The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Have you figured everything out now?” the elder asked.

  “Elder, that’s God’s work,” Nick said. “Let Him figure it out. We’re just here on planet Earth to do the best we can.”

  “Very well said, son,” the elder said. “It’s important to be humble.”

  “Humble! Boy, Elder, have I worked on being humble for the last year.”

  I was afraid that I was losing Nick. I had to get us out of there.

  “Brother Nicholas,” I said. “That pot of gold for us at the end of the trail won’t wait forever. We best be getting on, God willing.”

  The Mormon elder stepped away from the wagon wheel and reached his hand out to shake mine.

  “Be careful out there on the trail, son,” he said.

  “Oh, I will, Elder. Thank you. And God bless.”

  I took the lines and ran the mules down past the parking lots and the pastures full of handcarts. When we were out of Mormon earshot, Nick spoke up.

  “Hey, Rink, don’t you think you were shovelin the shit a little heavy back there? What is this ‘God bless you’ crap?”

  “Oh, and Nick, Jesus kicked your ass off that roof for a reason?”

  “Rink, you’re the one who told me to do Mormon.”

  Beyond the last Mormon RV park, we turned west through a cattle guard gate to stay with the Sweetwater through the Sun Ranch. Nearby, three teenage Mormon sisters in bonnets and long skirts, exhausted by a long handcart trek, were sitting together against the ersatz log-cabin wall of a Port-o-Pottie, resting. Olive Oyl ran over and jumped into their laps. Behind us, out over the Granites, low cumulus clouds shaded the peaks. With the groups of handcart reenactors pushing up toward Martin’s Cove, and the gray and green hues on the misty mountains, the scene reminded me of Thomas Cole’s Travelers in the Swiss Alps.

  22

  THE HILLY BUT FEATURELESS SCRUBLANDS of the Sun Ranch presented our biggest challenge yet. For the next thirty-five miles we would disappear into a dry abyss below the Granites with nothing to support us until we reached the next ranch. At Willow Springs and then while we camped at Independence Rock, local cowboys who dropped by the wagon to visit had told us that the raging Sweetwater had washed out the trail ahead, and we probably wouldn’t be able to follow the river. Escaping south to the paved highway at Muddy Gap Junction wasn’t a good option either, because we would expend all of our water getting there. But my high-altitude euphoria prevented me from registering bad news and, carefree, we pushed on for the foothills bordering the river.

  I knew from the pioneer journals that we had to spend most of the day following a consistent bearing slightly north of west, about three hundred degrees on my compass. Within a few miles a large and unmistakable waypoint that the pioneers had relied on, a cleft peak in the Granites called Split Rock, would appear on the opposite side of the Sweetwater, almost due west of our position. “Yesterday from the time we started we steered to this cliff with a steadiness that was astonishing,” wrote Kentucky 49er Dr. Joseph Middleton, “never deviating from it more than the needle does from the north pole.” Split Rock. We would track this “gun sight” peak for the next twenty-four hours and then when it was abeam proceed due west to the ghost town of Jeffrey City.

  For most of the day we bumped west along the range of the Sun Ranch, sometimes on a wagon track, sometimes not, and we saw only one trail marker. By mid-afternoon I began to see the large V-shaped formation at the highest point in the Granites, bearing north-northwest, right where it should be.

  “Split Rock,” I said to Nick. “All we have to do is keep that rock right there until dark. Then we can camp anywhere and find our way out in the morning.”

  We steered for the “gun sight” break in the Granite Range, Split Rock, for nearly a day, but even a waypoint as clear as this did not prevent us from getting lost.

