by Rinker Buck
We spent our first morning there patching fence and repairing the stables so that the mules would be comfortable during the long stop required to retrieve and repair the Trail Pup. Olive Oyl slowly got better after three days of moping in the wagon and began running around at night, chasing sticks down by the river for children who visited our camp. Nick established his bedroom on a cushion of dried straw and manure in the stable, near a pile of plastic and wooden toys used to entertain children during the rodeos. I slept in my wagon bed, delighted to be lulled to sleep by the sound of the racing river current below and the comforting ghosts of the past at the Big Sandy Station. It was here, in 1847, that mountain man Jim Bridger gave Brigham Young advice on leading the first Mormon trains into Salt Lake. In the 1860s, Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, and Sir Richard Burton stopped here on their stagecoach trips west.
The whole town of Farson—population 324—became our trail family. In the mornings, I climbed out of the covered wagon and Nick rose from his dirt hovel in the Pony Express stable and we walked over to Mitch’s Café for breakfast, falling in naturally with the bachelor ranchers and gas field crews who were the regulars there. They loved Nick and waved him over to their tables as soon as we stepped in, wanting to hear his incomparable yarns about horses or about fishing in Alaska. After breakfast, Nick ran off to a shop near Haystack Butte with a local cowboy and talented mechanic, Tell Brenneman, to chip the rot out of the Schuttler’s front wheels and repair them with steel bolts and epoxy glue. I stayed behind to go over my maps with the ranchers, many of whom had worked cattle or wrangled wild horses on the edges of the desert we had to cross. Gradually, I pieced together a route across the cutoffs to Idaho.
The next afternoon, Nick and Tell wound their way up to South Pass by the back trails in a pickup and long trailer, retrieved the Trail Pup, and hauled it back to Farson. When we cut into one spoke on the unbroken wheel of the cart, we found more black rot and concluded that we would have to ship both wheels back east to be rebuilt. That would take at least a month, and I reluctantly decided to leave the Trail Pup behind and transfer our water barrels and provisions to the main wagon. Ditching the Trail Pup and admitting that my prized design for crossing the West was now more trouble than it was worth would be difficult, but I was philosophical about it. Like the pioneers, I was trimming down and abandoning excess weight for the punishing crossing of the deserts ahead.
But wagon master Ben Kern, a veteran trail explorer and booster whom we had met in Casper, saved us. When I called him and told him about our accident at South Pass, he offered his own “kooster” half-cart for the rest of our trip. It had been sitting in a friend’s barnyard since his last big wagon trip and, within a day or two, he could run it down to Farson for us.
I was frantic for the next two days, making arrangements to ship the broken wheel hubs to Don Werner in Kansas for rebuilding, and arranging for the bed of the Trail Pup to be shipped ahead of us to Idaho where, later, we could have the new wheels shipped and rebuild the cart. I was dubious about using Don Werner again, but Nick and I concluded that we had no choice. Sending the wheels all the way back to Ohio or Pennsylvania to an unfamiliar Amish wheel shop would take too long.
Nick was furious that I was considering paying for new wheels. But I resorted once more to appreciation of the pioneers. Many of them had problems with their Missouri River outfitters too, but what could they do about it, a thousand miles away, out beyond South Pass? Their only choice had been to ditch their wagons, or cut them into carts, and continue moving west. There was a harsh determinism about it, a defiance of modernity that I liked. Taking on a covered wagon trip in 2011 wasn’t any different from taking one on in 1850.
The next morning, when I called him in Kansas, Don Werner was defensive. After we flipped the Trail Pup in Nebraska, I had sent him a picture of the downed cart with a note of thanks for building such a strong vehicle. I now realized that this was a mistake.
“Well, when you flipped that cart in Nebraska, you damaged the wheels,” Werner said. “Everything on that rig was perfect when it left here.”
“Don, we found rot in both wheels. There’s dry rot on the Schuttler wheels too, which we’re repairing right now.”
