The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  The summit seemed navigable—just barely—too. I could instantly see why Rocky Ridge had assumed mythic status during the trail years. The rounded, high ground ahead of us stood alone, separated from the other peaks, and the fierce Wyoming winds prevented soil formation, exposing the bedrock of tall boulders. But the views west were spacious and the ruts below dropped through a green Jordan of grassy meadows along the Sweetwater. Most of the elevation gain toward South Pass had already been made, and the pioneers couldn’t resist taking this brutal shortcut to their destination.

  Best, we would not have to cross two boulder fields on the top, just one. After the first boulder field, which appeared to be about sixty yards across, there was a red two-track in the sand curving around the second formation of rocks. Modern pickup traffic around the second field of boulders had reduced the challenge of Rocky Ridge by half.

  The worn spots on the rocks across the summit showed that the pioneers had simply continued in the southwest direction of the ruts below, taking the hurdles of rocks head-on. The boulders were huge—some of them taller than our hubs. But the rock strata again met the trail at a diagonal, roughly north to south. Between the rock lines, there were jagged but relatively flat intervals marked with sparse green vegetation, where the protection of the rocks had allowed shallow deposits of soil.

  When I walked to the south side of the boulder field and stood on top of a large rock, I could see that there was just enough space to squeeze the wagon through these flat intervals. We would take Rocky Ridge at a diagonal, crisscrossing the summit several times along these flat areas. But the only way we could get the wagon swung back around for the next trip between the rocks would be to maneuver the team back and forth in a K-turn, carefully watching to be sure that we didn’t jackknife the Trail Pup. It would be tight, but doable.

  Before I left the ridge to hike down for Nick and the wagon, I explained my plan to Sam and LaVora. When the wagon got to the ridge, I wanted them to stand at the clearest point at the end of each interval, so that Nick could see through the rocks to his end point each time. When he started K-turning, they could reposition themselves in the best place to show the end point of the next interval.

  Sam thought that my route would be difficult. The pioneers had obviously cut straight across the center of the rock field to avoid the clifflike edges of the summit. Maneuvering wagons along the perimeter risked pushing the wheels dangerously close to the edge and falling into the steep canyon below. But we didn’t enjoy the advantage of a wagon train with plenty of men available to lift the wheels over the boulders, and our only choice was taking the rock field at a diagonal from edge to edge.

  I didn’t say much to Nick when I got back to the wagon. By this time I trusted the seamless, terse communication that seemed to come naturally to us when I was leading the way through rough terrain on foot and he was driving the wagon. Our body language together seemed almost spiritual to me now. Just by leaning my shoulder and arm left or right, or placing my foot on a rock, Nick got it.

  I explained to Nick that the Peerys would station themselves on the summit to mark the narrow sand avenues between the highest rocks. When we couldn’t avoid boulders, go easy on the axles. Baby the wheels.

  “Got it,” Nick said. “You’ll guide me?”

  “I’ll guide you.”

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re takin Rocky Ridge. I was born for this fucker.”

  • • •

  We ascended the ledges climbing to Rocky Ridge axle by axle, pausing at each step, like an old canal boat rising through the locks. The mules adjusted splendidly to the work. Beck’s craziness seemed to fade with a challenge like this, as she narrowly focused her attention on remaining the most forward mule on complicated terrain. Jake was athletic and calm. Bute we never even thought about because she was so lazy that all she wanted to do was step up daintily from rock to rock, her loose tug chains trailing behind her like a prom dress. It was fascinating to watch the mules. They all turned their heads sideways at each ledge, to look out past their blinders and take advantage of their wide rear vision, to watch their hind legs on the rocks.

  The wagon cover behind him prevented Nick from seeing the two rear axles, but I was standing to the rear of the wagon and giving him advisories all the way up. The team had to be stopped and the wheels gently eased over each new obstruction.

  “Rear mains at the ledge.”

  “Rear mains.”

  “Trail Pup.”

  “Trail Pup.”

