The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  We also made camp and enjoyed the hospitality of “cowboy poet” Joe Jeffrey and his wife, Dianne, at the Robb Ranch near Plum Creek, Nebraska. John and Nancy Orr at the spectacularly beautiful Signal Bluff Ranch near Ash Hollow lent us their bunkhouse while we rested the mules for two days, and Nancy found us new collar pads at the Haythorn ranch in Arthur. John Orr’s tour of the high country around Signal Bluff allowed me to see how the pioneer trail along the Platte, and the big encampment nearby at Ash Hollow, intruded on traditional Sioux lands and eventually led to one of the earliest conflicts of the Indian Wars, the Battle of Blue Water Creek. Dan Hanlon at the Muddy Creek Ranch near Lisco rescued us with a pickup and trailer when we flipped our Trail Pup, opened his shop while we fixed it, took us on a short cattle drive, and suggested routes around the flooding of the Platte. The cowboys at the Rush Creek and Sun ranches near Oshkosh were kind enough not to laugh when they attempted to teach me how to open barbed-wire gates.

  Larry Gill at the Lower 96 Ranch and Jim Hecox in Gothenburg were also wonderfully hospitable, and Gill later made time for a long interview about his preservation of the Midway Pony Express Station. Ann Smith of Cozad, Nebraska, took wonderful pictures of Nick and me with the mules, and she and her husband, Tony, gave me an informative historical tour of the 100th Meridian area, and their family’s historic homestead farm, when I passed through on the way back from Oregon. I have described in the book how grateful I am for the hospitality and instant friendship of Don and Sheila Exner in North Platte.

  In western Nebraska, Barb Netherland, then the director of the North Platte Valley Museum in Gering, arranged for us to camp on a nearby horse farm, let us drop Nick’s truck on the museum grounds, and took me on a tour of the original Oregon Trail route, pioneer graves, and the fur-trading station at the scenic Robidoux Pass in the Wildcat Hills. Barb also provided introductions to a number of Mormon and western Nebraska trail historians.

  The park rangers and staff at the U.S. National Park Service’s Scotts Bluff National Monument invited us onto the site to deliver a covered wagon lecture, and I am particularly grateful to Robert Manasek, the resource management specialist at Scotts Bluff, who gave me a tour of the park’s archives and showed me many pioneer artifacts and the original watercolors in the William Henry Jackson collection there. It is a shame that I couldn’t find room in the book to write more about the remarkable career of Jackson as an expedition photographer, artist, and adventurer. Readers interested in how the trail looked at the height of the nineteenth-century migration can find his pictures on the web or in such excellent coffee-table books as An Eye for History: The Paintings of William Henry Jackson.

  In eastern Wyoming, Dr. Charles Cawiezell and his wife, Luanne, opened the grounds of their equine clinic and spacious house, and fed us wonderful meals when we stopped for vet checks, shoeing, and teeth-filing for the mules. Cawiezell also read and offered comments on the cholera section of my book. Rancher Bill Reffalt of Fort Laramie let us keep the mules overnight in his corrals and lent me a pickup to scout the trail ahead.

  Wagon master Ben Kern of Evansville, Wyoming, who has made assisted crossings of virtually every major trail in the West, caught up with us within a few days of our reaching the state, found us camping spots in Glenrock and Casper, scouted the trail with me as far as Independence Rock, and then drove all the way to Farson with a replacement provisions-cart after we broke our wheels at South Pass.

  Randy Brown, chairman of the Graves and Sites Committee of OCTA, probably has done more than anyone else alive to preserve the original Oregon and California trails, and his work identifying and preserving graves and other sites has added considerable information to our knowledge of routes, pioneer camps, and river fords. Brown was kind enough to spend two days showing me sites along the trail in Wyoming, and we exchanged dozens of emails fact-checking points, place names, and pioneer histories. I often relied on Brown’s monograph sketches when describing the major cutoffs and sites of the West. Brown also read my manuscript and made several useful suggestions for improvement.

