The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “God fucking damn-it-all to hell anyway, Nick. What is this obdurate mind block of yours about creating a shithole wherever you are? But don’t worry. I don’t mind! I like being your fucking maid. I’ll clean up all by myself.”

  It was just about the most dumbass thing I had ever said, and I immediately regretted it. Nick erupted from his camp chair, disgustedly looked inside the pickup at my bundles of new clothes, and spun around to face me, his sunburned, perspiring face flushed with rage.

  “Oh, I see! So I am here all fuckin afternoon in the hot sun making repairs that you fuckin could never do. And you are off doin your fuckin girlyman buying new Carhartt jeans and gettin a haircut. Rinker, you don’t know dickshit about life. Fuck your dumb ass.”

  “Nick, if you don’t like the way I am running this expedition, you can get in your fucking truck and drive home. I’m done with your pigsty shit. I’ve been putting up with your fucking filth for my entire life and I’m done. Understand?”

  Men, of course, are eminently rational and astonishingly articulate when they argue. You can never tell from their body cues that they are angry. After I had unloaded my shopping-spree haul from the pickup, Nick decided to use the Toyota to carry some power tools and electrical cords that he had borrowed from the taxidermist back to the ranch implement shed.

  Nick made the short run back to the implement shed in the Toyota at thirty miles per hour, in reverse. Engine roaring, spewing up clouds of dust, the Toyota bounced backward down through a gulch and then came partially airborne out the far side, still heading for the barn in reverse. At the big doorways, Nick did not see the two heavy steel posts that had been sunk in concrete near the entrance, to prevent a runaway truck from hitting the barn.

  The metallic clang of the Toyota’s bumper hitting the posts echoed so loudly that the mules jumped in the pasture. Nick’s head banged against the rear window of the cab. I could see from a distance that both the bumper and the tailgate were dented. Nick stormed out of the pickup, throwing his arms in the air.

  “See? Fuckin see? This is what you make me do!”

  The next fifteen minutes were the worst of the trip. I was furious at myself for initiating a fight, and astounded at the contradictions in my character. Nick flips the Trail Pup in Nebraska, and I am fine. Nick doesn’t pick up the wrappers for his wood screws and plumbing tape in Wyoming, and I freak. I was completely in the wrong, detested myself for it, and was terrified that Nick would take me seriously and pack up his tools and his dog and drive home. Brooding and speechless, I wandered around camp picking up and returning gear to the wagon, while Nick, cursing, inspected the damage to his truck, occasionally kicking the fenders and slamming the doors.

  It was a standoff to see who would break the silence first, but finally Nick walked over with a melancholy look on his face, Fu Manchu mustache drooped down. He reached over to shake my hand.

  “Rink. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. I should have ignored how stupid you are.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I started it. I’m sorry. If I did as much work as you, I wouldn’t clean up after myself either.”

  “We’re brothers, Rink. We will always be brothers. Once you’re a brother?”

  “What?”

  “You just can’t fuckin undo it.”

  Among males, conflict resolution requires a rapid return to the basics, preferably sports or automotive mechanics.

  “Rink, did you have my pickup serviced?” Nick said. “You got it detailed too. I can’t believe that. It looks great.”

  “I did it myself, Nick. It was fun,” I said, handing him the receipts for the oil change, the radiator flush, and the new fan belt.

  “Fuckin A. Thanks. I always feel like a new person when I clean out my truck.”

  I offered to drive Nick over to the Murdoch store to buy new jeans and shirts, but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to blow money on clothes until, he said, he had “greased the last wheel” on the trip.

  Nick wanted some time alone and, that night, he drove into Casper, found an AA meeting, and went to the movies. I puttered around the wagon, enjoying the solitude of the plains and the company of Olive Oyl while the coyotes howled out by Emigrant Gap. The next 350 miles across original ruts would be the toughest, most remote stretch of the trip and, as I stared at my maps, I worried about whether we had enough water to make the long runs between the rivers ahead.

