The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  I found Nick back in camp, leading Bute across the pasture to chain her to the fence while he administered her afternoon dose of liquid aspirin. I helped him with that and then we sat on the edge of the watering trough to talk, and I explained the offer from Vince and Sue Holtz, and what the brokers wanted to do.

  “It’s a brain-dead decision,” Nick said. “The Holtzes are great people. They’re just goin to put Bute here on chocolate bars and alfalfa for the rest of her life. But, hey, it’s your call. You’re still the wagon boss.”

  “I’m going to sell the mules to Vince and Sue,” I said. “It’s the right decision. I guess you know what this means.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “The trip stops here.”

  “Yeah, but not really,” Nick said. “I’ll be bullshittin about this fucker for the rest of my life.”

  It started to rain and I went over to the wagon to call Vince Holtz back and close the sale. Nick decided to drive into town and visit the Oregon Trail museum. When I was done speaking with Vince, I pulled on a rain slicker and walked over to the mules in the pasture. Beck and Bute kicked up their rear hoofs and ran away, but Jake came right over, bowing his head and burying it under my arm. I scratched behind his ears, and his dandruff mixed with the rain reminded me of the smell of freshly trimmed hooves in the blacksmith shops of Pennsylvania.

  “Ah, shit, Jake,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit. You’re my boy. But I am going to have to say good-bye soon.”

  Jake smelled the apple that I had bought for him in Baker City and started to nuzzle hard for it in the pocket of my rain slicker. I held it out for him on the flat of my hand. I patted him some more and enjoyed the sensation of his warm saliva mixing with the cold rain on my hand, and then I turned back to the wagon to sit in the rain and brood.

  • • •

  By selling the mules to Vince and Sue, I had landed on an emotionally sensible plan. Nick and I wanted to gypsy around the West for a while before returning home, taking in the rodeos and mule-driving competitions that we hadn’t had time for while crossing the trail, and the Holtzes wanted us to use their place in Idaho as a base. They invited us to stay there as long as we wanted. This would allow us to gradually decompress from the trip, commuting around for a few weeks via pickup and remaining close to the trail. We could part with the mules in stages.

  The morning that the trucks arrived to trailer the mules and wagon down to Idaho, Nick and I were up early at the Williams ranch, brushing and bathing the team, labeling the harness, and sweeping out the wagon. I had bought myself a used Chevy pickup for transporting the gear I wanted to keep back east, and I used it to cruise around Baker City off-loading my filthy mattress and blankets in dumpsters and distributing our other excess gear to thrift stores. Closing down the trip had gone well, and everything was shipshape for the drive down to Idaho to deliver the Schuttler and mules.

  Settling in with our newest trail family in Idaho was seamless, and a lot of fun. All of the pressures of the trip were behind us now and the Holtz place sat on the rolling hills of a vineyard district, a little Napa in Idaho overlooking the Snake River and a trail landmark, Lizard Butte. Nick left after a couple of days to head up to a big mule event, Hells Canyon Mule Days in Enterprise, Oregon, while I stayed behind in the comfortable camping trailer parked beside the new mule pasture. Vince had already purchased a beautiful one-horse victoria, and a team fore cart, from a wagon dealer in Oregon, and I taught them how to hook Jake. Vince and I bounced around between his farm and his seed-drying sheds with Beck and Bute hitched to the fore cart, pulling trailers loaded with equipment and seed bags. I quickly fell into the life of Marsing, the small agricultural town on the river near the farm, and we often drove Jake down for breakfast at the Whitehouse Drive-In, or dinner at a Mexican restaurant, tying him to fence posts while we dined inside.

  Nick thrived back in Oregon. Before heading home by a circuitous route through the Dakotas and then parts of the South, to visit wagon shops, he wanted to take in not only Mule Days in Enterprise but the largest rodeo and wagon parade in the West, the Pendleton Round-Up in Pendleton, Oregon. By this time everyone in the horse world had heard about our trip, and Nick’s arrival at Mule Days was classic. Within a few minutes of pulling into Enterprise he had announced in his best Radio Free Europe baritone, in response to an event organizer’s question, “Oh, yeah! I’m the one that just finished drivin mules across the Oregon Trail!” He was mobbed by all the mule skinners, their wives and their grandchildren, and offered a free place to sleep in town. He showed up at the corrals early every morning to help the mule owners harness their teams for competition events. Nick entered the toughest event, team log-pulling, with a borrowed pair of mules and won first place.

