The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  I was this squirrely little Irish pipsqueak boy who seemed to understand that I had too much energy. My psychiatrists would later diagnose a mild disorder called hypomania, or the hyperthymic personality, a kind of diluted bipolarism. I am manic, but not necessarily depressive. I cannot enjoy life unless I am overactive, or find a challenge that makes me ebullient. When I travel to visit friends, I can’t relax unless I am clearing fallen limbs in their yard or rebuilding their fence. The related symptoms are insomnia, obsessive-compulsive reading disorder, alcoholism, satyriasis, and fastidiously ironed shirts. Extrapolated backward into the life of a boy, this meant someone who loved to carry water for horses.

  My father scrubbed me every night out of a watering bucket for the horses, using the occasion to lecture me about the “pioneering spirit.”

  God, did I love carrying water for the horses on the covered wagon trip. Down to the river with the buckets, dip them in while the water riffled over the rocks, and then clamber up the banks with the water splashing on my legs and the galvanized handles digging into my palms. I used a short stepladder to hold up the buckets while the horses drank. Our Belgian shepherd, Midnight, lapped from the bottom of the bucket when the horses were done. I was always up at dawn, running down to the river with the buckets so that none of my siblings could beat me to it.

  “That’s the pioneering spirit, son,” my father would call out as I ran back and forth to the river. “Children, look at Rinker. He’s so lickety-split!”

  Childhood competition dies hard. I am still a dawn-riser, outside well before breakfast, attacking the garden weeds or spreading crabgrass preventer on the lawns, mildly annoyed that everyone else in the family remains in bed.

  Now I would be using a covered wagon to escape one life and replace it with another, pursuing my dream of being on the plains for a whole summer. I have the pioneering spirit for many reasons. But surely the most important is that I still miss my father so, and those days when we crossed Pennsylvania together in the wagon seem like the last time that we were really good for each other.

  6

  I SLEPT IN THE WAGON for the first time the night before we left, and I loved my new womb on red wheels. Nick and I had followed in his pickup while our trucker, Doyle Prawl, hauled the mules and the wagons over the Missouri River into Kansas, and after it started to rain we pushed the wagons into the implement barn at Doyle’s small farm. I left the barn doors open so that I would feel as if I were really camping. It was a beautiful Kansas night with light rain pattering on the tin roof and, far off, I could hear dogs barking and the traffic on the St. Joe Road.

  The next morning I woke at dawn and immediately was gripped by one last paroxysm of dread. Inside my wagon womb, I lay on the pillow with my hands clasped behind my head, brooding, staring up at the oak bows, unable to chase away my fears. Oh, Rinker, what have you done to yourself here? It is two thousand miles to the end of the trail. There are so many details to be on top of every day, and Nick will be looking to you for answers, for a daily plan. The maps, finding supplies, finding water. Harnessing every day. Bute is probably a defective mule, Beck shies more than any equine you have ever driven. Why do you have to be such a crazyass? You could be back in your house in New England, writing a nice, safe book about clipper ships.

  But I felt better after a while, mostly by schooling myself with the basics, the alluring simplicity of wagon travel. My assignment for the day was straightforward. Just follow the back roads up through the old junction country to Hiawatha, twenty-five miles away. It would just be a long hayride northwest through Kansas, and the next day would just be another hayride due west along the St. Joe Road. This would be my mantra now: Navigate—and live—day by day. I couldn’t default to my personality as a born worrier, and looking at the big picture of the journey would only rattle me with the enormity of the challenge we had taken on. I could succeed only by piecing together a series of small-picture days.

  Nick had slept in the guest room at Doyle’s and came down to the barn early, while I was making coffee on our Coleman cookstove. He stood on the concrete floor of the implement shed, freshly showered and in clean clothes, with his L.L. Bean backpack at his feet. His booming voice echoed off the corrugated aluminum walls.

  “Yo, Trail Boss! Let’s get rollin!”

