The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Scholars have now concluded that Buffalo Bill’s famous ride never happened, and in fact he was not a Pony Express rider at all. (“There seems no point in resisting the inevitable; Bill’s pony riding represents another spate of fiction,” wrote historian John S. Gray in an influential article in the Kansas Historical Quarterly in 1985.) The best that anyone can figure out today is that Buffalo Bill’s fabled ride was a “composite” fabricated out of the experiences of several other riders.

  But I loved this tale of the frontier and what it meant. The story of Cody’s “longest ride in the West,” endlessly repeated in puff pieces about him in eastern newspapers, helped build his reputation, and he went on to show how fortunes could be made capitalizing on tall tales of the American West, becoming the spiritual godfather of the Hollywood western. Cody was a classic résumé-bloater, a braggart impresario who prospered by exploiting the gullibility of the American people, most of whom are so poorly read, so bamboozled by religion and the sensationalist, mogul-worshipping press, and so desperate for heroes, that they’ll believe almost anything that a grand bullshitter like Cody shovels out. Cody’s style of self-promotion is still very much a part of American life today.

  When we drove in with the Schuttler, Cooper and Mattie Stevenson, the children of the ranch managers, were dozing on a bench out by the hitching posts. They were kids on summer vacation at a far-off ranch, looking quite bored. Cooper was eleven and his sister Mattie was nine, and they were both tall for their age, with handsome, attractive faces. They were stylishly but practically dressed in jeans with rodeo buckles, plaid western-cut shirts, and pointy stirrup boots. Cooper was snoozing beneath a big buckaroo-style cowboy hat. When we pulled the mules to a stop near the hitching post, the children woke up and looked over at us, cautious but curious.

  “Say,” I said, “we’ve been running these mules from St. Joe. Do you think we could fill our barrels and water the team?”

  Mattie jumped up from the bench and ran toward the ranch house.

  “Mom! Mee-uuuuules, Mom! Mules and a covered wagon!”

  “We can water your mules,” Cooper said. “But let me just see what my Mom says.”

  Their mother, Jennifer Stevenson, came out a few minutes later, and she was a take-charge cowgirl with runway model good looks and long blond hair. She was dressed in jeans with a big rodeo belt buckle, a western-cut shirt, and roping boots. Jennifer was glad to see us, but also edgy and tough, and very knowledgeable about western ranching.

  Jennifer had grown up on a farm in Wheatland, Wyoming, dreamed of ranching all the way through the University of Wyoming, met her husband, Travis, and together they eventually landed at Split Rock, one of the jewels of the West, where they have built up the herd and improved profitability. Cooper and Mattie began to ride early, and their parents have taught them to rope and cut steers—Cooper is already winning at rodeos and saving money for college. In some ways it’s a lonely life. At the Jeffrey City school, there were four students, including Cooper and Mattie, and it’s a one-day round-trip to Lander or Rawlins to shop for groceries. But running a spread like Split Rock also provides a lot of romance and variety. In her pickup, Jennifer carries a rifle with a large, long-range scope beside her against the door, for plugging coyotes, which she can hit from several hundred yards away. In the winter, when the Split Rock Ranch makes extra money hosting big-game hunters, Jennifer guides the visitors up into the Granites to shoot mountain lion and elk.

  Jennifer was surprised that we had found our way to the ranch through the maze of canyons on the Sweetwater, but was expecting a catch.

  “Where’s your support vehicles?” she said.

  “We don’t have any,” I said.

  “All the way from St. Joe without support trucks? Oh, okay. We haven’t seen that before.”

  It was a sore point with Stevenson, and many other ranchers we met along the South Pass segment. Every summer, when the Pony Express reenactors ride the trail, they roll into the local ranches with as many as forty-five support vehicles—horse vans, RVs, catering trucks—blocking the roads for miles. The Mormon handcarters—several groups of 150 or more can hit the same stretch of trail at once—block the local roads and disrupt cattle drives. It was hard for most ranchers at first to distinguish us from these reenactors. Most of them thought that our trail of support vehicles must be just over the hill.

  While Cooper and Mattie helped us water the team, I described to Jennifer our tangled route through the canyons above the ranch.