  It was an agonizingly slow climb with the pole banging and the tug chains crackling with tension each time we forced an axle over the next ledge. I ran back and forth on the ledges, signaling Nick to angle the pole correctly for the next rock step, then running back behind the wagon to call out the axles reaching the big hoist over the same spot. Several times Jake and Beck stumbled and spun their hooves on slippery, smooth rocks, and the wagon fell backward with a giant groan of pain from the running gear. But Nick stood on the brake and held the team with the lines, calming them in a low, soothing voice.

  “Good, Team, good. Rest now. Just rest. Then we’ll try again. You’re my team.”

  I was saturated with sweat and my eyes stung from the salty perspiration pouring off my forehead. I was wobbly in the high mountain air and stumbled several times on the ledges, and the sharp edges of rock slit my blue jeans at the knee. In the back of my mind I heard a deep, gravelly voice, Bill Petersen’s in Nebraska. “I’m no mule man, but you’re not going to get that wagon over Rocky Ridge. Go around.” But the gauzy, high Wyoming air drugged me like ether and I felt defiant and inexhaustible. Nobody knows. The experts said that we couldn’t do this. But we were climbing Rocky Ridge toward our Mormon angels and we would make it to the other side.

  Near the summit, at the edge of the boulder field, we stopped to water the mules, mostly to relax them, and I explained the rock field to Nick. From his high perch on the wagon seat he could see the flat channels between the spines of rock and how we would have to steer through them.

  “Boss, I can do this. But it’s going to take time.”

  “We’ve got all day. We can camp just beyond here if we want.”

  But it didn’t take that long. I stood at the first two boulders in our way and wedged small rocks underneath the wheels and pushed on the spokes to help the wagon over, and Nick entered the first channel, reached LaVora at the end, and pulled wide and due west. Then he backed the team so expertly that he needed only three K-turns in reverse to enter the next channel. Forty yards away, Sam was standing on a tall rock and holding his arms wide to mark the next channel.

  The work was exhilarating but stressful. There were a few spots along the channels where I had to run back and either wedge rocks under the wheels or hold back the spokes so the axles rose evenly. At the top of the stones Nick locked the brake and held the team so that the wagon sat perched sideways at a crazy angle on one wheel. Then he gently pumped the brake to let the wheel rim skid down the other side of the rock. He spoke softly to the mules to keep them calm. In a few places, where the channel narrowed to just our hub width, we left skid marks and red paint on the rocks.

  Nick tipped the wagon only once, when he misjudged his distance from the rocks on the right side and put both right wheels of the Schuttler on the top of boulders. I could hear the load shifting as the wagon started to lean over on its side, but I didn’t have time to call to Nick. He caught the near-spill just in time and calmly pulled the team and the pole even harder right, so that the front wheel pivoted and skidded backward down the rock. Then he eased the rear wheel down by turning left and standing on the brake.

  It was a masterly display of driving skills, but the wheels landed hard and the wagon box banged against the running gear as the Schuttler slid off the rocks. We stopped to inspect the spokes and hubs and they seemed fine. I ran back and forth repositioning Sam and LaVora so that Nick could steer for them at each channel, occasionally returning to the wagon to help the wheels
over another rock.

  The maneuvering at the end of each channel took forever. But Nick was patient for a change and the Oregon Trail had disciplined him into a more cautious driver. Back and forth, back and forth, he expertly steered the mules through the K-turns, turning the wagon one way in reverse, so the Trail Pup angled in the other direction. After forty-five minutes, we were off the rock field and onto the smooth track that skirted the rest of the summit.

  We had taken Rocky Ridge diagonally. To gain sixty yards west over a boulder field, we had traversed almost three hundred yards in a series of S-turns. It wasn’t the way the pioneers did it but I didn’t give a damn because now I could see clear west, through the opening of land between the Wind Rivers and the Red Buttes below. I felt that I could almost touch Oregon from the heights.

  The wagon on top of Rocky Ridge. Ascending the rock staircase east of the continental divide was one of the most arduous challenges of the trip.

