The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  I would have heard, too, the echoes of hammers against chisels, even past sunset.

  During the trail years, reaching Independence Rock aroused a kind of collective, Paleolithic carving gene, a powerful urge among the pioneers to leave behind some evidence of their arrival. While the wagon trains rested for a day or two at the rock, the pioneers found it irresistible to scramble up the curved walls and chisel in the hard granite their names or initials, the year, and their hometowns. There is no way of knowing exactly how many pioneers left their initials or names behind on Independence Rock because erosion by wind and water over the past century has removed thousands of these inscriptions. But perhaps as many as twenty thousand overland emigrants hammered their names or initials onto the rock, turning it into a crowded maze of graffiti. “[The rock] being painted and marked every way, all over, with names, dates, initials, &c,” wrote 49er J. Goldsborough Bruff, “it was with difficulty I could find a place to inscribe it.”

  The signatures left behind on the granite visitors’ book at Independence Rock are a vital historical record, and once again the heroic fieldwork of Randy Brown provides the background. His encyclopedic Historic Inscriptions on Western Emigrant Trails is one of the most fascinating volumes on the Oregon Trail. For over 450 pages of his illustrated, folio-size book, Brown meticulously records every known inscription on the western trails from Kansas to Arizona. He provides long introductory sections on such celebrated carving sites as Signature Rock and Name Rock in Wyoming, and biographical digests of each pioneer carver who can be established today. Brown’s inventory of the inscriptions on Independence Rock alone runs for eighty-two pages.

  From Brown we learn many compelling details about the inscriptions. The dated carvings on Independence Rock have allowed historians to confirm when military units and exploration parties reached the Sweetwater, and when the doomed Donner Party of 1846 got there. The stagecoach era that followed the initial pioneer years can also be documented by many signatures. Instead of carving their names into the granite, many pioneers took a shortcut, daubing their inscriptions with a mixture of tar, black paint, and wheel or bacon grease, probably as a message to friends and family in wagon parties behind them that they had safely arrived at Independence Rock. But these seemingly temporary marks actually became permanent, a product of the natural desert chemistry. Over time, the tar mixture was degraded by the desert heat. But enough residual material remained to prevent the growth of desert lichens on the letters, leaving behind a kind of primitive mezzotint image that Brown calls a “shadow inscription.” Many of these shadow inscriptions are still legible today and allow chroniclers like Brown to trace the arrival of specific individuals or wagon trains, providing critical cross-checking references against sometimes unreliable pioneer accounts.

  Rip-off artists thrived at Independence Rock. The pioneers were entranced by the opportunity to leave a permanent record on the rock, but many of them didn’t have the time or the patience to carve their own initials. Stone carvers often camped at Independence Rock for several weeks to help pay the costs of their trip to the California gold fields, and they were notorious for overcharging to inscribe a family’s surname up on the rock. The commercially minded Mormons were perhaps the most ambitious. In 1852, Michigan emigrant Thomas Potter found a group of Saints established for business at the large pioneer city around Independence Rock.

  A party of Mormons with stone-cutting tools were located on the spot and did a considerable business in cutting names in the rock at a charge from one to five dollars, according to the location. . . . Men who passed there a year later said that all the names previously cut in the rock had nearly all been erased and new ones put in their places. So transient is our fame! The scheming Mormons made a nice fortune from the emigrants in a few years by cutting their names in the rock for a fancy price and when they had passed on erasing these names and cutting others in their places.

  The accumulated frustrations of the trail after eight hundred miles, and the crowded, competitive conditions in the camps, unleashed another classic American response to stress—murder. In the pioneer journals, homicides suddenly spiked toward crime-wave frequency as the continental divide drew near, almost as if the pioneers were determined to establish a violent legacy for the West and inaugurate clear precedents for frontier justice. At the Mormon ferry crossing at Casper, the traffic backups often stretched east for miles, and armed road rage incidents often led to fatalities. At the confusing Sweetwater fords, it was often difficult to sort out the ownership of cows and calves after several herds commingled while being run across the river at once. Men dueled with rifles and pistols over that. At busy pioneer stops like Devil’s Gate, and in the old Green River Rendezvous country ahead, semiretired fur trappers ran frontier saloons inside slapdash log cabins. The alcoholic foreplay produced the usual results. There were gunfights over women, over horses, and competing claims about shot game. In 1852 Virginia pioneer John Clark reported that, at Devil’s Gate, a pioneer got into a fight with his wagon driver, shot and killed him, and was “tried and hung on our old waggon at sundown.”

