The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  After that, for the rest of Kansas, we diverted north or south of the Pony Express Highway whenever we could and stayed on the parallel dirt section roads. Modern covered wagon travel requires a strict policy of Winnebago avoidance. Waste is the eternal American by-product, and along today’s Oregon Trail, RVs have replaced the dead mules and discarded bedposts.

  • • •

  As we entered the Big Blue River country and slowly crossed the attractive farmland around Axtell, Beattie, and Home, Kansas, I was delighted by one aspect of the trip. The May wildflowers of Kansas, growing in the depressions of the tall prairie grass country, are rapturously beautiful. On either side of the wagon there was a profusion of prairie flox, purple vervains, and riotously yellow coreopsis, an ocean of petals and tall grass stems extending to the tree lines. In a covered wagon it takes so long to cross this garden on the plains, and the fragrances are so abundant, that all of life and its possibilities seemed arrayed forever, sky to sky, Flint Hill to Flint Hill. The kaleidoscope of naturally lit color going past the wagon seat was almost exhausting, too visually rich.

  The surprising wealth of wildflowers on the plains was something the pioneers noticed, and wildflowers played an important role in forming a national consciousness about the desirability of settling the near West. The rich native growth this close to the Missouri River suggested fertile soil and spring rains—land that eventually could be tilled. For now, the pioneers were passing through this country to reach the Shangri-la of Oregon. By the late 1850s, however, the frequent references to wildflowers in pioneer journals had convinced many American farmers that land in eastern Kansas and Nebraska could be settled and tilled. I also enjoyed the description of wildflowers in the journals because it showed that, despite the hardships of their crossing, the pioneers were capable of pausing to admire the abundant natural beauty they passed.

  On May 14, 1852, Abigail Jane Scott had reached a point on the plains about sixty miles from the Big Blue, and had camped the night before within sight of forty other wagons.

  The country as we pass along, looks more and more level; and the plains certainly wear a charm which I little expected to see. . . . We roll along, level roads for the most of the time, and those who are walking, or on horseback by going off the main road a little can see a sight which looks fit for angels to admire; The little hollows which at a short distance from the road we can see at almost any time are generally filled with flowers and variegated with ten thousand tints which are almost sufficient to perfectly enchant the mind of every lover of nature.

  But within two days, as she approached the Big Blue, Abigail discovered another side of Kansas. “The cold wind blows very hard and very disagreeably, and the atmosphere is cold enough for a drear November morning.” The winds didn’t abate for two more days and Abigail was clearly quite miserable.

  The brisk and incessant prairie winds of Kansas and Nebraska were one of the most persistent obstacles to travel that the pioneers complained about in their journals. Men chased their hats a quarter of a mile down through the hollows and couldn’t catch them. Mules spooked at blowing dust and tumbleweed, raw meat was eaten for dinner because fires couldn’t be lit, and wagon covers and tents blew away in the middle of the night. The wind exhausted children and turned them into crying brats. “The wind blew so hard I could not get out of the wagon for fear of being blown away,” wrote pioneer Martha Moore, a member of a particularly enterprising family that drove five thousand sheep across the trail in 1852, to sell at the trading posts. “The wind so rocked the wagons [at night] that in vain I wooed the goddess Sleep.”

  For Nick and me, mornings spent pleasantly driving the mules through attractive farmlands and the long wildflower patches merged into afternoons with leaden skies, temperatures in the forties, and winds so brisk that there was no way to stay warm. We huddled together on the wagon seat with blankets spread across our laps and Olive Oyl wedged between our legs. Our hats blew off and had to be restrained with chin straps we made from shoelaces and rawhide strips, and there were gusts that shook the canvas top of the wagon so hard we were afraid that the bows would crack.

  The constant battering by the wind had a curious, counterintuitive effect on me. I found myself even more stubborn and self-confident than before, and very dreamy and romantic. I had never realized before just how tiring and dehydrating long exposure to the wind can be, but this made me feel closer to nature. In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another—air-conditioned buildings, plush cars, gluttonously overbuilt homes—serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts. But now I had to get somewhere in a more primitive form of transportation, a covered wagon, that instead of protecting me immersed me in the elements.