  Before we left for the meadows below, Nick held the mules on the windy summit and our flag snapped in the breeze while I stood near the front wheels and thanked the Peerys. They were excited about their day now. To them, the real-life image of a covered wagon summiting Rocky Ridge was divinely inspired. God had directed them here to see this and witness it with photographs, so that other Mormons could see too and witness. Utah Mormons live such relatively isolated lives that they don’t realize how unusual it is for secular Americans like me to hear people talk so openly and matter-of-factly about their religion. Sam spoke for a few minutes about the stories he had grown up with, the sacrifices the Saints had made to cross to Utah, and the role that pilgrimages to places like Rocky Ridge played in sustaining his personal faith. Now he had seen a wagon cross the fatal Rocky Ridge and the day had sealed him with the Mormon martyrs.

  This was all theological ziti to me, but I loved and enjoyed the Peerys, and everything Mormon, that day on Rocky Ridge. Indeed, standing with them on the high rocks, I was a Mormon. My theory about religion is that we should believe in every one of them. Screw doctrine—it’s all made up anyway, and too divisive. When I feel like being spiritually revived by great music, I drive over on Sunday to my local Bethel AME church and get a good dose of gospel hymns, and then I’m an AME soul brother for the rest of the day. When I feel like hearing an intelligent sermon, I go to a synagogue, and then I’m a devout Jew. I love Mennonite and Quaker meetings because those faiths are so devoted to social service that I can always rely on an invitation to the next flood-relief mission or the building of a Habitat for Humanity house. That’s my dogma. Just borrow any old goddamn religion that happens to be around when you need it and enjoy the pleasure of being with welcoming people. Today, on windy Rocky Ridge beneath a hard blue Wyoming sky, I was Mormon.

  Sam and LaVora said again that they thought they were “angels” sent to help us over Rocky Ridge. But Nick and I were their angels too.

  “It’s a vision that you gave us,” LaVora said. “Now we have seen a covered wagon cross Rocky Ridge. We can believe it happened now. It affirms our faith.”

  “I don’t have the same amount of faith as you,” I said. “But I guess we can all be angels sometimes.”

  “That’s true,” Sam said. “God bless now. We’ll never forget today. Can you just be careful out here?”

  “Oh, we’ll be careful,” I said. “You just saw how careful we are.”

  We all laughed, exchanged contact information, and then Sam and LaVora turned east to go, holding hands as they stepped high over the first rocks. I walked with them to the edge of the ridge and watched for a minute or two as they descended the ledges, a happy, obliging Mormon couple receding downhill on the old, scuffed ruts.

  “Angels, Nick,” I said, back at the wagon. “Mormon angels guided us over Rocky Ridge.”

  “Well, I happen to believe in all that shit,” Nick said. “Those people were angels. You don’t have to be some Bible-whackin birdbrain from Alabama to believe in angels.”

  Taking Rocky Ridge infused us with energy. I had studied Rocky Ridge for months the winter before and learned to fear it, and all of the Oregon Trail “experts” had exhorted me not to cross it. But nobody knows. Nobody had taken a wagon over those rocks in a century. Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown. But when we got there and saw the terrain, it was just a lot of hard work crossing large rocks.

  The wagon box gently bumped over the sandy ruts and the oak bows creaked in the wind as we descended for the bottomlands along the Sweetwater, McLean Meadows. We had saved half a day by crossing Rocky Ridge, and along the boggy edges of the river we saw moose, beaver dams, and sandhill cranes.

  24

  THE SNOWMELT RAGING DOWN FROM the Wind Rivers had turned Willow Creek, which we had to cross to stay on the main ruts, into a twenty-acre swamp. July is usually the middle of the dry season, but in this record high-water year the channel was almost as broad as a river. Circuiting the mud fields along the banks on foot, I could see a trail marker on dry ground on the far side. But we couldn’t reach it across this Euphrates morass, which would have quickly swallowed the wagon and mules. We turned back for the Sweetwater to follow the Riverview Cutoff to the Seminoe Cutoff, which would lead us back west for the pass.