  Modern Wyoming homesteaders Polly Hinds and Lynda German run one of America’s most unique retailing locations, Mad Dog & The Pilgrim Booksellers in lonely Sweetwater Station—the sign outside reads OLD BOOKS, FRESH EGGS FOR SALE—and Polly was generous with her time, explaining the impact of the recent Mormon developments along the South Pass stretch of the trail. Jeanne Maher and her grandson, Charles Turquie, have done an extraordinary job protecting the wildlife corridor along the Sweetwater River at their Ellis Ranch near Sweetwater Station, and Charles was most helpful in showing us the various routes through South Pass. Tyler Cundall of the Cundall Ranch near Guernsey, Wyoming, Bill Sinnard at Fort Fetterman, Bill Larsen of the Rattlesnake Grazing Association in Casper, Jennifer Stevenson at the Split Rock Ranch, and Tena Sun of the Sun Ranch allowed us to cross the trail on their land and helped with directions and support. Vikki Correll and her daughter Crystianna Crawford of the Split Rock Café in Jeffrey City allowed us to camp on their grounds and rose early to feed us breakfast.

  I have described how Sam and LaVora Peery of Logan, Utah, interrupted their day to climb back up Rocky Ridge and assist us across some of the most difficult terrain of the trip, and I was moved by their religious faith and their dedication to strangers. Elder Doug Ellett and his wife, Beth, of St. George, Utah, welcomed us into Rock Creek Hollow and made us dinner when we camped beside the Willie Handcart burial site, and drove us ahead on the trail to scout our route to South Pass. In Idaho, several Mormon ranchers and their wives extended us similar courtesies. While I disagree with many policies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints along the modern trail, particularly the renaming of Devil’s Gate along the Sweetwater, the individual Saints I met were unfailingly helpful and devoted followers of the Good Samaritan rule.

  The residents of Farson, Wyoming, particularly Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper Ed Sabourin, cowboy and mechanic Tell Brenneman, and farmer and pilot Allen Stout, were lifesavers when we limped into the old Big Sandy Station after breaking our wheels at South Pass. My old friend Joe Cantrell of Rock Springs, now a district engineer with the Bureau of Land Management, met us in Farson and offered good advice on the routes through the cutoff country of western Wyoming.

  In Idaho and Oregon, ranchers Justin Smith, Gordon Thompson, Tony Clapier, Joe and Glenda Adams, John and Steph Teeter, Chip and Leila Lockett, and Wade Harris allowed us to use their corrals. Steve Stacy of the Snake River Garage in Huntington, Oregon, helped Nick rebuild the axle of our Trail Pup and arranged for us to climb twelve miles of original trail through the Langley Ranch above Burnt River Canyon. Photographer Merri Melde of Oreana, Idaho, who writes the Equestrian Vagabond blog, was wonderful company and made many contributions to our trip. Mike Williams of Baker City, Oregon, welcomed us onto his ranch for our last long camp. Wagon collectors and reenactors Lloyd and Julie Jeffrey of Glenns Ferry, Idaho, who have plunged into the Snake River at Three Island Crossing more than thirty times with their covered wagon and draft horses, spent an afternoon with me explaining the perils of river fords with horses and wagons.

  I will never be able to thank Vince and Sue Holtz of Caldwell, Idaho, and Farewell Bend, Oregon, enough for offering a permanent home to our mules and for their wonderful hospitality afterward. Their brother-in-law, Curt Jacobs, hauled Jake, Beck, and Bute and our wagons to their new home in Idaho.

  The staffs of the following museums and interpretive centers generously shared their archives and answered my queries while I was writing the book: the National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, Missouri; the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument and the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, Nebraska; the Fort Caspar Museum and the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper; the National Oregon/California Trail Center in Montpelier, Idaho; and the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City, Oregon. At the trail center in Montpelier, executive director Becky Smith and mountain man reenactor
Kurt Morrison helped make arrangements to receive our rebuilt Trail Pup wheels.

