The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  Marcus Whitman’s identity as both a missionary and a medical doctor had imperiled his position among the Cayuse from the start. By the fall of 1847, the frontier clash of cultures along the Columbia River plateau had led to a complete social collapse. The Cayuse and many neighboring tribes were beginning to resent the endless stream of wagon trains along the Oregon Trail every summer, and a harsh winter in 1846–1847 had decimated the wildlife, contributing to a belief among the tribes that the white man was taking too much game. The Cayuse and the Umatilla had traditionally served more migratory tribes as traders and berry pickers. But now, in a market swelling with passing pioneers, they had been displaced as traders by the Whitmans. Factions within both tribes, abetted by a group of mixed-race trappers, resented the evident wealth that the Whitmans had amassed by serving the wagon trains.

  As tensions rose among the Cayuse and sporadic violence broke out, the Whitmans were warned by fur traders and tribal chiefs to abandon their mission and move to the safety of the Willamette Valley. But Marcus was proud of the role that the Whitman Mission now played for the pioneers along a strategic stretch of the Oregon Trail and refused to move on. In October 1847, as the last of the wagon trains disappeared over the horizon for the Columbia River, an epidemic of measles and dysentery broke out, and as usual most of the white children at the mission recovered while the Cayuse children died in great numbers. In late November, enraged by the death of their children and convinced that the Whitmans had contributed to the epidemic, a small band of angry Cayuse made an all-day assault on the mission, killing fourteen whites, including Narcissa, Marcus, and several of their adopted children.

  News of what became known as the “Whitman Massacre” did not reach Washington, D.C., until the early spring of 1848, but it had a lasting impact on the territorial drive of America. For the next twenty years, politicians, army generals, and freelance Indian fighters would use the “slaughter” of the Whitmans as a rationale for escalating the campaign against the western tribes. In the summer of 1848, amid a popular outcry about Indian attacks, Congress created the Oregon Territory, the first territorial government west of the Rockies, and appropriated funds to build army forts to protect the pioneers. The Civil War would interrupt efforts to empty the plains of the wandering tribes, but the war against the Indians would resume in earnest once the whites tired of killing each other.

  In the meantime, the Oregon Trail was rerouted away from the gruesome remnants of the Whitman Mission. Instead of going north to the Walla Walla, pioneers now pushed due west for the Columbia. The Whitmans left behind a tragic statement about missionary zeal, and a dark stain on American history. Over eleven years on the Walla Walla, the Whitmans had evolved from benevolent missionaries to the Cayuse to commercial proprietors who prospered from a continued influx of white settlers. Their deaths became a rallying cry for ethnic cleansing. Few Americans at the time, of course, perceived this as a classic corruption of values.

  The common grave of the Whitman Massacre victims, called the “Great Grave,” stands today in a small open area of mowed grass along a bend in Doan Creek. Pheasants call and tree frogs sound from the nearby marshes, and cattails and willow branches bend in the breeze. I felt there the mixed spirituality and melancholy that I often experience when visiting historic graves. After the other members of the tour group had left for their cars, I sat on a bench and meditated about Narcissa Whitman.

  History almost everywhere is tragic and ironic, but in America the contrasts are more stark because we set such high ideals. Fortified by stirring Enlightenment appeals to the rights of man, we fought a war of liberation from the British crown and then decided to constitutionally protect the enslavement of our African laborers. The great evangelical pulsation of the 1820s spread religion and inspired useful social reform, while also unleashing decades of denominational squabbling, even murder, in the name of Christianity. We fought the Civil War over slavery that cost more than 600,000 deaths but still sugarcoat what happened by describing it as an unresolved conflict over “states’ rights.” I try not to even think anymore about the serial idiocy of leadership during my own lifetime, when sixty thousand American lives were squandered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Perhaps someday we’ll begin teaching our children the full, demythologized truth about ourselves, but I doubt it.

