The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  A westering American needed mules. Now that I was planning on becoming one myself, I needed a team of big Percheron draft mules, but I couldn’t rely on simply arriving at Independence or St. Joe and picking out my team from the spring herds delivered to the jumping-off corrals. Instead, I spent a fitful winter combing equine websites and phoning mule brokers from Alabama to Idaho, usually coming up short. But finally by pulling every connection I had in the Old Order horse world I located what sounded like a promising team at Ropp’s Mule Farm in Jamesport, Missouri, run by a legendary Amish mule trainer named Philip Ropp, who agreed to begin driving the three mules I had bought to get them in shape for a two-thousand-mile run across the plains, and to order the correct draft harness at the local harness shop run by his father-in-law, Elmer Beechy. Meanwhile an acquaintance of mine from earlier trips west, Don Werner of the Werner Wagon Works in Horton, Kansas, sold me a restored nineteenth-century Peter Schuttler wagon and began making the modifications I needed for an Oregon Trail run. Werner also began building, out of an old set of wagon wheels and an axle lying in his back pasture, a two-wheel “Trail Pup” provision cart that we would tow behind the main wagon, liberating us from the annoyance of motorized support by a fleet of pickup trucks. I had designed the Trail Pup myself, modeling it after the Spanish “carreta” donkey-carts, also called “Red River carts,” which were used to cross the Rockies during the fur-trapping era, and the military commissary carts towed behind escort wagons during the Civil War. I had outfitted myself by telephone and email, but now I had a real team of Missouri mules and an authentic prairie schooner and cart. I felt as ready—and as fearful—about going as a nineteenth-century pioneer.

  4

  NICK ARRIVED IN HIS PICKUP on the first Friday in May. I was overwhelmed with joy to see him but also stabbed by pangs of worry. He had put on a lot of weight during his winter of inactivity and he walked with a noticeable limp. But he looked buoyant and happy, finally liberated from his invalid’s bed for a ride across the Oregon Trail. He had driven hard from Maine as soon as the appointment with his doctor was over, making the trip from Augusta in under five hours. This was one trail hand raring to go.

  Nick and I immediately addressed the serious matter of how much equipment we could carry. We knew beforehand that we would have duplicates of a lot of items, and that we should eliminate as much gear as possible to avoid overloading the wagon. Still, my attitude about a covered wagon trip was that we were about to shove off for four or five months of living out of a twelve- by three-foot wagon box. Everything that was dear to me would have to be wedged inside my new wheeled abode on the plains.

  Nick’s attitude toward me has always been that I am too acquisitive and fussy. In his mind, a college education ruins people and he associates my fondness for worldly goods with that. But our differences were a lot worse than I thought. It all came to a head when Nick saw my piles of gear on the porch of my house.

  “Rink, what the frig is this?” he said, holding up my wheel wrench.

  I was proud of my wheel wrench. I had found it at an antique store in Vermont over the winter, and I even checked that it was the right size for our Schuttler wheel hubs.

  “Nick,” I said. “That’s my wheel wrench. It fits the wagon.”

  “Rink, this is not a wheel wrench. It’s a frickin piece of crap. It’s cheap alloy from Korea or China or somewhere. It will break on the first wheel. I’ve already got two good ones in my tool kit.”

  Nick tossed the wheel wrench a few feet away onto the lawn, indicating that he was starting a reject pile, and began poking through the rest of the gear on my porch.

  “Oh, I am not fuckin believing this,” he said, holding up one piece of gear that I had carefully stacked into a waterproof Tupperware container. “Rink, what is this?”

  “It’s a shoe shine kit,” I said. “C’mon, Nick. Somebody might invite us in for dinner at the ranch house, you know? We might want to look neat.”

  Nick tossed the shoe shine kit toward the rejected wheel wrench, and our provisioning session proceeded from there.