  Nick did just as well at Pendleton, where I caught up with him a week later. One of the biggest attractions at the weeklong Pendleton Round-Up is an evening entertainment, Happy Canyon Night, when more than five thousand spectators crowd the rodeo bleachers to watch a kind of western-themed outdoor vaudeville show. When another actor backed out, Nick agreed to play a burlesque part that called for a man dressed as a frontier woman to drive across the stage in a buggy pulled by a mule. The cowboy in drag, furious about catching “her” husband visiting a whorehouse, breaks into song. Nick was outfitted in a full-figure gingham dress, a blond wig, and a large bra stuffed with straw. In the middle of Nick’s performance, the wig fell off and the dress parted at the back seams, spilling the straw from his falsies across the stage. Undeterred, Nick finished his song as the rest of his costume disintegrated around him, and the crowd went wild. He was a celebrity for the rest of the week at Pendleton.

  At breakfast and lunch in town, Nick frequently interrupted our meals to sign autographs for tourists on their Happy Canyon playbills, and cute cowgirls blew him air kisses across the café.

  “I still can’t believe you kept singing after your bra bit the dust,” I said.

  “Rink, the thing you’ve got to understand about me is that I am a professional actor,” Nick said. “I had a wardrobe malfunction. The same thing happened to Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. Big fuckin deal.”

  • • •

  Nick dreads change, and I can always tell when he is approaching it. Because his days are often frantic and out of control, he clings to the routines he can rely on—sitting with Olive Oyl at night, feeding his horses, wandering off after dinner to visit friends. When these routines are interrupted, or are about to be interrupted, he gets moody and curt and his sense of humor disappears. After we got back to Baker City and moved into the Oregon Trail Motel for a few days, he was edgy and preoccupied. The Oregon Trail was his home now too, and our wagon-tramp life all summer was his routine. He was jumpy about knowing that it was time to leave.

  One morning while we ate breakfast, Nick sat quietly with his head buried in a newspaper, acting as if I weren’t there. Neither of us wanted to say good-bye, and there was a dark cloud of silence between us. But I knew that I had to speak up.

  “Nick, it’s time for you to leave for home, you know? What about your tour of the wagon shops?”

  Nick’s Fu Manchu dropped and he looked up with a surprised look, but then a resigned one, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But can’t we just spend one more day together? We can drop my truck off for new tires, and then go visit museums.”

  “Good,” I said. “I would like that.”

  I had already spent an afternoon wandering around Baker City, looking for presents for Nick. At the ranch supply store, I found the exact model and brand of an American-forged set of fence pliers that Nick had covetously eyed back in Wyoming. I found the last ball cap in town silk-screened with OREGON TRAIL on the front, as well as an illustrated guide to nineteenth-century farm implements. The clerk behind the counter at the bookstore helped me wrap the gifts in attractive paper and ribbon. I knew that Nick wouldn’t take any money from me, but I stopped at an ATM just in case and stuffe
d my pockets with cash.

  The next morning, after breakfast, we drove up to the large Oregon Trail monument near the center of town, where there was enough space to park our trucks bumper to bumper. As we sat together in the cab of Nick’s Toyota, I cradled Olive Oyl in my lap and Nick opened his presents. He loved the fence pliers and eagerly began thumbing through the farm equipment book as we spoke.

  “How did you know I wanted these fence pliers?” Nick said. “I can’t believe that. Thanks. These are really great.”

  “I saw you looking at them that day we went into Douglas for parts. The Fort Fetterman camp.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You may not know how to use tools, but you sure as fuck can buy them.”

  “Thank you, Nick.”

  Nick spoke for a while about how the trip had made him feel like “turning over a new leaf” when he got home. He was going to clean up all the piles of used lumber and farm machinery in his yard and rebuild his sagging porch. He always felt better, he said, after he cleaned out his pickup, and sprucing up his place would feel like that, a “major lifestyle improvement.”