“Not from my shop, there wasn’t any rot,” Werner said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. You’ve abused that wagon too much.”
I told Werner that I had already shipped the wheel hubs back to him, and gave him a month to rebuild the wheels and ship them to us in Idaho. When we were done with the trip, I would settle up with him for the cost of rebuilding the wheels.
When I got back to the wagon after my call, Nick was disgusted with me for agreeing to pay Werner for the wheel repairs.
“You’re payin him to fix those wheels?” he said before stalking off. “This was all his fault.”
I sighed, and stared down at the Big Sandy, which was racing at flood stage around the corners of the old trail stop, carrying logs and debris underneath the highway bridge. It was early August and we were halfway to Oregon. We had survived peril after peril and I knew we could make it the rest of the way by the fall. It didn’t matter anymore how many mistakes I made. It didn’t matter that, to Nick, almost every decision I made defined me as a college-educated jackass with nonexistent mechanical skills. The whole trip was just one long collection of mistakes, and, to put mule shoes in Oregon, I had to be willing to make them.
• • •
At night, at the Big Sandy Station, as we sat around the wagon cooking Hormel chili, no beans, and brewing coffee, the oil field mechanics and ranchers who were helping us make repairs dropped down the hill to visit. Ed Sabourin came over after finishing his highway patrols and drove Nick back to his house for a shower. Wildlife officers from the BLM wanted to sit down with me and my maps, offering tips about how to get across the Little Colorado Desert. Everybody wanted to be a part of our ride and to help. We had enjoyed the same kind of hospitality at the public corrals since Marysville, Kansas, a thousand miles away. This was more than a lesson in how spontaneity and unplanned days are still so richly rewarded in the American West. On the Big Sandy, I found the soul of my country.
The Americans today who like to whine all the time because they say that taxes are too high and that government costs too much should leave their television sets behind for a while and go out and see the country they live in. For a change in their lives they could educate themselves about America by reading a book. They would learn by such activities that nothing happens by accident, and that the cordiality of the American West exists because real Americans with real problems willed over more than a century that it be so.
During the homesteading years that began after the Civil War, the recurrent financial panics of a very primitive American economy sent successive waves of displaced farming families west on the overland trails. There was still free land out west, available through a variety of federal programs, but mostly through the Donation Land Act of 1850 and then three separate Homestead Acts passed by Congress in 1862, 1909, and 1916. The essentially homeless, rootless American farming families who took advantage of this sensible government largesse often departed for the West not knowing where they would end up.
Many of these families didn’t find land right away, and the small settlements and nascent towns of the West discovered that they had a problem. When the homesteading families arrived, they needed a place to camp for a few weeks while they waited for their land claims to be approved. The families camped beside their wagons near the edge of town, or sometimes on vacant prairie lots surrounded by the new houses and general stores that were shooting up, and gradually improvements were made to make the newcomers more comfortable while they waited for their land. Barrels mounted on wooden stands were set up for water, wells were dug, and outhouses and platform lean-to shelters were built.
These temporary settlements were called “camp towns,” a term that was carried west after the similar shantytowns that had always formed on the outskirts of rapidly
developing cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Stephen Foster’s popular minstrel song of 1850, “Camptown Races” (“Gwine to run all night! Gwine to run all day! Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”), evoked the transient camps of African-Americans, where betting on horse races was common. These camps sprouted up around the rail yards in his own native western Pennsylvania and in any given year, there were dozens of similar camp towns all across America. In the nineteenth century, America was a developing country with an emerging town grid ringed by boisterous, haphazardly organized camp towns. That’s where people lived.
