The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Unlike such traditional scholars as John D. Unruh Jr. or Merrill Mattes, Brown has never enjoyed the security and prestige of a university professorship or a position with the National Park Service. He began wandering the trail in the late 1970s during his summers off from teaching in rural one-room Wyoming schoolhouses, developing the concept that the hundreds of graves still to be found beside the ruts were time capsules left behind by pioneer families, revealing insights that cannot be found in published histories. Brown doggedly cross-checks information about each grave in emigrant journals, land records, and nineteenth-century newspapers. A lifetime of searching for graves along the Oregon and California trails has also allowed him to create a more complete portrait of nineteenth-century American life, the pageantry of characters thrown west by the great land migration.

  One of Brown’s best monograph sketches, for example, narrates the tragedy of Charles Stull, a deaf and mute man from Philadelphia who decided to cross the Oregon Trail, alone and on foot, during the peak emigration year of 1852. Stull died of cholera at Castle Creek, just west of Ash Hollow. He was found by the members of a passing wagon train, who examined his body and found $2.75 in his pockets, along with a certificate attesting to his graduation from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia. I learned from Brown’s account how crowded the trail was that year, and new details about the cholera plagues. Brown also portrayed how early-nineteenth-century educators and philanthropists founded schools for the deaf and circulated beautifully illustrated pamphlets on sign language. Stull was an exemplary product of that era. He was one of the first students at the Philadelphia school for the deaf, and he and his brother, an engraver, published one of the first sign-language manuals, an illustrated broadsheet titled An Alphabet for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb.

  The narrative background Brown provided about the grave along Castle Creek tells us something important about nineteenth-century values during the great land migration. The Second Great Awakening, which inspired Narcissa Whitman and thousands of evangelicals like her to venture west, also produced the reformist zeal that was so pronounced in America between the Revolution and the Civil War—a nascent suffrage movement, the antislavery crusade, and socially minded educational reform. Perhaps Stull felt empowered by his success at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb and that is what led him to hazard a dangerous crossing by foot across the trail. His silent journey, however eccentric, evinces the yearnings of a society that was embracing mobility and personal change.

  A native of Michigan, Brown moved to Wyoming in 1977 to teach in rural schools, and became interested in the trail before OCTA was founded. At the time, the idea of preserving the trail as a living monument was still in its infancy, following a long period of neglect and then the distractions of the Depression and World War II after Ezra Meeker died in 1928. Brown has long served as the chairman of OCTA’s Graves and Sites Committee, and for thirty years has spent most of his free time identifying and reinterring pioneer remains. He has fastidiously restored about forty graves and other important sites along the Oregon Trail alone, and his restoration work stretches some 1,800 miles across the western trails, from eastern Nebraska to California.

  Brown had no particular purpose in mind when he began exploring the trail in the late 1970s. “I think I was simply fascinated by the existence of so many long stretches of original ruts more than a hundred years after the trail was actually crossed,” Brown told me when I met him for a day of grave tours after we reached Casper. This was about fifteen years before the trail country of Wyoming began to be exploited for gas wells and pipelines, and there was very little concern for preserving the pioneer environment. Even near major landmarks and intersections, the trail was mostly empty and poorly marked. Detailed maps were not available to the public, few modern trail guides had been published, and, Brown says, “It would never have occurred to people to have all of these interpretive museums.” Brown is a voracious reader and researcher, and as he discovered more and more evidence of unmarked trail graves, he realized that proper identification of burial sites would not only add to knowledge about trail history but honor the pioneer dead.

  In many areas, especially near his home in eastern Wyoming, Brown began to appreciate that vagaries of both the past and the present had combined to preserve critical sections of the trail and pioneer graves. By the time they reached Wyoming, the pioneers were aware that the muddy Platte was not the best source of water. They began to travel in the higher ground of the Rocky foothills to rely on fresh creeks for water, which took them several miles away from the flatter land along the river. Later, these hilly areas were considered agriculturally undesirable because ranchers and farmers knew that they couldn’t plant corn or harvest hay there, and eventually these parcels were preserved as public lands controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM). “When we got there in the early 1980s,” Brown says, “the trail was just waiting for us, mostly undisturbed.”

  One grave that Brown showed me, along the Child’s Route above the North Platte, demonstrates how researching burial sites can reveal important themes about the Oregon Trail migration that are largely forgotten today, and also shows Brown’s persistence in preserving trail graves. Brown took me by car to the grave of Quintina Snodderly, a pioneer from Iowa who died in 1852 just west of Glenrock, Wyoming. The grave sat on high land near the entrance road to a ranch, and the site was a mix of the old and the new that typifies Oregon Trail country. A beautifully restored homesteader farm with a log-cabin house and a red Scandinavian barn stood below, and the blades of a new wind-turbine development swayed through the sky in the distance.