  Narcissa Whitman lived this national irony to the fullest. Propelled by missionary zeal and visions of a frontier utopia where “heathen” pupils would patiently consume Christianity, she was then unwilling to change according to the conditions she actually found in the West. Her ultimate mission was unsuccessful, but her journey getting there, and writing about it, was epic and changed her times, opening the gate for women and families to join the largest land migration in history. Which one do we remember? Who was the real Narcissa Whitman—the proud, self-important evangelist from the Finger Lakes, incapable of getting along with the Cayuse, or the brave, adventurous woman galloping sidesaddle up South Pass? The inconsistencies of history and character don’t require us to choose between these identities. Narcissa Whitman was both.

  Still, sitting beside her grave, I felt settled about making Narcissa Whitman my heroine as I crossed the trail. I was comfortable about my own western quest. The wrong outcome, or no outcome at all, is often the only result of a journey. Walkabouts and odysseys have always been common, and we needn’t search too hard for tangible returns. Journey for journey’s sake is enough. For weeks or months of a climb or a trek, we are forced to be in the moment. For Narcissa Whitman, this meant a lot. Behind her, the trapped energy of a country exploded west for two thousand miles.

  I didn’t accomplish that much calling mules for nearly two thousand miles across the plains, and I wouldn’t be returning home a changed person. The benefits of the trip related mostly to journeying itself. I had proven to myself that I could scout for vanished trail on modern terrain, and I drove team a lot better now. My habitual impatience was suspended to deal with frustration after frustration on the trail. I’m not worried anymore about my father’s reappearances in my life, because they’re just something to live with and accept. I know a great deal more now about a seminal time in my country’s history. But, mostly, I had indulged in a wonderful summer of romance and grit.

  The sun was falling against the distant wheat fields, it was time to go, and I drove south enjoying the anvil-black peak lines of the mountains and the lights of the combines in the fields as I passed the scattered farm communities on the way back to Baker City.

  • • •

  In Idaho, Vince, Sue, and I enjoyed our vineyard tour behind Jake in the new carriage, getting a little boozy by nightfall after sampling our share of local chardonnay and merlot. In the evenings, from a fire pit overlooking the Snake, we watched the sun drop while Sue taught me to cook stew in Dutch Oven pots. Vince and I cannibalized parts from an old disc harrow and welded them into a portable barbecue hearth that I could use on the way home. I ran the farm errands into town with Jake and the carriage, dropping down past the faux-Tuscan villas to cross the old trail ford at Lizard Butte.

  I left for home early in the afternoon on a warm October day, after taking Jake out for a last carriage drive. Beck and Bute were way off among the trees in their new pasture and weren’t going to come down to say good-bye to me, so I savored my time with Jake. I grained him as a reward for our pleasant ride, cleaned his hooves, and gave him a long bath with a hose strung up from Sue’s dog kennels.

  “Ah, screw it anyway, Jake, I’m leaving today but I’ll be back, I promise.”

  When I massaged his withers and lower legs with shampoo and a brush, Jake’s eyelids began to flutter and he dropped his head and began to snore. I told Jake that it was fine for him to take a snooze. I just wanted him to know how thankful I was for the way he held me up that day when I nearly passed out at the bottom of Dempsey Ridge. I thanked him for holding the mollies back and being the calm center of the team so many times.

  Jake woke up when a black
fly landed on his rump and he swished at it with his tail, showering me with bubbly shampoo.

  “I’ll miss you, Jake,” I said. “I wish I could bring you home. But you belong here with the girls.”

  I hosed Jake down with the spray nozzle on full just the way he liked it. At the fence gate, I pulled an apple from the feed box, held it for him, scratched behind his ears one last time, and then watched him canter off to join Beck and Bute.

  My truck was right there, packed and ready to go. I had said good-bye to Vince and Sue at breakfast. I took one last look at the mules, browsing on grass and swishing flies under the trees, and then I started my truck and drove down past Lizard Butte.

