The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  We would have to figure out the rest later. Our only priority was reaching Pacific Springs and getting our fencing set up before the storm hit.

  I heard a lot of moaning and cursing from behind as Nick examined the shattered wheel, and then a loud thump as he grunted the pin out of the Trail Pup hitch and the cart fell to the ground. The wagon shook as Nick threw the hay on board and then he rejoined me on the wagon seat.

  “Fast-walk the mules,” I said, nodding toward the storm clouds. “We’ve got to beat this storm to Pacific Springs.”

  When we reached the level floor of the valley below the pass, I was annoyed at myself again, surprised by the frailty of my thinking. Back in the crippled Trail Pup, we had left behind several bags of emergency “packing cubes”—a concentrated dry mix of alfalfa and grain used by hunting outfitters for mule treks into the mountains. I had bought them in Casper as a precaution. If we got stranded somewhere in the desert, the cubes would keep the mules alive for a day or two while one of us went for help.

  It was a big mistake to have forgotten the cubes. If I went back on foot for them, we would risk getting caught in the storm. But if I didn’t go back, we might not get beyond Pacific Springs. I still didn’t realize how much the high altitude was affecting me, and I was angry at myself for vacillating over a decision. But I told Nick that he would have to hold the team while I walked back for the packing cubes.

  It was the loneliest hike of my life. I ran along the ruts until they began to slope up for the pass and then paced myself to a walk, breathing deeply for air, trying not to think about my mistake of forgetting the cubes. Just keep going. You don’t know where anything leads. Nobody knows. Keep going. When I reached the Trail Pup it lay crazily on its side, pieces of the platform Nick had built back in Nebraska and our equipment scattered on the ruts. The cart looked so forlorn. I had designed it myself, and all of our hopes for crossing the trail unassisted were invested in that cart, but now it lay crippled between two high dirt walls below South Pass, a symbol of my vanity and naiveté.

  Stop thinking, idiot. Move forward.

  Rummaging around in the load, I found two bags of packing cubes, hoisted them out, and then genuflected in the mud left behind by our broken water barrels and threw the forty-pound bags onto my shoulders. At first, they didn’t feel very heavy. On the slope, I leaned forward slightly to let the eighty pounds on my shoulders push me faster downhill.

  I had another interesting flashback to my father right then, and was fascinated about how the mysterious workings of memory could raise an image that had been dormant for fifty years. During our covered wagon trip in 1958, we had stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania just before reaching Lancaster—Morgantown, maybe, or Blue Ball—to buy grain for the horses. One of the Amish men at the grain mill wheeled over a handcart to take the heavy grain sacks to the wagon, but before he could reach us my father picked up both sacks, balanced them on his hips with his hands, carried them over, and threw them onto the wagon.

  The Amish there must have known my father from earlier trips. They all laughed, their gray beards shaking, at the man standing there on the loading dock, uselessly, with the handcart.

  “Tom Buck!” one of them said. “And he’s doing that on a wooden leg yet.”

  But now I was struggling. When I reached the bottom of the slope, without gravity to help me, I realized that I couldn’t make it all the way back to the wagon with two bags. I dropped one bag on the trail, forced myself to make it to the distant wagon without stopping, threw on the bag, and glumly returned for the second bag. All of this was taking too much time. We might not beat the storm to Pacific Springs.

  Stop thinking. Just go back for the second bag.

  Winded, I reached the wagon a second time and climbed up to the seat, and Nick slapped the lines on the mules, calling them for Pacific Springs. I took a long drink from my canteen. I was amazed by another appearance of my father during the trip, and I told Nick about it.

  “Nick, those were hundred-pound bags he was carrying,” I said. “I couldn’t even get back here with forty-pound bags.”

  “Rinker, you are so full of shit sometimes that I agonize about you,” Nick said. “All Daddy had to do was carry those bags across a parking lot. He wasn’t crossin the frickin Wyomin desert. Why exaggerate against yourself?”

  “I’m not exaggerating. He made it to the wagon with two bags. I could only handle one.”