  There were other miseries of the trail. Five days would go by when neither Nick nor I took a shower, and a filmy residue of dust, axle grease, mule hair, and hayseeds covered everything in the wagon, including the plates we ate on every night. Coleman lanterns and flashlights, jostled by the constant bumping of the wagon, refused to work, so we started just living sunup to sundown, without any artificial light. Before harnessing, we had to chase mules every morning. Our backs ached from sitting on a hard wooden seat for eight or ten hours every day, holding back mules.

  But we adored the simplicity of life out there and pushing hard every day toward our twenty-mile goal. The fragrances of the wildflower fields sedated me and, when my brother called the mules, I felt that I was living a stanza of Walt Whitman.

  9

  THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PIONEERS CROSSING THE Big Blue River country in Kansas to the lower Platte in Nebraska faced a gauntlet of topography and weather unlike anything most of them had ever seen. The wagon trains generally left the Missouri jumping-off grounds no later than mid-May. By then the spring rains had turned the prairie into a natural if unevenly green pasture, providing critical forage for the draft animals during the first few weeks of travel. But this schedule exposed the overlanders and their vulnerable white-tops to a collateral problem—the notoriously violent thunderstorms that rattled down the Platte and the Big Blue in late May and June. Humorist Alonzo Delano, a 49er, called the Nebraska storms “King Lear in the height of his madness,” and in 1851 pioneer Daniel Bacon wrote home to his mother, “You may think it rains in Indiana but if you want to see it storm come to the Platte.”

  Nick and I found this treacherous reality impossible to avoid as we pushed on for Marysville. That spring was one of the wettest on record for eastern Kansas and Nebraska, and there were several days during which more than two inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours, raising the Big Blue and Little Blue rivers to flood stage. The situation was the same throughout the West. The winter before, record storms in the western mountains had laid down a Himalayan snowpack, and this was emptying millions of acre-feet of spring melt into the Platte River reservoirs, which could not contain the flow. From Grand Island, Nebraska, to Casper, Wyoming, the Platte was cresting over bridges and paved roads, turning campgrounds and crop fields into vast inland lakes. Along our riverine Oregon Trail route—the Platte, the Sweetwater, the Bear, and the Snake—we would not see a river at less than full stage all summer.

  On our fourth day out, just west of Axtell, Kansas, a monster downpour that lasted for two hours dropped from the angry, black clouds festering to the west. When I could see the leaves of the trees a half mile ahead flattened by the rain, I pulled up the wagon, handed the lines to Nick, and stood up on the seat to pull the front of the canvas cover over our heads. But the wagon top wouldn’t stay down in the stiff breeze pushing ahead of the rain and I jumped off to pull the pucker ropes tight. I was drenched by the time I got back into the wagon and within minutes everything on our rig—the mules, the sides of the wagon, our faces and jackets—was splattered with a pudding of wet, sandy mud. Pummeled by the heavy rain, we couldn’t see far enough ahead of the wagon to navigate very well and we were almost on top of an inundated bridge at Wolf Creek before we realized the hazard, which forc
ed us to divert two miles north on muddy roads to find a route west.

  The experience was claustrophobic. With the canvas top pulled tight over our heads, our field of vision ahead was restricted to about sixty degrees—just the mules and what was directly ahead of them. Our hats bumped up against the canvas, and the woolen blanket spread over our laps was saturated with rain. The rain lashed sideways under the wagon cover, freezing our faces and our hands. The strong quartering winds from the northwest buffeted the wagon top and box, almost nautically rocking us back and forth against the running gear. Beside us, the plains disappeared and now we were sailors experiencing the narrow aperture of storm—punishing rain and wind, rigging struggling against the elements, the fear that we would be overturned by the next gale-force blast. As we slogged through the mud past Beattie and Home, Kansas, I could feel my socks and the skin of my feet congealing together, a pulpy, putrid mass that disintegrated against the leather inside my boots. I wouldn’t feel dry again for two days.

