The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Elmer said. “Seeing as you’re buying so much stuff here today, I am going to do you a favor. I’ll give it away to you for my absolute, Amish Wal-Mart, everyday low price, okay? $350.”

  “Done,” the man said. “Thanks, Elmer. Wayland is going to love this baby.”

  I was not believing this. It was as if my old saddle were a leopard that could erase its spots. One minute a slick saddle seat was antiquated, utterly out of fashion, and unsalable. The next minute it was studmuffin testosterone additive. Elmer Beechy had made $200 on that saddle in less than five minutes, not to mention all of the other expensive gear he was selling both of us.

  The tab for everything the man was buying, including my saddle, came to more than $1,000, and he paid in cash.

  I was still standing there, stupefied.

  “Say, Rinker,” Elmer said. “You wanna help this gentleman carry this gear out to his pickup? I wanna get someone out back started on your mule saddle.”

  Jesus. Now I am even Elmer Beechy’s errand boy. I was in such a staggered state that I did it, carrying my old Wyoming saddle, and all of its memories, out to the man’s shiny pickup, throwing it on, and then watching him drive away.

  When I got back inside, Elmer was amiably smiling, not at all concerned about what I thought.

  “Elmer, you just screwed me,” I said. “That guy would have paid $500 for that saddle. You could have paid me so much more. You said it would sit here for months. It was gone in five minutes, at a $200 profit.”

  Elmer sighed.

  “Rinker,” he said. “You are looking at a humble Amish businessman. First I did you a favor by taking the saddle off your hands. Then I did him a favor, letting it go cheap because he was already spending so much money here. Everybody’s happy. But let me ask you something. Did you watch me do that?”

  “Yeah, Elmer,” I said. “I watched you do that.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because now you’re honorary Amish.”

  When my saddle was ready I unharnessed Jake, and Elmer helped me throw on my new mule saddle. I rode Jake out across the hilly meadows for half an hour. Ropp was right. Jake rode like a big old Boeing Stratocruiser—the same gentle, sweet Jake, but a freighter. However, I could steer him, and he would trot if I urged him hard. In Elmer’s hands, I had become the classic pioneer rube. But now I had a plausible worst-case scenario plan. Jake could carry me out of the wilderness if we broke a wheel.

  • • •

  When I got back to Ropp’s farm with Jake, Nick was working in the barnyard behind the Schuttler making last-minute tweaks to our modifications and checking the axels for grease. One of the additions he had made to the wagon while I was gone filled me with nostalgia.

  After my father died in 1975, there was a great dispersion of his fabulous loot, according to a family pecking order that made sense only to us. His wagon collection had already been sold off, but my sisters managed to get all of the valuable dry sinks and the best antique furniture. One of my brothers ran off with my father’s leather flight jackets and helmets. Nick, of course, secured most of the contents of my father’s shop, a mechanic’s booty of antique tools, anvils, hydraulic jack stands, piles of wagon parts, and four hubcaps for a 1967 Oldsmobile 88. I got a cardboard box filled with dog-eared reference books and a worn shearling coat.

  But the jewel in the family crown was a simple wooden sign, which Nick had hung for many years above his fireplace in Maine.

  On our 1958 covered wagon trip, my father wanted the automobile drivers backed up behind us to know that we appreciated their patience. They deserved to understand, he thought, why a covered wagon was running down the roads of New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the middle of an otherwise normal summer in the late 1950s. So he had a sign maker in New York City paint a simple explanation in black and red letters on a white background, across a four-foot pine board that hung from leather straps behind the wagon. It read:

  We’re Sorry For The Delay—But We Want The Children To

  SEE AMERICA SLOWLY

  New Vernon, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Lancaster, Gettysburg, Penna

  The sign was a big hit everywhere we went that summer and when the local newspapers printed photographs of our wagon trip, SEE AMERICA SLOWLY was always prominently featured.

  The back of the sign had never been painted, and over the years the pine had aged to a smooth surface. Nick had painted that white, and then taken the board to a sign painter in Maine for the similar messaging he considered appropriate for our trip.