  I read nearly one hundred general-interest histories on the West and the emigrant trails, from Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision, 1846, to Richard Slotkin’s brilliant and exhaustive series on the mythology of the frontier, Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation, and relied on reference books like Robert Frazer’s Forts of the West and Nick Eggenhofer’s Wagons, Mules and Men: How the Frontier Moved West. For readers interested in more detailed histories of the trail, John D. Unruh Jr.’s The Plains Across and Merrill J. Mattes’s The Great Platte River Road are monuments of scholarship, dense-packed with information and statistics on the commercial scams of the jumping off towns, Indian and pioneer cooperation and conflict, cutoffs and alternate routes, the cholera epidemics, and religious strife. Mattes, a cofounder of OCTA and a former National Parks Service historian, worked from the 1930s to the 1990s, and is credited with rescuing Western trail scholarship from the “main ruts” mentality to a more sophisticated approach that appreciated, as he put it, “that the various routes and trails were all simply components of one big natural and providential travel corridor, the Platte River Valley.” Mattes spent almost three decades compiling what has to be considered one of the most triumphant volumes in American history, the Platte River Road Narratives (University of Illinois Press), a six hundred-page bibliography of more than two thousand pioneer journals, with biographical sketches, journal excerpts, and manuscript locations for each one. Marathon readers willing to spend a few months with Mattes’s research opus will learn more about trail history than by reading several other books combined. I paid $160 for my copy and feasted on it for three years, relying heavily on Mattes’s precise entries when quoting from the pioneer journals.

  Keith Heyer Meldahl’s Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail vividly mixes pioneer accounts with scientific descriptions of the terrain they were crossing. Will Bagley’s excellent series on the western trails—So Rugged and Mountainous, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them, and South Pass—offers new research and additional pioneer voices not heard in earlier histories. The monographs and articles of Todd Guenther, a history and archeology professor at Central Wyoming College, were useful when I was writing about the South Pass segment of the trail, and Guenther was kind enough to help me straighten out some details about the cutoffs in the area of Burnt Ranch and the Ellis Ranch.

  The best and liveliest sources about the trail, of course, are the original trail journals and travel guides written after 1843. I read more than thirty original pioneer and Gold Rush journals, and excerpts of many more, which I identified in my text when quoting from them. I followed the practice of always trying to obtain an original copy of the manuscript or the published journal on the web or at antiquarian bookstores, but in cases where these were not available I attributed my source to the history book where I found it. For readers interested in reading the best journals I would recommend either used or republished volumes of Franklin Langworthy’s Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines, or Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff. Kenneth L. Holmes and Dale Morgan have done an excellent job editing the multivolume pioneer journal collections published by the University of Nebraska Press, Covered Wagon Women and Overland in 1846.

  For my chapter on Narcissa and Marcus Whitman, I relied mostly on Narcissa’s own published letters and the comprehensive, two-volume biography written by Clifford M. Drury. Richard Slotkin read and commented on sections of that chapter and I cross-checked information with other published histories, including an essay by Todd Guenther, Erin Hammer, and Fred Chaney, which included a very useful map of the Whitman route after South Pass, in the Winter 2002/2003 issue of the Overland Journal.

  I was able to cobble together my history of the American mule from pioneer accounts, and the excellent web databases and histories offered by the American Mule Museum in Bishop, California; Western Mule Magazine; the North American Saddle Mule Association; and Rural Heritage magazine. The state of Missouri, which after the 1840s became the mule-breeding capital of America, has funded extensive studies on mules, and I relied on the publications of the State Historical Society of Missouri; the Missouri Agricultural History Series; and the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine. In 1994, Melvin Bradley, a University of Missouri professor of animal science and mule lover who was also known as “the mule’s best friend,” published his six hundred-page opus, The Missouri Mule: His Origin and Times, a copy of which I managed to locate at a used book store in Kentucky. Susan Orlean’s excellent article on modern mules in the February 15, 2010, issue of the New Yorker, “Riding High: Mules in the Military,” confirmed many details that I originally learned from special forces veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Betsy Hutchins in Rural Heritage and Steve Edwards in Cowboy Showcase have written superb articles titled “How to Buy a Mule.” These included vital tips about making detailed inquiries about a mule’s bad habits, carefully checking their legs and hooves, and “[taking] your time while mule shopping,” advice I completely forgot when buying my own team of Missouri mules.