  Nick had been doing this strange thing for the last couple of days, always calling me “Boss.” He had always had this inexplicable quirk of character. When he visited my place and I took him to parties at the homes of my friends, he became very deferential, not at all his cheerful, brash self. Often, he called me “sir,” as if some bizarre British class system applied when he was visiting my world. At the time, he was supervising elaborate $3 million mansion projects on exclusive islands off the coast of Maine, but Nick would tell my friends, “Oh, I’m just a carpenter from Maine.” This made me feel uncomfortable and I hated it when he was implying that his status was beneath mine, that our different lives implied superiority on my part, inferiority on his.

  “Nick,” I said. “What is this ‘Boss’ shit? I am not your boss. We’re doing this trip together.”

  “I think it’s better to define the relationship,” Nick said. “I’m the Trail Hand. You’re the Boss. So just call me Trail Hand, okay?”

  Nick had spent a long time the night before on a cell phone call to his best friend in Maine, Ripley Swan, and he explained that he and Rip were worried about his brash personality. Nick knows a lot more about teams and wagons than I do, he is not exactly meek, and if he asserted himself too strongly we might develop conflicts and fight. There were decisions to be made every day. We might have emergencies. Somebody had to be in charge for the trip to be successful. Rip was also aware that Nick rarely paces himself, throwing himself into projects so frantically that he’s exhausted before they are even half done. Rip had advised Nick not to “take ownership” of the trip. The Boss title for me, they both thought, would help Nick police himself and find a sustainable level of energy for the trip.

  I didn’t feel that the denotation of titles was necessary, but I was touched that Nick and Rip had devoted so much thought to the question. This was obviously something that was important to Nick. It would be good management to buy into his plan.

  I handed Nick a cup of coffee.

  “All right, Trail Hand, go out and grain the mules,” I said. “We’re harnessing in half an hour.”

  • • •

  The biggest single danger on our trip was something that is both familiar to and greatly feared by horsemen—the “hitch runaway.” A hitch runaway happens when horses or mules, while being hooked to a wagon, suddenly take off because they have been spooked by a deer bounding into camp or by children riding past on bicycles. When one unhooked mule on a team decides to run, the other two will often try to join it, and in the muling chaos that follows poles get snapped and wagons are overturned. Hitch runaways injure people and wreck a lot of wagons.

  Runaway teams and getting run over by the wheels were frequent causes of injury and death along the Oregon Trail, dreaded almost as much as disease and hunting accidents. In peak migration years like 1849 or 1852, when literally thousands of wagons were being hitched every morning, there were dozens of runaway accidents, and many trail journals I read described how a team spooked by buffalo, or by a boy getting careless, led to sudden death under the wheels.

  After hitching several times in Jamesport, I appreciated the enormous power of our draft mules and was naturally concerned about this. Nick’s tendency to focus so intently on a job that he runs out of circuits to process language, communicating instead by a crude pantomime of grunts, shrugs, and nods of his head, could be fatal during hitching. Now the designation that Nick had conferred on me, Trail Boss, gave me the authority to establish the procedure that we would follow every day. During harnessing, I told him, the mules would always be chained “short” to a hitching post or the wagon wheels, and I would always hold the mules by their bridles at the pole while Nick attac
hed the yoke and then walked behind to hook the trace chains. When all was ready with the hitch, Nick would climb onto the wagon seat, take the lines, and check the manual brake, making one last inspection to be sure that the harness, tugs, and lines were hooked right. I wouldn’t let go of the team until he said, “The wagon is mine. The brake is on.”

  The standard “triple-tree” design for a three-mule hitch, with the evener bar that keeps the team pulling the wagon in a consistent direction.

  “Nick,” I said. “Procedure. Communication. You’ve got to talk to me. We’ve got $30,000 worth of wagon and mules here. One dumbass mistake and it all ends up in a ditch.”

  “Copy, Boss. Just don’t get mad at me if my ADD kicks in and I forget to talk.”

  “I won’t get mad at you. I’ll just tell you, ‘Trail Hand, speak up. Talk. Be specific.’ ”

  When we were done establishing these procedures, Nick thanked me and said one other thing that surprised me.

