by Rinker Buck
The desert actually teemed with wildlife, which I could easily see by keeping track of the geologic formations we were passing in the wagon. Spiny, exposed skeletons of rock beside the trail usually announced the approach of a dry creek wash, where there were often prairie dog colonies drawn to the underground flows of water. Because the prairie dogs were there, prairie falcons and red-tailed hawks were circling low for prey. The creek washes were unnamed but marked on my topographic maps, and by looking ahead through the mirages for the raptor birds, I could roughly gauge our progress across the endless flats.
Observing the wild horse herds also provided occasional waypoints, and relief from the boredom and heat of crossing the desert. Piles of stallion manure beside the trail—dropped by the dominant males to mark their breeding area and to protect their mare harems—gradually increased in height as we neared the center of a herd. Near the tallest manure piles, worn, single-file horse paths dipped south as the land fell to an occasional watered draw or mud hole. The mares and their foals linger all summer as close as they can to the water draws, and we often saw small herds there, browsing on the richer grass near moisture. “Bachelor herds” of young studs driven away by the dominant stallion wandered closer to the trail, nibbling on the short, sparse grass away from the draws. They were scrawny and looked lonely and lost, and they pointed their ears and galloped over from the hills nearby, curious about the mules. The taller the manure piles, the closer we were to the draws to the south, many of which were also marked on the maps.
We were also passing through the southern edge of the Jonah gas fields, one of two vast hydraulic fracturing zones that stretched north almost to the Wind Rivers and the Tetons. The old cutoff country to the Green River Rendezvous was just one long “Energy Trail” now, and Nick and I started counting the gas pads we could see in the distance from the wagon seat. By the end of the day, we had passed forty-six wells. These too were marked on the maps—Little Colorado Well Number 5, Little Colorado Well Number 13.
That was our life until nightfall, watching the wildlife, and navigating across the ruts, according to the wealth of detail available from the seat of a covered wagon. We watched for hawks, assessed the height of stallion piles, and counted fracked wells, cross-checking these fixes on our maps. When battling sleep became too much, but I couldn’t nap in the bumpy wagon bed, I climbed off and walked. Several times we thought that we saw the Green River, but these were false sightings caused by the low afternoon light slanting through the mirages.
At dusk, the land suddenly dropped off to our right and we could see a large, S-shaped lake, gray-blue in the weak light, and then a ribbon of oxbows falling to the south. It was the big reservoir where the river was held back by the Fontenelle Dam.
“The Green, Nick. That’s the Green River.”
We pushed on through the dark for two miles, occasionally losing the ruts as we steered for the river. We stopped on a high rise a quarter of a mile from the Green, stumbling around in the dark as we unharnessed and built fencing for the mules. I carried the last of our water to the team while Nick made dinner with just the light from the burners of the gas stove. The views down to the river and the flats beyond were spectacular and we were too tired to say very much.
“Forty-two miles in one day,” I said to Nick. “The Big Sandy to the Green.”
“It feels like Farson was a month ago.”
“It was a month ago. There is no time out here.”
“I don’t ever want to go back home,” Nick said. “I want to live out here in the wagon for the rest of my life.”
The desert cooled rapidly after the sun set. I wrapped myself in an extra blanket and stared down from the wagon at the silvery band of the river. Deserts are supposedly barren spaces but I had navigated all day by the clues of the terrain and the richness of wildlife. The black expanse of the cutoff country to the west seemed inviting and I would find a way through there too.
