The Oregon Trail Read online

  My father had a knack for making the complex seem simple, and we were relaxed about our preparations for the trip. One January weekend that year we drove down to the Pennsylvania Dutch country in Lancaster County and made arrangements with our regular Mennonite wagon builder, Jonas Reif, to convert a large farm wagon with hoops and a canvas top. We bought our draft horses, a team of Percheron-Morgan crosses named Benny and Betty, from Jonas’s son-in-law, Ivan Martin. My father, my older brother, and I spent a few delightful Saturday afternoons that spring banging around the barn with rusty hammers and saws, modifying our rig with racks for cooking pots and pans, hooks for water buckets, and a drop-down chuck wagon table for cooking meals. My father was a former barnstorming pilot and World War II flight instructor who had lost his left leg in a bad air crash in 1946. He stowed his maps for the trip in an old woolen stump sock that he placed underneath the wagon seat. With shoelaces, he hung a compass and a clock from the hoop over the front seat.

  We clattered down our drive early one Saturday morning in July that year, bound for Pennsylvania, and that was a beautiful junket for a father to share with his children. I was seven years old and our covered wagon trip was the dream summer of my youth. In those days New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania were still undeveloped, and we drove down through the green farmlands of Somerset and Hunterdon counties on quiet state highways or dirt roads, camping at dairies and state parks. In the mornings, while the waters of the Delaware or the Schuylkill river gurgled past our campsite, my father would rise at dawn and cook up a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and home fries over a wood fire, while my older brother and I fed and watered the horses. Along the cool, shaded lanes of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we sang songs together to pass the time, and took turns learning to drive the team. On warm afternoons the bumping of the wheels over gravel roads and the rhythmic clopping of hooves made me sleepy, and I loved stretching out in the back of the wagon and napping on a bale of hay.

  My father wanted his children to “see America slowly,” to bond us as a family, and the journey loomed long in memory.

  The highlight of my days that summer arrived in the late afternoon. We had brought along on the trip a very gentle and safe old western cow pony, a registered quarter horse named Texas, who was trailed behind the wagon on a lead line. At four or five in the afternoon, when my father decided that we had achieved our allotted mileage for the day, he would call for either my older brother or me to throw Texas’s saddle and bridle off the wagon, hitch up, and ride ahead to scout for a place to camp that night.

  I am still thrilled by the sensation of those rides. As soon as I had Texas all saddled up I leaped on his back, dug in my heels, and neck-reined him around the wagon and the team, galloping ahead into the narrow aperture of light glowing between the shade trees on a Pennsylvania lane. Within a minute or two I had lost sight of the wagon. I often passed up the first two or three farms that looked good for camping, just to stretch out the ride, loping over picturesque stone bridges and past fields with browsing Herefords or tall corn. I felt so free and adventurous on those rides—loved and trusted enough to bear the responsibility of finding our camp for that night, but also completely unbounded, with the confines of family plodding along in a wagon behind me, unseen, far back on the road.

  Those rides were my afternoons as an American boy, and I always returned to the wagon suffused with the thrill of spontaneous travel. The couples who owned the farms that I picked on my rides were always excited about the novelty of having a covered wagon stay for the night, and they offered us dinner, showers, or the use of their swimming pools. Sheriffs’ deputies chased us down with their pickups, offering loads of grain and hay. Restaurants along the way laid out meals for us on tables in their parking lots. All of this was completely unplanned, and covered wagon travel seemed to generate its own spontaneous reality and unique bounty of rewards. Not having specific goals for the day seemed to be the way to live. Just harness up in the morning and go. The rest would take care of itself. Three hundred miles of green roadways down and back from Pennsylvania opened as a succession of heavens for us.

  On that trip, my father gave us more than the gift of imagination. Travel became my endorphin. In a covered wagon, while riding slowly out in the open air, every blade of grass, every fence post and farm, or the mallard ducks rising from the streams, assumes a visual and olfactory intensity that you can never feel while trapped inside a speeding car. While on a wagon seat, the land embraces you, emotionally. The rumbling wheels, the creaking top, and the pull of the driving lines in your hands multiply the pleasure of travel. A part of me would always long for that strength of feeling again, and no other form of travel could match it.

  Our fifteen minutes of fame arrived in the form of a Look magazine spread about the 1958 trip.

  The theme of escape became embedded with me—I escaped to live, I escaped to elude ennui and the boredom of everyday life, I escaped to chase off my hereditary chronic depression. By the time I was a teenager my father had lost interest in his wagons and horses for the other great love of his life, aviation, mostly because my older brother and I were now old enough to learn to fly. In 1966, when he was seventeen and I was fifteen, Kernahan and I rebuilt an old Piper Cub in our barn and flew it to California for the summer, becoming the youngest aviators ever to fly coast to coast. We navigated out past the Rockies without a radio, with just a wobbly magnetic compass and a shopping bag full of airmen’s charts. In college I took long semester breaks to motorcycle out west and down south, then across Europe.

