The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  From the back of the wagon I could feel the wheels splash through Oregon Slough, and then I heard the grunting of the mules as they climbed the banks and pulled uphill.

  I was humiliated once more when I climbed back onto the wagon seat. At the top of the rise above Oregon Slough, there was a tall concrete trail marker right where the main ruts made the “last crossing” off Burnt Ranch. Nick had been right and we should have just proceeded directly off the Seminoe Cutoff up the most obvious track.

  “Nick, I’m sorry. I definitely screwed the poodle back there.”

  Nick handed me the lines to drive and stared vacantly at the hills to the south, beginning a long brood.

  “Don’t say nothin, all right?” he said. “I’m not mad at you and I’m not even mad at that motherless asshole back there. I am just worried about Olive Oyl.”

  The wind pushed against us as we turned back onto the main ruts. We were climbing gently uphill and with the elevation gain the brown hills and sage around us were turning light green. I was morose about my fuckup at Burnt Ranch and rehearsed in my mind all of the things I could have said, should have said, to the malevolent moron back there.

  A few minutes later, we had one more bizarre exchange with the mercurial owner of Burnt Ranch. As we bumped along the ruts west of the ranch we heard the whine of a four-wheeler behind us, and he emerged on the crest of the hill.

  “Oh, shit,” Nick said. “What does that bastard want now?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re back on federal land.”

  The rancher pulled up beside the wagon.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to camp on our place?” he said. “There’s a big storm coming tonight. My wife sent me back up here because she thinks we might have been too hard on you. Camp here and you can make the pass in the morning, easy.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll push on,” I said. “Is this the only two-track to the pass?”

  “You’ll pass another marker or two. But just stay on these ruts right here. There’s some cattle tracks that come in north to south, but stay on this one. Eventually it turns due west.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  He sat on his four-wheeler and watched us go, calling out one more thing.

  “Have a safe trip!”

  We plodded along the bumpy ruts for a while, not saying anything, but finally Nick spoke up.

  “How come they always say that, ‘Have a safe trip!’? The biggest assholes in the world are always telling you to have a safe trip.”

  I was too disconsolate to reply.

  Ahead, two sandy dimples of land, pink in the afternoon light, began to rise on the horizon. I was pretty sure that they were the Twin Mounds, marking the entrance to South Pass.

  25

  THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE AT SOUTH Pass was so featureless and lacking in physical drama that it seemed to have no significance at all. The broad, slightly humped saddle of land beyond the Twin Mounds was indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain and many pioneers had rumbled through with their wagons before they realized they had crossed the divide. “There we saw the far famed south pass, but did not see it until we had passed it,” wrote Illinois pioneer Amelia Hadley in 1851. “I was all the time looking for some narrow place that would almost take your breath away to get through but was disappointed.” The “visual anticlimax” of South Pass, as one geologist described it, stumped even experts sent out to find it. Captain John Frémont, the “great pathfinder” dispatched by Congress in 1842 to survey the Oregon Trail, identified the summit of South Pass as the land directly in between the Twin Mounds, which was more than two miles east of the true Continental Divide.

  But if Frémont missed the exact spot, he did not miss the main point. Crossing South Pass, which by the 1850s had been nicknamed “Uncle Sam’s Backbone,” required gradual, not extraordinary, effort. Nature had created an easy-to-climb gateway that was ideal for covered wagons. In his report to Congress, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, which was widely reprinted by commercial publishers and became a popular trail guide for the next decade, Frémont’s description of the gentle ascent was received as welcome news by a generation of nomadic Americans.

  From the impression on my mind at this time, and subsequently on our return, I should compare the elevation which we surmounted immediately at the pass, to the ascent of the Capitol hill from the avenue, at Washington. . . . It will be seen that in no manner [South Pass] resembles the places to which the term is commonly applied—nothing of the gorge-like character and winding ascents of the Allegany passes in America, nothing of the Great St. Bernard and Simplon passes in Europe. Approaching it from the mouth of the Sweet Water, a sandy plain, one hundred and twenty miles long, conducts, by a gradual and regular ascent, to the summit, about seven thousand feet above the sea; and the traveler, without being reminded of any change by toilsome ascents, suddenly finds himself on the waters which flow to the Pacific ocean.