27
WE MADE OUR LAST CAMP in Wyoming at 8,300 feet on the top of Dempsey Ridge. From the alpine heights we looked across an immense gorge to the sandstone palisades of Fossil Butte National Monument. For two days we had climbed the mules up the steep ruts of the Sublette Cutoff, emerging every few hours onto a series of stepped plateaus that were brilliant with yellow rudbeckia and purple thistles. We filled our water barrels at the Hams Fork River and, almost at the top of the ridge, at the old wagon campground at Emigrant Springs. We saw no one and at night the only sounds we heard were the wind whistling through the wagon cover and the mules placidly grinding their molars on high mountain grass, which filled me with a sense of complete isolation and freedom. River to river and pasturage to pasturage we had followed the old pioneer road, living as they did, simply, off the land. But we still faced an inescapable irony of the Oregon Trail. Reaching these beautiful places also required escaping them. Our only route down to the safety of the Bear River valley in Idaho was a two-thousand-foot plunge through Rock Creek Ridge.
The trail we patched together across the old pioneer shortcuts—we followed portions of the Farson, Slate Creek, and Sublette cutoffs—was about seventy miles shorter than following the main ruts south to Fort Bridger, and it delivered us to high country that one 1849 pioneer called a “perfect oasis in the desert.” In the early days of the trail, the last mountain barrier before the Bear River sheltered exotic remnants of the fur-trapping era, a mid-nineteenth-century melting pot high above the neighboring desert. Small bands of Shoshone and Snake Indians were camped on the ridges above Hams Fork, and these were interspersed with colorful “Frenchmen” camps of mixed-marriage fur trappers and Indian squaws. As fur trapping waned and the big summer rendezvous along the Green River ended, these Indian and French traders drifted north to resupply the emigrant trains by selling crafts, equipment salvaged from abandoned wagons, and preserved food. The pioneers would encounter these trading camps—each a sort of mixed-race flea market, bake sale, and entertainment center—all the way west to the Columbia River, as the crude merchant system originally formed to service the fur trappers evolved into spontaneous road ranches supporting the white migration.
In 1849, mapmaker and artist J. Goldsborough Bruff met one trader above the Hams Fork who had counted more than three thousand wagons that passed though during the month of June alone. “Here was a mixture, white women, and squaws & children, of every age and hue,” Bruff wrote, and they were camped in a mixed settlement of tepees, covered wagons, and temporary summer houses made of brush and sticks. The traders were dressed in deerskin shirts and pants, and the camps were filled with crude log booths displaying Indian goods and provisions—moccasins, skin water jugs, dried fish, and smoked muskrat. “Fat ponies and horses” for sale browsed in the meadows.
For the covered wagon travelers who had diverted due west and missed Fort Bridger, the mixed-race camp below Emigrant Springs was the first opportunity to trade in more than 250 miles, and they were fascinated by these mountain nomads. One night Bruff and a party of musicians from his covered wagon train, carrying violins, a bugle, and an accordion, walked over to the traders’ camp nearby and were invited inside one of the skin lodges.
Our party of a dozen, and the Frenchmen & squaws, all crowded around the interior of the lodge. . . . They performed several lively airs, such as “Dan Tucker,” “Carry me back to old Virginia,” “Zip Coon,” Etc. accompanied by singing, which delighted the traders much, and particularly the Indians.
Another “pleasant divertissement of the mind and eye,” as one pioneer called it, greeted the wagon travelers as they climbed above Emigrant Springs at seven thousand feet. Thick stands of mature whitebark pine and aspen swayed in the mountain breezes, the first extensive shade that the pioneers had found since Ash Hollow in Nebraska, 650 miles behind them. The surprise of finding carving surfaces as inviting as these trees had the same effect on the pioneers as Independence Rock or Devil’s Gate. By 1850 the lower trunks of what was variously called Pine Grove or Aspen Grove were so covere
d with names that the pioneers had to climb to the high branches to find a place in the bark to leave their initials. Pioneers and their children shinnied up the trees as high as they could to see if they could discover the names of friends or relatives who they knew were crossing the trail in front of them.
Wisconsin pioneer Jared Fox established a near record for a speedy crossing in 1852 when, relentlessly lightening his load and passing fifty to a hundred wagons a day, he reached Oregon City by the remarkable date of August 17. Fox is also appreciated by trail historians as a meticulous recorder of detail. Hurrying over the top of the Sublette Cutoff, he paused long enough to describe the elaborate forest of initials at Aspen Grove.
