The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Because the majority of Mormons departed from Nauvoo, Illinois, and then traveled through Iowa to reach the Missouri, they generally followed the north bank of the Platte through Nebraska. This northern route was also followed by more than 100,000 non-Mormon pioneers and was called at the time the Council Bluffs Road or the Great Platte River Road. There were also plenty of Mormons who followed the south bank of the Platte after disembarking from steamboats along the lower Missouri. At Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming, the Mormons joined the flow of wagon trains along the main Oregon Trail for five hundred miles to Fort Bridger, and then departed from the main ruts for their ninety-mile run south into Salt Lake.

  Less than a hundred miles of the 1,300-mile route the Mormons followed to Salt Lake followed wagon roads that didn’t already exist—for the rest, the Saints were simply following the old Indian traces adopted by the fur trappers and then the gentile wagon trains. But politically connected LDS leaders and church historians have long insisted that the Mormons created the “Mormon Pioneer Trail,” and they have waged a successful campaign to convince federal agencies to reclassify long portions of the Oregon Trail through Nebraska and Wyoming, and many historic sites, as exclusively Mormon. The renaming of the trail to suit Mormons’ needs has even extended to the published maps of the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, angering many trail enthusiasts, western ranchers, and scholars. Promulgating the myth that there was a distinct Mormon trail, writes historian Merrill Mattes, “is not merely inaccurate, it is an injustice to label the entire northern route as exclusively ‘The Mormon Trail.’ ”

  Randy Brown, and many other members of the Oregon-California Trails Association, point out that they have many friends in the group who are Mormons. But they are annoyed that political influence by the LDS Church, and what some of them call the activism of a “Mormon mafia” within the Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, have distorted the historical record to suit the needs of a single religion.

  “The Mormons can do whatever they want to out here because the state of Wyoming thinks no one else cares,” says Brown. “The rest of us, non-Mormon trail enthusiasts, don’t have the money and influence that LDS has.”

  Recently, the Mormons have become even more controversial along the trail for their efforts to reinterpret Mormonism’s darkest hour, the 1856 handcart disasters that left more than two hundred Mormon converts from Europe dead, as one of the most admirable and sacred moments of the flight to Salt Lake.

  Brigham Young’s vaunted empire-building ability suffered an unusual setback in 1855, when a crop failure in Utah suddenly diminished LDS contributions, reducing the church’s ability to continue importing European converts. Young was desperate because by now he knew that Mormon expansion in Utah relied heavily on the annual surge of converts from overseas. Instead of telling the Europeans to wait a year until sufficient funds were available, he devised a strategy of shipping them over from England and having the converts continue their journey from Iowa City with inexpensive handcarts that the immigrants would construct themselves, and then push 1,300 miles to Salt Lake. Just about everything went wrong with Young’s handcart scheme. Difficulties in finding enough ships to carry more than 1,800 European Mormons from Liverpool delayed their departures until too late in the spring, the lumber that the church provided the emigrants to build their own handcarts was green and quickly snapped in the Nebraska heat, and herds of buffalo stampeded the oxen pulling the provision wagons, depriving the handcart companies of sufficient food. Many of the European converts were traveling with children and elderly parents, and the agonies of pushing a handcart with all of their possessions and provisions across the arid Oregon Trail were intense. Three of the five handcart companies brought over from Europe in 1856 made a safe passage to Utah. But the breakdown in Mormon discipline doomed the last two groups—the Willie Handcart Company, and the Martin Handcart Company, named after their leaders, James Willie and Edward Martin—which did not leave Iowa until mid-August.

  Winter blizzards can begin in the Rockies as early as October, and the Willie and Martin companies were strung out between Casper and South Pass when the first storm struck on October 19, 1856. After holing up in the meager protection offered by the Wyoming bluffs, the handcart companies were found by rescue parties sent out from Salt Lake and encouraged to continue through the heavy snows. Struggling uphill through more than a foot of snow, the holes in their boots wrapped in rags, the hopeless Mormon handcart pioneers began dying by the dozen, especially at a place considered the most arduous climb of the trail, the boulder-strewn Rocky Ridge, a few miles east of South Pass. As many as fifteen members of the Willie Company were buried in a mass grave in a canyon nearby, at Rock Creek Hollow. Meanwhile, members of the Martin Company had begun dying of hypothermia and starvation, but the survivors somehow managed to struggle farther west and reach a somewhat protected cove near another fabled Oregon Trail site, Devil’s Gate, where the Sweetwater River cuts through a dramatic three-hundred-foot gorge of the Granite Range. The cove was shaped like a horseshoe against the Granites and the ground inside was a frozen bog. Camping and building fires there were hellish. Fifty-six Mormon converts died and were buried in what became known as Martin’s Cove.