  “Well, good,” Nick said. “That’s your memory. But Tom Buck isn’t here right now. We are. And we’re gettin to Pacific Springs before this storm.”

  We had to travel only two miles to reach Pacific Springs. I used the time to analyze our situation and calculate everything we were up against. We had just dropped our only source of water and feed for the mules behind us on the trail. Our dog was injured, and I had no idea whether we’d find forage or water at Pacific Springs. I was unfamiliar with the maze of trail and fence lines we’d have to cross to reach the highway to Farson, and after that we’d have to travel nearly thirty miles over the scorching alkali flats to our first water on the Little Sandy River. I’d always known Wyoming would be our toughest state, and most horsemen I knew would have given up by now and called for help. But we couldn’t even do that. There wasn’t cell service out here, and there probably wouldn’t be any until we reached Farson.

  It started to rain as we pulled into Pacific Springs. The old pioneer encampment had endured the usual transition from the wagon days, briefly housing a post office, a telegraph station, and a stage stop, and then enjoying a few decades of prosperity as a ranching center with corrals, a tavern, and a famous whorehouse. But it was now just a collection of moldering log cabins with fallen roofs and cow manure on the dirt floors. The springs themselves were swampland, trampled into mounds of mud and grass by the cattle, stretching off north toward a shallow creek. A decrepit barbed-wire fence ran above the mud line between two of the cabins.

  To the northwest, the black snarling clouds were beginning to drop low.

  “This has got to be the fastest unhitching in history,” I said to Nick. “I’ll unharness the mules. You put the fencing up against that barbed wire.”

  Nick had the fencing almost done by the time I led over the first mule. The rain was falling harder now, pooling up on his cowboy hat and then dropping as a waterfall off the rim. We were both forcing ourselves to cheer up because at least there was water that we could see, out in the clear creek beyond the swamps. Nick couldn’t resist this opportunity to make light of our awful day. Bending low in a bow, he swept his hand toward the fence opening, gesturing me in like a hotel doorman.

  “Pacific Springs, Boss,” he said. “Welcome to the shithole of the West.”

  “Ah, c’mon, Nick,” I said. “Use your imagination. This was a pioneer encampment. There were hundreds of wagons here every night.”

  “It’s a shithole.”

  “Nick, they played fiddles by lantern light. They had square dances.”

  “It’s a shithole.”

  “C’mon. Cheer up. Wait till you see the Big Sandy Station tomorrow, or the Green River Rendezvous. We’ll camp at Emigrant Springs on the Sublette Cutoff.”

  “Shithole, shithole, shithole,” Nick said. “You go to sleep every night in a covered wagon. I get to sleep on soggy manure piles. From now on, I’m callin it the Shithole Trail.”

  When I bent over to laugh, the rain pounded through the holes in the shoulder of my shirt and ran down my back and legs.

  “Screw you, Trail Hand. Let’s get the other mules.”

  • • •

  Pacific Springs wasn’t simply the most miserable camp of the trip. It was the most miserable camp of my life. In the middle of one of the most unforgiving deserts in the West there was water everywhere—wind and water lashing us from above, water ponds everywhere we stepped, rainwater seeping through every joint in the wagon—but we could use none of it. The springs themselves, trampled beyond recognition by a century of cattle grazing, stretc
hed for five acres like a giant mud pie across the flats.

  The mules hadn’t been watered since the middle of the day, back at the Seminoe Cutoff, and I knew that I would have to carry at least fifteen gallons from the springs to get the team through the night. The only route out to the clear water at the edge of the springs was along the patchwork of conical, grassy hummocks that stretched across the swamp. As I started out with a bucket, the grass mounds looked temptingly sylvan and ideally spaced—patio stones crossing to the fabled springs, I thought, placed there for my convenience.

  I was even cheerful about it. Disaster had struck, and we were now deprived of our barrels of water and provisions for the team. But this was where crazyass passion and endurance would count the most, and we would define ourselves by lugging enough water for the mules.