  • • •

  Reaching the Oregon Trail in Wyoming and not confronting the Mormon experience would be like reaching Paris and not studying the cathedrals. You cannot understand one without the other, and the Mormon hegira to Salt Lake that began in 1847, and then mightily expanded during the Gold Rush era, is the courageous and violent fable of America itself. Wallace Stegner, the dean of western writers, devoted at least a third of his Pulitzer Prize–winning career to writing about the Mormons, and he considered the Mormon struggle, and their record of both persecution and grave misdeeds, to epitomize the tortured history of the West. In The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail, Stegner pointed out that the Mormons not only transformed the Oregon Trail but colonized a swath of the West that extended from Utah to the mountains of Idaho, and as far west as the gold fields of California.

  “They built a commonwealth, or as they would have put it, a Kingdom,” Stegner wrote. “But the story of their migration is more than the story of the founding of Utah. . . . The Mormons were one of the principal forces in the settlement of the West.”

  Mormon-hating is still one of America’s most popular religious sports, and the Roman Catholics, southern evangelicals, and Jews who despise the Mormons have consistently ignored one salient truth. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saints, for all of his bombast, satyriasis, and murderous ways, was the only true prophet of a native denomination birthed on American soil, and he dramatically changed American history. Mormonism is a religion and, like all of them, grossly imperfect, but there has always been a glaring hypocrisy about American attitudes toward the Saints. During the bloody wars in the 1840s over where they would eventually settle in the west—battles mostly conducted in Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois—the Mormons got killed a lot, and they killed a lot of other people. The Mormons are abhorred for harboring many strange beliefs. They believe that we preexist as spirit children, can become divine during postexistence, and that, as the Book of Mormon describes, the Angel Moroni revealed to Joseph Smith that one of the twelve tribes of Israel somehow escaped the Mideast and reached North America, to gestate for centuries as an Indian tribe preserving the values of Christianity. The Church of Latter-day Saints practices baptism of the dead, even for non-Mormons.

  But the Mormons are strange compared to whom? The biblical heroes of mainline Christianity include a long list of murderers, adulterers, and warmongers, not to mention the philandering popes, genocidal Knights Templar, and Klan-loving Southern Baptists who have led various branches of Christianity since then. Traditional Christians perform some very bizarre mental gymnastics of their own. They believe that Jesus was born to a virgin, and that during Communion His body and blood are transformed into a thin wafer baked in Rhode Island. Which denomination, which doctrine, is more “correct”? None of them are even remotely correct, of course. It’s all made up anyway, and dogma is simply another excuse for introducing useless human conflict. Organized religion, mankind’s oldest, most exciting adventure, too often comes down to one church accusing another church of heresy. It is the worship of hypocrisy, squared. Mormons have never enjoyed a monopoly at this.

  The wonderful story began in the 1820s in Narcissa Whitman country, the Burned-Over District in upstate New York. The Smiths of Palmyra, New York, were the kind of happy family that reliably produces prophets. They were farmers, prone to crop failure and nasty land disputes, who moved around a lot. Young Joseph, born in Vermont in 1805, was crippled as a boy after suffering a bone infection, and walked for many years with crutches. By the time he was a teenager, ho
wever, Smith was able to hike unassisted and enjoyed long, solitary walks over the rolling countryside below Lake Ontario. The Smiths were swept up by the evangelistic zeal of the Second Great Awakening, which opened them to many interesting experiences. They had visions, woke up from dreams reporting that they had been visited by God, and practiced a variety of arts common at the time—folk magic, séances, miraculous healing. As a young man Joseph supplemented the skimpy family income by treasure-digging for buried gold and religious artifacts that he believed had been stashed in underground crypts. Smith claimed that placing the right “seer stone” in his hat would help reveal the location of these lost treasures.