  At one point in late October, as below-freezing temperatures began to form ice on the Sweetwater, there were almost a thousand shivering Mormons huddled in tents and abandoned log cabins between Devil’s Gate and Rocky Ridge. With the help of the Mormon rescue parties, most of the survivors had staggered into the promised land of Utah by early December, but not before a total of 215 had died.

  At the time, many Mormons risked censure by their church for criticizing Brigham Young’s mismanagement of the handcart emigration, a view that is still privately expressed by some church members today. But during a bellicose Sunday sermon at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake that November, Young made it clear that dissent was not permitted in his church. For anyone who questioned his decision to bring the emigrants forward so late in the season, he said, “Let the curse of God be on them and blast their substance with mildew and destruction, until their names are forgotten from the earth.”

  That party line has continued, and even become hardened over time. By the 1870s, the LDS leadership settled on a strategy of repackaging the senseless 1856 dying as a parable of noble suffering, the kind of mythmaking that often helps religion grow. The Willie and Martin handcart dead, victims of Brigham Young’s overreaching, became martyrs. From the 1870s onward, teams of Mormon researchers and grave hunters have combed the Oregon Trail from the Red Buttes near Casper to beyond South Pass, marking burial sites and landmarks, and elevating the mass grave at Rock Creek Hollow, and the winter refuge at Martin’s Cove, to the status of sacred sites. Beginning in the 1990s, the Wyoming and Utah local LDS divisions, called “stakes,” have aggressively bought up thousands of acres of deeded ranchland along the trail and now operate these parcels as vast summer camps for Mormon teenagers, who push replica handcarts around Devil’s Gate and up toward Rocky Ridge to reenact the struggles of their ancestors. Along the most scenic and famous stretch of the Oregon Trail, the hundred miles between Independence Rock and South Pass, the LDS now operates an ambitious museum-building and evangelization program for summer tourists.

  The federal government has stretched the principle of separation of church and state to an amazing degree to assist the Mormon reoccupation of the South Pass segment. In 2003, a clause quietly placed in an appropriations bill signed by President George W. Bush granted the LDS a twenty-five-year lease, automatically renewed, of federal land around the fabled pioneer encampment at Devil’s Gate. Since then, under Mormon control, any reference to Devil’s Gate—through which more than 600,000 Americans passed from fur-trapping days onward—has been obliterated from the maps and highway signage, and the national landmark has been retitled with the preferred Mormon place-name, Martin’s Cove. The LDS now operates Devil’s Gate as a religious site for Mormon youth, w
ho every summer travel to Wyoming from all over the world to spend a week or two, attired in “period dress” skirts and pioneer bonnets and hats, pushing wooden handcarts along the renamed Oregon Trail. It is as if the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania was renamed “Sisters of Charity” or “Mother Ann Seton Hospital” simply because a group of nuns from nearby Maryland traveled to Gettysburg in 1863 to help tend the sick and the wounded after the epic Civil War battle. The LDS estimates that between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand Mormon Youth—in LDS vernacular, they are called MYs—camp in tent cities along the Sweetwater every summer. Today, there are about five times as many Mormons reenacting the trail every year in Wyoming than there were actually traveling it for real in the 1850s.

  • • •

  After Casper, as we followed the trail markers along Poison Spider Creek and then slowly climbed the mules up to the summit of Emigrant Gap, I wasn’t worried about what we would face ahead in Mormon land. But from the high ridge of the gap we could see the epic stretch of desert that lay before us. An immensity of pink sand and dirty-white alkali flats, ringed by the parched Rattlesnake Hills, stretched through the mirages. The night before, I had calculated that the mules had been consuming about forty-five gallons of water a day, but they would probably require more like fifty gallons a day across the scorched expanse ahead. We were carrying 105 gallons and would need every drop of it before we reached the Sweetwater at Independence Rock, at least two days away.