  “How did you know to divert away from the river?” she asked me. “I think the Sweetwater is still flooded up there.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “We got lost up there.”

  “No you didn’t. You got from the Sun Ranch to here, right? It’s all trail.”

  Jennifer explained that cattle grazing in the Sweetwater hills had pretty much eliminated evidence of the Oregon Trail ruts, and that when we had pushed due west instead of north for the river we were actually on a stretch of the associated terrain now attributed to the California Trail. No one can say for sure today why one stretch was called the California Trail and the other the Oregon Trail because wagons destined for both places used either route. The California ruts had lost their definition years ago and had become an endless series of dead ends in the canyons, and the high water along the Sweetwater this year had washed out the northern path along the river. This happens every ten years or so, when the river extensively rechannels itself, forming new oxbows every half mile, and the trail along its banks has continually changed.

  “There isn’t any consistent trail through there,” Jennifer said. “There probably never was. You’re probably going to have the same problems getting around Rocky Ridge and finding South Pass.”

  Jennifer’s husband was off cutting alfalfa that day, and he had forgotten to leave a wrangling horse behind in the barn. She and the children were dawdling on a hot day, putting off going into the corrals and wrangling on foot. From Kansas onward, at the ranches and at road intersections where families had stopped to watch us go by with the mules, we had enjoyed giving children and grandchildren wagon rides, and I suggested to Jennifer that Nick take Mattie and Cooper in the wagon into Jeffrey City. Jennifer and I could follow later in her pickup.

  “Mom! Don’t even think about saying no,” Mattie called out. “Sir, just hold on there a minute, okay? I need to get my hat.”

  When Mattie came out of the ranch house with her big straw hat on, I stood beside the wheel to help her up to the wagon seat, but she raised her hand.

  “You think I can’t climb into a wagon?”

  Mattie nimbly monkeyed up the wheel and sat on the wagon seat next to Nick. Olive Oyl poked her head out from beneath the seat, between Mattie’s legs. Cooper climbed up the wheel and sat on the outside of the seat.

  “Okay, honey,” Nick said to Mattie. “We’re just goin to handle this like a real slow mule-drivin lesson. Okay? I’ll show you first.”

  “I don’t need showing,” Mattie said. “Hand me them lines.”

  Mattie gathered the lines firmly in her lap and slowly pulled them to her waist, so the team could feel on their bits that she was there, and spoke softly to them at first, just as it should be done. She had already learned their names.

  “Bute, Jake, Beck,” she said, “we’re headed for Jeffrey City.”

  Then she slapped the lines on their rumps and brightly called the mules.

  “Team! Get on there, you lazy critters! Get up there Jake! Buuute! Get up there, you old mules! Git movin!”

  The mules pranced with their front hooves and leaped forward into their harness. While the wagon bumped away Nick held his arms high above his head to show that he wasn’t handling the mules at all. Mattie was doing all of the driving, and he was just a passenger on the wagon now.

  I looked over to Jennifer.

  “Has she driven team before?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jennifer said. “Oh, maybe, I don’t remember. We have f
riends with teams. But it doesn’t matter. That’s Mattie. She usually knows.”

  I stood there with Jennifer watching the wagon turn west as the noontime low cumulus rolled in. The sun caught the Schuttler’s white-top and green sides, making them shine brightly. Mattie slapped the lines on the mules once more and continued her soprano calling. “Beee-uuuu-ute! I don’t see you pulling hard, muuule! Get up there, you critters!” Her blond hair blowing back underneath her cowboy hat reminded me of Narcissa Whitman galloping uphill for South Pass, and filled me with happiness about the trip.

  23

  OUR TIME OF TRIUMPH HALFWAY across the trail—ascending South Pass to cross the continental divide—arrived in mid-July. We rested the mules for an extra day at a magical space along the Sweetwater, the Ellis Ranch, and the young archeologist and ranch manager there, Charles Turquie, briefed me on the best route to follow around Rocky Ridge, the big obstacle that stood between us and the pass. The dramatic scenery along the Sweetwater is virtually unchanged from pioneer days. But the emigrants’ many cutoffs to avoid the worst hills, followed by gold mining, stagecoaching, and the modern Mormon reoccupation, has turned the approach to South Pass into a labyrinth of intersecting ruts and tempting wrong turns. In the most dreamlike setting, through exquisite country to savor slowly in a covered wagon, our next week would be hell.

