The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Rink, it’s just a frickin chain saw, okay?” Nick would say to me as I carried my prize Husqvarna back to my truck in pieces. “A glide bar, some sprockets, and a plastic housing. If you break it, you get to fix it!”

  Over the years I had devised an elaborate syllabus of coping techniques for spending time with Nick. I double-wrap my gear in plastic garbage bags as a prophylaxis against the grime in his truck, and I look away at meals while he speaks with an open mouth full of cole slaw, scalloped potatoes, and lobster au gratin. I’ve mentally trained myself to consider it charmingly down-market when Nick mangles clichés, drops the g’s at the end of “ing” words, and uses the F bomb as frequently as most English speakers use “and” or “the.” In the rural, blue-collar ghettos of Maine and neighboring New England, “frickin,” “freakin,” and “fuckin” are pause-fillers, a verbal tick that can indicate either wickedly good or bad.

  “Rink, I’ve spent my life in barnyards and bilges, okay?” Nick told me once. “How’m I supposed to fuckin sound?”

  Long ago I had decided that two days with Nick was my limit. Now he was proposing months together on the Oregon Trail.

  • • •

  Nick was particularly avid about bringing his Jack Russell terrier, Olive Oyl, which gave me a nervous twitch. With her beguiling cocked head, her cheery bark, and the brown patch on her right ear, Olive Oyl is unquestionably the most adorable canine since the Little Rascals’ mascot, Petey. She is an amazing dog, able to leap onto the roof of a minivan while fetching a stick. But Olive is also incurably filthy, porcine filthy. Her favorite activity when I arrive at Nick’s place in Maine is to sprint out the door for a long, strenuous roll in the patch of driveway where he changes the oil in his trucks. Then she burrows for rats in the manure pile before racing back to the porch to make a giant parabola leap onto my lap. Usually, I have stopped at the L.L. Bean outlet store on my way north and I am already wearing my new Allaghash twill chinos. I feel like taking a shower every time I see Olive Oyl.

  In his emails, Nick was now discussing Olive Oyl as an indispensable addition to “our” covered wagon trip.

  “Rink the thing to do is to creat as happy an enviremint for Olive Oyl as posible. She will remember this trip and talk about it for the rest of her life and I wudnt deny it to her for anythin I promis to wash her at the end of the day the same time with the same hos we wash the mules.”

  When this didn’t seem to convince me, Nick tried another approach.

  “Rink ther are prayeri dogs and ciotes and probly in wyomin even mtn lions and Olive Oyl will never stand for them being anywere near r camp shel be good with the mules and if it’s a cold nite she can sleep with you in the wagon and beleve me shes toasty.”

  Eventually I realized that it would be madness not to bring Nick. He is an incomparable horseman, and I needed him for such an ambitious trip. There would be wagon breakdowns, and it wasn’t wise to travel without a skilled mechanic. I tried to have positive thoughts about this. Nick and Olive Oyl were a package deal, but this was an opportunity for me. I could use the Oregon Trail trip to cure myself of my neatness fetish. I could abandon the English language as a work of art. Nick is a recovering alcoholic, and I could emulate his sobriety. Call the mules two thousand miles across the West with your brother and his squalid Jack Russell terrier. Return home a new man, no longer a boozer, a clotheshorse, or a control freak.

  So, we agreed. Nick’s final appointment with the VA doctor was slated for the first Friday in May, and he would reschedule it for early in the morning. Then he would drive down to my place in the Berkshires with a truck full of wagon jacks and tools, and we would depart the same day for the West.

  There was just one hitch. Anticipating his recovery, Nick had agreed to perform the difficult lead role in an Irish play, Stones in His Pockets, which was scheduled to begin its Damariscotta run in late June. In the production, Nick’s role was hermaphroditic. He would assume the voices and personalities of seven different characters, both male and female. “Rink, there just isn’t another actor in Maine who can do that,” Nick told me, insisting that he couldn’t back out of the commitment. So, after a month with me on the trail, Nick would take an acting hiatus and return to Maine.