  That would be our life now for 350 miles, almost a month’s travel, during which we would pass only two towns. To reach the Idaho line, we would make a series of river-to-river forced marches, and the earth’s most elemental resource—water—would become our ceaseless quest.

  21

  WE HAD NOW ENTERED WHAT I called the Acropolis stretch of the Oregon Trail. For the next two weeks we would travel over the original wagon ruts, through a series of dramatic sandstone and granite formations—Avenue of the Rocks, Independence Rock, Devil’s Gate, Split Rock—that marked our way toward the continental divide at South Pass. After Emigrant Gap, we met no one else along the dusty two-track, County Road 319, also called Oregon Trail Road. The land surrounding us was open and remote, preserving the scenery of the pioneers with a mesmerizing Grecian duality. The powdery sand and shelves of black rock beside the wagon wheels were tangible enough. But hazy mirages obscured the base of the Rockies as the desert receded toward the horizon. The Rattlesnakes and the Wind Rivers in the distance became blurry purple mounds floating in hard blue sky.

  The dreamy, vacant sensation induced by the landscape was enhanced by the dry desert heat and rising elevation. After Emigrant Gap we would climb from five thousand to 7,400 feet, and then remain at over seven thousand feet until we reached the Bear River valley in Idaho. The higher altitudes slowed us, calmed us, and winded us and the mules, and the secondary effect of high air is a mild euphoria that lasts all day. Now instead of just becoming sleepy from the monotony of wheel bumps and jingling harness, I was enveloped by the fog of desert hallucination.

  Hypoxia, or the oxygen deprivation experienced at high altitudes, causes weariness and sore joints, but the more important symptom is a kind of elevated optimism about life, an impaired judgment not aligned with the reality someone is facing. Short-term memory also begins to fade. We ran into the first instance of this dreamy forgetfulness about a mile after Avenue of the Rocks, when we crossed a long alkali flat that led to the first in a series of barbed-wire gates along the 75,000-acre Rattlesnake Grazing Association ranch. There, after jacking the gate and watering the mules, I jumped back onto the seat and told Nick to call the team, leaving behind one of our water buckets and the stepladder that we used to load and unload the wagon. I didn’t discover our loss until that night, when we reached Willow Springs, a small oasis in the desert shaded by ancient willows that was crowded with pioneer camps in the 1850s.

  Nick was surprised by my nonchalance when I told him that we had left the bucket and ladder behind us on the trail.

  “What the hell,” I said, as I began carrying water to the mules. “We don’t need three buckets anyway. And we can just buy another ladder somewhere.”

  “How far is it to the next hardware store?”

  “Four hundred miles,” I said.

  “Are you okay, Boss?” Nick said. “You are usually so anal about possessions.”

  “Who gives a shit? It’s a beautiful Wyoming night. All we have to do tomorrow is get past Horse Creek and then follow the trail to Independence Rock.”

  Nick was not as affected by the high altitude as I was. The forgetfulness and overconfidence caused by the lower oxygen levels would dog me for the rest of our journey through the Rockies. I should have seen the lost bucket and ladder as a warning sign, but I had already begun to experience the effects of the high elevations and didn’t realize that. Later, however, I would understand this as perhaps the most important lesson provided by retracing the trek of the pioneers. Hubris and feelings of invincibility would be required to conquer the many obstacles ahead.

  • • •

  Independence Rock slowly rose as a giant bump on the horizon as we cut across open country to avoid flooding near Pathfinder Reservoir, where the North Platte River is dammed and meets the Sweetwater. I took the lines from Nick and drove the team myself because I wanted to be calling the mules as we approached the famous waypoint, but I didn’t say anything to him at first. Nick contentedly daydreamed with Olive Oyl in his lap, staring off across the flats, and it took another mile or two for him to notice the tall, rounded eminence rising off the scrub plains.

  “Whoa, is that Individual Rock?” Nick finally said. “That is some big mother stone.”

  “Independence Rock, Trail Hand. Mile 815 on the trail.”

  Independence Rock, along the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, became a popular camping ground where thousands of pioneers scrambled up the granite sides to carve their initials and hometown.