  Grassy hummocks in Wyoming, however, are a ruse of the landscape. For four or five leaps across the lovely green mounds, the footing was good. But then the sixth and seventh mounds collapsed as soon as I landed on them, pitching me knee-deep into a sludge of black mud mixed with cow urine. Giving up on the hummocks, I sloshed through the winding channels of sewage, dipped into the creek for water, sloshed all the way back, and then at the fence held up the filthy pail for another ungrateful mule. Back and forth I went. I had reached the watershed of the Pacific and it was a bovine septic tank. I didn’t so much finish watering the mules as decide that one hour of this revolting therapy was enough.

  Back at the wagon, Nick was sitting against a wagon wheel beneath a gray tarp rigged from the spokes to protect him from the rain, with Olive Oyl curled on a blanket on his lap. He was massaging her wounds with mule salve and combing the dried blood off her white coat with a small screwdriver. He asked me what we were having for dinner.

  I scrounged around in the back of the wagon, realizing that most of what we needed for dinner was back in the downed Trail Pup. In addition to our cookstove, we had one saucepan, two family-size cans of Hormel chili, no beans, and some leftover Minute Rice. I found plastic spoons, but we had no plates.

  I protected the cookstove from the rain with my denim jacket and managed to get a feeble fire going, throwing the chili and rice into the pan together.

  “We’ll have to eat together out of the pan,” I said to Nick. “We don’t have any plates.”

  “Oh, I can find plates,” Nick said.

  Nick crawled out from underneath the tarp, rearranged Olive Oyl on a blanket, and then disappeared behind one of the log cabins. I heard a prying, crunching sound, demolition noise. When he emerged through the rain, Nick was carrying three cedar shingles that he had ripped from the log cabin roof.

  “Boss,” Nick said, handing me one of the shingles, “This is a plate. And this . . .”

  Nick cracked the second shingle in half against his knee.

  “Is a spatula.”

  Our cedar dinner china was tastefully decorated with long green stains where the copper roofing nails had been. With my penknife, I scraped off some dry moss and lichens. Nick wiped off his plate against the sleeve of his hoodie. We crouched in a miserable lake of mud near the rear of the wagon with the tarp stretched between our cowboy hats. When I ladled the chili and rice onto our shingle plates, the copper stain leached up through the rice, turning it green.

  “Bon appétit,” I said, handing Nick his dinner on a shingle.

  “Bon appétit,” Nick said. “Just in case I forget to say so, I’m really glad I stayed with this trip.”

  I still felt terrible about Olive Oyl, and didn’t want her to spend the night outside in the rain. I told Nick that he could sleep with Olive in the wagon until she healed. Nick politely declined the offer. He didn’t think that my “college-educated ass” could stand a night in the storm and felt that Olive would feel more secure bundled up with him on the ground underneath the wagon.

  Nick and Olive Oyl had a wretched night. They were flooded out underneath the wagon and spent the night migrating in the dark between the log cabins, trying to find one with enough roof for a dry bed of manure.

  I didn’t sleep very well either. The rain pounded all night against the canvas cover and I could hear thunder far off, rolling across the high plains, but the Schuttler was not the comforting wagon-womb I had enjoyed during earlier storms. Pacific Springs was one long dread hour. We had been on such a high crossing the Sweetwater valley, fording streams, conquering Rocky Ridge, making good time as we saw the most epic and historic stretch of the trail. But now, as we faced the longest desert stretches of the trail, our provisions cart and our water supply lay in wreckage behind us at South Pass. We were sailors, cast adrift off the Horn in a leaky boat without food or water, figures out of Melville or Conrad.

  Still, I felt strangely energized by our litany of disasters. Blind endurance was all that we had left for tomorrow. I didn’t know if that would be enough to deliver us to Farson, but I didn’t feel hemmed in or bored with life’s challenges either. Journey was everything and the more difficult it became the more I felt that I was living the life I wanted.