  I turned left after the bridge over the Snake and headed east along the trail country. The basalt cliffs along the river gleamed in the sunlight, and the austerity of landscape reminded me of the austerity of mission. Journey is all, and we did it, we made it, we got there. We had followed the Platte to the Sweetwater, the Sweetwater to South Pass, and then we slid the wagon down Dempsey Ridge to the indescribable beauty along the Bear. Broken wheels and a thousand miles of fences couldn’t stop us. The impossible is doable as long as you have a great brother and good trail friends. Uncertainty is all. Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CROSSING THE OREGON TRAIL AND then spending more than two years writing about it constantly reminded me of Daniel Boorstin’s description of the covered wagon as “plainly a community vehicle” that required working in groups. Even while lost in the remote Wyoming desert, or struggling over the lava-rock abyss of Idaho, I was always confident that I could find help ahead. In this way our covered wagon trip was not so much an adventure shared by two brothers but a display of the communal ingenuity and hospitality still to be found in the American West. The reassuring feeling of being handed off every day from rancher to rancher, and from trail expert to trail expert, remains my strongest impression of the trip. Likewise, my research into the history of the trail was built upon the heroic scholarship of many who came before me.

  My brother Nick deserves most of the credit for the success of our trip. His outstanding horsemanship, mechanical and harness-making skills, alacrity at making friends, and ability to get by with limited resources almost anywhere made the trip possible. The difficulty of finding friends and family members who can rise at dawn and then sustain physical activity on a project all day has been a major inconvenience in my life, but Nick made an ideal partner. I am especially grateful for his decision in Schickley, Nebraska, to remain with the trip. It is rare for two brothers to share a journey as unique as this, and I will always remember his gift to me.

  The Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA) of Independence, Missouri, struggles with a small staff and budget against such modern threats to the trail as mining and energy projects, housing developers, and hordes of dirt-biking enthusiasts. Chapter presidents and volunteers in the eight states through which the trails pass perform the largely unrewarded functions of marking the trail, applying for preservation grants, and testifying at court and federal agency hearings when the trail is threatened with new developments or road-building. OCTA also maintains an invaluable website devoted to the history of major trail stops and pioneer histories and publishes the Overland Journal, an excellent quarterly on selected trail topics and research that I often used while compiling the history sections of my book. Before we left on our trip, association manager Travis Boley and headquarters manager Kathryn Conway shared with us maps, insights on the trail, and a complete list of OCTA contacts in each state. This help proved invaluable during our four-month journey.

  OCTA also published Randy Brown and Reg Duffin’s Graves and Sites on the Oregon and California Trails, and Brown’s Historic Inscriptions on Western Emigrant Trails, which were immensely useful toward understanding the history we were passing and provided exact directions to trail sites. The compendium of geodetic maps on the trail originally compiled by OCTA founder Gregory Franzwa, Maps of the Oregon Trail, published by the Patrice Press in St. Louis, was indispensable for finding our way in the backcountry and narrow canyons of Wyoming and Idaho.

  Philip Ropp of Ropp’s Mule Farm in Jamesport, Missouri, fulfilled the one essential requirement I placed before him: selling me a team that could make it to Oregon. Yes, Bute was a laggard with pigeon-toed hooves, and Beck was our Lizzie Borden of the trip, but Jake’s imperturbability and good sense made up for this. Buying a team as quickly as I did and then realizing where I had erred only enriched the pioneer experience for me. Ropp and his neighbor, machinist and blacksmith Ivan Schrock, made it possible for us to get all our wagon modifications done on time. Elmer Beechy and the leatherworkers at the Jamesport Harness Shop quickly made all the adjustments and fabricated the extra parts I needed for our rig. Beechy taught me a valuable lesson in jumping off economics by quickly flipping my trade-in saddle at a profit. God bless the Amish for their industriousness and fun.

  Don and Connie Werner at the Werner Wagon Works in Horton, Kansas, maintain one of the best wagon restoration shops in the country and produced a serviceable rig under a tight deadline. I realize now that the problems we later had with the wheels and brakes on our Peter Schuttler wagon were mostly the result of my unyielding ambition to reach Oregon clashing with modern-restoration standards. The Meader Supply Corporation of Rochester, New Hampshire, promptly filled our orders for harness replacements and shipped them ahead of us on the trail. Dan Hathaway of Illusion Farm in Fryeburg, Maine, was always available when Nick called for advice on the veterinary care and shoeing of the mules, and indeed deserves a great deal of credit for the excellent shape they were in when we reached Oregon. Ripley and Susan Swan of Hallelujah Farm in Lisbon, Maine, also provided much needed equine and human help.

