The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Nick spent two days fixated on wagon repair while we camped at the rodeo corrals along the Malheur River in Vale. A few days before, I had spoken by cell phone with Don Werner in Kansas. Our Trail Pup wheels had been rebuilt and I had him ship them to Idaho, where I had found a trucker to haul the Trail Pup and new wheels to Oregon and then return our borrowed cart to Wyoming. Keeping the wagons moving across the trail was getting expensive—all told, I had now spent over $5,000 on Trail Pup repairs and shipping.

  When I scouted the trail ahead, my expectations about enjoying a leisurely run down the home stretch were dashed. The ruts north of Vale up through Alkali Gulch were as authentic and beautiful as the Acropolis stretch in Wyoming, but we were blocked again by an interstate. When the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s, the Oregon Department of Transportation solved the problem of routing traffic through the narrow canyons and over mountain ridges of the state by selecting the proven terrain of the pioneers. U.S. Highway 84—today called the “Old Oregon Trail Highway”—covers long stretches of the original Oregon Trail ruts throughout the state. Searching for a route around the interstate on the seven-thousand-acre Birch Creek Ranch, I found a prominent stone trail marker high up in the Owyhee foothills, but the trail route below became a morass of muddy cattle tracks that disappeared into a man-made lake, Love Reservoir, which was built early in the twentieth century to sustain a large cattle operation.

  Dejected and sunburned, my water canteen empty after a long afternoon of hiking the Owyhee foothills, I sat on a rock near the muddy fringes of Love Reservoir, once again stymied by trail interruptus. This was the story of our trip, the conundrum of the modern trail. My beloved ruts had just vanished under a lake and ahead, behind a screen of craggy badlands, they were paved over by a four-lane highway.

  As I glumly climbed back up the foothills, I found a NO TRESSPASSING sign at a barbed-wire gate, with a phone number for a land management company back in Idaho. I called that night when I had cell reception in Vale. Rancher Vince Holtz was excited to hear from me. Holtz ran a typical western agricultural operation—crop farming and a large seed-growing business in western Idaho, and rangeland for cattle at the Birch Creek Ranch in Oregon, seventy miles away. He had heard about our trip when we passed just a few miles from his farm near Marsing, Idaho, and was thrilled that someone was making an authentic crossing of the trail. He had spent the week worried that we would get lost when we reached the last trail marker on his ranch at Willow Creek. But he had no way of contacting us and was happy when I called.

  “Oh, a guy can easily get lost up there,” he told me on the phone. “But there’s a way through on original trail around the lake. I’ll come up there tomorrow and lead you through.”

  I didn’t like the idea of inconveniencing the proprietor of a substantial ranch, but Holtz insisted on driving up from Idaho the next day and guiding us. He turned out to be one of the best finds of the trip. But our struggle was far from over and I would soon learn why the pioneers considered eastern Oregon unremitting hell.

  • • •

  The Trail Pup was my Gettysburg, my Gallipoli, my perpetual Pearl Harbor and Dien Bien Phu. The invention that I was so proud of, and which had made our trip possible, just wouldn’t stop boomeranging back to torture me. It was my Watergate on wheels, my $13,000 boondoggle of the trail.

  Nick and I decided that, because we were now only a camp or two from Farewell Bend, we might as well keep the pickup with us until we decided where to end the trip. So, while he lingered behind in Vale for a healthy breakfast of fried chicken and tater tots, I pushed north out of town in the wagon alone, singing to the mules as the irrigated alfalfa country went by, then turning north a few miles above town for the marked trail up through the salt flats of Alkali Gulch.

  Everything was running well and I loved pushing mules up the mountains through classic trail country, alone on the wagon. Antelope bounded by on the scrub-grass hills and prairie falcons swooped low over the range. The salt flats were as hard as pavement and it was a joy looking back over the rig and seeing my jaunty Trail Pup, freshly rebuilt by Nick, bouncing along behind the main wagon with its American flag dancing in the wind.