The need for these camp towns never went away. America throbbed with financial panics through the 1890s, and during World War I thousands of U.S. Army recruits were stalled in small western towns because of traffic snarls on the railroads. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s flung millions more out onto the roads. We think of the American West as a boundless, scenic space where city dwellers and tourists roam for a few weeks in the summer, vacationing and visiting the national parks. In fact, more often than not, the old frontier lands beyond the Missouri River have been a place where a lot of people at once needed a place to camp.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had an enormous impact on all of this, and permanently changed not only the face of the American landscape but our national character. The millions of men dispatched across the countryside to work in such New Deal programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Public Works Administration built the access roads, lodges, bridges, and campsites at the national parks. There was no national park system to speak of before the Depression. The millions of acres preserved a quarter century earlier during the Progressive Era were mostly just forests and empty open lands, with no entrance roads or campgrounds to accommodate people. (The original progressive ideal had been to preserve forests and wildlife habitats as pristine natural spaces, not necessarily places that the public would actually visit.) But creating better access and facilities for federal lands was only the beginning. The CCC also built, in all forty-eight states, an extensive system of state parks—more than eight hundred in all between 1933 and 1941—and developed more than fifty thousand acres of state campgrounds.
Many of these new parks were built right on top of the old camp towns. During the Great Depression, when millions of people were on the move again, the New Deal built them parks with clean bathrooms, showers, cooking pavilions, and fire pits. The government effort to build national and state parks—a legacy as important as Social Security or stock market regulation—was so extensive that a whole new architectural look was needed to systematize what was happening. CCC forestry projects and the excavations for road building produced a lot of logs and stones. The CCC also built an impressive network of sawmills, to produce planking and cedar shingles for park rangers’ houses and picnic pavilions, and the agency helped support itself by selling finished timber to the commercial lumber market. These basic materials were put to use creating the “government rustic” style, a look that merged features from the Adirondack, “arts and crafts,” and log-cabin designs with the distinctive poled porches, shingle siding, and intersecting eaves and dormers that still dominate park architecture today. This look proved attractive, and the contingencies of an economic depression had an interesting and lasting impact on American design. Today, the mansion districts of Vail and Beaver Creek, Colorado, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Lake Tahoe, California, are heavily influenced by this lodge-style “parkitecture.”
During the 1950s and early 1960s, when the interstate highway system was built, America was on the move again. Touring the national parks created during the Depression was the only vacation many families could afford, gasoline was cheap, and many working-class families from the Midwest owned small pop-up camping trailers that auto and steel industry workers used for hunting and fishing trips. Families drove out to Yellowstone or Glacier National Park for a couple of weeks, camping at the CCC facilities along the way. State tourist agencies considered free or modestly priced camping facilities an important asset, both for establishing a reputation for hospitality and capturing tourist dollars for nearby towns. During the postwar years the states spent considerable sums adding free showers, recreation pavilions, and ball fields to the summer campgrounds. On public lands along the North Platte River in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming, and the Snake River in Idaho, a network of fishing access points with campgrounds was also built. The public pump-priming helped build the recreational hunting and fishing industry into the $150 billion sector it is today, and once more the echoes of nineteeth-century pioneer life influenced the look and economic prosperity of the country. West of the Missouri, many of these campgrounds and public amenities were built not just near the Oregon Trail, but on the Oregon Trail.
The ranching system that evolved in the West after the 1880s developed another kind of facility that can be found in virtually every western town. Large herds of cattle have to be moved twice a year, in the late spring and early fall, between summer grazing areas in the mountains and the winter rangelands below on the sagebrush flats. Ranches aren’t so much a single place as a collection of grazing areas, some privately owned by the rancher, some government “allotments” on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) parcels, interconnected by cattle paths, feedlots, and highways. Nationwide, about 35 million calves are born every year, usually in February, requiring a mass movement of cowboys and horses to tend the herds every winter. But winter winds and storms often force the closure of highways, trapping cowboys and their stock trailers overnight, or for a few nights, in small towns. In sparsely populated Wyoming, at the approach of a large storm, the state highways are locked shut with heavy metal gates, so that motorists can’t get stranded on a lonely section of road drifted with snow.