  “Quintina” was a popular nineteenth-century name, a borrowing from Latin that indicated a fifth-born child. Quintina was a native of Tennessee who moved with her husband, Jacob Snodderly, to Iowa, living there with their eight children for several years before deciding to migrate west once more, this time on the Oregon Trail. The Snodderlys were traveling in a wagon train of evangelical Baptists led by a popular circuit-riding minister, Joab Powell, whose story typifies not only the sweep of American history but an important factor in Oregon Trail migration. Many nineteenth-century Americans, having spent years warring with their neighbors over one doctrinal difference or another, would pull up stakes and move on to seek more religious freedom, frequently migrating by stages all the way across the North American continent.

  Joab Powell was a descendant of Tennessee Welshmen who belonged to a unique sect, the “Fighting Quakers,” who abandoned the Quaker doctrine of nonviolence during the Revolutionary War, after concluding that resistance to British rule was justified by biblical texts. During the Second Great Awakening in the 1820s, Powell made a common denominational swap of the time, leaving the Society of Friends for the more evangelical Baptists. Powell was a spellbinding speaker and an impressive figure, weighing almost three hundred pounds. Like many converted evangelicals, he was vehemently opposed to slavery, and his small congregation of Providence Baptists was hounded out of Tennessee and moved to Missouri, where Powell homesteaded a 640-acre farm and traveled widely as a circuit preacher. But after twenty years Powell had concluded that Missouri, racked by bloody battles between pro-slavery and antislavery vigilantes, was not hospitable to abolitionists either, and it was time to move on again. In 1852 he led a migration of Baptists to Oregon, in part because he felt called by God to join the political battle to admit Oregon to the Union as a free state, where slavery would not be allowed. The Snodderly family of Iowa apparently decided to join the Baptist wagon train after reaching the jumping-off camps in St. Joseph in the spring of 1852.

  Quintina’s remains were discovered in 1974, when the owners of the ranch outside Glenrock were building a new driveway and the grave was overturned by a road grader. The gravestone found at the site indicated that the pioneers were in a hurry and didn’t have time to finish carving the rock. The inscription was hammered into a flat stone found nearby with what appears to h
ave been either a screwdriver or a wood chisel, by an amateur hand. Its simple text, with the first “N” inscribed backward, read “QUIИTINA SNODERLY D J.” (“D J” probably signified “Died in June.”) In Graves and Sites on the Oregon and California Trails, Brown and his coauthor, Reg Duffin, described the condition of the remains when they were found.

  An examination of the skeleton revealed the cause of death. Most of the ribs had been crushed, probably by the heavy wheels of a covered wagon. The skeleton was in otherwise perfect condition, with fragments of a green ribbon bow still around the neck. The Powell wagon train probably crossed the North Platte River at this point and the accident may have occurred as the wagons climbed the river bluffs to enter the north bank [or Child’s Route] trail.

  The owners of the ranch realized that they had probably unearthed a pioneer grave, and appreciated the importance of preserving the remains, but as yet there was no OCTA to contact, and they didn’t know what to do. The family placed Quintina’s bones and the headstone underneath the couch in their living room, where they remained, pretty much forgotten, for ten years. At some point Quintina’s skull was dispatched for examination by a forensic science team at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The forensic team wanted to make a facial reconstruction, and then cast it in plaster, to render a fuller portrait of a pioneer woman. But that work was never completed and Quintina’s skull remained exiled in Fort Collins for years.

  In 1984, the family storing Quintina’s headless skeleton underneath their couch contacted Brown, who had now become well known for his reburials of pioneers. They were selling the ranch to move to Washington State, and thought that it was time to properly dispose of the bones. Brown drove up to Glenrock in his Ford Bronco II, and carried Quintina away in a cardboard box. Through OCTA, he raised money to prepare a reburial spot and buy protective fencing, and a friend of Brown’s, a handyman in the Douglas school system, built a simple pine coffin for reinterring the remains.

  But Brown couldn’t proceed with a proper reburial without Quintina’s skull, and this proved to be a stumbling block. Despite repeated calls and letters, he got the runaround every time he contacted Colorado State University’s forensic science team in Fort Collins. In the meantime, Quintina’s skeleton remained in the cardboard box, now in Brown’s care. He put the box of bones in a corner of his computer room at his house in Douglas.

  “This was still pretty early in my grave restoration days, and it was a very frustrating period for me,” Brown said. “The results of an analysis of Quintina’s skull were going to be vague anyway, and it seemed to me that a forensic science team should be more respectful of the need to get her back into a proper grave.”

  Negotiations with the Fort Collins team went on for months, and finally the university scientists agreed to release the skull, if Brown would drive down there himself and carry it away. On the arranged day, Brown made the 350-mile round-trip to Colorado. On the university grounds at Fort Collins, he found the pathologist with Quintina’s skull in his office, and together they packed it in a cardboard box, cushioning it for the ride back to Wyoming with Styrofoam peanuts. Quintina rode Interstate 25 back toward her original resting place in the front passenger seat of the Ford Bronco II.

  Brown selected the reburial place with care, choosing ground very near the original burial site on a grassy knoll overlooking the North Platte. Quintina Snodderly’s remains, thirteen years after they were unearthed by the road grader, were returned to Wyoming soil in the new pine coffin in the autumn of 1987.