  After consulting my maps, I didn’t think that this would be a problem. By the time Nick departed for his play, we would probably have reached North Platte, Nebraska, along a lovely stretch of the trail where the pioneers were hemmed in by the Platte River to the north, and on the south by a chain of elevated terrain called the South Hills. This natural corridor curves northwest toward Scotts Bluff and the Wyoming line, and all I had to do was follow the old Platte River Road that hugs the river. I was reasonably confident that I would have mastered the mules and the wagon by then. In early July, once he was done with Stones in His Pockets, Nick would return for the most epic portion of the trail—350 miles of undisturbed ruts that crossed the high desert of Wyoming, from Casper to Cokeville, in the cutoff country out near the Idaho line.

  Through the marvelous accident of family, I now had a sidekick for the trail, which I realized I had desperately needed all along. But what did this say about the adequacy of my planning, and how many other important things had I ignored? Several times, sitting up late at night or early in the morning, obsessively brooding over my maps, I realized that I still didn’t have a plan for navigating around the modern obstacles of the trail—interstate highways from Nebraska to Oregon, or the tangle of housing subdivisions and malls around Scottsbluff and Boise. There was no trail to speak of after Baker City, Oregon, where the old ruts were paved over by the interstate that ran the rest of the way to Portland. All of this would have to be explained to Nick who, given his hyperactive sarcasm gene, would remind me every time I erred on the trail.

  • • •

  Still, there was a pleasing verisimilitude about Nick joining me for the junket out west. Two brothers uprooting themselves to seek adventure or a better life together was a pretty typical Oregon Trail pairing, and our resemblance to the nineteenth-century pioneers was significant. Nick was an injured, unemployed construction worker in the midst of a deep recession in home building in Maine. As a print journalist I typified an American character type that had been familiar since the industrial revolution—the worker with redundant, antiquated skills displaced by technological change. We were going to see the elephant because there wasn’t much else going on for us at home.

  The theme of personal and financial desperation—that most of the pioneers left for the frontier because they literally had nowhere else to go—was popular with historians from the earliest days of the trail. Francis Parkman, a notoriously snobbish Boston Brahmin, went too far when he called the emigrants he met during his 1846 crossing “some of the vilest outcasts in the country.” But he was probably correct in concluding that most of the wagon travelers were motivated either by “an insane hope of a better condition in life, or a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society, or mere restlessness.”

  The 1840s and 1850s were tumultuous decades in American life, and the chronic instability of the young republic had a broad impact, especially on the farmers and rural tradesmen who made up the majority of the population. Families were disrupted and lives destroyed by the financial panics and bank failures that recurred every decade, towns were divided by bitter religious squabbling and labor strife, and the biggest political issue of the day—the spread of slavery—had degenerated into guerrilla warfare on the Kansas and Missouri frontier. Frequently, to be an American then was to be periodically unmoored, transient, so bereft of options that moving on was the only choice. Settling the frontier wasn’t simply America’s “manifest destiny.” It was a safety valve that prevented a calamitous society from imploding.

  Nick and I were certainly among the unmoored of the twenty-first century, and that was our joint advantage. Nothing prevented us from risking everything to take on the obsession of crossing the Oregon Trail. But escaping our personal problems to be
come wagon tramps for the summer didn’t mean that we possessed the know-how and skills to cross the trail. While I waited for Nick to arrive, I woke early most mornings to brood over my maps, spending what I called my “dread hour” at my kitchen table, drinking coffee while I agonized over the long, cluttered spaces out west where the trail had been subsumed by the suburbs of Scottsbluff or Boise, or blocked by the interstate highways. As a modern wagon traveler, I also faced another small problem. Before I could launch, I had to learn as much as I could about nineteenth-century prairie schooners and mules.

  3

  MULES OCCUPY A WONDERFULLY ANOMALOUS place in the American mind. Although the hybrid product of breeding a female horse with a male “jack” donkey was indispensable toward creating the America we know, most of us have very little idea what mules really are. Beyond associating them with long, floppy ears, ornery behavior, and loud, long braying—a noise that they can’t actually make—we regard mules as a quaint, mysterious anachronism about which knowing more is quite useless.

