by Rinker Buck
“This is disgusting,” she said. “I am not cooking on top of filth like this.”
Cindy came over for a look herself.
“This is revolting,” she said. “Rinker, you used to be so clean and neat.”
I didn’t think our kitchen gear looked that bad. A few of our dishes were stuck together because the night before we had accidentally spilled some harness oil on them after dinner, and clusters of dog hair, hayseed, and oats had stuck to our fingerprints. I had scraped most of the scorched Minute Rice, Wesson Oil, and Hormel chili, no beans, off of the pots and pans. Yes, our food coolers were shiny with cooking oil and axle grease and slipped out of our hands on a rainy day. But this was normal. Everything was shipshape, exactly as it should be on a covered wagon trip.
I explained to Cindy that I washed the dishes myself every morning.
“What did you wash them with?” Cindy said. “Motor oil?”
“A caveman wouldn’t eat on these plates,” Donna said. “Get out of here while we do a rescue clean.”
Nick walked over to see what the fuss was about. He pulled an undershirt out of our laundry bag and began rubbing the grime off the frying pan.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies,” he said. “Let’s not panic here. I’ve got some Grease Monkey Scrub in my tool kit and I’ll shine these pots right up for ya.”
Donna raised her voice now.
“Go. Both of you. Out of this camp for an hour.”
Perhaps I could smooth things over by offering to help.
“Cindy,” I said. “While you wash, I can dry, okay?”
“Did you hear her, dickhead?” Cindy shrieked. “Out! Out of this camp! Why don’t you go somewhere and take a shower!”
“There’s detergent and Scotch Brite in the bottom of the green cooler,” I said. “I’ll get it for you.”
“Go! Out of this camp!”
I looked over my shoulder as Nick and I meekly walked toward town, and what I saw is still one of my favorite images of the trip. Cindy and Donna were bent over a plastic washbasin with our kitchen equipment spread out on the grass. Olive Oyl snoozed in the shade of the wagon behind them. The pressure nozzle on the hose was spraying a rainbow-colored fan of water, and the wind picked up the foamy detergent along Cindy and Donna’s tanned arms and blew it away in bubbles.
When we got back an hour later the whole camp smelled like Brillo pads and Palmolive cleanser. Cindy and Donna had even washed the mule buckets, our camp chairs, and the wagon seat.
• • •
Cindy didn’t believe my claims about western nightlife either. After my trips herding cattle or covering wildfires in Wyoming or Arizona, I often described to her how I would drive every night to the nearest set of public corrals and camp, enjoying the carefree, bumptious company that I found at the local rodeo grounds. The rodeo corrals of the West, like the Dairy Queens in the Midwest, are major dating sites. The fun, wisecracking cowgirls and their hunky boyfriends all start rolling into the corrals together around six o’clock in the evening, in pickups towing horse trailers, four or five teenagers sitting on each other’s laps in the cab. For the rest of the night they goof off and flirt, cook hot dogs and steaks on barbecue grills, smoke and sneak beers, and then saddle up and chase around the ring for a couple of hours, practicing their roping or barrel-race turns for the summer rodeos. There’s always an extra horse and I loved those nights in the West, cantering around the rings with a pack of young riders.
“You’re such an exaggerator—nobody lives that way anymore,” Cindy said a couple of times when I told her about my latest trip. “You just go to the corrals to look at pretty girls.”
But, sure enough, the teenagers in their pickups and horse trailers started to arrive about an hour after we got to the McCammon corrals. While Donna cooked up a shish kebob feast on the grill, Cindy and I helped the rodeo kids unload and saddle their horses. They were an attractive group, mostly just fifteen or sixteen, but seeming much older because they were so experienced with their mounts.
Cindy and I sat high on the rodeo bleachers, sharing some wine, watching the riders circle on their horses.
“Okay, so I’m sorry,” Cindy said. “I never should have doubted what you said about life out here. Will it be like this every night?”
“Pretty much. All you have to do is roll in with the rig, and the fun begins. Everyone wants to be a part of your trip.”
“Nobody cares where you camp?”
“Nobody cares. Just live.”
“Okay, so how are you doing? You look so trim.”
