by Peter Stark
Across the Columbia, I entered Oregon. For much of the country, Oregon conjures mossy rainforests and Pacific waves crashing on rocky headlands. That version of Oregon certainly exists—on the west side of the Cascades. The mountain range creates a wall separating the two climates and two halves of Oregon. Wet air masses sweep in from the Pacific, climb up that wall, cool in temperature, pour down the rain that “cascades” back to the Pacific in salmon-filled streams. That air has been squeezed dry by the time it makes it over the range and reaches eastern Oregon. That half of the state has a desertlike, semiarid climate. The two halves are like black and white—or rather, emerald green and dusty beige.
Rumbling west, the Oregon Trail pioneers hungered for those green and fertile lands on the west side of the Cascades—especially the famously lush Willamette Valley, the final destination sought by many of the wagon trains. But to reach it, they had to get past high, dry eastern Oregon. The safest, and by far most common, route was simply to skirt northward around it in a long detour that followed the Snake and Columbia rivers until the Columbia—and the wagon trains—reached the moist side of the Cascades. This kept the emigrants along good, sweet water the whole way.
But the shortest route to the Willamette aimed straight across the high deserts of southeastern Oregon. Over their two-thousand-mile journey from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley, which took four to six months, the pilots of the prairie-schooner caravans constantly looked for “Cut-Offs”—shortcuts—that potentially could save many days of grinding travel. Most of these cutoffs they discovered did, in fact, save miles and time. But the one across southeast Oregon proved, over several attempts, to be an unmitigated disaster. As I read the old diary accounts by emigrants who survived it, I came to think of southeastern Oregon as the Bermuda Triangle of wagon trains.
The southeast was the last part of Oregon to get settled, and even now, it’s not “settled” in the common sense of the term. This is ranch country—big ranches. A small ranch here covers 25,000 acres. The large ones encompass holdings beyond anything that we consider conventional “ownership” of land. They are their own territories, sovereignties of open spaces.
You can still get lost here, and people do, willingly and not. They get lost in a different way of life, a different rhythm, a different sense of boundaries and space. Once you’ve been there, it’s easy to see why it attracted those who wished to live a life of adventure, those who did things their own way, and those whose preferred, by their own sense of necessity, or the sheer thrill of it, to live outside the conventional boundaries of the law.
Some of the Old West still lives here today, bumping with increasing force into the “New West.” Or maybe it’s vice versa. As ever, it centers on who controls—and how to treat—the land. Maybe that Old West was never more than a mirage. In our mythology it implies the ultimate freedom to do whatever you wanted. Maybe it was true in the West—as long as you possessed the land. But possessing the land—these vast acreages—was never easy and always temporary.
As one of America’s first naturalists to move west, John Muir understood this. He intimately grasped the importance of controlling the land. Having spent his youth clearing his family’s farm in the wilderness of Wisconsin, he was attuned to the motives of those who coveted land for profit and to the benefits of keeping land in the domain of the public. You could argue that Muir, starting in the 1870s when he came to Yosemite, represented the first crusader for a New West. He traveled through much of the West, including Oregon and the Nevada basin country near my destination. To this day, Muir’s voice remains one of the most powerful to advocate wilderness and empty spaces.
AT PENDLETON, HIGHWAY 395 SHRANK to two lanes and climbed out of the Columbia River Valley up a long draw. In a narrow valley among grassy hills, I glided through the tiny burg of Pilot Rock, where a large basalt cliff hefted above a clump of houses and cottonwood trees. The cliff had served as a navigation point for pilots guiding their wagon trains along the main stem of the Oregon Trail, the route that followed the Columbia and skirted around the high deserts of southeastern Oregon. As I drove out of Pilot Rock, I scanned the pastures along the road for traces of wagon ruts—still existing in places along the Oregon Trail—but saw none.