  “Hitching is such an intense time, Boss. I never want to talk because I’m afraid every time I hitch a team.”

  “What? You, afraid? You never told me that.”

  “You didn’t ask. I don’t relax until I’m on the seat and have the lines in my hands.”

  This was fascinating to me because I had assumed that I was the only one afraid, but we didn’t have time to explore the issue. Doyle was calling from the porch of his house that breakfast was ready.

  • • •

  Nick was so fastidious about hitching the mules that morning that he sounded like a prisoner in a chain gang. He was Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. “Boss, Jake coming out of pasture, chained,” he said. “Boss, three mules harnessed, let’s rein and yoke,” and so forth. He was overdoing it, but this was good because we needed to develop a routine.

  The hitch that day revealed the behavioral issues that we would have with the team. Sweet little Bute regarded herself as a Hollywood diva. She was Kate Hudson, visiting friends in Malibu for the afternoon. All she had to do to fulfill her life purpose was lie on a chaise longue in a bikini, looking skinny and lovely. As soon as we had the team yoked to the pole, Bute would sway out wide with her hips, almost perpendicular to the other two mules, and stare at me with a look of divine boredom. “Oh, like, you’re hitching me?” Before he could attach Bute’s tug chains, Nick would have to take the trace from its keeper up on her rump, loop it around her leg, and then yank her cute diva ass back to the right position. Bute pulled the same act every morning. Jake, anxious to go, would paw his front hoof just inches from my foot until I told him to stop, and then give me feral love bites on my arm. Interestingly, Beck, who Nick and I thought was going to be our problem mule, would stand patiently during hitching. She was saving all of her craziness for later.

  When everything was ready, Nick stepped onto the wheel hub, hefted his weight into the wagon by holding on to the seat, and then plopped down and took the lines.

  “It’s my wagon, Boss. The brake is on.”

  While Nick held the team, I made one last inspection tour around the wagon, switched on our hazard lights, and then cradled Olive Oyl in my arms and handed her up to Nick. Stepping onto the right wheel hub and then laddering myself up by standing on the wheel rim and holding on to the edge of the seat produced an immensely satisfying feeling. We were mounted now, ready to go. The stress of the hitch-up was over.

  I had taken the right side of the wagon seat, the traditional position for the main driver. The brake is on the right-hand side, but there was another reason that the principal driver sat there. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wagon roads were little more than crude earthen pathways worn down by traffic, a boggy morass when it rained, and a bumpy grid of hardened ruts when it was dry. The shoulders of the roads were indefinite and often contained deep crevices or creek ditches hidden in the grass. The safest way for a driver to pass a wagon coming from the other direction was to pull right as far as he could, concentrating on the ground just beside him to see obstacles and potholes.

  Our three-mule driving lines arrangement allowed us to “rein in” the entire team, a traditional but largely forgotten nineteenth-century hookup.

  But Nick and I had always been pretty good “transition drivers,” sitting on either side of the seat, and if we reached a difficult point in the road, our seating arrangement had the advantage that he was able to hold the team while I worked the brakes.

  When I had settled in the seat, Nick handed me the driving lines, but I handed them back.

  “Nick, it’s only right that you drive this wagon the first few miles. You’ve earned it. And that’s an order, Trail Hand.”

  “Cool. You’re asking me to launch.”

  “Call the mules, Trail Hand. We’re taking this rig to Oregon.”

  Doyle’s place has two cleared fields on either side of the road, but the area is heavily wooded and we were surrounded by a tunnel of green forest ahead. When Nick called the mules, his bellow briefly shot skyward but then the sound was caught and muffled by the thick cover of spring leaves.

  “Jake, Bute, Beck. Big Team! Big Team! C’mon, Big Team! Get on there you odd buggers! Big Team! We’re going to Oregon with this rig, Big Team!”

  Nick slapped the lines twice for a trot and the mules picked up their feet nicely, in the mood for a morning run. The pole bounced and the tug chains jingled. The iron tires sang on the road. Twelve hooves were moving in unison and pounding the asphalt. Behind us the new oak bows creaked and swayed at every bump and the wagon box jumped.