  The practices at the hastily convened murder trials were fairly consistent, and the pioneers usually tried to imitate the legal venues they remembered from back home. After a murderer was disarmed, either the wagon master, a lawyer, or a minister traveling with the train was appointed judge. The jurors were selected from the men of the company and stood in a semicircle around the accused. A larger crowd formed a human amphitheater behind them. A defendant’s chances of acquittal appears to have been about as good as those of accused criminals in czarist Russia. After being found guilty, the murderer was strung up from the nearest tree, but because there often weren’t any trees for miles around, a crude gallows was constructed from wagon poles. (The prisoner usually got to watch the construction of the scaffold before the “trial” even began.) There wasn’t a lot of time before the wagons had to move on, and digging in the hardtack desert soil was difficult. Account after account describes how the murderer was buried in a shallow grave, shoulder to shoulder with his victim.

  Along the ruts between the North Platte and the Sweetwater, accidental death and murder seemed to lurk almost everywhere. In late June 1852, Wisconsin pioneer Polly Coon passed a lone tree along the Sweetwater with an inscription carved on the trunk indicating the graves of a “Man Woman & boy” who were found with their throats cut, the murderer or murderers unknown. The next day her train passed another wagon company mourning the death of two men who had drowned while driving cattle across the river, and then hours later the train arrived at a grove of trees where a man had just been hanged for shooting his brother-in-law.

  “It seems that there are some demon spirits near us & the reflection is not very pleasing,” Coon wrote. But everything else was fine, for the most part. “Our Co are all well except Ma who is rather unwell.”

  • • •

  We entered Mormon country the morning after our camp at Independence Rock, turning west up into the Granites through Rattlesnake Pass. For almost two centuries this scenic area, where the Sweetwater races through a dramatic gorge with vertical walls rising three hundred feet above the water, was called Devil’s Gate. From the fur-trapping era in the 1820s to the end of the stagecoach era in the 1890s, as many as 700,000 travelers passed by or camped overnight at these granite portals. On the Sweetwater plain nearby there were log-cabin taverns, mail drops, replacement horse corrals, and encampments of “summer smithies” who operated wagon repair shops. In the 1870s, under the leadership of a canny French-Canadian frontiersman turned cattle baron, Tom Sun, Devil’s Gate became the locus of a famous ranch that was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

  But that is so yesterday now, so gentile. Since 1997, when the LDS Church took advantage of a disagreement between the Sun Ranch heirs and bought the eastern portion of the ranch around Devil’s Gate, the national identity of the Oregon Trail in central Wyoming has disappeared. Martin’s Cove, as Devil’s
Gate is now known, is the first in a string of Mormon sites over the next hundred miles that have transformed the Oregon Trail into a showcase pilgrimage site, a Golgotha for the Mormons.

  As we neared the top of the pass, I wasn’t sure what we’d see on the other side, but I was determined to reform Nick before we met the Mormons. A lifetime of reporting in the West had familiarized me with the Saints, and I had always enjoyed putting on my Mormon, like an actor going into character for a film shoot. Mormons like a lot of insignia and uniform-type clothing, name badges, just the right black backpacks and shoes, and exacting period dress when reenacting. They are neatness geeks, and I had made sure that both Nick and I shaved that morning before we left Independence Rock. With Mormons, a fondness for corny country and western music, bubblegum pop, and sincerity laid on as thick as meringue also helps a great deal. Family is everything, and the bigger the better. Within ten minutes of meeting a new Mormon I usually try to slip in that I am the fourth of eleven children, information which helps obscure that I am a born drinker, smoker, and curser. I was pretty sure that the American flag fluttering on our wagon and the SEE AMERICA SLOWLY sign would also be real assets for us at Martin’s Cove.