  I almost welcomed being forced onto the Seminoe Cutoff. I had always been curious about what it looked like, and the history of this popular shortcut connected the three main periods of trail development in the West. The route was named for Charles “Seminoe” Lajeunesse, a member of a prominent trapping and guiding family from the fur days of the 1820s and 1830s who turned to another line of work after 1850, when European tastes in hats changed from beaver to silk, effectively ending the beaver-trapping era. Lajeunesse saw the new opportunity offered by the growing covered wagon traffic on the Oregon Trail and took over the fort and trading post at Devil’s Gate, quickly building it into a busy trail stop. But this business was threatened in 1853 when heavy snowmelt and rains raised the Sweetwater over its banks, causing a traffic jam of wagons all the way back to Independence Rock. To keep the traffic—and his profits—flowing, Lajeunesse blazed a path along the plains south of the river for a hundred miles between Independence Rock and South Pass. The new road eliminated the need for the multiple fords required on the north banks and sidestepped the perilous Rocky Ridge. Over time, especially after the Mormon handcart disaster at Rocky Ridge in 1856, the Seminoe Cutoff became the preferred road and was heavily trafficked by wagon trains, and then by military convoys, mining caravans, and stage lines during the last, busy phase of the trail in the 1880s.

  But not every wagon train or stagecoach driver followed exactly the same path along the south banks, and the tangled ruts of the Seminoe road eventually suffered from the neglect that became typical of many other Oregon Trail cutoffs. To trail purists, the exasperating maze of choices made by the pioneers had to be resolved somehow, in order to preserve a single, agreed-upon National Historic Trail. By the late twentieth century, this effort had evolved into a “main ruts” approach to mapping and marking the trail, which allowed many important cutoffs to disappear into the cattle and pickup roads that generally followed the same terrain.

  This issue was more than academic to me. Like thousands of wagon travelers before me, I had just been forced off the main ruts at Willow Creek in a high-water year and would need to pick up the far end of the Seminoe Cutoff to continue west to the continental divide. The Seminoe Cutoff was the Oregon Trail, but there is no definable, marked Seminoe road anymore. After we crossed a bridge over the Sweetwater, there were several two-track cutoffs bearing southwest across the broad basin between the mountain ridges, all of them unmarked, and any one of them the possible Seminoe route. I eliminated the first two because of hilly terrain and what looked like distant fence lines, and finally asked Nick to turn west on the third track, not because I knew it was the right one, but because we had to start moving toward South Pass somewhere. We were headed straight across open range, and I was pretty sure that we w
ouldn’t see any sign of life or acquire a navigation fix until the next big waypoint, a former trail stop, cavalry fort, and mining town called Burnt Ranch.

  By now, I considered myself an Oregon Trail survivor and accepted the imprecise standards of trail navigation. South Pass was about fifteen miles southwest across the hardtack desert, with the gold hills on either side of us wedging us onto level ground. There was no marked road. Any route we followed between Willow Creek and Burnt Ranch was the trail.

  As he turned the mules west on the two-track, Nick asked about how I knew we were going the right way.

  “Nobody knows, Trail Hand.” I said. “We’re on the Oregon Trail.”

  • • •

  Burnt Ranch, originally called South Pass Station after the U.S. Army fort built there in 1862, was another of those junctions along the trail that once throbbed with the energy of westering Americans. Hundreds of wagons filed through every day to merge at the intersection of the Seminoe Cutoff and the main ruts at the “last crossing” of the Sweetwater. The open prairie outside the fort was the scene of emotional partings as some families elected to proceed due west to Idaho on the mountainous Lander Road, while others continued southwest to the Sublette Cutoff route or followed the main ruts to Fort Bridger. There were separate Mormon and gentile post offices and Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, and Sir Richard Burton passed through on the stage lines, immortalizing the last stop before South Pass in their books. The road ranch got its final name during the Indian wars in the late 1860s when the Sioux, fed up with the continued impact of the emigrant traffic on their traditional lands, and the frequent violations of their treaties with the white man, burned the fort and its outbuildings to the ground.