It was early evening now. The sunlight mellowed to a deep gold. The temperature cooled and I brought my bare arm in, rolled up the window partway. The swerving road climbed another long grassy draw, still farther from the broad Columbia. Western meadowlarks trilled. I passed almost no other cars. I’d left the Interstate system, with its nodal interchanges that serve as our own landmarks, our own Pilot Rocks—these places we regard as safe ports of familiarity and sustenance and shelter with their Denny’s and McDonald’s and Burger Kings, their Texacos and Citgos, their Starbucks and Wal-Marts, their Hampton Inns and Motel 6s and Super 8s. I felt a thrill to leave that easy, familiar world and strike out into the realm of twisting roads and small dots of towns, with evening approaching, unsure where I’d stay the night.
The road climbed over a small, forested mountain range still holding on to a few dirty patches of winter’s old snow. A historical marker at the summit called it “Battle Mountain,” where the last significant fight against Indians in the Pacific Northwest occurred on July 8, 1878. They were, predictably, protesting against white encroachment.
They lost.
From the 4,200-foot summit of Battle Mountain, I descended into a broad valley, rimmed by distant wooded hills like a far-off shoreline and specked, as if they were islands on the sea, by stands of ponderosa pines and patches of wet green meadow. There were virtually no houses. I sensed that this resembled the landscape the way it looked before white settlers arrived here. I sensed I was now entering the big country. It excited me the way all new and big country excites me with the desire almost literally to reach out and embrace it.
I swung down the canyon of surging Camas Creek, rose over another summit, down across another broad valley, climbed another summit, down across another valley, crossing the fingers of the Blue Mountains and forks of the John Day River, as if I were an ant running over a set of knuckles. Still I headed south on Highway 395. Finally, well after dark, after a fat yellow full moon rose over piney mountain ridges, I pulled into the small town of John Day. I found a motel and—with the town’s restaurants darkened at 10 p.m.—gratefully ate a takeout burger in my room and drank a beer.
TALL, CHEERFUL—and perhaps mentally unstable—John Day was a forty-year-old Virginian and crack rifle shot2 who, in 1811, joined the “Overland Party” that John Jacob Astor of New York City sent across the West to found a fur-trading empire on the Pacific Coast.
Astor had emigrated from Germany in the 1780s and, virtually upon stepping off the boat from Europe and with the advice of a fellow passenger, started a New York City fur shop. He then expanded into the Great Lakes fur trade, as well as New York real estate, and grew very wealthy. With the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark’s exploration to the Pacific in 1804–06, the ever-shrewd Astor saw the opportunity to massively expand his Great Lakes fur-trading business all the way to the West Coast, and beyond. This ambitious—even audacious—plan involved trading New York manufactured goods with the West Coast Indians for furs, trading the American furs in China for porcelain, and trading the Chinese porcelains back in New York for good money.
Astor sent a ship around Cape Horn with orders to establish a post at the Columbia’s mouth, soon to be known as Fort Astoria. He also sent the Overland Party to join up there with the shipboard group. In December 1811, while crossing the Rockies, the Overland Party ran low on food and one of its members, John Day, the crack Virginia hunter, fell ill and emaciated along the banks of the Snake River in today’s Idaho. Too weak to travel farther, he dropped behind the party’s main body, kept company by his former boss, Ramsay Crooks, who liked and respected Day and wouldn’t leave him behind alone.
After three weeks recuperating, Crooks and Day started west aga
in toward the Pacific Coast, at first following the main party’s tracks in the snow. Eventually they lost the trail. For several weeks, they wandered aimlessly in the mountains, eating horsemeat and beaver and roots. As winter gave way to spring, they finally stumbled over the last ridge of the Blue Mountains, and, with food and directions provided by a friendly tribe of Walla Walla Indians, reached the Columbia River.
They followed the Columbia downstream toward the Pacific Coast and their companions at Fort Astoria. After one hundred miles of traveling the Columbia’s banks, they reached the Mau Mau River and another band of Indians who gave the hungry twosome food. But as Day and Crooks stuffed themselves with nourishment, the Indians took their rifles. They then took Crooks and Day’s fire-making flints and steels.