  A natural pathway through the mountains that required no more effort than a lobbyist’s stroll onto Capitol Hill was just one of the many dualities of South Pass. Misunderstandings were inevitable because the term “Continental Divide” refers to the division of watersheds and rivers, flowing in opposite directions, and does not necessarily mean that the highest land has been reached. Over time, South Pass would generate a site-specific literature all its own, much of it unintentionally deceptive. Virtually every pioneer journal would mention—simply because the information was repeated in trail guides—that the divide at South Pass separated the drainages of the Mississippi and the Atlantic waters from the Pacific waters. But this grand hydrologic principle was practically worthless. The last rim of mountains in central Wyoming simply separated one desert from another. Finding water could still be maddeningly difficult for the next five hundred miles, and the pioneers would often spend the second half of their journey to Oregon or California making desperate scrambles between the rivers to survive. And by no means did reaching the division of waters at South Pass, at an elevation of 7,400 feet, end the steep wagon climbs for the pioneers. Along the Lander Cutoff there were still nine-thousand-foot peaks to conquer, and the popular Sublette Cutoff wouldn’t end until the wagons climbed and then perilously descended an 8,300-foot killer called Dempsey Ridge.

  But South Pass was the halfway mark on the wagon journey, and by now the pioneers had survived two months of Platte River storms, the outdoor cholera wards, and the high-altitude weariness of the Rockies. There had to be something to say about reaching such an important milestone. For the gifted Margaret Frink, who understood that the small, telling detail is everything, the spare surroundings at South Pass presented few problems. In her Journal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold Seekers, she reported finding the first post office in almost a thousand miles along the trail, and in the distance she heard live music at the summit, but these were incongruities that evoked the long journey she had made from civilization, and the many miles she still had to go.

  We could hardly realize that we were crossing the great backbone of the North American continent at an altitude of 7,490 feet. . . . Near the summit, on each side of the road, was an encampment, at one of which the American flag was flying, to mark the private post-office or express office established by Gen. James Estelle, for the accommodations of emigrants wishing to send letters to friends at home. The last post-office on our way was at St. Joseph, on the Missouri River. West of that stream were neither states, counties, cities, towns, villages, or white man’s habitations. The two mud forts we had passed were the only signs of civilization. There was an off-hand celebration of our arrival at the summit. Music from a violin with tin-pan accompaniment, contributed to the general merriment of a grand frolic. In the afternoon we spent some time writing letters to our friends, to be sent back by the express. On each letter we paid the express charge of $1.00.

  Another contradiction presented by South Pass—which from afar sounded so mysterious an
d remote—was that it served as the portal to the nearby campground at Pacific Springs, which was as clamorous and thronged as a walled medieval city. When he reached Pacific Springs at the end of June 1850, Franklin Langworthy camped “amidst thousands of other emigrants.” The “splendid carriages” of the commercial passenger trains passing through on their way to the gold fields reminded Langworthy of the busy traffic along the avenues of New York. The braying of cattle and human voices, violin playing, and that favorite pastime of bored Americans—rifle and pistol shooting—kept Langworthy awake all night.

  The merriment at Pacific Springs probably had a lot to do with the time of year—most of the wagon trains reached South Pass and the popular camp to the west on or near the Fourth of July. Reaching the Continental Divide on the national holiday was considered a favorable omen and an excuse to celebrate, and the pioneers serenaded the neighboring wagons with bands, shared whiskey and molasses mixed with brandy, and sat up all night watching groups of men igniting fireworks made out of gunpowder, clusters of wood, and rags stuffed into tin cans and water buckets. Perhaps the most memorable of these displays occurred in 1849, when a Missouri pioneer built his fire at Pacific Springs too close to a keg of black powder being carried west for the Gold Rush. A spark from the fire lit some spilled powder nearby and set off the keg, which exploded with a magnificent boom and flash and then barrel-rolled out of sight across the plains.