“Yeah, thanks. From Ash Hollow in Nebraska to here, I’ve probably walked four hundred miles ahead of the wagon, jacking fences. I must have lost twenty-five pounds.”
“Drinking? What about drinking? You’re only getting one more wine tonight, by the way.”
“Cindy, I got drunk one night in early July in a cowboy bar in Glenrock, Wyoming. The ranchers were buying, okay? But that was seven hundred miles ago. No drinking. There’s no time to drink when you’re running mules and scouting trail.”
“Okay, sleeping. What about sleeping? Maybe you actually sleep now?”
“Like an old dog. There’s no insomnia on the Oregon Trail.”
“Okay, reading. What about the reading?”
“Cindy, you’re not going to believe this one, but nothing. I’ve read exactly two pages of Wallace Stegner since we left. What is reading, anyway? I don’t even remember that person. I don’t have time for reading.”
“Oh, boy,” Cindy said. “Where are we? What state are we in, again?”
“Idaho.”
“Idaho. But they have doctors, right? They must have doctors in Idaho. We can get you checked.”
“Ha, ha, ha. Let’s eat dinner, and then we’ll put up your tent.”
The McCammon corrals swelled with sociability that night. Two draft-horse couples from nearby ranches, towing along their grandchildren, dropped by to inspect the Schuttler and our mules, and they gave us several bales of alfalfa hay. More teenagers pulled in with their horse vans, and the rodeo grounds began to fill up with young families and children as an amateur-league softball game began on the diamond nearby. The town maintenance man dropped over to visit and tell us that he had relocated the lawn sprinklers so that they wouldn’t spray on Cindy and Donna’s tent. He would leave the door to the restrooms near the ball field unlocked for the night.
After dinner we borrowed a couple of horses and took turns galloping around the rodeo ring, and I was surprised by how well Donna rode. Cindy and I stood with our arms resting on the top rail of the arena fence, watching her circuit on a buckskin mare. Donna leaned in almost perfectly with the gait of the horse, signaling a turn more with her body than the reins, and then pulled up in front of us in a wisp of dust.
“Go, girl,” I said. “How come you didn’t tell us you could ride so well?”
“It’s only my third or fourth time on a horse,” Donna said. “I love this out here!”
Then she galloped off again.
“See, what did I tell you?” Cindy said. “This is so good for her. It’s the covered wagon cure.”
• • •
Nick and I felt joyfully reunited as a wagon pair after Cindy and Donna left. West of American Falls the contrasts in the landscape passed like a lyrical microcosm of America. Out past Dietrich and Gooding, where the ground is irrigated, there is a green Eden of dairy farms that looks like Minnesota. Other stretches along the Snake, where the land is not watered, could pass for Death Valley. Along the Owyhee Mountains south of Boise, the August potato and onion harvest was under way, and the open trucks racing by with several tons of pungent onions made the mules sneeze. We camped several times at state fishing pullouts along the Snake. In the morning I loved waking early, stuffing our dishes and pots from the night before into my knapsack, hiking down to a quiet cove along the river, stripping bare, and stepping into the water up to my chest. I floated the dishes and a bottle of detergent out behind me to w
ash them, and then held them farther out to rinse in the current. While I shaved, by looking at the reflection of my face in the river, iridescent circles of soap and dish detergent eddied downstream.
By Homedale, at the western edge of Idaho, the long stretches of lava-rock fields and concrete highways had worn the mule shoes down to thin, shiny shards of steel. We stopped for two days and camped at the fairgrounds in town to find blacksmiths and to grease the wheels. Nick hitched a ride with a rancher back to American Falls to retrieve his pickup. Homedale was an enjoyable, civilized respite for us in a quintessential American small town, and we ate breakfast and dinner at the Owyhee Lanes and Restaurant, bowling after dinner before we returned to camp.
Still, our domicile at the fairgrounds and the pleasant routines of Homedale made me feel hemmed in, stalled. More than three months of obsessing for miles had turned me into a feral, nomadic creature who couldn’t stop moving, and life was no longer life for me when the wagon wasn’t pushing west all day. At dawn, I shivered through an hour of anxiety while I fed and watered the mules. I could almost smell Oregon now, but we weren’t there yet. It was only eight miles away and I couldn’t stand the suspense.