  26

  DESERTS ARE NOT TORTURE SIMPLY because they are hot and lack water. Deserts are a planet of sameness offering only false turns and dashed hopes. I scouted on foot the next morning among the innumerable cattle tracks and old stagecoach ruts of a section of the trail called Parting of the Ways, where the Sublette Cutoff branched due west for Idaho while the main ruts proceeded south to Fort Bridger. But the alkali plains out there were an infinite regress of rock piles and dead ends. Finally, in desperation, I climbed back onto the wagon and told Nick to steer straight across the sage on a compass course for the Big Sandy River, and we stumbled upon the highway for Farson. After two more hours of probing the fence lines we found a gate onto a cattle road that led to the blacktop.

  Nick was exhausted from not sleeping the night before and spent most of the afternoon flopped on the wagon bed, so I drove alone for hours along the lonely highway to Farson. For four or five miles across the flats the monotony of sage and pink sand was endless but, far off, a rise in the land tempted me with visions of reaching a green, irrigated valley on the other side. But each time I called the mules over the rise, all I could see was the identical monotony of sand and sage, climbing once more through the mirages to another rise. Dreary rise to dreary rise, I spent the day fighting off sleep and worrying about finding water for the mules.

  In the late afternoon, a stocky, cheerful trooper from the Wyoming Highway Patrol, Ed Sabourin, stopped on the opposite shoulder of the highway and started taking pictures of the wagon with his iPhone—to show to his wife and children at home. I pulled up the mules to stop and he walked over from his patrol car.

  “Whoa, where are you guys from?” Sabourin said. “Nobody told us you were coming.”

  Sabourin told me that we were still twelve miles from Farson, where we could use the old wagon camp and Pony Express stop, the Big Sandy Station, which had a stable and public corrals for the mules. The town had developed lately as a service area for the big hydrofracked natural gas fields in the dry basins farther north, and we could probably find a mechanic who could run back to South Pass to retrieve our Trail Pup. Sabourin offered to double back for town and make sure that the water was turned on at the Pony Express stables, and arrange for a rancher friend to deliver us some hay.

  “Anything else you need?” Sabourin said.

  “Water,” I said. “We need water for the mules. Maybe twenty gallons?”

  Sabourin radioed from his patrol car and twenty minutes later a deputy from the Sweetwater County sheriff’s office showed up with three full coolers loaded into the back of his SUV. Nick woke up and held the mules while I emptied the coolers and the mules greedily slurped down several gallons apiece.

  After so many hours of riding alone, it was a joy to have Nick on the wagon seat again, and we had only one more rise to clear before we saw the welcome, irrigated lands of the Eden Valley north of Farson. I have never been so happy to see green again. Broad alfalfa
fields stretched east and west from the banks of the Little Sandy River and we passed farms, horses grazing in pastures of tall grass, then a school and a Baptist church. A day that had begun with so little hope, with so few resources to rely on, would soon end at the meeting of two sizable rivers, the Little Sandy and the Big Sandy. We had reached water.

  But our struggle for water was far from over. After spending several days using Farson as a base for wagon repairs, we would make a series of forty-mile dashes for water across a barren alkali flat called the Little Colorado Desert. From Farson on the Big Sandy, we would head on a beeline southwest for the Green River, then to the Hams Fork at Kemmerer. After climbing Dempsey Ridge to a unique, high-country source of water called Emigrant Springs, we would crest the last of the Wyoming Rockies to drop steeply down to the Bear River in Idaho. The parched desert of the cutoff country of western Wyoming would enforce a brutal discipline of travel. We couldn’t stop to camp each night until we reached the next source of water.

  “River to river, Nick,” I said. “Everything else gets eliminated as a worry. But at least we’ve proved that we can do that.”

  “I like it when life is that direct,” Nick said. “We’re just goin for water now.”

  • • •

  Farson was a great trail stop for us. We camped at the Big Sandy Pony Express Station, which sat on a hill beside town overlooking a green oasis formed by the flows of the Little Sandy and Big Sandy rivers, with expansive views of the pink desert stretching southwest. The old log-cabin structures and natural pastures along the Big Sandy had evolved in the usual way—from pioneer camp and road ranch along the Oregon Trail to Pony Express and stagecoach stop, then to a livery, blacksmith shop, and telegraph station during the homesteading years, and finally into the public corrals and rodeo grounds serving the northern portions of Sweetwater County today.