  The visits by the aptly named Angel Moroni began in 1823, when Joseph was eighteen. Moroni informed Joseph that a book of golden plates, probably containing revealed texts, was buried on a hill near the Smiths’ home, but the angel initially prevented his new human friend from finding the plates right away, in much the same way that Moses was extensively tested by God before he climbed Mount Sinai and returned with the Ten Commandments. Over the next several years Smith continued his frustrating search for the buried texts, met and eloped with a Pennsylvania girl, Emma Hale, and, with her help, found the golden plates. Joseph, Emma, and some friends translated the plates, which emerged as the core of the Book of Mormon.

  The Book of Mormon contained everything required in an Abrahamic work of literature—lots of wandering around the deserts by a chosen people, periods of peace followed by periods of intense violence, and wonderfully alluring, made-up events. All of this culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ in North America a few days after his reported ascension from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Jesus returned later to convert the Nephites, descendants of the group that had wandered to the Americas from biblical lands. This revised travel plan of a resurrected Jesus, now including several North American stops, could not have arrived at a better time. During the Second Great Awakening, the Burned-Over District and other trans-Appalachian regions along the frontier throbbed with resentment over the European and still vaguely papist roots of Christianity, and there was considerable hunger for an indigenous American church. A huge amount of church-shopping was already happening, and the new Mormon faith offered a homegrown, made-in-the-USA doctrinal package not available in the other evangelical denominations. Smith’s fusion of mysticism with traditional Christianity proved highly attractive at a time when religious emotionalism had pushed many Americans to dabble in the occult.

  Smith promoted to great advantage two other aspects of Mormonism. At the time, during the 1830s, as described so well in W. J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic, a surplus of corn whiskey—the most efficient way to preserve and market a valuable crop—had made alcoholism rampant in American cities and small towns, even among the young. Another reliable surplus from Virginia and North Carolina, tobacco, had addicted millions more to nicotine. Evangelical moralists were also scandalized by the many whorehouses built along the new water canals to service the men and boys digging the trenches. As reformist zeal swept through churches and political parties, Smith positioned Mormonism as a kind of 12-step program for personal improvement. Converts vowed to abstain from sex outside marriage, and to stop drinking, smoking, and even consuming hot stimulants like coffee and tea. Meanwhile, Smith and his successors, especially the redoubtable Brigham Young, were superb organizers. The Mormons bought up huge tracts of land and homesteaded new areas as religious-agricultural fiefdoms. They sold their crops as a cooperative unit, organized their own dry goods stores and breeding farms, built churches and temples together, and preferred to barter and trade among themselves, forming a clannish economic self-determination that made them not only powerful but resented by non-Mormon neighbors. This blending of abstemiousness and financial drive proved deeply appealing during the 1830s and 1840s, when thousands of Americans were losing their farms and businesses because of the serial panics and bank failures racking a young, unstable country.

  Few organized religions, however, can prosper without stunning misbehavior by their leaders. Smith’s new faith soon stumbled over his secret endorsement of plural marriage, or polygamy, a practice he justified with a great deal of theological mumbo jumbo designed to conceal his chronic philandering. Smith was an attractive man and a spellbinding speaker, and women swooned during his sermons. He rarely met a follower’s pretty wife or teenage daughter whom he didn’t covet, and many of them succumbed to his charms without Smith having to make much of an effort. Under an impressive veil of deceit, Smith was eventually “sealed” to forty-five wives, and his successor Brigham Young would go on to build two adjoining mansions in Salt Lake to house his own fifty-one wives and estimated fifty-seven children.

  The Mormons were widely despised for all this. By the late 1830s Christian America had settled on a strategy for dealing with them that had already been successfully used against the eastern Indian tribes—violent harassment and containment. The Mormons were hounded out of New York and into Ohio, and then through Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and then back to Illinois, by late-night vigilante groups marauding through their settlements, shooting cattle, poisoning wells, and engaging in pitched rifle battles with the Saints. The clannish Mormons fought back. Smith organized a secret Mormon militia known as the Danites, for “peacekeeping purposes,” he said, but in fact their main business was murdering non-Mormons and apostates.