  We Are Sorry For The Delay, But We Want To

  SEE AMERICA SLOWLY

  St. Joseph, Ft. Kearny, Scotts Bluff, South Pass, Farewell Bend

  While I was away at the harness shop, Nick had hung the reverse side of the sign, with its new lettering, on the back of the Trail Pup, where it would be clearly visible to drivers following us on the highways west. I was charmed by the idea of recycling my father’s old sign. Our tailgate motto, fifty-three years after it had been created for my childhood covered wagon trip, would still be SEE AMERICA SLOWLY.

  The sight of our wagon rig finished off with the SEE AMERICA SLOWLY sign possessed me with jumping-off fever. We still had a long punch list of minor fixes that we wanted to make—extra harness rings for the driving lines, better attachments for our hoses and water barrels, a staff for the American flag we wanted to hang from the wagon. But, fuck it. Perfectionism was my enemy now. We would be dicking around Missouri for days if we continued to noodle with these fixes, most of which could be made after we launched on the trail.

  “Nick,” I said. “I’m calling the trucker in a few minutes. I’m going to ask him to get here tomorrow, as early in the day as possible. We’ll haul the mules and the wagons across the river tomorrow, spend the afternoon making any last-minute fixes, and launch the next morning. It’s time to leave.”

  “Yeah, but I still have more fixes,” Nick said. “And have we shopped for food? Rinker, we need food. We need hay and oats.”

  “No more fixes, Nick. Screw food for now. We’ll buy that at the first Wal-Mart. Do you want to hit the trail?”

  “Do you want to hit the trail?”

  “I want to hit the trail.”

  “Okay, boss. Let’s head ’em up and move ’em out.”

  5

  THE ERA OF THE CANVAS-TOPPED wagons crossing the American plains lasted about fifty years. During the peak migration years of the 1840s and 1850s, more than 400,000 pioneers crossed, in about sixty thousand wagons, but there were still remnant wagon trains rumbling across the prairie with homesteaders well into the 1890s. A giant wave of economic destiny rolled west with the red wheels. But history is often nonlinear and event followed event with unpredictable charm.

  With time, of course, the covered wagon became one of our most enduring cultural symbols, expressing both the wandering urge and the go-getter spirit of a society that had stumbled upon mobility as an engine of growth. But unlike the railroads or the clipper ships that propelled America’s growth as an industrial power and a global trading giant, the green wagons crossing Nebraska en masse after 1843 were not a result of planning or deliberation. Happenstance and local experimentation, more than anything else, created the distinctive American covered wagon, and its exact provenance is unknown for a very good reason. By the 1820s, covered wagon prototypes had become so common, and their design features were so democratically shared, that no one thought it useful to record their history. But to understand the rough ambit of wagon development is to understand America itself.

  One particularly strong misconception still persists. During the spring before I left, as I began to tell a few friends that I was headed for the plains for a covered wagon trip, they universally assumed that I would be taking a Conestoga wagon. There was even an interesting gender break about it. “Oh, so you’re taking a Conestoga across,” one male friend said. “Tell me, how much does that baby weigh? It looks big.” A woman friend said, “Oh, the Conestoga. I’ve seen
these lovely pictures of them with couches and carpets inside. So comfy. Can I come along for a week?”

  In fact, the Conestoga wagon was an eighteenth-century behemoth, essentially a brigantine on wheels, and it had very little to do with the overland migration before the Civil War. The Conestoga was an eastern wagon and saw only limited use out west on the big commercial roads like the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and New Mexico, or along the military trails that conveyed munitions and hardtack from Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to the distant, outlying forts up in the Indian country of Nebraska and Wyoming. But there was a connection between the Conestoga and the lighter, fleeter prairie schooners of the pioneers.

  In the 1730s, the sturdy forebears of today’s Lancaster County Amish and Mennonites had made a significant step forward on the ground they farmed along the rich bottomlands of the Conestoga River in eastern Pennsylvania. Briskly efficient at farming, very commercial in outlook, the Swiss-Germans were producing surplus grain on their farms within a generation of reaching America. The growing cities of Philadelphia and New York offered a ready market for these cash crops and were only a week or so away by wagon. But which vehicle to use? The Mennonite farmers along the Conestoga, many of whom built their own wagons, simply adopted a design that they knew well from Europe, and which probably dated back to medieval times.

