down for the evening so that I could listen to “the old man giving them hell.”

  “We’ll go to dinner afterward at Durgin Park,” he said. “It’ll be a nice chance for us to get together.”

  I didn’t have the heart to say no, and I was already a fan of Howard Zinn’s work and curious about hearing him speak. Bundling up against the brisk November weather in extra sweaters and a leather jacket, I roared off the campus on my motorcycle after my classes were over, determined to enjoy a last dusk ride of the season.

  The overflow crowd at the auditorium at Tufts was typical for an early-1970s antiwar event—lots of grungy college students dressed in long scarves and thrift-store coats, with a smattering of prosperous-looking older couples from the western suburbs of Boston. Howard Zinn was already speaking when I got there, delivering a literate and impassioned defense of civil disobedience that brought the audience to its feet with applause and cheers when he was finished. I was immediately worried about my father, who was the next to speak, because there was no way he could match Zinn’s erudition and convincing style. But I underestimated him. He began quietly, almost inaudibly, explaining why he called his talk “The Confessions of a Disenchanted American.” Patiently, with a lot of humor, he described his difficult personal journey from Depression-era Scranton to starting a family and a successful business career in the 1950s, all of which had made him fiercely loyal to traditional politics and led him to frequently take time off from work to help elect governors, senators, even a president, John F. Kennedy. But the carnage in Vietnam and Washington’s refusal to acknowledge the growing unpopularity of the war had turned him against “the system.” He spoke about the importance of moral outrage, insisting that protesters were still patriotic Americans. “I have not abandoned my country,” he said, raising his voice only at the end. “My country has abandoned me.”

  It was a very effective piece of conversational storytelling and the crowd cheered with approval. Howard Zinn was the first on his feet, clapping as he walked across the stage to shake my father’s hand. I had always been embarrassed by my father’s awkward and juvenescent embrace of radical politics, one reason I had turned away from him since my teens, but at that moment I was proud of him, and impressed. I didn’t even know this man whom I had barely seen in the past few years, or that he could move a crowd like this.

  After the event was over the audience mobbed the speakers near the rear of the auditorium, and I couldn’t get close to my father. I waved from a distance near the door and he cheerfully waved back, and I noticed that he was talking animatedly with two older couples, and making arrangements to meet them outside at their car. I drifted outside to wait for him, expecting that I’d have to share him at dinner with these old friends.

  I was standing near the curb outside when my father finally emerged and descended the stone steps, tall and elegant in his wool overcoat and tweed cap. The people he was leaving with had just pulled up in their car and he waved and motioned that he would be right over, and then he reached out and shook my hand.

  “Your speech was great,” I said. “I didn’t expect it to be that good.”

  “Oh, I am sort of getting this one down,” he said. “I really appreciate you coming down like this.”

  “So, dinner?” I said. “Where am I supposed to meet you?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I have to run off with these people. But I’ll be back again soon. I’ll call you. We’ll go to dinner at Durgin Park.”

  What I said then was robotic, just syllables to get through the moment.

  “Fine, Dad. I’ll see you.”

  My father tapped me on the shoulder and smiled, giving me a thumbs-up as he pulled his leather gloves from his coat pocket. With that, he disappeared into the night shadows on the edge of the Tufts campus.

  A spitting rain had started to fall and, underneath the campus lampposts, the student walking paths glistened with mud. I found my motorcycle a few blocks away, jumped hard on the foot starter, guessed my way through the maze of streets to the interstate, and drove north, a zombie biker in the rain. I bore north through a black landscape on a black motorcycle, so black inside there were no edges, no shapes, no emotional contours to assess as a specific feeling. By the time I reached the Maine Turnpike I was so frozen that I could barely move my arms to steer the bike, and I stopped to warm up at a twenty-four-hour diner in South Portland.

  Later, when I thought about that night, I couldn’t decide who I was angrier at—him or me. But there was always a solution for this. The Catholic doctrine of silence fixed everything and repression wasn’t a fault—it was the only way I could cope. I tried not to remember. My father was a very princely, intriguing man, always changing, always presenting a new side, and I couldn’t stay mad at him for much longer than a cold motorcycle ride back to Maine.

  • • •

  After the Black Hills, the Wyoming flats were broad and wide open, mostly cattle country, but there were lovely small towns and views of man-made lakes every fifteen or twenty miles, and the traveling would be easy until we
got beyond Casper. We slept at feedlots and at the state fairgrounds in Douglas, where more cowboys pulled into our camp and waited for us to get the mules settled in corrals before taking us out for dinner. Wyoming is a vast state, but everyone in the cattle business seems to know everyone else, and I enjoyed swapping tales with the cowboys. I talked about the ranches and cattle drives I had been on, while they brought me up to date on the antics of hedge fund and media billionaires buying up famous old ranches. Wyoming was my Shangri-la, and I was glad to have reached the high plains this time the way I did, swelling with self-confidence about getting across the Black Hills.

  19

  WE SPENT THE JULY FOURTH weekend in trail nirvana. A few miles north of Douglas, Wyoming, as we climbed the hills along the Child’s Route, a local cowboy and Civil War reenactor named Bill Sinnard flagged us down in his pickup and told us that the Wyoming Division of State Parks and Historic Sites was inviting us to spend the Independence Day weekend at the restored Fort Fetterman, just ahead, where the festivities would include United States Cavalry reenactments, wagon rides for the tourists, and luncheon and dinner barbecues. The forty acres of the fort grounds were fenced, and we could turn our mules loose to graze while we enjoyed the hospitality of the historic site. Two hours later we jacked open the gate below the fort and called the mules up to a broad plateau where an immaculately preserved officers’ quarters and a munitions barn commanded a breathtaking vista of the North Platte and the rolling plains beyond. While I set up camp and ran a hose down from the main buildings to wash six weeks of congealed mud and tumbleweed off the wagon, Nick entertained the tourists and reenactors with his marvelous palaver about wagons and mules.