  But the big split mountain ahead of us was illusory, and I wouldn’t realize until the end of the day that I had become a literalist, a strict constructionist of trail literature. Following a giant landmark fifteen miles away was too vague, a century after the main ruts had fissured into a maze of cattle tracks, pickup roads, and breaks in the scrub pines constantly inviting us in every direction over rough, unmarked terrain. Content that I could see Split Rock to our right, I picked a meandering route that climbed the foothills here, and dipped into washes of purple thistles and yellow coneflowers there. At the Sun Ranch watering holes, where there were large, mean-looking herds of longhorn cattle, Beck started dancing in her harness and shying, frothing at the mouth and threatening to run away. We threw Olive Oyl off to chase the cattle away, but Beck was still acting crazy.

  In the vast West, the sensation of being lost usually arrives long after you are lost, and the limited turning radius of a covered wagon provides almost no opportunity to turn around. You can drive in circles for hours because the moonscape of sand and creek washes always looks the same. By late afternoon we arrived at a very definable fork in the cattle tracks where a right turn would take us almost due north toward the Sweetwater, and a left turn would take us due west into the high country. I hiked both forks for almost a mile but couldn’t find any trail markers or much of a route, and when I returned to the wagon I told Nick to proceed on the west fork, because it seemed to follow my compass bearing northwest. Split Rock quickly slipped behind the foothills crowding around us and we wouldn’t see it again for hours.

  I was supremely oblivious at first to the navigation riddle we faced, the modern danger of riding a covered wagon through the Rockies. There were no clouds of dust from the covered wagons ahead, and no fresh wagon ruts, to follow. My confidence that the trail was well marked was also misplaced. The government surveyors and OCTA volunteers who mark the trail, occasionally, are riding in pickups or on four-wheelers, and turning around and having to retrace their tire tracks back to the last fork is a small inconvenience. The importance of marking forks in the trail has been completely lost. For no other reason except that this is the way it is done, intersections along the Oregon Trail are almost never marked today. When you arrive at a fork, the next trail marker, maybe, is a mile or two away—too far to be of any use to a mule skinner.

  Finally, when we emerged on a high, cleared plateau, Split Rock was right off our beam again, so large that I felt I might bump into it with my nose.

  “There we go, Nick,” I said. “We’re right on the trail.”

  “Like hell we are. That’s a sheer drop-off ahead of us.”

  I was irritated that Nick thought he could read terrain better than I could, and that he was now assuming responsibility for navigation, but I stepped off the wagon and crossed west across the plateau. At the edge, I was staring straight down a cliff, which curved north around the plateau into steep canyons. It looked as though we were trapped.

  “You’re right, Nick,” I said, back at the wagon. “Fuck. We are now officially lost.”

  “I could have told you that three hours ago.”

  Lifting Olive Oyl off the wagon so she could run rattlesnake patrols in front of me, I poked through the low ground off to the right. I found a route through the gullies and boulder fields down there, and then walked back to the plateau, signaling to Nick to carefully follow me through the low area by observing my hand signals. It was grueling work, inching the mules over rocks and sage growth that towered over the wagon top, but when we had climbed back to the high ground I picked up an indistinct cattle track.

  Traveling by foot, and being able to see the ground more closely, gave me a distinct advantage. I began picking up more cattle tracks—the bigger hoofprints of the mother cows, and the smaller, deer-size prints of the calves—and followed them north. By walking thirty or forty yards out to the sides of the track, I was able to pick up the prints of shod horses. Okay, good, I thought, somebody was moving cattle through here, fairly recently. In Wyoming, late June and early July are often the roundup and calf-branding season, when mothers and their calves are taken off their winter range and
pushed up into the higher green pastures in the mountains. Following the roundup tracks would take me somewhere, probably to some high corrals, but I didn’t know whether or not we could get the wagon out of there.

  After a mile or two of following a narrow rim where canyons fell steeply off on either side, the track ahead opened up into a well-traveled cattle road, and I could make out what looked like barbed-wire corrals ahead. I waited for the wagon and climbed back up.

  “Nick, I’m pretty sure we’re off the Sun Ranch now,” I said. “I think those fences ahead are the spring corrals of the Split Rock Ranch. Sorry about this. I’m supposed to know where we are, but I don’t, really.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Nick said. “I love driving team through country like this.”