  Nick was delayed when a part of his bumper fell off as he bounced through Alkali Gulch. He circled back to look for the missing part, which put him out of cell phone contact, when I dropped behind a tall, rounded peak beside the trail, Tub Mountain. I was in the middle of singing one of my favorite songs, “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech,” to the mules when I heard a loud bang! from the rear. The mules started digging in to pull a suddenly heavier load.

  “Team, whoa! Whoa! Jake. Just relax now. Jake, hold them.”

  I didn’t have to look back to know what had happened—it was the Lisco sound that I heard, the South Pass sound of splintering wood and then a heavy cart collapsing and dragging on the sand. The Trail Pup was down.

  When I did stand up and look back over the white-top, I could see that both of the shiny new cart wheels were intact, but angled in and resting against the box, collapsed from the center. It was axle failure this time. Now I would have to wait in hundred-degree heat for Nick to catch up, and once more pause and reorganize for repairs.

  I should have been crying, but I could only laugh at myself. We were twelve miles from Vale, twenty-four hours after Nick had completed a $5,000 rebuild on the cart. It was not even noon yet. It took only that long for the Trail Pup to once more shit the bed. Everything on the trip had gone so well so far, except for this one small problem of staffing that I had overlooked. Yes, Rinker Buck, the twenty-first-century trail boss and wagon architect, had undeniably designed one of the most attractive Trail Pups since the fur-trading days. It complemented the Schuttler as adorably as a shiny Airstream Bambi following an SUV down the highway. For reliability, however, the Rinker Buck Trail Pup was the Chernobyl of the Oregon Trail.

  For some odd reason that I still can’t figure out—except that memory does work in strange and amusing ways—I was reminded that moment of sitting in a movie theater as a boy and listening to the lyrics of a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein number from South Pacific. While taking baths on a palm-fringed Hawaiian beach, Mitzi Gaynor and the rest of the female cast spontaneously broke into song, lamenting the state of their boyfriend relationships. I’ve always loved the tune and, now that it was so appropriate, I began singing it to the mules, improvising my own lyrics.

  I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair

  And send him on his way.

  I’m gonna throw that Trail Pup into the Snake

  I’m gonna throw that Trail Pup into the Snake

  I’m gonna throw that Trail Pup into the Snake

  Deep-six that fucker today.

  The song therapy felt good and I was at one with my life, my mules, and my wagon. Desert meadowlarks sang along with me from the hills and the mules contentedly munched on wild sunflowers growing beside the trail. I had screwed the poodle again. Big fucking deal. Littering the trail once more with broken wagon parts and freshly splintered wood just made me a better pioneer.

  As he came over the rise in his pickup, Nick excitedly honked his horn and skidded to a stop behind the crippled Trail Pup.

  “This Trail Pup is like a bad girlfriend,” he said. “She never goes away.”

  “We’re throwing that fucker into the Snake as soon as we get to Farewell Bend,” I said.

  Wagon Professor Buck quickly diagnosed what had happened. The cast-iron hub skeins on the wheels were connected to the wooden axle on either side with a big lag bolt extending several inches into the oak. The lag bolt hadn’t failed, but the oak axle had, probably from sitting out in the open in Don Werner’s Kansas pasture for years, then drying out after bouncing across a thousand miles of desert.

  “Running gear failure,” Nick said. “Metal to wood is your weak point in every rig.”

  I quickly decided that we would again abandon the Trail Pup beside the trail. We could always find a co
wboy ahead who would help us retrieve it later. Nick yanked the drop-pin attaching the Trail Pup to the main wagon and I heard the tongue drop to the trail with an ignominious plop. While he unloaded the water barrels and provisions in the cart into his pickup, I would drive ahead to meet Vince Holtz at Willow Creek.