As a result, for more than a century now, most western towns have maintained “public corrals” with good access to the highways, so that the ranchers can turn their horses loose in a safe place and then camp in their trailers or find a nearby motel for themselves. Today, many of these public corrals also serve as the local rodeo grounds. Before that, they were Pony Express stables, stagecoach stops, and military bivouacs. Along the Oregon Trail, many of these public spaces began their existence as overnight camping spots for the wagon trains.
Today, the West is still full of such places, creating an interesting political irony. Some of the most conservative, red-state bastions in America—Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho—are the most park-rich states of all, with rodeo corrals, state fairgrounds, and free or inexpensive municipal campgrounds nearly everywhere. Untold millions in tax dollars were spent to build these national assets, and millions of dollars of public funds are spent every year to maintain them. The public corrals and parks measurably improve the quality of life and the local economies. But this region is also the Tea Party belt, where the central ideological pretense of the day is that government is the enemy and that every penny of taxes collected is a political crime.
The picture in Wyoming is typical of most western states. In Wyoming, travel and tourism—a sector heavily subsidized by government—is a $3 billion annual business. In Casper alone, there are two large Oregon Trail museums, one maintained by the city, the other by the BLM, and the tourists flock to them on the way to Yellowstone National Park or Fossil Butte National Monument. The federal government pours roughly $6 billion into Wyoming every year, more than $4 billion of that for assorted BLM, forestry, tourism, and road projects, making Wyoming one of the most federally dependent states in the country. According to federal statistics compiled by the news service WyoFile.com, in 2011 Wyoming residents paid an average of $6,795 in federal taxes, but the state collected more than $11,000 per capita in federal funds. In Wyoming, there are twice as many federal employees—thirteen thousand—as state employees. Federal dollars flow into the state and private coffers of Wyoming as plentifully as water spilling over the North Platte dams. Tea Party antitax activism isn’t just hypocrisy. It is total bunk.
Over the summer, we camped at small-town public parks and the public corrals dozens of times, across two thousand miles of America. We lived on the public space established by the pioneers. Rugged individualism and manifest destiny, for which the West is still celebrated, are fine things to believe in, but they never existed as abstractions. People were desperate and they needed free land and free places to camp, which government decided to supply, and still does. This national legacy was one of the best discoveries of crossing the Oregon Trail, but we never would have found it without detaching ourselves from the umbilical cord of the interstates and the motel chains, forcing ourselves to forage every night for a place to stay.
• • •
We left Farson early in the morning after a five-day camp. Ed Sabourin met us on the hill above the public corrals, his cruiser lights flashing, so that he could “escort” us up the highway until we made the turn onto the dusty Farson Cutoff. Just before Mitch’s Café, he gave his siren a squeal and the ranchers and waitresses poured out of the café and stood in the parking lot with their cups of coffee, cheering and urging us on.
“Go get ’em, boys! We’re rootin for ya!”
“Yo, Nick! Don’t let a mule sit on you!”
One of the ranchers who had helped me with the maps had scrawled a motto on the back of a paper place mat with his pen.
OREGON OR BUST!
Nick and I spent the next fifteen hours bouncing and rattling across the draws of the Little Colorado Desert, swapping driving duties while one of us sought relief from the sun and dust in the back of the wagon. We had just one mission to accomplish by nightfall, or even after dark if it came to that. We had to reach the Green River, more than forty miles away across the scorching sands. We had just enough water in our barrels to keep the mules hydrated for twenty-four hours. But we would probably be empty by the morning, and would have to water the mules and refill the barrels from the Green before we took on an even longer forced march for water—more than fifty miles to the Hams Fork River on the western edge of Wyoming. There was no stopping until we made camp within sight of the Green. I discovered, however, that I could just barely tolerate the tedium of sand and black rock by noticing the minute patterns of life in the desert environment. There was a fascinating connection, too, between observing the wildlife and navigating over the sands.