“They then stripped them naked,” recounted Washington Irving, who was commissioned by John Jacob Astor to write the history of Astor’s fur-trading enterprise, “and drove them off, refusing the entreaties of Mr. Crooks for a flint and steel of which they had robbed him; and threatening his life if he did not instantly depart.”
Reversing course and struggling—naked—back up the Columbia banks, they attempted to return to the villages of the friendly Walla Walla Indians. Day and Crooks had made roughly eighty miles and were about to veer from the river inland when they spotted a party of canoes of Astor’s fur traders descending the Columbia. They shouted out from shore and the canoes steered toward them. Rescued at last, they were taken down the Columbia by canoe and arrived, in May 1812, at the newly founded Fort Astoria on the Oregon Coast.
The haggard and exhausted Day convalesced only a few weeks, however, before he was dispatched back east as a member of a party carrying messages to Mr. Astor in New York City. This meant traveling by canoe, foot, and horseback the same way he had just come with such difficulty, two thousand miles back to St. Louis, whence the messages would be sent on to New York.
The messenger party and Day left Fort Astoria on June 29, 1812, according to Washington Irving’s book Astoria. To the surprise of the group, which knew only his usual manly cheer, John Day immediately showed signs of uneasiness and “wayward deportment.”
“It was supposed,” Irving reported, “that the recollection of past sufferings might harass his mind in undertaking to retrace the scenes where they had been experienced.”
Today we’d say it with an acronym. John Day was suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder.
As they progressed up the Columbia, Day became wilder and more incoherent. His companions tried to calm him without effect. The sight of Indians “put him in an absolute fury” and unleashed from him a barrage of epithets. The party had been under way from Astoria only four days, when, on the night of July 2, while camped at Wapato Island in the Columbia River, John Day made an attempt to kill himself, presumably with a gun. The others stopped him. He calmed down. The camp went to sleep. Sometime before dawn while others slept, he grabbed a pair of pistols, aimed them at his head, and pulled the triggers. He somehow missed, aiming too high. It was then his companions sent him back, in the company of friendly Indians headed downriver by canoe, to his comrades at Astoria.
“[B]ut his constitution,” Irving writes, “was completely broken3 by the hardships he had undergone, and he died within a year.”
And so Day’s companions renamed the Mau Mau River, at whose mouth he had been stripped naked and driven away into the wilds, the John Day River.
I HAD A LATE, QUICK BREAKFAST of eggs and bacon at a café on John Day’s main street before heading south again. The town felt small and far removed, like a mountain village, tucked in a narrow river valley and surrounded by steep piney hills. The date was May 20, 2008, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were feverishly fighting each other for the Democratic presidential nomination. Today was the day of the crucial Oregon primary, and yet, as I drove out of John Day, I saw no indication whatever of this Election Day. No yard signs for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. No billboards. Nothing.
I recalled that “blank spot” feeling I’d had in western Pennsylvania. One definition of “blank spot,” to me, is the absence of outside communications. You move away from terrain where messages constantly zip in from far away and where you must constantly filter out that information which is exterior and extraneous. In a blank spot, you move into terrain where all messages are local and all, in some way, are significant. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were not—it appeared—significant here. Or, conversely, their campaigns didn’t think John Day significant.
I drove south, over more low mountain summits and across more broad valleys. The terrain grew more arid—juniper trees instead of ponderosa pines. I saw men in pickups and cowboy hats. I saw cows—lots of cows—in distant herds scattered like flecks of pepper over the green pastures. I’d entered the big rangelands, and I’d left urban America, and the Interstate nodes that connect it, far behind.
Burns felt like an old cow town, with its broad streets and low stone buildings and an airy sense of spaciousness that began just beyond the edge of town. To freshen it up, they’d planted young trees along the sidewalks—apple, I believe—which were blossoming pink and white in late May. As I drove into town a cold, wet front suddenly hit from the coast. Low gray clouds swept over Burns, gusting a cold rain over the arid terrain that receives only six inches total moisture per year. I walked along the storm-darkened main street toward a brightly lit café for a sandwich while the rain blew confetti showers of the pink and white apple blossoms from the branches and plastered them in a wilting mosaic to the wet sidewalk. Burns reverted a notch closer to the high-desert town that it is.