  Summiting Rocky Ridge, legendary as one of the most punishing climbs of the Oregon Trail, had never been part of my plan. The gateway to South Pass is a twelve-mile geologic wonderland where the trail twists upward through elaborate formations of dark feldspar and basalt rock striated with pink schist, a giant sculpture park left behind by the collisions of the earth’s crusts aeons ago. The route culminates in an abrupt seven-hundred-foot rise over an ascending staircase of gravel and brown shale. On the rounded summit, Rocky Ridge, at an elevation of 7,300 feet, the spines of stone coalesce into two broad boulder fields. It was on this desolate pile of rocks that the handcart Mormons suffered in the snow, and all of the early pioneers struggled. When their draft animals gave out and collapsed onto the rocks, the overland companies lightened their loads and pushed the wagons by hand, easing their axles over the boulders one wheel at a time.

  There was no reason for me to tackle Rocky Ridge in the wagon. After 1853 the most popular route to South Pass was the Seminoe Cutoff, a parallel wagon road that followed the south banks of the Sweetwater and avoided the boulder fields above. The wagons also bypassed Rocky Ridge by following the creek beds to the north, and these paths were worn down by heavy traffic after mining began in the late 1860s.

  All of these alternative routes around Rocky Ridge are considered the Oregon Trail, but everyone had a different opinion about which ruts to follow. Two ranchers warned me about the narrow bridge at Strawberry Creek, which they didn’t think the mules would cross, and others advised me not to follow the old tracks of the Point of Rocks stage road to the Lander Cutoff, which would require crossing difficult terrain at Slaughterhouse Gulch. Nobody really knew, and once more I faced the riddle presented by the multiple cutoffs and the broad, maddening vagueness of the Oregon Trail. There was no single preferred route. We were heading off for the big moment of the trip, crossing the Rocky Mountain divide, into a chasm of doubt.

  But the return of the Mormons to the Sweetwater offered some help, and Charles Turquie told us about this as we sat around a campfire at the Ellis Ranch the night before we left. All along the approach to South Pass, the Mormons have staged a series of large, visible camps on BLM land for handcarting Mormon Youth, often at important intersections of the trail. After crossing the river to the north banks out of the ranch, we would follow the most prominent set of ruts west and eventually see a slate marker at the site of the old St. Mary’s Pony Express stop. A few miles later we wouldn’t be able to miss a large, elaborately designed Mormon monument—fenced in, and marked with a historical plaque—dedicated to the 1856 handcart victims who died on Rocky Ridge. Farther west we would see the colorful tents of a Mormon Youth site, the Sage Creek Camp.

  Turquie told us to turn north at the Mormon camp. The road would climb through the canyon and then, at the top of the terrain, branch south again, skirting around Rocky Ridge. We would then follow that serpentine track down through the gulches and back to the main trail.

  The country up top would be confusing, Turquie said, but if we missed the turnoff south for the trail we’d end up on the well-marked Fort Stambaugh Road, and along it there would be plenty of tracks south for the trail.

  “Just don’t try Rocky Ridge at all,” Turquie said. “Nobody can get a wagon across that. Rocky Ridge is the only place around here where I’ve ripped the tires off my truck.”

  • • •

  We left the Ellis Ranch for South Pass the next morning in a cheerful, expectant mood. The mules were jaunty after two days of pasture rest and pounded their front hooves into the pink sand of the ruts, perking their long ears forward and asking to trot when we reached the hills.

  We found the slate marker for the St. Mary’s Station and then the substantial Mormon monument to the handcart victims, on the top of a hilltop to our left. But when we reached a turnoff north that looked a lot like the one for Sage Creek Camp, there was no Mormon camp. A lonely, faux log-cabin Mormon Port-o-Pottie stood up on the hill, its PVC vent pipe glinting in the sun. But the hillside was otherwise deserted and I concluded that our failure to find Sage Creek Camp was just another example of the endlessly confusing directions provided by westerners. The turnoff would probably look just like this one and be a mile or two ahead. We continued to push west on the most obvious ruts.