  The Conestoga certainly looked medieval. The big hardwood wagons, up to twenty feet long, were built with floors that sloped sharply upward from the middle, with a tall front and back, to keep the load of grain or barrels pressed toward the center of gravity. The sides flared out dramatically like those on a coastal dory, also to stabilize the load, so that the finished vehicle looked nautical, capable of floating across the rivers it encountered nearby. (In fact, empty Conestoga wagon beds, their seams caulked with tar, could be floated across rivers and streams.) The Conestogas were massively overbuilt, weighing up to 3,500 pounds, and could carry four times their weight—eight tons of grain or cordwood, bound for Philadelphia.

  Conestogas had clunky, four-foot wheels with up to six-inch iron tire rims. The wagon body holding the cargo, and the axle undercarriage, later called the “running gear,” were connected as one structure, secured together with bolts or iron strapping on the axles. The distinctive-looking covered top, called the “bonnet,” was developed to protect the cargo against bad weather. Heavy-grade linen or cotton sheets, soaked in linseed oil to make them water-resistant, were stretched across a series of semicircular hickory or oak hoops, or “bows,” fitted to the side of the wagon. (Later, an even thicker cotton-linen blend made with hemp—canvas—was deemed more durable.) Heavy chains lashed to the sides prevented the bulging load from breaking the structure. This ungainly vehicle, hitched to long gang-teams of eight to twelve oxen or horses, squeaked and lurched over the bumpy colonial roads, complaining like the rigging on a four-master. Thousands of Conestogas were built, and they were usually organized into long cargo convoys of a dozen or more, which could be heard miles away. The professional teamsters who ran these caravans manned America’s earliest inland transportation routes, spurring trade, road building, and the development of urban markets, and also helping to build a sense of continental unity by linking the disparate colonies with reliable deliveries of food and other supplies. After the American Revolution, the groaning leviathans were hauled over the steep, muddy reaches of the Alleghenies, to connect the old colonies back east with the new settlements in the Ohio River valley. The Conestoga was the semitruck of young America.

  The Conestogas were legendary for their durability and load-bearing capacity, but they were also notorious for breakdowns. Because the wagon vessel and running gear were usually connected, essentially secured together as a single unit, the bearing weight of the load was applied directly to the hickory axle, and from there to the wheels. Eight tons of downward and sideways force were applied every time the wheels hit a bump or some Allegheny bedrock. Often, shortcuts had been taken while making wagons, and the wooden axles or running gear parts were not always made from the best, cured wood. Everyone overloaded their wagons, to make as much money as possible on a western Pennsylvania or Ohio run. Bump, axle break. Bump, axle break. The cursing of the teamsters echoed across the Allegheny hollows.

  Obsolescence overtook the Conestoga for other reasons. By the 1830s, two dynamics were roiling the young nation. The availability of cheap or even free land on the frontier west of the Appalachians had made America a very mobile society. Americans had always been absolute beavers about clearing forest land, but they were not very good at conserving soil by rotating crops, contour plowing, or providing fertilizer to keep their ground productive. The dispositive feature of the American character was impatience, and every few years families just moved on to fresh, fertile ground, leapfrogging hundreds of miles at a time. (By the time he was twenty-one, in 1830, Abraham Lincoln had lived with his family on at least five farms, moving from his birthplace in Kentucky to Indiana, then Illinois. George Donner, the leader of the famously unlucky Donner Party wagon train that was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevadas in 1846, had lived in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Illinois before migrating west.) To facilitate these moves, and to meet the diverse needs of America’s briefly tenanted farms, a new wagon design emerged, more or less by accident.

  The “mover’s wagon” that began to appear on American farms in the 1820s—so called, we think, because farmers used them to move a lot—introduced several major improvements. The new, boxier wagons were much shorter than Conestogas, about ten to twelve feet long, and lighter, with an empty weight of about 1,200 pounds. But they could still carry a great deal, up to two tons. Tall, four-foot wheels in the back distributed the load over bumps, and smaller, three-foot wheels in the front enhanced maneuverability and turning radius. The wheel base was wide—up to five feet—but the wagon box itself was narrow, usually just a few inches more than three feet. This design concentrated most of the weight toward the center of a wide platform of wheels, giving the new wagons more stability than the old, swaying Conestogas.