  Brown was undecided about what to do with Quintina’s headstone, because he was concerned about leaving it outside in the elements, where it might deteriorate over time. Originally, the headstone had probably been laid flat on the ground, not mounted erect. During the century after Quintina’s death, the Wyoming winds and rain had covered the headstone with a deposit of sandy soil, which had supported a healthy native growth of grass and wildflowers, preserving it almost intact.

  At the time, the city of Casper and the federal BLM were collaborating on plans to build a new museum, now the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center, which Brown thought would be a fitting location to preserve and display the headstone. Working with the new museum staff, Brown arranged for the original headstone to be exactly copied in all-weather plaster by a curatorial shop that also specialized in making precise casts of dinosaur bones. The original headstone is now displayed for museum visitors behind protective glass at the Interpretive Center in Casper. The attractive facsimile headstone was placed at Quintina’s new grave in Glenrock. Brown installed the new cast at the grave with a friend who has helped the Interpretive Center gather pioneer artifacts, and who is also a devout Roman Catholic. When the tombstone cast was reset in the ground, she said a prayer while sprinkling holy water on the grave.

  During reburials that occur during the school year, Brown has often recruited the students from his one-room schoolhouses to help rehabilitate grave sites, and they are frequently the only witnesses when the pioneer graves are rededicated with simple ceremonies that include Bible readings and poems written by the students.

  “I still remember the students I had with me, each day that we made a reburial,” Brown told me. “I taught them to be respectful of human remains, but that a skeleton was not something you should be afraid of, or consider strange. Human remains are part of our education, our appreciation of the past. The kids learned how to use a post-hole digger and to make fence. I explained the history of the trail in each area. I still feel very spiritual about every one of my reburials.”

  The day I visited the Snodderly grave with Brown, a strong breeze was blowing, swaying the tall grasses, and killdeers and mourning doves were calling nearby. Antelope bounded by on the golden plains. The tasteful pine-pole fencing, and OCTA’s practice of mowing the grass both inside and around the border of the preserved grave, make Quintina Snodderly’s final resting place look like a lonely but artful outpost on the ruts.

  Brown’s simple devotion to task and human decency, rare in the America that most of us know, was very moving to me. As we drove off, curious, I asked Brown what he did with the box that for so many years had contained Quintina Snodderly’s remains.

  “I put it back in the corner of my computer room,” he said. “It’s still there. I’ve never thought about it until today. I guess I just don’t want to part for good with Quintina Snodderly. Also, it’s a good box.”

  20

  NICK AND I HAD OUR first big fight at Casper. We had made excellent time running the mules up from Fort Fetterman and decided to give them another rest before we faced the scorching deserts ahead, and a local taxidermist offered us his large pastures out by Poison Spider Creek, on the western fringes of the city. We had now spent nearly two months on the trail and all of my clothes were ruined from scouting through the sage and gate-jacking fences. We wouldn’t hit another city until Pocatello, Idaho, more than five hundred miles away, but we had brought Nick’s truck forward to Casper two weeks before, conveniently positioning me for a long, lazy afternoon shop. After I made a morning run to the hardware stores for Nick, getting the rest of the day off was easy.

  “Okay, so, Nick. How about I help you with wagon repairs today?”

  “Go away. I don’t want your college-educated ass anywhere near my wagon.”

  “Nick, how fair is this to me? You’re consigning me to a life of mechanical incompetence.”

  “Not my problem. Go away.”

  “I’ll hold your grease gun.”

  “Go away.”

  After eight hundred miles of wagon travel through rural prairies, indulging the commercial possibilities of a modern, mall-enveloped city like Casper was deeply therapeutic, and it was easy to get carried away. As it happens, downtown Casper has just about the best western wear emporium in the country, Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitters, so I bought a new wardrobe of cowboy shirts there, and then crossed town for Murdoch’s Ranch and Home Supply, where I bought new Carhartt jea
ns, a leather vest, and new work gloves. I needed a haircut, so I got that, found a Japanese restaurant for lunch, and dawdled over a fine daily, the Casper Star-Tribune. Nick’s pickup needed routine servicing, and I didn’t like the way the water pump was screeching, so I stopped at a Lube Express and got an oil change, a coolant system flush, and a new fan belt. At Dog World, I splurged on Pup-Peronis and Milk-Bone minis for Olive Oyl. I couldn’t stand the grime in Nick’s truck anymore and I pulled into an AutoZone and bought new floor mats, Armorall vinyl shine, and Little Tree hanging car scents. I spent the rest of the day in the shady parking lot of the Fort Caspar Museum, contentedly devouring museum pamphlets and detailing Nick’s Toyota.

  Back at Poison Spider Creek, as I drove in toward the wagon, I was dismayed to see the debris field of hardware wrappers, tools, wood scraps, KFC chicken bones, and grease rags that Nick had strewn all around the Schuttler. He had emptied out the Trail Pup to make plumbing repairs on the water barrels, but he was too exhausted after his exertions to clean up, and all of our possessions were lying around in haphazard piles or blowing away in the wind. I had enjoyed such a fine afternoon shop. Now I had returned to my home on the plains and it was Fort Laramie, 1852, with the wagons burning. All of my rage about Nick’s slovenly ways, after so many weeks of successful repression, exploded in a fireball of anger.