  • • •

  At the Twin Mounds, I decided to walk the last stretch to the top of South Pass and savor it alone. The dusty ruts curved gently uphill, disappearing above into a metallic overcast sky. It was a lovely hike that revealed the graphic contrasts of nature in the Rockies. The snowfields of the Wind Rivers glittered on the north horizon, the vast alkali flats of the Green River country opened straight ahead, and storm clouds boiled black and gray vapors to the northwest. The westerlies were blowing so hard that I had to lean into the wind to make headway. I was exhausted and filthy after two days without a shower, and my whiskery face itched from sunburn and perspiration, but it was exhilarating to reach the continental divide. In two months we had traveled almost a thousand miles, confirming my estimates from the winter before, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could stop us now.

  But these were just mathematical calculations, and it felt as though we’d been gone for two years. In the thin air of the Rockies, I had lost all sense of time and the routines of life I knew back east. I couldn’t remember the last time I knew what day of the week it was. After Casper the battery in my watch had grown weak, and it was no longer keeping accurate time, but that didn’t matter. I woke in the morning, harnessed and hitched the mules, and then rode or walked ahead of a Schuttler white-top until rosy light told me to stop. Finding water was the principal metric of my day. Iterated drudgery—the sound of mules plodding, wheel hubs creaking, and watching Olive Oyl running snake patrols ahead of me on the high desert—was my life now.

  A familiar irony of the modern trail greeted me at the summit of South Pass. The preservationists and BLM managers responsible for trail upkeep seem to have thought of everything, except the possibility of a real covered wagon coming through. A large BLM barbed-wire enclosure, to ward off pickups and dirt bikes, had been placed around the Ezra Meeker and H. G. Nickerson monuments at the top, and the fence blocked almost all of the level ground on the crest, forcing Nick and the mules down into the badland gullies and tall sage to the south. After poking around the summit awhile and admiring the monuments—I was particularly impressed with the craftsmanship of Nickerson’s monument to Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding—I explored the route south and then walked back and raised my arms to hand-signal Nick. I lost sight of the wagon several times as Nick plunged the Schuttler through the gullies, and the sagebrush crackled and split against the wheels and the wagon cover as he squeezed through the tall vegetation.

  When we regained the trail on the west side of the pass, I could see that the situation was still unfavorable for us. The trail toward Pacific Springs, furrowed by thousands of wagons rolling over the same spot, and by pickup traffic later, curved sharply and deeply to the right. The right track sloped sharply downward, about two feet below the high track on the left. This would place most of the weight of the wagons on the right wheels, and I briefly considered emptying our water tanks to relieve the load on the Trail Pup. But this would remove only a couple of hundred pounds from the low wheel and I didn’t think we could do without our remaining water at Pacific Springs.

  Stumbling through the sagebrush to check the ground ahead, I yelled back to Nick.

  “Nick! The slope. Look at the slope! Slow, slow!”

  “I know! I can see it.”

  When I heard the crash, I was just out of sight of the wagon. But I knew what it had to be. A brief, sharp crack of splintering wood was followed by a loud crash as one of the wagons settled onto the trail, the same sound I’d heard when we flipped the Trail Pup in Lisco. Nick was calling “Whoa!” to the mules.

  Shouldering back uphill through the sage, I knelt on top of the high wall of the trail, looking almost straight down toward the wagons from above, crestfallen at what I saw. The right wheel of the Trail Pup had shattered, and several of the spokes were scattered on the trail like fallen juggling pins. The impact of the wagon collapsing had snapped both spigots on our tanks and the only water we had for the mules was gushing out in a stream, puddling up on the dust of the trail.

  The starkness of that moment took my breath away, and my mind seemed completely empty of solutions. I had never imagined a situation this dire—no worst-case-scenario planning could encompass it. We were forty miles from the nearest help, and the only water we had to support the mules was racing out of our barrels and falling downhill, with a gurgling sound that seemed to mock all of my plans.