Passed through a grove of some 20 rods shade, the most timber we have seen in a thousand miles & in this grove there is I suppose 5 or 10 thousand, for aught I know, names cut in the trees. Some printed with chalk or waggon grease, red paint & anything and everything. Dates from 1845 to the present, but most 1850 & many of them are 10 to 15 feet from the ground.
But there was a price to be paid for these scenic pauses, and the time saved by cutting straight across the deserts. Dempsey Ridge dropped to the Bear River valley as a straight defile west with precipitously high canyon walls, which limited the pioneers’ ability to maneuver around cliffs and formations of slate ledges that fell in steps to the grassy bottomlands below. The two thousand feet in elevation that the pioneers had gained in fifteen miles of climbing from the Hams Fork would now have to be shed in less than two miles of descent. It was a wagon driver’s nightmare, and negotiating it was made possible only by the advantage of traveling in wagon trains, which provided enough human labor and restraining equipment to hold back the wagons with ropes after the rear wheels had been chained. The wagons were also lowered by roping fallen logs or large rocks to the rear axle, adding drag for the slope.
There were two routes down this covered wagon chute. The first trended northwest over milder terrain to the top of Dempsey Ridge and then dropped through a series of excavated switchbacks to the Bear River just a few miles from present-day Cokeville, Wyoming. But this route has gradually disappeared over time through neglect and reforestation. The second route plunged due west down to a secondary elevation, Rock Creek Ridge. In high-water years, the Rock Creek descent was notorious for gullies and washed-out trail where fast-running creeks crossed the ruts. The Rock Creek ruts are a classic example of how solving one problem of wagon travel often created a new one. In the early 1850s this route had been relocated away from steep fifty-foot cliffs that were hidden in the tree groves and required an emptying of the wagons and then a difficult belaying of the wagon boxes and running gear with ropes. But the new route was prone to washouts and difficult creek fords.
In her 1852 diary, Abigail Jane Scott reported that she walked ten miles the day her wagon train crested Dempsey Ridge, probably because of the need to lighten the wagons for the steep slopes, and because the experience of sitting on a wagon pitched straight downhill was both frightening and dangerous. “We traveled two miles without unlocking the wagon wheels,” Scott wrote, “and in many places the men held back the wagon in addition to having both back wheels locked.” The dread associated with the final drop into Idaho’s Bear River valley was expressed by the name the pioneers gave this stretch of trail. The exit from the Sublette Cutoff was called the “Rock Slide.”
I didn’t deliberately choose the Rock Slide because I preferred a last, perilous descent out of Wyoming. We could have followed the main ruts south toward Rock Springs and Fort Bridger, and then picked our way along the ranch roads and highways that curled in a long loop around Fossil Butte and then north onto the Bear River. However, the paved Route 30, portions of which we would have to follow to remain with the main ruts, is busy with semitruck traffic. This notoriously accident-prone two-lane highway is curved and drops precipitously through canyons with almost no road shoulders, and several truckers and ranchers I’d spoken with in Farson warned me to stay off the highway. Besides, water would be difficult to find in the parched butte country to the south. Emigrant Springs below Dempsey Ridge was our last chance to refill our barrels for the final assault on the Rockies. The end of the Sublette Cutoff was our only modern wagon route to the Bear.
• • •
During our torpid days in the deserts, and then while we climbed up through the rock outcrops and pine groves of Dempsey Ridge, Nick took long afternoon naps on the mattress behind me and I spent a lot of time alone on the wagon seat. The mules were peaceful and easy to handle and softly tugged the lines in my hands. The wildflower fields were lyrical gardens in the sky. I fell into the combined melancholia and joyful romance that comes with rigorous travel and I felt meditative about my past, winsome. I was completely at home on the covered wagon, at rest with myself, and was finally beginning to understand the forces that had driven me west and compelled me to prove myself.