The morning when it was time to go, Nick helped me harness the mules and then leaned against the metal gate of the fairground corrals, looking down and gently toeing the dust with one boot. He pushed his cowboy hat back on his head and looked up.
“Boss, I’m headin into town for hardware parts, and then I think I’m goin to do some clothes at the Laundromat. Okay?”
“Nick, now?” I said. “Now?”
“Rinker, I think you should drive this last stretch into Oregon by yourself. This is your trip. You decided to do it. I really like the idea of getting back to Maine and telling everyone that you drove the mules into Oregon alone.”
“You think I should do that?”
“I think you should do that.”
And so, solo with the mules, I drove the last, dream stretch into Oregon. It was a beautiful, cool morning to be alone on a wagon, and the harness jingled and the iron rims sang as I passed the alfalfa farms and the irrigated orchards along the quiet road west. The country in western Idaho is hilly, and from the tops of the rises I could see the golden folds of the Owyhee Mountains ahead. I passed a mobile home with lovely gardens and my heart started to race when we reached the Stateline Store: GAS—BEER—POP. At Deer Flat I saw the large green sign ahead and started to sing to the mules.
WELCOME TO OREGON
I wanted to cry but couldn’t, I wished Nick were there to share this with me, and I was proud of my mules. There was a nice breeze on my face as I talked to the team and I thought again of my father and what I would tell him now. Thank you, Dad, for raising us so crazyass, because that was the reason I could not only imagine this trip, but do it too. Right then, I didn’t mind at all being just who I was—a loopy, anachronistic, dreaming jackass who had crossed to Oregon in a covered wagon. That was the journey I dreamed for myself and now we were there.
At the large green WELCOME TO OREGON sign I pulled the team onto the sandy shoulder of the road and tapped the sign with my hand as we passed by.
“Twelve shoes in Oregon, Team! Big Team! Big Team! Jake! Beck! Bute! Big Team! Twelve shoes in Oregon, Team.”
The road into Oregon from there twists beautifully down into an agricultural valley along North Alkali Creek. Irrigated alfalfa and soybean fields are planted like wall-to-wall carpeting across the bottomlands and, to the west, brown grasslands rise to the Owyhee Range. I passed several horse farms, and, at one of them, a buckaroo wearing a wide sombrero straw hat was saddling a chesty palomino-paint at a hitching post beside a red barn. He waved, quickly finished cinching his saddle girth, and galloped out to meet the wagon. The cowboy was named Clyde and he was training the paint for a client up in Prairie City. He rode beside me for an hour and we talked, and the spontaneous trail companionship seemed like something I had dreamed for myself about arriving in Oregon.
A few miles ahead, the road joined some low grassy banks along the Snake. Clyde tied his horse to the rear wheel of the Schuttler, climbed onto the wagon seat, and held the lines while I watered the mules from the river.
Clyde galloped off after that, a friendly cowboy on a pretty paint disappearing into the green bottomlands. On the road ahead, the wheels rhythmically sounded on the pavement joints, and my blue jeans were refreshingly wet and cool from watering the team. The scent of freshly mowed alfalfa was hypnotic. I was in Oregon now, alone with my mules on the road toward Keeney Pass, and I didn’t think that I would ever again enjoy such a perfect day.
29
PROBABLY VERY FEW NINETEENTH-CENTURY OVERLANDERS believed the exaggerated claims about pigs fattening to the size of cows and turnips growing as big as pumpkins in the fertile Pacific Northwest, but nevertheless there was a widely shared assumption that Oregon would be grassy and arboreal. Disillusionment was the reward for getting there. The long “rain shadow” cast by the distant Cascades limited precipitation to eight inches or less a year on the lee side of the mountains. Eastern Oregon is the far edge of the Great American Desert and the pioneers and their failing draft animals would struggle across another three hundred miles of salt flats and yellowish-brown ravines before they reached the green Willamette Valley.
For the wagons, eastern Oregon became one long breakdown lane. After banging over every rock and dry creek bed along 1,700 miles of river frontage, and drying out and cracking in the desert heat, the Schuttlers and the Studebakers were falling apart faster than the pioneers could repair them. Many pioneers, following the example of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, cut their disintegrating wagons into one-axle carts and continued on with a single draft animal. When those broke down too, they walked or rode the rest of the way to the Columbia River and then boated down to the Pacific coast.