  Looking down at the shattered wheel, I could easily see what had happened. Inside the broken hub, and in several of the splintered wheel spokes, there was a core of black dry rot.

  “Nick, hold those mules! The Trail Pup is down.”

  Nick was frantic up front, and I knew that he would want to jump off the wagon and rush back to assess the damage.

  “Is it hub failure? Tell me! Is it hub failure? Let me get back there!”

  “Nick, how do I know? The Trail Pup is down. We’ve got a shattered wheel. Just wait until I get there.”

  I slid down the exposed dirt wall of the trail and then inched my way forward against the wagon. I was surprised by how calm I felt. Later, I would conclude that the thin air at 7,400 feet just didn’t provide enough oxygen to let me get excited. The altitude slowed me down so that a kind of delayed, deliberative preservation instinct took over.

  Think, think, Rinker, don’t react. I’d expected all along that our wheels would break somewhere, but I couldn’t focus now on the disappointment of that happening just a quarter mile from victory, at South Pass, so far from help. I couldn’t dwell either on the overall dimensions of our predicament. Details, a hundred details, crowded my thoughts. But I had to maintain cockpit composure here and concentrate on just the two or three things I needed to do now to beat the storm to Pacific Springs.

  At the front of the wagon, I deliberately stood off several steps from the wheels, so Nick couldn’t hand me the lines and scramble back to see the damage. I had to calm him down first. I asked for my canteen, which Nick tossed off the wagon.

  I also had to work hard at not castigating myself for the broken wheel, because I should have known this would happen. The Trail Pup wheels had sat in the rain in Kansas for years, and the moisture had wicked up through the spokes to the hubs, rotting the wood in several places. With some sanding and fresh paint, the wheels looked fine when we picked the wagon up in May. But after a thousand miles of use and then the heat of the high desert, the undermined oak couldn’t take the steeply sloped trail at South Pass.

  “Nick, there’s dry rot through that whole wheel.”

  “Fuckin Don Werner.”


  “Nick. It’s really my fault. I bought the wagon in a hurry knowing the history of the wheels. But Don Werner isn’t here now. Philip Ropp isn’t here. We can’t just call Bill Petersen for help. Nobody knows, Nick. Nobody can help us. It’s our responsibility to get out of this mess.”

  “Fuck. I know.”

  Nick pushed his stubby index finger into his ear and burrowed around for a while, looking off vacantly toward the plains and Oregon Buttes. When he looked back, he was smiling.

  “You knew all along this would happen, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. We would have to break our wheels somewhere. But not here. Not at South Pass, forty miles from the nearest town.”

  I looked northwest toward the storm clouds rolling black and gray over each other past the bottom of the Wind Rivers. A misty curtain of rain was falling behind them. We had, at most, a half hour to reach Pacific Springs. When I looked up at Nick on the wagon seat, he was smiling again.

  “This is the whole trip, right here,” he said. “All I have heard out of you this summer is ‘Trail Hand, wait till you see South Pass.’ Now we’re here, and it’s the biggest clusterfuck of my life. I love it. We’re still makin Oregon.”

  The storm clouds were racing in so quickly that we might be forced to unhitch and unharness the mules, letting them go on the plains so they wouldn’t panic. We would have to camp in a thunderstorm in open country and then somehow catch the team in the morning. But adversity was my amphetamine now and I loved our journey and Nick.

  “We’re still making Oregon,” I said.

  Nick is a lot stronger than I am and I needed him back at the Trail Pup to pull the pin, now twisted in its mount, that held the cart to the main wagon. I told him not to waste a lot of time looking at the wheels because we were abandoning the Trail Pup for now. While I held the mules, he could also transfer two bales of hay from the cart to the main wagon. I did a quick mental inventory of our supplies in the Schuttler and knew that we had our cookstove and fuel, and probably enough food in one of our storage coolers to get us through the night.