  And so, cheerfully singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” to the mules, I climbed the wagon up through the sunny Owyhees. Calamities seemed to suit me and I was filled with a lightness of being. The skin on my hands was stretched tight and baked translucent by the sun, and I was now so thin that my belt hung loose on my waist. Abandoning the Trail Pup had reduced our load by a ton and the mules were giddy about pulling the lightened rig. In country as golden as the wheat hills of Montana, my wagon was light, the lines were feathery in my hands, and the wheels padded gently over a cushion of dust. I wanted to ride my Schuttler forever.

  • • •

  In the West, you can always tell the working ranchers from the rich-boy hobbyists out of Jackson and Palo Alto—the real deal could easily be mistaken for the service manager at the local John Deere dealership. As I climbed the rises through Birch Creek Ranch, I could see Vince Holtz far ahead, leaning against the fender of his battered pickup and photographing the wagon and the mules as I approached. He was tall, rangy, and white-haired, with a boyish face and hands that were calloused and smudged from turning a lot of wrenches. He wore a Carhartt T-shirt, ratty jeans, and scuffed black work shoes.

  I apologized for being late and explained that we’d just dumped our provision cart behind us on the trail. Nick was still back there loading our hay and oats into his pickup.

  “Oh, you don’t have to leave your wagon on the trail,” Vince said. “How big is it?”

  “Half the size of this wagon here.”

  “I’m going back to help your brother. We can easily fit the cart in my truck and I know a shop in Huntington where we can fix it.”

  Vince handed me bottles of chilled Gatorade and spring water from a cooler in the back of his pickup and told me to wait for him at the next cattle gate. When I reached it, I steered the mules into another large bloom of sunflowers and sat in the bright sunlight singing some more tunes to them.

  When Nick and Vince finally came up, we formed a jaunty, shitrig caravan of vehicles, bobbing up and down the hills. The Trail Pup and its wheels hung off the back of Vince’s pickup and bales of hay and our gear were stacked high on Nick’s Toyota. Vince led the way through his ranch, turning northeast for Love Reservoir at the Oregon Trail marker below Willow Springs Camp. I followed with the wagon and Nick brought up the rear. I could relax and just enjoy driving through lovely country now. For the rest of the day Vince would guide us through Birch Creek Ranch, and he knew the way to Farewell Bend on the original trail.

  We had lost a lot of time monkeying around with the Trail Pup and our trip through Birch Creek Ranch would be the longest day all summer. After he guided us around the lake and over the steep dam embankment on the far side, Vince stopped several times to explain how the first homesteaders had built their aqueduct down from the hills, and then fenced in the old Oregon Trail country for cattle range. He showed us the deep wagon swales that still exist on his lower ranch. All of this took time and we didn’t stop the wagon and fence in the mules until eleven o’clock that night. It was after midnight when we finally dumped the remains of the Trail Pup at the Snake River Garage in Huntington.

  The mules had been in harness for fifteen hours, but I was elated. For four months now, from St. Joe, I had carried on the back of the wagon the SEE AMERICA SLOWLY sign that identified Farewell Bend as our destination, our end-of-the-trail goal. We were now camped just a mile away from the old pioneer stop on the Snake.

  I thanked Vince for a great day and told him that I was worried that he still had an hour’s drive to get back to his farm in Idaho.

  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” he said. “If a guy decides to make a trip like this?”

  “Right.”

  “Things work out. I’m just lucky I met you.”

  I thanked him again and he rolled down his window after stepping into his pickup.

  “I’ll see you soon. My wife really wants to meet your mules.”

  • • •

  Fantails of welding sparks sprayed through the air as Nick and the owner of the Snake River Garage, Steve Stacy, rebuilt the Trail Pup axle. It was another repair interlude that morphed into a covered wagon party for us. Merri Melde, a photographer and endurance rider whom we had met back in Idaho, drove up for the weekend to share camp and shoot pictures of us riding the trail. Vince Holtz and his wife, Sue, drove back to Huntington with a large shopping bag full of apples for the mules and seemed to be very taken with the team. We all sat around on lawn chairs in the shade of the cottonwood trees at the garage, drinking coffee and eating take-out breakfast burritos while we watched the axle being rebuilt.