There was no single way to reach the end of the trail and a lively atmosphere of experimentation prevailed, turning the last stretch to the Pacific into a busy jalopy and boat works. As far back as the middle Snake, many pioneers decided to leave their wheels and running gear behind. Then they caulked the wagon boxes and floated them downriver, making long, difficult portages between the Snake and the smaller rivers ahead, following a meandering northwest course to the Columbia. In high-water years, these unwieldy wagon scows capsized in the rapids, and in low-water years they ran aground, and the rivers continued to exact sizable death tolls. Accurately calculating the percentage of wagons that made it all the way across is impossible today, but probably no more than half of the white-tops that left the jumping-off grounds along the Missouri finally made it past the Cascades intact.
The scuttled wagons and parts along the linear junkyard of eastern Oregon rarely sat for very long on the desert floor. Milled lumber was a valuable asset in frontier America and it was aggressively recycled, often more than once. During the flatboat and canal era in the 1830s and 1840s, coal, grain, and livestock from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the upper Midwest were floated to markets in New Orleans and beyond along the Mississippi river system. After the cargo was unloaded, some of these flatboats were poled back upriver, but that was arduous work and few river men enjoyed taking on the Mississippi’s powerful southern flow. Import-export towns like New Orleans were rapidly expanding at the time and needed lumber. On the Louisiana waterfront, the flatboats were carefully disassembled and the deck planking and framing timber were sold to be planed for houses, furniture, and wagons. The salvage value of Wisconsin or Illinois lumber carried downriver as a flatboat often delivered a large share of the profits for a cargo trip, and hundreds of boats were built every year with the explicit idea of quick resale on the New Orleans waterfront.
In the 1850s, the same kind of industry was built up at the Dalles and other settlements along the Columbia River. For a fee, teams of carpenters would take apart a wagon and use the parts to fashion a raft or a keelboat, sometimes even building a crude sleeping shanty on deck, and the pioneers continued towar
d the Willamette Valley on these marine contraptions. Commercial boat operators also hauled paying passengers downstream, many of them accepting payment in the form of wagons and teams. At Portland and Oregon City, most of these vessels were converted to fishing boats or river ferries, or taken apart and sold by the board foot as housing or furniture lumber. In most years, of course, the majority of wagons that reached Oregon managed to struggle over the Blue Mountains ahead and then follow the Barlow Road Cutoff around the Cascades. But hundreds of thousands of board feet of milled lumber also reached the west coast as wagon salvage, providing building material for mining camps, farms, and the burgeoning cities of northern California and Oregon.
It’s interesting to speculate just how far a single board from a covered wagon might have traveled, and how many uses it served before ending up as tavern flooring or siding on a livery barn in Portland or Sacramento. Certainly the leftovers from the estimated 150,000 wagons that crossed the western trail system was a lot of wood. At antique stores in Oregon and California, I’ve seen plenty of blanket chests and old hutches with handwritten placards stating that they have been “expertly” appraised by antique furniture specialists and labeled “19th Century, Real Wagon Boards.” It’s a great sales pitch and, in many cases, probably true. Given the hand-me-down nature of the nineteenth century’s rural economy, it’s not far-fetched to conceive of the greatest land migration in history as something more than a removal of needy families and religious zealots to cheap Western lands. The iconic covered wagons churning up dust on their way toward Oregon were also a massive transfer of valuable resources from the forested East to the drier West.
• • •
Oregon flummoxed us in the same way that it flummoxed the pioneers. The alkali flats stretching up from the Snake microwaved with dry heat, and, as I knelt in the sand to open cattle gates, dust devils blew down from the Owyhee hills. In Nyssa, we passed an outdoor bank clock registering 102 degrees, and I noticed that night that the metal frames of my sunglasses had left barbecue marks on my face. Our cart wheels got hung up on a gatepost at Keeney Pass above Vale, and we spent half an hour on the scorching summit grunting and heaving the wheels back onto the trail. Oh, sumptuous, verdant Oregon, the land of my dreams! Rinker, you may be the first wagon traveler in a century to cross the trail, but you are also that century’s most gullible dunce.