  As we crested the ridge, I shifted my shoulders, wiggled my ass on the wagon seat, and adjusted my cowboy hat. It was time to go Mormon.

  “Okay now, Nick,” I said, “you’ve got to put your Mormon on here, understand?”

  “Oh! I can fuckin do Mormon.”

  “Let’s start by eliminating the F-bomb.”

  “What do I say instead?”

  “Fudge is fine, fiddlesticks is also good.”

  “What about ‘shit’ and ‘goddamnit’?”

  “Shit is shucks or shoot, and goddamnit is goshdarnit. Don’t forget please and thank you and yes, ma’am, or no, sir. Oh, and, Nick?”

  “What?”

  “For the rest of this morning, I am ‘Brother Rinker’ and you are ‘Brother Nicholas.’ Older men are usually called ‘Elder,’ okay? It’s great. You don’t even have to remember the fucking guy’s name. Just call him ‘Elder.’ ”

  “What about the women?”

  “Sister,” I said.

  “Got it,” Nick said. “Just watch. I am goin to be the best fuckin Mormon you ever saw.”

  We called the mules to the top of the pass and then, cresting, gazed down on a glorious Potemkin village along the Sweetwater plain. For the past fifty miles we had not seen any trace of humanity or habitation—not a single house, a driveway, or even a mailbox. The only cars or trucks we saw were along the brief stretches of highway we had taken where the original trail was flooded. But now, spread out along the oxbows of the Sweetwater, we could see an immense, retro-nineteenth-century jamboree, the extraordinary hustle of Mormon metabolism everywhere.

  Down below, at large, graveled parking lots excavated out of the plains in front of the old Sun Ranch cabins, there were Mormon elders greeting tourists stepping out of their RVs. There were acres of yellow school buses from Utah. Satellite pods of Port-o-Potties, disguised by the Mormons as log-cabin structures, but betrayed by PVC vent pipes that stuck out of their roofs, were staged at three-hundred-yard intervals. Brightly colored tent cities swarmed along the bends of the Sweetwater. Large, prominent signs every few yards—NO SMOKING ON ENTIRE SITE, BUSES UNLOAD HERE, MALE URINAL, SISTERS REST ROOM—testified to the Mormon fetish for order. The quaint overtones of nineteenth-century wagon life were reinforced by the presence of replica hand pumps, replica hitching posts, replica log cabins. And, everywhere, parked in neat rows, there were hundreds of replica Mormon handcarts. My first thought as we came over the pass was that the parking lots of replica handcarts in the middle of the Wyoming desert must be visible to the astronauts orbiting in the International Space Station.

  Hundreds of Mormon Youth raced around the plain in period dress. They were darting along asphalt and dirt paths pushing Amish-made wooden handcarts freighted down with backpacks, Rubbermaid thermos water jugs, plastic chairs, grocery bags, campfire equipment, and the audio gear for hymn-singing at night. The heartier Mormon boys were pushing teenage Mormon sisters around in their carts, sometimes two or three at once.

  At the bottom of Rattlesnake Pass, we rolled the wagon in between the Welcome Area and the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center, where a gentlemanly elder with a fringe of white hair beneath his cowboy hat greeted us. He was dressed in the practical uniform that the mostly retired “missionaries” from Utah wear while spending six months volunteering at the Mormon shrines—a brown Wyoming Trader canvas vest, nondescript khakis, a plain white shirt, and a large brown plastic nameplate with white type. The elder greeter was hospitable but surprised to see us.

  “How come you didn’t call?” he said. “We like to know in advance when something special like this is going to happen.”

  I explained that we were riding the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon and normally didn’t call ahead in advance. Besides, we had not had cell phone reception for days.

  “Got a point, there,” the elder said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. All of God’s people are welcome here.”