  He was also looking forward to his monthlong tour of wagon shops around the country.

  “Okay now look,” I said. “On the way home? No buying any more wagons. You’ve got enough wagons in your barn.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I just told Mother on the phone last night that you’ve finally gotten control of your control freak. That’s not controlling your control freak.”

  “Shit,” I said. “You’re right. I’m sorry. But look, about Mother. Just keep bullshitting her, okay? Tell her I’m great so she’s happy.”

  “I’m goin to bullshit that lady till the moon goes down on that one. ‘Mom, Rinky lost his control freak on the Oregon Trail, and now he can’t find it again.’ But to everybody else?”

  “Shit.”

  “Rinky’s a frickin control freak.”

  “Okay, that’s fair,” I said. “But it’s not really true. I didn’t freak when you flipped the Trail Pup.”

  “Oh, see? You’re goin to be remindin me about that one forever.”

  “No. I’m going to be reminding you about California Hill and Rocky Ridge. You were so great on those days.”

  Nick was fidgeting with his fingers, drumming them on the Toyota steering wheel.

  “Oh, fuck, Rinker. I hate saying good-bye to you. Can I just say that I’ll never forget this trip? I mean, I’ll always be the guy that drove team all the way across the Oregon Trail. Thank you. Ah, shit, I don’t even know what I’m sayin here. What am I sayin here? Thank you, Rinker. I would be dead right now if I was home in Maine and you hadn’t let me come along.”

  My heart was skipping with roller-coaster emotions and I could feel my eyes fill with moisture. I hated it when Nick ignored his own contribution and heaped all of the praise on me.

  “Nick. I’m going to say just one thing. You stayed with me at Shickley. I’ll never forget that and I couldn’t have crossed the trail without you.”

  Nick sighed, turned the key in his ignition, and reached over and hugged me shoulder to shoulder.

  “Go, Rink. I love you but we have to do this.”

  “Okay, me too,” I said. “Do you have maps? Did you buy maps?”

  “You don’t think I can find my ass back across the country by now?”

  “Money? I’ve got cash.”

  “Don’t need money either.”

  “Cell phone?”

  Nick slapped all of his pockets, pawed around the pickup for his cell phone, and then asked to borrow mine.

  On my phone, Nick dialed his own number and we heard the muffled ring of his cell coming from a brown paper bag full of candy bars and Slim Jims behind the seat.

  “See? I told you,” Nick said. “That’s where I put my cell phone.”

  I gave Olive Oyl one last hug and handed her to Nick. I stepped out of the passenger side of Nick’s cab and walked around to his side, shook his hand through the open window, and we both smiled and laughed.

  “I love you, Wagon Master,” Nick said.

  “We did this together,” I said. “Together.”

  Nick’s muffler roared and he pushed his RPMs high through the gears as he turned south toward the interstate. Olive Oyl was sitting on Nick’s lap with her snout pushed forward out the window, and the wind flattened her ears. As the white pickup disappeared I swelled with regret about parting with him, but then a cloud raced off from the sun and the Oregon Trail monument was illuminated in brightness, with deep shadows cast into the engraved words, and I felt light inside.

  Now I knew what it was like to be part of a team that was broken up and for several days I was lonely and misplaced when I woke in the morning.

  31

  I SPENT THE NEXT FEW days alone in Baker City, treating the effects of wagon withdrawal by clinging to a town that felt like home. Everyone seemed to know me as “the covered wagon guy.” The manager of the laundromat on Campbell Street was considering chucking everything in Oregon and moving with her husband and children to a log cabin in Alaska, and wanted my advice on that. Betty’s Books gave me the bulk discount when I bought a stack of pioneer journals. Waking up to motel showers every morning was luxurious, and at the restaurant across the street the Trail Boss Burger, with jalapeños and provolone, was the best helping of protein I’d had all summer. I was loitering, reluctant to part with the hobo life.

  Vince and Sue Holtz were expecting me back in Idaho, where we were planning on hitching Jake to their new carriage and making an all-day tour of the vineyards. After that, I would ride with Merri Melde up in the Owyhees and then enjoy several trail family reunions on my leisurely drive home. But there was still one more trail pilgrimage that I wanted to make.