  At the corrals, the landscape below us opened to a vast, end-of-the-hills vista where the flats on the Sweetwater ran for miles over to the Granites, and the ground just ahead gradually sloped down toward the river. I still didn’t know exactly where we were, but the Sweetwater was right below us, where it was supposed to be.

  “It’s all trail, Nick,” I said. “We’re moving west, on the river.”

  “Rinker, half the time you don’t know what the fuck you are doing, but at least you act like you do. We’re fine.”

  There were a couple of other setbacks that night. As we unharnessed, I noticed that we were missing one of our lead chains, and we were now down to two, for three mules. The lost chain was probably another casualty of high-altitude forgetfulness, back at Independence Rock. And the plug on our rear water barrel had popped out, probably when we crossed the boulder fields in the canyons below, and a lot of the water had spilled. The thirty gallons we had left would be just enough to water the mules tonight and in the morning, but then we would be out. After that, I had no idea how far we would have to push the mules without water.

  After dinner I called for Olive Oyl to run ahead of me on snake patrol and I followed the cattle path running downhill from the corrals. Years before, on a long cattle drive in the Red Desert country to the south, a legendary western sheriff and range detective, Ed Cantrell, had taught me to read cattle and horse prints, and I was able to pick up most of the telltale marks of a classic spring cattle drive. Most of the cattle had followed a steady southerly course on the higher, smooth range. In the steep draws below, I knelt on one knee in the sand and saw the prints of cow dogs and well-shod horses where the cowboys had galloped down to round up stray steers. There were two distinct tracks from pickup tires pulling trailers—probably a chuck wagon rig and a stock van for the horses. There was a burn mark at the corrals where a branding iron had been used. After calf-branding up at the corrals, the herd must have been driven below for a reason, and I could see from my maps that somewhere down there the highway curved up again for Jeffrey City. I concluded that the herd I was following had been trucked to their summer pastures, and for that there would have to be loading ramps and big gates below, which would only be located on the highway.

  As I climbed back to camp, I decided that in the morning we would turn due south instead of northwest along the Sweetwater, following the safety of the herd tracks back to a known road.

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. My trail navigation had been off all day, and we were down to the bottom of our water barrels. I had performed poorly, just a third of the way across the Acropolis stretch of ruts, and this made me doubt my ability to negotiate what I knew would be even more challenging trail ahead.

  I woke up at three in the morning, couldn’t get back to sleep, and sat brooding with my legs hanging over the end boards of the wagon, smoking my pipe. I could see the outline of the Granites and stars flickered beside Split Rock. The desert to the west was vast and black, with just a few far-off lights shining weakly from the ranches. My dread hour lasted until dawn and my flagellant impulses carried me in every direction—Nick was losing confidence in me, Beck would run off, we would deplete our water tomorrow before we reached a ranch or creek.

  Maybe the Oregon Trail was beyond me. I shouldn’t have come west. There wasn’t a clear path of ruts ahead of us, just indecipherable space that you got lost in, leading toward more indecipherable space.

  • • •

  We harnessed early the next morning and followed the herd prints down through the draws and, sure enough, there were cattle chutes, an earthen truck ramp, and a big gate opening to the highway. But the elation of having tracked our way out of the maze of Sweetwater canyons soon gave way to anxiety. After several hours of plodding along the lonely highway, there were deep cavities on the haunches of the mules, a sign of dehydration, and our water barrels were empty. We had to get the team to water.

  Finally, from a mile off, I saw the large welded-steel letters of a ranch sign, suspended from tall posts of lodgepole pine.