  The rejects on my lawn quickly grew into a large, pyramid-shaped pile, a vertical yard sale depicting the vanities of life. Nick didn’t want to bring my CD player, my salad spinner and mixing bowls, or my boccie ball set, and on top of that he tossed extra pillows, my garment bag for wet-weather gear, my pasta colander, and several L.L. Bean bags loaded with Oregon Trail books. He had his own container of harness oil and a leather punch, so we didn’t need mine. By the time he was done, the pile of my gear that Nick had rejected would have filled about half the bed of a pickup truck.

  I was deliberately meek about all of this, and Nick seemed surprised that I didn’t put up a bigger fight. But I had known this was coming. To cross the Oregon Trail, my job would be to suppress as much of myself as possible, to manage the trip by never appearing to be a manager. In exchange for having Nick along, I would evaporate as a person.

  Nick was so disgusted with the chore of confronting my gear, and so tired after his long drive from Maine, that he decided he needed a long restroom stop inside the house, on top of my toilet. Grabbing an illustrated history of tugboats from my library, he disappeared inside the bathroom.

  Realizing that this was my last opportunity, I quickly sorted through the reject pile and pulled out the stuff that I still wanted—the boccie set, the kitchen gear, the shoe shine kit, and a lot more. Racing back and forth to Nick’s pickup truck, I stowed all of it way up front by the cab, hiding it in the cavities underneath Nick’s wheel jacks and tool kits. When we got to Missouri, I would have to figure out a way to secretly transfer my contraband stash to the covered wagon. I would buy hay in advance, I decided, and load it into the Trail Pup. You can hide a lot of shoe shine kits under bales of hay.

  While Nick was still on the toilet, I clunked up the stairs next to the bathroom as loudly as I could. Up in the attic, which was just above Nick’s head in the bathroom, I dropped some boxes full of heavy books, and kicked my snowshoes around a little, simulating the sounds of a dejected brother returning a lot of gear to storage. I sighed and moaned a lot when I got back to the bottom of the stairs, just beside the bathroom door.

  “Jeez,” I said out loud. “My boccie balls. Nick doesn’t like them. I can’t even bring my shoe shine kit.”

  One of Nick’s better qualities is that his short attention span does not permit him to hold a grudge for more than five minutes. When he emerged from the bathroom, he seemed refreshed, jubilant about leaving.

  “Yo, are we going now, or what?”

  As we left my drive I habitually reached into my jeans pocket to make sure that I had my keys. But there were no keys, and I suddenly realized the enormity of this leap. I looked back over my shoulder to my tidy barn house, with its neat board sides, clipped lawns, and flower beds. I didn’t need a key for the door there now. My home was sublet until November. My car keys had been left at my other house, with the car, so that my daughter could use it for the summer. I had also left behind the key to my post office box—the friendly postmistress in town would keep my mail. I had no keys, nothing to open, and nowhere to live, except in a covered wagon. I had never felt departure as strongly as this, as if I were leaving one form of existence for another.

  A few miles west of my home, the purple-black rim of the Appalachian chain rises steeply from the banks of the Blackberry River. It is a purposeful landscape, still bearing the relics of America’s nineteenth-century iron-making district. There are snowy-white lime pits dug into the hills, old stone furnaces beside the road, and a long chain of picturesque dairies in the valley. I drove that route several times a week, on my way to the supermarket, or to the library.

  Now I was leaving this familiar prospect behind to go forth and live my dream. But as I looked back one last time on the mountains of New England, I was racked by self-doubt, and my stomach and chest swirled with panic attacks. Being romantic, always effecting a new escape, wasn’t liberating at all. I didn’t
even know if I could push mules a mere fifty miles on the Oregon Trail, and the challenge I had taken on seemed terrifying. As we followed the back roads out over the Catskills and then picked up the interstates to drive west, my spasms of fear returned intermittently, especially early in the morning. I was departing on a crazyass errand into the wilderness and had no idea how it would end.

  • • •

  In northern Missouri, as we pulled off the highway and entered the large Old Order community in Jamesport, I could see right away that we had found a great jumping-off town. It was early afternoon during planting season and Amish and Mennonite farmers were clattering past the brick facades on Locust Street in their spring wagons, carrying furniture and potted flowers to sell to the tourists out on the highway. The two-lane highway north toward Ropp’s Mule Farm was crowded with big draft teams pulling harrows and corn planters to the fields.