  In Kansas, I want to thank muleman Doyle Prawl of Troy for helping us haul the wagon and mules across the Missouri River and then building wagon parts. The groundskeepers at the Brown County Agriculture Museum in Hiawatha and the Four Mile Corner Rest Area in Sabetha maintain beautiful camping facilities for transients like us. Pony Express reenactor Frank Wessel and his wife, Cheryl, welcomed us to their farm in Axtell for an overnight camp. In Marysville, Ken and Arleta Martin of the Oregon-California Trails Association graciously interrupted their schedules to escort us around the many trail sites in the area. More than a dozen people in town dropped down to our camp at the fairgrounds to offer help and gifts of food and free hay. The volunteers at the Habitat Thrift Shop in Marysville left the door of their shop open at night so that we could curl an extension cord outside to recharge our cell phones. The staff at the Hollenberg Ranch State Park graciously allowed us to use the restored Pony Express station there when we needed shelter from heavy rains.

  Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country. When thunderstorms surrounded us just after we crossed the Kansas line, Norman Rupprecht of Odell, Nebraska, flagged us down at a rainy crossroads and led us to safety nearby at an abandoned farm, then returned the next morning to help us with chores and run errands while we were stranded for another day. A couple camping next to us at the Rock Creek Station equine park drove me to the Fairbury Sale Barn so I could buy replacement harness parts for the team. At Shickley, when we were again trapped by storms, Don and Shirley Kempf and Will and Margie Swartzendruber allowed us to camp at their farm for two nights, take showers, and borrow their pickup, and even took us along to their church supper. My concept of “trail family” began to form at Shickley with the Kempfs and Swartzendrubers. I have already visited them twice since, and they will be lifelong friends. Also at Shickley, retired cowboy Bill Eich of Geneva, Nebraska, adopted us as his “trail project” and followed our wagon tracks for three nights to visit us in camp, running down the harness parts, camping equipment, and plumbing supplies we needed to add an additional water
barrel. I still wear the silk cowboy bandanna that Bill gave me to protect my face and neck against the dust and sun. I have lost count of the number of happy Nebraskans who dropped into our camp in the evening and brought us food, water, and free bales of hay.

  At Minden, Nebraska, where we paused just below the Platte River to reoutfit and make wagon repairs, Bill and Nancy Petersen, and their son Jim, were gracious and fun-loving hosts who fed us, welcomed us to sleep in their backyard camper, and charted the rest of the trail in Nebraska for us. Bill, the president of the OCTA chapter in Nebraska, has an encyclopedic grasp of the trail and frequently helped me track down obscure references on trail history. The way that the original fur-trapping route across the Rockies followed by the pioneers eventually grew into a cattle-driving road, a military freight route, the Pony Express, telegraph, the stagecoach road, the railroad tracks West, and then even the Lincoln Highway and the interstate highways, is essential toward understanding the trail’s role in American history. Petersen intimately knows the history of each phase of development and was instrumental in helping me understand the organic nature of the trail. His knowledge of the major cutoffs in Nebraska and Wyoming also helped me realize that what today is known as a “trail” was in fact a broad landscape supporting migration and settlement across the West.

  In Minden and nearby, woodworking hobbyist Ross Wright built us a new right brake out of oak stock when our original brake disintegrated after just 250 miles. Farmer and horseman Kevin Christensen gave us a spool of thresher belt that we could cut into brake pads and also lent us a second wagon seat for the rest of the trip. Tom and Theresa Delaet let us pasture the mules at their farm, and Tom opened up his shop while Nick was repairing the wagon and building a platform for an additional water barrel. Gene Hunt, the superintendent of the Fort Kearny State Historical Park, welcomed us to the Platte River country with a barbecue and a shady spot to rest the mules. Gene also provided us with a map of Nebraska state parks and public corrals and told us that we were welcome to camp at any of these facilities, even if we arrived too late in the day to find any staff.