  • • •

  For the pioneers, water—how to avoid it when it was too abundant, and how to find it when it was scarce—was the great destroyer-preserver on the trail. The prairie monsoons in the Kansas-Nebraska junction country were only the beginning of the problem. Waterways like the Kansas and the Big Blue rivers were relatively stable, with defined channels and high, established banks, and they ebbed and flowed predictably with the rains. But the Platte just to the north was both a hydrologic wonder and a true monster—serene and enticingly fordable one hour, and then a raging, turbulent killer an hour or two later. The largest land migration in history took place along seven hundred miles of a river valley that was one of the most capricious travel environments in the world.

  With its two tributaries, the North and South Platte rivers, the Platte River network runs more than a thousand miles from its headwaters along the east face of the Rockies in central Wyoming and Colorado. For most of its course through Colorado and Wyoming, the Platte is a relatively predictable river. After a heavy winter, the river rages bank to bank as it accepts the snowmelt from eleven-thousand-foot peaks, or peaceably runs over exposed river rock after a mild snowfall year. But by the time it loops southeast to the plains of western Nebraska, the Platte spills wide across flat bottomlands, expanding and contracting according to the delayed impact of snowmelt and rains hundreds of miles away. This created a drainage with an indefinite main channel and several continually shifting, parallel streams, more a delta of water than a river, a formation called a “braided stream” or “braided flow.”

  Braided flow rivers like the Platte distribute silt deposits across a broad area, creating a diverse riparian landscape—wooded islands toward the center of the channel, sandbars, river rock flats, and abrupt pothole depressions. The resulting variegation is scenic but deadly. Eddying currents form whirlpools as the water races past islands and sandbars, and the flow is destabilized by running past so many contrasting surfaces and shapes. The Platte is famous for its lovely sandbars, but these are deceptive. The subterranean water flow can often rise unseen to just a foot or two below the surface, undermining the apparently dry sand above and converting it into a porridge of quicksand that can swallow a man or a draft animal in less than a minute.

  Except during particularly intense high-water years, this hazardous environment is mostly forgotten today. In the twentieth century, the Platte was dammed in eight separate spots for large hydroelectric, irrigation, and water-containment projects, shrinking its drainage area and diminishing the old braided stream character of the river. But in the nineteenth century, the Platte and its adjacent mudflats were often a mile or more across. This required not so much a single fording of the river but what wagon masters had to organize as a staged fording, with the wagons and teams first crossing deep pools in the channel, then sandbars and low valleys of river rock. Chaos was often the norm as two or three wagon companies crowded down the banks to cross at once.

  The impetuosity of the river was maddening. The wagon trains would stop to “noon” or camp overnight at popular riverside resting places like Elm Island or Plum Creek, and children frolicked and draft animals were watered at the river’s edge. An hour later, snowmelt and rains that had gathered momentum the day before, hundreds of miles away, would flow around the bend and flood the wagon camp. The sudden surges of water could happen while a forty-wagon train was in the middle of fording the river, or become a silent menace when the water unexpectedly rose at night. Frequently, heavy local rains combined with snowmelt from the Rockies to expand the river drainage so dramatically that the Platte wasn’t really a river any longer but instead a series of interconnected lakes. The wagon companies had to wait for days before the water dropped to fordable levels.

  Margaret Frink, the Indiana pioneer woman who crossed to California in 1850, was a kind of iterated Narcissa Whitman. Unusually for a woman in a covered wagon train, Frink rode sidesaddle all the way across the country, and later attracted attention for her spirited and detailed published diary, Journal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold Seekers. She must have struck quite a figure, galloping sidesaddle across the prairie and then plunging into the rivers, and the Sioux along the Platte so marveled at her appearance that they called her the “white squaw.” Frink witnessed a variety of river crossings—by commercial ferry across the Missouri, by ropes lowering the wagons down the steep banks of the Green River in Wyoming, and traditional fords along the Platte. Here is her description of crossing the South Platte at “The Forks,” near present-day North Platte, Nebraska, where the North and South Platte curving in from the Rockies join to form a single, wide channel.