  In my own case, ignorance about mules was particularly pathetic. I had spent a lifetime around draft horses and mules, driving sleighs on weekends, skidding out logs in the woods, whiling away whole weeks on the farms of my Amish and Mennonite friends, watching mules work during planting and harvesting seasons. Now I had made the rash decision to drive a mule team two thousand miles across some of the most punishing terrain my country had to offer. It was as vital to me as it had been to the overland pioneers to find a team that could get me there. Still, I knew almost nothing about the animals.

  I was intrigued, as I began researching mules, to learn that no less a figure than George Washington was America’s original maharaja of mules. Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation. By the end of the American Revolution, General Washington controlled about sixty thousand acres of land, more than half of it in the promising frontier country west of the Alleghenies, in what we today call West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. Wresting clear title to this rich bounty of soil from the English crown may not have been a principal motive for fighting the Revolutionary War, but Washington knew that he would profit mightily if independence was achieved. In the 1780s, after the Revolution was over, Washington suffered the woes of all land developers. As he toured his vast frontier holdings—relentlessly collecting rents from tenant farmers and attempting to evict squatters—Washington envisioned a busy new commercial era during which the value of his lands would be enhanced by extensive forest clearing, road construction, and canal building. But the common beast for accomplishing such work, the horse, would never do.

  The traditional draft horses imported from Europe or bred on colonial plantations were magnificent equine specimens, weighing up to a ton apiece, their marbled thighs glistening under the sun as they pulled plows and farm wagons over the flat corn and tobacco fields of eastern Virginia or Pennsylvania. But these agrarian mastodons were enormously hungry at the end of the day, and, like so many “purebred” species, suffered the common defects of animals mated too often within the same bloodlines. The big, beautiful drafts were prone to lameness and chipped hooves, they lacked stamina, and essentially they could perform only one job—yanking a plow or a wagon across level cropland. Heavy draft horses were notoriously ungainly on the kind of steep slopes and rocky ground that would be encountered while conquering the Alleghenies.

  Washington and his fellow Virginia planters had long known about the plucky, kick-ass little mules developed for pack trains and for pulling light freight wagons in the Spanish territories of the lower Mississippi and Texas. These “crosses” were bred from horses and small Mexican donkeys, usually producing a mule that stood only four feet at the withers, the part of a horse or mule where the neck joins the body. What the young republic needed now was something much bigger—sturdier, draft-quality mules that stood at five or six feet. In Spain and France, where farming required pulling loads up the steep paths of terraced vineyards and wheat fields, mules of this size had been bred for centuries out of tall donkey sires called “Mammoth Jacks.” Mammoth jacks were any of several long-legged, large-boned studs selectively developed for draftlike qualities, probably from Middle Eastern donkeys brought back from the Crusades. The mammoth jacks had eventually branched off into several discrete European breeds: the Andalusian, Catalonian, Majorcan, and Maltese lines. But the courts of France and Spain, reluctant to share such prize breeding stock with the colonies of their rival Britain, had always banned the export of mammoth jacks to America.

  After the American Revolution, however, Washington was a global hero, and the Europeans were glad to help the man who had trounced their old British foes. In 1785 the king of Spain, Charles III, dispatched to Mount Vernon a shipment of mammoth breeding stock that included an Andalusian jack named Royal Gift. The shipment included two “jennies,” or female donkeys, suitable for mating with Royal Gift to create more mammoth studs. In the meantime, Washington’s old fighting companion during the Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, had shipped from France his own gift, a Maltese jack named Knight of Malta and four jennies.

  An experienced animal breeder like Washington—he is also credited with developing the American foxhound—knew what to do now. The new jacks had to be bred like bunnies in two directions at once. First, to create a new crop of mammoth donkey sires, the jacks had to mate with the jennies. The jacks produced from these unions in turn would be bred to as many draft-horse mares as possible—there were plenty in America—to complete the finished genetic product called mules.