I asked the waitress about the election and lack of activity.
“Some people voted,” she said.
I took that to mean it didn’t include her.
At the Harney County Library, around the corner, the cold rain gusted on the big windows. I sat at a research table in its Claire McGill Luce Western History Room, named after its benefactor. She’d grown up on a ranch near Burns, went to New York City for finishing school, met and married Henry Luce III, son of the founder of Time magazine, and who eventually became Time’s publisher like his father. When she died of cancer at forty-seven, she left funds for these Western collections.
A kind research librarian, Karen Nitz, combed file drawers and pulled folders of material on the “Lost Wagon Train,” piling them in front of me on the table near the rain-splattered windows. It turned out that several different wagon trains had gone “lost” right around here.
A former mountain man by the name of Stephen Meek4 piloted the first wagon train to attempt the cutoff across southeastern Oregon, in 1845. Meek knew the old Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading trails, which tended to follow Indian trails, and planned to lead the emigrants to the Willamette Valley along them. But the emigrants lost faith in his guidance, departed from his proposed route, ran out of food and water, and, as the weakest among them started to die, nearly hanged Meek from a tripod of upraised wagon hitches. He hid inside a covered wagon, piloting from within, while the train veered due north toward the safety of the Columbia, leaving dozens of graves along the way.
Eight years after Stephen Meek’s 1845 debacle another Oregon Trail party, which included Martin Blanding, made the same shortcut attempt, lured by the promise that a road had been cleared from the Willamette Valley over the Cascades to meet them. Their pilot, one Elijah Elliot, had been paid five hundred dollars5 to bring in a wagon train over the new route by settlers in the Willamette who stood to profit by it. But Elliot, apparently, was personally unfamiliar with this country. Rather, he carried a set of written directions. When the makeshift gallows went up and death threats were uttered, he admitted outright that he was lost.
The distances had been wildly underestimated. Near today’s Burns, the party believed it had almost reached the lush farms of the Willamette Valley, still deserts and mountain ranges away. In the arid country west of Burns they had to travel fifty or seventy-five miles b
etween watering holes.
It’s hard to exaggerate just how much water these wagon trains needed daily,6 these traveling villages where babies were born and people died, all the while moving, moving every day.
A seven-man “advance party” set off on horseback to summon help from the Willamette, thinking they’d return in ten days with relief. A month later they still stumbled through high country in the Cascades, having mistaken the peaks of the Three Sisters areas for their landmark, Diamond Mountain, where they were supposed to find the new road.
One by one, the advance party’s horses collapsed, and the men ate them. Then the men weakened, too. The four strongest went ahead—still farther in the wrong direction—while cold October rains fell in the Cascades. The three weaker men at the rear couldn’t start a fire with their usual tinder—bits of cotton plucked from the lapel of Andrew McClure’s coat, the cotton set aflame by loading it into a pistol and firing into a hat to catch the flaming bits.
Mc[lure]. was Sick. & discouraged,7 and Said Boys I don’t think I Shall ever be able to get into the Valley. But I want you to Save yourselves. Because While you are Stout enough to travel I think, it would be wrong for you to perish, on my account. I said No, Mc. I’ll Never leave you in these woods, as long as there’s a Button on your old coat, & Bob Said No Mc. We will never leave you as long as there is a Button on your old Coat & he was fairly overcome, & Said as he Wept, Boys, if you are not my true friends, No one ever had friends.
Down on the desert country west of Burns, the main party struggled to find water. Only a little flour and salt remained for food. As the beasts broke down from hunger and exhaustion, the emigrants slaughtered their cattle, which they’d brought to farm the Willamette. Observed Mrs. Esther Lyman, trying to feed the stringy meat to her hungry children, the cattle were so emaciated that “there was not enough [fat] on the whole Beef to greace a griddle.”