  From several miles away, it was easy to see why the immense natural wonder ahead, bounded by the Sweetwater River on its southeast side, had sheltered one of the largest campgrounds along the trail. The huge mound of naturally polished granite rises almost 140 feet above the desert floor, covers twenty-eight acres, and is more than a mile in circumference. Pioneers from the East and the Midwest had never seen a freestanding rock of such huge proportions, and they knew that this gigantic signpost in the sky marked their transition from the muddy and diseased drainage of the Platte to the cleaner flow of the Sweetwater. The two-day run down from Fort Casper was desperately dry, and by early summer places like Avenue of the Rocks and Prospect Hill had become animal boneyards, with oxen and mule carcasses scattered across several acres. The morning and afternoon shade provided by the rock created a comfortable layover spot where the pioneers could trade with other wagon trains, refill their barrels, and bathe and wash their clothes in the river.

  We arrived at the Sweetwater with our two main barrels empty, and I used a tent pole as a dipstick to measure what was left in our small barrel mounted on the side of the wagon—it came to about three gallons. The area around Independence Rock is now maintained by the state of Wyoming as a rest stop and tourist site along the two-lane highway between Casper and Lander, Highway 220. A paved walk with interpretive signs winds east to the rock and the air-conditioned pavilion of the Division of State Parks and Historic Sites sits at the edge of the highway pull-off. As I refilled our barrels from the water spigot behind the pavilion I could see a dirt access road down the highway with a gate where we could take the wagon through to reach the old pioneer camp. I walked inside the pavilion to tell someone that we’d be camping at the rock tonight.

  The uniformed Division of Parks employee inside was sixtyish and bored, wearied by dealing with tourists all day. I cheerfully briefed him about our trip and explained that we’d be pulling the wagon around the back side of the rock for the night.

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “You have to ha
ve a permit from the park ranger.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where’s the park ranger?”

  “On vacation. He won’t be back until Monday.”

  The Parks man told me that tourists on foot were welcome to walk back to the rock through the narrow gate at the end of the pedestrian trail. But the larger gate down the highway was strictly for state trucks. No “civilian vehicles” were allowed beyond that point. Besides, he said, the mules might damage a historic site.

  Fuck this dullard, I thought. For almost a century, hundreds of thousands of fur trappers, cavalrymen, and pioneers had camped here, and their animals had pawed the ground and shit all over the place every night. What damage could we possibly cause?

  Still, I felt wonderfully passive about meeting this moron. My Wyoming desert high saved me here. There must be something about oxygen deprivation, not to mention eight hundred miles on the trail, that was turning me into a cupcake. The Oregon Trail was the best anger-management therapy I’d had in years.

  “All right, then,” I said to the bonehead behind the counter. “We’ll be moving on. Happy trails!”

  “Happy trails,” he said.

  Outside, I pulled the gate jack from the back of the wagon and then stopped at the front wheel, below Nick.

  “We’re good to go, Trail Hand. See that gate up there at the end of the access road? When I jack it, bring the team through.”

  “Yup, Team! Yup! Big Team! Big Team! Jake! Individual Rock, Jake. Individual Rock.”

  Nick clattered the rig through the gate and down to the Sweetwater, where, behind twenty-eight acres of Archean granite, we couldn’t be seen from the highway or the rest stop pavilion. No one cared, of course, and our camp at Independence Rock was one of the best of the trip. With towels and some rope, Nick rigged the gate jack as a shoulder yoke so that I could carry two buckets of water at once. I walked back and forth to a bend in the Sweetwater where the flow raced around a grassy bank, genuflecting into the shallow water at the edge to fill the pails. Then I carried them back to the wagon, where Nick was shampooing the team, and rinsed each mule with both buckets. It was cool in the shadow of the Granites beside the rushing river and the evening exercise was refreshing. After dinner, I grabbed one of the camp chairs and climbed up Independence Rock, meditating on the dreamy curves of the Sweetwater far below. I tried to imagine what the view must have looked like 160 years ago, when the smoke from dozens of campfires filled the valley with haze, cattle brayed all night, and the oil lamps hung from the hoops made a thousand canvas wagon tops glow like Japanese lanterns.