  In my senior year at college, my professors discouraged me from pursuing a life of writing because they said that I would never make any money. But I was drawn to writing and journalism for a career because I knew the calling would never require me to remain very long in an office. I wanted open air, horses, or the throbbing of old cylinders hanging out in the breeze. Journey was everything for me. I learned to live for those bright, joyful intervals of travel, lasting weeks and sometimes even months, when I was liberated by my latest obsession from the grinding routine of domesticity and work—trips to Wyoming to write about cattle rustling, trips to Europe and the Middle East to cover politics and wars, trips to Arizona or California to cover wildfires and earthquakes. Even after I married, had children, and moved to the country, at least one long getaway a year was as essential as oxygen for me. There were always enough magazines or newspapers around to reward the curious and footloose like me. I felt content as long as I knew that the boy galloping ahead of the wagon could still be alive.

  By the time I reached the Hollenberg Ranch, however, those wandering years were nearing their end. My life seemed to have run its course. To make the payments on my daughters’ college education, I had stayed too long at my job, at America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Hartford Courant. The Courant was now controlled by a short billionaire from Chicago whose borrowings had bankrupted the Tribune Company less than a year after he bought it. My editors had once dreamed about great writing and scoops, and they loved it when I ran out at a moment’s notice and then scrambled back to the newsroom with something good about the family of a soldier just killed in Iraq, or the rude developer from New York who wanted to convert a priceless watershed into a golf course. But now my editors were ground down by the decline of print journalism, worshipping at the behest of their corporate masters the new web values of page hits, Twitter feeds, and cutting costs. They wanted stories about idiotic, “reader-driven” subjects that weren’t news at all—health fads, car wrecks, and celebrity scandals. (The most coveted stories combined more than one of these elements, a celebrity health fad, say, or even better, a celebrity car wreck.) Mostly owing to my own mistakes, my marriage had ended and I had moved out of my house, and its sixteen acres of fields and woods that I loved to roam and log. I lived now in a charming barn house higher up in the mountains, but the place was lonely. Simultaneously financing a separation and college tuitions had left me nearly bankrupt, and my house
was over-mortgaged to its limits. Many of my new best friends were heavy drinkers.

  In short, I had become that familiar subspecies of the North American male, the divorced boozehound with a bad driving record and emerging symptoms of low self-esteem. I knew that I had to escape again—this time in a big way. It was time for me to buy some maps and a team of mules and lose myself in the West.

  But I also knew that I needed a convincing rationale, a truth about history and the American experience that would justify a risky, lyrical journey across the plains.

  • • •

  The urge to wander west with a team of mules appeased another one of my personality defaults. As a boy, I desperately felt a need to flee the chaotic din of our house—new babies wailing downstairs, younger brothers and sisters fighting over dolls and Tonka trucks, my father’s weekend asylum of Roman Catholic priests, AA buddies, and politicians streaming in and out. I often retreated upstairs to my attic room, or to a quiet corner of the barns, for bouts of reading that could last all afternoon or night. I devoured science, adventure, and especially history books, escaping my domestic reality for an alternative universe of Civil War battles or Klondike dogsled rides. My adolescent feasting on books was a protective search for privacy and self that worked for me at the time, and later became habitual and delivered other benefits. I compulsively read ahead in my course work in school and college, and as a journalist I became the newsroom idiot savant who could always be relied on to convert his vault of trivia into some useful angle on a breaking story. My modus operandi was fixed long before middle age. To escape in fact, I had to escape first into books.

  That fall, after I returned from Kansas, I curled up before my fireplace in New England and binged on the trail. I began with literary classics like Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision, 1846, and then moved on to the steroidal, massively researched work of Merrill J. Mattes, author of The Great Platte River Road, and John D. Unruh Jr.’s The Plains Across. By the end of the winter my library was stacked high with piles of cardboard boxes and books, with separate archives containing maps, nineteenth-century trail guides, pioneer journals, and essays on wagon design and mules. I quickly realized that I had been missing a lot—almost the idiom of America itself—by not knowing more about the Oregon Trail.

  The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history. It virtually defined the American character—our plucky determination in the face of physical adversity, the joining of two coasts into one powerful country, our impetuous cycle of financial bubbles and busts, the endless, fractious clash of ethnic populations competing for the same jobs and space. Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities. For another generation the West would be destabilized, and our folklore made, by Indian fighters and gunslingers, mining and railroad plunderers, and range wars over cattle. But the trail experience had clarified our destiny and national character. Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything. Allegedly America was founded in part to promote religious freedom and harmony, but in fact we were a cauldron of denominational spats, prejudice, and even homicidal church wars. This created a lot of conflict, and for millions of Americans, the solution for problems where they were was to quickly sell out, pack their belongings, and move somewhere else, preferably west. Our economic affairs were chaotically mismanaged by government and exploited by cabals of stock swindlers and banks. But the huge national bounty was too considerable to destroy and America would quickly assemble a wealth and an élan unrivaled anywhere else in the world.