  But one seemingly small advance changed everything. It was a transportation tweak akin to the conversion from propeller airliners to jets in the late 1950s, or the widespread introduction of automatic transmissions in cars in the 1960s. By the early nineteenth century, wagon makers began perfecting a U-shaped assembly on top of the axles that acted as a cradle for the wagon box. This part was called the “bolster.” Gradually, the bolster was improved to provide a tighter, more engineered support for the wagon box, called “fitted bolsters.” The rectangular wagon box now rested on the axles, kept in place by gravity and the tight framing of the bolster. This eliminated the need for bolting the assembly to the axle as one unit. The empty weight of the box was just heavy enough, and the bolster so perfectly formed, that the wagon and running gear remained together without being attached.

  The standard Peter Schuttler farm wagon, converted with hoops and a canvas top at the frontier, was the minivan of the plains before the Civil War.

  It was a baby step, and it probably didn’t happen all at once. But, once the bolts or straps connecting the wagon box to the axle were removed, the physics were hugely advantageous. The wagon box now floated free, no longer rigidly bound to the axles. At a bad turn or bump, at least half of the load stresses were bounced back up into the load in the box, or dissipated into the air. This greatly reduced the bearing stresses on the axle. The wagon boxes bounced and jostled a lot, but that represented energy that wasn’t being transferred to the running gear. Bump, the harvested corn absorbs the shock. Bump, the cordwood rearranges itself. At the end of a long day on the wagon seat, a farmer’s butt felt like roadkill. But the running gear and axles were intact.

  By the mid-1820s, America had commenced its glorious but now forgotten Canal Age. Canals were being built everywhere to carry coal, grain, firewood, and whiskey from the hinterlands to the cities—along the Raritan and Delaware watersheds in New Jersey, across all of the Pe
nnsylvania river basins, and throughout the new frontier country in Ohio and Indiana. The grandest of these was the Erie Canal, which opened for use in 1825, “wedding the waters” of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic with a 363-mile ditch that crossed from Buffalo on Lake Erie to the Hudson River at Albany, New York. The Erie Canal was forty feet wide, had thirty-six locks, and had an elaborate system of towpaths and intersections with major wagon roads. Thousands of Irish laborers were dispatched to upstate New York to work under subhuman conditions with wheelbarrows and shovels.

  Nobody in his right mind would excavate a 363-mile canal that is forty feet across by running a big old Conestoga onto the crowded and dangerous construction sites. The Irish were dying like flies already and in terms of labor efficiency it made no sense to kill a lot more with capsizing wagons. Historians have long been frustrated by a lack of accurate record-keeping during the canal-building era, but we do know that farmers along the western New York frontier began selling their mover’s wagons to the builder of the canal, the Niagara Canal Company, which in turn hired wheelwrights and mechanics to improve these wagons for canal work. The lower front wheels of the wagons made them easier to maneuver around the obstacle course of dirt piles and rocks at the canal’s edge, and they were used primarily at lock sites and road connections, to haul away and relocate the construction debris. Overloading was a frequent problem, but the relative ease with which broken wagon boxes could be replaced was an advantage. It was probably along the Erie Canal that the practice of stockpiling extra wagon boxes and wheels was introduced.

  The riddles of history are always more interesting than the proven facts. Did the farmers, seeing an opportunity to make extra money over the winter, modify and strengthen their wagons specifically for canal building? Or did the canal builders make most of the design enhancements themselves? At some point, the wrought iron braces and pins that were used to assemble the running gear were improved. Wheel brakes for steep downhill grades were added during the 1830s, but where? On the farms or on the canals? Who built the first reinforced cast steel skeins to connect the axle to the wheel hubs? In the end, there are no specific answers to these questions, but a larger truth obtains. Two great impulses of the American experience—moving from farm to farm along the frontier, and building canals—resulted in the mythic prairie wagon that opened the West.