  The Ropp farm was the classic Amish place, a zone of fecundity busy with new life up against low green hills. Mule colts were kicking up their heels and galloping in circles in the pastures and spring puppies scampered across the lawns. In the barnyard, Ropp’s teenage son was training an attractive riding mule by standing on top of the saddle and running a long rope over the mule’s ears and rump.

  Philip Ropp is short and wiry, with a lean Abe Lincoln visage and beard, a bundle of nervous, cheerful energy. He was just about to run off on an errand and was working on the broken engine of his horse-drawn brush hog. But Ropp told me that my mules were in the large walk-in pen at the rear of the stables of the main barn below. Nick grabbed his tool kit from the pickup and jumped onto the brush hog to figure out the engine problems.

  I had expected this to be an emotional moment but, still, I wasn’t quite prepared for the heartthrob I felt when I first saw that team. The mules were enormously tall—the big gelding, Jake, had to be over seventeen hands—and looked at me with those beautiful, imperturbable faces that mules have. The sunlight reaching the pen shone off their broad black backs, and it was set off by the mushroom-colored markings on their muzzles and the inside of their legs. I was smitten right away and couldn’t believe that I had purchased such an attractive team so casually, almost by accident, over the phone.

  When I opened the gate of the pen and stepped in, the taller of the two female mules wheeled on her rear legs, leaped off the sawdust bedding, and vaulted outside, showing me her new shoes when she kicked out going through the doorway. That would have to be Beck, and I could see why Ropp had warned me about her skittishness when we first talked about the team six weeks before. Bute, a little shorter, with a small, adorable head and almost Morgan horse good looks, placidly trotted off to join Beck outside.

  Crazy Beck (left), Steady Jake, and Prom Queen Bute.

  But Jake, a gentle giant, immediately walked over to me with a curious look in his eyes, his immense long ears pushed forward. When I reached out my hand to pat his muzzle and gently grab him by the halter, he buried his face in my armpit, nuzzling affectionately to say hello. I reached up to scratch behind his ears and he rubbed his head up and down along my ribs, lifting me to my toes with his strong head. God, did I love that mule right away and, right there, I understood something important about him. He was so strong and self-confident that he didn’t fear a stranger. He could afford to be outgoing and friendly. No beast on earth was a threat to Jake.

  Ropp had told me that Jake drove single and that I should try him out. I found a single harness hanging in the barn and decided to drive back up the county highway to pick up our new team harness. Jake was classically Amish-trained and stood calmly while I threw on the harness, and his only fault seemed to be that he pawed the ground impatiently when I had him hooked to the wagon—he was that anxious to go. I was eager myself to get him on the road and see how he handled and moved because I had laid such plans in having a single-driving mule to hitch to the Trail Pup when we made one- or two-day stops.

  When I reached the brush hog up by the house, Nick was standing over the engine, parts distributed all around him, his hands and face smudged with grease.

  “Nick, c’mon. Let’s try Jake out on the road. You can finish the engine later.”

  At the road, when I slapped the reins on Jake’s rump for a trot, he gamely bowed his head and neck, vaulting forward with an attractive, willing leap toward work. His stride was effortless and very long, and he naturally curled his hooves high, Percheron-proud, and then pounded back for the pavement, never breaking his trot. He was a gorgeously moving animal, unbelievably nimble for his size.

  It was a delight to be on a new Missouri road in a wagon pulled by a good mule, with my brother beside me on the seat. Olive Oyl sat between us, cocking her head sideways with curiosity about this new land. Every blade of spring grass and dandelion seemed to reach up to us from the fields, and the freshening breeze carried Jake’s dandruffy smell back over our faces. The harness and the shafts rumbled as they bounced together and the iron tires sang. Jake rhythmically pounded the road on new shoes. The cows and the horses in the fields ran to the fence lines, galloping beside us, to see the big black mule.

  “God, this is one fine fuckin mule,” Nick said. “If the other two are this nice we’re home free. I can’t believe you picked so well.”

  “Nick, sometimes you’re just so idiotically naive that you get lucky.”