  In the early 1840s, the main ruts of the emigrant road after the Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon proceeded north to a place called Waiilatpu on the Walla Walla River, in what would become Washington State. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had spent eleven years there with the Cayuse tribe after their historic crossing in 1836. The Whitman Mission served as a vital frontier outpost in the early days of the trail, resupplying weary pioneers on their way to the Columbia River and offering medical care provided by Dr. Whitman. I had heard that the restored mission and visitors’ center there, run by the National Park Service, was a moving and peaceful site. I couldn’t end the summer of my dreams without saying good-bye to Narcissa.

  I drove up through the Umatilla National Forest in late September, enjoying the solitude of the long pickup ride. In the Cayuse language, Waiilatpu referred to the flat plains that stretch for dozens of miles along the Walla Walla and meant “place of the people of the rye grass.” The Whitman Mission there is windswept and serene, beautifully maintained by the park service. Beneath a tall, rounded hill, topped by a granite obelisk commemorating the Whitmans, Doan Creek winds through cottonwood groves that border broad green pastures and old trail ruts. Most of the buildings at the mission have collapsed or were burned during Indian raids in the late nineteenth century, but their foundations have been identified and carefully marked, and the attractive visitors’ center contains a small but interesting museum on the Whitmans and the early trail years. With a couple who had just completed a transcontinental bicycle trip from New York City to Astoria, Oregon, I went along on the afternoon tour and lecture delivered by a young, earnest park service historian.

  Even the kindest of biographers have concluded that Narcissa and Marcus Whitman were miscast as missionaries, completely unsuited by temperament and ill-prepared by nineteenth-century cultural mores to minister to the small Cayuse band. After settling at Waiilatpu in the late autumn of 1836 and building their first house, the Whitmans spent the next decade living as refuseniks in the host Cayuse society. Initially, Marcus Whitman was too busy building fences, a blacksmith shop, and barns to spend much time with the Cayuse, and Narcissa was perpetually frustrated by tribal conventions as she began Bible classes for the natives. She never l
earned Cayuse and expected the native people to understand when she explained the difficult concepts of reform Christianity in their broken English. The Cayuse saw no need to strictly observe the Sabbath when they had already spent several days of the week learning about Christianity, they interrupted their Christian education every summer to travel to the mountains to harvest berries, and they treated the Whitman house as just another one of their lodges, strolling through at all hours, sitting on the floor to talk, and helping themselves to whatever food they saw on the counter. Eventually the Whitmans built a new, larger house with a separate “Indian great room” walled off from the family quarters. Visitors to the mission were surprised by Narcissa’s condescending treatment of tribal members and often described her as “haughty.” The word the Cayuse used when referring to her meant “very proud.”

  With Narcissa refusing to change and adapt to Cayuse ways, and Marcus frequently absent to organize a territorial government or lead wagon trains, the Whitmans came to symbolize the unbridgeable gap between the white settlers and the native tribes. There were many other problems and even tragedy. At the age of two, the Whitmans’ daughter, Alice Clarissa, drowned after wandering off to play in the creek, and Narcissa fell into a long, deep depression that didn’t lift until she adopted a family of pioneer orphans. The wagon trains now flowing through the mission every summer decimated the local Indian tribes by introducing European diseases for which the natives had no immunity, and the Cayuse suspected Marcus Whitman of treachery because he seemed able to cure measles and smallpox among the white travelers but not in the tribe. The Whitmans’ evangelical work with the Indians eventually collapsed amid bitter recriminations, which included ugly spats with rival Catholic and Methodist missionaries plying the frontier for converts.

  But the Whitmans were still celebrated as founding pioneers, especially after Marcus successfully led the first large wagon train west in 1843. They were road ranchers now, planting large vegetable gardens and wheat for the summer pioneers and running a thriving blacksmith shop for the passing wagon trains. By the mid-1840s, the mission for the tribes had evolved into a bustling, whites-only trail stop with a school, a trading post, and a transient population of fur trappers, traders, and pioneers often numbering in the hundreds.