  The elder could see that I was curious about Martin’s Cove and didn’t want me to begin my visit with the wrong impression.

  “We operate this as a national historic site,” he said. “There are thousands of tourists that come through, a hundred thousand a summer. Members of all faiths. We get the Jewish people, Catholics, even followers of the Muslim beliefs. We treat them all the same.”

  “No evangelization?” I said.

  “No evangelization,” he said. “Of course, if a visitor asks a question about religion, that’s different. We’re glad to provide information about the Church of Latter-day Saints. You’d be surprised how many people are driving around on the highways looking for answers.”

  “Oh, I bet, sir.”

  While Nick held the mules, I strolled through the log-cabin compound of the old Sun Ranch, which the Mormons have restored to showcase condition. The log sides are aged to perfection and the mortar chinking is freshly whitewashed. Every walkway and patch of grass between the shade trees was immaculately kept.

  The Mormons now run a handcart museum in the rambling wings of the Sun Ranch house that, like everything LDS, is exquisitely well designed and tasteful. The typeface on the wall exhibits (“Prelude to Disaster: Mounting Delays & Twists of Fate”), the artwork, maps, and four-color illustrations are of Smithsonian quality. The overall decor of soft, cream white walls and beige trim is so soothing that visitors willingly digest the rewriting of history on the displays.

  I fall in love with the Mormons every time. They are divine exhibitors. The antique portable wagon organ for conducting musical services along the trail, the charming old poplar handcart decked out with plates, embroidered cloth napkins, quilts, and gingham bags of flour, the replica odometer, the maple rolling pins and butter churns, the lovely bonnets—oh, just everything Mormon, everything—would make Martha Stewart smile in her sleep. In the museum, the escape to a sanitized world of nineteenth-century covered-wagon travel is enhanced by inspirational music quietly piped in through ceiling speakers—it’s a combination of Enya, John Tesh, and Kenny G. The Mormons say that they do not evangelize at this national historic site, but in the handcart museum a whole wing is devoted to “The Gospel of Jesus Christ Restored.” It contains hagiographic accounts and portraits of Brigham Young, mural odes to Mormonism, and large displays presenting the handcart disaster of 1856 as a kind of nineteenth-century social welfare state: “HANDCART PLAN: The Poor Welcome Less Expensive Travel.”

  All of this is presented inoffensively, not urgently. The theme-park feeling inside the handcart museum was quaint, watercolored, and genteel, as if a sedated Walt Disney, after a proper, posthumous baptism, had been rescued from postexistence and brought back to design the space.

  The Mormons are effective because they exploit something so basic in the national psyche that most of us have lost the ability to see it. Ame
ricans on summer vacation, especially the RVers, are idiots, and haven’t read anything in years. Their every cranial neuron has been erased by watching Fox News. The brains of American tourists will accept practically anything as truth because there is nothing else up there to compete with new information. Just say something, anything, preferably in bland, thirty-six-point type, and it will stick. And so, “Brigham Young: The American Moses” doesn’t have to convert anyone. The Mormons are converting so many people these days in Cambodia and Swaziland they don’t even need Americans anymore. They just want to make Mormonism nonthreatening and palatable, chicken soup for the soul.

  As I walked up the swept path back toward the wagon, thinking about Mormonism’s brilliant fusion with Disneyism, my ears could not believe the words that they were hearing.

  At the wagon, Nick was engaged in deep, contemplative conversation with the Mormon elder greeter. Nick was sitting on the wagon seat holding the lines, with Olive Oyl in his lap and his hat pushed up at a jaunty angle. I had never seen Nick quite this earnest, and the Mormon greeter was obviously impressed. He stood with his foot resting on the wheel hub and propping his chin up with his hand.

  “Well, you know, Elder,” Nick said, “I actually believe that Jesus had me fall off that roof for a reason. I needed to spend eight months on the couch thinkin about my life, takin stock of my values. Then Brother Rinker came along with this mission across the West. It was a callin and I had to respect it.”