  We faced one more peril ahead. To get around another stretch of the interstate, we would have to follow the original ruts that climbed a notorious wagon graveyard in the ravines above the town of Lime, the Burnt River Canyon. The fifth-generation owners of the mountaintop ranch that the ruts crossed were excited about guiding us through the area, and they were certain that no wagon had been over the original trail there in more than a hundred years.

  But there was a big hazard at the end, along the Burnt River below the canyons. When the first railroads were introduced to eastern Oregon in the 1880s, the surveyors were so intent on following the favorable Oregon Trail terrain along the river that they laid the rails adjacent to the ruts. Freight trains ran through this section of track several times a day, after emerging through the tunnel on the north face of Lookout Mountain. If a locomotive roared through we would have no warning until the train was almost on top of us. Then we would be sharing the trail with a mile-long freight train, separated by only a few feet.

  Steve Stacy offered to round up enough pickup trucks and trailers to ferry the mules and wagons north along the interstate. But I was entranced by the opportunity to cover another fifteen miles of original ruts, and I didn’t want to truck the mules after 1,800 miles of unassisted wagon travel. I would take my chances with the trains.

  On our second day in Huntington, I was anxious to put the Burnt River Canyon ruts behind us, but Nick and Steve were still finishing the repairs on the Trail Pup. I decided to forge ahead over the canyons with Merri Melde, and Nick and Steve would catch up with us late in the day, bringing the repaired cart forward on a trailer.

  It was a fun, rigorous day, with some of the toughest driving of the whole trip. Merri clicked away with her camera while I threaded the team through the ravines, and by late in the afternoon we had splashed across the last creek and reached the bottom of the canyon. I pulled the mules up to water them, a few feet away from the Union Pacific tracks.

  I stared down the track, which disappeared into the foothills along the narrow river plain. Our graveled route literally abutted the tracks to the left, and there was a steep embankment sloping down to the right where the ground had been built up to lay the elevated track bed. We faced a classic runaway scenario if a train rumbled out of the Lookout Mountain tunnel behind us and spooked the mules. They would probably protect themselves by not turning left onto the tracks, or right over the embankment, but instead galloping straight ahead to escape the sound of the train.

  I told Merri that if a train arrived and the team took off, I would let the mules run themselves out. Once they realized that the rushing sound behind them was a train—something they recognized by now—they would tire and slow down.

  “I read somewhere that if a team takes off, it’s better to stay on the wagon instead of jumping off,” Merri said. “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But stay with the wagon. I may need you to hold one line and help me control the team.”

  Of course, just a minute or two after we turned down the access road and were committed, I heard the
metallic echoing of wheels against rails and the muffled roar of turbine exhaust funneling out of the Lookout Mountain tunnel behind us. I knew that the freight train would be a big one—more than a mile long—and that it would clatter and bang over the rails for almost fifteen minutes, less than three feet from the mules.

  But I was also counting on one thing. All the way across from Missouri we’d met Union Pacific trains along the trail, though never as close as this, and the engineers had always waved and slowed down the trains as they passed. In June, we had met several engineers at the big Union Pacific yards in North Platte and they told us that they were all exchanging information about our crossing, keeping up with our progress across the West. The fraternity of trainmen knew that the Union Pacific tracks hugged the Oregon Trail across the continent, and this was the first time they had encountered a covered wagon. They loved seeing our white-tops and fluttering American flag from a distance. This engineer would have to know about us. My luck across the plains had been good so far. I hadn’t reached the Burnt River Canyon in Oregon just to meet the one engineer in a hundred who didn’t recognize the Schuttler with the American flag along his tracks. The mules might not spook if I could just get the engineer to slow down and ease past us with his turbines at an idle.

  When the locomotive was a hundred yards off, I gave the lines to Merri and stood up on the seat, waving my hat first and then dramatically raising and lowering my arms—slow, slow—to signal the engineer.