  “Right,” Nick said. “Then, the next time? You’re as dumb as a stump post.”

  • • •

  The next day was sunny and bright, with high cumulus clouds resting in a big western sky as we made the Highway 36 crossing west from St. Joe to see our wagon. The bridge over the broad Missouri River crosses right where the ferry services bearing the wagons ran in the 1840s and 1850s. I asked Nick to drive slowly on the bridge so that we could see the high bluffs on the western side of the river that the pioneers described in their trail journals.

  From there, stretching more than a hundred miles southeast in a series of giant horseshoe bends, the Missouri’s course had defined the edge of the frontier. For twenty years before the Civil War the jumping-off towns along the river—Independence, Kansas City, Westport, St. Joe, and the Mormon crossing from Iowa, Council Bluffs—had bustled with departing trail traffic. Mule brokers, wagon dealers, and outfitters selling flour and sides of cured bacon competed fiercely for the new business that arrived every spring. Most of these towns were founded expressly to serve the Oregon Trail pioneers or the military forts, and every year their civic boosters sent thousands of printed pamphlets east to advertise their advantages. St. Joseph, which after its founding in 1843 quickly overtook Independence as the most popular jumping-off town, mushroomed from a population of just five hundred people in the early 1840s to almost nine thousand in 1860. The sudden boost in economic activity along the frontier helped the country recover from the devastating impact of the Panic of 1837. On a busy spring day, when everyone seemed to be launching for the trails at once, there were dozens of ferries and barges crossing with wagons at each spot, so thick on the river that it was said someone could step from barge to barge and get across to the far bank.

  As we entered the rolling farm country of Brown County and then drove up the shore of Mission Lake in Horton, where the Werner Wagon Works sits on a small plateau above town, my heart raced again. There, on the mowed lawn outside Werner’s shop, stood my covered wagon rig. The Peter Schuttler wagon and its matching Trail Pup were perched alone on the prairie, and from the bottom of the hill near the lake they were framed by the clouds and a distant fence line, lovely and idealized, like a monument reaching for the sky. The fresh canvas tops glowed bleach white under the sun, and the light glinted off the green wagon box and the matte red wheels. The smell of fresh wheel paint and the sound of the wind buffeting through the new wagon top filled me with the romance of travel, and all of my worries about the trip evaporated in an endorphin rush.

  The jumping-off towns along the Missouri River frontier (here, Westport, Missouri, depicted by William Henry
Jackson) boomed with overland traffic and became a major stimulus for the nineteenth-century American economy.

  Don Werner was glad to see us, and came out of his shop in worn dungarees, a plaid shirt, and an old pair of lace-up packer’s boots. He had grown up in the 1940s on a small Kansas farm, where his father still used horses, and retained as a favorite memory riding the family’s farm wagons as a boy. He spent his young adult years working as a union electrician on big construction projects in Kansas City, spending his weekends restoring covered wagons for friends. In 1989, Werner was awarded a dream contract, an order to build eight historically correct covered wagons for the displays at the National Oregon-California Trail Center in Montpelier, Idaho. Werner quit his union job and used the museum contract to establish his business, eventually emerging as one of the most respected wagon builders and wheelwrights in the West.

  Werner showed us the modifications he had made to the wagon according to my specifications, including the wooden platform bed with foam mattress that was installed inside the wagon box.

  When Don briefly left us to take a phone call in his office, Nick scrambled underneath the wagon on his shoulders and rump as he inspected the running gear and axles. We had agreed on a plan as we drove out that morning. We weren’t going to raise with Don any issues that were either ornamental or easy to fix back in Jamesport. But if Nick found anything mechanically wrong with the wagon, he would take his NAPA Auto Parts cap off and stow it in his back pocket. That would be our signal to quietly discuss the subject and decide what to do. Nick never took off his hat. But he did find a few things that he thought we should do. The oak brake shoes did not have rubber pads, and Nick didn’t think that the naked wood would last very long with the constant abrasion against the iron tire rims, especially after we started hitting a lot of hills. Nick thought that we should take along extra brake shoes.