  I considered the evolution of the Pennsylvania Conestoga and the common farm wagon that eventually became the prairie schooner of the plains—in particular, its role in developing the American economy and manufacturing technology—an important aspect of my tale. I was able to pull the many strands together with the help of Jack Day of Monkton, Maryland, the former secretary of the Carriage Association of America and a vice president of the Carriage Museum of America in Lexington, Kentucky, and the preeminent builder of wagons and stagecoaches today, Doug Hansen of the Hansen Wheel and Wagon Shop of Letcher, South Dakota. Histories and articles that I was able to obtain on the internet included Dan R. Manning’s “The Challenger,” about the Springfield Wagon Company; “Wagons of the West” by Jerry Adams; the Wheels that Won the West website; and “Wagon Makers & the Wheels of History” by John Knarr, published by the North Manchester (Indiana) Historical Society in May 2010. On eBay, I obtained original nineteenth-century wagon manuals and sales pamphlets with detailed specifications and company histories from the Peter Schuttler Wagon Co. in Chicago, the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Co. in South Bend, Indiana, and the J. Murphy & Sons wagon factory in St. Louis. I was able to follow the development of the larger Conestoga into the smaller, more streamlined mover’s wagon of the 1830s—paticularly the development of the fitted bolster—by examining the wagon collections at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; the Cornwall Iron Furnace in Cornwall, Pennsylvania; and the Pioneer Village museum in Minden, Nebraska. The photographs and displays at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, New York, and the National Park Service’s Roebling Bridge Tollhouse at Minisink Ford, New York, provided several examples of farm wagons at work on the canals. Merrill Mattes’s The Great Platte River Road and Will Bagley’s So Rugged and Mountainous have long sections about wagon parts, wagon-cover inscriptions, and how the wagons were purchased and put together on the frontier. Peter Schuttler Company histories, the Encyclopedia of Chicago, and John Carbutt’s Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men of Chicago contain extensive material on the Schuttler family and their house-building spree after the Civil War. Communications manager Julia Tunis Bernard and museum director Beverly Smith at the Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco confirmed information about the company’s early stagecoaches.

  I am happy to have written a book that contains a long section expressing ambivalence about the Mormons, because I feel the same way about my own “birth religion,” Roman Catholicism. I know so many wonderful, accomplished, and open people within the Saints that I am tempted to ignore the often clumsy administration and public relations of the official LDS Church. Lately, there have been encouraging signs that LDS leaders and scholars are promoting a more tolerant approach to issues like minority membership, the role of women and gay rights, and a more honest assessment of th
e controversial roles played by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, polygamy, and the Church’s violent history on the frontier. But a book about the Oregon Trail and what it has become today cannot ignore the Church’s efforts to control important historic sites and retell frontier history to its own advantage.

  Wallace Stegner’s The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail remains the single best book about the Mormons and a classic work of history. Fawn M. Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, is also excellent, and I also relied on John G. Turner’s Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet, and The Mormon Experience by Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton. David Roberts’s Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy, and Tom Rea’s Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story, document the 1856 Mormon handcart tragedy and its repercussions today.

  The LDS Church maintains an extensive web archive on the Mormon crossing to Utah after 1847 that includes individual pioneer journals, histories of each year’s crossing, descriptions of the Mormons’ impressive network of road ranches and trail markers, and documents on the 1856 handcart crisis. I found the work of Chad M. Orton, an archivist with the Family and Church History Division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially informative. LDS publications such as “Willie Handcart Historic Sites Information” and the “Handbook for Trek Leaders” at the Mormon historic sites in Wyoming were also very helpful. I obtained the May 2006 agreement between the Bureau of Land Management, the LDS Church, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which essentially converted a national landmark along the Oregon Trail in Wyoming, Devil’s Gate, into a Mormon-controlled site, and renamed it by the preferred LDS place name, Martin’s Cove. Attorney Megan Hayes of Laramie, Wyoming, who was hired to represent the ACLU in its action against the BLM and the LDS Church, explained during a phone interview the reasons for settling the case. Eric Hawkins, the print and broadcast media representative of the LDS Church in Salt Lake, answered my questions and confirmed details of my account. The Mormon takeover of Devil’s Gate was extensively covered in the Wyoming press, and occasionally by national newspapers, and I consulted articles published by the Billings Gazette, the Green River Star, the Deseret News, the Casper Star-Tribune, the New York Times, and the LDS News operated by the Church.