  In Troy, Kansas, there is a stately brick courthouse at the highest elevation in town, and we could see it from the top of the first rise. The Doniphan County courthouse is a magnificent Victorian pile of brick, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with a unique, octagonal belfry with large clerestory windows. Beside it on the lawn is a tall flagpole with a large American flag, which was billowing brightly in the stiff winds aloft.

  As we trotted the team up the hill toward the courthouse and the American flag, there was a sensation from the wagon of sharply climbing toward the clouds to go out and see our country.

  The team was running up the hill and my heart was singing now. We were climbing toward sky inside a tunnel of green to go see the elephant. I wasn’t going to give up until we got there. We would never stop trying. I would walk the last five hundred miles if I had to. All I wanted to do for the next summer of my life was work hard to put mule shoes in Oregon.

  • • •

  I was in heaven out there on the plains. I had spent many long winter nights studying maps of the fabled “junction country” of eastern Kansas, so named because it was littered by the junctions of many early-nineteenth-century trails that eventually fed into the main Oregon Trail along the Platte River in Nebraska, 250 miles away. There were old fur-trading trails, military freighter routes that ran up from Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth, and the ruts of the Independence Road and the St. Joseph Road. The prairie was wide open then and the wagon trains, depending on which rivers were high or where the grazing was good, followed a variety of routes to reach the Platte. In the 1860s, the Pony Express trail, the stagecoach lines, and then the telegraph lines and railroad tracks cut new fissures on the plains. These routes generally followed the main junction trails, diverting here and there for several miles for more favorable terrain, endlessly intersecting on their way up to the Platte.

  Understanding this had fundamentally changed my view of the overland emigration. The pioneers didn’t follow a single set of ruts worn into the prairie. They meandered along a collection of trails, requiring many choices. Each turn in the road involved considerable freedom, but also the peril of not knowing what was ahead. Now I was passing the junctions where these decisions had been made, picking my way along the dirt section roads with my detailed DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer and a full set of geodetic maps of the Oregon Trail.

  During our first three days out, we were mostly paralleling Route 36, which had been paved ove
r the original St. Joseph Road early in the twentieth century. We also passed markers for the Independence Road and many old military trails. The country we were crossing was a kind of universal American landscape, level farm ground in some spots, pale green from recent planting, and then wetlands and fringes of forest, with small housing developments climbing the Flint Hills. From the wagon seat, with a team of mules in front of me, I could easily eliminate the modern, visual obstructions—paved roads, farm silos, pivot irrigators slowly circling the crop fields—and stare across the plains, imagining what each choice along the trail felt like. The landscape reaching up to me was a diorama of the wagon routes that had defined the history of the West.

  Many sections of the old Oregon Trail were paved over in the early twentieth century to create two-lane blacktops. Here we travel along U.S. Highway 36,“The Pony Express Highway,” west of Seneca, Kansas.

  It was a lovely day as we ambled along with our new mules. The harness chains jingled, the wheels drummed along the roads, and the prospect of the Kansas farm country from the high wagon seat was panoramic. The weather was uneven, typical for Kansas in the spring. For half an hour or so we would be in sunlight, and we would throw back the canvas cover directly on top of us to let in more sun. Then it suddenly turned blustery and cold, occasionally spitting light rain. Wiggling around on the narrow wagon seat, we pulled on jackets and spread a blanket between our legs. Olive Oyl snuggled tightly in the space between us and napped, a welcome source of warmth.

  • • •

  Calling mules is not just something theatrical that mule skinners do. The calls are purposeful, specific. Mules respond to the sound of their simple, monosyllabic names. They respond to directions like “Get Up,” “Easy Now,” or “Whoa” for stop. For a faster pace, a slap of the reins and “Trot, Team, Trot” will do. “Walk Lively Now!” is the preferred call for the brisk walk that allows a wagon to cover ground at about four miles per hour.