  The stream we had now reached was fearful to look at, rushing and boiling and yellow with mud, a mile wide, and in many places of unknown depth. The bed was of quicksand—this was the worst difficulty. But there was no way to do but to ford it. . . .

  Of all the excitement that I ever experienced or thought of, the crossing of that river was the greatest. A great many other wagons and people were crossing at the same time—mule teams, horse teams, ox teams, men on horseback, men wading and struggling against the quicksand and current, many of them with long poles in their hands, feeling their way. Sometimes they would be in shallow water only up to their knees; then, all at once, some unlucky one would plunge in where it was three or four feet deep.

  The deafening noise and halloing that this army of people kept up, made the alarm in the river more intense. The quicksand and the uncertainty of depth of water kept all in a state of anxiety. Our horses would sometimes be in water no more than a foot deep; then, in a moment they would go down up to their collars. On one occasion I was considerably alarmed. Several other wagons, in their haste, had crowded in ahead of us on both sides, and we were compelled to stop for several minutes. Our wagon at once began to settle in the quicksand, and it required the assistance of three or four men lifting at the wheels to enable the horses to pull out.

  Where we crossed, the river was a mile wide, and we were just three-quarters of an hour in getting over. I here date one of the happiest and most thankful moments of my life to have been when we landed safe on the north side. The danger in the crossing consisted of the continual shifting of the sandy bed, so that a safe ford to-day might be a dangerous one to-morrow.

  Frink was not overestimating the danger. That year, at least ninety people drowned in the rivers along the trail, forty of them in the Platte. In his monumental The Plains Across, historian John D. Unruh Jr. meticulously toted up trail deaths by category. He concluded that at least three hundred pioneers drowned in the 1840s and 1850s, and he points out that almost every overland diary records drownings or near misses along the rivers. The victims were not just impatient pioneers, attempting an unsafe crossing when the fords ahead of them were jammed with other wagons, or mounted riders pushing cattle across the raging rivers for better grass. “One inebriated 1853 emigrant,” Unruh writes, “misjudged rain-swollen Buffalo Creek for a slough, drove his w
agon in, and was never seen again.”

  • • •

  As we moved west with the wagon through northeastern Kansas, word started to circulate about our progress via an informal cell phone and internet grapevine. The old St. Joe Road between Seneca and Beattie was mostly rural, but between the towns there were occasional clusters of housing developments built along the agricultural frontage. The modest ranch and colonial houses were well kept and their driveways and yards contained the usual totems of American contentment—vinyl gazebos facing the open plains, boats on trailers, piles of children’s bikes left by the corner of the garage.

  Everyone loves the sight of a covered wagon going by and, in Kansas, you can see the traffic coming from miles away. Often, as we approached the next group of houses, children and their parents had gathered near the mailboxes out on the road, with wheelbarrows and little red wagons filled with water buckets, apples, and carrots for the mules. There were bottles of Gatorade and ham-salad sandwiches for us. Families who saw us coming from a distance hopped into their minivans and drove into the supermarket in town for bags of apples for the mules.

  I began to notice something interesting about the families. At several homes, the parents, or the people who appeared to be the parents, weren’t the right age. They were in their late fifties or early sixties, sometimes even older, and the children called them “Mom-Mom” or “Pappy.” There seemed to be a lot of grandparents caring for their grandchildren out here in Kansas.

  I was so curious that I asked one of the grandparents about it. The family lived in a pleasant green Cape-style house with a matching green garage and a white picket fence around the front lawn, about two miles outside Marysville. When we stopped the wagon near the end of the driveway, Nick stepped down to stand at the front of the team and show the children how to snack mules by holding an apple upright in the palm of their hands. The man of the house, who I guessed was in his mid-sixties, was wearing a white T-shirt, Dickies khakis, and fashionable Keen shoes. He had stepped back by the wagon seat to ask me about our trip.