When I was in college, my friends and my professors occasionally chastised me for complaining about my father and his meddling ways. “You need to accept that families are always difficult,” my favorite professor, James Bland, said to me once. “At least your father cares. He has goaded you to do good work.”
When I graduated from college in 1973, I won the history prize and was selected as a commencement speaker, but my father was not there to share this with me. He had retired and moved to rural Pennsylvania two years earlier and his health had rapidly declined. There were some weeks when he was fine and could remain active, and he sounded on the phone as if his old exuberance had returned, but there were other weeks when his phantom pains were so severe that his doctors worried about the impact on his heart. The month that I graduated was not a good one and he couldn’t travel north to Maine. My closest friends from New Jersey drove up instead and became my surrogate family for the weekend.
But there was one last favor that he could provide. On a motorcycle trip south that spring, I had talked my way into my first writing job, at the respected Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts, a “feeder paper” for talent hoping to move on to big-name publications in New York. My responsibilities would include taking photographs for the stories I wrote. I was knowledgeable about photography but completely unskilled at using a camera, but this was exactly the kind of challenge I enjoyed. I had three months to give myself a crash course in taking pictures before the job began. I rented a cheap room in a boardinghouse in Great Barrington and found work at an all-night truck stop out on the turnpike, but I still couldn’t afford to buy a camera. When my father learned about that he offered me his best 35-millimeter camera, a Nikkormat, and several expensive lenses. They just happened to be in New York, he said, getting serviced and cleaned at “the best photo shop in Manhattan.” I could start my first job with the finest photo equipment available.
“Why don’t we meet in the city next week?” he said. “I can give you the camera and show you how to use it, and we’ll go to lunch.”
The details about our luncheon date seemed a bit off. In the past I had usually met my father at publishing industry haunts where he felt comfortable and would run into old friends, fashionable midtown restaurants like Sardi’s or the 21 Club, but this time he asked me to meet him at a seedy Irish pub way over on Tenth Avenue, because that would be closer to his parking lot. I got there on time and chained my motorcycle to a parking meter between a Puerto Rican bodega and a used furniture store on Forty-Sixth Street, feeling out of place while I waited for my father at the bar, which was mostly filled with idlers and a few construction workers drinking beer with their lunch.
My father arrived late, carrying a small travel bag and a brown manila shopping bag with paper handles, and I tried not to show my reaction to his appearance. He looked jaunty in his crisp white shirt and a summer-weight Irish tweed jacket that I recognized from years before, but it no longer fit him. He had lost a lot of weight and the thinned curvature of his cheeks reminded me of an old picture of him that my mother had kept on her dresser for years
, taken when he was in his mid-thirties and underweight, still recovering from his air crash in 1946. But he was sprightly in that photo and his face beamed with optimism about the small magazine he had just founded. Now, the sadness in his eyes and the defensive inflection in his voice were things I had not noticed before.
We moved to a table away from the bar and my father asked me if I wanted a beer, and said that he was ordering one for himself too. This was the first time I had ever seen him order a drink. He had been sober for twenty-five years and his identity as an AA disciple was so complete that I considered it an inseparable part of his personality. I must have looked surprised.
“Well, son,” he said. “Sometimes after a life of successful sobriety a man like me decides that it’s safe to drink again. Just a little. I can handle it now.”
After we ordered a simple lunch of hamburgers and french fries, my father started emptying the camera and lenses from the paper bag. He had also brought me a new camera bag with separate storage compartments for film, lenses, cleanser, and the like. He thought that I would look “real smart,” “a young reporter on the make,” with the camera bag slung over my shoulder as I chased around the Berkshires for my stories. He explained a few things about f-stops and exposure speeds that I already knew and regaled me with stories about the famous Life and Look photographers he’d known over the years. I loved my father most for this trait. The stores of information and trivia that were hidden in his memory, and then presented later as conversational surprises, had always impressed me, and I enjoyed myself at lunch. There were glimmers, lasting just a few moments, of his old brio and appeal.