  But you couldn’t get to the bottom of that without first knowing the Oregon Trail. The ruts crossing the plains had not only physically connected a finished continental space, but spiritually cohered a young country’s first principles into a national psyche. For most Americans, the time line between the American Revolution and the Civil War is a seventy-year black hole, as if nothing had happened in between. But now I saw in the Oregon Trail the big event that filled the void and explained what we came to be.

  And the details of the prairie migration were wonderful, crying out for renewed attention. Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate. The initial encounters between the first covered wagon trains and the tribes were extraordinarily friendly, and the pioneers would never have made it past Kansas without their Pawnee and Shoshone guides. The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess, developing shore-to-shore windlasses and flatboat ferries to cross the rivers, innovations as vital to the country’s progress as the steam engine and the telegraph. America’s default toward massive waste and environmental havoc was also, and hilariously, perfected along the trail. Scammed by the merchants of Independence and St. Joe into overloading their wagons, the pioneers jettisoned thousands of tons of excess gear, food, and even pianos along the ruts, turning vast riverfront regions of the West into America’s first and largest Superfund sites. On issue after issue—disease, religious strife, the fierce competition for water—the trail served as an incubator for conflicts that would continue to reverberate through American culture until our own day.

  Another compelling detail emerged from my research that winter. Along the Oregon Trail—unlike such embalmed historic places as Independence Hall in Philadelphia or the Custer Battlefield in Montana—the continuum of history is still very much alive. After the Civil War, the rush to build a transcontinental railroad made the familiar and mapped wagon train path the preferred route, and the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines were quickly laid down within yards of the original trail. The Pony Express, the telegraph lines, and the stagecoach routes followed, usually right along the original ruts, and then the big ranches, cities, and beef packing yards followed. Early in the twentieth century, the nation’s first coast-to-coast motorway, the Lincoln Highway, was built along six hundred miles of the trail in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. The western reaches of the interstate highway system—Route 80 through Nebraska and Wyoming, routes 86 and 84 through Idaho and Oregon—closely follow the old ruts. In the U.S. highway system, the marked “auto trail” following the emigrant road between Independence, Missouri, and Astoria, Oregon is now called the “Old Oregon Trail Highway,” and includes more than a dozen interstates and two-lane highways.

  Today, at some of the loveliest and most historic spots along the trail, O’Fallon’s Bluff in Nebraska, or Register Rocks in Idaho, you can sit and watch a landscape that still hums with western movement. The whistles of the big yellow Union Pacific engines wail day and night at the track crossings, along what is now the busiest freight corridor in the world. Just a football field away, often even closer, the semitrailers race down the interstates in packs, their metal sides glaring under the sun like the white-tops of the pioneers.

  And now there is a new scrum along the trail. Over the past fifteen years, from the Missouri to the Columbia, the old emigrant road has become dotted with innumerable energy projects—ethanol plants, massive wind farms, high-speed transmission lines, hydrofracked gas fields, and huge data centers for Google and Microsoft. The Oregon Trail could aptly be renamed the “Energy Trail.” All of this passes by an
environmental treasure, a proud legacy of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era—nearly a dozen national forests, millions of acres of preserved land, that stretch 1,500 miles from the Medicine Bows in Wyoming to the Cascades in Oregon. The trail today, far from being a historic artifact, reverberates with the modern echoes of America’s most eternal struggle—the battle between those who would preserve the plains and the mountain forests, and those who gaze across the same pristine landscape and say, “Drill, baby, drill.”

  • • •

  A sensible plan seemed to have emerged from my winter of reading. A long ride across the plains would allow me to experience the incomparable joys and physical rigors of wagon travel, and I would be seeing the country slowly, with plenty of time for reflecting on how a fabled landscape had matured and still bore spiritual meaning today. All the bombast and bravery of the overland years in the 1840s and 1850s, the religious strife, the scams at the jumping-off cities, the wonder the pioneers felt about the unfolding vistas of the West, could be conveyed, adequately enough, from the safe remove of a library. But actually riding the trail would deliver me to so much more, tangibly connecting me to the history I now felt so passionate about.

  Roaming west would also embrace a very old American theme. Henry David Thoreau immortalized this urge with his poetic “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.” A century later, beat writer Jack Kerouac was still exploring this motif in his road books. Kerouac, as his friend John Clellon Holmes wrote, “hankered for the West, for Western health and openness of spirit, for the immemorial dream of freedom [and] joy.” The pioneers had found this too. William Barlow of Indiana, who crossed the trail in 1845 when he was twenty-three years old, was in many respects an emblematic American. His father, S. K. Barlow, led a company of fifty wagons across the trail, carrying several hundred pounds of tobacco for trading with the Indians. In Oregon, the Barlows were dissatisfied with the existing trail around the Cascades, so they built a new one, which became the famous Barlow Road. Later, the Barlows helped found Oregon City, a bustling lumber and industrial center along the Willamette River south of Portland. As an old man, William Barlow vividly recalled his five months on the plains. “I will now say again, for myself and our company, that I never passed a more pleasant, cheerful and happy summer in my whole life.”