  As we cleared the next rise and began to descend downhill, the climb ahead looked very rocky, with brown and black ledges glinting in the sunlight. The rock formation was stepped and the climb so steep that all we could see beyond it was blue Wyoming sky. By this time, the terrain on either side of us was impassable. To the left the slope fell sharply downhill, and the boulder fields to the right looked like the dump zone of a quarry. The staircase of rock ahead of us looked far too abrupt, and I worried out loud to Nick about climbing the obstacle in the wagon.

  “Oh, I can put the mules up through that,” Nick said. “It doesn’t look that bad.”

  As we neared the bottom of the small valley before the rock slope, we saw the distant figures of two people easing down the track ahead of us, picking their way over the rock ledges. There wasn’t enough room for two-way traffic and we decided to hold the wagon and water the mules while we waited for them to descend. As I watered the mules I looked uphill at the hikers. They were carrying walking sticks and had water bottles strapped around their waists, and they looked like a married couple out for a day of trekking along the trail.

  The man looked surprised and was so excited about finding us that he ran the last thirty yards downhill to the wagon.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said. “Who are you? I never expected to see a covered wagon way out here.”

  His name was Sam Peery and he was a dentist from Logan, Utah. Peery and his wife, LaVora, were descendants of Mormons who joined the trail exodus from Illinois in 1849 and 1851, and they had driven up from Utah for the weekend to make a pilgrimage typical for Mormon couples. They wanted to see Willie Handcart shrines erected by the LDS and to hike sections of the South Pass segment, and they were particularly interested in exploring Rocky Ridge to learn more about how the heavy wagons of their ancestors had crossed the rocks. Peery told me that he was a horseman himself and owned a draft team and a covered wagon. Like a lot of Mormons who enjoy horses, he had participated in several “Mormon Wagon Trains” along the overland trail routes.

  While we waited for his wife to reach us, Peery looked back up the slope and then wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve.

  “You do know, by the way, that you’re headed straight for Rocky Ridge?”

  “That can’t be Rocky Ridge,” I said. “We haven’t reached the Mormon camp yet.”

  “There is
no Mormon camp today,” Peery said. “It’s Saturday. Those kids cleared out of there yesterday and headed back for Salt Lake. They’ve got church tomorrow.”

  He couldn’t really mean this. It was impossible, I’d been told, to miss the Mormon camp. My voice was a falsetto now.

  “You mean we missed it? Missed it? What do we do now?”

  I looked off the side of the wagon toward the steeply plummeting ground to our right, and then left, up the boulder fields. The basalt chute surrounding us was only a few feet wider than our wheels. Once more, we were boxed in. We couldn’t turn the wagon around and our only choice now was straight ahead, across Rocky Ridge.

  I knew that I had to walk ahead to scout the terrain and thought that Sam, a wagon man, might be able to help, and I asked him if he would come along.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s actually not as bad up there as they say. I think there’s a way through.”

  By this time LaVora had reached us and the Peerys said that they considered our meeting providential. Mormons are wonderfully candid about what they consider the spiritual coincidences of life and don’t seem embarrassed about blurting out the mysteries of their faith in front of strangers. God, the Peerys said, had sent them to scout the ridge and lead our wagon across hallowed land.

  “LaVora,” Sam said. “We are angels today. We were sent for them.”

  “We are angels today,” LaVora said. “There is a reason that we met them like this.”

  As I climbed the steep, rocky path uphill with the Peerys, I decided that they were angels. Ambassadors from God had miraculously appeared to guide us over the notorious Rocky Ridge, and the terrain itself didn’t look as bad as all the trail experts had told me it would be. The stepped rock ladder to the ridge wasn’t going to be very difficult, at least for a driver like Nick. In many places the ledges were diagonal to the trail, and by angling the pole at the same diagonal we could ease the wheels over axle by axle. Nick would see the same thing. Most of the ledges were eroded from wagon and foot traffic and had either sand or small pebbles on the top, which would give the mules some purchase against their shoes.