  Religions truly gain the ability to take off when their leaders are martyred, and Smith fell victim to this useful form of departure in 1844. In Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormonism had prospered during an extraordinary period of controversy and temple building when, among other advances, Smith came up with the idea of posthumous baptism. But Smith made the mistake of shutting down and destroying the press of a dissident Mormon newspaper that accused him of polygamy and worshipping multiple gods, and a war broke out between the Mormon factions, forcing the governor of Illinois to intervene. Charges were eventually filed against Smith for inciting a riot and treason, and Smith and his brother Hyrum were held in the jail at Carthage, Illinois. On the night of June 27, 1844, a mob with faces blackened by grease attacked the jail. Hyrum was shot in the face and Joseph was riddled with bullets while attempting to defend himself with a pistol. After calling out his last words to the Lord, the prophet, now quite dead, fell out through a window.

  The internecine Mormon battles on the frontier, and the development of the Oregon Trail, occurred more or less simultaneously in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and perhaps it was inevitable that the growth of a powerful nativist religion would coalesce with the great migration westward. Even before Smith’s death, the Mormon leaders gathering around Brigham Young had dreamed of making an escape far away from the violent, anti-Mormon frontier in the Midwest, and in 1846 Young began dispatching Mormon exploration parties beyond South Pass in Wyoming along the nascent Oregon Trail. The Mormons eventually decided to colonize the uninhabited desert region around Great Salt Lake in Utah, because it was naturally protected by mountains that would make it difficult for their enemies to harass them there, and the plentiful water falling from the Wasatch range would make it possible to irrigate the land. The Salt Lake basin could be reached relatively easily by blazing a ninety-mile spur off the existing wagon road.

  Between 1846 and the early 1870s, more than seventy thousand Mormons would cross the Oregon Trail. Thousands of them were impoverished English and Scandinavian workers who had been displaced by the industrial revolution, and who were ripe for the picking when the Mormons began evangelizing in the European slums. The Mormons were the largest single group to cross the trail and compared their exodus to the Jewish flight from Egypt, which is now an integral part of their faith. This identity has often led the LDS Church to make outsize claims about their right to control the modern trail and the writing of its history, assertiveness that makes Mormons as controversial today as they were in the nineteenth century.

  There is no doubt that, with their practiced efficiency and thoroughness
, the Mormons accelerated the development of the Oregon Trail. Brigham Young had the mind and management skills of a military quartermaster, and after 1847 he converted the Mormon resources at his disposal into a bustling covered wagon enterprise. By establishing a series of “winter camps” in Iowa and Nebraska, the Mormon emigrants and their wagons could be ready for early-spring departures. The Mormons replaced the haphazard system of river fords with a network of ferries across the Platte, allowing Mormons to pass for free but charging gentiles $3 per wagon. (In peak years, the traffic jam awaiting the Mormon ferry crossing at Casper stretched back on the trail for twenty miles. One 49er said, “The Mormons have as good a gold mine here as any in California.”) The Mormons were the only organized group on the trail to operate west-to-east traffic, so that wagons, supplies, and scouts familiar with the trail could return in the fall and then lead a new group in the spring. The LDS published precise mileage guides, and a Mormon inventor even built a wooden odometer that clacked against the wagon spokes so that the Mormon trains knew their exact distance to the next waypoint. Bad credit? No problem. Young established a Perpetual Emigration Fund to underwrite the travel expenses of impoverished converts and made bulk purchases of wagons from the Peter Schuttler works in Chicago. Mail service, creature comforts such as bathhouses and barbershops at “halfway houses” along the trail, and dairies and vegetable gardens to replenish the wagon pantries of the faithful were among the amenities that Mormons added to the trail.