  SPLIT ROCK RANCH

  As we turned the mules in at the ranch driveway, they broke into a trot and then tried to gallop—they knew that we were making a stop and that they would soon get water. I was intrigued by what we’d find ahead because Split Rock Ranch is one of those Oregon Trail stops that demonstrate how frontier settlement led to boisterous economic development in two directions, east and west, after the initial emigration period ended with the Civil War. From the long gravel entrance, we approached a distant cluster of whitewashed log cabins, barns, and corrals, shaded by cottonwoods and nestled into a break in the folds of the Granites. The 200,000-acre spread typified the immense dimensions of western ranches that we would be crossing now. The ranch’s rolling expanse of plains and high country includes twelve miles of riverfront along the Sweetwater, six hundred acres of irrigated alfalfa fields, shaded creek draws, and elk and mountain lion habitat in the mountain forests. The private land and adjoining grazing acreage leased from the government sprawls over the entire valley between two mountain ranges, the Granites and the Greens, and a drive through the ranch, north to south, is thirty-six miles.

  Until the 1890s, there were still wagon companies riding through the trail country of central Wyoming, and the homesteaders headed west were joined by military freight convoys, the stage and mail lines, and the long pack-mule caravans of miners. (Gold was discovered in the South Pass hills in 1866.) Cattle herds of 2,500 head or more were driven east against this traffic to railheads in eastern Wyoming and slaughter yards in Nebraska, and were often stopped for two or three days to graze along the Sweetwater. U.S. Army cavalry units, dispatched to maintain order and to provide protection from Indian raids, camped there all summer. The corrals and log cabins at Split Rock became a Pony Express and stagecoach stop, a telegraph station, and a post office, and there were large watering troughs and livery stables for horses. The summer population of one of these busy outposts could number more than a hundred, and there were many settlements like Split Rock—Devil’s Gate and Fetterman City behind us, the Ellis Ranch and Burnt Ranch ahead.

  After World War I, the mechanization of farming and the transfer of traffic to distant rail lines and highways emptied most of these western ranch towns, turning them into lonely agrarian outposts with just one or two families spread out over several miles of range. It was hard to imagine that the lonely plain we were now crossing once bustled with so much life and commerce. As we approached the ranch, I realized something important about our trip that I had never considered before. For all of my planning and my existing knowledge of the West, I had been stunningly naive about navigating these vast spaces. In the nineteenth century, the Oregon Trail had been marked with fresh wagon tracks, and there were ranches the size of small towns every fifteen or twenty miles. But the congestion and settlement that had once supported wagon travel had disappeared. Steeping myself in the pioneer journals and history books—literature dating to a time when these plains teemed with human activity—had lured me into thinking that I could easily find my way. But without that naïveté, and without the willingness to tolerate uncertainty, I would never have begun this trip.

  Rolling into Split
Rock Ranch was also interesting because it was the locale for one of the great fabrications of American life. In the early 1860s a young man with a hardscrabble past, William Frederick Cody, burst out of the Kansas Territory and began to work along the Oregon Trail as a bullwhacker for the freight lines, a U.S. Army scout, and an avid buffalo slaughterer. “Buffalo Bill,” as he began to call himself, was a great storyteller, and he went on to become one of the world’s greatest showmen, touring America and Europe with his flamboyant circus about western life, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” which made him a fortune and established him as an international celebrity. But very few of Buffalo Bill’s stories about himself check out today, and even in his own lifetime he was celebrated more for his flamboyant mendacity than for any actual daring deeds in the West.

  While he was still a teenager, it is possible, but far from certain, that Cody worked for the Pony Express, probably building corrals and working as a stable boy. But a true Wild West figure like Cody would not sit at a bar telling everyone that he had mucked out the stalls at the Red Buttes Station. In his various autobiographies Cody alleged that “one day” (he never provided the date) in 1860 or 1861 he raced off on his horse from Red Buttes and galloped across the Sweetwater stretch of the Pony Express route that followed the Oregon Trail. At Split Rock, as the story continued, Cody learned that the rider scheduled to take over at the next station had been killed. So he continued on as a replacement rider and rode all the way out to Rocky Ridge near South Pass and then back to Red Buttes. Cody claimed that he had completed the ride, “accomplishing on the round-trip a distance of 322 miles,” which was a convenient four miles longer than the real record holder’s distance.