  There were problems at first. Royal Gift was an inexperienced four-year-old who initially seems to have been intimidated by Washington’s tall draft-horse mares, and he wouldn’t fornicate with horses. But after a year or two of conjugal training with the friendly jennies, Royal Gift emerged. At his main estate in Mount Vernon, Washington built new barns and fenced in nearby pastures to create what he called “the compound,” ambitiously interbreeding his new Andalusian and Maltese stock for the best conformation and temperament. By the time he died in 1799, there were sixty working draft mules at Mount Vernon alone.

  But that was only the beginning. A single jack could service several horse mares a day, twenty or more a week, up to a thousand a year, and Malthusian growth just took over from there. Washington either sold his jacks outright to other breeders, or advertised in the Pennsylvania and Virginia newspapers the “at fee” services of his jacks, who made long breeding tours throughout the old colonies and the new frontier states every year. The new draft mules proved wildly popular. Many other Virginia planters, seeing a good thing, began importing the European mammoths themselves, and before long the Old Dominion had essentially become a mule bordello. By 1810 the region’s initial breeding stock had yielded an estimated 800,000 mules distributed throughout the South and beyond the Allegheny frontier.

  The early descendants of the Mount Vernon stock—tall, drafty, and weighing between a thousand and 1,200 pounds—were initially called “American Mammoth” mules, but the breed name gradually changed as the frontier moved west. In the 1820s, the most prized farm animals were called “Tennessee” and then “Kentucky” mules, because the frontier of Tennessee and Kentucky were where most of them were working and the best breeding lines were being established. By the 1840s the frontier had moved to Missouri and it was the “Missouri Mule” that became the American archetype. Thousands of these tall, reliable draft animals—mostly bred from black Percheron mares—were produced every year to supply the burgeoning overland trail traffic. The rapid spread of the Missouri mule and the success of farmers at breeding them to meet each new demand were signature American achievements. But it w
as government spending—so often a factor in developing a new industry—that proved decisive after the 1850s.

  More than a million mules were used by the Quartermaster Corps and the sutler trains that supplied the Union forces during the Civil War, a vital contribution when you consider that provisioning, as much as anything else, helped win the war for the North. After the Civil War, the same bloodlines were used to produce thousands of mules every year for the U.S. Army’s supply convoys, which traveled all summer along the many tributaries of the Oregon Trail to military forts in the West. During the great stagecoach era of the American West in the 1860s and 1870s, mules did most of the work, even if, later, in Hollywood westerns, horses got all of the credit. Perhaps as many as 800,000 distinctive, black Missouri mules—branded with a large “U.S.” on their rumps—were sent to Europe during World War I. In World War II, roughly 35,000 Missouri mules were deployed to mountainous or jungle theaters where Jeeps and trucks couldn’t get through, mostly for hauling light artillery, ammunition, and soldiers’ rations. The animals played valiant roles in two of the most important actions of the war—the 10th Mountain Division’s storming of the Italian Alps, and with the fabled Merrill’s Marauders along the Burma Road to China. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Command quickly reactivated the mule programs, and thousands of distant descendants of Washington’s jacks have been deployed in Afghanistan and other mountainous countries around the world. The marines and the army maintain their herds at bases in North Carolina and California, where mountain warfare troops are trained in mule handling, packing, and veterinary care.

  The advantages of mules have been known since ancient times. Fully grown mules tend to have the height and musculature of their mother, while inheriting the leaner physique and more nimble legs of their jack father. This produces a hybrid with the strength, but nowhere near the weight, of the mother. The two most common draft-mule crosses today are mammoth jacks bred to black or gray Percheron mares, and the sorrel and dun mules produced by mating with Belgian mares. When mature, the hybrid offspring weigh as much as seven hundred pounds less than their mother, giving the finished mule an extraordinary strength-to-weight ratio and agility far beyond its roots in the horse. In the equine world, the most common adjective applied to mules is “athletic.”